April 28, 2003

STUPIDITY WATCH: MAUREEN DOWD DEPT.

        The oh so clever wordsmith, Maureen Dowd, courageously warns us of the "fedayeen"(formerly the cabal of neocons) among us:---"...the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board — Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman..."

        Well Maureen, perhaps you might read an article by fellow NYTimes journalist Craig Smith to become acquainted with some real Fedayeen and their victims:

        "...Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch.
        "I thought they were going to execute me," said Mr. Salman, sitting on the floor in his family's small house in a run-down neighborhood of the capital a week after being freed by a frightened prison warden as Americans took control of the city. "When one of the fedayeen said they were going to cut my tongue out, I said, `No, please, just kill me..."

         Do you think Mr. Salman and the thousands of other fedayeen victims might quibble with Ms. Dowd's use of the term?

Posted at 11:11 AM by