If you want to look at both sides of the Iraq war there are two opposing visions readily available with the click of your mouse.
Arthur Chrenkoff offers once again his meticulously pieced together, distilled and linked collection of hopeful news from Iraq. Chrenkoff’s work — this is Part 27 — is the kind of documentation political scientists do. Very detailed. Totally attributed.
An opposing view comes from Seymour Hersh who contends Iraq is on the verge of civil war. Hersh is fascinating to read and listen to. And he states his case and makes his argument quite well.
But if you read the two and use documentation as yardstick — and don’t read either with an inclination to automatically dismiss on viewpoint because you already disagree with it — Chrenkoff’s has more credibility. The reasons: he documents, he links. Hersh recently raised eyebrows when he contended that its OK when he speaks to use composites, etc. A lot of what he says is based on anonymous sources.
There is nothing inherently wrong with anonymous sources. Just because a journalist doesn’t reveal a source does NOT mean he/she is lying. But in the case of Chrenkoff you can check his source material and see if he has taken things out of context. In the case of Hersh you must take his word for it that he is not only correct but that he is stating facts in their correct context.
Again, Hersh is highly compelling but it requires accepting that because he has won journalism awards he therefore must be accurate. A few quotes:
I think (John) Bolton will probably get through (as UN Ambassador) and the critical vote on the nuclear option, of course, is probably going to be John Warner of Virginia, I’m told. He’s the guy who promised to investigate Abu Ghraib. And he does investigate it. Every time another report comes out, he has a hearing, and the officers who write the report come and they testify about their report, and everybody agrees that the report they’re talking about is the one they’ve written. And that’s the extent of the investigation. Imagine this. Just alone on what we have in the Abu Ghraib, there’s no serious investigation.
And:
The renditions, which is a three – or what, ren-di-tion – three-syllable word to describe a process that really is very simple. It still goes on, by the way. We send people in undercover, mostly military guys, not approved, no C.I.A. stuff, because if you do the C.I.A. route, you have to have a formal presidential finding under the law and you have to tell Congress. So you stick this stuff in the military. A bunch of guys go in sterile, with no I.D.s. They go into a country, you know, they get together. They go to some village. They go to some house. They grab some guy by the hair. They drag him to an airport where they have a private plane. They fly him somewhere where the sun don’t shine. They torture them and sometimes kill them. And that’s called rendition. It’s been going on. It’s — another word that we used a couple of decades ago for Argentina and Brazil was “disappearingâ€? people.
Compelling. Troubling. But it’s a view based on taking him totally at his word. You can’t dismiss it totally but there is no sourcing at all. And, yes, the argument is “it’s too delicate to name sources.” Fair enough…but does that mean then that we must also totally accept what the government says at face value because it also cannot name its sources on touchy issues?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.