We interrupt your steady diet of panic and process talk to bring you the following news from the outside world.
On August 21st, something happened in Nawabad, Afghanistan. Everyone but the Pentagon agrees: US forces killed 92 civilians, including about 60 children. The Pentagon insisted that its forces had attacked a Taliban meeting, killing 35 Taliban and seven civilians.
Now that there is video of the slaughter, however, the Pentagon is reopening the investigation it just closed. In doing so, the Pentagon revealed the name of their star witness, denying the massacre:
Oliver North.
As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.
Women are heard wailing in the background. "Oh God, this is just a child," shouts one villager. Another cries: "My mother, my mother."
The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.
You can see now why Oliver North, drug trafficker, the man who armed Hezbollah, obstructor of justice, and FOX News star, might have wanted to mouth the official lie ... again.
However, US commanders and Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that seven civilians died alongside 35 Taleban militants during a legitimate combat operation, the target of which was a meeting of Taleban leaders.
The villagers’ accounts have been supported by separate investigations conducted by the UN, by Afghanistan’s leading human rights organisation and by an Afghan government delegation. Two Afghan army officers involved in the operation have been dismissed.
The Pentagon’s original investigation concluded last week that US forces used close air support after coming under heavy fire during a mission to seize a Taleban commander named Mullah Sadiq. They allege that he died in the operation.
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.*
And here we'd thought that embedded journalists, and FOX News generally, were just here to feed us the official line as a matter of state propaganda, not too different from journalism in North Korea. What we did not anticipate, that I know of, is the use of embedded reporters to maintain official disinformation in an official capacity, in this case as the star witness for an official lie.
Not nearly as much fun as hiding documents in Fawn Hall's panties, but shoving 60 dead children down the memory hole does have its rewards, for a Republican, anyway.
Now, aren't you glad MSNBC got rid of those nasty liberals? This is how a real, American journalist operates. When the Pentagon finally fesses up to five dozen dead children, you can still expect Oliver North to be a hero to Republicans everywhere.
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* The Times, a Rupert Murdoch paper, managed to get North's rank and branch of the services wrong. (h/t Anarchofascist)
(h/t: Lenin's Tomb)
UPDATE: I see that Think Progress has this, too.
