“When You Can’t Find A Witness, Just Quote Yourself”

More and more often, we’re seeing declining standards of journalism.  From Say Anything:

Good grief…

U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb: witness
By Noor Mohammad Sherzai

BATI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) – At least one U.S.soldier opened fire to scatter a crowd of civilians and police on Thursday after failed suicide bomb attacks on a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military and witnesses said.

A car bomb targeting a U.S. convoy in the village of Bati Kot, 15 km (9 miles) east of Jalalabad, killed the driver, two passengers and a nearby civilian, but none of the soldiers was hurt, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Afghan police securing the site in eastern Afghanistan were then attacked by an insurgent dressed in police uniform. He was killed by the police and coalition troops before he could detonate his suicide vest, the statement said.

To add to the confusion, a fire brigade vehicle speeding to the scene rammed into the U.S. and Afghan vehicles.

“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

So the premise of the article is that a witness saw at least one US soldier scatter a crowd around an Afghan suicide bombing by opening fire, and that one witness just happens to also be the author of the story.

Professional.  You can’t tell me that in the entire crowd with Sherzai couldn’t fine one single person to get a quote from aside from himself.

By the way, you gotta love how they make it sound as though the troop started firing into the crowd of police and civilians to disperse them.  We don’t learn until the end of the article that the soldier fired shots away from the crowd in order to break them up in case there should be another bombing. 

Nope…no liberal media bias! Not that this should come as a surprise from al-Reuters, the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” network.