Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2221 Editor's Choice: 18
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KTWDawg
[Read the article: Response from ABC News re: the Saddam-anthrax reports]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'll give Schneider the nit that the line he cites could be seen as a 'correction', contrary to your passing assertion that "they have never retracted, corrected or even explained their false reports." Even so, this line is still nothing close to 'journalistic integrity' as measured by what could be called the 'net signal amplitude over time' of the anthrax-Saddam link.
We're obviously in agreement on the broad point, but I strongly disagree with the concession you're willing to make to ABC. "Correcting" the story would require an acknowledgment that the original report was WRONG (as Schneider acknowledged in his e-mail). Ross didn't do that. He claimed the original story was RIGHT (that "initial tests" showed bentonite), but that subsequent, better tests revealed there were none.
By definition, in order to "correct" an erroneous report, there must be an acknowledgment that the report was wrong. Not only did Ross not acknowledge that, he strongly implied the original report was correct. The November 1 Ross "correction" was really, itself, a futher act of dishonesty.
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e_five
[Read the article: Response from ABC News re: the Saddam-anthrax reports]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]By making a point of mentioning White House denials every time while continuing to push the story, they're giving the story a salacious, taboo quality. Why don't they just say, "Here's what the White House doesn't want you to know..." to hype their story? It's the same thing.
I find this aspect really interesting. I'm not saying this was coordinated or deliberate (I couldn't say that except by pure speculation), but by having anonymous sources leak information that fingered Iraq for the anthrax attacks (and for 9/11), and having the White House either deny the stories (in the case of anthrax) or refuse to confirm them (in the case of 9/11), it almost made the Bush administration seem dovish, overly cautious, even excessively unwilling to take action against Iraq.
There was that remarkable exchange on ABC where Cokie Roberts cited the Brian Ross anthrax report and the Mohammad Atta/Prague meeting when interviewing Donald Rumsfeld, all but demanding to know why we hadn't attacked Iraq in light of those stories and really accusing Rumsfeld of being afraid of mentioning Iraq.
That created a climate where the media was actually pressuring the Bush administration to be more hard-line against Iraq -- at exactly the time when internal factions inside the administration (certainly including Rumsfeld) were arguing that Iraq should be attacked.
Coordinated and deliberate? Who knows. But that process certainly bolstered the agenda of those who wanted, almost immediately after 9/11 (and before), to invade Iraq.
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Some NY Guy:
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An actual patriot would blow the whistle once and for all on this criminal, fanatical, incompetent regime. Isn't there one single patriot within the Bush Administration who loves this country enough to try to save it?
There have been administration officials who left and revealed what really goes on inside -- Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke and, at a lower level, David Kuo and John Dilulio. They were immediately smeared by Bush followers and then more or less rendered irrelevant by the media.
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JSpring:
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of the 1261 words in Greenwald's article, he only wrote 153 of them. The rest were merely quoted from various news sources, cut-and-pasted into place. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V! That's what I call some hard-hitting analysis.
In fact, many of the "letters" written in response to this article topped Greenwald's word count, including the one by prunes found here:
But I guess this type of lazy, phone-it-in blogging is what I've come to expect from Salon. Kudos Greenwald! You really know how to deftly strike at the administration! I'm sure the house of cards that Bush has built will promptly come tumbling down.
Well that's something I never thought I would see: a complaint that I wrote too few words in a post.
Yeah - it's terrible to use evidence and facts to make a point without larding it up with all kinds of gratuitious rhetoric. Great point. I'll be sure from now on to count the number of words in the evidence I excerpt and make sure that the analysis I add has a higher number of words, because that's important.
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Caferty:
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Caferty File
Was this post just featured on CNN?
Yes - I didn't see it, but C&L has the video of it now (I'll add a link). Cafferty did a really good job with this post - basically took the best parts of every quote and showed the pattern of disappearing documents.