Tamping Down “Conservative Bloggers” Analysis of Iraqi Docs

     Reporter Scott Shane takes a jab at “conservative bloggers” who think they can “second-guess the government” in his front-page article Tuesday, “Iraqi Documents Are Put on Web, And Search Is On.”

     “American intelligence agencies and presidential commissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein had no unconventional weapons and no substantive ties to Al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion. But now, an unusual experiment in public access is giving anyone with a computer a chance to play intelligence analyst and second-guess the government.”

     Shane emphasizes the piecemeal state of the analysis thus far and hints the conservatives are rushing in where angels fear to tread: “Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view.

     “On his blog last week, Ray Robison, a former Army officer from Alabama, quoted a document reporting a supposed scheme to put anthrax into American leaflets dropped in Iraq and declared: ‘Saddam's W.M.D. and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!’

     “Not so, American intelligence officials say.”

     In contrast to Shane’s dubious take on the judgment of “conservative bloggers” like Robison, Shane has in the past found anti-war serial misleader Joseph Wilson to be quite trustworthy and credulously claimed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, had “shunned publicity,” even as her photo appeared in Vanity Fair that very month.

     Nathan Goulding at National Review Online finds Shane’s take scornful and writes sarcastically: “But there's no need to second-guess in this case, the NYT assures us. After all, an anonymous ‘senior intelligence official’ says there's nothing to these documents. Besides, the only people who seem interested in the documents are those crazy conservative bloggers.”

     Goulding talked to Ray Robison who writes about what the paper left out on his blog.

     As Goulding points out, the Times story is incomplete, ignoring the long, hard spadework done by journalist Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard, which resulted in a cover story last week, “Saddam's Philippines
Terror Connection.” Reporter Shane also quotes Michael Scheuer knocking down the freelance bloggers, but fails to note he’s the author of the anti-Bush anti-war book “Imperial Hubris.”

For more from Shane, click here.

“The Wars Started by the Bush Administration in Afghanistan and Iraq….”

     There’s some odd wording in Pentagon reporter Thom Shanker’s short piece Tuesday on an unusual ceremony in a Pennsylvania meadow.

     “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gazed across a rolling meadow on Monday, its grass yellow in late winter's grip, and toward the stand of hemlock trees marking the area where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. He then bent and wordlessly placed a medallion at the base of a temporary memorial here.

     “Known as the defense secretary's ‘coin,’ the medallion is an elaborately pressed memento that Mr. Rumsfeld hands out to troops he meets in combat zones overseas.

     “His visit was his first to the site where passengers of Flight 93 overpowered their hijackers and sent an airliner crashing into the countryside instead of its intended target, the Capitol in Washington. His gesture was intended to link that event, through the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to the wars started by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

     But there’s no need for Rumsfeld to “link” Flight 93 to the war in Afghanistan -- Osama bin Laden, harbored by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, did that himself on September 11. And just who started the war --  Bush, or bin Laden when he attacked America?

For more from Shanker, click here.

Overwhelmed by a Huge Illegal Immigration Rally

     Reporter Nina Bernstein evidently caught the spirit of the weekend protests by illegal immigrants and their supporters in Los Angeles, judging by the positive tone of her Monday article, “In the Streets, Suddenly, An Immigrant Groundswell,”

     “When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee meet today to wrestle with the fate of more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, they can expect to do so against a backdrop of thousands of demonstrators, including clergy members wearing handcuffs and immigrant leaders in T-shirts that declare, ‘We Are America.’”

     Bernstein gushes in the next sentence: “But if events of recent days hold true, they will be facing much more than that. Rallies in support of immigrants around the country have attracted crowds that have astonished even their organizers. More than a half-million demonstrators marched in Los Angeles on Saturday, as many as 300,000 in Chicago on March 10, and -- in between -- tens of thousands in Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee and elsewhere.

     Bernstein explains the protests have been galvanized by “proposed legislation -- already passed by the House of Representatives -- that would make it a felony to be in the United States without proper papers, and a federal crime to aid illegal immigrants.”

     Supporters of the illegal immigrants outnumber opponents 7-1 in Bernstein’s story, with Dan Stein of Federal for American Immigration Reform given a single blunt sentence of dissent compared to 14 sentences of quotes from pro-immigration sources.

     The Times also gives a religious body credit for rallying the pro-illegal immigrant troops. “One of the most powerful institutions behind the wave of public protests has been the Roman Catholic Church, lending organizational muscle to a spreading network of grass-roots coalitions. In recent weeks, the church has unleashed an army of priests and parishioners to push for the legalization of the nation's illegal immigrants, sending thousands of postcards to members of Congress and thousands of parishioners into the streets.”

     But the Times coverage of Catholic officials taking political stances is far less favorable when it comes to the liberal cause of abortion. When some Catholic bishops condemned John Kerry’s pro-abortion stance during the 2004 presidential campaign, reporter Ian Fisher suggested they were strident for doing so.

     "But interviews with Vatican officials, many who did not want to be named, and experts who watch the church closely turn up a bottom line in which many Vatican officials seem to differ with hard-line American Catholics: while opposition to abortion is nonnegotiable for the church, that does not necessarily translate into uniform hope here that President Bush wins re-election….In recent weeks several conservative bishops in the United States have done just that, particularly over the issues of abortion and the use of embryonic stem cells for research. In public statements and published articles they have told parishioners that no other issues are as important in the election and that they should support the candidate who opposes abortion and stem-cell research. But other American bishops are less strident, urging parishioners simply to 'vote your conscience.'"

To read the rest of Bernstein’s laudatory coverage of the rally for illegal immigrants, click here.