The Death of a Friend - General Lee

Our defeatist media frequently takes shots at the Stryker. The soldiers who actually use them and know just a bit more than our media love them. They even give them names.

Michael Yon's latest article describes the final hours of the General Lee, a Stryker that protected its crew from a massive IED.

Of special interest is how the media got the story wrong.

As the bomb detonated beneath it, the General Lee arced like a dolphin from the sea of Hell. LT Brad Krauss can be seen flying out like Superman, if you look closely and imagine real hard. PFC Devon Hoch can clearly be seen standing in the back hatch. And that was it. Our guys’ lives seemed to be reduced to propaganda. The terrorists published reports that the soldiers were killed.

The story might have ended in the American press:

Four Soldiers Killed by Roadside Bomb Northwest of Baghdad

Four U.S. soldiers were killed today northwest of Baghdad when their Stryker vehicle was destroyed by a roadside bomb. Names of the service members are being withheld until notification of next of kin. The controversial Stryker vehicle is increasingly under fire by critics who claim that its armor is insufficient to protect troops in Iraq. Elsewhere, Iraqi and U.S. forces killed at least 50 people in Baghdad after three days of fighting in the area around Haifa street. About 130 people have been killed since Saturday. Separately, 27 bodies thought to be Shia were found shot. . . .

But that’s not exactly how it turned out.

It's interesting, is it not, that our media are so eager to tell the enemy's side of the story.

Speaking of which, you're probably not reading or hearing very much about this, as it reveals how the media fell right into line behind the enemy's propoganda line.

It all began in 2005, when the ambush of Marines led to a battle in which eight terrorists and a number of civilians were killed. That said, the aftermath of the incident was mishandled, giving a reporter and a human-rights group enough room to make claims of a massacre. The initial Haditha investigations uncovered some apparent discrepancies in the Marines' stories, and a criminal investigation by NCIS was launched. NCIS filed criminal charges, and internal investigations showed that officers failed to ask the right questions. It was, in essence, a more refined version of the Palestinian claims after the battle of Jenin in 2002, in which 52 people, a majority of them combatants, were killed.



Al Qaeda faced the same problem that the Palestinian terrorists at Jenin faced in 2002. They have been unable to win in a straight fight with troops that are highly trained and motivated – and American and Israeli troops tend to be among the best in the world on a soldier-for-soldier basis. The terrorists needed to try a different approach. What they came up with was media manipulation, where lies and deceptions would make the Americans (or Israelis, as the case could be) look bad while winning. Sometimes, this involves exacting a high price on the attacking force in terms of casualties, but this is difficult. More often, it involves creating the impression that the American or Israeli troops are indiscriminate killers who routinely slaughter civilians. This would boost both recruiting (to avenge a massacre by the Americans/Israelis) and it would also get media play, undercutting the American war effort (by giving opponents of the global war on terror ammunition).

If we lose this war, historians (if any from our side survive) will declare our own media as our enemy's most effective weapon.