Agenda Check

I'm not quite sure that I have ever read anything from the Associated Press that was this nakedly partisan. This is obviously an attempt to cover a huge misstep by Barack Obama. It is not "Republican spin" to call him on his actual words. It is hyper-partisan spin by a purported "news" organization to try to justify the damning words Obama used.

"We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there," Obama said.

THE SPIN:

The suggestion whispered by Obama's opponents was that he was maligning the efforts of troops fighting in Afghanistan by stating they are "just" out there killing civilians.

The Republican National Committee simply repeated the comment as one of their "They Said It!" series used to highlight statements by opponents that supposedly put them in a bad light. RNC Chairman Mike Duncan followed up later in a statement demanding that Obama apologize for his "offensive" statement…….

…….A check of the facts shows that Western forces have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians.

The U.S. and NATO say they don't have civilian casualty figures, but The Associated Press has been keeping count based on figures from Afghan and international officials. Tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify.

As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can't be attributed to one party.

Nedra Pickler, the AP reporter pontificating the "fact check" has admitted that the AP has no casualty figures that are from its own reporters, only figures from other sources. Those sources may or may not have been accurate. They probably, in fact almost certainly, include inflated figures provided by helpful Taliban spokesmen who have free access to the AP. The large number of US ground forces in Afghanistan prove that Obama's allegations are false. Obama's words are exactly what they are and the AP cannot cover for him here. He implicitly accused American military forces of war crimes. Obama probably just destroyed his campaign - and Pickler probably destroyed her credibility trying to save him.