FLUNKING AP HISTORY

I love America, and Saddam is a bad man, and I'm glad he was caught.

That being said,

Today's SF Chronicle gave us an Associated Press-supplied Timeline of Saddam Hussein's life, up to and including his capture a couple of days ago. And of course, it's a telling study into what the media will and wont say about Saddam and America.

-- March 28, 1988: Uses chemical weapons against Kurdish town of Halabja, killing estimated 5,000 civilians.

That's right, he "gassed his own people!" Yet no mention of where those weapons originally came from.

Flash forward to this past April:

-- April 9: Jubilant crowds greet U.S. troops in Baghdad, go on looting rampages, topple 40-foot statue of Hussein.

In baseball, if you're batting .333, you're doing pretty well. Not if you're a writer for the Associated Press. The crowds that greeted the troops in Baghdad were neither wholly jubilant nor were they large crowds of the Belgrade/Moscow variety. And it was lovely of ol' AP to attribute the toppling of the big Saddam statue to the Iraqi people.



There's something very tankish just past the left edge of this photo's range... and does the surrounding crowd strike you as "jubilant"?

But good work on the looting, bravo. One out of three ain't bad, AP!

More late tonight...