Dailies Contact Lenses

How is it that Mian Ridge from the Monitor has such blatant misrepresentations in this news story re:Sri Lanka?

"Chief among the complaints is delaying the return of more than 250,000 displaced Tamils" CSM needs to verify numbers because at my last count there were 220K in IDP Camps and over another 5,000 IDPs from Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala backgrounds were resettled yesterday. Family reunification continues as appropriate depending on clearances and separation of combatants from non-combatants. "Last Friday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced he would ensure the return of all refugees by January" Actually, what President Rajapaksa said was that his target was to have 70% of IDPs resettled by the end of January. "The government said Mr. Elder, who had said recently that the island's monsoon rains would cause chaos in the camps, was "spreading propaganda" The propoganda that Mr. Elder was spreading were comments related to the "months of hell" that children and combatants had to endure prior to reaching IDP facilities without any consideration for the THIRTY years of hell that they had to face at the hands of the LTTE and its recruitment and indoctrination wing - including that by fellow Aussie "Aunty" Adele Balasingham, a nurse from down under that taught women and children to be underage soldiers, suicide bombers and to take cyanide instead if surrendering - our rehab camps are full of young women who tell the stories of "Aunty" Adele. "Treating every Tamil as a terrorist?" We are certainly not treating every Tamil as a terrorist and in fact there are more Tamils that live in areas outside of the North and East and these people also have been terrorized, run out of their communities by LTTE and its affiliate organizations. We are daily discovering influx of LTTE from overseas, movements within and outside of IDP camps and huge stockpiles of weaponry. ""It seems absolutely racist, to treat every Tamil as if he was a potential member of the Tamil Tigers," says Suhas Chakma of the Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights." Asian Center for Human Rights knows much better than casting such aspersions on Sri Lanka for this is patenty untrue. "Only days before Mr. Rajapaksa's comment, British television aired a video that apparently showed soldiers killing unarmed, naked, and blindfolded Tamils – which would constitute a serious violation of international law – during the last and bloodiest phase of the war." There have been 3 independent studies done on this video and thay have all proved that the backstory, timeline and other details do not add up including elements of editing, date stamp VO and SOT. "The footage was obtained by Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, an organization made up of several dozen expatriate Sri Lankan journalists, which said the film was taken by a Sri Lankan soldier in January using his mobile phone." Even the edited version shown on British television as "original" video has a date stamp that does not correspond to the January time frame, the original on Asian Tribune indicates that language spoken by "soldiers" is Tamil, the investigation provided to the Sri Lanka government shows that there has been sound editing, discrepancy in regulation uniform and that the footage was not shot using a camera phone. http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2009/09/20/new02.asp 3 studies by three different organizations have all proved major credibility gaps for both Journalists for Democracy and the video itself. There is also historical references of LTTE commiting such vile propoganda techniques. http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20090921/bs_prweb/prweb2910884_1 Why didn't Tamils for Obama write a letter to Raj Ratnam??? http://www.colombopage.com/archive_091/Sep1253514383CH.html http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=62107 http://www.colombopage.com/archive_091/Sep1253455414CH.html CHECK DRAFTS NOW RAJA/GENERAL F/PEIRIS/BEN B CHECK DRAFTS NOW GATES/RAJA/BEN B/GENERAL F/GENERAL P

Public Comments

1. it is because of deception.