The press and cable TV news carried the stark report all day Friday: A pair
of bloody suicide bombings carried out in Iraq by "mentally disabled" women
who were tricked into wearing bomb vests detonated from nearby by "al-Qaeda
in Iraq" operatives.
Of course, this is all too possible -- but most of the media presented it
as fact, rather than wild speculation. The Washington Post headline, for
example, carried no qualifier: 'Mentally Disabled Women Used in Bombings."
It turns out on the following day, that the evidence for the mentally
disabled part was that one of the alleged bombers' head recovered after the
blast was deformed, suggesting Down's syndrome. Now the AP and The New York
Times point out that the severed head may have merely been deformed by the
blast.
Also, McClatchy's crack Baghdad bureau now reports that Iraqi officials
"have made similar claims in the past" about mentally crippled bombers --
and a police official told them "that authorities were still investigating
whether the explosion at the second market might have come from a bomb
hidden in a cage or a box of eggs."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003705961
________________End of message________________
This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies).
Enquiries about list administration should be sent to [log in to unmask]
Archives and tools are located at:
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
You can VIEW, POST, JOIN and LEAVE the list by logging in to this web page.
|