The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the Allawi 'execution' story:
The most complete version of the story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. Two anonymous sources claimed that they had witnessed Allawi executing six handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners in a Baghdad jail. The executions were said to have taken place shortly before the Americans returned sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government June 28.
And Tony Blair, quoted in The Australian, says the claims are not true.
But there's been little high level U.S. acknowledgement of the claims, whereas Blair has commented on the story.
What's interesting to me is not so much the truth of the story, which I'm certainly in no position to know, but what it says about the relatedness of the media and politics of three Anglophone countries even over the Iraq issue, in which they are all tied up. [For the simple reason that they didn't participate in the invasion, Iraq has affected Canadian and New Zealand politics slightly less]
Even if the mainstream press did not really acknowledge the story -- the SF Chronicle story indicates it was on page A-12 of the print edition. The original SMH/Age stories were page 1 stories -- blogs did pick it up. For example, The New Republic mentioned the story in it's Iraqd blog -- not in the main magazine pages. And leading blogs like Political Animal did mention the story. Twice actually.
Thanks to Google, I can carry on this monitoring with little more than two minutes worth of checking my hotmail every morning ... but don't expect any more comments unless the story gets legs.
Posted by robe0419 at July 23, 2004 12:49 PM | TrackBack