(1)
As you have no doubt heard, read or seen, the US military in Iraq has announced that we have killed Haitham al-Badri, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be the mastermind behind the 2006 and 2007 attacks on the al-Askari shrine in Samarra.

The 2006 attack is widely regarded as the trigger that set off the probably inevitable sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq.

Here’s what I found most interesting about media coverage of this story: the BBC‘s headline reads: “US ‘kills’ key Iraq shrine bomber”. That’s right, they put kill within quotes.

Nothing in the story specially calls anything in the U.S. military’s account into question. The story contains standard disclaimer language, like “US troops in Iraq say they have killed an al-Qaeda leader…”, “Mr Badri’s body has reportedly been identified by people close to him”, and “(t)he US claim came as mortar attacks killed at least 11 people…”.

They’re just choosing to underline — in their headline — that this is what the US military in Iraq is saying, and what they say is not necessarily to be believed by inquiring minds.

So I did a little search of other headlines for the story. Nobody else disses us that badly. But take the Reuters headline: “U.S. says kills mastermind of pivotal Iraq attack”. When did you last see a disclaimer like that “says” in a headline?

AP has both “Iraq: US military says it killed al-Qaida mastermind of Golden Dome minaret bombing” and “U.S. kills Iraq shrine bomber”. (Before someone jumps in and embarrasses himself again with some rant about how can we know whether the newspaper or AP was responsible for the headline, both versions of this headline appeared in multiple publications, even though I gave just one link each. Unless newspapers are plagiarizing each other’s headlines, the headlines came from AP.)

(2)
Interestingly, both the BBC and Reuters identify al-Badri as a leader of al-Qaeda as opposed to al-Qaeda-in Iraq.

AP describes him as an “an al-Qaida leader” and then “the al-Qaida in Iraq emir of Salahuddin province” in the first story, but only as an “al-Qaida mastermind” in the second.