Informed Speculation

The vaunted editorial oversight that seperates the MSM from little ol’ bloggers like me is not without its flaws, as we’ve seen with 60 Minutes and the National Guard document forgeries and Jayson Blair. Once again, it’s the celebrated New York Times that is forced to admit their hunger for a scoop embarassing to the Bush Administration was based on thin air:

A front-page article last Saturday profiled Ali Shalal Qaissi, identifying him as the hooded man forced to stand on a box, attached to wires, in a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal of 2003 and 2004. He was shown holding such a photograph. As an article on Page A1 today makes clear, Mr. Qaissi was not that man.

The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi’s insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi’s account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.

Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi’s claim.

The Times also overstated the conviction with which representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed their view of whether Mr. Qaissi was the man in the photograph. While they said he could well be that man, they did not say they believed he was.

To be sure, there WAS a man on that box, and Abu Ghraib is a stain on the honor of America and should be and has been the catalyst for punishment and soul-searching.

The article, however, was based largely on this false claim, and the natural question arises – if he lied about something so basic as his identity, is there anything factual in anything he says? Everyone can get suckered in by a huckster – but, as the correction says, the Times‘ own reporting named another man as the infamous hooded figure on the box. Sloppy, yes, but would such carelessness have resulted if the man’s story didn’t fit in with the editorial slant of the paper? I say most assuredly not…