Canadian Cynic

Iraqi PM Allawi personally executes prisoners. No highlights at 11.

For almost a day now, the blogosphere has been pretty much frantic with the news that the U.S. appointed and approved new Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi personally executed several handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners by shooting them through the head from close range with a pistol. (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, apparently.)

Holden over at Eschaton has posted a timeline of the developments. A few of the initial URLs:

The original article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
General article on Allawi, also from SMH.
An interview with the author Paul McGeough.


Holden also mentions (no surprise here) the absolutely deafening silence from the mainstream US media (go ahead, check out CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS or Faux News -- wall-to-wall Martha, with a smattering of Bush twins, but nary a reference to the new butcher of Baghdad, at least right now at 6:29 am Saturday morning.)

But here's where it gets interesting (yes, I really do have something original to contribute).

Holden does give credit to The Washington Times for this breaking story. What's odd is that, while you can read the story given the exact URL, that page is apparently unavailable from either the front page of the Washington Times, or even from the UPI breaking news page (again, as of 6:30 am this morning). In other words, it's as if the Times posted the story, then thought better of it and dropped all of the links to it, but left the actual page in place. Down the memory hole. It remains to be seen how long the exact link will last, or whether it too will mysteriously vanish.

UPDATE: More down the memory hole? Kevin Drum also has a posting on the Allawi controversy, and buried in the midst of comments to it is a reference that Matt Drudge linked to the story. In itself, not a big deal, but a quick trip over to http://www.drudgereport.com shows absolutely no mention of the story. Am I missing something? Or did another link just disappear?

UPDATE 2: For more breaking developments on this story, apparently, you still have to go overseas here.

UPDATE 3: Based on a private e-mail I just got, apparently, Matt Drudge really did have a news piece up at his web site, but it was taken down sometime late last night. My, but these news pieces have a short shelf life, don't they?