The Belmont Club has an excellent analysis of the "wedding party" story that has been making the media rounds today. No conclusions can be made at this point, obviously, but there were some questions the newsmedia should have asked (and answered) to begin with:
Why was a wedding party in full swing at 02:45 am in the middle of the desert? A glance at the map would show the area in which the wedding took place was 250 kilometers from "Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi," and who "put the death toll at 45." A long way to go for medical treatment or burial when Qusabayah is 50 kilometers away. Under normal circumstances, there are two wounded for every dead. By the normal ratios there should have been at least 90 injured. There was a videotape of "showing a truck containing bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless." A video of the dead, but where were the wounded?
Read the rest of his analysis.
Hopefully we'll get a clearer picture soon. The media has already decided what it wants to believe, and run away with the first story.
New observations using NASA's orbiting Chandra telescope have strongly confirmed the existence of dark energy, by measuring X-rays from 26 galaxy clusters. This is a form of repulsive energy that causes the expansion of the universe to accelarate. The new results being consistent with predictions made by different methods earlier is a strong confirmation that dark energy exists.
So what do you do if you have been ambushed, you are surrounded and you are outbnumbered five to one? If you are the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, you fix bayonets and charge.
In what is described as the first bayonet charge by the British army since a similar attack by the Scots Guards and the Paras in the Falklands war 22 years ago, twenty Argylls recreated their countless exercise drills when they charged 100 rebels near Amara. When the fierce hand to hand battle was over, 35 Iraqi insurgents lay dead, nine were captured, and the Brits had suffered only three minor wounds.
I have had it explained, and I believe it willingly, that there is something about a soldier running against you with cold sharp steel pointing in your direction that simply makes all morale evaporate.
In another sign that Iraqi Governing Council member and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi is falling out of favour with Washington, US soldiers and Iraqi police have raided his Baghdad home and party headquarters, and carried away documents and computers. It is a bit unclear what they were looking for.
The reports about the alleged "wedding massacre" in western Iraq is wildly conflicting. As many as 40 people were killed, and early reports said it was an attack on a wedding which may have been provoced by celebratory gunfire being mistaken for hostility, a mistake that proved costly in Afghanistan in 2002
However, the Pentagon insists they were attacking foreign fighters, that they came under hostile fire, and that nothing indicates a wedding party was going on.
Al-Arabiya has been instrumental in propagating the "wedding massacre" version of this story, which will add up to a very dangerous climate for the coalition forces in Iraq. Even if it proves false, the danage is done.
