Following up on the article below, I sent this to the Record's online feedback for factual errors:
"Regarding the article "U.S. might be able to win in Iraq" posted as http://news.therecord.com/Opinions/article/222043 ON July 31, 2007
MICHAEL E. O'HANLON AND KENNETH M. POLLACK
New York Times News Service.
I think it is important for the context of the authors opinions to be shared with your readership, I think it would be fair to state that they haven't been entirely honest. They portray themselves as harsh critics of the Iraq war and the administration in Washington. They make claims about troop morale and the success of the surge. Yet there are serious factual errors. They cite electricity as a marker of success, yet the provision of that vital utility has fallen to approximately an hour a day and is enough of an embarrassment that the American leadership has ceased to report on the state of the grid there. There are also documented instances of troops stating the opposite of improved morale. The increased deployment to 15 months has not been popular at all. The authors provide only their hearsay account with neither quotes nor documentary evidence. This is shoddy reporting. Your readers deserve better.
I think that if one were to take the time to look into the positions espoused by Mr. Pollack and Mr. O'Hanlon, one would find that rather than being harsh critics of the Bush administration policy they have been cheerleaders.
Here are a few links that might be of assistance:
Greenwald at Salon
Think Progress
The Carpet Bagger
Lefarkins
Booman Tribune
Liberty Street USA
Here's a quote from an article posted at:
Consortium News
"Yet the authors – and the New York Times – failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O’Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq.
Indeed, Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war.
British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack’s book the “most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] ‘debate’ in the United States.”
With a very large tip o' the hat to all of the commenters that did the homework and collected the links. I'll be interested to see what comes of the note. And of course you are all welcome to use the Report Typo or Correction feature in the side bar.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
LOL. Did you read the first/only comment to that CJ post? "We Southern Rednecks are proud to be the inheritors of a warrior culture, willing to take up arms and defend freedom for self and others," it begins. Yeah, just not for black folks, I guess. Oy.
hey rt, i think you were looking to comment one post down. still, what kind of loonie blather was that commenter spouting? 134% recruitment and nonsense about the very high standards that are kept for recruits. like the jazz guys would say, crazy daddio. deployments get longer, redeployments more frequent, downtime between deployments shrinks, recruiting standards slip, allowing the dumber, the meaner and the crooked to serve. booyah or something. i'm afraid that what the southern redneck warrior culture is going to actually inherit won't be a real boon. but i suppose if one can justify defending the brown moslem fellow's 'freedom' under a white christian banner, perhaps the delusions are deep enough that they won't even notice how screwed they be.
PSA — Perhaps I was. I really try to avoid that place and rarely venture into the comments because you get nuttery like that guy going on about the "warrior culture" of the south. What utter nonsense. And yeah, the recruitment levels are just through the roof! What planet do these people live on?
Nicely done, PSA.
I've started calling CBC radio on their version of the same thing - introducing some commentator and then listing their think tank creds without mentioning said thinking tank's affiliations with subject at hand. It's particularly exasperating when they have a US thinktank rep give enthusiastic support to their Canadian think tank counterpart. Gah.
Post a Comment