America, turn your hearing aid back on

I’m getting tired of America’s limited patience with the war in Iraq. There are lots of opinions as to why we need to end the war, but what information are those opinions based on? I hear people state that the majority of Americans wants us out of there. OK, but the majority of Americans can’t even tell you who the Secretary of State is during man-on-the-street interviews.

America’s lack of understanding in Iraq becomes more clear when you examine the media coverage. An example is this exchnge between NBC News Chief White House Correspondent David Gregory and conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham on the Today Show on March 21, 2006:

Gregory: "Laura what's your take on [coverage in Iraq] because obviously the White House has made a determination that speaking about the war candidly as they can is what's important now, and yet it's clear that the President's having a hard time being heard."

Ingraham: "Well here, here's what I think David. I think with all the resources of networks like NBC, The Today show spends all this money to send people to the Olympics, which is great; it was great programming. All this money for Where In The World Is Matt Lauer? Bring the Today show to Iraq. Bring the Today show to Tal Afar. Do the show from the 4th ID at Camp Victory and then when you talk to those soldiers on the ground, when you go out with the Iraqi military, when you talk to the villagers, when you see the children, then I want NBC to report on only the IEDs, only the killings, only, only the reprisals. When people are on the ground whether it's recently, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whether it's recently..."

Gregory: "Okay but, but Laura let's be, hold on, let's be..."

Ingraham: "Let me finish, David, because you got, you guys are, no, no, let me finish, let me finish..."

Gregory: "Wait a minute Laura! Wait a second! If you want to be fair. First of all the Today show went to Iraq. Matt Lauer was there; he reported there."

Ingraham: "Did he do a show, did you do a show from Iraq?"

Gregory: "Okay and we, and we've got a bureau there so..."

Ingraham: "Yeah. David, David, to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off. It is very difficult in Iraq. People are struggling..."

Laura is right. America could be tuning out any good work our troops have performed while mostly absorbing the if-it-bleeds-it-leads stories they have been saturated with from the mainstream media.

I work at a hospital with clients who have hearing impairments and sometimes they neglect to turn their hearing aids on. When they go without their hearing, a pattern seems develop where they miss key components of information. The same can be said about America and Iraq.
 

I often wonder if America is so interested in the results of popular TV shows such as “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol” that they depend on the mainstream media to do their thinking on current affairs in Iraq.

My sister-in-law’s brother plays in a band called the Groove Alliance, from New England. They were invited to play in the Green Zone for the troops and Iraqi workers. He told me at a family function that they went over to Iraq not knowing what to expect. They came back with a message: The morale was high and troops were pleading with them to tell people back home not to have their mission cut out from underneath them.

These perceptions have even influenced our government committees formed to investigate the war on terrorism. Can the final reports from the 911 Commission, Senate Select Intelligence Committee and Iraq Study group be trusted when they all have been targets of left-wing activist groups?
 

A column by David Swanson in the Atlantic Free Press titled “New Senate Report Is Worst Betrayal Yet” exemplifies the views of the left that have been bleeding throughout the entire mainstream media across our nation. Swanson said: "The report does not even summarize and give its stamp of approval to the existing and overwhelming body of evidence that the pre-war claims about weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda were known at the time to be false. THAT is the report everyone's waiting to see. And we don't want just a boring report."

The documents that were captured in Iraq titled the Docex Project, along with the documents captured in Afghanistan titled the Harmony Database, tell a very different story than the Democrats and the media. The Harmony Database Web site has a captured Al Qaeda document from Afghanistan that shows without any doubt that Aymen Al Zawahiri, who is Bin Laden’s deputy and the “Al Qaeda Brain,” had visited Iraq and Iran. The document, #:AFGP-2002-601693 located at Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, does not indicate which year those visits took place but it was definitely after 1995, based on the context of the document. This information confirms irrefutably a terrorist relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Other reporting from different sources said that there is an indication that Zawahiri visited Iraq in 1998.

A patriotic volunteer who identifies himself as Jveritas at FreeRepublic.com and who has worked translating the Docex Project documents captured in Iraq has told me: “There is no doubt that the Intelligence Reports by the Senate and in many cases by the Intelligence agencies have been greatly impacted by the anti-war crowd. Those reports are much more political than just about ‘intelligence assessment.’ Look at the style used in this latest report by the Senate Intelligence Committee; did moveon.org or the Democratic underground left-wingers write the text? It is just incredibly biased and full of lies.”

An opinion piece dated Friday, June 18, 2004 from the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com, titled “Spinning 9/11,” said: “Yet nearly all of the media coverage has focused on what the 9/11 panel claims it didn't find--namely, smoking-gun proof that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were working together. The country has traveled a long way psychologically from the trauma of September 11 if we are now focusing on the threats that allegedly don't exist instead of those that certainly do. Or, to be more precise, we're further from 9/11 but very close to an election. The ‘no Saddam link’ story is getting so much play because it fits the broader antiwar, anti-Bush narrative that Iraq was a ‘distraction’ from the broader war on terror. So once again the 9/11 Commission is being used to tarnish the Iraqi effort and damage President Bush's credibility in fighting terror.”

An article dated june 1st 2007 in South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper, by Ammar Karim and Nafia Abdul Jabbar, titled “Sunnis take on Al-Qaeda” reported: “Many of these Sunni militants are former insurgents once hostile to the U.S. military and Baghdad’s Shiite-led government but, angered by Al-Qaeda’s attacks on civilians and tribal leaders, they have changed sides.” I am seeing a lot of new reports of Iraqis chasing Al Qaeda out of their country.

America, please, it’s time to turn your hearing aids back on.