Checkpoints Take Toll on Post Reporting

comPost's Moore does it again.

On page A1, she emphasizes Palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty....this time at the checkpoints on page A1 no less. When was the last time the Post reported on US checkpoints?

Checkpoints Take Toll on Palestinians, Israeli Army
Civilians Describe Abuse; Troops Lament Conditions
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 29, 2004; Page A01

Embedded in the article is this statement, which captures Moore's imbalance:

At least 83 Palestinians seeking medical care have died during delays at checkpoints, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. At the same time, 39 Israeli soldiers and police officers have been killed at checkpoints and roadblocks, according to the Israeli military.

She credulously cites a Palestinian group's sensational claim, which if wrong means the checkpoints are not nearly as severe as claimed. If wrong, it means Israeli soldiers routinely risk their lives, while Palestinians are merely delayed.

A fairer piece would also describe the terrorist's tactic of using ambulances, pregnant women and children to conduct their terrorism.

A still fairer piece would have compared Israeli checkpoint practices with US and other western checkpoint practices.....say the French, for instance.

My guess is that Israeli practices compare favorably.

Notice her subtle choice of verbs also in the following passages. Israeli military sources merely "say", while Palestinian sources "document", creating the subtle but false impression that Palestinian sources are more credible.

The Israeli military says the checkpoints are necessary to protect Israel and Jewish settlements in the territories from Palestinian attackers. Government and military officials have repeatedly cited the system of checkpoints in the West Bank as one of several factors contributing to a steady reduction in the number of suicide bombings against Israeli targets in the past two years.

At the same time, Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented hundreds of cases of abuse by Israeli troops against Palestinians at roadblocks: beatings, shootings, harassment, humiliation and life-threatening delays. Last year, a female Israeli soldier assigned to a Gaza Strip checkpoint was convicted of forcing a Palestinian woman at gunpoint to drink a bottle of cleaning fluid, according to court records. This month, soldiers at the Beit Iba checkpoint, not far from the Hawara checkpoint, ordered a Palestinian to open his violin case and play for them while the lines behind him grew.

comPost's chilling report slams IDF soldier. Misses IDF heroics that save Arab children from terrorists that use them as decoys.

comPost's Moore reports that IDF soldier killed a 13 year old Arab girl.

A Girl's Chilling Death in Gaza
Israeli Army Concedes Failure in Initial Probe of Shooting
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 28, 2004; Page A18

A fairer piece would have reported this.....IDF heroics routinely save Arab children while terrorists use children as decoys. It better helps to understand the actions of the soldier above.

IDF Saves Arab ‘Decoy’ Child
Friday, November 26, 2004 / 13 Kislev 5765

Golani soldiers won special recognition for saving an innocent Arab child who was sent to provoke IDF soldiers into shooting him.

The two Golani soldiers recently were manning a check post near Gush Katif when a 10-year-old boy suddenly ran towards them. Despite fears that the child was carrying explosives, the soldiers did not fire.

"The child fell into the arms of one of the soldiers," said the troops’ officer. "He hugged him to make sure he was not carrying a bomb. The child apparently received a few shekels to run towards the soldiers and provoke them into shooting."

The officer awarded the soldiers a special certificate for keeping an "even head" under pressure.

Arab terrorists have sent dozens of children on life-endangering missions, including suicide bombings, and often use children to smuggle explosives and ammunition. Army officials explain that Palestinian Authority incitement in the school system and on television is one of the prime reasons for the increase in the use of children as terrorists.

Read the whole the account to see another instance of selective comPost reporting that slanders Israel.

Post Uses Misleading data on Civilian Deaths...Getler Apologizes for not being More Wrong

Oxblog shows that comPost's gutless Getler, the useless ombudsman, misses the point.

Post statistics about Iraqi civilian deaths are spurious. Colleague Leo Rennert makes the same argument about Post reportage of Iraqi and Palestinian civilian statistics.

Posted 9:13 PM by David Adesnik
OMBUDSMAN MISSES THE POINT: WaPo ombudsman Michael Getler apologizes today for the Post's insufficient coverage of the impact that the war in Iraq has had on civilians.

In spite of OxBlog's loud protest, Mr. Getler has nothing to say about the extremely misleading data on civilian casualties provided by iraqbodycount.net and reprinted by the Post on a regular basis.


# Posted 3:10 PM by David Adesnik

Oxblog shows comPost Iraq malnutrition report is empirically lean

Colleague Bob Samet shows that the comPost casts Israel in a negative light.

Oxblog's David Adesnik thinks the comPost casts the US in a negative light also. The comPost implies the US is responsible for higher rate of malnutrition in Iraq.

Read his blog.

Posted 1:16 PM by David Adesnik
IRAQ -- "MALNUTRITION NEARLY DOUBLE WHAT IT WAS BEFORE INVASION": That the headline from today's WaPo. Naturally, the conclusion that malnutrition has doubled depends on the uncritical comparison of statistics compiled while Saddam was in power with those compiled more recently.

Just as naturally, the WaPo never makes this point explicitly and never suggests that the older statistics might be questionable. According to the article's second sentence,

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year.
Considerably later on, we find out that:
International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program helped reduce the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of acute malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis gradually dropped from a peak of 11 percent in 1996 to 4 percent in 2002.
I do believe that the oil-for-"food" program improved nutrition for Iraqi children. Corruption at the UN may have been pervasive, but it seems that most of the money still went for food. But why should I attribute any credibility to pseudo-statistics such as the 11 and 4 percent malnutrition figures?

Before continuing with my criticism of the Post, I think it is worth point out that malnutrition rates in Iraq are apalling, regardless of whether they are higher or lower than they were before the invasion. As the Post points out,
Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.
So no one should pretend that this isn't problem. But why is this problem on the front page of the Washington Post? Because the problem is supposedly America's fault.

Even so, the Post does illustrate that some of this fault is indirect. For example, one apparent cause for the rise of malnutrition (and the widespread lack of health care) in Iraq is the fact that violence has forced relief workers out of the country. The United Nations, Doctors Without Borders and CARE International have all left the country.

While the Post does mention the specific incidents -- "a truck bombing", a "director...was kidnapped" -- that led these agencies to haul anchor, it never connects the dots to make an obvious point: that the insurgents have deliberately sought to increase the misery of the Iraqi people by violently attacking those who seek to make their lives better.

UDPATE: Reader OV points to this UNICEF study of malnutrition in Iraq which also reports that 7.7% of Iraqi children suffer from acute malnourishment. The problem is that this UNICEF study was conducted less than three weeks after the invasion of Iraq.

This raises a lot of questions. Were two different studies conducted, one last year and one this year? If so, then the malnutrition rate has remained essentially stable since the US invasion of Iraq -- and the increase from 4 to 7.7 percent was Saddam's doing.

Or are the two studies one and the same? Both were conducted by Iraq's Ministry of Health with help from the United Nations. If the two studies are the same, then the earlier date (April-May 2003) is presumably the correct one. The political implications of such a scenario are the same as above.

Finally, did the WaPo simply get confused and report on last year's study as if it were new? I'd put my money on that one. Even so, if any of these three scenarios is correct, then the entire thrust of the Post's article is very, very wrong.

UPDATE: Both this UN press release as well as this one confirm that the 7.7% figure was publicly available by May of 2003. One should note, however, that it applies only to Baghdad.

UPDATE: The WaPo identified two organizations as having worked with the Iraqi Ministry of Health to conduct the nutrition survey. They are Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the UN Development Program. Both IAIS and UNDP have webpages devoted to Iraq, but neither seems to have information about the malnutrition statistics.

Post's Priest is Disgruntled.....Can you guess who she voted for

comPosts Dana Priest substitutes "abrasive" and "highly partisan" editorial judgment for "respected" reporting....Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes dissects.

The CIA Fights Back
The Agency fights back as Porter Goss and the Bush administration push for institutional reform.
by Stephen F. Hayes
11/15/2004 11:00:00 AM


ON NOVEMBER 5, 2004, a top aide to new CIA Director Porter Goss warned the associate deputy director of counterintelligence about unauthorized leaks to the media. It was an admonition that might be considered unnecessary: secrecy is a hallmark of the agency and, in any case, such leaks are often against the law. But several officials bristled at the forewarning and after a series of confrontations the deputy director of Operations, Stephen R. Kappes, offered his resignation as a protest.

How do we know about all of this? The details were leaked and appeared Saturday on the front page of the Washington Post. Both the Post and the New York Times ran follow-up stories on Sunday. That evening, CBS News anchor John Roberts was already suggesting a failure, asking reporter Joie Chen, "What went wrong?" And so we have, three months into Porter Goss's tenure at the agency, a full-blown war between the Bush administration and the CIA.

In fact, this war has been underway for years but only one side--the CIA--has been fighting. The White House response to this latest assault will be an important sign of its willingness to gut the rotten bureaucracy at the CIA.

Dana Priest, co-author of the two Washington Post stories and one of a dozen reporters who regularly receive CIA leaks, previewed this current battle in an online chat on October 13, 2004. A reader from Bethesda, Maryland, asked: "What's your take on Porter Goss's leadership at the CIA after nearly a month in office? Is he making an effort to reach out to the rank and file or is he pretty much relying on his 'special advisers' to run the place for him?"

Wrote Priest: "He's created quite a stir among employees who are anxious and worried about his intentions. Mainly this is because he brought with him a group of Congressional aides who were not well respected, so I hear, by people in the building. Now, the question is: are they not well respected because they have axes to grind or because they represent change at an agency that has a hard time changing; or, are they not well respected because they don't know enough about intelligence and are mean spirited. Time will tell."

Now we know. According to the Post, top advisers to Goss are "disgruntled" former CIA officials "widely known" for their "abrasive management style" and for criticizing the agency. One left the CIA after an undistinguished intelligence career and another is known for being "highly partisan."

On the other side, though, are disinterested civil servants: an unnamed "highly respected case officer," and Stephen Kappes, deputy director for operations "whose accomplishments include persuading Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to renounce weapons of mass destruction this year." (Persuasion? Were the Iraq war and subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein mere details?)

With this description of the participants is it any wonder that the anti-Bush-administration leakers often choose the Washington Post? What exactly has the Goss leadership team done to deserve such a cheap shot? Unfortunately, the Post articles give us few answers.

The reporting consists mainly of a one-sided chronology of the dispute over media leaks and a collection of unsourced and unsubstantiated personal smears of the Goss team. As for substance, the Post reported on Saturday that former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin believes top Goss aide Patrick Murray "was treating senior officials disrespectfully." The article continues: "Current and retired senior managers have criticized Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, for not interacting with senior managers and for giving Murray too much authority over day-to-day operations."

The Post article from Sunday replowed much of the same ground. It added one new wrinkle: Goss has not yet made time to meet with four former senior CIA officials. (These weren't just any officials. According to the article, "the four senior officials represent nearly two decades of experience leading the Directorate of Operations under both Republican and Democratic presidents." The not-so-subtle implication is that Goss was unreasonable for failing to meet with the leaders.

Was he?

According to yet another anonymous source in the Post piece on Sunday, the group didn't want to talk so much as they wanted to lecture. The former officials "wanted to talk as old colleagues and tell him to stop what he was doing the way he was doing it."

After hundreds of words from the Post we still have very little idea of what, exactly, Goss is doing that has caused so much heartburn at the agency. But if he's aggressively reforming the bureaucracy, he should most certainly not stop what he is doing. In fact, the concern among critics of the agency is that Goss faces a nearly impossible job and will not do nearly enough to change the dysfunctional culture of the agency.

On Friday, the CIA lost Michael Scheuer, a senior official who headed the agency's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999. The agency had allowed Scheuer to write two books critical of the Bush administration as "Anonymous." But as he gave media interviews upon the publication of his most recent book, Imperial Hubris, he became more critical of the agency. He was then silenced by his CIA superiors.

"As long as the book was being used to bash the president," said Scheuer, "they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

That has been the modus operandi of the CIA for years. Goss wants to end it. He'll have to fight.


Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.


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Update, 11/16/04: When I originally examined the turmoil at the CIA, I criticized current and former CIA officials and, by implication, reporting by the Washington Post's Dana Priest. The unnamed officials used the Post piece to smear the new leadership team assembled by CIA Director Porter Goss. The reporting was, in my view, one-sided and incomplete.

Later in the article, I quoted Michael Scheuer's criticism of CIA leadership and sourced it to the Washington Post. Scheuer made those comments in an interview with Priest, a fact I should have noted.




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