Massacres a go go

On Abdul Rahman, Afghan Supreme Court justice Khoja Ahmad Sediqi (hey, he’s also a Muslim cleric, what’re the odds?) says: “The words of our prophet are very clear. There can only be one outcome: death.”

The Washington Post’s next right-wing blogger?

A London Sunday Times columnist has a quote from classicist FM Cornford: “Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists of nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”

Speaking of the art of lying, I’ve been holding off weighing in on the Haditha massacre, waiting for some sort of official response to the Time report, in which Marines last Nov. 19 mowed down a family after one Marine in a convoy was hit by a roadside bomb, killing one Marine (massacres, actually, as the Sindy reports that some students in a car on the same road as the convoy were also shot, one left for hours to bleed to death). But there evidently won’t be a response until the “investigation” is complete. Not the investigation that said all the dead Iraqi civilians were “collateral damage,” which was discredited, like the first story that the 15 civilians were all killed by that bomb, after the second story that the Marines were under fire was discredited by a video showing a complete absence of bullet marks. Maybe it’s just me, but when the first story put out by the Marines is a lie, shouldn’t that trigger the idea that maybe there is something being covered up, and that it should be looked into?

And as long as we’re doing massacres, where’s the follow-up on last week’s killing of 11 members of a family in Abu Sifa?