Look. I started off by asking a simple question about it. You claim it was the least important part of your OP, and yet it was the first thing listed in the title and the first point you made in your OP. Is it surprising that that was the first thing I tried to establish the truth about? Note what I said as a point of explanation in my second post:
I think I’ve clearly established that you misrepresented O’Reilly on the first point. He did not “excuse” the events that allegedly* happened at Haditha, as he explicitly indicated that if Americans murdered anyone, they should be tried and punished accordingly.
If, in fact, O’Reilly purposely reversed the roles of the players in Malmedy, then he should be condemned for it. I’m with you 100%. But let’s look at what might have been the source of his error. Remember, he was looking for examples of situations in WWII similar to the events that allegedly happened in Haditha (emphasis added):
Note that Chenogne is in Belgium, which was also mentioned by O’Reilly.
So, in a very quick verbal exchange, O’Reilly screwed up and called out the Malmedy masacre instead of the response that Americans made to that masacre. For that he owes a sincere apology to the Americans who were killed at Malmedy.
Having said that, for one who accuses me of missing your central point, you have missed O’Reilly’s central point: Masacres such a Haditha and Chenogne happen in every major armed conflict. They should be dealt with quickly and appropriately, and those involved should be punished. However, they are not per se a symptom of a policy gone wrong. That is not to say that the policy might not be wrong, but other proof is needed to determine that.
Now, I’m not saying that my explanation is what actually happened (although the video cite in your OP indicates that it probably was). I’m only suggesting that the events surrounding Malmedy do indeed contain a sitution not unlike what allegedly happened at Haditha. And while the incident I described above involved solidiers, not civilians, there was an additional (alleged?) event in Malmedy itself that did involve civilians, and happened almost immediately after the German masacre of US prisoners:
Your characterization of that mistake as equivlaent to Holocaust denial is absurdly out of proportion.
In summary, I think I see the source of O’Reilly’s error. Although the error was not central to the argument he was making, he needs to issue a calrification and an apology to those he offended. If he doesn’t, he is indeed a scumbag. But he’s still more right than wrong about Haditha, as tragic as that seems to be.
*Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the exact events of that day have not been established. Once they are, I’ll no longer refer to them as “alleged”.
Having thought about this more, let me tell you what I see wrong with your Pitting, Finn. It doesn’t appear that you actually saw the O’Reilly segment, or read the entire transcript. Instead, you took the Olberman piece at face value, ratcheted it up a notch (by claiming O’Reilly lied), and rushed off a Pit OP. It’s pretty clear that he didn’t lie (ie, deliberately state something false) as there is no reason for him to have done so. That particular incident was not central to his argument, and he could’ve picked any number of incidents (including the one he appears to have meant) to make that point. Unless, of course, you think that his secret mission is to besmearch the WWII armed forces.
It’s clear to me that what happend is that O’Reilly was sloppy with the facts. He sayd “Malmedy” instead of “The response to Malmedy”. He actually did issue a correction (which is contained in your OP’s audio/videa cite, btw) as he should have, although he didn’t applogize for any insult he may have caused (which I think he should have, but that’s his business). Frankly, though, Olberman has been playing a game of “gotcha” with O’Reilly, and I can’t imagine anyone who could run a 1 hour daily show without making errors. We could do this all day with any talk show host.
The real Pit-able offense here is what initiated this O’Reilly segment in the first place. Apparently Congressman Murtha made some comments about the Haditha incident as being an indication of things going wrong in Iraq. According to O’Reilly, this undermines troop morale. He’s made this claim many times before-- that Congressmen shouldn’t criticize the war in public because it’s bad for the troops. Now, maybe Murtha didn’t put enought “ifs” in his comments (eg, if these allegations are true), but BFD. As a Congressman he has to be able to speak ourt about policy. The troops know the war is becoming unpopular, and they know that some Congressmen think that we should exit immediately. I think they can handle that. But O’Reilly wants to muzzle criticism of the war and he simply won’t hear the other side. That’s where he’s dead wrong. In fact, that’s a dangerous idea for a free society.
Now, the particular point he was trying to make when he mistakenly referred to “Malmedy” was a reasonable point, I think, even if you disagree with him. I tend to think he’s more right than wrong, and as someone said earlier if you can’t stomache these instances then it’s good indication the war isn’t worth it (which is a separate issue). War is, afterall, hell. I’m actually more concerned with what appears to have been a cover-up by senior military officials. Not to minimize the civilian deaths (they were horrible), but you put a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds in a situation where it’s hard to tell the enemy from civilians, and bad things are gong to happen sometimes. If our brass over there isn’t quick to investigate and take action, however, and particularly if they turn a blind eye, we can expect these types of incidents to escalate.
That’s spectacularly unconvincing. The man is clearly trying to air a laundry-list of “American” atrocities, and you think there’s no motive for him to embellish it? Pff. Regardless, I agree that his “argument”'s factual status is probably the least important thing here. Of course, I disagree that it’s because he’s basically right; quite the opposite.
His underlying point is full of shit, if it’s that this sort of thing is to be expected in Iraq, and that Haditha is therefore not a sign of things going horribly wrong. Yes, atrocities occur in war. But hang on; we’re not supposed to be in a war in Iraq, right? This, if we listen to the Bush and Blair administrations, is most certainly not a civil war, or a war of occupation. This is nation-building now, right? Liberation? Establishment of democracy? Since when were atrocities endemic to such noble causes? Two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished”, is it really O’Reilly’s contention that we should expect Iraq to be a quagmire on a par with the middle of World War fucking II? That doesn’t sound like a great argument in favour of “policy”, to me. Claims that Iraq would turn into the sort of situation in which atrocities occur were scoffed at, prior to and during invasion. After all, we’d learnt our lessons from previous cock-ups, hadn’t we?
And now we’re supposed to swallow the idea that these sort of things are to be expected, and that we can’t blame the fucked up policy, the fantastical predictions of democratic splendour, the rose-tinted glasses that have landed us with an Iraq in which 35+ people a day are getting murdered in Baghdad alone? Tell me: if the Iraq experiment hadn’t catastrophically failed in just about every way imaginable, would there be such a tense situation as to cause these atrocities? Yeah, we could’ve expected this sort of thing - if we’d anticipated everything going completely to shit. What was Bill’s opinion on that, again?
Well, then convince me that he lied. Why on earth would he deliberately make something up when he has absolutely no need to do so? As I noted, the cite in the OP contains a clip of O’Reilly correcting the error. So what is “spectacularly unconvicing” about: Talking head makes factual error, issues correction.
Oh, now we’re going to get into a semantic debate about whether this is war or an armed conflict. Color me uninpressed with that argument. People are killing each other, call it what you want.
But that’s just a strawman. I never said the policy wasn’t fucked up. And we’re not talking about 35+ people a day getting killed. I said that the incident in Haditha (about which we still don’t know all the facts, btw) is not per se an indictment of the war itself. If it is, then you can indict every war that has ever been fought, and where does that get you? That’s not to excuse what was (allegedly) done in Haditha. No one is excusing it, since no one is advocating we ignore it. I speficially said that the men, if found guilty, should be punished approporiately. O’Reilly said that, too.
Those Olbermann video links posted above are completely damning. Here’s Bill O’Reilly’s exact words to Wesley Clark:
Later, Bill took a letter from a viewer who wrote:
O’Reilly replied to this saying,
The official transcript on the Fox news site was later altered to read “At Normandy” rather than “at Malmedy” which is a blatant attempt at a coverup.
I don’t see how O’Reilly’s “correction” jibes with his actual statement to Gen. Clark. O’Reilly emphasizes that it was US forces doing the capture, that the SS forces had their hands in the air and were gunned down. Then he takes the time to emphasize that this is a documented fact and Clark should know it.
O’R made a lengthy, emphatic statement that the US massacre of Nazis was a well known fact. O’R’s later claim that he was talking about some other unnamed, later massacre is at odds with his specific insistance that Malmedy was scene.
If O’R had simply said, “Right, sorry, I got it backwards. It was SS capturing US” that would have been a correction of a reasonable error. Instead he insists that he was right, US had committed the massacre at some other place.
His insistance that he was right coupled with the attempt to whitewash the transcript stinks to high heaven.
I’ve read most of this thread although I am guilty of skimming a bit toward the end.
I’m a little surprised that I didn’t see one thing addressed: assuming the Bill O’R indeed referred to post-Malmedy retaliation by American soldiers against prisoners of war, isn’t that qualitatively different from the Haditha allegations?
Not that either one is excusable, but angry soldiers taking out rage on enemy soldiers who had until very recently been shooting at them feels distinctly different than shooting a 1-year-old. There’s no possibility the one-year-old killed your buddy in a previous ambush.
Try this: Talking head makes outrageously wrong and offensive allegation that first surfaced among anti-Semites seeking to deflect attention from Nazi atrocities just after WWII. Talking head does not make a real apology, but instead refers vaguely to some other, undocumented incident.
It’s not just semantics (gee, didn’t know you were anti-semantic, John ;)).
If Congress had actually followed the Constitution and issued a declaration of war against Iraq (with the full and legitimate debate that such a serious step should entail) we might not be in this mess right now.
For crying out loud, this is like punching sand. The modern art of debate, people: sound like you’re strenuously disagreeing, while shaving your points of contention until they’re so narrow as to be non-existent.
John, read the transcript. O’Reilly is attempting to sound like he strenuously disagrees with Gen. Clark, while limiting himself to stating the bleeding obvious. Clark is trying to make a broader point about the ramifications of atrocities for the Iraq mission’s eventual success, but is repeatedly shouted down by O’Reilly with his mindnumbingly facile point that atrocities occur in war. Great; trot out a truism, back it up with some “cites” - don’t worry about whether they’re true or not - shout it loud enough and it has all the look of debate without engaging a single braincell. And lo! “Mission accomplished!” Gen. Clark is on TV trying to criticise the administration, and O’Reilly is battling him tooth and nail. Never mind that the battleground he’s chosen is utterly irrelevant; never mind that he’s doing it using evidence that is false (intentionally or not). What’s important for this sort of political TV is that he appears to be arguing.
There’s a phrase I can’t get out of my head at the moment: “We can’t see the forest for the trees.” This is exactly the problem, but in O’Reilly’s case the fixation is deliberate. By hammering on the irrelevant point that violent circumstances breed atrocity, he gets to completely ignore any question of how we got there, and how we might possibly get out. This is utterly apparent in the transcript, where as soon as Clark starts to question whether the alleged atrocity is a symptom of deterioration, and examine the consequences this has for withdrawal, O’Reilly pounces with his canned bullshit about atrocities being a fact of war. Yeah, Bill, but that doesn’t absolve us of the need to deal with them, or to consider their effects. And you’ll turn round and say you never said it did, and you’re right - but it sure stopped us talking about them for a bit, didn’t it?
Yes, oh yes I’ve seen the light! It’s not about Bill saying that American victims of the Nazis were war criminals, and then not apologizing. Oh no, it’s about what one of those Damn Libruls did! Thank you for showing me the light. Thank you.
Gee thanks mister! Will you also deliberately make up things and claim that I started my OP with something that I didn’t say while nitpicking for all you’re worth about accurate characterizations? You will? Swell mister!
Believe it or not, disagreeing with your reading of an exchange doesn’t, in fact, mean I didn’t read it. Nice try though. Nor does it mean I just repeat what talking heads say, but it’s awfully nice of you to suggest.
Clearly. Just as clearly as the first thing I said in my OP was about Haditha. Yeep.
Your commitment to intellectual honesty is just astounding.
So because this incident, which he used to make a big ol’ dramatic point, can’t have been altered deliberately because, well, there are other incidents out there. And if you believe otherwise you’re a paranoid who thinks that O’Liely wants to smear all our WWII armed forces.
Your commitment to acting in good faith is just so admirable John!
Pathetic.
He clearly said “at Malmedy”. And he described the scene in some detail. You need to make all this shit up in order to nitpick me and defend good ol’ Bill.
Again, pathetic.
You know John, it’s getting rather obivous that you have an axe to grind here, and personally I don’t appreciate your little agenda. First you try to take me to task for my ‘innacurate’ portrayal, when many other people seem to agree that it was an accurate gloss.
Meanwhile, while nitpicking for all you’re worth, you deliberately distort what General Clark said, later changing your mind and admitting that O’Liely probably nitpicked him on false grounds. And now, of course, you make this crap up. *John, the thread isn’t even two pages now, why do you think you can make stuff up, and I, as the guy who wrote the OP, wouldn’t even notice? *
What was the actual very first thing I said? The very first damn sentence of my OP?
Obviously your commitment to accuracy in verbiage and commitment to ruthless nitpicking doesn’t apply to yourself.
Moroever, as I already pointed out, I included the part about Haditha to give it context. And again, before you try distorting that, what did I actually say?
If you were being intellectually honest, at all, instead of grinding an axe you would’ve realized which issue I felt was important.
Yes. You latched on to one throwaway phrase that was only included for context and I explicitly said I wasn’t concerned about. It’s mighty odd, and your further conduct is more than passing strange.
It’s good to think things, John.
But why you seem to think that an interpretation that I have, that numerous other posters in the thread share, can be ‘debunked’ by furiously inconsequential nitpicking, well, I have no idea. Raise your fists to the sky in triumph if it makes you feel better.
I’ve already addressed this, John. In a rather detailed paragraph. I’m just going to assume that your agenda is, again, making you deliberately twist and ignore what I’ve actually said.
Ah well.
And he didn’t give them that apology, now did he?
Are you typing just to hear your keys go clickity-clack, John? In that big ol’ paragraph explaining why normalizing an event excuses it’s extraordinary nature, I addressed why this ‘point’ was not helpful, and a Red Herring.
Again, my furious nitpicker, you’d do best to maintain some standards of decorum while trying to rail on me for “mischaracterized” interpretations. As I already pointed out, you distorted General Clark’s quote to serve your own axe grinding. It is less than honorable that you keep it up. Yet again, Clark was talking about discipline breaking down “at the margin”, not indicting the entire strategic plan.
Nice talking point, but you screwed the pooch on the dismount.
Saying that the victims of the Nazis themselves were the real war criminals is exactly what would happen in both instances.
In what world, exactly, is “the victims of the nazis were the actual war criminals” more right than wrong? Your reaching and nitpicking is reaching rather epic proportions here.
You can’t simply assert that “the United States committed atrocities like this in every war” without providing any evidence to back it up. For example, if you’re talking about the Belgium massacre, you’re making a false analogy. Refusing to accept the surrender of enemy soldiers is different in kind from kicking in a civilian’s door and shooting a one-year-old infant.
When has the United States Army done anything like that before?
Exactly. Clark said essentialy the same thing to O’Liely and was ignored, and I have made the same challenge in this thread, and likewise I’ve had nobody touch it.
Well, probably Mai Lai, but it’s hardly standard procedure. But your point is, of course, spot on… and I have to question the motivation of those who want to conflate these seperate instances in order to claim that American soldiers deliberately murdering civilians in an act of revenge isn’t indicitave that there are problems at the margins and that certain aspects of our policy need to be revised.
Mass killing of civilians by American troops was pretty commonplace during the Philippines War. That was a hundred years ago. Civilians were murdered by American soldiers en masse during the Plains Wars, which were 120-130 years ago or so. Of course you had atrocities of various sorts in Vietnam, some organized, such as the bombardment of civilains in Cambodia, and some not, such as My Lai. These are fairly well documented occurrences. It’s nothing new by any means.
Not that this excuses O’Reilly accusing the murdered of being murderers. That’s frankly kind of insane.
And the (alleged) massacre at No Gun Ri in the Korean war, which has many parallels to the alleged events at Haditha.
You know, that’s EXACTLY what I take issue with O’Reilly about when he disagrees with someone. Instead of saying “they’re wrong” or “they made a mistake”, he says “they’re insane”. That only severs to shut off debate. In this particular case it is obvious to anyone looking at this objectively that O’Reilly did not “lie through his teeth”, as the OP claims. It’s clear as day that he either misspoke, or got his facts mixed up. I see no reason to ascribe an insidious motive to someone’s actions when a slip-up fits the facts more closely. If someone wants to call him on a “bad analogy” since the reaction to Malmedy invovled US troops killing German troops (not civilians), that’s a point well taken.
Even the claim that he had the transcript altered to “Normandy” to hide his mistake makes no sense at all. That makes the mistake look worse, since few people are familiar with Malmedy but most everyone knows about Normandy and associates it with heroism and many deaths of US and Allied troops. I think a transcription error is a more likely explanation. Anyone who has every watched the news with closed captioning on sees that sort of the thing quite often.
So, do you honestly think O’Reilly lied about Malmedy (ie, deliberately distorted the truth) or do you think it was a stupid mistake?
Either way, he should have had the decency to apologize for it. I also think he would gleefully crucify any liberal commentator who made such a mistake.
I can think of so many things that O’Reilly should be Pitted over: His claim that there is a war on Christmas, his charactarization of his opponents as “insane”, his insistance (as in this case) that Congressmen should not ciriticize the war, etc. But Pitting a pundit for getting his facts mixed up during a heated verbal exchange? And when said pundit did offer a public correction? I just don’t see it.
Yeah, but that’s what happened in Oct 05, he got it wrong twice in less than one year!
He really seems to believe “Tailgunner Joe” got it right.
Hmm,
“…Bill O’Reilly holds a degree in History from Marist College…”
“…Bill’s Favorite Books
The Boys Of Pointe Du Hoc by Douglas Brinkley
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins…”
I can see how a guy with a limited education and no personal interest in the subject could get the SS confused with the US. Maybe.
O’Reilly ain’t that guy.
Given that he made the same “mistake” not 8 months ago, and was corrected on the facts then (according to Olbermann, “he got beaten up appropriately in some places”), yes, I quite sincerely believe that O’Reilly was intentionally lying this time. When one knows something is a falsehood, yet continues to repeatedly misrepresents it as a fact in spite of that knowledge, it is fair to conclude that that person is deliberately lying. Especially when the perpetrator has a reputation for intentionally lying to serve his own agenda.
And continued, with varying degrees of intensity, right up to the US pullout / Philippine independence. Did you know where “waterboarding” was invented, and by whom? And the British invented concentration camps, in the Boer War.
Offhand, I don’t know of *any * war of significant length where an occupying force hasn’t indulged in depressingly similar atrocities, born of simple fear, born of being badly outnumbered and unable to trust *any * of the local populace, most of whom want them to leave, combined with a stubborn command structure deluded into thinking they’re pacifying and liberating the place instead.
It’s spelled “My Lai”, btw.
The problem I have is that I can’t think of any good reason for him to purposely lie about this. It makes no sense whatsover. Someone earlier tried to insinuate that it derives from some antisemetic strain in his psyche. I doubt that. I can imagine that he got that erroneous “factoid” stuck in his brain at some point, and in the heat of a verbal exchange went to what he thought was a safe rebuttal.
Never ascribe malice to what can be explained by incompetence.
A common fallacy, and not when the lie serves no useful purpose since there are a plethora of other, valid examples that could be used instead. Habitual liars make just as many legitimate mistakes as the rest of us. Each case has to be looked at individually. If you care to read the 30-odd page thread titled “Lying whore” in the Pit, you can see why.
