Harboring Terrorists

It is interesting to see how the story about the capture of Saddam Hussein’s half brother reported and changed over the past few days.

First it was reported by AP that Iraqi security forces captured him, then a U.S. military spokesman said that he was captured and will be turned over to Iraqi government without saying who captured him. Then AP reports again that it was the Syrians who captured him and handed him over to Iraqi forces, but not just that, the news is qualified with this statement : “… ending months of Syrian denials that it was harboring fugitives from the ousted Saddam regime..” suggesting that Syrians were protecting him and suddenly decided to hand him over. Are there any evidence of Syrians harboring Iraqi fugitives? None is given in any of these reports nor in the follow up reports by Washington Post and San Jose Mercury news, etc, but the same line is repeated in all of these reports.

This is perhaps a small example of how press works here, insinuations and suggestions without hard evidence. This is of course nothing new and by now we must be all too familiar with it. It wasn’t too long ago that Dick Chaney threw around accusations that the September 11th terrorists met with Iraq’s intelligence service, something that was widely talked about in press, talk shows, political analysis, etc. It was later completely refuted, but hardly reported by then. It is the same type of accusations we see Rumsfeld sometimes throws around about Iran harboring Al-Qa’edeh terrorists, the sort of accusation that sticks in the mind of American public as truth and will come handy later when the drums of war start beating louder.

Of course, Iran is harboring terrorists, but not the kind of terrorist that U.S. government is interested in. Iran is harboring assassins and torturers of Iranian dissidents, those terrorist who killed many Iranian writers, thinkers, political activists in Iran and abroad, those who have terrorized the whole nation of Iran for many years. But U.S. government itself is harboring those kinds of terrorists such as members of South and Central American death squads who are living comfortably in Florida, or Texas, or elsewhere in the U.S (Of course, those used to be “our” vicious dogs who we unleashed on anyone and everyone whom we didn’t like. They are now retired in our living room couch. We don’t just throw them out to the dog pound). While many of these terrorists are still living in U.S. with the full knowledge of U.S. government, once in a while, the victims and human right organizations successfully make a case against one of them and force U.S. officials to take action and deport them. Do you see American press report on the deportation of any of these murderers as “ U.S. deported so and so ending years of U.S. denial that it was harboring fugitives from Central America…” ?