HomeExamples of HuffPost’s propaganda jihad against the U.S. military – and for America’s enemies (62 case studies) V2
Examples of HuffPost’s propaganda jihad against the U.S. military – and for America’s enemies (62 case studies) V2
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by Jon Sutz, Editor, SaveTheWest.com
Al Zawahiri, beside Bin Laden
“We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
– Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2005, while second-in-command of Al Qaeda (now its leader)
“People of jihad have to create a media war that goes parallel to the military war. They should not be short on anything because we see the effect the media has on the nation and people in supporting or denouncing us.”
– An Al-Qaeda Media Committee memorandum, as reported in “The Nature of the Enemy,” a U.S. Department of Defense publication, October 17, 2006 (via Global Security)
Case studies: HuffPost’s propaganda jihad against the U.S. military — and for America’s enemies:
(1) Examples of HuffPost smearing the U.S. military and American soldiers (25)
(2) Examples of HuffPost dehumanizing U.S. soldiers, and their families (26)
(3) Examples of other ways that HuffPost undermines the U.S. military, and whitewashes America’s enemies (15)
Bibliography: Articles and reports that document terrorist groups’ information warfare strategies and tactics, especially against the U.S. military
Introduction & summary
The 1,460,000 volunteers who serve in America’s military deserve all the support we can provide them.
In any organization of that size, however, there are going to be some “bad apples,” who commit acts that violate military regulations, or the law. In such cases, the accused deserve every benefit-of-the-doubt, until the facts are established, and a judgment is rendered, based on those facts.
Responsible journalistic enterprises wait until that point to issue any opinion-based condemnations of the specific members who are to be punished, and how.
For many years, however, HuffPost has consistently, maliciously smeared and dehumanized members of the U.S. military — while humanizing, showering sympathy on, and whitewashing its enemies. Specifically:
HuffPost has repeatedly smeared the U.S. military as a whole. It has constructed incendiary headlines that accused members of the US military of perpetrating horrific crimes that it knew, or should have known, were completely untrue, unprovable, or were being depicted in an egregiously decontextualized fashion. See detailed case studies here.
HuffPost has repeatedly dehumanized American soldiers. It has ignored American soldiers who were being awarded the military’s highest distinction, the Medal of Honor — in one case, while at the same time, devoting sustained, top-level sympathy on a “homesick American jihadist.” Further, it has ignored service members who were killed in action, or sacrificed themselves to save others (including, in one incident documented on this page, an Afghanistani child), and who have been the victims of hate crimes on U.S. soil. See detailed case studies here.
HuffPost has repeatedly undermined the U.S. military, while whitewashing America’s enemies. It has posted “news” stories that provide sympathetic, “humanizing” depictions of Islamist terrorists — including one incident in which it showed “thegentle face of Al Qaeda” — while never showing (or even acknowledging) the “human face” of American soldiers. See detailed case studies here.
In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of Al Qaeda (now its leader) said:
“We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
One year later, the Al-Qaeda Media Committee issued a memorandum that read, in part:
“People of jihad have to create a media war that goes parallel to the military war. They should not be short on anything because we see the effect the media has on the nation and people in supporting or denouncing us.”
– “The Nature of the Enemy,” a U.S. Department of Defense publication, October 17, 2006 (via Global Security)
In the following years, ISIS and other Islamist terror groups echoed the utmost importance of this “propaganda jihad,” particularly against the U.S. military (example). To aid the newcomer in fully grasping these terrorist groups’ information warfare strategies and tactics, SaveTheWest has prepared a comprehensive bibliography of articles and reports.
As relating specifically to the U.S. military, these groups’ key objectives are:
To falsely accuse American soldiers of murdering innocent Muslims and committing various war crimes
To falsely depict the U.S. military as being on a “crusade” to convert Muslim nations into Christian ones, by force (HuffPost gave top coverage to twoarticles that falsely made this accusation, one of which used the term “crusade”)
This page documents the fact that for many years, HuffPost has perpetrated acts and omissions that, given its immense influence and reach, it knows (or should know) could only serve to help advance Islamist terror groups’ information warfare objectives, by:
Inciting global hatred against the U.S. military (and as an extension, the C.I.A. with which the U.S. military often works in operations to defend America)
Contributing to the documented phenomenon of “sudden jihad syndrome,” in which borderline violent Islamists say later that they were pushed into a terrorist act, by seeing or hearing something — often online, via the “Internet jihad” — that validates an inflammatory, erroneous perception of his enemy, most often, the U.S. military
Emboldening and legitimizing the jihadists who are murdering American soldiers — especially now that HuffPost has two all-Arabic editions, in the Middle East and North Africa
Considered as a whole, HuffPost’s bigotry, bias and incitement against the U.S. military is comparable to that of newspapers controlled by the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South, in the early 20th century. Disguised as “news,” the only time one saw stories in these newspapers about black people, or featuring black faces, was when they were being accused of having perpetrated crimes large and small (whether truthfully or not), or being stupid, lazy, violent, or similar. Yet whenever black Americans performed some noble deed, big or small (eg the Tuskegee Airmen, or George Washington Carver), these “newspapers” ignored them.
It was these indoctrinated, incendiary perceptions — propagated by the local “news” media — that led directly to blacks being lynched throughout the Deep South.
In HuffPost’s case, however, it is getting rich by inciting hatred against and dehumanizing U.S. soldiers, while whitewashing and evoking sympathy for America’s enemies — thanks to advertising from mainstream American corporations, many of whom probably have no idea that they’ve been enabling this behavior.
HuffPost’s alleged journalistic principles and practices — versus the reality
Ironically, one of HuffPost’s top “journalists,” Christopher Matthias, decried anyone who smears the many, for the actions of the few. In the wake of jihadist Omar Mateen’s June 2016 massacre at the Orlando gay nightclub (which HuffPost whitewashed), Matthias said:
Then there was the sadly predictable backlash in the U.S., with politicians and pundits publicly blaming a major religion and its 1.6 billion adherents for the actions of a few.
While Matthias has written a seemingly endless array of heart-wrenching stories about every alleged hate incident against Muslims in America (many of which were soon proven to be hoaxes, some of which HuffPost willfully legitimized), he has apparently had nothing to say about the “newspaper” for which he writes engaging in a deliberate, consistent, malicious pattern of inciting hatred against the U.S. military as a whole, for the alleged actions of a few. Nor has he apparently had anything to say about the fact that, as the documentation on this page proves, many of these alleged actions either never occurred, are unprovable, or are presented by HuffPost in a wildly-decontextualized, incendiary fashion.
“The Huffington Post has in place rigorous editorial policies and standards, to ensure that we maintain the highest level of journalistic integrity.”
“At HuffPost there are guidelines that have to be followed — and they include a prohibition on conspiracy theories or inflammatory claims […] what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ which he defined as angry minds that traffic in ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,’ and that see ‘the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms… always manning the barricades of civilization’.”
“Too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned.”
“If you’re looking for the usual flame-throwing, name-calling, and simplistic attack dog rhetoric … don’t bother coming to the Huffington Post.”
“There is an objective reality, and it is the media’s job to present it unequivocally.”
Do HuffPost’s advertisers know what they are reallyenabling?
HuffPost presumably promotes these alleged standards and practices in its sales pitches to major, mainstream U.S. corporations, in order to secure advertising contracts. And these corporations presumably purchase advertising there in good faith, at least in part based on the presumption that HuffPost fulfills these promises.
The reality, however, as documented on this page, is that HuffPost has been consistently and flagrantly violating its own supposed standards and practices when it comes to reporting on issues concerning the U.S. military. And in doing so, it has also been violating the stated and presumed corporate values of both its current advertisers, and its prospective advertisers.
Under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, HuffPost is free to engage in this subversive, dishonest, malicious behavior concerning the U.S. military.
But do the many mainstream American corporations that advertise at HuffPost know that they are financially enabling its “propaganda jihad” against the U.S. military (and, as noted before, on occasion, the C.I.A.)?
After reviewing this page, however, the senior executives of these corporations will know exactly what they have been enabling, whether knowingly or otherwise — as will the general public.
(1) Examples of HuffPost smearing the U.S. military and American soldiers
(1.1) May 2009: HuffPost gave top coverage to a false allegation, sourced from Al Jazeera, that the U.S. military was giving soldiers Christian bibles, and instructing them to “hunt” and convert Afghanistani Muslims — then rewrote and buried the corrected story
HuffPost knew, or should have known at the time that this was a lie. It published this libelous smear anyway. Details here.
(1.2) April 2010: HuffPost used a debunked, selectively-edited WikiLeaks video as the basis of a front page splash headline, to falsely claim that American soldiers engaged in “collateral murder”
(1.3) April 2010: HuffPost gave top coverage to a false claim that U.S. soldiers are deliberately murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
(1.4) May 2010: HuffPost gave top coverage to an unprovable claim by a discredited “journalist,” that American soldiers are murdering civilians in Afghanistan
(1.5) September 2010: HuffPost published a front-page headline that smeared highly-trained, honorably-discharged American soldiers as “mercenaries” — including those who protected Sen. Obama and Sec. Clinton
(1.6) October 2010: HuffPost constructed an incendiary splash front page headline that it knew was falsely accusing the U.S. military of “torturing, abusing and murdering” Iraqi detainees
(1.7) October 2010: HuffPost relied on Wikileaks and a deranged Wired “journalist” to viciously libel American soldiers — then ignored them when they revealed findings that clashed with its fundamental lies about the Iraq war
(1.8) November 2010: HuffPost manipulated a wire service headline in a way that could only serve to incite hatred against American soldiers, by falsely implying that they are demolishing Afghanistanis’ homes without good cause
HuffPost knew, or should have known, that the U.S. military did not do this. It published this incendiary libel anyway. Details here.
(1.9) January 2011: HuffPost gave top coverage for a second time to a discredited “journalist,” this time to use Al Qaeda-based verbiage to smear the U.S. military leadership, in a way that could only help to incite violence against American soldiers
(1.10) April 2012: HuffPost gave top coverage to a smear that depicts U.S. soldiers as Nazi storm troopers
(1.11) January 2013: HuffPost gave top coverage to a picture of massive civilian death and destruction in Pakistani marketplace to falsely claim the U.S. military was responsible — when it knew, or should have known, that it was the result of an Islamist terror bombing
(1.12) July 2014: HuffPost constructed a front page headline that falsely depicted a U.S. military drone strike as killing 6 civilians, when it knew at the time that only terrorists were targeted, and killed [INCIDENT 1]
(1.13) July 2014: HuffPost constructed a front page headline that falsely depicted a U.S. military drone strike as killing 11 civilians, when it knew at the time that only terrorists were targeted, and killed [INCIDENT 2]
(1.14) December 2014: HuffPost used decontextualized imagery in a deliberate effort to smear all U.S. soldiers and intelligence personnel as torturing sadists, to support a hyper-partisan Senate report
(1.15) October 2015: HuffPost published at the top of its front page a carefully-staged anti-U.S. military propaganda photo, which used a child as a prop, standing before elaborate graffiti that asked why U.S. drones murdered his family
(1.16) June 2016: HuffPost published an editorial that falsely claimed the U.S. military “uses drones that indiscriminately take innocent lives around the world” — and left it on a top page for nine straight days
(1.17) February 2017: HuffPost smeared the U.S. military, by implying that it mistakenly (or maliciously) buried a top Nazi sympathizer at Arlington National Cemetery
(1.18) April 2017: The U.S. Navy “is waging a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities”
(1.19) June 2017: HuffPost published a news story on its front page that falsely implied that the U.S. Navy shot down a Syrian plane without any reason
(1.20) July 2017: HuffPost published a news story on its front page that called ISIS terrorists “soldiers,” and drew a moral comparison between their atrocities against civilians, and U.S. and coalition air strikes that may have accidentally killed civilians who were being held as human shields by ISIS
(1.21) August 2017: HuffPost published an editorial that implied that serving in the U.S. military makes one a racist
(1.22) November 2017: HuffPost published front page headline alleging the U.S. is “On Track To Drop Three Times More Bombs On Afghanistan This Year” — while omitting all key context, and the Afghanistani ambassador’s high praise for the success of this effort
(1.23) November 2017: HuffPost published a front page headline that insinuated the U.S. military “may have massacred Somali civilians,” when it knew, or should have known that the Pentagon said its investigation concluded this was a lie
(1.24) March 2018: HuffPost published a splash headline that claimed President Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA “is a literal torturer,” then never corrected the record after its source for the story retracted the claim [UPDATED: Was this latest smear the catalyst for a suspected terrorist attack on Travis Air Force Base, that occurred seven days later? Or a series of explosives being mailed to U.S. military installations, ten days later?]
(1.25) March 2018: For the second time, HuffPost published a splash headline that visually depicted the U.S. military and intelligence communities as engaging in widespread, 16th-century-like sadistic torture of innocent victims
SUPPLEMENTAL CASE STUDIES
The following are case studies that we became aware of after the above chronology was produced.
(S1) September 2010: HuffPost published an editorial on its front page that falsely alleged American soldiers “horrendously abused” a top female Al Qaeda terrorist — one day after she asserted, in a U.S. court, that this allegation was a lie
(1.1) May 2009: HuffPost gave top coverage to a false allegation, sourced from Al Jazeera, that the U.S. military was giving soldiers Christian bibles, and instructing them to “hunt” and convert Afghanistani Muslims — then rewrote and buried the corrected story
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
On May 4, 2009, HuffPost published this shock “news” story as its front page splash headline; the following is a link to the original story — captured by Google Cache (*HuffPost rewrote the story, but did not re-post it on its front page; see below):
Military officials at Bagram are caught on tape urging US soldiers to evangelize in the Muslim country.
New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan. What’s more, the center of this evangelical operation is at the huge US base at Bagram, one of the main sites used by the US military to torture and indefinitely detain prisoners.
In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him.”
Analysis: Is this really what happened? Were American soldiers really instructed to convert Afghanistani Muslims to Christianity?
Aside from the fact that HuffPost apparently has no problem relying on terrorist–celebrating “news” networks for its source material, there are a just a few little problems with the perception that this inflammatory headline insinuated (some of which were included in the article, others that developed over the next few days):
No bibles were distributed to Afghans — and none of our soldiers proselytized in Afghanistan
The bibles in question were sent by a single U.S. church to a single soldier in Afghanistan — they were not provided by the U.S. military
The U.S. military intervened before any proselytizing could happen; proselytizing is strictly against our military policy, which was enforced to the letter
The story created new, incendiary misperceptions as to what our military is actually doing in Afghanistan, while downplaying or ignoring how vigilant it actually is to not offend local sensitivities
The story is more than a year old(acknowledged deep in the article)
UPDATE: All of the above was confirmed in a follow-up article several days later at… al-Jazeera. Furthermore, the story details how some soldiers who considered distributing these bibles to Afghanistanis have been reprimanded. Thus far, HuffPost has not published this information… which would be sort of difficult anyway, being that it doesn’t have a “Corrections” feature, as (responsible) print newspapers do.
HuffPost later rewrote and re-dated the article, but did not publish it on its front page. This is proven by its current version of the “story,” which it falsely claims was written by another “journalist”:
A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al Jazeera documented Sunday night.
It is against military rules to proselytize — a regulation one of the soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. “You cannot proselytize, but you can give gifts,” says the soldier. It is a crime in Afghanistan to attempt to convert anyone from Islam to any other religion. “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out.” The footage is said to be roughly a year old.
The Al Jazeera report also shows a military preacher urging army parishioners to “hunt people for Jesus.”
Here is a screencap of the “new” version of this article, at this link:
Given the severity of this deception, and the extremely inflammatory nature of the false accusation to which it gave top coverage:
Why did HuffPost not publish all of these corrections in new article, to alert its readers that they had been misled — and to exonerate the U.S. military?
Why did HuffPost not apologize to all American soldiers, for falsely helping to advance Al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s false narrative, that the U.S. military is comprised of “crusaders for Christ”? (Which it again falsely accused the U.S. military of doing, eighteen months later, in Section 1.10)
We submit that the answer to these questions is that if HuffPost were to do these things, it would undermine its “propaganda jihad” against the U.S. military, which at this point was just getting started.
A sampling of the user comments that HuffPost published in reaction to this libelous article
Below is a small sampling of the hateful user comments that were incited by this libel, which only appeared on HuffPost because its human moderators reviewed, approved and decided to publish them:
“They should be executed”
“The only good Christian evangalical soldier is a dead Christian evangalical soldier! And to all the out there, if you see anyone who is passing the B!ble to your children, I say, take em out! You have my permission.”
“This is ridiculous. Go there to do your job. Which is to kill people. Not convert them.”
“Well, that is perfectly typical isn’t it? hate and kill for jezis! sounds like a routine day to me.”
“Spreading “democracy” and “Christianity” at the tip of an M-16; it’s kinda’ like trying to spread healthy living while force-feeding someone excrement.”
“it could be worse they could try to convert them all to judaism you know, to help Israel achieve its greater Israel goal. I mean the US fights all its wars for Israel’ benefit… might as well recruit for them too.. huh?”
See many more hateful user comments, incited by HuffPost’s libel, at the bottom of the page here.
(1.2) April 2010: HuffPost used a debunked, selectively-edited WikiLeaks video as the basis of a front page splash headline, to falsely claim that American soldiers engaged in “Collateral Murder”
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch, and complemented by original STW research.
On April 5, 2010, HuffPost published the following as its front page splash headline:
Its original article made shocking allegations against the U.S. military:
Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.
None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
But are the incendiary allegations in HuffPost’s headline true? No. HuffPost’s editors would have known this, had they ordered the “journalist” who wrote this story (more on this later) to do the most basic of fact-checking, and verified that it was accurate, before publishing this blistering, libelous assault on American soldiers.
Specifically:
The “men” on the video had been firing at the U.S. military moments earlier, and were still carrying their RPG launchers and machine guns — as the video showed.
The Reuters employee was not wearing the required “PRESS” vest or helmet, or any indication that he was not one of the terrorists whom the U.S. military engaged.
It completely ignored the fact that CENTCOM had already investigated this incident — three years earlier — and concluded:
“The AWT accurately assessed that the criteria to find and terminate the threat to friendly forces were met in accordance with the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement.”
WikiLeaks had selectively edited this video in such a way as to depict the terrorists only as “men,” while omitting their attack, moments earlier, on U.S. soldiers.
These facts were documented and exposed in enormous detail in a number of websites, both before and after HuffPost published its headline:
Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military “murdered” a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi “civilians” in Baghdad on July 12, 2007.But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but “Collateral Murder,” as Wikileaks describes the incident.
HuffPost never updated its story to include any of these articles that so thoroughly debunked Wikileaks’ allegations, which it made its own via this incendiary headline – in contrast to the advertising pitch for HuffPost by AOL (its parent company), that claims that it:
“covers the world’s stories from every viewpoint”
HuffPost gave cult-like, daily publicity to Stephen Colbert’s show and proclamations — but ignored his debunking of Assange’s libels against the U.S. military
On April 12, 2010, WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange appeared on Stephen Colbert’s TV show, “The Colbert Report,” one week after the “Collateral Murder” smear was published. And although Colbert is a notoriously left-leaning media figure, he tore into Assange for the obvious errors and incitement contained in his attack on the U.S. military:
For many years, HuffPost has obsessively reported on its front page the most pedestrian occurrences involving Colbert, when it suits its subversive agenda. In fact, it featured nine “news” stories about Colbert’s antics on its front page just between March 30 and April 9, 2010:
Yet curiously, HuffPost never shared with its readers Colbert’s demolition of Assange’s lies about the “Collateral Murder” smear, nor did it updates its story page to include it. Presumably, it ignored this video in order to continue deceiving its readers into believing that its horrifically libelous assault on the U.S. military was true. (A deceptive practice that HuffPost has recently been employing in order to help legitimize fake anti-Muslim hate crimes.)
Further, even after HuffPost’s editors and executives and editors knew, or should have known, that this malicious libel against the U.S. military was debunked, it kept the “journalist” who wrote it, Dan Froomkin, on its payroll for the next four years, until December 2014.
About the “journalist” whom HuffPost paid to write this “story”
But HuffPost wasn’t done enabling Froomkin to continue waging his propaganda jihad against the U.S. military. See the next article (1.3).
(1.3) April 2010: HuffPost gave top coverage to a false claim that U.S. soldiers are deliberately murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
Continued from 1.2. The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch (see “April 21 update” at bottom), and complemented by original STW research.
On April 21, 2010*, HuffPost published this “news story” at the top of its front page — another written by its “journalist” Dan Froomkin, whom it had recently promoted to being its “Senior Washington Correspondent.”
Earlier this month, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks released a deeply disturbing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly machine-gunning a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then opening fire on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men. (Here’s my article about it.)
Froomkin then described Reuters’ request of the U.S. military’s rules of engagement, and whether or not the soldiers involved in the above incident violated them, or international laws. That is the gist of this article; yet compare that with the incendiary, libelous headline that HuffPost chose to assign to this “story.” In regards to Reuters’ request, Froomkin then said
I totally agree. I want what he wants. And here’s something else I want. I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit.
And he concluded this “news” article with:
Where’s the outrage? Where’s the responsibility? Where’s the oversight? Hell, where’s the basic curiosity? Has anyone on the Hill even asked any questions of the Pentagon or the White House? Hey, President Obama, are you OK with this? Does your member of Congress give a shit?
This is “journalism,” HuffPost-style. And curiously, HuffPost blamed this entire episode on the entire U.S. military, and Congressional representatives, but downplayed the fact that President Obama was Commander in Chief at the time — in contrast to how it wrapped an accidental death of civilians in February 2017 directly around President Trump’s neck, as documented in Section 2.11.
All the facts that HuffPost ignored, in order to publish this libelous screed
At this time, HuffPost regularly cited Wired Magazine for a variety of news stories. Yet curiously, it completely ignored the fact that on April 20, 2010 — the day before it published this libelous screed — Wired published a story containing an interview with Army Specialist Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers who was on the scene in the Iraq incident under discussion, and he explained what really happened:
Wired.com: Wikileaks presented the incident as though there was no engagement from insurgents. But you guys did have a firefight a couple of blocks away. Was it reasonable for the Apache soldiers to think that maybe the people they attacked were part of that insurgent firefight?
McCord:“I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. However, when I did come up on the scene, there was an RPG as well as AK-47s there…. You just don’t walk around with an RPG in Iraq, especially three blocks away from a firefight…. Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement… I’ve spoken with one of the medics who was there. He’s no longer in the Army. When this video first came out, there was a lot of outrage by the soldiers, just because it depicted us as being callous, cruel, heartless people, and we’re not that way. The majority of us aren’t. And so he was pretty upset about the whole thing…. He kept saying, we were there, we know the truth, they’re saying there was no weapons, there was.”
How Huff-Watch concluded its debunking of this “story”
The following is presented, unedited, from the Huff-Watch blog:
We agree. Where is the outrage (over what HuffPost has done)? Where is the responsibility… and the oversight (to ensure it never happens again)?
We at Huff-Watch are deeply concerned that HuffPost’s irresponsible actions, and its journalistic “jihad” against the U.S. military, are going to end up getting American soldiers killed. Recall that on June 1, 2009, an American who recently converted to Islam murdered a U.S. Army Recruiter in Arkansas. His explanation? He developed a “hatred” of the U.S. military — presumably thanks to “news” stories like this, which are spread on the Internet like wildfire by radical Islamists and their supporters.
Given that an estimated 135,000* or more of HuffPost’s monthly visitors originate in Iran and Pakistan, we don’t think our concerns are unfounded (see Section 4.3 here). Also consider:
The Internet has become the primary medium through which radical Islamists (Muslim supremacists) and jihadists spread and reinforce their propaganda — including their incendiary blood libels (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Al Qaeda even has its own Web propaganda division.
One of these groups’ missions is to infiltrate Western websites to spread their messages of hate, in order to demoralize and undermine their nations’ efforts to combat militant and cultural Islamism (1, 2, 3, 4).
Here is a sampling of the hate-filled, libelous user comments that HuffPost reviewed, approved and decided to publish on this thread, submitted as a direct result of this incitement.
(1.4) May 2010: HuffPost gave top coverage to an unprovable claim by a discredited “journalist,” that American soldiers are murdering civilians in Afghanistan
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
Upon what evidence does Hersh base this incendiary, libelous conspiracy theory against the U.S. military?
Well, Hersh has no evidence whatsoever — as is proven in the article itself. So what is the basis of his allegations? Here’s Hersh’s explanation (emphasis added):
What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.
That’s it.
That’s the entire basis of Hersh’s allegations: Unnamed sources who may or may not exist, and who may or may not be telling the truth. And it was upon that basis, of no substance, that HuffPost chose to run this story, as one of its top-line news items.
Wait… hasn’t HuffPost claimed it prohibits inflammatory claims and conspiracy theories?
Yes it does. Here’s Arianna Huffington, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of HuffPost, explaining her site’s journalistic virtues and mission:
“[At HuffPost] there are guidelines that have to be followed — and they include a prohibition on conspiracy theories and inflammatory claims…” – Feb. 1, 2010
Indications of what HuffPost knew, or should have known about Hersh, before it ran this “story”
Continued, quoting verbatim from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
So what was knowable about Seymour Hersh at the time HuffPost made the decision to publish his baseless smear against the U.S. military? Is this the first time Hersh proved to make wild accusations without a shred of proof, or to twist and deny the truth? Well, as the Hertz commercials go… not exactly:
“The Iranian regimes apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organizations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides in the New Yorker article titled The Coming Wars. Mr. Hersh’s article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.”
– U.S. Department of Defense press release, January 17, 2005
“Hersh’s Israel-bashing is so egregious it gives yellow journalism a bad name.” – Jerusalem Post, March 6, 1992
“Former Attorney General John Mitchell, a major source for Hersh’s book ‘The Price of Power,’ said that ‘almost every episode or statement on Kissinger ascribed to him by Hersh [was] a distortion, an exaggeration, a misinterpretation, or an expletive-deleted lie’.”
– National Review, June 24, 1983
At this point, a few more questions arise:
Is it even possible that Nicholas Sabloff, HuffPost’s “World Editor,” who wrote this “news” story, didn’t know of Hersh’s history? That’s pretty unlikely, being that he is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Or is “Fact-Checking 101” no longer part of the requirements for graduation?
Is there any conceivable way that HuffPost’s crack team of 52 other editors could not have known all this, if it had done even the most basic fact-checking, prior to or after seeing this inflammatory headline?
And, as Huff-Watch documented, in reaction to this post, it approved and published a torrent of hateful comments from its users, continuing the inferno of hate against the U.S. military that it helped to incite.
(1.5) September 2010: HuffPost published a front-page headline that smeared highly-trained, honorably-discharged American soldiers as “mercenaries” — including those who protected Sen. Obama and Sec. Clinton
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
Get ready to meet America’s new mercenaries. They could be the same as the old ones.
Two State Department sources who requested anonymity say a new multi-billion contract for private security firms to protect diplomats is “about to drop.” And one winner could well be Blackwater, or whatever it’s calling itself these days. So much for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s one-time campaign pledge to ban “Blackwater and other private mercenary firms.”
Analysis of this smear
The following passage is taken directly from Huff-Watch.
Is there a difference between a “mercenary” and a “security contractor”? Yes, a huge one. Honest journalists and those who have served, or care about anyone who’s served in the U.S. military or law enforcement, know that to refer to American private security contractors as “mercenaries” is the most egregious, unfair and malicious way to libel them.
Why? Let’s start by examining the definition of a “mercenary.” According to Merriam-Webster, it is:
“One that serves merely for wages; especially a soldier hired into foreign service.”
Another definition, from Collins, comes closer to defining the meaning of “mercenary” when it is used as a libel:
“A soldier who is paid to fight by a country or group that they do not belong to; If you describe someone as mercenary, you are criticizing them because you think that they are only interested in the money that they can get from a particular person or situation…”
Could Arianna Huffington and her crack team of 53 “editors” really be unaware of all the following facts?
The security contractors to whom this article refers are not fighting. They providing protective services to U.S. government officials as they travel abroad — at the request of the U.S. government. They also provide additional services, such as training police officers, and security during reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.
These security contractors are almost invariably honorably-discharged U.S. military and American law enforcement personnel, who must pass extensive background checks, and complete intensive training.
The firm that HuffPost habitually maligns, Blackwater, has a 100% perfect record of never letting harm come to any State Department protectee, in the four thousand-plus missions for the government, since it began this work in 1994. This fact may be why three successive administrations — two Democratic and one Republican — have maintained Blackwater’s services. Here is a State Department briefer on its use of security contractors for the past 20 years.
Blackwater protected Barack Obama during his trip to Iraq a a candidate, in July 2008 — and while there, he praised the firm, saying “Blackwater is getting a bad rap.”
These are some of the reasons why the State Department requested new proposals from the top private security contracting firms.
[Huff-Watch then profiled a number of American security contractors who performed heroically, and lost their lives, protecting U.S. government officials and others.]
So who is the “journalist” to whom HuffPost enabled to smear former American soldiers — including those who died heroically protecting U.S. government officials?
The following passage is taken directly from Huff-Watch:
So who is Spencer Ackerman, who constructed this malicious libel against former American soldiers and law enforcement personnel? Here are few introductory factoids about him:
In 2006, Ackerman was fired by The New Republic for threatening his editor, that he’ll “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat… then declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides.
“If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?”
Want to learn more about Ackerman’s depravity and assault on the basic tenets of good journalism? See this article at Big Journalism.
The result: HuffPost helped incite global hatred of these former American soldiers, and reviewed, approved and published a torrent of libelous user comments
The following is just a sampling of the user comments that HuffPost reviewed and decided to publish (it publicly announced, two years earlier, that not a single user comment gets published without first going through a human moderator):
“The corporation that hires the mercenary does whatever they f*** it wants, including rape and murder with no accountability.”
“Cut backs for schools, billions for murderers.”
“When will the people finally rise up against the corrupt terrorist state that is USA Inc.? C’mon already. Billions more for mercenaries? Billions for Israel and their terror state.”
“Mercenaries. When I read about people who kill for no sense of right or justice, but simply for a paycheck I am reminded of how far we are from fixing this planet’s problems.”
(1.6) October 2010: HuffPost constructed an incendiary splash front page headline that it knew was falsely accusing the U.S. military of “torturing, abusing and murdering” Iraqi detainees
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
On October 23, 2010, HuffPost published the following as its front page splash headline:
A hint that HuffPost knew, or should have known it was lying: It (falsely) accused U.S. soldiers of “torture, abuse and murder” – but the soldiers in its photo are not wearing U.S. military uniforms.
The reality, as HuffPost knew at the time it published this story, was that U.S. soldiers had not done any of the things its shock, libelous headline alleged. Rather, it was Iraqi soldiers and police officers who are alleged to have done these things, while U.S. soldiers either ignored these abuses (assuming they were even aware of them).
How do we know these things? And how do we know that HuffPost knew them, at the time it wrote this headline, as well? Because before HuffPost published this headline, other, more responsible news organizations, including the AP, NBC, BBC told the actual story:
U.S. forces often failed to follow up on credible evidence that Iraqi forces mistreated, tortured and killed their captives in the battle against a violent insurgency, according to accounts contained in what was purportedly the largest leak of secret information in U.S. history. The documents are among nearly 400,000 released Friday by the WikiLeaks website in defiance of Pentagon insistence that the action puts the lives of U.S. troops and their coalition partners at risk. Although the documents appear to be authentic, their origin could not be independently confirmed, and WikiLeaks declined to offer any details about them.
NYT: U.S. documents detail horrific abuse by Iraq’s army, police, by MSNBC, October 22, 2010.
Leaked documents on Iraq war contain thousands of allegations of abuse, but a Pentagon order told troops to ignore them.
HuffPost’s own story page proves it knew the reality of the situation — but chose to construct this false, incendiary, libelous headline against U.S. soldiers instead
Despite a vigorous attempt by the Pentagon to stop WikiLeaks from releasing 400,000 pages of classified military documents about the Iraq War, the group has gone ahead with its latest document dump. Most shockingly, the documents allegedly show that US troops abused prisoners for years even after the Abu Ghraib scandal and that the US ignored systemic abuse, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, according to several news reports.
HuffPost then twisted the knife in U.S. soldiers’ backs, by inserting material into this “news” article that blindly repeated a previously-debunked allegation about an incident in which they were accused of “murdering” Iraqis from a helicopter gunship (see detail in Section 1.2).
HuffPost’s libel against American soldiers incited a deluge of hate-filled user comments — all of which were approved and published by its human moderators
Below is a sampling of the user comments that were incited by this libel, which only appeared on HuffPost because its human moderators reviewed, approved and decided to publish them:
“Honor the troops, respect the troops, on and on. I am sick of it. They are just mercenaries…”
“Are the American people finally starting to realize that the military are the bad guys? […] It amazes me that so many people still don’t see the truth about the hyenas that while they look like people, are actually intra-species predators that prey upon the real humans.”
“The main reason the U.S. (went to war in Iraq) was because of you’ve guessed it – ISRAEL. That’s right, since the U.S. is remote controlled by Israel, all important military, political and economic decisions are made by Israel.”
“If this illegal war had not been conceived by the Neocons, along with our supposed friend, that Apartheid theocracy…”
(1.7) October 2010: HuffPost relied on Wikileaks and a deranged Wired “journalist” to viciously libel American soldiers — then ignored them when they revealed findings that clashed with its fundamental lies about the Iraq war
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
As shown in Sections 1.2 and 1.3, HuffPost blindly relied on WikiLeaks to smear American soldiers, in ways that could only motivate and morally justify jihadists to attack them. And as shown in Section 1.5, HuffPost gave top coverage to a vicious libel, published in Wired magazine, against honorably-discharged American soldiers, who served under contracts to protect U.S. government personnel.
Yet when Wired reported that WikiLeaks documents showed that the U.S. military and coalition partners had discovered vast stores of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, HuffPost completely ignored the story. Here is the proof:
On October 23, 2010, HuffPost again published this already-debunked smear against the U.S. military at the top of its front page. Note that below, it asked its readers to sift through the WikiLeaks documents, and share with it anything notable that they found (as a side note, what kind of “newspaper” asks its readers to do its research for it?):
Later the same day (October 23), Wired magazine published something startling: that contrary to the narrative that the radical left had used for years to undermine America, that there were no WMDs in Iraq — the WikiLeaks documents showed that the U.S. military and coalition partners had discovered vast stores of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.
An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents. […]
Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”
Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
Why would HuffPost completely ignore such a story, especially since it came from WikiLeaks’ own documents, which it had been using for six months to vilify and smear the U.S. military?
Only HuffPost’s senior executives at the time could answer this question. But given HuffPost’s consistently malicious efforts to undermine the U.S. military, and legitimize the narrative of Americas’ enemies, it is reasonable to speculate that HuffPost’s motivation was its unwillingness to:
Undermine the narrative, that it had been so heavily invested in propagating, that there was no good justification for the U.S. to invade Iraq after 9/11
Undermine President Obama’s efforts to rapidly withdraw all U.S. soldiers from Iraq
(1.8) November 2010: HuffPost manipulated a wire service headline in a way that could only serve to incite hatred against American soldiers, by falsely implying that they are demolishing Afghanistanis’ homes without good cause
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
That headline led to this story page. Notice at the top of the copy, it indicates it is an excerpt of a wire story from the New York Times, which is confirmed by a statement at the bottom: “Read the whole story: New York Times.”
The link at the bottom leads to this page, at the New York Times:
Notice that the New York Times said:
“To Save Lives, NATO Is Razing Booby-Trapped Afghan Homes”
This was a definitive statement, accepting NATO’s credibility in this matter, and acknowledging the pattern of Afghanistani terrorists and insurgents setting explosives within the homes from which they fire at American soldiers, in the hopes that they will be blown up when they search them, later. This was a tactic that even the Red Cross had publicly condemned in May 2010 — six months prior to HuffPost publishing its manipulated version of this article.
Instead of merely posting the New York Times article as is, however, with a summary and a link back to the actual article, HuffPost decided to manipulate the source headline to imply that American soldiers are destroying Afghans’ homes on less than 100% certain justification — by inserting “they say,” in regards to whether the homes are booby-trapped or not:
U.S. Forces Demolishing Afghan Homes They Say Are Booby-Trapped
HuffPost deliberately, materially manipulated this headline in such a way that could only result in its inciting hatred against American soldiers — which is exactly what happened.
Contrast this false skepticism with the automatic credibility that HuffPost assigns to allegations of hate crimes against its favored groups
HuffPost’s false implication that American soldiers might not be telling the truth about this matter stands in sharp contrast to the automatic credibility that it assigns in its headlines to the alleged victims of hate crimes, who are members of its Favored Groups. Here is a small sampling of such headlines, in the context of hate crimes that were later proven to be hoaxes — but which HuffPost granted automatic credibility to, initially:
Notice that HuffPost didn’t construct a headline that said, “Waitress alleges that white customer stiffed her on tip, despite great service.” Its headline granted automatic credibility to her allegation — even though her story is now coming apart at the seams.
HuffPost did this despite the fact that it knew, or should have known that many if not most of the alleged anti-black and anti-Muslim “hate crimes” in recent years proved to be hoaxes, or were perpetrated by the alleged victim.
HuffPost’s insertion of false doubt of American soldiers’ credibility triggered a torrent of hate comments from users, which it decided to publish
As the Huff-Watch blog documented, this article triggered and outpouring of hate-filled user comments against American soldiers and the USA in general, all of which HuffPost reviewed, approved and decided to publish. A sampling:
Now who are the “terrorists”?
jonester
And some people wonder why they h@te us.
evekendall (HuffPost moderator)
How about we stop terrorizing these people, give them some apology money, and leave? Labyrinth666
Don’t be surprised if all these “booby trapped” demolished houses lay in the path of a planned pipeline.
PresidentRobertBooth
(1.9) January 2011: HuffPost gave top coverage for a second time to a discredited “journalist,” this time to use Al Qaeda-based verbiage to smear the U.S. military leadership, in a way that could only help to incite violence against American soldiers
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
When one clicked on that story, they were taken to this story page. Note the teaser at the top, claiming that “Sy Hersh” alleged that a “top (U.S.) military branch is run by ‘crusaders’.”
“What I’m really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over,” Hersh said.
He said that the attitude that “pervades” a large portion of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is part of the military’s special forces branch and which has carried out secret missions to kill American targets, is one that supports “[changing] mosques into cathedrals.”
Analysis: This libel was unsupported by evidence, and uses terminology that mimics and incites cornerstone Al Qaeda propaganda
In Section 1.4, we saw how eight months earlier, in May 2010, HuffPost gave top coverage to another completely unsupported, vicious libel against American soldiers by Seymour Hersh. We also saw how many times Hersh had been revealed as a discredited propagandist.
Yet now, HuffPost once again gave him a perch atop its global platform, with which to incite hatred against American soldiers, based on nothing. Only this libel went much further. For as Huff-Watch pointed out:
HuffPost’s trumpeting of the term “crusader” in the context of this article — without criticism or challenge — echoes militant Islamists’ propaganda, and can only serve to incite and legitimize their targeting of U.S. soldiers
The first thing to know about that headline is that the word “crusaders” was not chosen at random by Hersh — or HuffPost.
It is an inflammatory code-word that has been routinely used by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other murderous Islamist terror groups for two decades, to describe American soldiers — and to incite Muslims to attack them. Specifically, from bin Laden on down, they allege that America is leading a “holy war” (or crusade) to transform Muslim nations into Christian ones, akin to the Christian Crusades of the 12th – 17th centuries:
“Do not wait for these traitor governments to free Jerusalem or to stand in the face of the Crusader invasion on Muslim land,” for “they are stooges to the Jews and Christians.” — Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, November 2010
“Bin Laden repeated his characterization of a so-called ‘new crusade led by America against the Islamic nations,’ and emphasized his belief that an emerging conflict between Islam and the West would be fought ‘between the Islamic world and the Americans and their allies’.” — “Correspondent Meets With Opposition Leader Bin Ladin,” Channel 4 (London) Feb. 20, 1997
Is it really possible that HuffPost, with its crack team of 53 “editors” under Arianna Huffington’s direction, was totally unfamiliar with the use of the term “crusader,” as applied to the Muslim world?
(1.10) April 2012: HuffPost gave top coverage to a smear that depicts U.S. soldiers as Nazi storm troopers
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
On April 9, 2012, HuffPost published this as its splash headline:
Clicking on that headline lead to this story page:
The only copy that HuffPost included on its story page came from Wired magazine — which as we saw in Section 1.8, publicizes incendiary smears against both current and honorably-discharged American soldiers. The copy:
Reports of the demise of the Afghanistan War’s signature tactic are premature. U.S. Special Operations Forces will still conduct “night raids” on Afghan homes — sometimes without the prior approval of the Afghan government.
The link at bottm takes the reader to Wired magazine source article, which was written by Spencer Ackerman — the same “journalist” who falsely smeared honorably-discharged American soldiers who protect U.S. government officials and facilities as “mercenaries,” in Section 1.5.
Analysis
The following facts prove that this was another deliberate, malicious smear of American soldiers by HuffPost:
(1) The Wiredarticle makes clear that American soldiers are acting under the rules of engagement that their commander-in-chief, President Obama, set forth, in consultation with the Afghan government.
Yet HuffPost deliberately chose to ignore that essential fact, presumably to protect Obama, and instead falsely imply that the most elite of our special forces soldiers as deciding to act like Nazi storm troopers, of their own volition.
It is also notable that while HuffPost protected Obama from being held accountable for what the troops under his command did, as documented in Section 2.11, it falsely assailed President Trump for a special, high-risk operation to secure Al Qaeda computers that went wrong.
(2) HuffPost completely left out this crucial passage from the Wiredarticle:
Since December, there have been “more than 350″ night raids, [Kabul-based U.S. military spokesman Navy Capt. John] Kirby said, all of them joint operations with Afghan commandos. The teams found their man in 75 percent of the missions, and only fired a shot during 31 night raids. (That works out to, conservatively, nearly three night raids every night since December, an index of how important the U.S. considers those operations.)
Assuming this success rate is accurate, it is clear that America’s special forces had a spectacular record, that would have infused this story with at least some rational context. HuffPost presumably left it out, because it would have undermined the hatred that it sought to incite among Americans, against the U.S. military.
(3) The Wiredarticle did not include the picture that HuffPost chose for its splash headline and story page.
Wired included only one picture — the one at right. HuffPost apparently rejected the use of this photo, and instead searched the Internet until it found a picture that would serve its libelous, deceptive, incitement against American soldiers.
It should be noted that this is the exact same, maliciously dishonest tactic that HuffPost employed when it published another externally-sourced article, to falsely smear Israeli soldiers several years earlier, by falsely accusing them of “killing Palestinians to harvest their organs.” No picture was provided with the article, which HuffPost knew was a completely unsupported allegation. So it searched for an image that could only serve to incite the insane hatred of its readers, and found one: a completely unrelated picture of IDF soldiers, grinning, marching towards the camera. See the full documentation at Huff-Watch here.
(4) HuffPost found and used a photo that, without the context that it denied its readers, makes American soldiers look like faceless, oppressive, mindless automatons — and the Afghanistanis as presumably innocent victims.
Huff-Watch also likened this photo, in its full, maliciously false context, to those of Nazis marching innocent Jews away, to be murdered:
(1.11) January 2013: HuffPost gave top coverage to a picture of massive civilian death and destruction in Pakistani marketplace to falsely claim the U.S. military was responsible — when it knew, or should have known, that it was the result of an Islamist terror bombing
The following libel was originally reported by Huffington Post Monitor, and complemented by research by Huff-Watch., and now, by SaveTheWest.
QUETTA, Pakistan — A bomb targeting paramilitary soldiers killed 12 people in southwest Pakistan on Thursday, while five suspected militants died in a U.S. drone strike in the country’s northwest, officials said.
Separately, an explosion ripped through a crowded mosque in the northwest city of Mingora, killing 21 people and injuring more than 70 others, said hospital official Mian Gul Aleem. The blast was caused by a gas cylinder that exploded, said senior police official Gul Afzal Khan.
Notice that the caption of the photo in the story says:
Pakistani police officers and local residents gather at the site of bomb blast in Quetta, Pakistan, Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Arshad Butt)
Right there, in HuffPost’s own story page, it is clear that this photo of such massive human devastation was not caused by the U.S., but rather, from an Islamist terrorist’s bomb.
Analysis: Other major news sources correctly identified the cause of the devastation in that photo; Why did HuffPost misreport it?
The Huff-Watch blog took screencaps of other major news organizations’ coverage of this tragedy at the time, and noted that every one correctly attributed this photo to carnage caused by Islamist terrorists:
The AP page, which is where HuffPost got the story in the first place:
So why did HuffPost falsely claim to its readers that this picture was the result of a U.S. military drone strike?
Given the pattern of incidents documented on this page, one can reasonably assume that this was another incident in HuffPost’s pattern of deliberately, maliciously turning facts and evidence on their heads, in order to smear the U.S. military, and incite global hatred against American soldiers.
This assumption is given further weight when one considers that HuffPost also never published a advisory to its readers, to alert them that they had been misled. Instead, although the original story is still in the Internet Archive’s cache, HuffPost removed the story from its website, to prevent anyone who is unaware of the cached version from being able to see how it assaulted the U.S. military. This is proven by our February 24, 2017 screencap, using the correct story page link:
And the URL:
(1.12) July 2014: HuffPost constructed a front page headline that falsely depicted a U.S. military drone strike as killing 6 civilians, when it knew at the time that only terrorists were targeted, and killed [INCIDENT 1]
A half-truth is a whole lie. – Yiddish Proverb
This is part of HuffPost’s ongoing pattern of malicious, subversive efforts to undermine and vilify the U.S. military, while whitewashing and vindicating America’s enemies.
On July 10, 2014, HuffPost published this “news story” on its front page and World page, where it remained for two straight days:Did the U.S. military really kill (murder) six Pakistani civilians, as this HuffPost headline suggests?
No. As the very first line in HuffPost’s own story (screencap), sourced from the AP, proved:
Two Pakistani intelligence officials say a suspected American drone strike has killed six militants in a northwestern tribal region where the military has launched an operation against local and foreign militants.
The intelligence officials say the strike happened Thursday morning in the town of in Datta Khel in North Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Curiously, Canada’s CP24 news site published an accurate headline for this exact same AP story:
Assuming that CP24 ran the original headline that the AP provided, this was another incident in which HuffPost manipulated the headline that had been provided by a reputable news source, in order to deliberately give its readers a false impression — in this case, to continue inciting hatred against the U.S. military. (See another example of HuffPost’s malicious headline-manipulation here, in which case it changed a Reuters headline to remove indicating that a Palestinian had murdered an American Jewish teenager, Ezra Schwartz.)
Regardless, the facts show that:
HuffPost knew that it was six militants who were killed in this drone strike
HuffPost omitted that fact from its headline from its front page teaser, and from the headline on its story page (below), apparently assuming that only a small percentage of its readers would actually read the entire story
Apparently someone called HuffPost out on this atrocity of incitement against the U.S. military — because as of March 2, 2017, it has completely removed the story page from its site:
(1.13) HuffPost constructed a front page headline that falsely depicted a U.S. military drone strike as killing 11 civilians, when it knew at the time that only terrorists were targeted, and killed [INCIDENT 2]
A half-truth is a whole lie. – Yiddish Proverb
On July 19, 2014, HuffPost published this headline on its front page:
Did the U.S. military really kill (murder) eleven Pakistani civilians, as this HuffPost headline suggests?
No. As the very first line in HuffPost’s own story (screencap), sourced from the AP, proved:
A U.S. drone fired several missiles at a sprawling compound in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan on Saturday, killing eleven militants, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.
The officials said the strike happened in Datta Khel, a town in North Waziristan, where the Pakistani military has been carrying out a major offensive against militants since last month. They said most of the slain men were members of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella group encompassing militant organizations across the tribal areas.
So once again, HuffPost deliberately manipulated its readers into hating the U.S. military based on a false headline, that it knew was false when it posted this “story.”
But unlike the July 10 incident, in Section 1.12, HuffPost gave this “story” at least three straight days of top coverage, as these screencaps prove – taken on July 19 and 21, 2014 (see date stamp on lower right):
July 19, 2014:
July 21, 2014:
And as in Section 1.12, apparently someone called HuffPost out on this atrocity of incitement against the U.S. military– because as of March 2, 2017, the storypage is now blank:
(1.14) December 2014: HuffPost used decontextualized imagery in a deliberate effort to smear all U.S. soldiers and intelligence personnel as torturing sadists, to support a hyper-partisan Senate report
On December 8 and 9, 2014, HuffPost published two splash headlines, relating to a report on allegations of torture by Senate Democrats, that was so biased and hyper-partisan that even one Democratic Senator, Sen. Bob Kerrey , blasted it in the national news media. In both instances, however, HuffPost sought to prop up this report, through two means of deliberately, maliciously deceiving and inciting its global readership:
It only featured stories that supported the report, in the most shocking terms imaginable
It sought out and used two completely unrelated images to use as splash headlines, to complement these stories, in a naked effort to whip up global hatred against the U.S. military and intelligence communities — not against the handful who were accused of wrongdoing, but against each branch, in total
(1) This headline appeared on HuffPost’s front page at 11:00pm on December 8:
The first thing to notice is that that picture of one of the American soldiers who was accused and convicted by the U.S. government of committing criminal acts against detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Lynndie England. What occurred at Abu Grhaib was neither sanctioned nor known by U.S. officials, until these pictures emerged. HuffPost, being one of the largest “news” organizations in America, knew or should have known this fact — but disregarded it, apparently in an intent to deceive its readers, and incite uniform hatred against all U.S. soldiers, in America and beyond. It is only upon the foundation of that knowledge that one can begin to understand the further deception and incitement in which HuffPost engaged.
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this story page:
Note that the words “Abu Ghraib” appear nowhere in this article, further validating HuffPost’s passive admittance of its deception.
(2) This headline appeared on HuffPost’s front page at 11:00pm on December 9:
One glance at this shock headline and image, depicting an ancient, sadistic torture chamber, is sufficient to confirm the depth of HuffPost’s malice towards the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Not against specific personnel who were accused and/or convicted of wrongdoing, but against these communities of volunteers, as a whole.
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this story page:
In both of these cases, HuffPost clearly knew exactly what it was doing, and how it was betraying even the loosest pretense of the objective journalism that it has repeatedly told the public it is practicing, since it debuted nearly ten years earlier.
(1.15) October 2015: HuffPost published at the top of its front page a carefully-staged anti-U.S. military propaganda photo, which used a child as a prop, standing before elaborate graffiti that asked why U.S. drones murdered his family
On the morning of October 16, 2015, this photo appeared at the very top of HuffPost’s front page:
Notice the construction of this carefully-staged scene:
A young boy appears to be walking in front of a camera, which he looks at, presumably only then becoming aware of its presence.
Behind him — very precisely — is graffiti on a wall, in red letters: “Why did you kill my family?”
Above him is a painting of an aircraft, on the side of which is written, in English, “US Drones”
Analysis
HuffPost’s “story” page provided no attribution for this staged photo, which would leave the casual reader to be manipulated by exactly the message that those who staged it wanted to convey.
Nor did HuffPost make mention of the fact that Islamist extremists and terrorists object to U.S. drone strikes, and display signs that were clearly produced by professionals, to express their outrage. Below are two such examples, in which Pakistani Islamist extremists protested a U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Taliban terrorist:
Source: The Daily Star (Lebanon). Caption: “Activists from right-wing religious parties led protests in Pakistan Friday to denounce a U.S. drone strike that killed the leader of the country’s Taliban, after the movement named a notorious hard-liner as his successor.”
Source: Naharnet (Pakistan). Caption: “Activists from right-wing religious parties led protests in Pakistan Friday to denounce a U.S. drone strike that killed the leader of the country’s Taliban, after the movement named a notorious hardliner as his successor.”
These facts demonstrate that this is but one more incident in which HuffPost employed deceptive shock media in order to advance a terrorist narrative — in this case, using a clearly-staged photo to evoke sympathy for the terrorists who are targeted by U.S. drone strikes.
(1.16) June 2016: HuffPost published an editorial that falsely claimed the U.S. military “uses drones that indiscriminately take innocent lives around the world” — and left it on a top page for nine straight days
June 6, 2016 was the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. HuffPost completely ignored this fact, and the amazing feat that the U.S. military accomplished on that day. The only item that appeared on HuffPost’s front page concerning D-Day on June 6 was a story that alleged Trump used a mis-dated photo about it in a speech.
As if that weren’t bad enough, HuffPost published an editorial near the top of its World page that contained this incendiary libel against the U.S. military, and its civilian overseers (screencap):
After all, wouldn’t purchasing any American product be an endorsement of a government which uses drones that indiscriminately take innocent lives around the world? Or is that okay, because women are allowed to drive in the US?
HuffPost knew, or should have known:
That this is an egregiously false accusation; that every branch of the U.S. military exercises enormous caution before it fires any weapon, especially drones, to ensure that no civilians are harmed, or as few as possible to achieve the mission.
That this libel is pulled almost verbatim from Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s propaganda manuals. (This is part of HuffPost’s continuing pattern of mimicking and spreading Islamist terrorist propaganda; more in Section 4 of SaveTheWests recent documentary, “The Huffington Post’s Anti-Semitic Bias and Incitement During the Third Intifada”.)
To add insult to injury, HuffPost left this libelous screed published on its World page for nine straight days, from June 6 through June 14.
(1.17) February 2017: HuffPost smeared the U.S. military, by implying that it mistakenly (or maliciously) buried a top Nazi sympathizer at Arlington National Cemetery
On February 17, 2017, HuffPost published this “news” story on its front page:
But is this really what happened? Did the U.S. military, under President Trump, really bury a man who was only known as a “top Nazi sympathizer” in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery? No.
The reality, as HuffPost knew when it constructed this “news” story, was that this man had served in the U.S. military during World War II, where he earned a Purple Heart, and had been honorably discharged, which entitled him to be buried at Arlington. How do we know HuffPost knew all this? Because it is in the opening sentences of the story page to which this inflammatory, decontextualized headline led:
The family and friends of Willis Carto, one of the United States’ most prominent Nazi sympathizers, laid him to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday.
Carto, who died at age 89 in October, was wounded as an Army soldier in the Philippines during World War II, earning him a Purple Heart medal.
Purple Heart recipients are among those veterans and family members of veterans who may be interred at Arlington’s military burial site — as long as they were subsequently honorably discharged, and not convicted of a state or federal crime.
Why would HuffPost choose to leave that crucial information completely out of its incendiary, decontextualized headline, if not to continue its long pattern of smearing the U.S. military as an incompetent, malicious, murderous organization?
It is true, as HuffPost reported in great detail in its story, that in later years Carto became a full-fledged Nazi sympathizer. That reprehensible development, however, in no way changes the fact that Carto was legally entitled to be buried at Arlington if his family requested it, as it did.
(S1) September 2010: HuffPost published an editorial on its front page that falsely alleged American soldiers “horrendously abused” a top female Al Qaeda terrorist — one day after she asserted, in a U.S. court, that this allegation was a lie
This is a continuation of a larger case study, contained in Section 3.2 of this page, which documents the fact that HuffPost whitewashed and helped to evoke global sympathy for Aafia Siddiqui, one of Al Qaeda’s most prized terrorists. She had attempted to murder American soldiers who’d been searching for her since the FBI put her on its most-wanted terrorist list, due to her work in WMD development for Al Qaeda. HuffPost then mimicked — in words and pictures — the exact narrative that radical Islamists and known terrorist groups were using, to stand with this terrorist.
As an extension of these actions, HuffPost also ran this front-page editorial the following day (which it has since removed):
Curiously, however, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has removed this editorial from its archives. A March 16, 2017 search using the string “Andy Worthington Siddiqui” returns no results.
Perhaps HuffPost removed it because someone exposed it for having once again libeled the U.S. military, based on incendiary, false allegations — which even Siddiqui herself said were not true. Fortunately, we can discover the truth thanks to Google Cache’s capture of this editorial:
To be honest, I can hardly express sufficiently my shock at the news that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was rendered to the U.S. to face a trial after she reportedly tried — and failed — to shoot two U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn’t make sense. […]
Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention — possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan — where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
Note that this “journalist”:
Only referred to Siddiqui as a “neuroscientist,” mentioning nothing about the other details about her work to develop and deploy WMDs for Al Qaeda
Ignored the fact that Siddiqui herself said, in open court, that she had not been tortured by U.S. forces, and that Muslims should stop spreading this lie — the day before this editorial was published (screencap):
During a rambling statement to the court Thursday [September 23], Siddiqui carried only a message of peace.
“I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
Siddiqui said she was particularly upset by overseas reports that she was being tortured in a U.S. prison. She said she was actually being treated well.
“I am not sad. I am not distressed. … They are not torturing me,” she said. “This is a myth and lie and it’s being spread among the Muslims.”
The fact that HuffPost cleansed its archive of any instance of this “journalist” having written about Siddiqui also indicates that it never published an apology or retraction to this libel against the U.S. military. Thus, HuffPost’s original act, and this omission, could only serve to fuel the widespread protests against the U.S. military regarding Siddiqui, and may have helped to ignite physical attacks on U.S. soldiers as a result.
It’s war in the Gulf and the U.S. Navy is on hand to protect us. No, not that Gulf! I’m talking about the Gulf of Alaska and its actually mock war ― if, that is, you don’t happen to be a fin whale or a wild salmon.
This May, the Navy will again sail its warships into the Gulf of Alaska. There, they will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet. Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.
One thing that is not mentioned in this “news” story is any comment or reaction from the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.
(1.19) June 2017: HuffPost published a news story on its front page that falsely implied that the U.S. Navy shot down a Syrian plane without any reason
On June 18, 2017, HuffPost published this news headline on its front page. Note that the way this headline is worded, it depicts the U.S. military as the aggressor, without any context as to the nature of the attack.Clicking on that headline led to this story page — where the reason for the attack was described in the first paragraph of its own story:
A U.S. warplane shot down a Syrian army jet on Sunday in the southern Raqqa countryside with Washington saying the jet had dropped bombs near U.S. backed forces and Damascus saying the plane was downed while flying a mission against Islamic State militants.
A Syrian army statement released on Syrian state television said the plane crashed and the pilot was missing. It said the incident took place on Sunday afternoon near a village called Rasafah.
The “flagrant attack was an attempt to undermine the efforts of the army as the only effective force capable with its allies … in fighting terrorism across its territory,” the Syrian army said.
Here, however, is how Fox News depicted the event — not the dramatically different headline:
Question:
Why would HuffPost falsely depict the U.S. Navy as the aggressor in this encounter, when it clearly knew the reason for the attack?
How could doing so not help whitewash and embolden Assad’s regime, which has murdered 500,000 civilians to date? This isn’t the first time HuffPost went out of its way to whitewash Assad; see Case Study 3.1 on this page.
(1.20) July 2017: HuffPost published a news story on its front page that called ISIS terrorists “soldiers,” and drew a moral comparison between their atrocities against civilians, and U.S. and coalition air strikes that may have accidentally killed civilians who were being held as human shields by ISIS
On July 11, 2017, HuffPost published this story at the top of its front page:
Note first HuffPost’s use of the term “soldiers” to describe ISIS terrorists, whose ideology and acts are, by any reasonable standard, the most savage and brutal that exist in our world, and in most rational peoples’ imaginations. The use of the term “soldiers” to describe them serves only to downplay their savage brutality, and elevate them to the moral status of anyone who ever wore a military uniform to protect innocent civilians from foreign or domestic enemies. But that was just the start of this latest, shocking betrayal by HuffPost of America’s military forces.
Clicking on that shock headline brought the reader to this page. The first few paragraphs are inserted, verbatim:
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi declared victory in the city of Mosul on Sunday after a monthslong battle to regain control of the city from self-described Islamic State militants.
Yet the siege resulted in a “civilian catastrophe” that included mass torture and death ― and both sides have blood on their hands, survivors recounted to Amnesty International in a report published on Monday.
“The scale and gravity of the loss of civilian lives during the military operation to retake Mosul must immediately be publicly acknowledged at the highest levels of government in Iraq and states that are part of the U.S.-led coalition,” said Lynn Maalouf, director of research for the Middle East at Amnesty International.
“Entire families have been wiped out, many of whom are still buried under the rubble today. The people of Mosul deserve to know, from their government, that there will be justice and reparation so that the harrowing impact of this operation is duly addressed.”
Here, HuffPost and the notorious Amnesty International provide moral equivalence between ISIS terrorists, who use civilians as human shields, to protect them from the soldiers who are fighting to liberate these civilians. But HuffPost’s betrayal of the U.S. military in this regard actually goes far deeper. Because if HuffPost were applying a reasonable standard to covering ISIS-related news, it would have, in the months prior to this “report,” also published the fact that ISIS had established a policy of using human shields on a massive scale to protect its soldiers terrorists from U.S. and coalition air strikes. Here are five articles in major U.S. and British news media that document this ISIS atrocity:
The only news story that HuffPost did publish, however, that even remotely addressed Iraqi civilians killed by potential actions of U.S. actions, was on March 25, 2017, with this incendiary headline which, without the broader context, puts U.S. soldiers in a very bad light:
The U.S. military said on Saturday a U.S.-led coalition strike had hit an Islamic State-held area of the Iraqi city of Mosul where residents and officials say dozens of civilians have been killed as result of an air raid. The incident occurred on March 17 but what exactly happened is still unclear as IS militants fight to defend the areas of the city they still control.
Iraqi government forces paused in their push to recapture western Mosul on Saturday because of the high rate of civilian casualties, a security forces spokesman said, a move apparently motivated by the incident. The United Nations also expressed its profound concern, saying it was “stunned by this terrible loss of life.”
Being that this was ISIS-controlled territory, these civilians may have indeed been killed because its soldiers terrorists deliberately placed them near a high-value facility. Further, as ISIS soldiers terrorists control the ground, there is no telling how much, if any, of this report is accurate.
Note that HuffPost also never reported, in May 2017, that ISIS its soldiers terrorists were allegedly murdering the civilian human shields after U.S. and coalition air strikes had left them alive:
How many of the supposed civilians that were supposedly killed by U.S. and coalition air strikes were actually targeted and murdered by ISIS soldiers terrorists, which the terror gang then blamed on the U.S. — and HuffPost then reported it, on July 11, as fact?
If this were just an isolated incident of shoddy, anti-U.S. military propaganda disguised as “journalism,” that would be one thing. But as the previous 19 case studies in Section 1 show, this was no isolated incident; it was merely the latest effort by HuffPost to assail the U.S. military on a global scale, morally compare American soldiers to the world’s most savage, brutal Islamist soldiers terrorists, while effectively doing a volunteer PR campaign for the latter. And many of America’s largest, most respected public corporations have been paying to enable this, whether knowingly or unknowingly, through their advertising dollars.
(1.21) August 2017: HuffPost published an editorial that implied that serving in the U.S. military makes one a racist
On August 17, 2017, HuffPost published this editorial:
One of the more shocking things to learn about the white nationalists’ rally in Charlottesville this past week, was not that they blame the protestors for the death of Heather Heyer. As stupefying a statement as that is, you expect cowards like that to shift the blame away from themselves whenever possible. After all, the entire white power and neo-Nazi movement is based on blaming someone else for your problems.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Vice News’ Elle Reeve mentions that security for the neo-Nazis was not provided by the Charlottesville police, as one might expect, but by veterans of the Iraq/Afghan war.
To hear that these veterans claim they were ‘radicalized’ in Iraq and Afghanistan during their tours of duty is one of the more unfortunate things to come to light regarding the side-effects of serving your country.
By now, we’re all familiar with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and even with proper treatment, the debilitating state it can leave a returning soldier in, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
But to learn that these brave men and women over there return with a new-found hatred for those different from them, especially after their mission is one of liberation from those who kill and persecute anyone of different faiths/beliefs, is quite disturbing to say the least.
Analysis: Within the ranks of any organization of 1,400,000 volunteers, there are going to be some bad apples. Yet notice how HuffPost’s editorial writer takes a literal handful of veterans and implicitly smears the entire U.S. military as being a tacit facilitator of turning normal men and women into racists, and one begins to grasp the depth of this latest betrayal of American soldiers.
And what are the qualifications of this implied expert to pontificate on this matter? What experiences has he had that gives him more legitimacy to write about this matter than anyone else? According to HuffPost’s bio on him, there is no justification, other than his claim to be (a) a musician, and (b) a “Trump resister”:
David Fagin Writer, musician, Trump Resister, food snob
David is a New York-based writer/producer/musician and the founder of indie-rock icons, The Rosenbergs, the first band credited with going viral. His diverse resume includes partnering with Napster, representing artists nationwide at the C.A.R.P. hearings, lecturing at Harvard, and appearing on shows such as Dennis Miller LIve, Carson Daly, and Howard Stern. His writing has been featured everywhere from Billboard to The Onion to AOL News. He’s even worked with The Muppets. David’s music can be heard on a variety of television shows and in retail stores around the country. Have a listen here. He is also a food snob.
So basically, HuffPost allowed someone with zero experience or knowledge of anything beyond music and hating President Trump, to smear, by suggestion, the entire U.S. military, for the actions of a few self-proclaimed veterans.
Contrast how HuffPost enabled this smear of the entire U.S. military, to its rushing to the defense of Black Lives Matter, after a string of horrific black-on-white beatings, some caught on video, explicitly because of the victim’s skin color
Note the curious wording of HuffPost’s headline — in which it comes out of the gate claiming that Black Lives Matter is not responsible for the “horrific teen beating in Chicago” (details in a moment):
A disturbing video was broadcast on Facebook Wednesday showing black Chicago residents beating and teasing a mentally ill white teen.
The suspects, two men and two women, have been taken into custody and will likely be punished for their horrific crimes. They also have no official affiliation to the Black Lives Matter movement and Chicago police said on Thursday that they have not made any connection to the racial justice group.
But, like clockwork, many right-wing conservatives and BLM critics are unfairly laying blame on the organization and have wrongfully labeled the attack the #BLMKidnapping.
Notice what HuffPost left out of its description of the incident — the race of the perpetrators. In an ultimate act of irony, given how readily and globally it smears the entire U.S. military and intelligence communities (as evidenced in the above twenty case studies) HuffPost concludes its editorial with this statement:
When one black person, or a small group of black people, commits an act of racial hate, the entire Black Lives Matter movement is blamed. Will this ever end?
Here is the video of a portion of the attack, which was broadcast live on Facebook. Note that the perpetrators are torturing this white teenager, because of his skin color:
It is crucial to note that the terms used by the perpetrators closely mirrors the hatred and incitement that BLM leaders have been employing for a long time, and for which the organization is now being sued — by two black police officers, and the father of an officer who was murdered by a BLM-supporting domestic terrorist, for incitement to violence:
Then there are innumerable articles that document BLM-affiliated individuals’ incitement of violence, on racial grounds. One example is the explicit threat of widespread racial riots by BLM-affiliated rapper and celebrity activist Tef Poe (aka “War Machine III”), who posted this Tweet on March 16, 2016 (later removed; archived here):
More documentation of BLM’s incitement and legitimization of racial violence:
HuffPost mentioned none of the above articles in its editorial, nor has it reported any of the facts they contain.
Further, HuffPost has reported none of the dozens of recent violent, near-deadly attacks by black individuals and mobs on white Americans, in most cases specifically because of the victim’s skin color, documented on this page — in which their rhetoric was almost identical to that used by the perpetrators of the beating of the white boy in Chicago. Examples:
Brian Ogle, 17, was beaten into a coma by a mob of Black Lives Matter supporters. HuffPost completely ignored him.
(1.7) September 2016, Sylacauga, AL: 17-year-old white boy beaten nearly to death by an estimated 9-60 Black Lives Matter-affiliated teens, allegedly in retaliation for his Facebook post in support of police officers
(1.4) July 2016, Nashville, TN: Black college football player who raped white student reportedly told her, “That’s for 400 years of slavery, you bitch!”
(1.6) September 2016, Charlotte, NC: September 2016, Charlotte, NC: A U.S. Army veteran was severely beaten by a black mob — on video — because he was white
(1.8) November 2016, Chicago, IL: A black mob was caught on video while severely beating a white man, while accusing him of voting for Trump
(1.14) November 2016, New York, NY: A black Queens man tried to murder a white subway rider, screaming “I HATE WHITE PEOPLE!”
Conclusion
Returning now to the original thrust of this case study — HuffPost gave top publicity to an editorial which implicitly smeared the entire U.S. military for being racist, even though the only “evidence” it had was a handful of self-proclaimed veterans.
Yet after the dozens and dozens of recent violent, racist attacks by black Americans on white people, specifically because of the color of their skin, HuffPost had the audacity to rush to the top of its front page an editorial which falsely claimed that no one affiliated with BLM has ever incited racial violence.
(1.22) November 2017: HuffPost published front page headline alleging the U.S. is “On Track To Drop Three Times More Bombs On Afghanistan This Year” — while omitting all key context, and the Afghanistani ambassador’s high praise for the success of this effort
On November 21, 2017, HuffPost published this headline near the top of its front page:
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this page:
Note that the focus is entirely on the number of bombs dropped, but completely omits vital context, such as (a) Why the bombs are being dropped, (b) What the targets are, (c) The success or failure of this effort. Instead, HuffPost chose to depict this as a malicious, indiscriminate, offensive campaign, to drop bombs for the sake of dropping bombs — similar to the incendiary allegations it routinely, and falsely, mounts against Israel (examples 1, 2), and against American police officers, in the context of “killing Americans” (examples 1, 2, 3).
Curiously, HuffPost’s own story provides some of the vital context that it deliberately kept out of its incendiary headline:
Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said on Monday that Trump had emboldened him with “new authority” to launch a bombing campaign against opium labs that have been lining the Taliban’s pockets with cash.
“In striking northern Helmand and the drug enterprises there, we’re hitting the Taliban where it hurts, which is their finances,” Nicholson told reporters in a teleconference, speaking from Afghanistan. “These new authorities allow me to go after the enemy in ways I couldn’t before.” […]
U.S. airstrikes have been “saving Afghan military lives,” Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., told NBC. Earlier this year, Mohib called Trump’s new war policy a “10 out of 10.”
Why would HuffPost construct such a misleading, decontextualized headline when it knew the context of the article? And why would it deny, in its headline, the credit that the Afghanistani ambassador to the U.S. say was due to the U.S. military, in regards to this specific campaign?
Only its senior editors can answer those questions.
(1.23) November 2017: HuffPost published a front page headline that insinuated the U.S. military “may have massacred Somali civilians,” when it knew, or should have known that the Pentagon said its investigation concluded this was a lie
On November 29, 2017, HuffPost published this article on its front page:
This screencap was taken of HuffPost’s front page at 3:40pm, and shows that it led not to a story at HuffPost (red line), but rather, to one at the Daily Beast:
Note that at the top of the Daily Beast page (screencap also taken at 3:40pm), it indicates an update was published at 1:30pm from AFRICOM, the Department of Defense’s authority in Africa:
The AFRICOM statement, included at the end of the article, reads:
Aug. 25 civilian casualty allegation assessment results released
After a thorough assessment of the Somali National Army-led operation near Bariire, Somalia, on Aug. 25, 2017 and the associated allegations of civilian casualties, U.S. Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAF) has concluded that the only casualties were those of armed enemy combatants.
At the time it published the link to this Daily Beast article, HuffPost knew or should have known the following:
That this was a completely unproven, and unprovable allegation.
That AFRICOM claims it investigated the matter four months earlier (August 2017) and concluded that “the only casualties were armed enemy combatants.”
That these types of incendiary allegations can only serve to incite hatred against the U.S. military, and drive radical Islamists from passive to violent actors.
Yet HuffPost published the headline anyway, and did not even bother to update its wording after 1:30pm to indicate that AFRICOM had denied the essential allegations it contained, thus calling into question the veracity of the Daily Beast’s article to which it linked.
The net effect of HuffPost’s acts and omissions in this incident is the same as in the preceding 22 case studies on this page: to maliciously incite worldwide hatred against the U.S. military on unproven or possibly false grounds.
(1.24) March 2018: HuffPost published a splash headline that claimed President Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA “is a literal torturer,” then never corrected the record after its source for the story retracted the claim [UPDATED: Was this latest smear the catalyst for a suspected terrorist attack on Travis Air Force Base, that occurred seven days later?]
Previously: See case studies (1.14), (1.6), (1.7), (1.9) and (1.10) on this page for previous incidents in which HuffPost maliciously smeared the U.S. military and intelligence communities as sadistic torturers and murderers
On March 13, 2018, HuffPost published this splash headline:
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he had chosen Deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel to run the agency while her boss, Mike Pompeo, replaces Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Haspel’s legacy is marked by her time in charge of one of the CIA’s most controversial programs to boot ― the torture of terror suspects in the early fight against al Qaeda.
Working as a clandestine officer in Thailand in 2002, Haspel reportedly was involved in the interrogations of two suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, severalnews outlets reported last year. The methods used against the men included waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times in one month, to the point where doctors once had to revive him, and ramming his head into walls. He lost sight in one eye.
Just one tiny problem: Two days later, on March 15, the source of HuffPost’s “story” retracted the claim on which it was built:
The online news site ProPublica said Thursday night that it had retracted part of an article alleging Gina Haspel, President Trump’s new choice to head the CIA, oversaw the waterboarding of an Al Qaeda suspect at a so-called agency “black site” in Thailand.
“We at ProPublica hold government officials responsible for their missteps, and we must be equally accountable,” editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg said in a statement. “This error was particularly unfortunate because it muddied an important national debate about Haspel and the CIA’s recent history.
“To her, and to our readers, we can only apologize, correct the record and make certain that we do better in the future,” Engelberg added.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it never retracted or apologized for the false claims in this story
A March 30, 2018 search using the string “Gina Haspel CIA torture” reveals that rather than notifying its readers that they had again been misled by the site, HuffPost instead put up a barrage of new smears against her:
UPDATE 1: Was HuffPost’s latest smear the catalyst for a suspected terrorist attack on Travis Air Force Base, that occurred seven days later? Or a series of explosives being mailed to U.S. military installations, ten days later?
Travis Air Force Base, just after this truck rammed through the gate and exploded (CBS News)
On March 23, 2018, seven days after HuffPost began refusing to correct this story, a citizen of India with a Muslim name drove a minivan through the gate at Travis Air Force Base, near San Francisco, CA, and detonated the explosives inside, killing himself in the process.
Was this another terrorist act perpetrated by a Muslim, allegedly in defense of America’s actions against Islamist terrorists? Or because of the libelous incitement against the U.S. military and intelligence communities, that HuffPost has engaged in for years, as as documented in this case study and the previous 23 on this page?
We don’t know yet. But what we do know is that HuffPost also completely ignored this story, as well. See the details in:
Case Study 2.25 March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the news that a Muslim man drove an explosive-laden truck into Travis Air Force Base in California, then detonated it, killing himself and triggering a terrorist investigation
UPDATE 2: Was HuffPost’s latest smear the catalyst for a series of explosives being mailed to U.S. military installations, ten days later?
On March 26, 2018 — ten days after HuffPost decided to not retract or apologize for this debunked smear — news broke that a series of explosive devices were delivered to military installations in the Washington, DC area, including the White House mail processing center. See the details in:
Case Study 2.26 March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored a series of explosives-laden packages sent to military installations in the Washington DC area
(1.25) March 2018: For the second time, HuffPost published a splash headline that visually depicted the U.S. military and intelligence communities as engaging in widespread, 16th-century-like sadistic torture of innocent victims
Previously: Case Study 1.14 December 2014: HuffPost used decontextualized imagery in a deliberate effort to smear all U.S. soldiers and intelligence personnel as torturing sadists, to support a hyper-partisan Senate report
On March 29, 2018, HuffPost published the following splash headline:
Clicking on that headline led to this story page:
The story visually focused on Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee for CIA Director, whom HuffPost libeled several days earlier — then refused to correct the record after the source of its claim retracted it:
Regardless of how one feels about the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” that the U.S. military and intelligence communities applied to three high-value detainees (as admitted in HuffPost’s “story,” these incidents were rare, and lawful at the time. Further, to explicitly, visually depict American military and/or intelligence personnel as engaging in widespread torture for sadistic reasons, as part of a government-sanctioned enterprise:
Is an outrage to anyone who knows what America did to defend herself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as one presumes HuffPost must (or should) know
Legitimizes and emboldens Islamist terrorists who attack America and our armed forces, allegedly in retaliation
Further pits Americans against each other over lies, making civil discourse on an issue such as this impossible
(2) Examples of HuffPost dehumanizing U.S. soldiers, and their families
(2.1) April 2016: STW DOCUMENTARY VIDEO: HuffPost dehumanized a beloved U.S. combat veteran and officer, after he was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist — while at the same time showering personalized coverage on jihadists, sad celebrities and animals
(2.2) March 2012: HuffPost ignored a beloved U.S. Army officer who sacrificed his life to save a young Afghan girl
HuffPost completely ignored these three Marines who, according to a lawsuit, were murdered because of President Obama’s inept rules of engagement. Instead, at the time it published stories on its front page about sex gossip. Details here.
(2.3) August 2012: HuffPost ignored three U.S. Marines who were murdered on an Afghanistan base by a child, according to a lawsuit, because of President Obama’s irrational rules of engagement
(2.4) February 2013: HuffPost ignored an American war hero receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. Instead, it evoked sympathy on its front page for a “homesick American jihadi.”
(2.5) March-November 2014: HuffPost ignored a U.S. Marine who was held captive by Mexico — in contrast to how it showers sympathy on overseas animals, and jailed criminals
(2.6) August 2014: HuffPost ignored a white U.S. Marine who was beaten into coma by gang of African Americans
(2.7) February 2016, Washington, DC: HuffPost ignored a decorated, famous U.S. Marine beaten by Black Lives Matter supporters
(2.8) September 2016, Charlotte, NC: HuffPost ignored a U.S. Army veteran, were severely beaten by a black mob — on video — because he was white
HuffPost completely ignored this American soldier, beaten nearly to death by a mob that didn’t like his Army jacket. Instead, it published on its front page a story about Japanese toilets. Details here.
(2.9) November 2016, Plant City, FL: HuffPost ignored a Trump-supporting veteran whose home was set on fire, ransacked, and vandalized with anti-Trump and anti-white graffiti
(2.10) January 2017, South Philadelphia, PA: HuffPost ignored a white U.S. soldier, on leave from duty in the Middle East, was severely beaten by a mob that was critical of his Army jacket
(2.11) February 2017: HuffPost ignored a decorated Navy SEAL who was killed in a strike against Al Qaeda that went tragically wrong — while politicizing the action, and super-humanizing a top terrorist’s daughter, who was also killed
(2.12) April 2017: HuffPost completely ignored a disabled U.S. Marine combat veteran who ran the Boston Marathon, carrying a special American flag — but gave two straight days of top coverage to a non-disabled Muslim who was also competing
(2.13) April 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the allegations of an Air Force pilot, that President Obama’s irrational rules of engagement led directly to the deaths of 30 American special operations soldiers in Afghanistan
(2.14) July 2017: HuffPost downplayed, then quickly removed from its front page the story of sixteen U.S. Marines who were killed in a helicopter accident in Mississippi [UPDATED]
(2.15) November 2016: HuffPost completely ignored three U.S. Special Forces soldiers who were murdered by a Jordanian terrorist, while training Syrian opposition forces, per President Obama’s orders [belated discovery]
(2.16) October 2017: HuffPost ignored the names, faces and stories of three Green Berets who were ambushed and murdered in Niger — treatment it routinely affords to convicted murderers, terrorists and animals
(2.17) October 2017: HuffPost completely ignored a military hero who was being awarded the Medal of Honor — and instead gave top coverage to a man who was driving “nearly naked and covered in Vaseline”
(2.18) October 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the testimony of soldiers who employed superhuman efforts to try to rescue Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, at his sentencing hearing for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy
(2.19) October 2017: HuffPost ignored additional testimony in the sentencing hearing of Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, by the wife of a severely disabled soldier who lost his ability to speak or care for himself, as a result of his effort to rescue Bergdahl
(2.20) November 2017: Throughout the trial of Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, and the sentencing phase of his conviction, HuffPost completely ignored the names of the six American soldiers, and one military dog, who were killed searching for him
(2.21) August 2017: After routinely giving top publicity to allegations of sexual abuse in the U.S. military, HuffPost completely ignored a U.S. Army officer whose career was destroyed by a false rape allegation — and who won an $8.4 million judgment against his false accuser
(2.22) November 2017: HuffPost completely ignored an 89 year old WWII veteran who died, on video, after his please for help in a hospital went unanswered — and the nurse is seen laughing over him
(2.23) January 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the recorded video of a notorious California high school teacher who smeared — during class — the entire U.S. military as “dumb shits, the lowest of the low”
(2.24) June 2016 – March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the efforts to raise Congressional support for, and pass the Taylor Force Act, to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority until it stops inciting, glorifying and financially rewarding Islamist terrorists
(2.25) March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the news that a Muslim man drove an explosive-laden truck into Travis Air Force Base in California, then detonated it, killing himself and triggering a terrorist investigation — and instead gave top coverage to a former porn star who says she feels “threatened” by disclosing her alleged relationship with President Trump, 12 years ago
(2.26) March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored a series of explosives-laden packages sent to military installations in the Washington DC area — and instead gave top coverage to two “news” stories about celebrities who allegedly insulted another celebrity’s face
(2.1) STW DOCUMENTARY VIDEO: HuffPost dehumanized a beloved U.S. combat veteran and officer, after he was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist – while showering personalized coverage on jihadists, sad celebrities and animals
UPDATE, March 2, 2018: HuffPost has completely ignored the efforts to raise Congressional support for, and pass the Taylor Force Act, to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority until it stops inciting, glorifying and financially rewarding Islamist terrorists. See Case Study 2.24.
Summary
In April 2016, SaveTheWest.com released a short documentary video (17 minutes), “HuffPost’s Dehumanization of Capt. Taylor Force.” The film exposes how HuffPost betrayed its publicly-stated “core values,” to downplay and ultimately dehumanize a beloved U.S. combat veteran, who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist — while at the same time, showering personalized, sympathetic attention on terrorists, farm animals, etc.
Detail
Capt. Taylor Allen Force, 28, was a decorated West Point graduate who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, he began pursuing his MBA at Vanderbilt University. In early March 2016, he joined a school trip to Israel, to learn more about entrepreneurship. On March 8, while he was walking along the ocean, Taylor was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist. See a chronology of news and blog articles about Taylor’s murder here.
Capt. Taylor Force was “the perfect example of a U.S. Army officer,” said a fellow West Point graduate who served with him in Iraq and Afghanistan.“The Huffington Post’s Dehumanization of Capt. Taylor Force” presents detailed evidence of how HuffPost covered Taylor’s murder:
HuffPost only posted an initial wire service report about Taylor’s murder on its front page, then quickly moved the story to a secondary page. Although his name was known, and pictures of him were available at the time, its headline only said a generic “American tourist” had been killed, which it matched with a picture of an Israeli policeman, at night.
HuffPost never published a single picture of Taylor, or any of the details about his character, heroism and grief-stricken family, that emerged in the 24 hours after his murder, in U.S. and Israeli newspapers.
The highest position HuffPost gave Taylor’s story was just beneath a graphic, original story it wrote about Kim Kardashian’s anger at other celebrities criticizing her for posting a nude selfie (which it also posted on its front page as “news”; right).
HuffPost’s treatment of Taylor, his murder and his family stands in sharp contrast to the other stories to which it gave personalized, graphic and sympathetic treatment on both its front page and World page, during this period. These picture-rich stories depicted a swan that was abused in Eastern Europe; a dying whale; an American jihadi who regrets joining ISIS; and profiles of two Syrian refugees in Turkey.
HuffPost also ignored the fact that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas openly celebrated Taylor’s murder. Instead, it posted stories on its front page about a dog that appears to be driving a tractor; an ISIS leader who may have been killed; and a tattoo-faced gangster who was arrested.
HuffPost’s founder and editor in chief at the time*, Arianna Huffington,claimed that her newspaper is distinguished by its “core values,” which include:
“Using storytelling to put flesh and blood on statistics, putting a human face on the numbers,” and “Comforting the afflicted.”
This documentary reveals that Huffington only applied these “core values” to anyone and anything other than victims of Palestinian and Islamist terrorism.
* Several months after this documentary was released, and a special report on how HuffPost repeatedly lied to the American people regarding the Iran “deal,” Huffington was pushedout of HuffPost, and her name no longer appears anywhere on its masthead.
(2.2) March 2012: HuffPost completely ignored a beloved U.S. Army officer who sacrificed his life to save a young Afghan girl
The following is adapted from a detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
U.S. Army Sgt. Dennis Weichel was a beloved father of three and, by all accounts, a manof exceptional character and generosity. He died while saving a little Afghan girl from certain death. According to a March 28, 2012 Army press release (excerpt):
“On the morning of March 22, Weichel and members of his unit were leaving the Black Hills Firing Range in Laghman province, Afghanistan, when they encountered multiple Afghan children in the path of their convoy. Weichel was among several Soldiers who dismounted to disperse the children away from the vehicles. As one child attempted to retrieve an item from underneath a U.S. Army mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, known as an MRAP, Weichel moved her to safety and was struck by the MRAP in the process.”
Starting on March 28, Fox News, CNN and small blogs, such as Jawa Report, all ran top-line stories about Sgt. Weichel’s heroism, and why he was so beloved by his fellow soldiers.
HuffPost, however, made no mention on either its front page or World page of Sgt. Weichel on March 28, or any day since then.Instead, from March 28-30, HuffPost devoted its front page and World page to publishing “news” stories such as:
“Six-legged calf is adorable and milking the attention”
“Dolphins’ sexuality may be more open than you think”
Numerous exploitative stories focusing on womens’ bodies
February 2017 update: HuffPost continues to ignore Sgt. Weichel to this day
And as of February 2017, HuffPost still has published absolutely nothing about Sgt. Weichel, or his heroic sacrifice. A February 19, 2017 search using the string “Sgt. Dennis Weichel” returns zero results:
(2.3) August 2012: HuffPost ignored three U.S. Marines who were murdered on an Afghanistan military base, according to a lawsuit, because of President Obama’s irrational rules of engagement
Note: “Rules of engagement” (ROE) is a term that describes a code of legal dictates that determine if, when and how force may be employed (info). In the U.S., the ROE are defined by the President of the United States, as commander-in-chief of the military, in consultation with advisers and appointees to the Department of Defense.
From left: Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley, 21, Cpl. Richard Rivera, 20, and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, 29.
On August 10, 2012, four U.S. Marines were exercising in the gym at Forward Operating Base Delhi, in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. Without warning, a 15-year-old Afghan boy, Aynoddin, burst in with a machine gun and opened fire on all of them until he ran out of ammunition. Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley, 21, Cpl. Richard Rivera, 20, and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, 29, were instantly killed. The fourth Marine, Staff Sgt. Cody Rhode, 24, was hit with five bullets, but recovered.
A lawsuit was filed against the Marine Corps soon after, by the family of Lance Cpl. Buckley, accusing it of, according to a report in theWashington Times, “refusing to turn over documents that would show the dangerous environment inside Forward Operating Base Delhi. Excerpt:
A lawyer for the family of Lance Cpl. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. says Lance Cpl. Buckley and two other Marines were gunned down by a young civilian in a close relationship with a corrupt Afghan police chief. Sarwar Jan was known to help the enemy yet was allowed to work inside the FOB.
“Since the Aug. 10, 2012, murders, the Marine Corps has refused to provide the standard death investigative report,” said attorney Michael J. Bowe. He said the Corps told the father, Gregory T. Buckley Sr., that if he wanted to attend the suspects’ trial in an Afghan courtroom he would have to get there on his own. With little notice, the trial occurred last week, leaving Mr. Buckley no time to make arrangements.
“This is an ugly story,” said Mr. Bowe, a partner in a prestigious national law firm that took the case pro bono. “[It is a] cover-up because no one wanted Americans to know that we were forcing our young men and women to share bases and work with corrupt Afghan officials who were raping children, shaking down villagers, collaborating with the Taliban and opium dealers and putting them in environments where we could not protect them.
“As a result,” he said, “not only did three United States Marines get murdered in their own base gymnasium, but the truth about how and why those murders happened has been systematically suppressed because it contradicts the administration’s narrative.”
The Marine Corps disputes this, providing a statement to The Washington Times detailing security at Delhi and the amount of communications it has maintained with the three families. “Our approach to supporting the families of our fallen Marines is based on our unwavering commitment to loyalty,” the statement said.
The murders at the Helmand Province FOB came amid a wave of insider, or “green on blue,” attacks carried out by Afghan security personnel working closely with the Americans. […]
The case is tied to Sarwar Jan, a notoriously corrupt Afghan police chief whose headquarters were located at FOB Delhi. He is known to have ties to the Taliban and a penchant for boys — not uncommon among Afghan men.
Another article, from the Daily Mail (UK), describes how the LCpl Buckley’s family lays the blame for their son’s murder squarely on the Obama administration’s rules of engagement:
Gregory Buckley, Sr. holds a photo of his son and namesake.
The father of a Marine shot dead by a teenager and alleged sex slave in Afghanistan has slammed the US military for making him seem like an enemy to abused local children. According to Gregory Buckley Sr, American officers were ordered to turn a blind eye to the sexual abuse of Afghan boys – even on military bases – because that was not the ‘priority of the mission’.
It was this policy, he believes, that led to his son Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr, 21, being gunned down on Helmland Province in 2012 by 17-year-old Aynoddin, an Afghan ‘tea boy’ for local police chief Sarwar Jan – who had previously been reprimanded for child abduction.
‘As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,’ Buckley Sr told the New York Times. ‘They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.’
His words come as he files a landmark lawsuit against the military, with testimony from US Marines, describing how local boys would be chained to beds and abused daily by America-backed Afghan officers – but they were barred from intervening.
The Obama administration’s rules of engagement were severely criticized prior to LCpl Buckley’s murder
As we prepare to draw down our forces in Afghanistan we continue to hear stories about the abhorrent ROE (Rules of Engagement). The following story will only serve to increase the angst and question the purpose of our current involvement in that country. Why would an unvetted teenage boy be allowed on this Forward Operating Base (FOB) Delhi in Helmand province, or any FOB, as it is clearly a breach of security? Of course the obvious other question is why would the United States turn a blind eye to this practice and seemingly condone it by allowing it on a combat outpost? The father of Marine LCPL Buckley Jr. believes Jan set up his “tea boy” to do the shooting. The serial number of the AK-47 Aynoddin used to shoot the Marines matched Jan’s rifle. Jan has yet to be charged. But it gets worse.
From the Wall St. Journal and the combat veterans and officers it interviewed:
When Capt. Zinni spotted the four men planting the booby trap on the afternoon of Feb. 17, the first thing he did was call his lawyer.
“Judge!” he yelled.
Capt. Matthew Andrew, judge advocate for 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, advises the battalion about when it is legal to order the airstrikes. He examined the figures on the video feed closely. “I think you got it,” Capt. Andrew said, giving the OK for the strike.
[HotAir.com] But, the story reports, Zinni (son of Anthony Zinni) ended up spotting kids nearby — so the strike was called off. The terrorists ended up getting away. Is it just an accident that some kids were wandering near insurgents planting a booby trap? Almost certainly not:
Capt. Zinni had seen this scenario before in Marjah. Insurgents using women and children for cover as they moved weapons or crossed open spaces into fighting positions in buildings. In this case, the captain was certain that the children were acting—either by their own volition or under coercion—as shields for the men planting the bomb.
The way the Taliban see it, he thought, they’d win either way: The Americans might hold their fire and allow them to plant a bomb unmolested. Or the Americans might kill a few civilians, a propaganda victory for an insurgent force increasingly adept at using the media to spread its message.
From the Washington Times, which spoke to a veteran intelligence officer:
The number of U.S. battlefield fatalities exceeded the rate at which troop strength surged in 2009 and 2010, prompting national security analysts to assert that coinciding stricter rules of engagement led to more deaths.
A connection between the sharp increase in American deaths and restrictive rules of engagement is difficult to confirm. More deaths surely stemmed from ramped-up counterterrorism raids and the Taliban’s response with more homemade bombs, the No. 1 killer of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
But it is clear that the rules of engagement, which restrain troops from firing in order to spare civilian casualties, cut back on airstrikes and artillery strikes — the types of support that protect troops during raids and ambushes.
“In Afghanistan, the [rules of engagement] that were put in place in 2009 and 2010 have created hesitation and confusion for our war fighters,” said Wayne Simmons, a retired U.S. intelligence officer who worked in NATO headquarters in Kabul as the rules took effect, first under Army Gen. Stanley M. McChrystal, then Army Gen. David H. Petraeus.
“It is no accident nor a coincidence that from January 2009 to August of 2010, coinciding with the Obama/McChrystal radical change of the [rules of engagement], casualties more than doubled,” Mr. Simmons said. “The carnage will certainly continue as the already fragile and ineffective [rules] have been further weakened by the Obama administration as if they were playground rules.”
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored these Marines’ murders, and the Buckley family lawsuit
The murders of the three Marines occurred on August 10, 2012. The Buckley family’s lawsuit was filed in early 2014. A series of February 26, 2017 searches using HuffPost’s own search engine proves it completely ignored this entire story:
The Washington Timesarticle at the top of this post, detailing the Buckley family’s lawsuit, was published on July 27, 2014. Here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page over the next three days, July 28-30, 2014, instead of anything about this lawsuit:
(2.4) February 2013: HuffPost ignored an American war hero receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. Instead, it evoked sympathy on its front page for a “homesick American jihadi.”
The following is excerpted, and consolidated, from a detailed report at Huff-Watch.
On February 8, 2013 HuffPost published simultaneously on its front page and World page a “news” story about an American-born Islamist terrorist who complained that he was “homesick,” in part because his gang’s leaders won’t let him touch the “war booty” that he captures. Excerpt:
Once his reputation was of a feared fighter, an American-born extremist who left small town Alabama to wage war alongside Al-Qaeda-linked Somali Islamists and who called on other foreigners to join. Today, Omar Hamami — better known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or “the American” — has split from the insurgents, who want to kill him.
He cuts a forlorn figure: homesick, stuck somewhere in Somalia, and telling anyone who will listen about his apparently doomed career path. […]
“War booty* is eaten by the top dogs, but the guys who won it are jailed for touching it,” Amriki says in one message on Twitter. It is a sharp turnaround for a man who once issued rap videos aimed at recruiting foreign fighters. […]
“What I would like though is to have a three day visit to see my mom, dad and sister… I often wonder what this whole experience has done to them,” he writes in the book, adding he misses his daughter whom he abandoned in Egypt as a baby.
“I’d like to make a round of the restaurants and get some Chinese food, some hot (chicken) wings, some Nestle ice cream, some gourmet coffee and a slew of other foods and beverages.”
* HuffPost’s story made no mention of the fact that “war booty,” to jihadis in general, and Al Shabaab in particular, includes the women and girls that they kidnap and sexually terrorize. Here is a detailed explanation, by one of the world’s top radical Islamist preachers, Abu Ishaq Al Heweny:
https://youtu.be/m1Kh1EOKM1c
HuffPost kept the story on the front page for two straight days, and on the World page for five straight days (evidence file).
Sgt. Clinton Romesha
Sgt. Clinton Romesha
During the same time period, a U.S. soldier, Sgt. Clinton Romesha, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for distinct heroism in a particularly brutal firefights against jihadis, in which eight of his comrades were killed.
Romesha and his comrades in Bravo Troop (3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division) had become engaged in what President Obama described as “one of the most intense battles of the entire war in Afghanistan,”against an overwhelming number of jihadis who snuck onto their base. Romesha, however, said that he was only accepting the award:
“on behalf of all soldiers who served with me that day… for the eight soldiers that didn’t make it, and for the rest of the team that fought valiantly and magnificently that day.”
HuffPost, however, made no mention of Sgt. Romesha, his comrades, or this award, on either its front page or World page, on February 11 or any day since then. This is despite the fact that HuffPost has at least one full-time “reporter” who, for the previous four years, had reported from inside the White House and Congress.
Instead, HuffPost populated these top pages with “news” stories it considered more deserving of this top-line treatment, including:
(2.5) March-November 2014: HuffPost ignored a U.S. Marine who was held captive by Mexico, and allegedly abused in one of its jails
The following is excerpted, and consolidated, from a detailed report at Huff-Watch, from June 26, 2014.
On March 31, 2014, a highly-decorated U.S. Marine, Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, accidentally crossed into Mexico, on his way to San Diego, due to a confusing series of road signs. Mexican officials refused his request to turn around a few hundred feet over the border, and instead threw him in jail, where he has remained ever since. The reason: Tahmooressi, who was essentially living out of his truck, was carrying all of his possessions, including three firearms, which he openly admitted to Mexican officials.
An Afghanistan war veteran suffering from PTSD, by all accounts Sgt. Tahmooressi served honorably, and was relocating to San Diego to obtain the mental health counseling that had been prescribed to him. Since his incarceration in Mexico, however, Tahmooressi has reported that his jailers have beaten him, stripped him of his clothes, chained him to a bed, and threatened to rape him.
Here’s a video summary of Sgt. Tahmooressi’s situation, from Fox News Channel:
https://youtu.be/LggZtG_QnXI
President Obama was silent throughout Mexico’s imprisonment of Sgt. Tahmooressi. Unlike incidents in which he called to express support for Americans who he felt needed the public moral support that only a sitting U.S. president can offer, he completley ignored Sgt. Tahmooressi’s plight.
He was released on October 31, 2014 — after 214 days in captivity — as a result of pressure from his mother, Jill, Fox News Channel, Republican Congressmen Duncan Hunter, Ed Royce, and Matt Salmon, TV host Montel Williams, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, and veterans groups.
On November 6, 2014, Fox News Channel broadcast an hour-long video profile of, and interview with Sgt. Tahmooressi, about his ordeal, and hopes for the future:
Tahmooressi told Van Susteren about his experience crossing the border. He said that he immediately reported that he had guns, and that one man was initially helpful.
“I was thinking, hopefully these guys are going to be considerate and caring and understanding […] You know, they were very helpful and then it shifted,” he said.
Tahmooressi landed in a La Mesa prison cell with 20 other prisoners, though he said the cell was fit for six or seven prisoners. He said that the other men in the cell were initially cordial, but said he was worried and feeling vulnerable.
“So they see my weakness and I think they started taking advantage of my weakness, just to maybe have fun with me. Or maybe they feel threatened by me because I was this odd-out guy, you know, kind of keeping to himself over there.” […]
“I was very afraid. I felt like it would be the last night of my life right there, that these guys were going to kill me. That these guys were going to brutally kill me, I was thinking. I built up strength to run away because I thought running away was my only hope to get away from a situation like that,” he said.
The guards “beat him up a little bit,” then strapped him to the post of a bunk bed naked for eight or nine hours, Tahmooressi revealed.
“I felt like guards outside were having fun with the whole thing, like they were mocking me outside, making fun of me, so that was hard. So I’m like some kind of animal in a cage here […] like I don’t even have life in me.”
In this segment of the interview, Sgt. Tahmooressi described his multiple attempts at suicide while in captivity:
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored these stories.
As Huff-Watch documented on August 26, 2014, HuffPost had completely ignored Sgt. Tahmooressi’s five months in captivity:
So how many stories did the Huffington Post, the world’s #1 most-read online “newspaper,” publish about Sgt. Tahmooressi and his plight and allegations, in the nearly three months since he was taken captive by Mexico?
Zero – and you can prove this for yourself. If you search “Andrew Tahmooressi” at HuffPost, you will find a list of returns – all of which have “huff-wires” in the URL, meaning that these were items that were inserted into HuffPost’s news feed, but not published – least of all on its front page, or any prominent position.
This deafening silence stood in sharp contrast to Arianna Huffington’s proclamation — five days before the Huff-Watch article — of how, under her leadership, HuffPost always stands with the victims of injustice:
“At The Huffington Post we’re relentless in our coverage of… injustice… [and] are equally relentless in giving our readers and viewers a full and accurate idea of the entire human story. […]”
Apparently, as the evidence shows before and since, she meant unless the victim of injustice is a person who belongs to a group that HuffPost considers worthless — including active-duty and former American soldiers.
This allegation is proven by HuffPost’s own search engine.
A March 1, 2017 search using the strings “Andrew Tahmooressi” returned only two results — both blog articles, meaning, not news items:
Only the first of these blog articles specifically addressed Sgt. Tahmooressi, as the subject, and according to HuffPost, it was published at 3:12pm on November 7, 2014. Yet Internet Archive captures of HuffPost’s front pages on November 7 (11:57pm), November 8 (11:43pm), and November 9 (9:29pm) show that HuffPost never featured this blog article on its front page.
Returning now to November 1-3, the three days after the news broke that Sgt. Tahmooressi had been released from his 214-day captivity, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page during this period, instead of a single word about him:
This “news” story appeared on HuffPost’s front page on November 2, 2014.
Contrast HuffPost’s ignoring of Sgt. Tahmooressi to the sympathetic coverage it gave to a convicted U.S. traitor, to Palestinians, Al Qaeda, and the notorious Al Jazeera, after its “journalists” were arrested in Egypt
As the following facts demonstrate, were Tahmooressi anything other than (a) an American combat veteran who honorably served, and (b) a gun owner, it would have given his plight front-page coverage. Consider the following facts:
(1) HuffPost gave front-page splash treatment to Michael Moore’s allegations that a Palestinian filmmaker was detained for merely a few hours at LAX:
(2) HuffPost gave front-page splash treatment toconvicted traitor PFC Bradley Manning when it became difficult to prove whether or not his treason led to actual deaths of U.S. service members or our allies:
(3) HuffPost gave Manning a front-page editorial to explain why he was changing his name, and had changed genders – and left this editorial posted on the front page for four days:
(4) HuffPost gavefive days of top coverage to a “homesick jihadi” –yet ignored the a U.S. military hero who was given the Medal of Honor during the same time period:
(6) HuffPost gave splash treatment to Palestinians whom it alleged were “left behind by government, the world”:
These are not isolated incidents, or “accidents,” as HuffPost likes to claim when it is caught in embarrassingsituations. Rather, they are par for the course in the “news” room that is commanded by the woman who reportedly claimed she is “the future of journalism.”
HuffPost’s recent, sympathetic coverage of Al Jazeera “journalists” who were sentenced in Egypt (and who then made overt threats against the Egyptian government)
Most recently, on June 24, 2014 HuffPost published an editorialized teaser atop its news section, for an original “news” story that presents what it contends is the “heartbreaking” reaction that an Al Jazeera “journalist” had to being sentenced by an Egyptian court:
Note also that by HuffPost’s own admission, amidst this “heartbreaking” ordeal, the “reporter” overtly threatened the court, screaming, “They will pay for this! I promise they will pay for this!”:
Note further that as documented in a detailed report, HuffPost has a long, intense relationship with Al Jazeera, in which it has relentlessly worked to get the terrorist-celebrating “news” network into millions of U.S. homes.
(2.6) August 2014: HuffPost ignored a white U.S. Marine who was beaten into coma by gang of African Americans
The following is excerpted, and consolidated, from a detailed report at Huff-Watch.
HuffPost ran five straight days of top-line coverage to elicit sympathy for a “homesick jihadi.”
It gave front-page splash headline treatment to an allegation that a Palestinian filmmaker who was detained for several hours at LAX.
And it ran two straight days of front-page coverage to elicit sympathy for its female staffers who allege (without any proof) they were spoken to unkindly by men on New York streets.
Ralph Weems IV, 32.
Yet HuffPost has completely ignored the story of a white U.S. Marine, Ralph Weems IV, who served two tours in Iraq, was beaten into a coma by a gang of between 7-20 African Americans in West Point, Mississippi — because of his skin color.
On August 23, 2014 the local CBS-TV affiliate, WCBI, reported:
A West Point man undergoes emergency brain surgery following a serious beating at a West Point restaurant. Ralph Weems the IV was airlifted to North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo following the assault at the Huddle House between 1 and 1:30 a.m., Saturday. Friends and relatives tell WCBI that Weems and a friend, David Knighten, were at Waffle House, and got into an argument with as many as seven men. It involved some racial slurs.
The story was then reported by the AP — HuffPost’s most-cited news source — at 12:07am on August 25, and described Weems’ injuries as “life-threatening”:
West Point police said a man received life-threatening injuries in what they are investigating as an aggravated assault at a restaurant. Ralph Weems IV, who was injured early Saturday, was in fair condition Sunday at North Mississippi Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Genie Causey said without elaborating. […]
A relative, Bradley Barnes of Madison, told The Associated Press by telephone on Sunday that his brother-in-law was in a medically induced coma following brain surgery. “They’re going to try and wake him up tomorrow and see what damage was done,” Barnes said, describing Weems as a 32-year-old former Marine who had served in Iraq. […]
David Knighten of West Point told AP earlier by phone that he and Weems had gone to a Waffle House early Saturday. He said a man waved him over outside the restaurant and told him politely that people were upset by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it wasn’t a safe place for whites. When he went in, he said, Weems was inside and was arguing with other men.
USA Todaycovered the story. The NY Daily News covered the story. Many other news sources and blogs covered Weems’ plight. A GoFundMe account was set up by Weems’s brother, to help raise money to pay his estimated $25,000 in medical bills.
In April 2015, two men were indicted for their roles in the assault on Weems:
A Clay County grand jury has indicted two men for their alleged roles in an August assault that attracted national media intention for its racial undertones.
Marquavious McMillian, 21, of Aberdeen, and Courtez McMillian, 23, of Okolona, both have been charged with single counts of aggravated assault for allegedly beating Ralph Weems IV in a Huddle House parking lot on Aug. 23, according to Assistant District Attorney Lindsay Clemons. The exact family tie between the two is unconfirmed, but they are believed to be related, authorities said.
The alleged assault took place at the Huddle House on Highway 45 South in West Point. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in August, the assault drew national attention after a witness said Weems was attacked due to his race. The indicted suspects are black. Weems is white.
Marquavious McMillian (L), and Aberdeen, and Courtez McMillian
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
As Huff-Watch documented on August 26, 2014, HuffPost completely ignored the story of the racial attack on Ralph Weems IV. In the two-and-a-half years since the attack that nearly killed him, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has continued to ignore what happened to him.
A February 28, 2017 search using the strings “Ralph Weems Marine beaten coma” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page, from August 25-27, 2014 (three days after the AP published this story):
This “news” story appeared on HuffPost’s front page on August 25, 2014, and remained there until August 26.
Contrast how HuffPost ignored Ralph Weems, to how it showered top-level, personalized sympathy on a waitress, a dishonorably-discharged Marine, who alleged (falsely) that someone left her a homophobic note
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this story page — note the fact that HuffPost put the alleged “victim’s” name right in the headline, claimed she was a Marine, and stated that this incident had, in fact, happened:
An excerpt from this “story” — which HuffPost just assumed was true:
A waitress in New Jersey who previously served in the Marines received an offensive note from a family who denied her a tip because of her “gay lifestyle.” Now, she is speaking out against those very people whose freedom she once defended.
Dayna Morales, a server at Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater, N.J., wrote an email to gay-friendly blog “Have A Gay Day” about her recent experience with homophobia while serving a family of diners, reports Gay Star News. When Morales introduced herself to the couple and their two children, the mother was allegedly shocked by Morales’ short hair.
“Oh I thought you were gonna say your name is Dan,” she allegedly said. “You sure surprised us!”
At the end of the meal, Morales was left with no tip on the $93.55 bill. Instead, she found a note on the receipt, reading: “I’m sorry but I cannot tip because I don’t agree with your lifestyle & how you live your life.”
As HuffPost reported, Morales then implicitly threatened the customers, in a post she put up on a gay website (emphasis added):
Morales expressed her disgust over the incident in her email to Have A Gay Day. The email, later posted to the site’s Facebook page, read:
I am THOROUGHLY offended mad pissed off and hurt that THIS is what her kids will grow up learning and that I served in the Marines to keep ignorant people like them free. Sorry lady but I don’t agree with YOUR lifestyle and the way you’re raising your kids but you didn’t see me throwing that in your face and giving you shitty service. Keep your damn mouth shut and pray we never cross paths again.
Thanks to HuffPost giving her “story” top-level, worldwide coverage, Morales set up a PayPal account so those who sympathized with her could send her monetary donations:
The purported incident created a media firestorm, with well-wishers sending Morales at least $3,000 in donations through a PayPal account.
There was just one tiny problem with the “story”: it was a hoax — and Morales was soon fired by the restaurant at which this fake hate incident occurred. As reported by NBC-New York:
After a gay server at a New Jersey restaurant said a customer denied her a tip and wrote her a hateful note on the receipt, a local family contacted NBC 4 New York and said their receipt shows they paid a tip and didn’t write any such note. […]
But a family contacted NBC 4 New York claiming their receipt from the restaurant shows they did leave a tip, and provided what they said was a credit card statement as proof. […]
They also provided a document they said was a Visa bill, which appears to indicate their card was charged for the meal plus the tip, for a total of $111.55.
The couple told NBC 4 New York that they believed their receipt was used for a hoax. The wife says she is left-handed and could not have made the slash in the tip line, which she said looks to be drawn from the right.
“We’ve never not left a tip when someone gave good service, and we would never leave a note like that,” the wife said.
The husband said he and his wife have both worked in restaurants and believe in the value of tipping, and noted that he didn’t vote for Gov. Chris Christie because the governor doesn’t support gay marriage.
Further research revealed that Morales had been dishonorably discharged from the Marines:
The New Jersey waitress whose story has been questioned after she claimed she received an anti-gay note instead of a tip on a restaurant bill was discharged under dishonorable terms from the Marines last spring after she stopped showing up, NBC 4 New York has learned.
And those who knew and worked with Morales publicly claimed she was a compulsive liar:
Acquaintances say Morales — who was dishonorably discharged from the military — has a history of fibbing and at one point pretended she had terminal cancer.
“She exaggerated every story,” former coworker Julie Howat told The Post. “I knew [the receipt] was fake. When the articles came out, everyone at my job laughed.”
Yet HuffPost’s own search engine proves it ignored these developments. A March 11, 2017 search using the string “Dayna Morales receipt tip” returned no relevant results:
(2.7) February 2016, Washington, DC: Decorated, famous U.S. Marine beaten by Black Lives Matter supporters
On the evening of Friday, February 12, 2016, decorated, famous U.S. Marine, Chris Marquez, was dining in a Washington, DC, when he was accosted by a group of Black Lives Matter supporting teenagers. From the Daily Mail:
An Iraq war veteran whose bravery inspired two statues says he was beaten by a group of teens in Washington, DC on Friday night after they approached and asked him whether ‘black lives matter’.
Chris Marquez, 30, a decorated US Marine veteran, was eating in a McDonald’s when the youths walked up and started questioning him, WJLA reported. ‘I felt threatened and thought they were trying to intimidate me, so I figured I’m just going to keep to my food, eat my food and hopefully they’ll leave me alone,’ Marquez told the station.
The youths started calling him a racist, he said, but it was when he tried to leave the restaurant that things went badly for him. […]
The marine, who had survived ambushes in Fallujah at the height of the Iraq War, was taken unaware again — and this time he was unarmed and without backup.
One of the teens hit him in the head from behind, knocking him to the floor, where the gang beat him savagely before robbing him. Marquez told police that one youth hit him in the head with a handgun.
‘As soon as I walked out of the McDonald’s I got hit in the back of the head, or the side of the head,’ he told WJLA. ‘I just dropped to the ground, and [the McDonald’s manager] says I looked unconscious.’
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
A February 18, 2017 search using the string “Chris Marquez Marine beaten” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page on February 17-19, 2016 (the three days after this story broke at the Daily Mail):
This “news” story, hailing a chimp who was grateful to his rescuers, appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page on February 17, 2016.
(2.8) September 2016, Charlotte, NC: A U.S. Army veteran was severely beaten by a black mob — on video — because he was white
David Palmer served seven years in the U.S. Army, then returned home to North Carolina to be close to his family, and resume his life, in peace. On September 21, 2016, however, while walking home after a dinner in a restaurant, he was targeted and severely beaten by a gang of black men, specifically was of his skin color.
A video released online shows rioters in Charlotte, North Carolina, attacking a military veteran and then shouting at him: “You’re in the danger zone, white boy!”
The video’s early seconds show a white man being attacked by two black rioters. The man eventually flees while holding a hand over his injured face, while onlookers jeer. After the man jogs off, somebody can be heard shouting “You’re in the danger zone, white boy!”
Since the video’s release, the white man in the video has been identified as David Palmer, a seven-year Army veteran who only returned to civilian life within the past year. The video was recorded the night of Sept. 21 and uploaded to YouTube shortly after.
Palmer’s sister, Ashley Brooke Warlick, has created a GoFundMe page for her brother, seeking to raise money for his medical and living expenses in the wake of the attack.
And here was David Palmer in the hospital:
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
One year earlier, HuffPost gave top publicity to a fundraiser for a “library of orgasm sounds”; one year later, to a fundraiser to provide surgery for a kitten who “needs a butthole”
In regards to the donations sought to help veteran David Palmer with his medical expenses, while HuffPost completely ignored this aspect of his story — as well as the rest — four months earlier, in May 2016, it posted this “news” story, with a solicitation for donations, near the top of its front page:
Then, on October 27, 2017, this “news” story appeared on HuffPost’s front page. In summary, the story is about an effort to raise $4,000 for a kitten who “needs a butthole.” On the bright side, by 9:15pm, less than three hours after HuffPost published this story (6:24pm), the effort raised $4,585.
[Palmer] said a group of men walked toward him. According to the police report, the men approached him and said, “You are in the danger zone, white boy,” and started to beat him up. Police said they took his baseball cap and cellphone. Palmer said he managed to get away, and ran straight home to his sister.
Palmer said he suffered a damaged eye socket, a broken nose and shattered facial bones.
“(I’m) still getting feeling back to my face, weird nerve sensations, twitches,” Palmer said.
Police arrested Cortney Pinkney and Jamario Simpson, who are facing charges in the attack.
Cortney Pinkney (L), and Jamario Simpson, charged in the racist attack on David Palmer.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
A March 14, 2017 search using the string “Cortney Pinkney Jamario Simpson,” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page, from November 19-21, the three days after the news of these arrests broke:
(2.9) November 2016, Plant City, FL: A Trump-supporting veteran’s home was set on fire, ransacked, and vandalized with anti-Trump and anti-white graffiti
This article and video were posted by the local ABC affiliate at 9:53am on November 29 — and from there, began to go viral:
PLANT CITY, Fla. – The State Fire Marshall is investigating a suspicious fire at a Plant City home that started early Tuesday morning. Naval veteran Matthew Smith said he got the call just after 3 a.m. from his neighbor that fire trucks were across the street.
“Your heart kind of just sinks in your chest,” Smith said. “Definitely blessed to have not been here. It was pretty bad.” Smith said the family was staying with their grandparents when he got the call. His 8-year-old daughter’s bed was set on fire along with his 18-month-old son’s crib. Every single room in the remainder of the home also suffered fire damage.
[…] On the walls someone wrote in spray paint the words, “cracker, F- Trump, not my prez, and F- yo kids.” […] Smith said he made a lot of pro-Trump posts on Facebook, but never put any signs supporting Trump in his yard.
He couldn’t even begin to try and understand who would do something like this to his home. He felt that whoever destroyed his home were just copying other anti-Trump protesters from across the country.
“It’s been several months now where there’s protesters breaking the law, damaging property, destroying cities,” Smith said. “And, ‘oh just let them do it’ and that’s not how it should have gone down. If you are breaking the law you should go to jail. That’s it.”
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
A December 1 search using the string “Matthew Smith fire Plant City FL burned” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page over the next three days, from 10:00pm on November 29 (12 hours after the story was posted, and began to go viral) through December 1:
(2.10) January 2017, South Philadelphia, PA: A white U.S. soldier, on leave from duty in the Middle East, was severely beaten by a mob that was critical of his Army jacket
On January 1, active-duty soldier Austin Freni was walking with his mother and girlfriend in South Philadelphia, PA after attending a folk festival. A mob became critical of his Army jacket, and began attacking him, as well as his mother and girlfriend. From the local Fox-TV affiliate:
A soldier’s mom is speaking out after a brutal attack on her son. The serviceman became a target for a violent group after the Mummers parade. He is now in the hospital with a long recovery ahead of him. “He’s such a good kid. He did not deserve this.” […]
“Group of 10-15 guys walked by me (making) derogatory comments towards Austin’s Army jacket,” she explained. Then she says one of the young men struck Austin before others piled on. “Me and his girlfriend tried pulling them off and they hit us . We got hit in the face. She got thrown in the street,” his mom explained “He’s got to get plates put in his jaw and his mouth will be wired shut for the next eight weeks.”
Later on January 2, the Daily Mail (UK) reported the story and added more details.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
A January 4 search using the string “Austin Freni” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that HuffPost published on its front page, from January 2-4:
This “news” story was posted near the top of HuffPost’s front page on January 4, 2017.
(2.11) February 2017: HuffPost ignored a decorated Navy SEAL who was killed in a strike against Al Qaeda that went tragically wrong — while politicizing the action, and super-humanizing a top terrorist’s daughter, who was also killed
On January 31, 2017, HuffPost published these headlines near the top of its front page:
Both of these headlines both led to an NBC story, which had a very different headline — and headline picture:
Notice, first, that NBC’s story led off with a tribute to the Navy SEAL (Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens), who was killed in this action. More on that in a moment.
In what an official said was the first military raid carried out under President Donald Trump, two Americans were killed in Yemen on Sunday — one a member of SEAL Team 6 and the other the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born al Qaeda leader who himself was killed in a U.S. strike five years ago.
The raid in southern Yemen, conducted by the supersecret Joint Special Operations Command, was intended to capture valuable intelligence, specifically computer equipment, according to a senior U.S. military official. Three al Qaeda leaders were killed, according to U.S. officials. […]
“Almost everything went wrong,” the official said.
An MV-22 Osprey experienced a hard landing near the site, injuring several SEALs, one severely. The tilt-rotor aircraft had to be destroyed. A SEAL was killed during the firefight on the ground, as were some noncombatants, including females. […]
On Monday, [Secretary of Defense Mattis] released a statement identifying the dead SEAL as Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens and said, “Ryan gave his full measure for our nation, and in performing his duty, he upheld the noblest standard of military service.”
The senior military official said the 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, also known as Nora, was among the noncombatants killed in the raid, which also resulted in the death of several Yemeni women. U.S. officials said some of the women who were killed, however, were combatants and had opened fire on the SEALs as they approached the al Qaeda camp.
While al-Awlaki’s father disputed this account, what is not in dispute is that the SEAL mission was to attack the Al Qaeda headquarters — which begs two questions:
(1) How could SEAL Petty Officer Owens have been killed in a firefight, if someone — presumably these women — were not firing back on them? (Note: SEAL Team 6 encountered the exact same scenario in Pakistan, when it raided the safe house in which Osama Bin Laden was hiding; it killed several women who were firing at them as well — yet HuffPost made no mention of that in its glowing reporting of the incident).
(2) Why would this top terrorist’s little girl be at this military installation to begin with, if not to be used as an unwitting human shield — and for future PR value, in case she was injured or killed?
Now that we know exactly what HuffPost knew at the time it wrote and published these headlines, let’s revisit what it decided to put in — and to leave out:
Notes:
(1) HuffPost completely ignored CPO Owens in this headline, and the fact that even a single Navy SEAL had been killed in the strike. Had it done the barest of checking, it would have discovered through the link in the NBC story that CPO Owens had served in the Navy since 1998, and had been decorated numerous times for his bravery and performance
Owens, who was from Peoria, Illinois, enlisted in the Navy in 1998 and earned numerous awards and decorations, including two bronze stars with a combat “V” for valor and heroic service.
(2) HuffPost completely omitted the fact that this “American girl” was the daughter of one of the top Al Qaeda terrorists, and that she had been located at an militarized Al Qaeda safe house.
(3) HuffPost put “first clandestine strike” in quotations marks, as if to imply that it was unclear whether that was the purpose of this mission.
(4) HuffPost latched onto the quote from the unnamed official that “almost everything went wrong,” but the way the headlines were constructed, falsely implied that it was all President Trump’s fault.
Contrast HuffPost’s treatment of CPO Owens to its treatment of others whom it considers “victims”
The following are some examples of how HuffPost showers graphic, front-page attention on other “victims” of what it views as tragedies:
The top-of-the-front page splash headline it gave to a Palestinian film maker who alleged he was detained for 60 minutes at a U.S. airport:
And here is a sampling of other front page headlines that constitute part of HuffPost’s near-daily, slavish publication of everything that occurs within, or is rumored about the Kardashian freak show — focusing in several incidents that it apparently considered tragedies:
HuffPost never published a single story that focused on CPO Owens’ service, or featured a picture of him. HuffPost’s own search engine proves this fact. A February 18 search using the string “Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens Yemen” returned four results, three of which assailed President Trump — including one that HuffPost put on its front page on February 7, that gave a platform for the Al Qaeda terrorist that was targeted in the raid, to “taunt” him:
Compare how HuffPost blamed President Trump for this little girl’s death — and then enabled an Al Qaeda leader to taunt him — to how it consistently shielded President Obama from culpability for the 117 civilians who were accidentally killed by U.S. forces during his administration
According to Newsweek, during President Obama’s administration, at least 117 civilians were killed in military actions that he ordered. According to the UK Guardian, the actual total is more than 1,100.
Yet a Google search of the string “Huffington Post civilians killed US military strike” reveals that prior to January 20, 2017, HuffPost left President Obama’s name out of the headlines concerning all those attacks.
This includes the most tragic of these accidents, an October 2015 U.S. Air Force strike that killed fifteen doctors at an Afghanistani hospital:
Notice that HuffPost merely implied that the U.S. maybe “at fault” — nothing regarding President Obama:
Next, notice that HuffPost now removed all reference to who perpetrated this “strike” — and still, nothing regarding President Obama:
And again, notice that no mention is made of President Obama being the commander in chief of all branches of the U.S. military, and the fact that he was ultimately responsible for it:
Conclusion
Throughout this entire story, HuffPost chose to humanize only two people:
(1) The daughter of a top Al Qaeda terrorist, who was apparently being used as human shield, and who was accidentally killed in the raid
(2) An Al Qaeda leader, whom it gave a worldwide platform to “taunt Trump”
We at SaveTheWest wish to humanize CPO Owens with this tribute, and a select body of links to learn more about this great American warrior, who lost his life after nearly twenty years of exemplary service to America:
(2.12) April 2017: HuffPost completely ignored a disabled U.S. Marine combat veteran who ran the Boston Marathon, carrying a special American flag — but gave two straight days of top coverage to a non-disabled Muslim who was also competing
This Tweet about S.Sgt. Sanchez running in the Boston Marathon was posted at 7:01am on April 17.
At 7:01am on April 17, 2017, pictures emerged of Staff Sgt. Jose Sanchez, a disabled Marine who was running in the Boston Marathon. From American Military News:
Retired Texas Marine Staff Sgt. Jose Sanchez lost the lower half of his left leg after he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan in 2011. The retired Marine would not let that interfere with him running in the 121st Boston Marathon on Monday.
The Marine became an instant social media star as people watching Sanchez began posting pictures on the internet of him carrying an American flag while running.
Several hours later, at 2:20pm on April 17, the Lost Angeles times picked up the story, and provided video of Sanchez’s journey — and background on him, and the special American flag he was carrying:
Six years ago, Staff Sgt. Jose Luis Sanchez lost the lower part of his left leg after he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan.
Last year, he started running marathons while wearing a prosthetic leg.
On Monday, the San Antonio resident ran the Boston Marathon for the second time — and did so while carrying an American flag signed by many who served with him in Afghanistan.
“It’s not for me, it’s for others to be inspired, to be motivated,” Sanchez said after finishing the race in five hours, 21 minutes, 56 seconds.
“We live for others — I’ve learned that throughout being angry and frustrated and all that PTSD. I’m channeling that to do positive and give back to whatever I’ve taken from the community.”
HuffPost gave two days of top front page coverage to a Muslim runner in the Boston Marathon
Curiously, however, HuffPost devoted two straight days of top-of-the-front-page coverage to a Muslim woman who planned to run the same marathon, and give the money(?) to charity. Note the time stamps in the lower right corners of thesescreencaps.
Why would HuffPost completely ignore S.Sgt. Sanchez’s courage, character, and the fellow Marines he wished to honor? Especially, given its propensity to celebrate even animals who’d done things it found worthy of public adulation, including:
And while HuffPost completely ignored S.Sgt. Sanchez, in the past it found and gave top front page, celebratory to:
(2.13) April 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the allegations of an Air Force pilot, that President Obama’s irrational rules of engagement led directly to the deaths of 30 American special operations soldiers in Afghanistan
On April 18, 2017, news broke that a retired U.S. Air Force pilot, Joni Marquez, accused the Obama administration of being negligently responsible for the deaths of 30 American special forces soldiers, and 8 Afghanistani colleagues, in 2011.
A decorated retired Air Force officer who witnessed one of the most deadly attacks on Navy SEALs in U.S. history is breaking her silence, saying the government covered up evidence detailing that the 2011 downing of a Chinook helicopter gunship that killed 38 fighters in Afghanistan could have been prevented had it not been for restrictions to the military’s rules of engagement that were changed under the Obama administration.
The mission
August 6, 2011: Retired Air Force Capt. Joni Marquez and her crew were working the dark morning hours aboard an AC-130 gunship after being summoned to a mission she describes “as almost like a 9-1-1 type of a situation.”
The gunship was ordered to fly close-in air support above Afghanistan’s dangerous Tangi Valley, in Wardak Province, assisting troops with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment who were being fired on by eight heavily armed Taliban insurgents.
In summary, Capt. Marquez describes a nightmarish firefight that left two Taliban terrorists wounded, and crawling to recruit others to join in the fight. By being ordered over and over to not fire on them, or any other terrorists in the area, it created a situation in which the helicopter carrying 38 special operations forces, 30 Americans and 8 Afghans, code named “Extortion 17,” was shot down, and all were killed.
Pleas and warnings from her crew to turn the Chinook back or cancel their mission went unheeded, she added.
“Whenever we reached out to the Joint Operations Center, they would essentially just push back with, ‘Find a, a good infill location. Find a good helicopter landing zone,’” said Marquez, adding that by the time Extortion 17 was coming in, everything was mired in confusion.
One of the SEALs was ejected from the burning Chinook helicopter and Marquez watched from her infrared monitor as his heat signature faded from red to blue as life was slipping from his body. “We had to sit and watch that, and I think that was one of the hardest things that I had to do,” she said. “That man was, you know, dying on the ground.” Marquez says the pain of living with what happened has taken its toll and she was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is in therapy.
Her account is corroborated by a previously top-secret report by the Defense Department inspector general that includes interviews with some of Marquez’s colleagues on the gunship, including the commander.
“If we would’ve been allowed to engage that night, we would’ve taken out those two men immediately. I mean, it’s just one of those things where you know that it could’ve all been prevented,” she said, tearing up at times as she recollected that night.
After the Circa.com interview with Capt. Marqez was published, on April 18, it steadily gained circulation within military and conservative websites, and on April 20, the Fox News website enabled the reporter, Sara Carter, to pen a new summary about the bombshell accusation:
On Tuesday, decorated Air Force Captain Joni Marquez broke her silence with Circa about the night Extortion 17 was ambushed. She said the government lied to the families, adding the troops on board Extortion 17 were in eminent danger when her AC-130 gunship was denied permission to engage two enemy fighters, who escaped from an earlier air assault by Apache helicopters protecting U.S. Army Rangers.
Marquez said she and her crew were following the two men all night and they had not disappeared into a “grove of trees” as the military report had claimed. She said the men knocked on doors and regrouped with more fighters. Further, she said warnings from her crew to turn back Extortion 17 were ignored.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
An April 24, 2017 search, using the string “Joni Marquez Extortion 17” returned zero results. Instead, here is a sampling of the “news” stories that appeared on HuffPost’s front page in the three days since this story broke at FoxNews.com, April 21-23:
Conclusion: HuffPost dehumanized Capt. Marquez, and all those who were lost in Extortion 17
As documented in all of Section 2, what HuffPost did, and failed to do in this incident, is a continuation of its pattern of dehumanizing members of the U.S. military.
But the most relevant case study is 2.11, in which HuffPost falsely blamed President Trump for being responsible for the deaths of a number of civilians, including the (American) daughter of a top terrorist leader.
Yet in this case, HuffPost has completely ignored Capt. Marquez, her fellow pilots who witnessed the events of Extortion 17, and all the special operations forces who were, apparently, needlessly killed that fateful night in Afghanistan. And in doing so, HuffPost is helping to delay the day when the rules of engagement that led to the Extortion 17 tragedy are never applied to American warriors, ever again.
As a reminder of how egregiously this complete omission violates HuffPost’s supposed journalistic principles, consider this editorial by HuffPost founder and editor in chief, Arianna Huffington:
“And at every step along the way, we refused to fall prey to the innovator’s dilemma by constantly evolving, innovating and reinventing vital aspects of how we put together The Huffington Post while remaining true to the core values that made HuffPost HuffPost, including:
– Using storytelling to put flesh and blood on statistics, putting a human face on the numbers.
– Finding the buried lede and moving it to the top of the page.
– Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
– Putting an end to seeing every issue through the tired frame of “right vs. left.”
Facts and truth are basic elements of the news. But they alone are not enough.Emotion, humor and empathy are also essential ingredients of journalism that helps you know what’s real. It’s no wonder so many people these days get their news from comedy shows.
This is what drew me to HuffPost. As one of the very first digital media organizations, HuffPost pioneered a journalism of listening through its vast contributor network. It covered the world with verve and wit, connecting in deep and personal ways with its vast audience.
At HuffPost we reach nearly 200 million people around the globe each month. We aim to make this extraordinary platform the news source of choice for people everywhere. We have big and ambitious plans to reset the conversation about news and make it, once again, an essential and trusted part of any citizen’s life.
What stories aren’t being told by the mainstream media ― including HuffPost? Tell us at listening@huffpost.com.
Given the contents of this page, and others, that document how HuffPost ignores the victims of the violence and hate crimes that it plays a role in inciting, SaveTheWest submits that readers of this report might want to send an email to Ms. Polgreen, and ask when she is going to start covering these stories. Starting with Capt. Marquez, and the victims of Extortion 17.
(2.14) July 2017: HuffPost downplayed, then quickly removed from its front page the story of sixteen U.S. Marines who were killed in a helicopter accident in Mississippi [UPDATED]
On July 11, 2017, news broke that a U.S. military helicopter crashed in Mississippi, and that all sixteen Marines on board were killed. Major news media outlets, including Fox News, CNN and others had the story at or near the top of their front pages.
As this full-page screencap at the Wayback Machine proves, however, HuffPost put the story mid-way down its front page, beneath what it apparently deemed a far more important story worthy of public sympathy: that the man who provided the voice-over for “Kermit the Frog” is being replaced:
Then, as this 2:40pm screencap from the Wayback Machine proves, less than six hours after posting the story on its front page, HuffPost completely removed it.
What possible reason would HuffPost have to:
Initially post the story only mid-way down the front page
Completely remove the story from its front page, less than six hours later?
Update July 15, 2017: Pentagon released names and photos of fallen service members
On July 14, 2017, all of the victims of this air tragedy — fifteen Marines and one Navy corpsman — were publicly identified, with their faces, on the Houston ABC-TV affiliate, at 4:30pm. One hour later, at 5:30pm,Rare.com published these fallen warriors’ names and faces:
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
Contrast HuffPost ignoring these sixteen fallen American servicemen to the graphic, sympathetic, multi-day, front page treatment it gives to convicted murderers who are sentenced to be executed — and “hot convict” Jeremy Meeks
It is also notable that weeks earlier, HuffPost gave four straight days of front page coverage to this story— of eight convicted murderers who had been sentenced to death, and were about to be executed:
On April 15, 2017, HuffPost debuted this story at the top of its front page. And for the next three straight days, it remained on front page. You can see this for yourself via these full-page screencaps from the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive):
This is part of HuffPost’s long pattern of giving top publicity to sympathetic depictions of convicted murderers — and animals, and sad celebrities — while ignoring the sacrifice and suffering of U.S. soldiers, when it is not inciting worldwide hatred of them, based on lies and egregious distortions.
Also, contrast how HuffPost completely ignored this story, to the front-page, graphic, star treatment it has given for years to “hot convict” Jeremy Meeks. Note that the teardrop tattoo next to his eye indicates that he has murdered someone, or was sentenced to a very long prison term for a heinous crime:
UPDATE July 17, 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the Washington Post profiles of each of the sixteen servicemembers who were killed
On Sunday, July 16, the Washington Post published this feature on page A12 of its main section. The piece was originally published on its website on July 14:
(2.15) November 2016: HuffPost completely ignored three U.S. Special Forces soldiers who were murdered by a Jordanian terrorist, while training Syrian opposition forces, per President Obama’s orders
The following is an update to the November 2016 murders of these soldiers; the father of one has now filed several lawsuits.
From left: Staff Sgt. Matthew C. Lewellen, Staff Sgt. Kevin J. McEnroe, Staff Sgt. James F. Moriarty (photo: US Army)
Families of three U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan are officially demanding that Jerusalem Sbarro restaurant bomber Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi be extradited to the United States from Jordan to face trial as a condition for settlement on the case involving the murder of their sons.
The father of one of the soldiers, attorney James R. Moriarty, has taken the lead in confronting the Jordanian government over the attack.
Staff Sgt. James Moriarty, 27, of Kerrville, Texas, Staff Sgt. Kevin McEnroe, 30 and Staff Sgt. Matthew Lewellen, 27 were all members of the U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, “Green Berets.” They were sent to Jordan to train Syrian opposition forces at the base as part of a CIA program that was started a few years ago.
In November 2016, as they entered the King Faisal Air Base, about 145 miles south of Amman, M’aarek Abu Tayeh opened fire on their military convoy, killing the three soldiers.
A seven minute security video documenting the killing showed what Moriarty senior called “incredibly aggressive behavior,” prompting him to ask what had motivated the Jordanian gunman.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
(2.16) October 2017: HuffPost ignored the names, faces and stories of three Green Berets who were ambushed and murdered in Niger — treatment it routinely affords to convicted murderers, terrorists and animals
On October 5, 2017, news broke that an ambush was perpetrated on U.S. military personnel in Niger, in which three Green Berets were killed and two were wounded. HuffPost published one initial, wire story about the attack.
Then, on October 6, the identities of the three Green Berets were publicized:
The three U.S. Army Green Berets killed in Niger earlier this week were identified Friday as decorated soldiers based out of Fort Bragg.
The Army identified the men as Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35, a Special Forces medical sergeant, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39, a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist, and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29, an engineer. All three were assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne).
Black, from Pallyup, Wash., enlisted in the Army in 2009 and has received numerous awards, including the Army Good Conduct Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, a statement said.
Johnson, from Springboro, Ohio, joined in 2007 and has earned the Army Commendation Medal and Army Achievement Medal, among other distinctions. Wright, from Lyons, Ga., enlisted in 2012 and also has won numerous awards, such as the Joint Service Achievement Medal and Special Forces Tab.
Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39, and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29. (Department of Defense)
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
Contrast HuffPost denying these Green Berets’ humanity to the personalized, graphic, sympathetic coverage it provides to Islamist terrorists and dead animals
HuffPost devoted five straight days of top coverage to a sympathetic story of a “homesick American jihadi”:
On April 19, 2017, HuffPost featured on its front page an original story that one of its “journalists” wrote, about “Patrick,” an elderly wombat, whom it discovered had tragically died as a virgin:
UPDATE October 25, 2017: HuffPost finally gave downplayed mention to these fallen soldiers, but only as part of a Congressional inquiry into the matter — but still never published their pictures or personal stories
A follow-up search of the three Green Berets’ names on October 25, 2017, “Jeremiah Johnson Bryan Black Dustin Wright,” proves that HuffPost continued ignoring the names of the three Green Berets until four days earlier:
The only mention HuffPost made of these Green Berets was on October 20 — exactly two weeks after news of their deaths broke –was in the context of a broader story about a congressional inquiry into this tragedy:
Note that these three Green Berets are not mentioned until the fourth paragraph – and there are no pictures of them:
(2.17) October 2017: HuffPost completely ignored a military hero who was being awarded the Medal of Honor — and instead gave top coverage to a man who was driving “nearly naked and covered in Vaseline”
On October 23, 2017, President Trump awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to Capt. Gary Michael Rose, a special forces medic who served in Vietnam.
President Donald Trump, for the second time in his presidency, awarded the Medal of Honor during a ceremony Monday at the White House.
Trump presented the highest military honor to Gary Michael Rose, a retired US Army captain who served as a medic in the Vietnam War, saving lives while risking his own during a four-day operation despite being seriously wounded himself.
Rose is receiving the honor for repeatedly risking his life to provide medical aid to fellow soldiers throughout the operation, using his own body at one point to shield a wounded American from enemy fire and helping to load wounded comrades onto helicopters while under fire.
“This will enshrine him into the history of our nation,” Trump said as he told the story of Roses heroism. “Mike, today we have a room full of people and a nation who thank God that you lived. Your will to endure, your love for your fellow soldier, your devotion to your country inspires us all.”
Here is a video that Fox News produced of the event, containing a background of Capt. Rose’s heroism:
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
(2.18) October 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the testimony of soldiers who employed superhuman efforts to try to rescue Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, at his sentencing hearing for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy
Disgraced soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy
Background: Since President Obama announced that he was trading five senior Taliban terrorists for the release of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, HuffPost has in effect been acting as a PR agency for his White House, just as it did for the fraudulent Iran nuclear deal; see our special report on this here. And as in the case of the Iran deal, it only presented a one-sided account of the issue — that Bergdahl was a victim, who served honorably, etc., then either ignored or downplayed the fact that he is a deserter whose acts led directly to American soldiers being injured and killed as they attempted to rescue him, when they thought he’d been abducted. It employed an almost identical strategy to do PR for the traitor Bradley Manning, including giving him front-page blogging space and always-positive “news” stories (see end of this case study for examples).
On October 16, 2017, Bowe Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. On October 25, 2017, several of the soldiers who attempted to rescue Bergdahl testified before his sentencing hearing, as to what they endured in their efforts:
Several soldiers and a Navy SEAL testified Wednesday about the risky, all-out efforts to find Bowe Bergdahl after the soldier’s 2009 disappearance in Afghanistan. Troops and commanders went without sleep. Shirts and socks disintegrated on soldiers during weekslong patrols. And several service members were seriously wounded — including the Navy commando whose career was ended by AK-47 fire.
The testimony came at a sentencing hearing for Bergdahl, who walked away from a remote post in Afghanistan and was held by Taliban allies for five years. He pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy last week and faces a maximum of life in prison.
The wounded SEAL, retired Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer James Hatch, said his team’s helicopters came under fire as they landed in an area near the Pakistan border where they had information on Bergdahl’s possible whereabouts. He said the mission in the days after Bergdahl disappeared was hastily planned, and their only objective was the Bergdahl search.
A military dog leading them through a field located two enemy fighters that the team had seen at a distance. Hatch said the fighters sprayed AK-47 bullets at them, killing the dog. He was hit in the leg.
“I screamed a lot. It hurt really bad … I thought I was dead,” said Hatch, who entered the courtroom with a limp and a service dog.
Hatch said he believes he would have died if a comrade hadn’t quickly applied a tourniquet. Hatch has subsequently had 18 surgeries.
The military tribunal also heard from two other soldiers in Bergdahl’s unit:
Army Col. Clinton Baker, who commanded Bergdahl’s battalion at the time, said one unit on patrol for nearly 40 days straight had their clothing start to disintegrate on their bodies. “We had to fly socks and T-shirts to them because they had literally just rotted off them,” he said. “We were all doing the best we could.”
Evan Buetow, who served as a sergeant in Bergdahl’s platoon, said he was among three soldiers who were left behind for 10 days to guard the outpost that Bergdahl walked away from near the Afghan town of Mest. The rest of the platoon embarked on a frantic search in the nearby areas.
Sitting in a fortified bunker, Buetow and another soldier suffered stomach flu-like symptoms while trying to stay awake and be vigilant.
“Every single day I think about it,” he said of the heat and ever-present dung beetles. “It was miserable.”
Buetow, who rejoined his platoon on subsequent search missions, broke down in tears when a prosecutor asked him why the guard duty and searches were important.
“I mean, my guy was gone,” he said before reaching for a tissue.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
So what “news” stories did HuffPost decide were worthy of appearing on its front page in the following three days, instead of anything about these soldiers’ testimony?
Here is a sampling — starting with a story that appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page on October 26, from Germany, about allegedly sub-par worker conditions — in Brazil:
This story appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page on October 26, 2017.
Contrast HuffPost completely ignoring these soldiers’ testimony, and the horrors they endured, to the front-page, sympathetic coverage it gave in the past to terrorists, a U.S. traitor, and sad celebrities
HuffPost gave five days of top coverageto a “homesick jihadi” –yet ignored the a U.S. military hero who was given the Medal of Honor during the same time period:
HuffPost published this story on its front page – about a militant Islamist who ordered the rounding up and imprisonment of homosexuals, in Chechnya:
Starting on February 19, 2016, HuffPost began a 7-straight-day tribute on its front page to evoke sympathy for the singer Kesha, after she lost a lawsuit to release her from a recording contract. HuffPost’s tribute began with this story, which appeared at the top of its front page:
HuffPost gave front-page splash treatment to Michael Moore’s allegations that a Palestinian filmmaker was detained for merely a few hours at LAX:
HuffPost gave front-page splash treatment to convicted traitorPFC Bradley Manning when it became difficult to prove whether or not his treason led to actual deaths of U.S. service members or our allies:
HuffPost gave Manning a front-page editorial to explain why he was changing his name, and had changed genders – and left this editorial posted on the front page for four days:
(2.19) October 2017: HuffPost ignored additional testimony in the sentencing hearing of Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, by the wife of a severely disabled soldier who lost his ability to speak or care for himself, as a result of his effort to rescue Bergdahl
The wife of a soldier seriously wounded while searching for Army Sgt Bowe Bergdahl has given an emotional testimony about the effects of his brain trauma on their family.
Prosecutors called Shannon Allen to the stand in Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Monday to discuss the injuries suffered by her husband when he was shot during a search mission for Bergdahl after he walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009.
Her husband, National Guard Master Sgt Mark Allen, was shot in the head during an insurgent ambush.
He was left unable to speak and is paralyzed over much of his body.
Mrs Allen’s voice faltered when she referred to the brain injury’s effect on his interactions with their daughter, who was an infant when he was wounded.
Their daughter is now aged 9, but Mrs Allen said her husband isn’t able to reach out and hold her.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story.
So what “news” stories did HuffPost decide were worthy of appearing on its front page in the following three days, instead of anything about Shannon Allen’s testimony?
Here is a sampling:
This “news” story appeared on HuffPost’s front page on October 31, 2017.
(2.20) November 2017: Throughout the trial of Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, and the sentencing phase of his conviction, HuffPost completely ignored the names of the six American soldiers, and one military dog, who were killed searching for him
Case Studies 2.18 and 2.19 on this page document numerous ways in which HuffPost refused to acknowledge the testimony of those who were injured or otherwise traumatized as a result of Pvt. Bergdahl’s desertion, during his trial, and the sentencing phase after his conviction.
HuffPost also completely ignored the six American soldiers who were killed in the search for Bergdahl, whose names and faces have been known since June 2014:
Six soldiers died in the frantic search for Sgt. Bowe Bergdhal immediately after his mysterious disappearance five years ago, fueling the increasing backlash over the POW’s recovery.
Former platoon mates of the now-recovered serviceman accused Bergdhal of deserting his post and blamed him for the unnecessary deaths of comrades.
“I was pissed off then and I am even more so now with everything going on,” former Sgt. Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl’s platoon, told CNN. “Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him.”
Accounts of Bergdahl’s disappearance on June 30, 2009, have varied wildly.
And now CNN is reporting that at least six soldiers were killed in subsequent searches for Bergdahl in rugged Paktika Province in the ensuing days and weeks.
The six men reportedly killed while searching for Bergdahl were identified as Staff Sgt. Clayton Bowen and Pfc. Morris Walker on Aug. 18, 2009; Staff Sgt. Kurt Curtiss on Aug. 26; 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews and Pfc. Matthew Michael Martinek on Sept. 4; and Staff Sgt. Michael Murphrey on Sept. 5.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored all of these fallen soldiers
On April 19, 2017, HuffPost featured on its front page an original story that one of its “journalists” wrote, about “Patrick,” an elderly wombat, whom it discovered had tragically died as a virgin:
HuffPost devoted five straight days of top coverage to a sympathetic story of a “homesick American jihadi”:
HuffPost devoted a the top-of-the-front page splash headline to a Palestinian film maker who alleged he was detained for 60 minutes at a U.S. airport:
Starting in August 2012, HuffPost began giving a flurry of top coverage to an all-girl Russian punk band, “Pussy Riot,” after they were arrested for barging into a famed orthodox church in Moscow, during services, then singing a vulgar song. HuffPost essentially went apoplectic over the plight of the band, and began a multi-year stream of more than a hundred sympathetic stories about these “victims,” including top-of-the-page splash headlines:
On one day alone, HuffPost had nine separate stories on its World page about Pussy Riot – at the same time. See this PDF:
(2.21) August 2017: After routinely giving top publicity to allegations of sexual abuse in the U.S. military, HuffPost completely ignored a U.S. Army officer whose career was destroyed by a false rape allegation — and who won an $8.4 million judgment against his false accuser
Background: For many years, HuffPost has been giving top coverage to allegations of sexual abuse by members of the U.S. military, and even ignored vital statistics that show reported incidents are actually lower within America’s armed services than in the general population. See details here.
This incident: On August 11, 2017, the Washington Post reported that after his career was destroyed by a false rape allegation, a decorated U.S. Army officer, Col. David “Wil” Riggins, won an $8.4 million judgment in civil court against the woman behind the accusation, according to one juror, “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again.”
Col. David “Wil” Riggins, after a highly decorated Army career that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was on the verge of promotion to brigadier general in July 2013 when he got a phone call at the Pentagon from the Army’s criminal investigation division to come in for a meeting. Once there, he learned that a blogger in Washington state had just accused him of raping her, when both were cadets at West Point in 1986. An investigation was underway.
Riggins waived his right to an attorney and immediately gave a statement denying any sexual assault of the woman, Susan Shannon of Everett, Wash. Shannon also cooperated with the CID investigation, which could not “prove or disprove Ms. Shannon’s allegation she was raped,” the CID report concluded. But in the spring of 2014, with the armed forces facing heavy criticism for their handling of sexual assault cases, Secretary of the Army John McHugh recommended removing Riggins from the list for promotion to general. Riggins promptly retired.
Then, Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was “provably false,” and that she wrote two blog posts and a Facebook post “to intentionally derail [his] promotion” to brigadier general. During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Va., heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2½ hours of deliberation, they sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens. The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages, “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” according to one of the jurors.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored all of these fallen soldiers
In isolation, this omission would not be relevant. But when considered in the context of how HuffPost rushes to give top coverage to sexual assault allegations against members of the U.S. military, while ignoring vital context, as well as cases such as this, in which the accused are completely exonerated, this incident becomes highly relevant.
See the next section.
Supplement: Examples of how HuffPost gives top coverage to allegations of sexual abuse within the U.S. military — but ignores data that shows there are far more reports, as a percentage, in the general population
HuffPost routinely gives top coverage to allegations of sexual assault by U.S. military personnel. Here are but a few examples:
December 27, 2013:
February 15, 2014:
September 1, 2014:
Just as in the case of Col. Higgins, however, HuffPost routinely ignores the evidence that exonerates military members who are accused of sexual assault — and the data to place these accusations into a rational context
Note: SaveTheWest generally does not cite far-left or far-right websites, except in extraordinary instances when the data is vital, and can be independently verified as accurate, and contextual. In this case, an original essay by a Navy veteran at the far-right Breitbart helps to expose the reality: that there are far less allegations of sexual assault in the U.S. military than in the American population. For this reason, we are citing excerpts of the article:
When I joined the U.S. military in January 2011, a family member asked me: “Aren’t you worried about being raped?” And she wasn’t the only one. Many people cautioned me that I would be entering an institution synonymous with machismo, authoritarianism, and violence.
What I found instead was very different: professionalism, respect, and a strong presence of women in the highest ranks. I also found the most transparent, aggressive, and in-your-face Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program I had ever witnessed. […]
To place the military’s sexual assault problem in a wider context, here are some illustrative numbers. According to an anonymous survey, service members may have experienced as many as 26,000 instances of “unwanted sexual contact” in 2012. In other words, about 6.1% of female service members and 1.2% of male service members experienced unwanted sexual contact that year. Note that this number includes a substantial number of cases that occurred before the victim entered the military, as well as cases involving civilian perpetrators.
Although it is difficult to make direct comparisons due to differences in the way survey questions are asked, rates of sexual assault outside the military appear to be similar–if not higher. A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that 6.7% of all women had experienced sexual violence, rape, or attempted rape in the 12-month period preceding the study. Since sexual assault rates are highest among the young, the CDC finding implies that the incidence of sexual assault is even higher than 6.7% among military-aged women. The CDC also found that between 20 and 25 percent of women, and approximately 6.1 percent of men, are victims of an attempted or completed sexual assault while they are in college.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this examination of context
(2.22) November 2017: HuffPost completely ignored an 89 year old WWII veteran who died, on video, after his please for help in a hospital went unanswered — and the nurse is seen laughing over him
James Dempsey, during service in WWII
On November 14, 2017, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta, GA reported the following:
An 11Alive investigation uncovered hidden camera video catching nursing home staff laughing while an elderly patient dies in front of them. The incident happened at the Northeast Atlanta Health and Rehabilitation in 2014, but the video was recently released as part of a lawsuit filed by the family.
Attorneys representing the Atlanta nursing home tried to prevent 11Alive from obtaining the video. They asked a DeKalb County judge to keep the video sealed and then attempted to appeal to the Georgia State Supreme Court. The judge ruled in favor of 11Alive and the nursing home eventually dropped its appeal to the state’s highest court.
The video includes almost six hours of video court deposition from a nursing supervisor explaining how she responded to the patient before she knew the hidden camera video existed. The video shows a completely different response.
The deceased patient is 89-year-old James Dempsey, a decorated World War II veteran from Woodstock, Georgia.
As part of the lawsuit, this video of Mr. Dempsey’s pleas for help, and his death — and nurses laughing at him — emerged:
The video shows the veteran calling for help six times before he goes unconscious while gasping for air. State records show nursing home staff found Dempsey unresponsive at 5:28 am. It took almost an hour for the staff to call 911 at 6:25a.m. […]
When a different nurse does respond, she fails to check any of his vital signs. Nuckles says she would have reprimanded the nurse for the way she responded to Dempsey. She called the video “sick.”
When nurses had difficulty getting Dempsey’s oxygen machine operational during, you can hear Nuckles and others laughing. […]
11Alive showed the video to Elaine Harris, a retired nursing professor and expert in adult critical care. “In 43 years in nursing, I have never seen such disregard for human life in a healthcare setting, is what I witnessed,” said Harris.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
A November 16, 2017 search using the string “James Dempsey 89” returned zero results:
Contrast how HuffPost completely ignored the plight of Mr. Dempsey, to the sympathy it showers on other “victims”
Examples:
On April 19, 2017, HuffPost featured on its front page an original story that one of its “journalists” wrote, about “Patrick,” an elderly wombat, whom it discovered had tragically died as a virgin:
HuffPost devoted five straight days of top coverage to a sympathetic story of a “homesick American jihadi”:
HuffPost gave front-page splash treatment to Michael Moore’s allegations that a Palestinian filmmaker was detained for merely a few hours at LAX:
So what kinds of “news” stories appeared on HuffPost’s front page in the days following the emergence of this story, instead of anything about Mr. Dempsey?
A sampling:
This “news” story appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page on November 15, 2017.
(2.23) January 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the recorded video of a notorious California high school teacher who smeared — during class — the entire U.S. military as “dumb shits, the lowest of the low”
On January 26, 2018, the mother of a student at El Rancho High School in the Pico Rivera, CA posted a series of videos on Facebook that she claimed were taken by a friend of her son’s, in the classroom of teacher Gregory Salcido, in which he launched into a series of vicious verbal attacks on the entire U.S. military. The story was first published by a local newspaper,
Three videos on social media of Pico Rivera Councilman Gregory Salcido, a teacher at El Rancho High School, making disparaging remarks about the military and berating a student for wearing a sweatshirt with a Marines logo have gone viral and created a backlash.
El Rancho Unified School District officials confirmed Saturday, Jan. 27 that the person speaking is Salcido and that the incident took place on school grounds.
“We acknowledge it is his voice based on the research of the incident so far and knowing it came from one of our classrooms,” district Superintendent Karling Aguilera-Fort said in a phone interview.
And, as the article noted, the videos had been viewed nearly 1,500,000 times in the first 24 hours:
A post on Facebook with the three videos was shared more than 23,500 times as of 10 a.m. Saturday. It had nearly 1.5 million views.
On January 29, 2018, the Los Angeles CBS News affiliate reported that members of the U.S. military, their families and supporters asked to speak at a school board meeting, to express their outrage over Salcido’s attempt to indoctrinate his students to hate America’s soldiers — but were denied this opportunity by the chair:
Salciso’s history of being removed from the classroom for his behavior — including an alleged physical assault on a student
According to the Washington Post, which published a major article on this story on January 31, 2018, Salcido had been removed from the classroom for physically striking a student, and other disciplinary breaches:
This is not the first time Salcido has been in the news.
In 2010, he was placed on administrative leave after a parent complained about his classroom conduct, according to the Whittier Daily News. About two years later, he was again placed on leave after the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department received a complaint that he struck a student, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
All these factors led the story of Salcido’s anti-U.S. military screed to go viral, particularly in military-supporting and conservative media. A February 2, 2018 Google search using the string “Gregory Salcido military lowest of low” returned 123,000 results.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
A February 2, 2018 search — seven days after this story broke — using the string “Gregory Salcido” returned zero results:
So what kinds of “news” stories appeared on HuffPost’s front page in the days following the emergence of this story?
A sampling — starting with a salacious story about a spat over a celebrity’s nudity that HuffPost positioned at the top of its front page for two straight days:
This “news” story appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page on January 30 and 31, 2018.
(2.24) June 2016 – March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the efforts to raise Congressional support for, and pass the Taylor Force Act, to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority until it stops inciting, glorifying and financially rewarding Islamist terrorists
Since soon after Capt. Taylor Force, a beloved American combat veteran, was laid to rest, after being murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, his family and others have been working to enact federal legislation to cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to the Palestinian authority until it stops using this money to incite, glorify and financially reward terrorism.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it has completely ignored Taylor’s family, and all efforts to raise awareness of, and pass the legislation bearing his name
A March 2, 2018 search using the string “Taylor Force Act” returned zero relevant results:
Try to reconcile HuffPost’s blackout on the Taylor Force Act, to the claim that its newly-installed editor, Lydia Polgreen wrote in an editorial on April 24, 2017 about its “new mission”:
We’ve got a new name, look and mission ― to tell the stories of people who have been left out of the conversation.
Apparently, that’s true — so long as the “people” are not U.S. soldiers, or their families or loved ones.
(2.25) March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored the news that a Muslim man drove an explosive-laden truck into Travis Air Force Base in California, then detonated it, killing himself and triggering a terrorist investigation — and instead gave top coverage to a former porn star who says she feels “threatened” by disclosing her alleged relationship with President Trump, 12 years ago
Also see: Case Study 1.24, another incident of HuffPost’s malicious libeling of the U.S. intelligence community, which occurred seven days before this attack.
At 4:18pm PST on March 22, 2018, the CBS affiliate in Sacramento reported the following, :
There was a security breach at Travis Air Force Base Wednesday night when a car loaded with propane tanks crashed through a gate and an explosion tore through the vehicle.
Military personnel ran up to the burning car that exploded in flame after breaching the security gates at the base.
In a video posted on an Air Force forum on Facebook, firefighters are seen attempting to put out the flames.
Law enforcement sources say the car carried propane tanks and the driver deliberately ignited the fire.
Later on March 22, and on March 23, more details emerged of the attack:
The local ABC affiliate identified the perpetrator as 51-year-old Hafiz Kazi, “a native of India who was a permanent legal resident of the United States.”
The local NBC affiliate reported at 6:37pm on March 23 that law enforcement officials found no jihadist link to the attack, and were still trying to determine the attacker’s motivation
It should be noted, however, that according to Merriam-Webster, the name “Hafiz” is Arabic, and means, “a Muslim who knows the Koran by heart —used as a title of respect,” putting to rest whether or not there is legitimate grounds to suspect that this was a terrorist attack — especially given ISIS’s and Al Qaeda’s urgings to Islamists in Western nations to use vehicles as a means of ramming civilian and military personnel, of which there have been 196 such attacks since 2006.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
So what kinds of “news” stories appeared on HuffPost’s front page in the hours and days following the emergence of this story?
Here is a sampling — starting with a former porn star who says she feels “threatened” by disclosing her alleged relationship with President Trump, 12 years ago:
(2.26) March 2018: HuffPost completely ignored a series of explosives-laden packages sent to military installations in the Washington DC area — and instead gave top coverage to two “news” stories about celebrities who allegedly insulted another celebrity’s face
The FBI is investigating suspicious packages with apparent explosive components at several U.S. military installations and intelligence facilities in the Washington, D.C., area Monday, a law enforcement official said.
The National Defense University at Fort McNair in D.C. received a suspicious package about 8:30 a.m., and the building was evacuated.
The package tested positive for black powder, which can be used to make explosives, according to Fort McNair. An X-ray showed what appeared to be GPS and a fuse. It was rendered safe and the building was cleared about 1:15 p.m. The components are being investigated.
Suspicious packages were sent to two sites at Fort Belvoir in Virginia Monday afternoon: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and another defense university. One contained liquid in a vial and a circuit board, the law enforcement official said. It also was rendered safe.
Other news media including ABC News and various national sources reported the story as well.
March 27: The FBI arrested a Seattle man for sending these packages
Authorities have arrested a man suspected of sending a series of suspicious packages to military bases and government sites in the Washington, D.C. area, the FBI announced Tuesday. It said the packages contained “potential destructive devices” and cautioned that similar packages could have been mailed in the area that have not yet been found.
The FBI identified the suspect as 43-year-old Thanh Cong Phan. He was arrested Monday at his residence in Everett, Washington. Phan was scheduled to appear in court at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported that the arrest was made about 12 hours after the packages were discovered. Court documents are expected to give insight into how many packages were mailed and whether or not the devices were actually explosive
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
(3) Examples of other ways that HuffPost undermines the U.S. military, and whitewashes America’s enemies
Opening note: A definition of “America’s enemies”
As Congress has not passed a declaration of war on any nation since 1942, America is, technically, not at war. It does, however, have enemies. In the context of this page, SaveTheWest defines “enemies” as:
(1) Terrorist groups who have declared war on America, and/or have perpetrated or attempted to perpetrate physical attacks on our civilians or soldiers
(2) Nations whose governments have done one or more of the following:
(a) Murdered U.S. soldiers or civilians
(b) Helped anti-American terrorist groups through financial and/or material support, training or other assistance
(c) Have openly declared their intention to destroy or substantially harm America
(3) Individuals and groups of individuals who:
(a) Have unlawfully obtained highly-sensitive American national security and military materials, and who are distributing these materials to the world, in either their original form, or deceptively edited, for the purpose of inciting hatred against the U.S. military
(b) Are known to act on behalf of enemy nations, or terrorist groups
Contents
The following case studies are just a sampling of incidents in which HuffPost effectively acted as a public relations (PR) agency for America’s enemies — in ways that has never done for America, or the U.S. military.
(3.1) July 2009: HuffPost helped whitewash the murderous Syrian dictator Basher Assad, by publishing a glowing fashion depiction of his wife as “news” — which was later discovered to be part of a paid Syrian PR campaign
This is how HuffPost depicted Al Qaeda’s aspiring bioweapons specialist, who attempted to murder several American soldiers – as merely a “scientist,” and via the picture it chose, a victim. Details here.
(3.2) September 2010: HuffPost whitewashed and helped evoke worldwide sympathy for one of the world’s most wanted anti-American terrorists, in part by using radical Islamist propaganda pictures
(3.3) December 2010 — onward: HuffPost began acting as the unofficial PR agency for Julian Assange, to defend him, and give him top-level positioning in its global platform to engage in his propaganda war against the U.S. military
(3.4) January 2013: HuffPost posted a front-page story about the “gentle face” of Al Qaeda — based on an egregious half-truth
(3.5) February 2013: HuffPost gave five straight days of top-line coverage to evoking sympathy for a “homesick American jihadi” — while at the same time, ignoring a U.S. Marine who was receiving the Medal of Honor
(3.6) June 2013 — onward: HuffPost began acting as Iran’s unofficial, US-based PR agency, starting with a “news” story about how Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” is “sad that no one goes hiking anymore”
(3.7) November 2013: HuffPost published a front page headline that assailed the NSA for breaking into “activists'” computers, when in fact its own “story” page proved they were supporters and funders of Islamist terror, including Al Qaeda
(3.8) December 2013 — onward: HuffPost began acting as the unofficial propaganda partner for a proven front group for Iran’s rulers, to bamboozle America into accepting the “nuclear deal”
(3.9) December 2014: HuffPost published a front page headline that accused the CIA of “depravity and incompetence”
(3.10) June 2017: HuffPost flew at least one of its “journalists” to interview the parents of an accused traitor, against whom the evidence is overwhelming, and write a weepy, whitewashed depiction of her, replete with staged photographs to make her look like a peaceful patriot
(3.11) June 2017: HuffPost published a report that claimed most America’s terrorists are white, not Muslim, and part of the right-wing — even though it knew, or should have known, that this is grossly decontextualized — and left it on its front page for nineteen straight days
(3.12) November 2017: HuffPost published a splash headline that used only Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl’s first name to report that he would not serve any jail time after being convicted of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy
(3.13) August 2013: HuffPost published a splash headline that referred to one of the Islamist terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon by using a term that it acknowledged is one that his “friends” use in addressing him
(3.14) November 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the discovery that bin Laden’s diaries confirm Al Qaeda’s long-term working relationship with Iran; Instead, it only noted that he was a fan of American cartoon “Tom & Jerry”
(3.15) November 2017, Colorado Springs, CO: Racist graffiti targeting black cadets was found at the U.S. Air Force Academy; The black cadet who reported finding the graffiti admitted that he did it
(3.1) July 2009: HuffPost helped whitewash the murderous Syrian dictator Basher Assad, by publishing a glowing fashion depiction of his wife as “news” — which was later discovered to be part of a paid Syrian PR campaign
For many years, Syria’s dictator, Basher Assad, has been known for running one of the world’s most brutal regimes. For example, see this 2008 report by the U.S. State Department, detailing the ghastly, widespread terrorizing and repression of Syrian citizens, among a litany of human rights violations.
Fawning treatment of world leaders — particularly attractive Western-educated ones — is nothing new. But the Assads have been especially determined to burnish their image, and hired experts to do so. The family paid the Washington public relations firm Brown Lloyd James $5,000 a month to act as a liaison between Vogue and the first lady, according to the firm.
HuffPost helped to whitewash the Assads’ image, as part of a broader, paid PR campaign
HuffPost claims to be a champion of human rights, and of standing for victims of injustice. Yet it was apparently only too happy to look the other way, and play its part in this whitewashing campaign. According to the New York Timesarticle above:
“She responded beautifully, because she speaks well and is beautiful,” said the Italian writer Gaia Servadio, who worked for Mrs. Assad in Damascus. She added that Mrs. Assad hoped the coverage would deflect some of the negative attention her country had received.
Here is the glowing “news story” that HuffPost developed for this PR campaign — while not labeling it as such — which it published on July 17, 2009:
In February 2016, the New York Timesreported that at least 470,000 Syrians had been killed, due to Assad’s murderous actions.
How many Syrians might still be alive if HuffPost — the world’s most-read online “newspaper” — did not help this paid campaign to whitewash Assad?
(3.2) September 2010: HuffPost whitewashed and helped evoke worldwide sympathy for one of the world’s most wanted anti-American terrorists, in part by using radical Islamist propaganda pictures
The following is adapted from detailed blog article at Huff-Watch.
On September 23, 2010 HuffPost published this item on its front page:
If you attempt to follow the link to that story, however, as shown in this screencap, taken on March 15, 2017, you’ll find that it leads to a dead page:
We speculate there are reasons why HuffPost threw this story “down the memory hole.”
As the Huff-Watch blog noted at the time (emphasis added):
A reasonable person would ask a few initial questions upon seeing this picture and headline:
(1) Why would a “scientist” fire on U.S. troops?
(2) And why would this poor woman, whom HuffPost chose to depict as a “victim” in this photograph, be sentenced to 86 years, if she didn’t even kill anyone??
If you read HuffPost’s version of the story, you’ll discover, below, all the inconvenient truths that HuffPost neglected to mention in this “news” story and headline — which it sourced, but selectively edited, from the AP.
Thanks to the Internet Archive (“Wayback Machine”), here is the story as it originally appeared at HuffPost:
The sentence imposed on the mother of three capped a strange legal odyssey that began two summers ago, when the 38-year-old Siddiqui turned up in Afghanistan carrying notes referencing a “mass casualty attack” on New York City landmarks and a stash of sodium cyanide.
At trial earlier this year, jurors heard eyewitnesses describe how, after she was detained by Afghan police, Siddiqui grabbed a rifle and tried to shoot U.S. authorities who had gone to interrogate her. They said she yelled, “Death to Americans!” before she was injured in return fire and subdued. […]
During a three-hour hearing in federal court in Manhattan, Siddiqui claimed she had evidence Israel was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and warned more plots were in the works. […]
Further, as Huff-Watch blog noted at the time, other news organizations played the AP story “straight,” and included details that HuffPost omitted from its version:
Why was she being sought? Because the architect of 9/11 attacks, Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed, who began singing like a bird after interrogations, revealed in 2003 that other al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S., planning terror attacks — including Siddiqui. Combined with the fact that she was a U.S.-trained neuroscientist, meaning she could give al Qaeda the technical expertise to produce biological and chemical weapons, she became one of the most wanted women on Earth, from 2003 onward. More information, including the indictment against Siddiqui, is located at The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Even MSNBC, not exactly a right-wing outlet, played the AP story “straight.” Breitbart.com, run by HuffPost’s original news editor, Andrew Breitbart, also played the story “straight.”
It is only after reading the Breitbart version of the AP story that one realizes how much of the story HuffPost chose to omit in its version — even though Breitbart’s version was published three hours before HuffPost’s went up. For example, all of the following was not included in HuffPost’s version of the story:
Though she was not convicted of terrorism, the government has argued that Siddiqui is a cold-blooded radical who deserves a “terrorism enhancement” under federal sentencing guidelines that would guarantee a life term.
“She made it explicit, through her own words and her conduct, her intention to kill Americans, to cause `death to Americans,'” prosecutors wrote in court papers. Prosecutors cited threatening notes Siddiqui was carrying at the time of her detention.
They directly quoted one as referencing “a `mass casualty attack’ … NY CITY monuments: Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge,” and another musing how a dirty bomb would spread more fear than death. They claimed the notes, along with the fact that she was carrying sodium cyanide, showed she wasn’t an accidental menace.
Now, another question arises: After its deceptive headline and story copy, why would HuffPost decide to run that particular, sympathetic picture in its headline?
At the time HuffPost ran this story, it could have found out in a few keystrokes that this picture was taken right after she was shot, in 2008, by the U.S. soldiers and FBI agents whom she just attempted to murder. It is not, as militant Islamists and propagandists allege (below), a photo taken while she was being “tortured” and “raped” by U.S. forces.
Here is how MSNBC played the exact same AP story — using the picture that the AP provided with it, which is the same one the FBI used when it put this “scientist,” Aafia Siddiqui, on its Most-Wanted List:
During a rambling statement to the court Thursday, Siddiqui carried only a message of peace.
“I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
Siddiqui said she was particularly upset by overseas reports that she was being tortured in a U.S. prison. She said she was actually being treated well.
“I am not sad. I am not distressed. … They are not torturing me,” she said. “This is a myth and lie and it’s being spread among the Muslims.”
And as the Huff-Watch blog noted at the time, rather than using the photo the AP provided for this story, HuffPost chose to use the one after she was shot, while attempting to murder U.S. soldiers — which helped to advance its false narrative, as expressed in its deceptive headline, that she was merely a “scientist,” who had merely “fired at U.S. troops.” A narrative that, at the trial, even Siddiqui herself debunked.
It should also be noted that Islamists who were protesting Siddiqui’s inarceration also chose that picture, of her depicted as a distressed “victim,” to use in their propaganda materials.
In Karachi on Thursday, about 400 activists of the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and its allied youth group, Pasban, gathered outside the Karachi Press Club carrying pictures of Siddiqui and chanting slogans against the U.S. government and justice system. “Free Aafia,” ”We want Aafia, not dollars!” the activists chanted, a reference to U.S. aid funds given in return for Pakistan’s cooperation in battling Islamist militancy.
Even CBS, however, did not explain what Jamaat-e-Islami actually is. According to the U.S. State Department:
Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on October 23, 2002, Jemaah Islamiya (JI) is a Southeast Asia-based terrorist group co-founded by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar that seeks the establishment of an Islamic caliphate spanning Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, Singapore, Brunei, and the southern Philippines. More than 400 JI operatives have been captured since 2002, including operations chief and al-Qa’ida (AQ) associate Hambali. […]
In December 2001, Singaporean authorities uncovered a JI plot to attack U.S., Israeli, British, and Australian diplomatic facilities in Singapore. Other significant JI attacks include the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed more than 200, including seven U.S. citizens; the August 2003 bombing of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, the September 2004 bombing outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, and JI’s October 2005 suicide bombing in Bali, which killed 26, including the three suicide bombers.
A JI faction led by Noordin Mohammad Top conducted the most recent high-profile attack associated with the group July 17, 2009 at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta when two suicide bombers detonated explosive devices, killing seven and injuring more than 50, including seven Americans.
With all that in mind, it becomes easier to understand why there was such support for Siddiqui from radical Islamists throughout Pakistan and elsewhere, demanding her release — all of which used the same, sympathetic picture of her that HuffPost chose to, to craft its deceptive, sympathetic depiction of her:
Given all these facts, it is not difficult to understand why HuffPost would want to cleanse its archive of any trace of its original depiction of this “story” — in which it falsely depicted one of the world’s most dangerous aspiring terrorists, attempted murderer and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, as merely a “scientist,” and deliberately altered a source story to further depict her as a victim.
HuffPost went further, by giving top positioning to an editorial that alleged Siddiqui had been tortured by U.S. troops — a libel that she had denied two days earlier, in open court
On September 24, 2010, HuffPost published this editorial on its front page:
Curiously, however, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has removed this editorial from its archives. A March 16, 2017 search using the string “Andy Worthington Siddiqui” returned zero results.
Perhaps HuffPost removed it because someone exposed it for having once again libeled the U.S. military, based on incendiary, false allegations — which even Siddiqui herself said were not true. Fortunately, we can discover the truth thanks to Google Cache’s capture of this editorial:
To be honest, I can hardly express sufficiently my shock at the news that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was rendered to the U.S. to face a trial after she reportedly tried — and failed — to shoot two U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn’t make sense. […]
Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention — possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan — where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
Note that this “journalist”:
Only referred to Siddiqui as a “neuroscientist,” mentioning nothing about the other details about her work to develop and deploy WMDs for Al Qaeda
Ignored the fact that Siddiqui herself said, in open court, that she had not been tortured by U.S. forces, and that Muslims should stop spreading this lie — the day before this editorial was published (screencap):
During a rambling statement to the court Thursday [September 23], Siddiqui carried only a message of peace.
“I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
Siddiqui said she was particularly upset by overseas reports that she was being tortured in a U.S. prison. She said she was actually being treated well.
“I am not sad. I am not distressed. … They are not torturing me,” she said. “This is a myth and lie and it’s being spread among the Muslims.”
The fact that HuffPost cleansed its archive of any instance of this “journalist” having written about Siddiqui also indicates that it never published an apology or retraction to this libel against the U.S. military. Thus, HuffPost’s original act, and this omission, could only serve to fuel the widespread protests against the U.S. military regarding Siddiqui, and may have helped to ignite physical attacks on U.S. soldiers as a result.
UPDATE June 3, 2017: The Gatestone Institute has published a new, detailed report on Siddiqui, why she was of such high value to Al Qaeda, and her affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the (U.S.) Muslim Student Association, here.
(3.3) December 2010 — onward: HuffPost began acting as the unofficial PR agency for Julian Assange, to defend him, and give him top-level positioning in its global platform to engage in his propaganda war against the U.S. military — then turned on him when he revealed Democratic Party corruption
Background
As documented in Sections 1.2, 1.6 and 1.7, throughout 2010, Wikileaks and its head, Julian Assange, were effectively on a propaganda jihad against the U.S. military, to:
Incite global hatred against American soldiers, based on lies and egregious distortions
Steal and publicize highly classified operational and intelligence information that bipartisan political figures anticipated could or did get American soldiers and allies killed
As reported by the Guardian (UK), Assange announced to several journalists his belief that anyone who worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan “deserve to get killed” (which is also exactly what the Taliban said:
David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names.
“Well, they’re informants,” Assange replied. “So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”
A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange’s disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose “informants” niggled in his mind.
Voices from across the political spectrum expressed outrage at Assange and Wikileaks, and speculated that their actions would endanger untold numbers of American and coalition soldiers and human assets, and may lead to their deaths. For example, according to a December 2010 article by the BBC:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wikileaks’ actions undermined US foreign policy efforts and amounted to “an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.”
New York Congressman Pete King (Ed.: R-NY) has called for the US Attorney General to designate Wikileaks a terrorist organisation and to prosecute founder Julian Assange for espionage.
“The truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters. In what appears to be an attempt to build a criminal case against Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the director of the FBI to ask the bureau to join the investigation.
“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners,” Gates told reporters. “The documents reveal the names of Afghans who provided intelligence to the United States. Their lives are now in danger and their exposure will send a chill through anyone else thinking of helping.”
HuffPost’s efforts to defend Assange — as “news” — and to give him a global platform
In HuffPost, Wikileaks and Assange found a true partner, which not only insulated its readers from discovering these realities, it treated him like a rock star, and published on its front page:
Incendiary, anti-U.S. military editorials written by Assange
Outside editorials that supported for him, but which it depicted as “news” items
Here are but a few examples of this phenomenon:
December 5, 2010: HuffPost claims attacks on Assange are “shameless” — as “news”
At the time, HuffPost’s front page was arranged so that the opinion pieces appear in the left column, while news items appear in the center and right columns. Yet on December 5, 2010, it ran this “news” story on its front page:
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this page:
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
This opinion piece was source from The Atlantic, yet HuffPost published it as “news.”
August 19, 2012: HuffPost depicted Assasnge as the victim
The following was the splash “news” headline that HuffPost published on August 19, 2012:
Julian Assange spoke in public on Sunday for the first time in months. He addressed a large crowd of supporters from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum.
Assange called on the U.S. to end its “witch hunt” against Wikileaks. He also said that Obama needs to “do the right thing” and release Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier charged with leaking classified information to Wikileaks.
“There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation, be it Wikileaks or the New York Times,” he said. “The U.S. war on whistleblowers must end.”
June 3, 2013: HuffPost gave Assange front-page editorial space to smear the entire U.S. military — and kept it there for three straight days
On June 4, 2013, HuffPost published this editorial by Assange near the top of its front page — and left it there for three straight days; note the time stamp at the lower right of this screencap, taken on June 6:
In this editorial screed, Assange smeared the entire U.S. military, for the alleged misdeeds of a few of its soldiers:
In the end it is not Bradley Manning who is on trial. His trial ended long ago. The defendant now, and for the next 12 weeks, is the United States. A runaway military, whose misdeeds have been laid bare, and a secretive government at war with the public. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists. We must not turn away.
Curiously, one of HuffPost’s top “journalists,” Christopher Matthias, decried anyone who smears the many, for the actions of the few. In the wake of jihadist Omar Mateen’s June 2016 massacre at the Orlando gay nightclub (which HuffPost whitewashed), Matthias said:
Then there was the sadly predictable backlash in the U.S., with politicians and pundits publicly blaming a major religion and its 1.6 billion adherents for the actions of a few.
While Matthias writes a seemingly endless array of heart-wrenching stories about every alleged hate incident against Muslims in America (many of which are soon proven to be hoaxes, some of which HuffPost willfully legitimized), he has apparently had nothing to say about the “newspaper” for which he writes engaging in a deliberate, consistent, malicious pattern of inciting hatred against the U.S. military as a whole, for the alleged actions of a few.
June 10, 2013: HuffPost created a sub-page dedicated to Assange
July 25, 2016: HuffPost turned on Assange, when be began leaking embarrassing internal Democratic Party documents
After six years of whitewashing and enabling Assange, HuffPost did an about face on him, when he began exposing the corrupt inner workings of the DNC, and its favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, for whom it embarked on a scorched-Earth campaign of incitement, lies, and deception. For example, HuffPost published this “news” story on its front page on July 25, 2016:
And from that point on, HuffPost’s coverage of Assange went from treating him as a crusading social activist – rock star, to one who is putting innocent people in danger.
Curiously, HuffPost never expressed any sympathy for all the innocent American soldiers, or allied soldiers, or their civilian assets whom Wikileaks, with its assistance, were placed in danger, or even killed.
(3.4) January 2013: HuffPost posted a front-page story about the “gentle face” of Al Qaeda — based on an egregious half-truth
The following is excerpted, and consolidated, from a detailed report at Huff-Watch, from January 1, 2013.
On January 1, 2013, HuffPost published this “news story” on its front page:
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this story page. As shown in the screencap below, as of March 8, 2017, HuffPost has now stripped the sympathetic pictures out of this PR piece for profile of Al Qaeda:
But as indicated, at the bottom of this “news story,” HuffPost’s source was the notorious Al Jazeera, which, as the Huff-Watch blog pointed out at the time:
Al Jazeera is one of the world’s mostnotorious pro-terrorist propaganda networks — which threw a birthday party (video) for the Islamist terrorist who smashed a 4-year-old Jewish girl’s skull to pieces, after murdering her father in front of her, to ensure that that would be the last image she’d ever see.)
Al Jazeera’s story page claimed that Al Qaeda provides some humanitarian services to those whom it conquers. From the Huff-Watch article:
Here’s an example from the Al Jazeera story page around which HuffPost built its “piece”:
Caption: “The Mujahideen distribute charity in hospitals and slums.”
Left out of Al Jazeera’s story was the fact that like ISIS, Al Qaeda also engages in mass rapes of those whom it takes captive.
In contrast, HuffPost never presents “the gentle face” of the U.S. military
Curiously, HuffPost publishes nothing that shows the “gentle face” of the U.S. military. To the contrary, as documented in Sections 1 and 2, it is invested in inciting global hatred of American soldiers — and in dehumanizing and ignoring them, after they meet misfortune.
(3.5) February 2013: HuffPost gave five straight days of top-line coverage to evoking sympathy for a “homesick American jihadi” — while at the same time, ignoring a U.S. Marine who was receiving the Medal of Honor
The following is excerpted, and consolidated, from a detailed report at Huff-Watch.
On February 8, 2013, HuffPost published this “news” story on its front page:
Once his reputation was of a feared fighter, an American-born extremist who left small town Alabama to wage war alongside Al-Qaeda-linked Somali Islamists and who called on other foreigners to join. Today, Omar Hamami — better known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or “the American” — has split from the insurgents, who want to kill him.
He cuts a forlorn figure: homesick, stuck somewhere in Somalia, and telling anyone who will listen about his apparently doomed career path. […]
“War booty is eaten by the top dogs, but the guys who won it are jailed for touching it,” Amriki says in one message on Twitter. It is a sharp turnaround for a man who once issued rap videos aimed at recruiting foreign fighters. […]
(Ed.: The story made no mention of the fact that “war booty,” to jihadis in general, and Al Shabaab in particular, includes the women and girls that they kidnap and sexually terrorize.)
“What I would like though is to have a three day visit to see my mom, dad and sister… I often wonder what this whole experience has done to them,” he writes in the book, adding he misses his daughter whom he abandoned in Egypt as a baby.
“I’d like to make a round of the restaurants and get some Chinese food, some hot (chicken) wings, some Nestle ice cream, some gourmet coffee and a slew of other foods and beverages.”
HuffPost kept this “news story” on the front page for two straight days, and on the World page for five straight days (evidence file).
As if that weren’t enough, during the five straight days of top coverage it gave to this “news” story,” HuffPost completely ignored the fact that President Obama was awarding a U.S. Marine with the Congressional Medal of Honor — for his heroism in fighting this terrorist’s allies in Afghanistan. See details in Section 2.4, and at the Huff-Watch blog’s detailed article about this incident.
(3.6) June 2013 — onward: HuffPost began acting as Iran’s unofficial, US-based PR agency, starting with a “news” story about how Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” is “sad that no one goes hiking anymore”
The following are excerpts from a larger SaveTheWest report, about the key role HuffPost’s use of lies, deception, bias and anti-Semitic incitement to help trick Americans into supporting the Iran deal.
In summary, at the same time HuffPost was doing everything in its power to smear and lie about Mr. Netanyahu, Israel and Jews, it published a regular stream of glowing articles about Iran and its rulers. Here are but a few examples of this effort.
(3.6.1) Khamenei is “sad” that “no one goes hiking anymore”
Israel, under Netanyahu and his predecessors, has produced innumerable breakthroughs in health science, water technology and every other realm of human life. HuffPost gives Israel no credit for any of these achievements, on its front page or World page.
Yet when Iran’s top terrorist, “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamanei said he was “sad” that “no one goes hiking anymore,” HuffPost assigned a “journalist” to write an original PR “news” “story” about this revelation, and positioned it on its front page:
This is exactly the same kind of slavish propaganda that Iran’s own (Khamanei-controlled) “news” media produces, to burnish his image. Yet here, HuffPost used its global platform to spread this PR “news” to its 130 million readers around the world.
(3.6.2) “A gorgeous journey through ‘100 years of Iranian beauty'”
HuffPost has not published any stories on its front page or World page about the innumerable beautiful aspects of Israel and its people. Yet on February 19, 2015, as the climax of the Iran deal negotiations was approaching, HuffPost published this original PR “news” story about this photo-essay on its front page:
Curiously, HuffPost chose to position this PR “news” story next to an original “news” story about a frowning Netanhyahu hiring a lawyer, for a “possible” corruption case:
(3.6.3) Iran’s “laughter yoga” programs
If one only got their news from HuffPost, they might wonder why so many have a dim view of Iran and its “leaders,” after seeing this original July 2, 2014 original PR “news” story that it assigned a “journalist” to write, about how Iranians are embracing something called “laughter yoga.” This headline graphic takes one to a detailed, picture-rich PR piece photo-essay, from inside Iran, about this “hilarious” healing practice:
Curiously, HuffPost has given no coverage on its front page to any of the major healing advances and charitable actions to originate in Israel over the past two years, including:
(3.7) November 2013: HuffPost published a front page headline that assailed the NSA for breaking into “activists'” computers, when in fact its own “story” page proved they were supporters and funders of Islamist terror, including Al Qaeda
HuffPost claimed that the NSA, staffed with both military and civilian employees, was “spying” on “activists” and their porn habits. An excerpt from the (original) story page:
The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target’s credibility, reputation and authority.
The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT” — or signals intelligence, the interception of communications — “assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues.
So who are these Muslims whom HuffPost refers to as “activists”?
HuffPost knew from its own “story” that, according to top-secret documents stolen from the NSA by Edward Snowdon, these were individuals who were funding Al Qaeda, and/or spreading its hate propaganda. From the (original) story page (larger, dated screencap here):
Sometime later, however, HuffPost changed the story page headline to indicate that these individuals were “radicalizers”:
Analysis
Contrast how HuffPost whitewashed these Al Qaeda supporters and funders into “activists” to how, as documented in Section 1, it instantly and automatically assumed the worst about American soldiers and their commanders, and described them as such — even though the facts either didn’t support these allegations, or contradicted them.
Note also how HuffPost consistently refers to Jews who are merely accused of having done something wrong, as “extremists”:
Yet when admittedly top-secret documents were stolen from the NSA that showed the agency was tracking and exposing Al Qaeda supporters’ porn habits, HuffPost’s first action was to rise to their defense, depict them as merely “activists” in its headline, implying that they were the victims in this equation.
(3.8) December 2013 — onward: HuffPost began acting as the unofficial propaganda partner for a proven front group for Iran’s rulers, to bamboozle America into accepting the “nuclear deal”
Starting in 2013, HuffPost engaged in a two-year, scorched-Earth campaign of lies, deception, bias and anti-Semitic incitement in order to help promote the Iranian nuclear deal. This is all documented in a special report produced by SaveTheWest (July 2016):
As part of this campaign, HuffPost gave top, sustained coverage to news stories about, and editorials by “experts” whom it (a) depicted as being nonpartisan, and (b) enabled to viciously attacked critics of the Iran deal. One of these “experts” was a convicted pedophile who, years before HuffPost began giving him front-page editorial space, had served time in prison after multiple incidents of soliciting sex from underage females. Details here.
The most troubling of these “experts,” however, was the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a group that HuffPost knew, or should have known, had been:
Determined in a U.S. federal court to be a front group for Iran’s rulers, more than a year before it began citing them as nonpartisan experts
Informally and formally lobbying Congress to support the deal, and at its climax, openly solicited funds to continue its lobbying
HuffPost reported none of these facts to its readers. The following is adapted from our report, “The Rhodes To HuffPost.”
On December 19, 2013, HuffPost published this splash headline as a “news” story on its front page: This article was written by two HuffPost “journalists”: Joshua Hersh (whom we exposed in Section 5.1 for writing this discredited article), and Ryan Grim, its “Washington bureau chief.” The article hinged on what HuffPost claimed was a “report” by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which it depicted as follows (emphasis added; screencap):
Iran experts have decried the Senate’s attempts to impose new sanctions as a possible death blow to the first detente between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear program.
“This would be a direct violation of the Geneva deal which would cause the collapse of the talks not due to Iranian sabotage, but American foul play,” said Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, which advocates better relations between Iran and the West.
Dr. Parsi is the President of the largest Iranian-American grassroots organization in the US.”
However, seven days later, on December 26, 2013, the Algemeinerexposed the reality of Parsi and the NIAC, which HuffPost either knew, or should have known. In summary:
In April 2008, Parsi and NIAC filed a libel and defamation lawsuit in U.S. federal court against an investigative researcher, Seid Hassan Daioleslam, for alleging they are a front group for Iran’s mullahs.
In September 2012, after more than four years of litigation, the court not only dismissed the case, with prejudice, after concluding that Daioleslam’s claims were correct, it ordered Parsi and NIAC to pay Daioleslam nearly $200,000.
The Legal Project, a nonprofit that helps defend anti-terrorism researchers from retaliatory lawsuits by radical Islamists,claims Parsi and NIAC have “deep and incontrovertible ties to high-level agents of the Iranian regime,” and that this assertion was proved accurate in a September 2012 U.S. federal district court ruling:
The case reached national prominence when Parsi’s e-mails (produced during discovery) confirmed his ties to the mullahs […]
Federal District Court Judge John B. Bates for the District of Columbia yesterday granted summary judgment for Seid Hassan Daioleslam, editor of the English Iranian Lobby website “In Search of Truth: Reports on Mullahs’s lobby in US,” the defendant in a defamation suit brought by Trita Parsi and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Judge Bates also ordered sanctions against Parsi for failure to comply with the discovery phase of the litigation. […]
Trita Parsi sued Seid Hassan Daioleslam for defamation in April, 2008 after Mr. Dai’s investigative reporting exposed Parsi’s and NIAC’s deep and incontrovertible ties to high-level agents of the Iranian regime. The suit went through 53 months of litigation that included 24 months of discovery and over 30 court motions. These ultimately confirmed the accuracy of Mr. Dai’s investigative reports.
Even though that ruling occurred more than a year earlier, HuffPost disclosed none of these facts to its readers, and never updated its story to include any mention of the Algemeiner expose’. To the contrary, HuffPost continued allowing Parsi and others at the NIAC to write editorials (archive), which it positioned at or near the top of its front page, under the presumed auspices of being nonpartisan “Iran experts,” including the following lie-filled screeds:
HuffPost continued to enable and depict the NIAC as “nonpartisan experts,” even after they began overt fundraising to lobby Congress to advance the deal
September 1, 2015 brought an important victory for advocates of the Iran deal: they had secured the 34 Senators needed to block any resolution condemning it. In response, the NIAC’s president, Trita Parsi, published the following editorial at HuffPost:
The very next day, September 2, 2015, Parsi sent out the following fundraising email, for the purpose of enabling it to pressure 7 more U.S. Senators to support the deal. Emphasis is added on certain passages, to highlight its clear lobbying objectives:
From: Trita Parsi [mailto:trita@niacaction.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 2, 2015 10:26 AM
Subject: We’ve hit 34 votes to seal the deal!
Dear ,
You did it! Thanks to you, we just took a giant leap forward in sealing the Iran deal!
Senator Mikulski (D-MD) will announce her support for the deal this morning, giving us the 34 Senate votes needed to protect the President’s veto of a resolution of disapproval of the Iran deal!
Barring the unforeseen, this historic victory means that the deal will officially withstand Congressional rejection.
But we can’t celebrate just yet.
We need 41 votes in the Senate to win the vote outright, preventing the President from having to resort to a veto. A deal protected merely by the President’s veto pen faces an uphill battle in future administrations. A different president can use the same pen to kill the deal.
We must be ready to double down our efforts on the remaining 7 Senators to ensure we seal this deal without a veto.
As we speak, AIPAC and Congressional hawks are working to implement new sanctions aimed at destroying the deal. Draft bill language circulating throughout Congress now shows a clear aim to kill the deal and pave the way for war. Opponents want to force the President to use his veto to diminish the credibility of the deal.
We must be ready to counter these diplomacy-killing efforts in the long-term.
This is not the time to sit back. This is the time to be counted.
Join our efforts to defend the deal in Congress by making a contribution online today!
Our goal is to raise $150,000 in the next few weeks to mobilize Americans of all walks of life to help secure the historic chance for peace we now have within our reach.
With your help, we can do it!
Sincerely,
Trita Parsi
Board Member, NIAC Action
NIAC 1411 K St NW, Ste 250 Washington, DC 20005 USA
Help advance peace and the Iranian-American community. Contribute today.
Learn more about the NIAC
We’ve compiled an array of investigative exposes’ on the NIAC and related issues on our Resources page:
(3.9) December 2014: HuffPost published a front page headline that accused the CIA of “depravity and incompetence”
Note: Although this case study focuses on the CIA, it deals with interrogations of suspected or actual terrorists, which is often done in conjunction with the U.S. military, which is why it is included here.
On December 13, 2014, HuffPost published this story on its front page (the man featured is John Brennan, then-director of the CIA):
This week, a summary of the Senate’s report on CIA torture was released into the wild, and while the redactions were thick, it nevertheless read as a thoroughgoing chronicle of depravity and incompetence that will, at the very least, ruin hummus forever. National security reporter Ali Watkins is here to walk us through the report.
The first notable factor of this “story” is that HuffPost never uses such words as “depravity” or “incompetence” against the actual monsters among us — such as Omar Mateen, the jihadist behind the Pulse nightclub massacre (which it whitewashed, in several ways).
The second is that despite the public advertising pitch for HuffPost by AOL (its parent company), that claims that it “covers the world’s stories from every viewpoint,” the “journalists” who wrote this “story” included no statements from anyone at the CIA, or those who offered a different, informed perspective. Had they done so, they would have discovered that days earlier, a range of bipartisan voices expressed outrage and opposition to this report, and its release:
Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Jim Risch (R-ID) “blasted” this report as hyper-partisan, highly decontextualized, and described its public release as “unconscionable”:
“The one-sided report that will be released by Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cost U.S. tax-payers over $40 million dollars to produce, and its authors never interviewed a single CIA official.
“It is unconscionable that the Committee and the White House would support releasing this report despite warnings from our allies, the U.S. State Department, and a new coordinated Intelligence Community document assessing the increased risk to the United States the release of this report poses. We are concerned that this release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies. Simply put, this release is reckless and irresponsible. We have written to the administration reminding them of these concerns. […]
“The American civilian and uniformed personnel who worked tirelessly in the days and months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on our nation to keep us safe and prevent another mass casualty event deserve our eternal gratitude, not politically–motivated attacks. As a nation at war, we need a coherent detention and interrogation policy in order to extract valuable intelligence about terrorist networks from captured operatives. The Obama Administration has no detention policy, and it has hindered U.S. efforts to fight terrorism globally.”
Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) blasted the release of the report:
“I strongly disagree with the Senate Intelligent Committee’s decision to release information contained in the CIA report. Although I support transparency in our national intelligence programs, I do not believe this information needed to be made public. I am extremely concerned about the unintended consequences the report’s public release may have for members of our military based overseas, as well as our Embassy personnel and U.S. citizens working abroad. As we have seen time and time again, many dangerous terror organizations, such as ISIL and Al Qaeda, are looking for excuses to vilify America and the West, and this report, even though the practices contained in it are no longer used, may do just that.
(3) Ex-CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden flatly denied the report’s assertion that he lied to or misled the Senate; and further, that Congress was both informed and supportive of what the CIA was doing to interrogate terror suspects
More:
CIA rebuttal to Senate committee that constructed this report
“CIA Saved Lives”: A website constructed by retired CIA personnel, to rebut the Senate report
(3.10) June 2017: HuffPost flew at least one of its “journalists” to interview the parents of an accused traitor, against whom the evidence is overwhelming, and write a weepy, whitewashed depiction of her, replete with staged photographs to make her look like a peaceful patriot
Reality Winner (photo: DailyMail)
On June 5, 2017, news broke that an NSA contractor, Reality Winner, had been charged with disclosing top-secret materials to a website. As reported in The Hill:
The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release Monday. Court documents filed by the government don’t specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. […]
Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 — the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. Last month, Winner allegedly “printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information” before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors. […]
The FBI then arrested Winner for being in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 793(e), under which it is illegal to “willfully” deliver or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The next day, June 6, the New York Timesreported that a Tweet confirmed that Winner said she woudl stand with Iran if a military conflict erupted between it and the America:
In response to the Iranian foreign minister, she posted on Twitter a sympathetic comment:
“There are many Americans protesting US govt aggression towards Iran. If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!”
Also on June 6, the media watchdog site NewsBusters reported that Winner is also a self-declared racist:
Winner was also a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and had said on Twitter that:
“being white is terrorism.”
Then, on June 8, CBS News reported that Winner declared in a personal journal that she wants to “burn the White House down”:
Prosecutor Jennifer Solari says investigators seized a notebook from Winner’s house in Augusta, Georgia, and in it, Winner made references about traveling to the Middle East. At one point she wrote:
“I want to burn the White House down … find somewhere in Kurdistan to live. Haha.”
Also on June 8, the Daily Mail revealed that according to the FBI, Winner’s allegiance to Iran was not mere passing talk — that she was serious. And, that in a recorded call, she described a strategy to employ the media in a dishonest way, to try to give her better PR:
Winner’s notes allegedly contained sympathetic statements on Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, and referenced going to live in a number of countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Mexico. Solari said that Winner had taken a three-day trip to Belize last month and had researched travelling from Atlanta to Tel Aviv in September 2017.
Solari also said that in recorded conversations from jail, Winner had told her mother to ‘play that angle’ with the press that she had been afraid for her life when FBI agents arrested her at her home. In a separate call she also told her sister that she would ‘go out and play the cute, blonde white girl. Braid my hair, going to cry.’
In another recorded call, she reportedly said: ‘Go nuclear with the press – because that’s how Manning got out’ apparently in reference to the recent release of military intelligence leaker, Chelsea Manning.
Rather than instantaneously giving Winner the “villain” treatment it automatically gives to American soldiers and police officers who are accused of wrongdoing, HuffPost turned “Reality” on its (her) head, flew at least one of its “journalists” to her parents’ home in Georgia, and produced a whitewashed sympathy story about her
Section 1 documents examples of how HuffPost constructs inflammatory shock headlines that vilify American soldiers, whenever they are accused of wrongdoing — even if it knows, or should know, that there is no evidence to support the allegations, that they are wildly decontextualized, or that the “story” is untrue. This page documents how it does the exact same thing against American police officers.
In contrast, HuffPost essentially gave this accused traitor the star treatment, which is exactly what she told her parents she most needed. In summary, it:
Flew at least one of its “journalists” to Georgia to interview Winner’s parents, and stage propaganda photos in her home, to make her appear as a peace-seeking idealist
Put this propaganda story at the top of its front page, then kept it on the front page for two additional days
Humanized her in ways that it has never done for any of the American soldiers documented in Section 2, or their grieving families or loved ones
On June 9, 2017, this story appeared at the top of HuffPost’s front page:
That link led to this page — which HuffPost assigned three of its “journalists” to construct. The first paragraphs of this “story” follow:
AUGUSTA, Ga. ― A collection of framed Beatles record covers adorn the living room wall of the house where 25-year-old government contractor Reality Winner lived until late last week. One room is empty, save for a rug where she practices yoga, a book titled “The Art of Peace” and prayer beads. In her bedroom, a blanket with a giant picture of the Pokemon Pikachu is laid neatly on her bed.
It doesn’t seem like the house of a mastermind bent on bringing down the government.
“I want people to keep in mind that she’s a human being, that she did serve her country, that she would never hurt anyone,” Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told HuffPost in a sit-down interview Thursday morning. Her parents have come to Augusta from their home in Kingsville, Texas, to stand by their daughter.
From there, HuffPost took photos that were clearly staged to convey this exact impression (note the credit to HuffPost in the captions):
Curiously, HuffPost has never afforded such “humanizing” treatment to any of the American soldiers (other than Bradley/Chelsae Manning) or police officers whom its incendiary headlines accused of wrongdoing.
Nor did HuffPost ever provide such ‘humanizing” treatment to any of the families of Americans who were murdered by the Palestinian terrorists who are sponsored by Iran, which Winner claims allegiance, including:
Capt. Taylor Force, the beloved U.S. Army officer who was murdered in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist, in March 2016 (details)
Ezra Schwartz, 18, murdered by a Palestinian terrorist. Not an “American tragedy” to HuffPost.
Ezra Schwartz, the American Jewish teenager who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, in November 2015 (details)
Richard Lakin, the American Jewish peace activist, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, in November 2015 (details)
American Rabbi Eitam Henkin, and his wife, Na’ama, who were murdered in front of their children, by Palestinian terrorists, in September 2015 (details)
Chaya Zissel Braun, the 3-month-old Jewish infant who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, in October 2014. (details)
U.S. Army Sgt. Dennis Weichel, the beloved U.S. Army officer who sacrificed his life to save a young Afghan girl (details)
Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley,Cpl. Richard Rivera, and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, U.S. Marines who were murdered on an American base in Afghanistan, allegedly because of President Obama’s negligent rules of engagement (details)
Nor has HuffPost ever interviewed the American soldiers who were victims of domestic, racist attacks, perpetrated against them because of their skin color — which, as documented here, it actually helps to incite — or their loved ones. To the contrary, as documented in the links following each citation, HuffPost never published a single story about any of them:
Ralph Weems IV, a U.S. Marine veteran who was beaten nearly to death by a black mob in Mississippi, because of his skin color, in August 2014 (details)
Chris Marquez, a decorated, famous U.S. Marine who was severely beaten by Black Lives Matter supporters in Washington, DC, in February 2016 (details)
David Palmer, a U.S. Army veteran who was severely beaten by a black mob — on video — because of his skin color, in September 2016, and needs facial reconstruction surgery (details)
Austin Freni, a white U.S. soldier, on leave from duty in the Middle East, was severely beaten by a mob that was critical of his Army jacket, in January 2017 (details)
Yet for the accused traitor Reality Winner, HuffPost pulled out all the stops to shower her with exactly the kind of positive PR for which she reportedly asked. And the process, HuffPost further revealed the depths to which it will sink to dishonor those who wear America’s uniforms, while “humanizing” and whitewashing those who are at war against them.
(3.11) June 2017: HuffPost published a report that claimed most America’s terrorists are white, not Muslim, and part of the right-wing — even though it knew, or should have known, that this is grossly decontextualized — and left it on its front page for nineteen straight days
On June 23, 2017, after a rash of Islamist terror attacks on U.S. soil (most of which HuffPost either never reported, or whitewashed), it posted this “news” story on its front page. Note that the sub-headline says, “Right-wing terror is real, and it’s a problem.”
The first hint that this is a non-credible story is the fact that the murderer depicted in the photo, Jeremy Joseph Christian, who killed two men in Portland who were defending several Muslim females from his verbal attack, is far-left Bernie Sanders supporter, who expressed vitriolic hatred for President Trump — and was kicked out of a Trump rally, by attendees, on video, who also reported him to the police. Yet HuffPost mentioned none of that in its “news” article.
That headline led to this story page, the opening paragraphs of which are presented below, verbatim (emphasis added). Note that the source of this report, the Nation Institute, is a left-wing nonprofit, closely related to the extreme-leftThe Nation magazine:
When it comes to domestic terrorism in America, the numbers don’t lie: Far-right extremists are behind far more plots and attacks than Islamist extremists.
There were almost twice as many terrorist incidents by right-wing extremists as by Islamist extremists in the U.S. from 2008 to 2016, according to a new report from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal.
Looking at both plots and attacks carried out, the group tracked 201 terrorist incidents on U.S. soil from January 2008 to the end of 2016. The database shows 115 cases by right-wing extremists ― from white supremacists to militias to “sovereign citizens” ― compared to 63 cases by Islamist extremists. Incidents from left-wing extremists, which include ecoterrorists and animal rights militants, were comparatively rare, with 19 incidents.
HuffPost’s “news” story quickly went viral — being shared nearly once per second, in the first eight hours — and it left the story on its front page for eighteen straight days
HuffPost published its story at 1:39pm on June 23. By 11:15pm, it had been shared on social media 51,000 times — meaning, 5,368 times per hour, 90 times per minute, for nine and a half hour straight. (By June 24, its share-count had gone up to 82,000).
Note also that AT&T and GoDaddy ads supported this story. Do its senior executives know what their shareholder dollars are being used to enable?
SaveTheWest’s investigation into the claims in HuffPost’s report — which turned out to be the inverse of the reality
SaveTheWest conducted a thorough analysis of HuffPost’s claims, and found them to be demonstrably false, or at best, egregiously decontextualized. The major findings of this counter-report include:
Of the 119 domestic terror incidents over from 2008-2016 in which the perpetrator(s) and motive were identified, 67% were Islamists (35) and leftists (45) – not white right-wingers (39).
From 9/11 through year-end 2016, Islamist terrorists have killed almost twice as many Americans as white right-wingers (95 to 51).
While there are 60 times more white, non-Hispanic people than Muslims in America, Muslims are, proportionally, 54 times more likely to perpetrate terrorist attacks on American soil.
Sunni Muslims are, proportionally, four times more likely to perpetrate terrorist attacks on American soil than white right-wingers.
(3.12) November 2017: HuffPost published a splash headline that used only Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl’s first name to report that he would not serve any jail time after being convicted of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy
Background: This incident was the latest in HuffPost’s systematic campaign to whitewash the prosecution of Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, offenses that, had they been discovered at the time, could have resulted in a sentence of his battlefield execution, were he found guilty by a military tribunal.
Instead of reporting on his prosecution and sentencing hearings (after pleading guilty to the charges), as documented in Case Studies 2.18 and 2.19 on this page, HuffPost completely ignored the testimony of (a) the soldiers who were injured while searching for him, (b) the wife of one who was left with a grievous brain injury, and (c) a former SEAL whose military dog was killed during the search, and whose career was ended as a result of the injury he sustained. Further, as documented in Case Study 2.20, HuffPost also completley ignored the six American soldiers who were killed during the search for Bergdahl.
In doing so, HuffPost maintained its practice of dishonoring and dehumanizing American soldiers who served honorably, if not heroically, while evoking sympathy for, and whitewashing those who betrayed their oath, and even terrorists.
This Incident: On November 3, 2017, the military judge presiding over the sentencing of Bergdahl, decided that he would receive no jail time. HuffPost published this splash headline on its front page:
After all the death, injury and emotional pain Bergdahl caused, there was an outcry of opposition to the injustice that this judge meted out. For its part, after sanitizing his trial, HuffPost apparently decided to advance the outrage, by not expressing even a hint of shock at the judgment, but rather, by referring to him by his first name only, “Bowe.”
Contrast HuffPost’s folksy reference to the judgment regarding this admitted deserter, who led to so much death and injury, to how it reacts when it believes we’ve witnessed an injustice
In regards to the police officers who were found innocent on charges that they unjustifiably shot black Americans:
On December 4, 2014, HuffPost ran this story as a “news” headline – an overt accusation that police officers “murdered” Eric Garner and other supposedly innocent people, and got away with it.
Attorney Ben Shapiro demolished HuffPost’s incendiary lie –
On November 26, 2014, HuffPost ran this story on its front page:
The Huff-Watch blog documented the endemic problems with this article, which could only serve to help incite hatred of, and violence against police officers.
On December 6, 2014, HuffPost positioned this inflammatory editorial screed, not on the left margin, where its opinion pieces go — but rather as a “news” item. How could any reasonable person view this as anything other than a call for direct action, if not violence, against police officers, everywhere?
As documented in Case Study 1.6 on this page, on October 23, 2010, HuffPost published the following as its front page splash headline, which it knew, or should have known, was an incendiary lie against American soldiers:
As shown in Case Study 3.13, however, this was not the first time that HuffPost tacitly humanized, if not seemingly defended one who had caused irreparable harm to America and Americans.
(3.13) August 2013: HuffPost published a splash headline that referred to one of the Islamist terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon by using a term that it acknowledged is one that his “friends” use in addressing him
On April 22, 2013, HuffPost published this as its splash headline:
This headline referred to brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev (L) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (R), radical Islamist immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, who perpetrated the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. As police were closing in on them, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ran over his brother with a car, and he later died. Dzhokhar was arrested soon after.
Apparently, during police questioning Dzhokhar claimed that he and his brother “acted alone,” without help from any Islamist terror groups — although he admitted that they learned how to build the bombs they used from an Al Qaeda online training manual.
But notice how HuffPost referred to him as “Jahar,” instead of as “surviving terrorist,” or some similar means of addressing this monster. What is the origin of this term — and why did HuffPost chose to use it, instead of his name?
Turns out, HuffPost acknowledged in its own story that “Jahar” is how his “friends” referred to him:
The news organization tweeted the information Monday night. NBC was the first media outlet to report that Suspect 2, as he was dubbed by the FBI, was captured late Friday evening.
NBC also reported that Tsarnaev, whom friends called “Jahar,” told authorities in writing that he and his brother discovered instructions for bomb-making on the Internet.
Why would HuffPost refer to this mass-murdering Islamist terrorist by a term it acknowledged only his “friends” use? Only HuffPost can answer that question.
Contrast how HuffPost “friended” this Islamist terrorist, to the terms it uses to refer to its political enemies, who have neither murdered anyone, nor advocated that anyone do so
A sampling, in the form of a four-minute video:
(3.14) November 2017: HuffPost completely ignored the discovery that bin Laden’s diaries confirm Al Qaeda’s long-term working relationship with Iran; Instead, it only noted that he was a fan of American cartoon “Tom & Jerry”
On November 1 and 2, 2017, a number of national news organizations reported that after six years, some of the contents of Osama Bin Laden’s home and personal archives have been made public — among them excerpts from his dairies that conclusively show the operational working relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran, for the purpose of attacking America.
WASHINGTON — A document seized the night Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden suggests that Al Qaeda and Iran had a relationship more complicated and intimate than previously known — one that included threats and kidnappings, but also occasional cooperation.
The document was among a massive trove of material released Wednesday by the CIA following a request by the Long War Journal, a website that has chronicled the U.S. war on terrorism. The site received a copy of the materials Tuesday.
The U.S. government released hundreds of thousands of files in the aftermath of the May 1, 2011 raid on Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound, and released other tranches in 2015 and 2016.
Wednesday’s release included nearly 470,000 more files recovered in the raid. Most of the newly disclosed material is in Arabic, untranslated, and uncurated. It includes Bin Laden’s untranslated 228-page private journal, and other documents that officials say support a U.S. intelligence estimate produced just after the raid that bin Laden continued to act as an operational commander of Al Qaeda even in the months just before his death.
Iranian offers of secret funding, arms and training to al-Qaeda have been laid bare in a 19-page document declassified by the C.I.A. that shows how Tehran provided extensive support for the terror group in an effort to weaken the United States.
The previously unseen document, released with 470,000 files recovered in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in May 2011, gives an assessment of al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran, according to a senior jihadist in the group.
Translations by the Long War Journal, which chronicles the U.S. war on terror, have shown how Iran offered the “Saudi brothers” in al-Qaeda “everything they needed” if they were to carry out strikes on U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. This aid extended to “money, arms” and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon,” the documents explain.
In other instances it can be seen that Iran provided logistical assistance to al-Qaeda, facilitating travel for some operatives and providing safe houses for others. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Tehran provided safe-haven for prominent ideologue Abu Hafs al-Mauritani and his followers in Iran.
HuffPost’s search engine proves it completely ignored this story
Instead, HuffPost gave top coverage only to the claim that Bin Laden was a fan of American “Tom & Jerry” cartoons
Rather than publishing any indication, anywhere on its site, of the startling revelation of Iran’s long-suspected operational relationship with Al Qaeda, the only thing HuffPost published on its front page about what was discovered in the Bin Laden raid is a claim that he enjoyed “Tom & Jerry” cartoons:Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this page:
On Wednesday, the CIA released a dump of declassified documents and computer files recovered from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound during the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed him. In this huge digital trove, amid stuff any reasonable observer might find somewhat surprising and counterintuitive in the possession of a fugitive radical terrorism financier ― screencaps from pornographic video games, a viral YouTube video of a British baby biting his brother’s finger, anime ― are 138 files that make perfect, dismal sense: “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. Bin Laden, if the contents of these files are to be trusted, was very possibly a nut for “Tom and Jerry,” and literally nothing in the history of the world has ever made more sense than that.
To confirm that the word “Iran” never showed up in HuffPost’s story, here is a screencap taken on November 2, with the search term “Iran” at lower left:
The probable reasons why HuffPost completely ignored the startling revelation of Iran’s long-term alliance with Al Qaeda
HuffPost is notorious for giving top coverage to what it alleges are scandals and betrayals by public offiicals, particularly when they involve its political enemies, including the U.S. military, police officers, Republicans, Israel and Jews, and others.
So why would HuffPost completely ignore such a startling revelation, that may lead directly to the next 9/11, given that President Obama released $100 billion to Iran — effectively Al Qaeda’s partner in anti-American terrorism?
Here are some of the probable reasons:
(1) For ten years, HuffPost has been falsely claiming that there is no substantive link between Iran and Al Qaeda. This active denial began in April 2008, as part of HuffPost’s multi-faceted smear campaign against Sen. John McCain, then the front-running presidential candidate against then-Senator Barack Obama. As the Huff-Watch blog documented on April 6, 2008, HuffPost’s “senior White House correspondent” Sam Stein blasted McCain for claiming there is an operational link between Iran and Al Qaeda — despite reports from credible researchers provided evidence that supported their relationship.
(2) HuffPost completely ignored the 2011 a federal court ruling that showed Iran played “a material role” in helping Al Qaeda to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks. On December 21, 2011, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Iran played a “material role” in helping Al Qaeda to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks, and had been working with the terror group for at least ten years prior to, and ten years after the attacks. The case, Havlish v. Bin Laden, et al, was initiated by several hundred surviving family members of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. The trial lasted seven years, and resulted in a $7 billion verdict against Iran, which it refused to pay, so the U.S. government seized and auctioned off a $500 million NY building and gave the money to the plaintiffs. See the details of the case here. HuffPost, however, completely ignored both the case, and the verdict.
Given these facts, it is understandable why HuffPost would be so committed to not alerting its readers of facts that would reveal (a) its lies, obfuscation and complicity in foisting the Iran “deal” on us, or (b) the implications of its betrayal of their trust.
Rather than being an aberration, this is part of a pattern of HuffPost’s fetish for “humanizing” the world’s most notorious, murderous villains — while vilifying those who stand against them
SaveTheWest has documented this fetish here; some excerpts:
(1) Hitler secretly wanted to be a Mouseketeer
On September 14, 2010, HuffPost featured this “news” story on its front page:
(2) Ahmadinejad, the grinning mass murderer
Iranian “president” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was notorious for hanging gays in the street, and facilitating the murders and maimings of hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Yet on August 10, 2010, HuffPost continued its practice of consistently depicting him as a grinning “leader,” in this case, while he threatened the mass murder of more U.S. soldiers, and heavily promoted the story atop its story pages:
(3) The “homesick American jihadi”
As documented in Case Study 3.5 on this page, HuffPost gave five straight days of top coverage to this “homesick American jihadi,” who regretted his decision to join a murderous Al Qaeda affiliated group, and wished to come home to “…make a round of the restaurants and get some Chinese food, some hot (chicken) wings, some Nestle ice cream, some gourmet coffee and a slew of other foods and beverages.”
(4) Iran’s gay-hanging, anti-Semitic “supreme leader” is “sad” that “no one goes hiking anymore”
As documented in Case Study 3.6 on this page, on June 19, 2013, HuffPost reported on its front page that “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamanei said he was “sad” that “no one goes hiking anymore.”
Contrast these “humanizing” treatments that HuffPost affords mass murderers, to how it consistently vilifies members of the U.S. military (Section 1), and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
(3.15) November 2017, Colorado Springs, CO: Racist graffiti targeting black cadets was found at the U.S. Air Force Academy; The black cadet who reported finding the graffiti admitted that he did it
On September 29, 2017, HuffPost produced an original story about racist graffiti targeting black cadets being found at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and positioned the item near the top of its front page:
In a poignant defense of equality, the United States Air Force Academy’s superintendent made it crystal clear that the institution will not tolerate any form of disrespectful behavior toward someone of another race or gender.
The Academy’s Preparatory School found racial slurs written on message boards of five African-American cadets, leading Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria to express his disgust to the Academy’s more than 5,000 cadets, faculty and staff in Colorado Springs.
“If you’re outraged by those words, then you’re in the right place,” he said Thursday. “You should be outraged not only as an airman, but as a human being.”
On September 30, HuffPost moved the story up to the top of is front page, directly atop an original story about its effort to “find a white supremacist meeting in a Tennessee forest”
The proof that this was a fake hate crime
On November 7, 2017 the Air Force Academy announced that it had concluded its investigation into this incident — and that the perpetrator, the black cadet who reported the graffiti, was identified as the perpetrator, and admitted to doing it. As reported by the local NBC TV affiliate:
One of the cadet candidates who claimed to be the target of racist remarks at the U.S. Air Force Academy in El Paso County admitted to writing the slurs, the academy said on Tuesday.
In late September, racist graffiti was found on the doors of five black cadet candidates. This spurred an impassioned speech from Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, superintendent of the Air Force Academy, where he told both Air Force cadets and preparatory students they needed to treat others with dignity and respect or “get out.”
USAFA’s investigation revealed the student, once thought to be a victim, actually wrote the slurs on the doors, including their own.
“We can confirm that one of the cadet candidates who was allegedly targeted by racist remarks written outside of their dorm room was actually responsible for the act,” USAFA said in a statement.
The release went on to say that cadet candidate, who was not named, is no longer at the school.
Soon after, other local news organizations published versions of this discovery, including the Miami Herald, Later, the Daily Caller, ABCNews.com and others news outlets publicized the story.
HuffPost’s complicity in helping to legitimize this fake hate crime
Bibliography: Articles and reports that document terrorist groups’ information warfare strategies and tactics, especially against the U.S. military
The following are presented in chronological order, for the purpose of showing what information was available to HuffPost before it began engaging in the acts and omissions documented above, which it knew or should have known could only serve to help advance the “propaganda jihad” being waged against America, and the U.S. military. It should be noted that HuffPost went live in May 2005.
Reports from research organizations, the U.S. government, and others
The Use Of The Internet By Islamic Extremists, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, by Bruce Hoffman, RAND Corporation, May 2006.
Considered as a whole, HuffPost’s bigotry, bias and incitement against the U.S. military is comparable to that of newspapers controlled by the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South, in the early 20th century. Disguised as “news,” the only time one saw stories in these newspapers about black people, or featuring black faces, was when they were being accused of having perpetrated crimes large and small (whether truthfully or not), or being stupid, lazy, violent, or similar. Yet whenever black Americans performed some noble deed, big or small (eg the Tuskegee Airmen, or George Washington Carver), these “newspapers” ignored them.
Soon after he was fired by the Washington Post in 2009, HuffPost hired “journalist” Dan Froomkin. This acquisition was pretty much only celebrated by Salon.com, the notorious terrorist-whitewashing, U.S. military libeling, pedophile-whitewashing, subversive far-left propaganda site. And Froomkin has continued in his peddling of hate and conspiracies disguised as “journalism,” as was recently exposed by NewsBusters and the Lawfare Blog.
Yes it does. Here’s Arianna Huffington, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of HuffPost, explaining her site’s journalistic virtues and mission:
The security contractors to whom this article refers are not fighting. They providing protective services to U.S. government officials as they travel abroad — at the request of the U.S. government. They also provide additional services, such as training police officers, and security during reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.
trip to Iraq a a candidate, in July 2008 — and while there, he praised the firm, saying “Blackwater is getting a bad rap.”
In 2006, Ackerman was fired by The New Republic for threatening his editor, that he’ll “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat… then declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides.
Clicking on that headline led to this story page:
Jerusalem or to stand in the face of the Crusader invasion on Muslim land,” for “they are stooges to the Jews and Christians.”
“Bin Laden repeated his characterization of a so-called ‘new crusade led by America against the Islamic nations,’ and emphasized his belief that an emerging conflict between Islam and the West would be fought ‘between the Islamic world and the Americans and their allies’.”
Clicking on that headline lead to this story page:
Wired included only one picture — the one at right. HuffPost apparently rejected the use of this photo, and instead searched the Internet until it found a picture that would serve its libelous, deceptive, incitement against American soldiers.
Huff-Watch also likened this photo, in its full, maliciously false context, to those of Nazis marching innocent Jews away, to be murdered:
Did the U.S. military really kill (murder) six Pakistani civilians, as this HuffPost headline suggests?
Notice the construction of this carefully-staged scene:
But is this really what happened? Did the U.S. military, under President Trump, really bury a man who was only known as a “top Nazi sympathizer” in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery? No.
Curiously, however, HuffPost’s own search engine proves it has removed this editorial from its archives. A March 16, 2017 search using the string “Andy Worthington Siddiqui” returns no results.
Clicking on that headline led to this story page — where the reason for the attack was described in the first paragraph of its own story:
More documentation of BLM’s incitement and legitimization of racial violence:
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this page:
The highest position HuffPost gave Taylor’s story was just beneath a graphic, original story it wrote about Kim Kardashian’s anger at other celebrities criticizing her for posting a nude selfie (which it also posted on its front page as “news”; right).
U.S. Army Sgt. Dennis Weichel was a beloved father of three and, by all accounts, a man of exceptional character and generosity. He died while saving a little Afghan girl from certain death. According to a March 28, 2012 Army press release (excerpt):
Once his reputation was of a feared fighter, an American-born extremist who left small town Alabama to wage war alongside Al-Qaeda-linked Somali Islamists and who called on other foreigners to join. Today, Omar Hamami — better known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or “the American” — has split from the insurgents, who want to kill him.
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this story page — note the fact that HuffPost put the alleged “victim’s” name right in the headline, claimed she was a Marine, and stated that this incident had, in fact, happened:
Both of these headlines both led to an NBC story, which had a very different headline — and headline picture:
Al Qaeda Leader Targeted In Botched Yemen Raid Taunts Donald Trump
Why would HuffPost completely ignore S.Sgt. Sanchez’s courage, character, and the fellow Marines he wished to honor? Especially, given its propensity to celebrate even animals who’d done things it found worthy of public adulation, including:
And while HuffPost completely ignored S.Sgt. Sanchez, in the past it found and gave top front page, celebratory to:
“And at every step along the way, we refused to fall prey to the innovator’s dilemma by constantly evolving, innovating and reinventing vital aspects of how we put together The Huffington Post while remaining true to the core values that made HuffPost HuffPost, including:
On April 15, 2017, HuffPost debuted this story at the top of its front page. And for the next three straight days, it remained on front page. You can see this for yourself via these full-page screencaps from the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive):
Excerpts:
This is exactly the same kind of slavish propaganda that Iran’s own (Khamanei-controlled) “news” media produces, to burnish his image. Yet here, HuffPost used its global platform to spread this PR “news” to its 130 million readers around the world.
Curiously, HuffPost chose to position this PR “news” story next to an original “news” story about a frowning Netanhyahu hiring a lawyer, for a “possible” corruption case:
Curiously, HuffPost has given no coverage on its front page to any of the major healing advances and charitable actions to originate in Israel over the past two years, including:
HuffPost claimed that the NSA, staffed with both military and civilian employees, was “spying” on “activists” and their porn habits. An excerpt from the (original) story page:
This article was written by two HuffPost “journalists”: Joshua Hersh (whom we exposed in Section 5.1 for writing this discredited article), and Ryan Grim, its “Washington bureau chief.” The article hinged on what HuffPost claimed was a “report” by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which it depicted as follows (emphasis added; screencap):From: Trita Parsi [mailto:trita@niacaction.org]
An excerpt from the story:
That link led to this page — which HuffPost assigned three of its “journalists” to construct. The first paragraphs of this “story” follow:
Curiously, HuffPost has never afforded such “humanizing” treatment to any of the American soldiers (other than Bradley/Chelsae Manning) or police officers whom its incendiary headlines accused of wrongdoing.
The first hint that this is a non-credible story is the fact that the murderer depicted in the photo, Jeremy Joseph Christian, who killed two men in Portland who were defending several Muslim females from his verbal attack, is far-left Bernie Sanders supporter, who expressed vitriolic hatred for President Trump — and was kicked out of a Trump rally, by attendees, on video, who also reported him to the police. Yet HuffPost mentioned none of that in its “news” article.
The Huff-Watch blog documented the endemic problems with this article, which could only serve to help incite hatred of, and violence against police officers.
Clicking on that headline brought the reader to this page:
