I have been gone the past few days on a really neat trip I will write about later, but right now I am working on little sleep and trying to catch up with the day-to-day stuff that needs to be attended to since my return. I will be blogging more later tonight, but wanted to quickly pass along the following on the controversy over the “Burning Six” story, which continued to develop over the weekend.
Curt at Flopping Aces has an informative post responding to the New York Times, including an extensive roundup. Pay attention folks. This one has significance beyond this specific story and is worth paying attention to because of what it says about the pattern of shoddy journalism coming out of the Middle East, and Iraq in particular, and the role the blogosphere will be playing as watchdog to the mainstream media, and also in directly providing good information from the region. Here are some excerpts from Curt’s post. Read it all.
The Iraqis set up a unit so that the press could be assured that the official spokesmen that these reporters like to quote so much are in fact who they say they are. What’s absurd is the notion that this wrong and somehow restricting their freedoms. Is it too much to ask that the media quote REAL police officers?
As I said last week, forgive us lowly bloggers for questioning a story coming out of the mainstream media from a source who isn’t who he says he is, but some of us still have visions of identically matched smoke clouds dancing in our heads.
Update: Bruce Kesler compares the AP’s sources on the “burning six” story to John Kerry’s sources on his Vietnam medals.
John Kerry’s claims to his medals in Vietnam has more credibility than the Associated Press’ claims about its reporting of the six Sunnis purportedly set afire by Shiites.
As we used to say in the Marine Corps, that’s lower than whale sh_t, which lays on the bottom of the ocean, and you know how low that is.
Kerry’s medals were issued, however manipulatively or erroneously, by an official U.S. military process. The AP’s source for its story is not the policeman he and the AP claims he is, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials, and the AP refuses to produce him.
Kerry mustered several named boatmates to support parts of his claims, although far more fellow and chain of command witnesses saw otherwise. The AP says it has, afterwards, found three witnesses, who are unnamed and not produced.
Update II: Mark Tapscott has an excellent piece on this story and explains how easy it would be for the AP to clear up this whole thing.
