Haditha Massacre

I drive for a living. I listen to NPR from 6AM to 8AM and then I listen to Democracy Now! By 9AM I am ready to turn the radio off for a while. At noon I listen to the Marc Steiner Show on WYPR which used to be WJHU until John’s Hopkins lost interest in it. Marc Steiner is extremely well read and came out of the Civil Rights Movement. He was “merely” the daily talk show host of his own show two hours a day before Hopkins decided to dump the station. He is the main reason the station survived and is thriving. He is the only radio talk show host I respect and you can listen to at least some of his shows here.

I mention all this because I have become very skeptical of NPR. They seem to bend over backwards to get out the Heritage Foundation’s views on every topic from Abortion to Torture. It irritates me. And although Marc has their mouth pieces on as well he goes way deeper into stories especially about Iraq and Palestine and Israel. No need to point out he is Jewish. You can tell by his name. He refuses to take sides and refuses to let things devolve into shouting matches. He is well respected and loved in Baltimore.

This morning I was listening to NPR interview reporters about the Haditha Massacre and the reporters were asked how the Iraqi’s felt about this. They all responded that they took it with a grain of salt because there is so much violence going on in Iraq that it is just one more incident. They said it is a much bigger story over here. I thought, yeah more Corporate Media spin.

I listened to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! ask independent reporters in Iraq the same question and she got the same answer with the addition that there is some anger and that people are still upset about what happened in Falluja. Basically people are seeing horror upon horror every day and the deaths of twenty five innocent civilians is just a continuation of what has been going on every day.

Marc Steiner had a show about Iraq and Afghanistan today and all the reporters said the same things, more or less.

Iraq has been averaging 38 civilian murders a day since January 1, 2006. Executions, beheadings and whatever.

It is astounding that George W. Bush’s adventurism in Iraq has turned out so horribly that US Marines could go into a few homes and shoot 25 people from the ages of two months old to seventy six years old and the people in Iraq can barely react to it because of all the other horrible things that our invasion of the country has wrought.

People here are hardly reacting to any of it. It is just wave upon wave of atrocity after atrocity. From the torture we are committing right now to the domestic spying we are doing right now to the killing we are doing right now to as of today the escalation of the number of troops in Iraq. Another 1500 sent in from Kuwait. Not enough to make a difference. Just enough to enrich the target environment for all the people in Iraq we have taught to hate us.