Cherif Bassiouni

update.

On April 26 I wondered why prominent US nes sources didn't mention that Cherif Bassiouni was removed as the head UN human rights investigator in Afganistant after he criticized US actions. His removal was neither secret nor routine. I found it reported in The Independent and The LA Times but not in New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN or The Onion (included so I couldn't be accused of including only sources known to be in the tank with the Bush administration).

One of my many vices is to repeatedly check my pathetically few hits on sitemeter. I found a referal from technorati listing this blog as the 6th leading source on "bassiouni afghanistan". This is amazing and not only because it makes me wonder how the hell technorati orders results after searches.

I guessed that I and the searcer had made the same misspelling of bassiouni. This is one of the main ways I get visits. I don't do it on purpos, but I'm often temtped. Prof Bassiouni teaches at DePaul U, so he has transliterated his name into the Latin alphabet some time ago guaranteeing a unique official correct spelling.

So I went back to searching the above listed news sources and found that
The New York Times, CNN and The Onion spell Bassiouni the same way I do. The searches also show that they haven't bothered to report his removal. My search of www.washingtonpost.com for Bassiouni gave no results so maybe they have special rules for spellings of names of professors at midwestern universities or something.
Of course CNN and the Post have more important things to write about.

Again, I am mainly disappointed in The Onion, but it does have an excellent article not by Tom DeLay

What does Bush have to do to get some coverage of his efforts against human rights inspections ? Grow dreadlocks and sing "I laid off Cherif but I did not fire his deputeeee?"