available from www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04cohen.html?ref=weekinreview.
171. More combat footage, however, seems to be posted to the site Liveleak.com. I have done no numerical analysis, that is simply this author's impression.
172. Compare virtually anything posted by American personnel to Liveleak to, for example, "Ruins of Nineveh in Mosul," posted to the MNF-I channel on December 15, 2008, which doesn’t even have a narration. Available from www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTforK9Jc1k.
173. Jim Krane, AP, "US Forces Storm Fallujah," Washington Times, November 8, 2004, available from www.washingtontimes.com/world/20041108-125353-3217r.htm.
174. Jim Miklaszewski explicitly reported on November 8, "At the same time, the US military will be fighting a propaganda war. As their first target last night, US and Iraqi troops seized Fallujah's general hospital to keep the insurgents from inflating the numbers of civilians killed or wounded." NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, NBC News, Lexis Nexis Academic. Interestingly, there was no suggestion in the report that there might have been a reason the marines would consider such a possibility, for example, that prior numbers might have been inflated and erroneously reported.
175. The ways in which the press suggested that what had been accomplished in Fallujah was not that important shifted over the course of the operation. The bottom line was that, since terrorist attacks continued in other parts of the country, even appeared to increase in the short term, and since the need to telegraph the operation to permit civilians to get out of the way also permitted terrorist leaders to leave, the operation (if not an out and out failure) was not portrayed as being a complete success, either. Thus Jamie McIntyre of CNN on November 10: "Mosques, used by insurgents as command posts, have come under heavy attack. But with most of Falluja resembling a ghost town, it is now growing more apparent that along with much of the population, many of the insurgents fled in advance of the assault. What is left appears to be a small number of desperate and disorganized remnants." Wolf Blitzer Reports, CNN, Lexis Nexis Academic.
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