Maggie's Farm

I think you will find, reading from Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino and Michael Yon, along with various others, that those that were left are from the minority of a minority in the Sunni Arab community: the ones who had ties to the Ba'athist regime and realized that their necks were on the line if they stayed.

The AP is not to be trusted in general for its reporting on Iraq, and for its ability to mis-characterize anything it gets its hands on. They are the ones that have over 60 stories without confirmation and, in many, actual physical evidence that they did not happen... and yet AP refuses to retract stories that are factually incorrect or even issue corrections. While some extremely small minorities in Iraq are threatened in some places, like the Syriac Christians and the Alawite Muslims, they are generally not the target of the terrorist groups nor of the insurgents. In the Kurdish regions they are included in government, so that this concept of 'multi-ethnic common government' can be seen in the towns and cities there.

I now count AP along with Reuters, NYT (including IHT and Boston Globe), WaPo, any television news network with more than one letter, and quite a few other organizations as untrustworthy based on their skewed, biased and non-factual reporting as well as those reports lacking context to allow the reader to understand the actual situations involved. And, yes, I have put out multiple articles on those things... so that one can see for themselves that the WaPo cannot even understand the timing of something simple, like the Federal Budget. If they cannot figure that out and publish stories that go through the vaunted editorial process and comes out *wrong*, then why should I trust them for anything else they report on?

There are some fine individual reporters, but finding their accounts in an ungarbled form is often very hard to do. John Burns of the NYT deserves a Pulitzer for his work when he can get it published, as does Michael Yon who has no editorial staff between himself and his reports.

It is telling that the largest group of refugees wound up in Syria... which has done little to publicize their humanitarian operations, because they are not humanitarian in nature, just welcoming home fellow travelers now out of power in a neighboring country.

Perhaps AP could try and get an adventurous journalist to look into that? Mind you, it might get them suddenly dead in a police state dictatorship, but those are the risks of *reporting*... and damned few reporters could get into Saddam's Iraq and survive unless they were CNN which censored the 'bad things' out of its reports. Luckily not listening to these highly suspect 'news' sources means I can now look for facts that have more than one witness or that have strong corroborating evidence to back them up. Because that, apparently, is beyond the ability of the MSM to do.