Name Game

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)-- An insurgent suicide bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body Saturday, triggering a huge explosion at a gas station near a mosque south of Baghdad and killing at least 54 people. The attack capped a string of three major bombings over the past four days that killed at least 120.

Police Capt. Muthanna Khaled Ali and Dr. Adel Malallah of the Jumhuri General Hospital in Hillah, the provincial capital, said the gas station blast in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, killed 54 and wounded at least 82 others. In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry put the casualty count at 51 dead and 82 wounded, but the report was believed based on a preliminary count.

Witnesses and police said the fuel tanker was moving slowly toward the pumps when an attacker ran to it and detonated his charge. A cluster of houses near the city-center gas station caught fire, the witnesses said. Gasoline stations in Iraq routinely include a number of small businesses selling tea, soft drinks and snacks and are often crowded with people.

...Three British soldiers from the 1st Battalion the Staffordshire Regiment were killed in a roadside bombing before dawn Saturday while on patrol in the city of Amarah, 180 miles southeast of Baghdad, British officials said. At lead nine Iraqi police died in other attacks across the country.

Iraqi police also arrested a would-be suicide bomber in Baghdad before he could detonate an explosive belt among a crowd mourning victims of an attack Wednesday that killed 27 people, mostly children, an official said. It was the second time a would-be suicide attacker was captured this week.

...In other violence Saturday, a suicide attacker detonated an explosive belt inside a police station 10 miles south of the northern city of Mosul, killing six policemen and wounding 20 others, Brig. Gen. Saeed Ahmed said.

A suicide attacker detonated his car Saturday near an Iraqi army convoy in the town of Hawija, 150 miles north of Baghdad, army Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin said. At least four soldiers were wounded, hospital officials said.

A suicide car bomber also struck an Iraqi police patrol in the Baghdad subdivision of Dora, killing three commandos and wounding five civilians, hospital and police officials said.

Excuse me, but I could use some clarification.

Are the people that the AP calls "insurgent suicide bombers" and "suicide attackers" terrorists?

I guess they don't think so at the AP.

Notice nowhere in the story is the word "terrorist" used.

Why? The people who carried out Saturday's attacks aren't members of an organized militia. They purposely target civilians of all ages in public places. They seek to murder, cause mayhem, and spread fear. In short, they use this terror as a political weapon. It's not traditional warfare.

For AP to avoid the word "terrorist" is to distort and report events inaccurately.

If the organization is concerned with using terms that carry no emotional or value judgments, then why does it use the term "suicide bomber." Why focus on the death of the murderer? This lends a martyr's status to a cold-blooded killer.

The act becomes suicide rather than homicide. To me, that carries a value judgment.

As many civilians were murdered today in Iraq as were killed in London on July 7th, over fifty. Last Wednesday, an attack killed twenty-seven, mostly children. The AP would prefer that you don't consider the attackers to be terrorists or think of what they did as homicide. That would be too judgmental.

Immediately after the London attacks, the BBC did call the bombers "terrorists" and referred to the acts as "terrorism." That changed quickly.

Tom Leonard writes:

Within hours of the explosions, a memo was sent to senior editors on the main BBC news programmes from Helen Boaden, head of news. While she was aware "we are dancing on the head of a pin", the BBC was very worried about offending its World Service audience, she said.

BBC output was not to describe the killers of more than 50 in London as "terrorists" although - nonsensically - they could refer to the bombings as "terror attacks". And while the guidelines generously concede that non-BBC should be allowed to use the "t" word, BBC online was not even content with that and excised it from its report of Tony Blair's statement to the Commons.

...Few people at the top of the BBC think that not calling terrorists "terrorists" is remotely absurd.

For the BBC and the AP to deny the nature of these individuals and the heinous acts that they commit is to deny reality.

A terrorist by any other name is still a terrorist.