The WaPo “Accident”

Now you didn’t think I was going to stay out of this WaPo "whoopsie" story did ya?

A case where our MSM ran a whole story based on a report from the DoD. 

Official’s Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted
‘Dubious’ Intelligence Fueled Push for War

By Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 9, 2007; A01

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Feith’s office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith’s activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."

But what do you know, that report turned out to be the talking points of a Democrat Senator name Carl Levin.  Here is the correction the WaPo issued:

Correction to This Article
A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general’s report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith’s office producing “reporting of dubious quality or reliability” and that the office “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda” were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith’s office drew on “both reliable and unreliable reporting” to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq “that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration” were also from Levin’s report. The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith’s office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general’s report did not draw.The two reports employ similar language to characterize the activities of Feith’s office: Levin’s report refers to an “alternative intelligence assessment process” developed in that office, while the inspector general’s report states that the office “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.” The inspector general’s report further states that Feith’s briefing to the White House in 2002 “undercuts the Intelligence Community” and “did draw conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

Wow!  Just wow.  Has our MSM stooped to it’s lowest point yet?  The whole article was full of lies and misinformation but Chrissy Matthews didn’t let that stop him:

As I write this, Chris Matthews is peddling the phony WaPo scoop on Hardball, prattling on about how this report proves that Doug Feith "cooked the intel" to get us into war.

You know what is most ironic about all this?  That the WaPo is guilty of precisely what they have been accusing the Bush Administration of doing.  That being the manipulation and fabrication of data in order to develop facts and reports that match their agenda.

Will we see a Senate Hearing anytime soon on this?

Don’t bet on it, Pelosi can’t get a flight back from California.

I will end this post with the ever quotable Ace:

The correction, of course, does not quite capture the enormity of this error — breathlessly labeling a partisan liberal Democrats’ "conclusions" as if they were the indpendent, nonpartisan official conclusions of the Bush-run Pentagon. How could they really convey how massively they fucked up here? This is, in journalistic terms, simply catastrophic.

"Confirmation bias," they call it– the press simply will run anti-Republican stories that ought to sound a little implausible or sketchy because, to them, they sound pretty darn reasonable. Such "facts" are "self-checking" — they just prove themselves by how wonderfully they fit in with the liberal worldview.

Meanwhile, anything that shows the Democrats in a bad light is vetted, checked, confirmed, re-confirmed, and subject to a complete full-office rewrite to insure all appropriate mitigating "context" was included before ultimately being buried on page A37 beneath a short blurb on Icelandic geese migration.

As always, dead on target.

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