… how long till one types up The New York Times?
Here’s how the NY Times reported on Falluja Friday:
Black Flags Are Deadly Signals as Cornered Rebels Fight Back
… The flags are the insurgents’ answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and – in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon – concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.
The insurgents are coordinating their attacks at a time when they have nowhere left to run. American forces have pushed south of Highway 10, the boulevard that runs east to west and approximately bisects Falluja. American intelligence officers believe that many of the insurgents have retreated as far as the Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area that is the southernmost neighborhood in Falluja.
But beyond Shuhada is only the open desert, patrolled by the United States Army. So the insurgents are turning and fighting. And at night, they are setting up deadly ambushes in the moonless pitch blackness of Falluja’s labyrinthine streets. …
Leave it to a NY Times reporter to find a way to portray ominously a foe left with only Napoleonic-era communications technology. Imagine how they’d report on the three idiots who spray-painted vulgarities on NC GOP headquarters, mock-lynched Bush and Kerry in effigy and failed to set the place ablaze: At night, they set up a horrific scene. In one tactic that goes back at least as far as the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstructionist South, and in another tactic that goes back at least as far as fifth grade …
Anyway, look who’s terrified in the report by the Times (UK):
THE last hours of the mujahidin are terrifying. With the city they once ruled with the absolute authority of medieval caliphs now overrun by American and Iraqi troops, they have to keep moving. To pause even for a few minutes can mean instant death from an unseen enemy.
A group of 15 fighters dressed in black and carrying an array of weapons ducked into a two-storey house in war-torn southern Fallujah yesterday morning. Their movement was picked up by an unmanned spy plane that beamed back live footage to a control centre on the edge of the city. Within minutes, an airstrike was called and the house disappeared in a giant plume of grey smoke.
From a house across the road, the explosion flushed out another group of guerrillas. Deafened by the blast, they stumbled out into the street, formed a ragged line and started off on the marathon to postpone their deaths, the drone dogging their every step.
Unmanned drones dogging your every step and calling in airstrikes vs. black flags … that’s like
