SHE COULDN'T EVEN USE SCARE QUOTES?

About an hour ago, Associated Press writer Maggie Michaels filed a story from Baghdad about how Iraq's new prime minister will be either Ibrahim al-Jaafari or Ahmad Chalabi (ha!). Done with the top story, she moved right along to the unfortunate but necessary recap of the latest allied deaths:

The U.S. military also reported Wednesday that a U.S. soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action Tuesday in western Iraq. In addition, the bodies of eight Iraqis described as collaborators with U.S. forces were found in a desert area north of Baghdad.

If they aren't really collaborators, then what were they? And who described them as such? Of course we know the answer to both of these questions: The slain men were Iraqi soldiers or police, and the missing "describers" were the terrorists who killed them and then released a statement.

Could Ms. Michaels really be so dense as to know the word "collaborator" but know only its first definition and not its second? Unlikely. Why couldn't she just write "eight Iraqi security officials" and leave the murderers' opinion out of it?

I'd like a correction. I'll be on the lookout.

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posted by WWB at 2:32 PM |