I know what you are saying about shoddy reporting.
Still, sometimes, people deny reports that seem pretty much on the mark, or at least close.
And I look at that denial from the military and it seems a bit fuzzy. It's hard for me to see precisely where the Times went wrong. In fact, it seems like the main point the flack wanted to make was that this new policy *doesn't* mean our G.I.s will shoot defenseless little children. In other words, the denial might be intended as spin more than anything.
From what I understood, U.S. forces hadn't been firing at looters at all. (I could be wrong, here). If our boys are going to start doing so, or at least expand the scenarios in which they will do so, then this would seem to represent a change in policy.
Perhaps the Times put too fine a point on the story it thought it had.
Meanwhile -- I might have been a wee bit hard on the Washington Times, by the way. It's hard to know what its sources were.
If, on the issue of French passports, all the U.S. had was one uncorroborated report which even U.S. intelligence never believed was true, then one of at least three things could have happened:
1. The Washington Times reporter knew this was a pretty weak intelligence tip but ran with it any way because it was such a headline grabber -- and never offered readers the context to consider the incident(s) might never have happened. The reporter on that story was the Times' intelligence reporter. One would hope he would have a little experience understanding that intelligence comes in all shades of gray.
2. The Washington Times reporter thought he had a super scoop, but returned to his editors with something less than what he originally thought he had. At that point, the editors insisted he punch it up beyond the point at which he felt comfortable.
In these two scenarios the Times story strikes me, potentially, as a hatchet job. (That and the fact that it just exploded on the right-wing media stage. Our local Fox affiliate was all over the story, and Savage had the Washington Times reporter on the next night).
But there is a third possibility:
3. Someone with standing in the U.S. military or political establishment, perhaps acting on his or her own and without White House authority, oversold the value of that tip. In this scenario, it isn't the Times reporter's fault. It would have been this official performing the hatchet job.
Reading stories out of Washington is tough work. They use so many anonymous sources, it's hard to evaluate the information that you are given.
I do think that if I were that Washington Times reporter, the strength of that French denial would have made me want to re-examine my reporting before anything hit the paper. It was the strength of that denial that made me suspicious right up front. It was awfully strong. They didn't seem to mince words.
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U.S.: No evidence France helped Iraqis escape.
