Too much flesh for Allawi

This is old news by now, but it's too big for us third shifters not to mention: It appears that Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi is a cold blooded killer. Not that the US has ever invaded a country and placed a ruthless murderer in power before... [cough]NgoDinhDiem[cough]

This being old news, I'll try to add whatever new details I can to the story. Holden, guest blogging at Atrios, has recognized the media's silence on this story. He commented on it at 3:00pm yesterday, and it's 3:09am right now. Almost 12 hours later, I imagine that's one news cycle, the only place where this story has picked up steam in the blogosphere. That's great, but it's certainly not the mainstream media, where this story doesn't have the legs it very well should have.

If I do a search on "Allawi" at Google News, there is no mention of this story on the first page of results. If I search for "Allawi murder", the story is the third item listed. One would figured a story saying Allawi is guilty of murder would be the first thing mentioned... If such a story were not being buried.

Hmm, maybe Google News just isn't powerful enough. Lets try Lexis-Nexis.

The alleged killings by Allawi happened at Al-Amariyah security centre. Searching Lexis for any references to "Al-Amariyah" in the past week brings up a measly 4 articles. Maybe that search is too detail oriented, but I can't think of a better one. I could query "Allawi shot", "Allawi cold blood", or "Allawi pistol", but I'll receive too many results that have no relevance to the story being buried. In fact, when I sort through the results, only 4-6 on the first pages are links to this story.

So, just to recap, we have a credible story accusing the new Iraqi Prime Minister of being a cold blooded killer, and it's been almost completely ignored by the US and international press. Amazing. Why do these things happen?