Webloggin » WAPO Coverage of Somalia Airstrike

Is it any wonder that American’s are increasingly turning away from the dinosaur media in preference for alternatives that at the very least are not pretenders when it comes to owning up to who they are?

In the Washington Post’s case the reporters are pretending to be professional journalists – and they almost pull it off in their coverage of the Somalia airstrike. But unfortunately they can’t help their activist ways.

WAPO staff writer Karen DeYoung does a pretty good job of covering the U.S. airstrike in Somalia. In fact I would have to say that most of the MSM reporting that lead up to today fell short of drawing the connection between the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union and terrorism against the United States. DeYoung does a pretty good effort in this task.

One target of the strike, sources said, was Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese who is married to a Somali woman and has lived in Somalia since 1993 — the year of the attack against U.S. troops that was chronicled in the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” In a 2001 U.S. court case against Osama bin Laden, Sudani was described by a leading witness as an explosives expert who was close to the al-Qaeda leader.

Sudani is among several senior al-Qaeda operatives who, the Bush administration said, were being sheltered by Islamic fundamentalists who last year seized control of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. Late last month, the fundamentalists, who controlled much of southern Somalia, were driven out of the capital and were pushed toward the Kenyan border by Ethiopian troops, who installed an internationally backed transitional government.

Other al-Qaeda figures who allegedly had taken refuge in Somalia, U.S. officials said, included three participants in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

This information is finally starting to trickle out mainly because the press is forced to explain why the U.S. is going after the Islamic terrorists who were reported by the same press as a stabilizing force as late as last week.

But then DeYoung takes the opportunity to use the report as a drive by against the Bush administration by insinuating that perhaps the area surrounding the airstike is populated.

The AC-130 gunship is a heavily armed aircraft, with four cannons and a six-barrel Gatling gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute. But its most striking weapon is a computer-operated 105mm howitzer that juts sideways from the middle of the aircraft. An offensive behemoth that is relatively defenseless against counterattack, it flies only at night.

It is a blunt weapon that can scorch a wide swath of territory but is not well suited to precision attacks. Sources last night emphasized that intelligence reports indicated that the targeted area was “unpopulated.” [emphasis mine, quotes theirs]

I wonder if the area where Somali’s were executed and publicly flogged according to Qur’anic law by the grassroot Islamists was unpopulated? Ah, but then I digress…

The above was just the first drive by in the WAPO article. DeYoung followed that up with a stronger insinuation that the Bush administration is creating the “right to launch military attacks” where none exist – which is immediately and inexplicably followed up by recounting a U.S. strike in Iraq that killed women and children while missing the main target of al-Zawahiri. (History stops and starts with the Bush administration mind you).

The Bush administration has long claimed the right to launch military attacks in other countries when suspected terrorist targets have been identified. In 2002, a missile fired by a U.S. Predator drone over Yemen killed six suspected al-Qaeda terrorists riding in a car across the desert about 100 miles east of that nation’s capital. Officials later said the attack had been carried out with the approval of the Yemeni government

A Predator strike was ordered by the CIA last January in response to intelligence placing Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-ranking al-Qaeda leader and bin Laden’s chief deputy, at a compound near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The attack killed a reported 17 people, including six women and six children, but not Zawahiri, who apparently was not at the compound at the time of the strike.

Actually this isn’t that inexplicable. The mainstream media lives to criticize the U.S. government so this was expected. I knew I could count on the usual suspects to pitch in for the other guys at a time when America’s enemies are on the run. But then again I don’t make any bones about being pro-American – I’ll save that for the other guys.

Update: The BBC is reporting that the air strikes were carried out with the permission of the Somali government. This is sort of an understatement since the Somali government was under attack by the Islamists and the United States fears the spread of radical Islam in the area – especially the kind funded and backed by al-Qaeda.

Somalia’s interim President Abdullahi Yusuf backed the US action.

“The US has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,” he said in Mogadishu, a day after entering the city for the first time since the Islamists withdrew.

The BBC’s Adam Mynott in Nairobi says the attack seemed to be an opportunistic attempt by the US to destroy an al-Qaeda cell that they had been tracking for some time.

The cell is accused of responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and Dar Es Salaam, in Tanzania.

More than 250 people died in the two attacks.

The US also holds the same group responsible for attacks on an Israeli aircraft and Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya in 2002, in which 15 people died.

The BBC also reports that some civilians were killed including a 4 year old boy. I honestly don’t know what our government is expected to do. This is a no win situation, one that must weigh the costs of action against that of inaction – both of which will result in the loss of innocent life somewhere along the line. In the case of al-Qaeda and radical Islamists the definitive choice is that they will be wiped out. The alternative is the ethnic cleansing as has been seen in Darfur, Sharia law as has been seen in Somalia and attacks on American’s and other Western interests at home and abroad.