HomeHuffPost’s chronic smearing and dehumanization of American soldiers, and whitewashing U.S. enemies
HuffPost’s chronic smearing and dehumanization of American soldiers, and whitewashing U.S. enemies
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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 repeatedly and maliciously smeared and dehumanized members of the U.S. military — while humanizing, showering sympathy on, and whitewashing its enemies. Specifically, it has repeatedly:
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
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”
Dehumanized or ignored American soldiers who were killed in action, or injured in race-based hate crimes after they returned home
Even posted a “news” story that showed the allegedly “human face” of Al Qaeda — while never showing (or even acknowledging) the “human face” of the U.S. military
HuffPost’s bigotry and bias is comparable to that of the 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 about black people, or black faces, was when they were being accused of perpetrating a horrific crime (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 through the local mass media — that led directly to blacks being lynched in the Deep South.
Similarly, given its immense influence and reach, HuffPost knew, or should have known, that its pattern of reprehensible behavior in this regard could only serve to:
Undermine American citizens’ support for their fighting men and women
Contribute 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 “cyber-jihad”) that validates an inflammatory, erroneous perception of his enemy — most often, the U.S. military
Embolden and legitimize the jihadists who are inciting hate against, and murdering American soldiers — especially now that HuffPost has two all-Arabic editions, in the Middle East and North Africa
Embolden America’s other non-Islamist adversaries, by indicating that no matter what they do, HuffPost will automatically assume the worst about the U.S. military
All of these acts and omissions are direct, extreme violations of HuffPost’s publicly-stated journalistic standards and practices, including:
“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 the reality of what they are enabling?
“We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
– Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda second-in-command, 2005
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 mainstream American corporations that advertise at HuffPost know that they are financially enabling its “propaganda jihad” against American soldiers?
After reviewing this page, the senior executives of these corporations will know exactly what they have been enabling, whether knowingly or otherwise — as will the general public.
(2) Examples of HuffPost dehumanizing U.S. soldiers
(3) Examples of other ways that HuffPost undermines the U.S. military, and whitewashes America’s enemies
(1) Examples of HuffPost smearing U.S. soldiers
(1.1) 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
(1.2) HuffPost smeared the U.S. military, by implying that it mistakenly (or maliciously) buried a top Nazi sympathizer at Arlington National Cemetery
(1.3) 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
(1.4) 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”
(1.5) HuffPost gave top coverage to a false claimed that U.S. soldiers are deliberately murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
(1.6) HuffPost gave top coverage to an unprovable claim by a discredited “journalist,” that American soldiers are murdering civilians in Afghanistan
(1.7) 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
(1.8) 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
(1.9) 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
(1.10) 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
(1.11) 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) 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
(1.13) HuffPost gave top coverage to a smear that depicts U.S. soldiers as Nazi storm troopers
(1.14) 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]
(1.15) 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]
(1.1) 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
On June 6, 2016 was the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. HuffPost completely ignored this anniversary, and what the U.S. military did on that day. It did, however, feature a front-page story that criticized Trump for using a misdated 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 XXX and 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.
(1.2) 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.
(1.3) 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 twists 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 1.4).
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…”
(1.4) 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”
Further, HuffPost never reported on the devastating appearance of WikiLeaks head Julian Assange on Stephen Colbert’s TV show, “The Colbert Report,” one week later (April 12), in which the lie about the “Collateral Murder” smear was revealed:
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:
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 (1.5).
(1.5) HuffPost gave top coverage to a false claimed that U.S. soldiers are deliberately murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan
Continued from 1.4. 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 2.2.
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.
(1.6) 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.
(1.7) 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
(1.8) 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.”
(1.9) 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 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5, 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 1.8, 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
(1.10) 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 1.6, 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?
(1.11) 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) 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 (screencap unavailable); the following is a link to the original story — captured by Google Cache:
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.
(1.13) 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 1.8.
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 2.2, 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:
(1.14) 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:
(1.15) 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 Case Study 14, 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 in Case Study 14, 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:
(2) Examples of HuffPost dehumanizing U.S. soldiers
(2.1) 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) 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
(2.3) HuffPost ignored a beloved U.S. Army officer who sacrificed his life to save a young Afghan girl
(2.4) 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) 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) 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
(2.7) HuffPost ignored a white U.S. Marine who was beaten into coma by gang of African Americans who were upset over the Michael Brown killing
(2.8) HuffPost ignored a U.S. Marine who was held captive by Mexico, and allegedly abused in one of its jails
(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
Summary
In April 2016, SaveTheWest.com released a short documentary video (18 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. Watch the trailer here.
Note: The full documentary is embedded at the bottom of this post.
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) 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:
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:
(2.3) HuffPost completely ignored a beloved U.S. Army officer who sacrificed his life to save a young Afghan girl
This case study describes an incident from 2012, and is consolidated from an article at the Huff-Watch blog:
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
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 sacrifice. A February 19, 2017 search using the string “Sgt. Dennis Weichel” returns zero results:
(2.4) 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. […]
(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 the story on the front page for two straight days, and on the World page for five straight days (evidence file).
Sgt. Clinton RomeshaDuring 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:
(2.6) 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
“Rules of engagement” (ROE) is a term that describes a code of legal dictates that determine if, when and how force may be employed. 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.
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 ammunation. Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley, 21, Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, 29, and Cpl. Richard Rivera, 20, 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:
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:
(2.7) HuffPost ignored a white U.S. Marine who was beaten into coma by gang of African Americans who were upset over the Michael Brown killing
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.
(2.8) 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.
(3) Examples of other ways that HuffPost undermines the U.S. military, and whitewashes America’s enemies
(3.1) HuffPost posted a front-page story about the “human face” of Al Qaeda — based on an egregious half-truth
(3.2) 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
(3.1) HuffPost posted a front-page story about the “human face” of Al Qaeda — based on an egregious half-truth
Al Jazeera is one of the world’s mostnotoriouspro-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.)
Turns out, Al Jazeera’s point was that Al Qaeda does provide 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.
Curiously, HuffPost never publicizes “the human face” of the U.S. military.
See (X) on this page for just one example of how it completely ignores the actual humanitarian sacrifices made by American soldiers, on behalf of others.
(3.2) 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) HuffPost used a debunked allegation as the basis of a splash headline to claim American soldiers engaged in “Collateral Murder”
(x) HuffPost smeared the U.S. military, by implying that it mistakenly (or maliciously) buried a top Nazi sympathizer at Arlington National Cemetery
HuffPost’s bigotry and bias is comparable to that of the 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 about black people, or black faces, was when they were being accused of perpetrating a horrific crime (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.
Contribute 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 “cyber-jihad”) that validates an inflammatory, erroneous perception of his enemy — most often, the U.S. military
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.
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.
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’.”
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’.”
An excerpt from the story page to which it led:
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?
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).
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
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.
Sgt. Clinton RomeshaDuring 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.
