Media Battle In Baghdad
The treatment of the kids may have been indefensible, but their rescue made for a rare good news story out of Iraq. Not much more to say, then, right?
Wait. Nothing is easy when reporting from Iraq.
Later that day we got word that the Iraqi Labor and Social Affairs Minister was contesting the report. According to the Associated Press:
"We totally reject the tricks they used to manipulate and distort facts and show the Americans as the humanitarian party. That could not be further from the truth," said Labor and Social Affairs Minister Mahmoud Mohammed al-Radhi.Public Eye went directly to Logan for comment. She wrote in an e-mail:The minister said the institution in which the boys were housed had saved them from death on the streets of Baghdad. All the boys, he said, were severely handicapped and abandoned by their families.
He accused the Americans of staging a photograph of at least four of the boys cluttered in a small bed.
"Are they really concerned about how well the children are treated in that shelter, or is it just propaganda for their alleged kindness?" Radhi said of the U.S. troops. "They are our children not the Americans'."
The pictures tell their own story, no matter what the Minister says.Even without Logan's comments, we would have been exceedingly skeptical of the minister's claims -- after all, the images speak for themselves. And in the time since the story was reported, the United Nations has denounced the orphanage as well.And so do the facts. I don't understand how the minister can say the children were saved from certain death on the streets of Baghdad when they were facing certain death INSIDE the government run institution he has chosen to defend.
The doctor who treated the children said four of them would have been dead in two days, had they not been rescued. So I am confused by how the minister can say Americans have no compassion.