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How I Was Blacklisted at CNN, and How Easily America Goes to War Now
It was about two years ago to the day I was blacklisted at CNN.
I don’t want to remind them they were sadly wrong, but they were. So write this off however you prefer, but understand that we were lied to again to drag us again into an open-ended war in Iraq-Syria. Last time it was Bush and those missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. This time is was Obama and saving the Yazidi people from genocide.
Wait, what? Who are the Yazidis? How they get us back into Iraq?
Ah, how fast time flies.
Two years ago a group of Yazidis, a minority spread across Iran, Iraq and Turkey, were being threatened by a group called ISIS few American were focused on. Obama declared a genocide was about to happen, and the U.S. had to act. U.S. officials said they believed that some type of ground force would be necessary to secure the safety of the stranded members of the Yazidi group. The military drew up plans for limited airstrikes and the deployment of 150 ground troops.No Congressional authorization was sought, no attempt was made to secure UN sanction, no effort was made to seek Iraqi military help to save their own people inside their own country. However, promises were made by the White House of having no American “boots on the ground” and that the airstrikes to kill people were for a humanitarian purpose.
Two years later the U.S. has some 6,000 troops on the ground, including artillery units and aircraft based inside Iraq and Syria. The limited airstrikes have expanded to a 24 month broad-based bombing campaign, which has spread into Syria, with the sideshows of complete collapse of democracy in Turkey, a Russian military presence in Syria, and an Iranian military presence in Iraq. For the record, the Yazidis are pretty much fine, as are ISIS and Syrian president Assad. The Yazadis do occasionally show up in fear-mongering, unsourced stories about ISIS sex slaves, usually spoon-fed to American media, and only American media, by pro-Yazidi ethnic groups safely in the west.
In fact, other than a massive regional death toll and no progress toward whatever the actual goal for the United States is (um, whatever, “destroy” ISIS), things are pretty much the same after two years, +chaos. And whomever is elected this November will be the fifth U.S. president to make war in Iraq.
Back to CNN.As the Yazidi situation was unfolding, I was invited to tape a discussion there alongside the usual retired U.S. military colonel. I was asked a single question, explained in my answer that the U.S. was in fact using the Yazidi “humanitarian crisis/faux genocide” as an excuse to re-enter the Iraq quagmire, and equated it to George W. Bush’s flim-flam about weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
The host literally said I was wrong. I was not asked another question, though the colonel was given several minutes to explain the urgency of the situation, demand America act where no one else would, and assure the public that Obama planned only limited, surgical strikes and that was it, one and done.
My question was edited out, the colonel’s lengthy answer was played on air, and my very brief moment in the glow of CNN was ended even though I wore a nice suit and a tie. Oh well, we still have each other here, and hey, CNN, my number’s still the same if you wanna call.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Did an ISIS Fighter Try to Sell Sex Slaves on Facebook?
Well, maybe. It is amazing how these horrific stories about ISIS just happen to appear on global social media, and then are instantly picked up by the mainstream media as fact.Why, it is almost as if someone is creating them, and then calling the mass media’s attention to them on obscure sources, for anti-ISIS propaganda purposes. Hmm.
Well, don’t be shocked, but…“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” began the Facebook posting attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young woman’s face with weepy red eyes.
“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads. “Yay, or nay?”
The photos were taken down within hours by Facebook but of course still were coincidentally captured by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit group with unclear funding sources that monitors jihadists’ social media accounts. That Institute then pumped the story out across the web.“We have seen a great deal of brutality, but the content that ISIS has been disseminating over the past two years has surpassed it all for sheer evil,” said a researcher for the Institute. “Sales of slave girls on social media is just one more example of this.”
Uh huh. It must all be true.
BONUS: Selling sex slaves violates Facebook’s Terms of Use, so ISIS that did wrong thing too. Bastards have no respect for our American social media.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
NYT: ISIS Uses Birth Control to Maintain Supply of Sex Slaves
OK, I’m going to skate out on some very thin ice here.
Of course I do not in any way condone ISIS, rape, terrorism, violence, victim shaming or slavery. But I do have what I believe are legitimate questions about a New York Times story involving those topics, and hope I can ask them here without being accused of supporting things I find abhorrent.I ask these questions only because while rape is tragically used all-to-often as a tool of war, claims by people or groups in war can sometimes be untrue, exaggerated, or reported erroneously for political aims. Iraqi defectors lied about WMDs to help draw America into the 2003 invasion. Claims in 1991 that Iraqi invaders bayoneted Kuwaiti children in their incubators were completely fabricated. In 2011 Susan Rice announced Libya’s Qaddafi was handing out Viagra, so that his soldiers could commit more rapes, it was a lie.
The Times article was scary, inflammatory, designed to incite. But was it responsible journalism?
The Times’ story last Sunday reported Islamic State leaders have made sexual slavery as they believe it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad’s time integral to the group’s operations, preying on the women and girls the group captured from the Yazidi religious minority almost two years ago. To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the women are passed among them.
The New York Times story was written by Pulitzer Prize winner Rukmini Callimachi, and front-paged, so these things should have easy answers. You can read the whole story yourself, to better understand my questions.
1) How did the reporter make contact with the 36 escaped Yazidi sex slaves she interviewed? What organization made the connection? She states in the article “Many of the women interviewed for this article were initially reached through Yazidi community leaders.” Was one of the group Yazda or its founder Murad Ismael (see below)?
2) Does the reporter speak Arabic? Most Yazidis speak Kurmanji as their primary tongue; if the reporter used a translator for either language, what steps did she take to verify the translation? Who supplied and paid for the translator?
3) Did the ISIS rapists who explained the purposes of the birth control to their victims speak Kurmanji, a language generally limited to Kurdish areas off-limits to ISIS? If not, did the reporter verify that the victims had sufficient Arabic vocabulary to understand what they were being told, including some limited medical and drug terms?
4) Was the reporter contacted by a group or organization inviting her to interview the victims, or did she uncover the story fully independently?
5) The young women interviewed appeared to have specific and detailed knowledge that they were being given birth control. Did their ISIS captors explain this to them and if so, can she explain why? As most Yazidis are unlikely to have first-hand knowledge of chemical birth control, how did the young women learn so much about the pills they were being forced to take?
6) The article states “Some described how they knew they were about to be sold when they were driven to a hospital to give a urine sample to be tested for the hCG hormone, whose presence indicates pregnancy.” How did the women know what hormone they were being tested for?
7) The article states “The teenager feared she was about to be raped. Instead he [the rapist] pulled out a syringe and gave her a shot on her upper thigh. It was a 150-milligram dose of Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive, a box of which she showed to a reporter.” How did she know the chemical and dosage she was given? Did her rapist allow her to keep the box? Did the victim hold on to the box throughout the ordeal of her escape from ISIS captivity until her contact with the reporter? Was the victim asked these questions?
8) Chemical birth control is not generally available in the Middle East. Did the reporter make any inquiries as to where the ISIS-supplied birth control pills and injections came from? Is it her belief that ISIS has established an international smuggling route to bring such substances into the Middle East?
9) The reporter references a “manual” that describes how rape of slaves under the circumstances of birth control is allowed under ISIS’ interpretation of sharia law. Is this manual openly available? When and how did the reporter access it, and verify its authenticity?
10) The New York Times article encourage readers to donate to a charity for Yazidi victims, Yazda. The charity is contactable by mail only through a post office box. Standard charity verification site Charity Watch had no listing for the group under the name “Yazda.” Charity Navigator lists the group only as “unrated.” I have been unable to find much independent information on Yazda founder Murad Ismael.
Did/how did the New York Times verify the legitimacy of the Yazda charity?
11) The reporter quotes a local Yazidi doctor as saying “With more than 700 cases of rape recorded so far, Dr. Taib’s center has treated only 35 pregnancies. He expected to see at least 140. ‘Even higher than that, if you consider that these women had multiple partners and were raped every day over many months,’ Dr. Taib said.” The doctor’s statement is offered as verification of the widespread use of birth control; i.e., without birth control, there would be more pregnancies.
A 1996 study by the American Journal of Obstetrics stated that the national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45). That 5% would match with what the doctor found, 35 pregnancies out of 700 cases. The doctor’s estimate of 140 cases is 20%.
A 1987 study also found a 5% pregnancy rate from rape among 18- to 24-year-old college students in the U.S. A 2005 study placed the rape-related pregnancy rate at around 3–5%.
Statistics can be imprecise. However, given that the reporter cited the local doctor’s count of pregnancies as evidence supporting the claims of the Yazidi women, did she not ask him, or why did she not raise in her article, that other evidence may contradict his assertion?
I don’t like having to write about rape. I am sorry for every victim of rape, and every woman who was enslaved. My concerns are not about ISIS, which remains a terrible organization, but about journalism. I hope someone very quickly refutes or answers every one of my questions and makes me look foolish and embarrassed for even asking. Please do that.
I have emailed this to the New York Times Ombudsman several days ago (“public editor“) and will publish any reply I receive.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Kerry Says U.S. Troops Could Deploy to Iraq
For those who argued with the theory about a month ago that interceding in Iraq for “humanitarian purposes” to help the Yazidis was just a subterfuge to have the U.S. re-enter a messy war that supposedly ended for us in 2011, well, you were wrong.
It was. Enjoy that slippery slope.
This Means War
Just hours ahead of the president’s speech where he is expected to widen the current Iraq War, possibly expand the war into Syria, all the while pledging there will be “no American boots on the ground,” Secretary of State John Kerry got ahead of his boss when he raised the possibility U.S. troops could be committed to ground operations in Iraq in extreme circumstances, the first hedging by an Obama administration official on the president’s pledge that there will be no U.S. boots on the ground to battle the Islamic State.
Kerry made the comment during a news conference after a day of meeting with Iraqi officials.
While Kerry reiterated that Obama has indeed said that no U.S. combat troops would be deployed to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, he adding “unless, obviously, something very, very dramatic changes.”
No U.S. official has previously used those words in discussing the growing U.S. confrontation with the Islamic State.
Doomed to Repeat It
Just as a reminder of the last few weeks, here’s some history:
— From 2011 until early August, the U.S. was not involved overtly, militarily, in Iraq.
— In announcing U.S. airstrikes in Iraq in August, Obama said they would be limited to preventing Islamic State genocide of the Yazidi religious minority, a tasking quickly expanded to stopping the ISIS advance on the Kurdish capital of Irbil. Special Forces’ boots were on the ground.
— As Obama deployed upwards of 1000 American troops as “advisors” into Iraq, the air mission was widened into protecting them and the embassy.
— The Yazidi’s forgotten, the U.S. moved into providing close air support for Kurdish troops fighting,bombing near the Mosul Dam, being the air force for Iranians and Iranian-trained Shiite militia breaking the Islamic State siege of Amerli, and forces of whoever is fighting around the Haditha dam.
Conclusion?
While in Baghdad, Kerry also said “Every single [Iraqi] leader I talked with today in the strongest terms possible affirmed that they had learned the lessons of the past years” and were determined “to move in a different direction from the direction of years past,” he said.
Ah, if only American leaders would do the same.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Questions about the Yazidis on that Iraq Mountain
No one wants to see anyone suffer, Yazidi or otherwise. What we do want is to know the truth about what is going on in Iraq even as Obama continues airstrikes, and prepares to send in 130 more American troops. The 130 additional advisers brings the number of American military personnel in Iraq to more than 1,000.U.S. officials said they believed that some type of ground force would be necessary to secure the passage of the stranded members of the Yazidi group. The military is drawing up plans for consideration by President Obama that could include American ground troops.
So a couple of questions here.
Long before U.S. airstrikes, the defenseless Yazidi people climbed up that mountain for refuge from ISIS, who supposedly wanted to slaughter them. Why didn’t ISIS just also climb up and then slaughter them? We know ISIS had mortars and actual artillery, because the U.S. later bombed those. Why didn’t ISIS use those weapons to slaughter the Yazidis from afar?
Also, after one or two airstrikes, ISIS became so easy to defeat that the Kurds made it possible for 24,000 Yazidis to walk off the mountain, walk into Syria and then U-turn walk back into Iraq and settle in safely. It begs the question about how surrounded by determined ISIS fighters that mountain really was. It takes a long time for 24,000 people to do anything, and they’d need to be walking a long way during which time they would be vulnerable to ISIS. How could ISIS go from being such a threat that U.S. airpower was essential, to be pushed aside by Kurds who otherwise were having their hats handed to them by ISIS everywhere else?
And after all that, plus more airstrikes, why are there still people up on that mountain without food or water? How was it that 24,000 people could walk away but not everyone? The air strikes are ongoing, and those same Kurds that cleared a path once are still there.
The Iraqi government claims ISIS killed at least 500 Yazidis, burying some alive and taking hundreds of women as slaves. The Iraqi government claimed “Some of the victims, including women and children, were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar.” This was reported by western media, at least one of whom was still ethical enough to add “no independent confirmation was available.” Recent mass graves in a desert area should stand out. This seems like something worth confirming instead of just repeating. What efforts are being made to confirm the information?
If every seat on every helicopter will save a Yazidi child’s life via evacuation, why are seats being allotted to CNN camera crews and other journalists? What is the priority?
What is the thinking about a group the U.S. has long-designated as a terrorist organization playing an active part in rescuing the Yazidis under American air cover? Shouldn’t the U.S. be bombing known terrorist organizations instead of working with them? Isn’t that sort of the actual point of a war on terror, to kill terrorists wherever they are?
Maybe there are good answers to these questions (please share below, with links) but is it at all possible that we’re being sold an emotionally compelling story to justify U.S. military intervention in Iraq? Perhaps that mountain the Yazidis are on has a slippery slope for the U.S.?
WMD? Again.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
#SaveOurYazidi (in Iraq)
Show of hands: anybody out there who heard much of the Yazidi in Iraq before a day or two ago? Because our president is going to re-engage in combat in Iraq to save them. Airstrikes are now authorized!
Save Our Yazidi
Once upon a time placing America’s service people in harm’s way, spending America’s money and laying America’s credibility on the line required at least the pretext that some national interest was at stake. Not any more. Anytime some group we don’t like threatens a group we could care not so much about, America must act to save a proud people, stop a humanitarian crisis, take down a brutal leader, put an end to genocide, whatever will briefly engage the sodden minds of the public between innings and spin up some new war fever. Some of these crisis’ get a brief moment in the #media (Save our girls!), some fizzle and fade (The Syrian people!) and some never even made sense (Somebody in the Ukraine!)
With some irony, “freeing the Iraqi people from an evil dictator” was one of the many justifications for the 2003 invasion.
And so this week, apparently it is the Yazidis in northern Iraq. These people consider themselves a distinct ethnic and religious group from the Kurds with whom they live in Iraq, though the Kurds consider them Kurdish. Their religion combines elements of Zoroastrianism with Sufi Islam. One of their important angels is represented on earth in peacock form, and was flung out of paradise for refusing to bow down to Adam. While the Yazidis see that as a sign of goodness, many Muslims view the figure as a fallen angel and regard the Yazidis as devil-worshippers. Fun Facts: the Yadzidi don’t eat lettuce, either, and also boast a long tradition of kidnapping their wives. The photo above shows them slaughtering a sheep, which they do eat.
Between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians (kind of a big spread of an estimate given how important these people are now to the U.S.) are currently stranded on Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq without food and water, having been driven out of town by ISIS earlier this week.
So, in response to this humanitarian crisis, or this genocide as the New Yorker called it, Obama’s answer is pretty much the same answer (the only answer?) to any unfolding world event, more U.S. military intervention.
With no apparent irony, the White House spokesperson, surnamed Earnest (honestly, Orwell must be laughing in his grave) said on the same day “We can’t solve these problems for them. These problems can only be solved with Iraqi political solutions.”
Obama also has said U.S. airstrikes on Iraq aim to protect U.S. military advisers in Iraq who one guesses are not part of that political solution by definition.
Some Questions
I feel for anyone suffering, and I have no doubt the Yazidis are suffering. But as we start bombing things in Iraq again, let’s invite Obama to answer a few questions; White House journalists, pens at the ready please:
— Since this is happening in Iraq, and the U.S. spent $25 billion to train the Iraqi Army and sold it some serious weaponry, why isn’t it the Iraqis who will be doing any needed bombing? Is it because they are incompetent, or is it because the Baghdad government is either afraid to operate in Kurdish territory and/or wholly unconcerned what the hell happens up there?
Yep, might be those things. The Yazidis have long complained that neither Iraq’s Arabs nor Kurds protect them. In 2007, in what remains one of the most lethal attacks during the American Occupation, suicide bombers driving trucks packed with explosives attacked a Yazidi village in northwestern Iraq, killing almost 800 people.
— At the same time, since this is happening in defacto Kurdistan, and the U.S. has spent billions there since 1991 and supplied it some serious weaponry, why isn’t it the Kurds who will be doing any needed bombing to protect those they consider their own people? Hmm, just an idea, but the U.S. has recently imposed an economic oil embargo on Kurds to force them to stay with Iraq and they might be unhappy with American ‘stuff right now.
— Outside Kurdistan/Iraq, the other major Yazidi population centers are in Turkey and Iran. So why aren’t they doing any needed bombing?
— If indeed this Yazidi issue is a genocide, why isn’t the U.S. seeking UN action or sanction? The UN has, after all, started safely extracting small number of Yazidis. Could anyone help with that?
— If indeed this Yazidi issue is a genocide, why aren’t any of America’s allies jumping in to assist in any needed bombing? Seriously, if all this is really so important, how come it is just the U.S. involved, always?
— While saving the Yazidis is the stated goal, in fact any U.S. airstrikes are technically and officially acts of war on behalf of the Government of Iraq. And we’re also cool with that, yes?
— And c’mon, isn’t this just a cynical excuse to tug on some American heartstrings, crank up the war fever and get us back into the Iraq war? ‘Cause even if that’s not the intention, it is a likely result.
— And Obama, we’re gonna be cool announcing the loss of American life, again, in Iraq, this time to save the Yazidi? ‘Cause even though there are supposedly no boots on the ground, there is no way you are going to drop bombs near civilians you are trying to protect without Special Forces laying their boots on the ground to guide in the airstrikes. We are not Israelis, after all.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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