Harper's Reporter Claims He Witnessesd Beachampian Fakery In Baghdad Reportage... From "Those Thuggish Neocons"

Put up or shut up, buddy. We're all eager to hear the names of the "neocon thugs" who have infiltrated the AP, NYT, Reuters, WaPo, etc. corps.

He makes this charge in order to pull a sort of "Nyah, nyah, Thuggish Neocons did it first, so Beauchamp's just pushing back" defense.

Amazing. These people are supposedly our "patient fact-finders."

I congratulate Chait for standing his ground. And his comments left me thinking back to Bush’s awful Weimar speech from yesterday. Did Bill Kristol have a hand in that atrocity as well? In any event, that speech was clearly stained with Neocon DNA.

This guy claims to have first hand proof of faked reports from Iraq, which makes him more inclined to believe Chait and Beauchamp without actual confirmation?

Funny how that works.

This guy needs to be blitzed. I think he's a BDS ideologue who's flat-out lying. He can disprove this by offering details of his claims of Beauchampian lies.

One wonders why he did not rebut these false reports earlier. In fact, given his claim of blatant fabrication, one wonders why he's not rebutting them now by naming names and citing specific reports he claims to be false.

Or is covering up for fabulists now considered a professional courtesy in the MSM, as most of us suspect?

Update: Thanks to Tara at CY, we seem to have found the article Horton is challenging without actually naming.

Thanks to Jose for pointing that out.

Another Update: Confederate Yankee doesn't think that's the article being referred to, as he thinks (based on what he knows) that Horton returned from Baghdad in spring 2006, and his reference to "last spring" would seem to mean spring of 2006.

Who is Scott Horton, by the way?

Just consider the case of CBS cameraman Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein. In April 2005, he was shot in the hip by an American sniper while filming the wreckage of a car bomb in Mosul. US troops then detained him, claiming he had tested positive for explosive residue and that images in his camera linked him to the insurgents.

He was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib for more than a year without due process.

Abdul Ameer was released just last week after an Iraqi criminal court acquitted him of collaborating with insurgents, citing a lack of evidence. No charges were made public until the trial itself.

The case is not an isolated one. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented seven cases in 2005 alone in which U.S. forces detained Iraqi journalists for many weeks or months without charge or due process.

Scott Horton [is] a New York attorney who recently returned from Baghdad where he was working on Abdul Ameer's case. Horton is Chairman of the International Law Committee at the New York Bar Association.

Ah, nuance. I'm glad the MSM is employing such obviously unbiased folks as their blogger/reporters.

posted by Ace at 02:34 PM

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