Needlenose

Before

After
As some might remember, last week the U.S. military in Iraq bombed the living hell out of what locals later claimed was a wedding party killing some 40-odd people (not unlike a similar incident a couple of years ago in Afghanistan). The military’s top brass, however, has steadfastly refuted these claims. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director For Coalition Operations in Iraq went on today, in the daily CPA news conference, to offer a slideshow intended to bolster the military’s argument:

GEN. KIMMITT: Yeah. As we have talked about over the last three press conferences, there are inconsistencies between what we saw in those videos and what we found on the ground. We have started an investigation. Let me offer some more photos of what we found on the ground.
…
These are pictures that are somewhat inconsistent, to my mind, with a wedding party. This is the number of weapons that we saw there. One could say, yes, it is true that out in the desert that you need to have a rifle to protect yourself against Ali Baba; but the necessity for rocket propelled launchers, rocket launchers on the bottom, special machine guns may be a little much for Ali Baba out there.

(The good General, it is safe to assume, skipped the cultural sensitivity training session where they teach you not to use derogatory terms like Ali Baba to address Arab natives).

Trouble is, someone videotaped the wedding (pop-up link to video mid-way down the page) then passed the tape on to Associated Press Television News (APTN) who then proceeded to do research on the people showing up on the video, offering a strong counter-rebuttal to the General’s rebuttals:

The APTN videotape, obtained Sunday, shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert, escorting a bridal car decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.

The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck.

…

“There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration,”Kimmitt said Saturday.

Video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.

An Associated Press reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video — which runs for several hours.
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As expected, women are out of sight — but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. Al-Ali was buried in Baghdad on Thursday.

Prominently displayed on the videotape was a stocky man with close-cropped hair playing an electric organ. Another tape, filmed a day later in Ramadi and obtained by APTN, showed the musician lying dead in a burial shroud — his face clearly visible and wearing the same tan shirt as he wore when he performed.

…

Kimmitt again denied finding evidence that any children died in the raid.

“We had a ground force element that went through the objective. It did not identify any children killed,” he said Monday.

However, an AP reporter obtained names of at least 10 children who relatives said had died. Bodies of five of them were filmed by APTN when the survivors took them to Ramadi for burial Wednesday. Iraqi officials said at least 13 children were killed. Mourners say the bride and groom were killed.

Question is, who would you believe. The General or the villagers (and APTN)?

Green Boy has been threatening for quite some time (pretty much since the last election) to become an election monitor out in Florida. He’s convinced there was funny business out there in 2000. Looks like he’s not the only one:

Gadsden is the only majority-black county in Florida and one of the poorest, with high unemployment and illiteracy rates and, in 2000, an outmoded voting system that had been in place for decades. Its demographics are similar to parts of Duval, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and other counties that had high rates of ballot spoilage: an investigation by The Miami Herald and USA Today found that 83 of the 100 precincts with the largest numbers of discarded ballots were majority black.

Anger, shame and fear roiled those precincts afterward, fueled by reports of police roadblocks near black polling places, poll workers turning black voters away and the mysterious disappearance of registered black voters from the rolls. As the extent of Gadsden’s problem was discovered, television cameras descended, conspiracy theories brewed, and Gadsden County became an object of national ridicule that haunts it still.

So if you’re free sometime early this November, you might want to head out to one of the battleground states and offer to become an election monitor. It looks like the DNC is finally getting a clue. People for the American Way has set up a voter rights education program, and the Center for Democracy has an active election monitoring program ready to go (presumably modeled after the third-world country one they’ve had in place for years).

Wonder where all that Bush/Cheney reelection money ($200M at last count) comes from? Who are all these people sending big checks and what’s their relation to GW?

It’s eminently fair to ask and The Washington Post (!) has put together a very cool Flash-based interactive feature to let you explore the connections.

Go. It’s fun.
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