Dead Babies for Democracy

A story originating in American headquarters in Baghdad and attributed to a General Barbero disgusted just about everybody in telling how car bombers had used two small children to fool security checks. They detonated their bomb, apparently killing the two children. The story was later corroborated by the Iraqi police.

This story has engendered more than 165 000 internet posts, but has appeared on only six notably similar news reports. The details are sketchy. All six tell of two children in the back seat of a car driven through security checkpoints and exploded after the front seat passengers, 2 men, exited and walked away. Then things start to change. In one post the children were spotted by American security at two checkpoints. In another the children were spotted by shop keepers who told the men they couldn't park their car.

The story reports 6 - 8 people killed but does not refer to the children. In the aftermath, these children remain apocryphal - no reports on their bodies, gender , age, etc. - no reports of missing children. Since the original story - nothing, if you don't count 165 000+ internet entries, that is. If numbers alone can make something true this is a fairly good example. Not one poster in the first ten pages even wonders if the story is true.

Like other stories of atrocities committed by one side or the other, that later are found to be insubstantial, these things have a way of remaining buried in the psyche. To the pro-war population they're just more proof that it's a 'mission civilitrice', a prevention of similar atrocities over here, a battle against heartless terror. To the antiwar people its another in a litany of inhumanites in a questionable cause. To others it's bullshit, pure and simple, like the BS that started it all.

Two weeks ago a truck bomb aimed at a kids playground turned out to be some American demolitions gone awry. Before that, there was the massacre of the innocents leaving the mosque - it never happened.

One of the first casualties of war, is truth. It's just a real pity when the 'good guys' the claimed forces of the light are forced to lie. It's disgusting that they do it with such blatant arrogance. If it wasn't for the fact that they're claiming to save the world, it would be understandable. But then, look at what happens in our 'democracies' every day. The media runs us and the powers run the media. And some of those 'powers' are deluded, they're so whacked on their own BS they're nuts. What you have in Iraq is just some third-rate advertising flunkies, the real deals are back stateside making six figures peddling beer and cars.

The bummer about making fabricating wartime horror stories is that, eventually, they come back to make you look wrong. And when you're snotting hell out of somebody else's country that can be worse than dead babies.