We know the New York Times makes up the narrative on Iraq; now they're making up quotes too

If you want to know what's really going on in Iraq, rather than having your news spun, cherry-picked or just plain made up by the MSM, then in addition to the obvious sources such as Michaels Yon and Totten you should check out Talisman Gate, the blog of Iraqi scholar Nibras Kazimi.

Kazimi, who has family, friends and other contacts on the ground in Baghdad and elsewhere, takes great delight in dissecting the US media's Iraq reporting, and in particular that of the New York Times.

In a recent post Kazimi mocked the Times' Baghdad bureau chief Jamie Glanz's continuing portrayal of the recent violence in Basra and elsewhere as a spectacular defeat for Prime Minister Maliki. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, says Kazimi,

…Glanz still has the gall to write, and write, and write: “…the badly coordinated push into Basra…”, “…the Mahdi Army stopping Mr. Maliki’s Basra assault cold…”, “…Mr. Maliki’s military operation in Basra foundered against Mahdi resistance…”, and “…the military ‘fiasco’ of his Basra adventure.” How is that?

It seems that Glanz hopes that by repeating something often enough, he can magically make it real.

Most interestingly, Kazimi presents evidence that suggests Glanz is at best a careless reporter, and is at worst making up quotes to suit the stories he's determined to file:

To authenticate such stretches, Glanz cites a single source to firm up his diagnosis:

Reflecting that calculus of power on the streets, Amal Mosa, a 28-year-old computer systems worker in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad, said, “I think Maliki and America are more powerful than JAM, but Maliki alone would be smashed by it,” referring to the Mahdi Army by its Arabic acronym.

There is something very fishy about this quote, since there is no “Arabic acronym” for the Mahdi Army. It is either referred to in Arabic as jaish almahdi, jaish alimam, or jama’at alsadr. “JAM” is an acronym invented by the U.S. military and is never used by speakers of Iraqi Arabic. I don’t want to accuse Glanz of fabricating a quote, but even if this error is somehow passed on to Glanz’s interpreter then it would seem doubtful that Glanz, who boasted in his Op-Ed over the weekend that he can speak some Arabic, would not have caught this error while in translation or not figured out that it was quite weird for a native speaker to employ American terminology.

Kazimi stops short of accusing Glanz of making up the quote, but given the bias that's prevalent in Glanz's reporting, I suspect he's being overly charitable.

Pulses racing at New York Times over Basra violence: we may just lose this thing yet

I have a new piece up at Pajamas Media on the New York Times' take on the violence in Basra:

“I watch the news with my family, and I see that Maliki is fighting the innocent people in Basra,” said Muhammad, 12. “I don’t understand it all, but it looks bad to me.”

So ends today's New York Times report on the violence currently raging in Basra and other parts of Iraq. And it's an appropriate quote for the Times to use, because Muhammad's sentiments neatly sum up its own attitude to this new outbreak of fighting: “We don’t understand it all, but it looks bad to us.”

You can read the rest of the article here.

Blackwater is the NYT's new Abu Ghraib

The New York Times famously carried a front page story about Abu Ghraib virtually every day for a month back in 2004. While its obsession with Blackwater hasn’t quite reached those levels, it’s clear that as far as the Times is concerned, the private security company’s name has become the new byword for failure in Iraq.

Following yesterday’s story on the report prepared for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Times today carries yet another new account of the shooting incident involving Blackwater contractors on September 16.

The Times now claims the incident began when, for no apparent reason, a Blackwater guard shot the driver of a car in a line of traffic close to an intersection that had been blocked to allow a Blackwater convoy carrying US officials to pass. According to the Times, with the driver incapacitated the car continued to roll towards the intersection, and “Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons, leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded”.

Even if we accept that a Blackwater guard chose to shoot the driver of a car just for the hell of it, and that rather than crashing into the vehicle in front the car somehow managed to ‘roll’ towards the Blackwater team, there’s the question of that death toll, which started at eight, rose to 11 and now has become 17. Who’s to say the actual death toll isn’t five? Or seven?

And as the Times reports, several deaths apparently occurred in a separate, and previously unreported, incident at a different location. It’s odd that with Iraqi and US forces swarming over the scene in the aftermath of the shooting, and with several investigations being carried out, we’re only hearing of this new incident two weeks later.

Then there were the initial reports, seized on by the Times, of a dead mother cradling her dead baby in her arms. That ‘dead baby’ now appears to have been an adult. If witnesses can be ‘mistaken’ about something that clear-cut they can be mistaken about other things. Then again, ‘witnesses’ motivated by anger towards the US, and news ‘stringers’ with ties to political and militant groups, know that in Iraq, one dead infant is worth perhaps ten dead adults.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if the Times reported tomorrow that an entire ‘wedding party’ had been mown down in the incident. And isn't it funny that, as is so often the case in such incidents, one of the key witnesses just happens to be a 'lawyer', rather than, say, a kebab vendor or the local pickpocket – particularly given that the Times is forever telling us that most of Iraq's professional classes have fled the country.

Having breathlessly presented its preferred version of events, the Times later concedes that the role of Iraqi security forces (funny how you never hear those guys referred to as 'trigger-happy cowboys') in the incident has yet to be ascertained, and quotes a US official as cautioning that "important elements could still be missing from that account".

None of the above is to dispute that innocent civilians were killed, or to claim that Blackwater personnel didn’t act recklessly, and possibly illegally. If Blackwater employees are found to have used excessive force, or otherwise broken Iraqi or US law, then they should face justice. But we don’t know the full facts yet, and perhaps we never will.

The Times is fully aware of how hard it is to get to the truth in Iraq when reports from hospitals, the police, government officials and other contacts are unreliable at best, and distorted or manufactured for political reasons at worst. Far from building the case against Blackwater, the Times’ rash of conflicting, uncorroborated accounts, each more sensational than the last, demonstrates just how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction.

Unfortunately, for the Times and others on the anti-war left, this is about neither truth nor justice: it's about propaganda. The tide of political and public opinion has turned in recent months from calls for an immediate withdraw from Iraq to a growing realisation that progress is being made, and can only be sustained by keeping large numbers of troops there for a good while longer.

Abu Ghraib, which opponents of the war seized on at a time when support for the war, and for President Bush, was still strong, is over. Haditha hasn’t lived up to the hype. In the absence of a steady stream of bad news from Iraq, the Times and others are taking one tragic, chaotic incident, and from it weaving a narrative of politically-connected mercenary armies rampaging around the country slaughtering civilians.

But while the Times’ obsession with Blackwater is irritating, it’s also encouraging. Because as long as Blackwater remains on or close to its front pages, we can be confident that things are going pretty well in Iraq, and in the War on Terror.

Update: Of course, it's not just the Times – Ace tears the WaPo a new one here.

Exclusive: Blackwater 'not Boy Scouts of America'

Having got its teeth into Blackwater, the New York Times shows no signs of letting go, having clearly decided that the alleged misadventures of the private security company in Iraq currently offer the best opportunity for undermining the American war effort there.

Despite its best efforts, however, the Times has conspicuously failed to build a case against Blackwater, and PSCs in general, as this post, and this response from an Infantry NCO with extensive service in Iraq, make clear (scroll down, or click the Blackwater label at below right, for related posts).

Undeterred, the Times has returned to the fray with another Blackwater-bashing piece today, based largely on a report by a congressional committee, and the introductory paragraph sets the tone nicely. It’s a perfect storm of violence, irresponsibility and heartlessness, and I take my hat off to the writers and editors who crafted it:

Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.

The sentence is, however, devoid of context and utterly misleading. We’ve already established that, while Blackwater has been involved in more shooting incidents than other PSCs, this is largely explained by fact that it operates in more dangerous areas, and protects higher-value officials. And as the Times acknowledges in today’s story, Blackwater has twice as many employees in Iraq as the two other main security contractors, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, combined.

It’s unclear how many of the incidents involved nothing more than warning shots being fired, but it’s hardly surprising that Blackwater guards fired from moving vehicles in the majority of cases, given that they’re in the business of convoy protection. As for the bit about not stopping, perhaps Mother Teresa would have hung around in a hostile environment around to tend to the wounded, but then it’s unlikely that she would have fired a weapon from a moving vehicle in the first place.

That intro also implies that Blackwater convoys habitually leave a trail of dead and wounded in their wake, but gives no supporting evidence. In fact, leaving aside the recent tragic, and apparently exceptional shootings, in over two years of careering around Iraq firing at everything that moves, the Times suggests Blackwater employees have only managed to kill two people. There may have been others, but as the Times is pulling out all the stops in its efforts to demonise Blackwater, you would think it would mention them.

The Times is also desperate to create the impression that Blackwater and the State Department have been covering up the carnage left, right and centre. While some less-serious incidents may have been brushed under the carpet, in the two cases the Times mentions in which people were killed, there’s no suggestion of any attempt to conceal the truth. The relevant authorities were informed, investigations were carried out and compensation was paid to the victims’ families.

An official writing “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly” does not constitute a cover-up; indeed, its a phrase that’s probably been used on many occasions at the Times with regard to the various editorial scandals the paper has been embroiled in over the years. And the Times further undermines its ‘cover-up’ theory by revealing that Blackwater has dismissed employees for, among other things ‘failure to report incidents or lying about them, and publicly embarrassing the company’.

Predictably, the report also rehashes the now-familiar ‘cowboys’ leitmotif:

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

The Times obviously feels that it has established the ‘trigger-happy’ narrative to the extent that it doesn’t need to provide any quotes to support this claim, anonymous or otherwise. It remains a disgraceful and unsubstantiated slander. As for ‘aggressive’ – well, show me a passive former Navy SEAL and I’ll show you an SUV full of dead diplomats.

The Times at least breaks some new, albeit unremarkable, ground with the revelation that Blackwater employees (or ‘gunmen’, as the Times has taken to calling them) took part in offensive operations alongside uniformed American military personnel on two (two!) occasions “in violation of their State Department contract”.

Such behaviour could only appear ‘wrong’ to someone – say a New York Times editor – who can’t even begin to understand the military mind, and whose experience of combat is limited to squabbling over the last bagel in the vending machine.

What such people couldn’t possibly understand is that the ties between soldiers are rather more binding than a State Department contract. Most Blackwater guys are ex-special forces, and if they found themselves in a position where regular forces were under attack, and they had the training and equipment to assist, does anyone seriously imagine they wouldn’t do so, lest some Green Zone bureaucrat – or indeed the New York Times – take exception?

As I’ve said before, while the liability of PSCs, and the authority under which they operate, need to be clarified, the obsession of the Times and others with these companies is out of all proportion to the problem, and reflects their growing desperation to respond to the progress that’s being made in Iraq, and to which PSCs and their brave employees are contributing.

Once again the Times has produced an ostensibly sensational story that, on closer inspection, tells us little that’s new, and adds absolutely nothing to the wider debate over PSCs. Unfortunately for the paper, its own obsession with ‘accuracy’ and ‘record’ compels it to include details that either fail to stand up its claims, or completely contradicts them. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot – when it comes to Blackwater, the Times is doing a wonderful impression of a centipede with a minigun.

The NYT: Making sure you get the message

The above image is from a promo at the New York Times online, and shows a page from the Times displayed on a handheld device. You probably can't make out the headline on the left, but if you see the original ad it reads 'Afghans say NATO bombs kill 25 civilians'. To the right is a photo of coffins draped with the American flag, presumably those of fallen service personnel from Iraq or Afghanistan, although I can't make out the accompanying text.

The image is a link to the Times' technology pages, where you'll find stories about mobile phones, computers and internet companies, but very little about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I guess you could call it 'subliminal editorialising'.

Today's NYT Blackwater non-stories

Two more stories on Blackwater in the New York Times today – they might as well start a separate daily 'Blackwater' section. Neither contains much in the way of new or useful information, and appear to be in the paper simply because several reporters have been tasked with producing Blackwater stories every day for the next year:

(a) because it's the kind of sinister, 'military-industrial complex' stuff the Times feels compelled to report and thinks is 'sexy', whether or not it's correct or even interesting;

(b) because it's one of the few 'negative' stories coming out of Iraq right now, and an important counterweight in the eyes of the Times to the increasingly positive stories coming out of the country; and

(c) because the Times hopes that if it keeps digging it'll come up with some damning evidence against the Bush administration.

I've done two lengthy posts on Blackwater in the past few days, here and here; The White Rabbit is doing a lot of interesting stuff, and this article is also good. I'm not going to pick through the latest stories – as I said there's not much to pick through – although each contains an important omission that's worth noting.

This story is a mainly political report, which suggests that Blackwater has been involved in a higher number of shooting incidents than figures given yesterday by the Times suggested; however the Times has left out pertinent information included in yesterday's story: namely that Blackwater is working in more dangerous areas of Iraq, and protecting higher-value targets, than other contractors.

The other story contains the latest, still confusing and still conflicting accounts of the shoot-out on September 16 that sparked the whole Blackwater furor. This story mentions that Blackwater contractors fired on a car, without providing any context, which suggests the shooting was unprovoked and indiscriminate. However, an earlier Times story reported that the car was approaching a junction that the Blackwater convoy was about to cross, that it was driving on the wrong side of the road, and that it ignored a policeman's order to stop.

So all told, the Times brings us nothing new, but quietly drops inconvenient facts that don't fit its 'murdering mercenaries on the rampage' narrative.

Appropriately enough, the second story concludes with a line that the Times itself, not to mention the other media outlets, and the Democrats and anti-war types who've jumped on the anti-Blackwater bandwagon, would do well to heed:

The official added that in the urgent moment of a shooting events could often become confused, and cautioned against leaping to hasty conclusions about who was to blame.

Somehow I don't think the Times is finished jumping just yet.

NYT takes aim at Blackwater; hits self

The New York Times is still obsessing over Blackwater – well at least it gives Halliburton a break. Today the Times reports:

The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.

The Times doesn't have any precise figures for Blackwater, but explains:

In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable Blackwater statistics were not available, government officials said the firm’s rate per convoy mission was about twice DynCorp’s.

So DynCorp's 'shoot rate' was around one mission in a hundred in 2005, and around one mission in 150 in 2006. Blackwater's shoot rate was about twice as high, so if we average the shoot rate for DynCorp over the two years (one incident per 125 missions) then double it and round down for good measure, that gives Blackwater a shoot rate of one incident per 60 missions.

I don't know about you, but I find those figures – both for Blackwater and DynCorp – staggering, even allowing for the fact that there must be other incidents where convoys come under attack, but keep going without returning fire.

I was under the impression that every time a convoy left the Green Zone it was like the scene in Mad Max II where the fuel tanker (no spoilers in case you haven't seen it) driven by Max leaves the good guys' compound. I pictured insurgents leaping off buildings on to the roofs of SUVs, IEDs going off left, right and centre, and suicide car bombs and RPGs coming from every direction.

Where did I get this impression? From watching the TV news and reading the mainstream news websites. It's almost as if… as if… the media is exaggerating how bad things are in Iraq!

Having helped the reader to establish that Baghdad is actually safer than anyone but the most optimistic Petraeus enthusiast had previously thought, the Times continues its half-hearted assault on Blackwater, claiming the company 'flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions', and so on and so forth. (See this post of mine and The White Rabbit for more on why these and other accusations leveled at Blackwater don't stick.)

Then, not content with shooting itself in one foot, the Times puts a well-aimed round through the other one (and they say Blackwater's guys are careless!) by giving a perfectly reasonable explanation for the disparity in the frequency of shooting incidents:

Today, Blackwater operates in the most violent parts of Iraq and guards the most prominent American diplomats, which some American government officials say explains why it is involved in more shootings than its competitors. The shootings included in the reports include all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots.

Sounds fair to me.

Yet the story limps on for another whole page: 'corporate culture…' 'stoking resentment…' 'close relationship with the Bush administration…' (That's right – Blackwater has close ties to an administration it does business with, and whose employees it's protecting.) Over 1,500 words of accusation, speculation and gossip, but nothing that comes close to a point.

Blackwater should of course operate according to rules of engagement as strict as those imposed on the military, and its contractors should be subject to the full rigours of either military or civilian law. It's crazy that those rules were apparently never agreed upon, and the company's activities should be curtailed until the legal stuff is sorted out.

But Blackwater, and companies like them, are here to stay, both in Iraq and elsewhere. There's talk of such outfits becoming involved in places like Darfur, where others either fear to tread or lack the necessary competence. And if I were a diplomat or aid worker I know who I'd rather trust with my life, given a choice between Blackwater and a bunch of stoned, rape-happy African 'peacekeepers' supplied by the UN.

So the Times might as well get over itself. This latest attack on Blackwater is overly aggressive, undisciplined and way off target – in short the Times is doing with words everything it accuses Blackwater's contractors of doing with bullets.

Update: Thanks to Instapundit and Hot Air for linking. If you came via Hot Air you may not have seen this excellent piece on Blackwater, with some great comments, which Glenn linked to earlier.

There's bound to be a few Monkey Tennis newbies among you, so here's the welcome spiel: I've been at this for just two months, so do check out some of my earlier stuff while you're here, and let me know what you think. A couple of recent favourites are my earlier Blackwater post, and this one on the MoveOn 'Betray Us' ad. I try to mix it up a little, but as I explain in my mission statement, most days I run into some egregious MSM mistake/distortion/outright lie regarding the War on Terror, and that kind of fills up my blogging day, meaning I don't get to add many smaller posts linking to cool stuff I've found – I'll try and do better!

NYT's exercise in damage exacerbation

After prevaricating for almost two weeks, the New York Times has admitted it made a ‘mistake’ in giving MoveOn.org a discounted rate for its now infamous ad attacking General Petraeus, and various executives have gone on the record to try and explain away the scandal. The trouble is, their explanations just don’t ring true.

A notable exception is the paper’s Public Editor, or ‘ombudsman’, Clark Hoyt, who in a strikingly honest editorial about the affair, confirms that MoveOn.org should indeed have paid $142,083, rather than $64,575, and questions whether the Times should have carried the ad in the first place. MoveOn has reluctantly agreed to pay the balance.

The row over the discount centres on the fact that the Times gave MoveOn a ‘standby’ rate for the ad. As Hoyt explains, customers who pay this rate ‘aren’t guaranteed what day their ad will appear, only that it will be in the paper within seven days’.

Such an arrangement would clearly have been of no use to MoveOn, whose ad could only have run on Monday September 10, the day Petraeus made his report to Congress. And while the Times would have us believe that the foul-up was due to some misunderstanding between MoveOn and a lowly and anonymous sales rep, it’s also inconceivable that senior ad people weren’t aware of the time-sensitive nature of the ad, and how much it was sold for.

Hoyt quotes Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, as saying that, while he regarded its contents as ‘rough’, he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office, and therefore acceptable for the Times to carry.

If Jespersen approved the ad then he must surely have been aware that it needed to run on the Monday, and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t also aware of how much MoveOn was paying. I don’t know what kind of seniority Jespersen holds in the Times’ advertising hierarchy, but the buck clearly didn’t stop with that anonymous sales rep.

There’s also the issue of how much Rudi Giuliani paid, or should have paid, for his ad rebutting the attack on Petraeus, which ran in the Times the following Friday. Hoyt writes that Rudolph Giuliani ‘demanded space in the following Friday’s Times to answer MoveOn.org. He got it — and at the same $64,575 rate that MoveOn.org paid’.

So if Giuliani got the same deal as MoveOn, then he should now have to pay the higher rate as well, right? MoveOn’s Eli Pariser certainly thinks so. In a statement that stands as a masterpiece of self-indulgence and equivocation, Pariser blames the whole debacle on the Times, grudgingly agrees to stump up the extra $77,083 (which is hardly going to leave much of a hole in the organisation’s Soros-lined pockets) and calls on Giuliani to pay the higher fee, because he 'received exactly the same ad deal for the same price'.

However this doesn’t in fact appear to be the case. According to Giuliani, his people were given the ‘standby’ rate because the Times was unable to guarantee that the ad would run on Friday 14th. Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on the Thursday, Giuliani said: “We submitted the ad, and they wouldn’t tell us whether they were going to put it in tomorrow.”

In the event Giuliani’s ad did appear on the Friday. However, while we're not privy to the exact nature of the agreement between Giuliani’s people and the Times, if placement on that day wasn’t guaranteed – as it obviously was with MoveOn – then there’s no reason why Giuliani should have to pay any more than the standby rate.

Of course, both MoveOn and the Times would have you believe that piffling disputes over who paid how much for what are diverting attention away from the loftier issues that lie at the heart of this affair. In his statement, Pariser says the ‘dishonesty’ of the Bush Administration ‘is more worthy of the attention of the electorate and the media than the mistake of an advertising representative or the wording of an advertisement'.

And here’s Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the Times, who claims he wasn’t aware of MoveOn’s ad until it appeared in the paper: “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.”

Fine words indeed – they could well be the Times' epitaph some day. Meanwhile the paper faces serious questions about the integrity and incompetence of senior executives and about its relationship with far-left organisations such as MoveOn, and could yet attract the interest of the Federal Election Commission. Likewise, for MoveOn, which disastrously miscalculated the outrage its ad would cause, and for those Democrats who failed to distance themselves from the ad, the matter isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

You’d think that, given almost two weeks, such an august body of wordsmiths could have come up with a rather more convincing account of what went on. As Thomas Lifson wrote at The American Thinker yesterday: ‘Once again, the Watergate maxim that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" is proving valid.’