If there’s a way to give a story an anti-US spin, count on the Guardian to find it. Here’s a story about the prison revolt subtitled Guardian reveals blunders by US:

A single, horrific, atrocity can provide the defining moment in a war. America is still facing demands to apologise for the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the remains of charred Iraqi soldiers on the Mutla ridge outside Kuwait were a chilling illustration of Washington’s overwhelming firepower in the Gulf war.

That comma-laden first sentence reveals the agenda: the battle at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort was an “horrific, atrocity,” similar to My Lai and the killing of fleeing Iraqi soldiers.

As someone who was passionately against the Vietnam War, I have no trouble with characterizing My Lai as an atrocity. However, it was not an atrocity sanctioned by US policy; it was a rogue action in a situation that was out of control, committed by soldiers who were scared out of their wits, and the people responsible for it were tried and convicted. Who exactly is “demanding” that the US apologize for My Lai? (Besides the Guardian, that is…)

But calling the attack against fleeing Iraqi soldiers an “atrocity” is utterly dishonest. Those soldiers had not surrendered and they were not civilians; in fact, they were fleeing with all their weapons, after robbing, torturing, and murdering as many Kuwaiti citizens as possible. (And those Kuwaiti citizens are now exhibiting very little gratitude toward the US—but that’s for another post.)

Mullah Faizal, the Taliban’s commander at Kunduz, had told the foreign fighters to give up their weapons - but failed to tell them that they would then be taken into custody, it emerged from Amir Jan’s account: “The foreigners thought that after surrendering to the Northern Alliance they would be free,” he said. “They didn’t think they would be put in jail.”

Apparently war has conferred psychic powers on Amir Jan, since this statement is reported as fact. But even if it’s true, how is what they “thought” about their capture relevant?

By mid-afternoon, the prisoners had been piled into five trucks. Said Kamal, Gen Dostam’s head of security, arranged for prisoners in the first three trucks to be body searched. But with dusk approaching, the convoy set off with the last two trucks not searched. This proved to be disastrous.

And this is exactly what I wrote on Wednesday; the real mistake was the failure to adequately search the prisoners, a mistake which was made by General Dostam’s head of security—not the United States.

Wading through the muck, we eventually reach the turgid paragraphs that inspired a Guardian editor to come up with that “US blunders” subtitle:

Two CIA agents, Johnny “Mike” Spann and “Dave”, had also been instructed to screen the Taliban fighters for possible links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida organisation. From a distance Dave looked Afghan. He even spoke Uzbek, the language of Gen Dostam’s soldiers, and wore a salwar kameez beneath a long coat. But his square-cropped haircut gave the game away, indicating he was American.

Two television crews - from Reuters and the German station ARD - had also turned up at the fort. They were in the prisoners’ compound, together with Dave and Mike, who had begun interviewing suspects.

At 11.25am the Taliban fighters were marched to the central grassy compound of their mini-citadel. The guards tied up the first eight prisoners, Amir Jan said. “The prisoners suspected they were about to be shot. They attacked one of the guards and grabbed his gun,” he added. The foreign fighters also assumed that the television journalists were American soldiers who had come to film their execution.

Again, Amir Jan claims telepathic abilities, and this time the Guardian reporters flesh it out with a little mind-reading of their own, telling us what the foreign fighters “assumed,” with absolutely no corroboration.

So it turns out that the “US blunders” reported by the Guardian amount to nothing more than routine, necessary interrogations of prisoners of war—suicidal prisoners who turned on their captors and fought to the death.

This is axe-grinding, not journalism.