Iraq's Interior Ministry said Thursday it had formed a special unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be incorrect.
Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the ministry, said the purpose of the special monitoring unit was to find "fabricated and false news that hurts and gives the Iraqis a wrong picture that the security situation is very bad, when the facts are totally different."
... As an example, he cited coverage by The Associated Press of an attack Nov. 24 on a mosque in the Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad.
The AP reported that six Sunni Muslims there were burned alive during the attack....
Khalaf said the ministry had dispatched a team to the Hurriyah neighborhood and to the morgue but found no witnesses or evidence of burned bodies....
Gateway Pundit says "Wow!" Michelle Malkin quotes Brigadier General Khalaf, apologist for the torture-enabling ministry, proudly and at great length. And here's more from Free Republic:
EXCELLENT! I'm excited about the prospect of them taking a much more 'active' role in battling AP/Reuters than the Bush administration or DOD are able (politically) to take.
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Good. Should have done this sooner. The media is a huge if not the main "front line" in this war. On this side of the ocean too.
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Our government should take a hint.
If you're not up to speed on the burning story invoked by the general and the right-wing blogosphere's efforts to debunk it, you can catch up here.
I came late to the story myself, and -- since we're talking about a country where about a hundred people a day are murdered, many of them beheaded after torture -- I'm having a little trouble understanding the fuss over whether this particularly horror story is true. All I can think is: OK, maybe that one story about improper food sanitation on the Titanic was flawed, but you still haven't told us why the damn ship sank.
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