Information War
Although the Washington Post does not repeat by rote the worst of the unconfirmed rumors swirling around in the aftermath of the US airstrike on Somali islamists, they are repeating some of them. But they do reveal part of the problem with the reporting coming out of these regions, perhaps inadvertently.
Two days after the United States launched an airstrike against alleged al-Qaeda terrorists in southern Somalia, U.S. officials declined yesterday to provide details of who, or what, was hit.
In Mogadishu, the Somali capital, reports circulated that as many as 50 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack by a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship. U.S. officials said they are fairly certain that at least one targeted individual was hit; they said they had no information about civilian deaths in the strike along the Kenyan border.
Several officials suggested that stories reaching Mogadishu of many deaths and continuing U.S. attacks had confused the airstrike with ongoing operations in the area by Ethiopia's military, including helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. But it was impossible to confirm independently any of the widely differing accounts in Mogadishu or in Washington. The officials agreed to discuss the attack only on the condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity……
……In the chaos of Mogadishu, where invading Ethiopian troops routed the Islamic fundamentalists last month and installed an internationally backed transitional government, word of the U.S. attack provoked rage and anti-Americanism.
Given that they acknowledge that there is anti-Americanism in play here, how credible are the reports coming in? How much propaganda is being fine tuned to get printed in the US and Western media? Yesterday the AP cheerfully reported the unsubstantiated rumor that the airstrike had killed "two newlyweds". They admitted there was no confirmation whatsoever for that, but they printed it anyway. But that has been a winning catch phrase for the islamists in the past and has gotten them lots of media coverage. So they repeat it - and the press dutifully prints it. If you count up all the times the islamists have claimed the US hit a wedding party or newlyweds, you have to conclude that the US has perfected the bride and groom seeking missile. Our media is helping us lose the information war.
Media, War, World news | Gaius Wednesday, 10 January , 2007
