Another piece of the Main Stream Media that doesn't know its arse from its elbow

The AFP published a brief article with an associated picture - "Tuesday August 14, 2007: An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City." The accompanying picture, as you can see, shows an elderly Iraqi woman holding the two bullets which had been fired at her house following a coalition forces raid. All very clear cut; what a lucky escape this woman had and what were the coalition forces thinking acting in such a reprehensible way...

Not quite, the objects being held up by the elderly Iraqi woman are not bullets, they are cartridges. Is that important? Yes it is, they are what exists before the bullet is fired. The bullet is the pointy bit at the end of the cartridge. To be more specific, these are unfired cartridges, they have not been fired by coalition forces or anyone else. If they are in this elderly Iraqi woman's hands, she didn't pick them up after they "hit her house", the only way they could have hit her house is if someone threw them at her house, or used a catapult or dropped them. Maybe, and this is just an idea, someone gave the cartridges to the elderly Iraqi woman so as to create another anti-Coalition forces story. What you have to ask is how did the AFP "reporter" fall for the story? What is such a "reporter" doing reporting from a war zone without any understanding of the difference between a bullet and a cartridge?

Thanks for the spot must go to The Dissident Frogman for the spot. If you want to see a nice piece of video by The Dissident Frogman explaining the difference between bullets and cartridges via the medium of mime then look at the video here.


There are other points to be made here:

1) regarding the blogosphere militaria pointing out that the cartridges are not US issue and look like AK47 cartridges, I cannot comment on this not knowing the differences between different ammunition types.

2) regarding AFP changing the ext to now read "An elderly Iraqi woman holds up two unspent bullets at her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 14 August 2007.”
So AFP have had the mistake pointed out to them and they have tried to cover their tracks. However this still leaves the problem that the original piece said that "An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house". The bullets obviously didn't hit her house so was she lying? If she didn't make the claim then maybe the photographer made the claim up, maybe he even gave the elderly Iraqi lady the cartridges to hold? Maybe the photographer is not an AFP staffer but a local stringer, maybe he is not entirely unbiased in his "choice" of photograph?

3) regarding the elderly Iraqi lady, she has "form", she has appeared in similar situations before. There was an article here but it is currently down. This elderly Iraqi lady is in fact an old favourite of mine and one of the prime examples of the MSM's gullibility. I will link to some more examples later.