Breaking News: Iraqi Parliament Cafeteria Bombed
A suicide bomber wearing a bomb vest managed to get into a cafeteria in the parliament building in the fortress-like Green Zone in downtown Baghdad and to detonate his payload. He killed 8 persons and wounded 20, among them two members of parliament. They included an MP from the secular Sunni National Dialogue Front (11 seats) and another from the Kurdistan Alliance.
John McCain's silliness about how safe it is to walk around Baghdad should be decisively put to rest by this incident. Security is clearly getting worse in Iraq, not better. Although the Green Zone has frequently taken mortar fire, bombings have been extremely rare (one previous successful one?). It could only have happened if persons who look to the Americans as though they are loyal allies were actually smuggling in components and working for the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement.
Kyra Phillips is saying that a lot of security checking coming into the Green Zone has been turned over to the Iraqis or over to private security firms. "Someone is obviously not doing their job," she observed.
The oddest thing is that I hardly saw anything about this on American cable television news Thursday morning. (At noon, of course, CNN allows one hour of a feed from the adult news, CNN International, and it did a good job.) They had some small town murder mystery again, or stories about white shock jocks being shocking and racist (as if the owners of the cable television news weren't the ones purveying white shock jocks with racist views to the world). It is tragic that corporate media get away with using public resources to divert the attention of the people from what is important and to baby sit them with pablum.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/12/2007 06:05:00 AM
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10 Comments:
I think this must be that ONE bombing a day that Laura Bush and Glass-Is-Full McCain blame the media for exaggerating...
Oh, also, 10 dead and over 25 injured in a bombing that destroyed al-Sarafiya bridge across Baghdad and sent vehicles tumbling into the Tigris...
Maybe that will also be the ONE bombing a day the media hypes...
Professor Cole,
While I agree with you that the sad state of media coverage in this country is a real tragedy, I don't think its accurate to say that CNN is using public resources. CNN is a cable channel, not a broadcast channel. While your complaint is valid as to Imus and his corporate masters, I don't think that's a fair criticism of CNN. To be sure, there are plenty of fair complaitns to be had...
As long as two salient realities continue we will not see quality media in the U.S.:
1. Advertisers pay for the quantity of viewers that a program will deliver (with some adjustments for "quality" i.e. golf tournaments routinely have viewers with larger income and so make up in dollars what they lack in overall numbers). This is an amoral and corporate perspective that is controlling public airwaves, and we get lousy newscasts as a result. They can use the ad revenue meme to justify all manner of nutiness and fictionalized news. Keeping everyone massaged and frightened is hard work!
2. Wealthy freakazoids can accept red figures for programming they support if there is another perceived payoff, as in controlling messages to the public so as to mirror their own political and financial positions. Ned Beatty's speech and relationship to Howard Beale (as written by Paddy Chayefsky) in the film Network is more or less how I feel about Rupert Murdoch and other, less visible Content Monarchs in America.
The Internet is full of madmen, but also peopled with knights and Truth Tellers. I count Juan Cole as one of the Truth Tellers.
+++
Juan,
Check out this great resources from the BBC, called "Baghdad: Mapping the violence".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/baghdad_navigator/
If I am reading it correctly, it appears this will be the 5th bomb to go if in the Green Zone since May 2003.
At any rate, it's a good visual reference.
I would say the counter-surge is in full swing, unfortunately as predicted.
The bottom line for the past two+ years remains the same: Only the impeachment process has a chance to change policy in a manner favorable to the TRUE interest of PEOPLE everywhere.
Professor Cole
Could not have been said better about the US Media.
I think eventually it will sink, when people like Lee Iacocca come to the movie Network moment “ I can’t take it anymore, Had Enough? ” that means we need turbine no longer fan will do the job.
How's this for sorting out the important stuff. Wolfowitz is in trouble but not because he helped mastermind and light the Iraq inferno. No, he got caught getting his girlfriend a fat job.
He's apologizing profusely about helping his girlfriend, in hopes of not getting canned at the World Bank, but I don't think he sees any need to apologize for his Iraq role.
This story has legs, especially if Wolfie's friend has shapely ones. Maybe Wolfie will come out of this whole thing looking like a hunk.
in a fascinating interview on the U.S. PBS Newshour programme, Yochi Dreazen, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal reveals that "there have now evolved ‘Green Zones’ within The Green Zone, itself," with varying degrees of safety; and, that "vehicles move in groups of three, at high speeds ~ as if they were convoys themselves ~ within the greater Green Zone."
Residences for Iraqi citizens (there are several thousand living there) as well as international personnel, "all have security walls, themselves," and "everyone has their own security service personnel," again: all this within the Baghdad Green Zone (!)
Fascinating. Though news correspondents often complain, and rightly so ~ that it is near impossible to travel about, report thus the conditions within Iraq, or even the City of Baghdad: it would be quite enlightening, apparently, for Western Media to depict and report accurately the actual conditions of the AngloAmerican Green Zone!
I would have thought a simultaneous attack on the seat of power and a high-profile infrastructure target would have caused more of a stir in the U.S. In fact, I wonder if the insurgents realize that the U.S. public has atrocity fatigue and thought two spectacular attacks like this would cut through the "surge is working" fog. But no. Just another day in Iraq. Amazing.
At noon, of course, CNN allows one hour of a feed from the adult news, CNN International, and it did a good job.
Thank God I get CNN Int'l, then. They were covering the Green Zone bombing so extensively that I had to flip to BBC World to hear about what else was going on (who also covered the bombing, but not as thoroughly as CNNI).
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