Sunday, December 18, 2005

Dear New York Times: That's some nerve you've got there.


You know, given that the New York Times sat on this story for a year, it's pretty fucking galling for them to start taking the moral high ground here. They might want to atone for all that Judith Miller bullshit before they start lecturing anyone else on morals or ethics.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the NY Times always has a lot of nerve; nothing new or surprising here.

Here's a letter to the editor I sent a few weeks ago (unpublished):

Dear Editor,

Dexter Filkins inexplicably lets the Pentagon off the hook in his article on Iraqi death squads (Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and Slayings, Nove. 29, 2005), citing unnamed "American officials" who claim that it is "difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible." To anyone who remembers the civil war in El Salvador, such feigned innocence will sound familiar. Indeed, Newsweek reported at the beginning of 2005 that the Pentagon was considering "the Salvador Option" -- sending "Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers..." In fact, the NYT Magazine reported on the Salvador Option itself last September.

It's hard to fathom how Mr. Filkins could report on what could obviously be a manifestation of this policy without once mentioning its antecedents.