[A raid], in a village not far from the spot where Mr. Zarqawi was killed, appeared to cause a number of civilian deaths.
[. . .]
[. . .] General Caldwell said [t]he soldiers arrested 25 people and killed one [. . .].
That account was disputed in a village north of Baghdad, where Iraqis said American commandos killed five civilians in a Friday morning raid.
In Ghalibiya, near the scene of Mr. Zarqawi's death, a local Iraqi interviewed by telephone said American commandos dressed in black had raided the hamlet around 4 a.m. The Iraqi, a farmer named Mustafa Muhammad, said a group of local Iraqis, standing guard to protect their predominantly Sunni village from Shiite death squads, fired their guns into the air.
"They thought the Americans were a death squad, dressed in black," Mr. Muhammad said.
The American commandos threw a hand grenade in response, he said, killing five villagers.
"The people were saying that the Americans were looking for Zarqawi loyalists," he said.
Mr. Muhammad said a group of American soldiers wearing regular Army uniforms came to Ghalibiya later in the day to apologize. They promised to provide compensation for the dead Iraqis, he said.
The above appears in yesterday's New York Times. The thirty-seven paragraph article is by Dexter Filkins and entitled "U.S. Says Zarqawi Survived Briefly After Airstrike." By Dexter Filkins, so of course the above is buried in the story. C.I. pulled the information from eight of the thirty-seven paragraphs. Filkins didn't even lead with this event.
That's not surprising. The "award winning" Dexter Filkins went into Falluja in November 2004 and emerged from a slaughter with nothing but Happy Talk. (That's how awards are won!)
Instead, Filkins' focus is that Zarqawi (or "Zarqawi") didn't die in the explosion but in the aftermath. Day three of Zarqawi.
Day one was Thursday. John F. Burns wrote of the death first on Thursday morning -- the article was available by seven a.m. EST at the paper's website.) Friday, as C.I. noted in "NYT: Everybody wants to be a war pornographer," the paper ran not one, but four reports on the man, the myth. For the third day in a row, the paper wanted to offer nonsense about Zarawi. Filkins teased a reported death upon a stetcher into, more or less, a thirty-seven page article.
In addition, Michael Slackman (perfect last name for a Times reporter) wrote of Zarqawi's family ("Clan Calls Death of 'Martyr' a Blessing," June 10, 2006, A7).
Zarqawi (or "Zarqawi") died and the paper of record makes it the focus of three days of coverage, seven stories. They have an incident where civilians may have died and the military is denying it. Instead of reporting on that, they bury it within an overlong, overstuffed non-report. However, we're sure, should the story get traction, we can expect to read many stories in The New York Times, months from now, containing the sentence: "As The New York Times first reported . . ."
There is an obvious conflict between what the US military spokespeople are saying and what people in the village observed. That is a story. A reporter, knowing of the conflict, would pursue it. Not only does Dexy not pursue it, he buries the actual story, the only thing newsworthy, in his yada-yada nonsense that's not worthy of much more than a paragraph in the paper's "World Briefing" section. (And as a "Note to the Readers" in the corrections since the latest update contradicts John F. Burns' earlier reporting.)
This is a story. What really happened? Who is telling the truth? Real reporters would want to find the answers. Real reporters are in short supply in the Green Zone. The deaths will be "compensated" Filkins' article informs us.
What the price for a life of an innocent Iraqi? Utilizing David S. Cloud's "Compensation Payments Rising, Especially by Marines," C.I. estimates it's $2,500 a person. A miserly sum under any circumstance but when you consider the 1990 estimate on Iraqi family size (7.1 members per family), you're left with a little over four hundred dollars to each immediate member. Not exactly NBC's Windfall, is it?
But it does tell us the actual price the US government has placed on civilian life. Only the Kool Aid drinkers will be surprised.