Another 48 Hours

Michael Yon has a new post up, Operation Arrowhead Ripper: Day One. The military is allowing him full access to the battlefield and to the TOC headquarters. Civilian casualties are occurring, as the terrorists are using civilians as human shields when they engage our forces. The number of civilian casualties is as yet unknown.

Yon notes that only Michael Gordon of the NY Times is with him, making them the only two members of the media in the battle. CNN, TIME, Reuters, etc are apparently working their way to the battlefield now, making me wonder just who and how they're getting their stories to date.

I'm not going to steal all of Mike's thunder; go to his site to catch up on the rest of his account, and remember he is reader supported.

I will say this: I've been reading him since his embed with the "Deuce-Four" Stryker Brigade and have been corresponding regularly with him for most of a year, and I've rarely seen him so confident of an on-going operation. If he's correct—and he's rarely wrong, even when being right is unpopular—then al Qaeda in Baquba is living on borrowed time.

According to a press release from MNF-I PAO yesterday, "41 insurgents have been killed, five weapons caches have been discovered, 25 improvised explosive devices have been destroyed and five booby-trapped houses have been discovered and destroyed."

Other operations are underway as part of an overall operation called Phantom Thunder, but some are not getting as much media attention as Arrowhead Ripper is beginning to attract, so you may not be aware of them.

Operation Commando Eagle has been launched as joint U.S Army-Iraqi Army air-ground assault targeting al Qaeda cells southwest of Baghdad. Twenty-nine suspects have been detained, and multiple weapons caches were reported captured.

According to the MNF-I PAO release:

Troops of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd BCT, detained three men when their truck was found to contain documents requesting rockets as well as a spool of copper wire, commonly used to build improvised explosive devices.

I'm going to try to track down who that document was requesting rockets from, as while it could be nothing conclusive, it could be quite interesting if a source of the rockets could be identified.

Southeast of Baghdad, Operation Marne Torch is joint U.S. Army-Iraqi Army operation clearing the Arab Jabour area. More than sixty suspects have been detained, and 17 boats used to ferry explosives across the Tigris River have been destroyed, as have 17 weapons caches.

No Agenda Here

It in the past 48 hours, more than 40 al Qaeda terrorists (including a Libyan) have been killed, more than 100 have been captured in these and other on-going operations, and tons of munitions have been captured or destroyed in weapons caches.

What does CNN focus on? You already know the answer:

Fourteen U.S. troops have been killed in attacks over the past two days in Iraq -- 12 soldiers and two Marines -- according to the U.S. military.

In the deadliest attack, a roadside bomb struck a military vehicle on Thursday in northeastern Baghdad, killing five U.S. soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi interpreter.

A U.S. soldier and two civilians were wounded.

Also Thursday, a rocket-propelled grenade struck a U.S. military vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a soldier and wounding three others.

On Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two U.S. Task Force Marne troops and wounded four others southwest of Baghdad.

A similar attack in western Baghdad on Wednesday killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded a fifth.

In addition, two Marines were killed in combat operations in Iraq's Anbar province on Wednesday.

There was zero--ZERO mention of the successes of the operations above mentioned by CNN. If you read this, their featured story on the war for today, you'd be left to understand that American and Iraqi forces, as well as Iraqi civilians, are suffering significant casualties, and al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents, and Shia militiamen got away with barely a scratch for the carnage they created. The CNN account reported a grand total of one dead terrorist, and he was a suicide bomber.

Propaganda is as much about what you chose not to print, as much as it is about the angle from which you pursue what do decide to print. Not that many years ago, CNN took a vow of silence not to report the torture being committed by Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in order to maintain a Baghdad office.

I'm beginning to wonder exactly what CNN gains now by refusing to tell all of the truth of this current Iraqi war.

Nah. Couldn't be.