Wasn't "a few bad apples" the Bush apologists' excuse for abuses at Abu Ghraib?
Mallard Fillmore
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Bennett Cerf
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Bennett Cerf
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Tinsley must really crack himself up with that "blue helmet of peacefulness" line, which he's now used in three consecutive strips. But, hey, at least he admits what really bugs him about the UN.
I like how the original article refers to "girls as young as eight." Apparently not believing that was shocking enough, Tinsley has to embellish it to "girls, often as young as eight."
I like how the original article refers to "girls as young as eight." Apparently not believing that was shocking enough, Tinsley has to embellish it to "girls, often as young as eight."
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Bennett Cerf
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I guess this is the Washington Times editorial in question. It's certainly critical of Kofi Annan's handling of the scandal, but it doesn't exactly accuse him of "doing his best to ignore" it.
Despite being aware of the abuse for some time, the United Nations appears to be operating at its usual sluggish pace. A U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Liberia, Jordan Ryan, told the Associated Press that the report was "outdated" and that "much has improved since then." "There are good things that are now happening in Liberia," he said, adding that those caught engaging in "sex-for-food" are fired.
That, unfortunately, hasn't been good enough. It took U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan nearly a year of similar allegations from the mission in Congo before telling reporters that he was taking the matter seriously. When the United Nations finally did act, a handful of peacekeepers were fired. But the scandal continues to spread, suggesting that a more serious overhaul of hiring and training practices needs to be implemented.
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Rspaight
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Bennett Cerf wrote:Tinsley must really crack himself up with that "blue helmet of peacefulness" line, which he's now used in three consecutive strips.
At least its cracking *somebody* up.
I looked at the Wikipedia entry for the strip a while back, and it looks like at one time there were other characters and situations and plotlines going on. Now it's just boring, paranoid right-wing screeds seven days a week (and usually the *same* boring, paranoid right-wing screed several days in a row).
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
The timing of these smug "jokes" is pretty awful: trashing the U.N. as "America-hating thugs" with a holier-than-thou attitude doesn't really fly when this is making the news:
Haditha: Massacre and cover-up?
By Martin Asser
Haditha is an agricultural community of about 90,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates north-west of Baghdad.
It lies in the huge western province of Anbar, which has been the heartland of the insurgency since US troops led the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is a dangerous place for the US marines who control this part of Iraq and for the inhabitants, caught between insurgents and American troops.
On the morning of 19 November 2005, the Subhani neighbourhood was the scene of an event that has become like the pulse of the insurgency - a roadside bomb targeting a US military patrol.
It killed 20-year-old Lance Corp Miguel (TJ) Terrazas, driving one of four humvee vehicles in the patrol, and injured two other marines.
A simple US military statement hinted at the bloody chain of events which the attack started - though subsequent scrutiny showed it to be far from the truth.
It said: "A US marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha.
"Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."
Video footage
The tragedy of Haditha may have been left at that - just another statistic of "war-torn" Iraq, a place too dangerous to be reported properly by journalists, where openness is not in the interests of political and military circles, and the sheer scale of death numbs the senses.
However, a day after the incident, local journalist Taher Thabet got his video camera out and filmed scenes that - whatever they were - were not the aftermath of a roadside bomb.
The bodies of women and children, still in their nightclothes; interior walls and ceilings peppered with bullet holes; bloodstains on the floor.
Mr Thabet's tape prompted an investigation by the Iraqi human rights group Hammurabi, which passed details onto the US weekly magazine Time in January.
Before publishing its account on 19 March, the magazine passed the tape to US military commanders in Baghdad, who initiated a preliminary investigation.
Following their findings, the official version was changed to say that, after the roadside bomb, the 15 civilians had been accidentally shot by marines during a firefight with insurgents.
Nevertheless, on 9 March the top commanders in Baghdad began a criminal investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS). Its report is expected within days.
On 7 April three officers in charge of troops in Haditha were also stripped of their command and reassigned.
Pretended to die
Eyewitness accounts suggest that comrades of Lance Corp Terrazas, far from coming under enemy fire, went on the rampage in Haditha after his death.
Twelve-year-old Safa Younis appears in a Hammurabi video saying she was in one of three houses where troops came in and indiscriminately killed family members.
"They knocked at our front door and my father went to open it. They shot him dead from behind the door and then they shot him again," she says in the video.
"Then one American soldier came in and shot at us all. I pretended to be dead and he didn't notice me."
Hammurabi says eight people died in the house, including Safa's five siblings, aged between 14 and two.
In another house seven people including a child and his 70-year-old grandfather were killed. Four brothers aged 41 to 24 died in a third house. Eyewitnesses said they were forced into a wardrobe and shot.
Outside in the street, US troops are said to have gunned down four students and a taxi driver they had stopped at a roadblock set up after the bombing.
Damage
The Pentagon has said little about the Haditha deaths publicly, and in Iraq the incident has caused little controversy - US troops there are already routinely viewed as trigger happy and indifferent to Iraqi casualties.
But politicians in Washington who have been briefed on the military investigation say it backs the story that marines killed civilians in cold blood.
The chairman of the Senate armed services committee, John Warner, says it will hold hearings into the incident and how it was handled.
Media commentators have spoken of it as "Iraq's My Lai" - a reference to the 1968 massacre of 500 villagers in Vietnam.
Democrat congressman John Murtha, a former marine and war veteran, has said the Haditha incident could turn out to be an even bigger scandal than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
The Marine Corps has responded to Mr Murtha by saying it would be inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation, but would do so "as soon as the facts are known and decisions on future actions are made".
US Troops version of events
1) Marine Lance Corp Miguel Terrazas dies in attack on US convoy.
2) US military initially says bomb also killed 15 Iraqi civilians.
3) Eight insurgents killed after attacking convoy. US later says the 15 civilians were not killed by bomb, but shot accidentally in battle.
Eyewitness version.
1) Marine Lance Corp Miguel Terrazas dies in attack on US convoy.
2) Troops go on rampage - eight killed in one of three houses.
3) Seven killed in a second house, including five children.
4) Four brothers put in wardrobe and shot dead in a third house.
5) Four students and taxi driver killed at roadblock.
Haditha: Massacre and cover-up?
By Martin Asser
Haditha is an agricultural community of about 90,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates north-west of Baghdad.
It lies in the huge western province of Anbar, which has been the heartland of the insurgency since US troops led the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is a dangerous place for the US marines who control this part of Iraq and for the inhabitants, caught between insurgents and American troops.
On the morning of 19 November 2005, the Subhani neighbourhood was the scene of an event that has become like the pulse of the insurgency - a roadside bomb targeting a US military patrol.
It killed 20-year-old Lance Corp Miguel (TJ) Terrazas, driving one of four humvee vehicles in the patrol, and injured two other marines.
A simple US military statement hinted at the bloody chain of events which the attack started - though subsequent scrutiny showed it to be far from the truth.
It said: "A US marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha.
"Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."
Video footage
The tragedy of Haditha may have been left at that - just another statistic of "war-torn" Iraq, a place too dangerous to be reported properly by journalists, where openness is not in the interests of political and military circles, and the sheer scale of death numbs the senses.
However, a day after the incident, local journalist Taher Thabet got his video camera out and filmed scenes that - whatever they were - were not the aftermath of a roadside bomb.
The bodies of women and children, still in their nightclothes; interior walls and ceilings peppered with bullet holes; bloodstains on the floor.
Mr Thabet's tape prompted an investigation by the Iraqi human rights group Hammurabi, which passed details onto the US weekly magazine Time in January.
Before publishing its account on 19 March, the magazine passed the tape to US military commanders in Baghdad, who initiated a preliminary investigation.
Following their findings, the official version was changed to say that, after the roadside bomb, the 15 civilians had been accidentally shot by marines during a firefight with insurgents.
Nevertheless, on 9 March the top commanders in Baghdad began a criminal investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS). Its report is expected within days.
On 7 April three officers in charge of troops in Haditha were also stripped of their command and reassigned.
Pretended to die
Eyewitness accounts suggest that comrades of Lance Corp Terrazas, far from coming under enemy fire, went on the rampage in Haditha after his death.
Twelve-year-old Safa Younis appears in a Hammurabi video saying she was in one of three houses where troops came in and indiscriminately killed family members.
"They knocked at our front door and my father went to open it. They shot him dead from behind the door and then they shot him again," she says in the video.
"Then one American soldier came in and shot at us all. I pretended to be dead and he didn't notice me."
Hammurabi says eight people died in the house, including Safa's five siblings, aged between 14 and two.
In another house seven people including a child and his 70-year-old grandfather were killed. Four brothers aged 41 to 24 died in a third house. Eyewitnesses said they were forced into a wardrobe and shot.
Outside in the street, US troops are said to have gunned down four students and a taxi driver they had stopped at a roadblock set up after the bombing.
Damage
The Pentagon has said little about the Haditha deaths publicly, and in Iraq the incident has caused little controversy - US troops there are already routinely viewed as trigger happy and indifferent to Iraqi casualties.
But politicians in Washington who have been briefed on the military investigation say it backs the story that marines killed civilians in cold blood.
The chairman of the Senate armed services committee, John Warner, says it will hold hearings into the incident and how it was handled.
Media commentators have spoken of it as "Iraq's My Lai" - a reference to the 1968 massacre of 500 villagers in Vietnam.
Democrat congressman John Murtha, a former marine and war veteran, has said the Haditha incident could turn out to be an even bigger scandal than the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
The Marine Corps has responded to Mr Murtha by saying it would be inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation, but would do so "as soon as the facts are known and decisions on future actions are made".
US Troops version of events
1) Marine Lance Corp Miguel Terrazas dies in attack on US convoy.
2) US military initially says bomb also killed 15 Iraqi civilians.
3) Eight insurgents killed after attacking convoy. US later says the 15 civilians were not killed by bomb, but shot accidentally in battle.
Eyewitness version.
1) Marine Lance Corp Miguel Terrazas dies in attack on US convoy.
2) Troops go on rampage - eight killed in one of three houses.
3) Seven killed in a second house, including five children.
4) Four brothers put in wardrobe and shot dead in a third house.
5) Four students and taxi driver killed at roadblock.
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war." – Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Neither slave nor tyrant." - Basque motto
"Neither slave nor tyrant." - Basque motto
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Bennett Cerf
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lukpac
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lukpac
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Has Tinsley yet figured out that "the man" is a (neo)conservative Republican president?
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD