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August 08, 2006
Mission accomplished?
If Jennifer Copestake the journalist is the same activist who did things like this, it worries me, and I hope she doesn't typify the MSM: The steel bars of the heavy-duty, black Magnum bicycle lock wrap around her throat almost delicately, and as the police siren wails in the distance, Jennifer Copestake smiles to herself. The cops are coming. Shes accomplished her mission.Unless there are two student journalists with that name, the same Ms. Copestake now appears to be writing for the Observer, producing videos and accusing the Interior Ministry of a deliberate policy of arresting homosexuals, informing their families that they should be killed, following which their corpses turn up mutilated. She has also cited Section 111 of the Iraqi Penal Code -- a section I cannot locate anywhere (and which is contradicted by the only version of the code I could find) -- as specifically sanctioning murder in the name of religion: Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an 'honour killing' to murder someone who is gay - and the perpetrator can escape punishment. Section 111 of Iraq's penal code lays out protections for murder when people are acting against Islam.Is there such a section in the Iraqi Penal Code? I can only find Ms. Copestake's assertion, and nothing more. As to the dead bodies and the Interior Ministry, there is a serious problem: dead bodies turn up all over Iraq, and the Interior Ministry is in chaos: One group entered a mobile phone shop, the other went to the next door office of the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce, police Lt. Thair Mahmoud said. The gunmen rounded up 15 staff and customers from the shop and 11 from the chamber office and drove away with them, Mahmoud said.It's clearly an awful situation which needs to be remedied before the U.S. can pull out. But if no one is in charge, it's rather tough to level accusations of official policy. What is needed is careful, level-headed reporting by journalists who have earned their positions of trust. The fact that it is next to impossible to determine who is doing what has already led to the replacement of one Interior Minister with repeated calls for another shakeup: The shootings, kidnappings, bombings and extortion have prompted a public outcry about the effectiveness of Iraq's U.S.-trained security forces, whose ranks are believed infiltrated by Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias and common criminals.Far be it from me to accuse any journalist of bias. I'm not a journalist, and I'm not in Iraq, and hell, I'm not even a war blogger. But common sense suggests to me that a situation like this would be a gold mine for a biased journalist, because there'd be no way to check the facts behind any report. I certainly can't check them. And as we all know, a dead body is a dead body. (It's tough to tell who has what mission, much less whose mission is being accomplished. . . .) posted by Eric on 08.08.06 at 07:29 AM |
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