{"id":1465,"date":"2003-04-08T00:25:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-08T04:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=1465"},"modified":"2003-04-08T00:25:00","modified_gmt":"2003-04-08T04:25:00","slug":"normality-high-farce-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2003\/04\/08\/00\/25\/normality-high-farce-and-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Normality, High Farce and Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/argument.independent.co.uk\/commentators\/story.jsp?story=395123\"><BLOCKQUOTE>Even as the Americans were fighting their way up the river and the F\/A-18s were returning to bombard the bank, the Iraqi Minister of Information gave a press conference on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle.<\/p>\n<p>As shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving American jets, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf announced to perhaps 100 journalists that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, the Americans were no longer in possession of Baghdad airport, that reporters must &#8220;check their facts and re-check their facts &#8216; that&#8217;s all I ask you to do.&#8221; Mercifully, the oil fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the river, so fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking behind Mr Sahaf&#8217;s back.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nMr Sahaf used his time to condemn the Arabic television channel al-Jazeera for its bias towards the US &#8230; And the more he spoke, the more one wanted to interrupt Mr Sahaf, to say: &#8220;But hang on, Mr Minister, take a look over your right shoulder.&#8221; But, of course, that&#8217;s not the way things happen. Why didn&#8217;t we all take a drive around town, he suggested defiantly.<\/p>\n<p>So I did. The corporation&#8217;s double-decker buses were running and, if the shops were shut, stallholders were open, men had gathered in tea houses to discuss the war. I went off to buy fruit.<\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even as the Americans were fighting their way up the river and the F\/A-18s were returning to bombard the bank, the Iraqi Minister of Information gave a press conference on the roof of the&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}