David Chater of Sky News acts as propagandist for the insurgents

With voice full of foreboding, David Chater, on the Sky News channel this morning, gives his report on the 'uprising' around several Iraqi cities.

The viewer is confronted first with three screaming terrified Japanese hostages roughly grasped by masked insurgents who hold knives to the hostages' throats. The scene is clearly meant to intimidate viewers in the West. Chater makes no clarifying remark, leaving the action to have its full intentional effect. So far, so good for insurgent propaganda.

Vision passes next to a smoking American tank with a wounded and bleeding solder climbing through the hatch and collapsing. The tank's crew, says Chater dramatically, 'struggles out of the burning wreckage, weakened by their wounds and still in shock.' This is the cost, he emphasises, of 'trying to pacify for the town.' Obviously, it is entirely futile for the Americans to try and do anything about the murderous psychopaths who kill civilians in the attempt to set up a Taliban-style rule. Excellent free propaganda for the psychopaths.

The vision passes to several insurgents in full action in Fallujah's streets. The shoot, they run, they dive for cover...'well trained and well armed,' says Chater admiringly, they 'show no signs of giving up.' Do you get it? In contrast to the beaten bleeding Americans, the insurgents are on a victorious roll.

To fully push home the contrast (inflating the spirits of the insurgents and the Moslem world, and deflating the spirits of the West), vision switches to an F-16 Tomcat carrying out manoeuvres to evade ground-to-air missiles. We see the plane swinging and rolling and throwing out flares. At no time do we see any missile. Instead of this being a normal routine manoeuvre of the pilot to escape possible missile attack, Chater sees it quite differently.

The American command, he asserts triumphantly, will not like these scenes of a 'Tomcat F-16 struggling to escape the missiles...Sunni insurgents have scores of missiles in their possession...' Get it? The planes have no hope.

The next scene is of a provisions convoy in flames on the outskirts of Baghdad. Insurgents appear on the scene waving their guns, cheering and celebrating the glorious victory over the provisions convoy. Then changing tone, Chater reports that throughout Baghdad calls went out from mosques to help the people of Fallujah (you know, under attack by the nasty invaders). There are encouraging scenes (for the insurgents) of people rallying around helping.

Finally, there is the unpaid advertisement going worldwide of one of the Al Qaida beasts brandishing a rifle and calling for the moslems to 'terrorise the Americans'. Chater ends his report by saying that 'peace is a distant prospect'. No, you don't say!

For those of us who clearly remember the reporting of the Vietnam War, this is just the sort of utterly biased reporting that helped a vicious, brutal communist dictatorship to more than thirty years of oppression over the Vietnamese people.

You have to wonder whether Chater is just stupid, or a clumsy but purposeful propagandists for the insurgents.