Haditha Could Be Another Drive-By Story

RUSH: The Drive-By Media are just like drive-by shooters. They pull up to a congested area; they spray a hail of bullets into the crowd. This causes mass hysteria, mass confusion, many mistakes and misinterpretations, sometimes people or their careers actually die. Then in the midst of all of this confusion, in the midst of all of these mistakes and misinterpretations, in the midst of all of this hysteria, the Drive-By Media smirks and laughs and marvels at their own power to create chaos and tumult — and they ride away. They head in a convertible. They head on down the highway looking for the next congested area to spray their hail of bullets into the crowd. They are unnoticed in all the excitement. They are never blamed. They are never held accountable.
In fact, the Drive-By Media are lauded and held up as heroes, mostly by themselves, for calling attention to such dangerous circumstances that we all needed to know about. While decent, normal everyday people are engaged in mopping up, cleaning up the messes that the Drive-By Media caused, there they are in their convertibles, heading down the highway with the top down, laughing and looking for their next victims with the cameras and microphones pointed in all directions, hoping to find the next area of chaos that they can expand, exploit and create. This is repeated over and over and over. There appears to be no way to stop them. There appears to be no way to stop their marauding ways. Everything is now a crisis. Crisis, crisis, crisis. The Drive-By Media creates them, tries to find as many as possible, and that is the reason for the analogy. Go up to line four. I want to grab this guy from Baton Rouge. David, welcome to the EIB network. Nice to have you with us, sir.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. How are you sir?
RUSH: Yeah. Just fine. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Rush, I live in little community by the name of Dutchtown, Louisiana. I’m probably about 45 miles east northeast of New Orleans, and so I personally have experiences, not in New Orleans, but I experienced all of the flyovers coming from this area. Believe me, the sky was full of helicopters for about five-to-seven days after Katrina, and I personally have been trying to find out exactly what happened, you know, the major news media reported all kinds of very negative things that happened — and I’m telling you, Rush, they got so much, so wrong that I now no longer trust the mainstream media at all.

RUSH: Well, that’s good. It’s a long time coming, but join the club. Whatever real life experience it takes, that is good. I would just as soon you experience it for yourself rather than trust me — although don’t doubt me. When I do tell you these things, don’t doubt me. But I understand it will have even greater impact if you see it for yourself. You are absolutely right — and yet, they all got awards! They all gave themselves awards for their Katrina reporting. They got book deals. They got television appearances. They’re heralded because they cried and they saw all of the suffering and all of the damage and it was bad and they had the sensitivity to cry about it on television.
They showed their emotions. Aren’t they, oh, wonderful people!
So they gave themselves awards. But it sort of got glossed over that a good percentage of what they reported was nothing but myth. A lot of it was just myth. The deaths, the destruction, all of the stuff in the Superdome, the “toxic soup” that was the water that had flooded New Orleans? All of this was bogus. If you are going to doubt them in other places, let me suggest to you, David, that you have some doubts in their reporting about what is going on the war on terror, individual incidents like this Haditha.
For example: (story) “The lawyer for a Marine being investigated in the deaths of two dozen civilians in Haditha described the event as tragic but denied that innocent people were killed intentionally. He said the troops followed military rules of engagement.” Now, no one has been charged in the Haditha case but you wouldn’t believe that listening to the Drive-By Media. “The case centers on allegations that a small number of Marines from Camp Pendleton’s 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment killed 24 Iraqi civilians including unarmed women and children on November 19th after a roadside bomb killed a fellow Marine.
“Lawyer Neal A. Puckett said Sunday that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, told him several civilians were killed after the bombing when his squad pursued insurgents firing at them from inside a house. Puckett quoted the sergeant as describing a house-to-house search that went wrong and resulted in unintended civilian deaths. [The Marine] denied allegations of an intentional massacre… Wuterich told his lawyer that as he was attending to those in the Humvee, he saw a car carrying five ‘military-aged’ males. When the occupants were ordered to stop, they tried to flee. The Marines shot the men, killing at least four of them.”
He then told the lawyer “after the confrontation, Marines began to draw gunfire from a nearby house. A four-man squad, including [the Marine] Wuterich, burst into the building to pursue the shooter. In the house, the Marines found a room with a closed door and heard ‘rustling sounds’ coming from behind it. Because they had taken machine gunfire, the Marines cleared the room in the way they had been trained. ‘Everything happened very fast,’ the lawyer said. ‘There’s no preparation, there’s no deliberation involved, it’s just a quick reaction time, shooting and neutralizing any threat that might be in there. And in these cases it turns out after the fact that there weren’t threats in that room.'”

Now the lawyer is saying that it is “possible none of the Marines would be charged with murder and instead some commanders could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to properly investigate the incident at the time.” We also learned, reported last week, that the primary culprit reporting this story, a TIME Magazine reporter, actually has sympathies towards the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and has written some things that are not favorable and kind about the US Military. Clarice Feldman at the AmericanThinker.com, one of our favorite blogs, even speculates in a narrative that we might actually have another Mary Mapes-type incident here in the reporting that has taken place on Haditha.
Yes. We might. This guy from TIME Magazine might be the modern day equivalent of Mary Mapes. She has put together… A blog that has listed all of the various elements of the story called “Sweetness & Light.” What happened was, that, I think, Clarice Feldman got a hold of the Ssweetness & Light people and asked if they would mind if she used some of the data to write a narrative form of the information they’ve got, and we shared that with you. It’s currently up on our website, the link to the website is up because it is from Friday. So, keep your powder dry on this one, folks, because it is a classic, I think, illustration — if it turns out to be — the prism and the lens which the Drive-By Media looks at this event in this whole war in Iraq, against Al-Qaeda, the whole war on terror is somehow we are the ones immoral. We are the ones that are being inhumane. We are the ones that are uncivil.
You know that that exists because we’ve seen it at Abu Graib; we’ve seen it at Club Gitmo. It continues today with this whole Club Gitmo story. For example, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Knight Ridder News Service, a story by Carol Rosenberg, headline: “Prisoners [At Club Gitmo] Linked to Terrorism, U.S. Says.” No kidding! This is news? “Guantanamo Bay Navy Base — The three men who killed themselves at the prison here included a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative, a Saudi who sided with the Taliban against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and a supporter of a banned extremist group that helped arrange travel for al-Qaeda loyalists, the military said yesterday.”
Really? The people at Guantanamo are terrorists? You’re kidding! The people that committed suicide were people with terrorist links? No! I can’t believe it, folks.

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