Now the Times which exploited and selectively reported the Wikileaks documents turns on Wilileaks Founder Julian Assange in what smells like a snarky putdown making fun of him and questioning his sincerity. (Yves Smith Of Naked Capitalism says it "verges on being a hit piece.") Verges?
Oh, so typical, First the paper of record admits consulting (clearing?) on its own reportage by pandering to the Pentagon to show how responsible and "patriotically correct" they are, and then ran a Pentagon statement without doing their own reporting on the way the military is trying to discredit this challenge to its secrecy system. And now to show who the real journalists are, they trash Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Shame on John Burns for taking part in this character assassination, Here's The Times profile from Sunday's paper. Read between the lines. Telegraph, UN Calls For Obama Investigation of Wiki Torture Revelations
Portside: Columbia Journalism Review Take on How Many Media Outlets Covered Wikileaks' latest
A Primer on Early WikiLeaks Coverage
WikiLeaks calls the coordinated media coverage "an extraordinary moment in journalism" Campaign Desk, Columbia Journalism Review October 22, 2010, By CJR Staff
Around 5 p.m. on Friday, the online secret-sharing site WikiLeaks released almost 400,000 previously classified U.S.military documents pertaining to the Iraq war. As with their last document dump, WikiLeaks shared the documents with a number of news organizations before they were widely released. Here's a basic rundown of those outlets' initial coverage. (The French newspaper Le Monde was also given access to the documents. Unfortunately, nobody here reads French.)
The New York Times
Just as it focused on Pakistan's involvement in the war in Afghanistan in its reporting on WikiLeaks's July dump, The New York Times focuses heavily on the involvement of Iran in the Iraq War logs released today. Reporters Michael R. Gordon and Andrew W. Lehren do the bulk of reporting in four main stories posted online Friday afternoon, which were published in a package with an introduction, overview, links to selected documents from the war logs, and two harrowing slideshows. Reportage is expected to be bolstered over the weekend, with a profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be published on the weekend.
The Times's current online lead WikiLeaks story is "Leaked Reports Detail Iran's Aid for Iraqi Militias," which details the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' backing of Iraqi militias.
The piece draws on specific incidents from the logs to demonstrate that Iran's Quds Forces mostly maintained a low-profile, arranging for Hezbollah to train Iraqi militias in Iran, and financing and providing weaponry to insurgents. Other times the Iranian forces sponsored assassinations; at others, they sought to influence politics.
Gordon and Lehren's reporting is strong, and they provide much needed context to the documents-Quds Force-backed attacks continued during Obama's term, for instance -- with jarring summaries of specific incidences and weapons halls, tagged with links to the original reports. For example:
The provision of Iranian rockets, mortars and bombs to Shiite militants has also been a major concern. A Nov. 22, 2005, report recounted an effort by the Iraqi border police to stop the smuggling of weapons from Iran, which "recovered a quantity of bomb- making equipment, including explosively formed projectiles," which are capable of blasting a metal projectile through the door of an armored Humvee.
Most striking is the account of a particularly brazen plan to carry out a kidnapping against American soldiers.
According to the Dec. 22, 2006, report, a militia commander, Hasan Salim, devised a plan to capture American soldiers in Baghdad and hold them hostage in Sadr City to deter American raids there.
To carry out the plan, Mr. Salim turned to Mr. Dulaimi, a Sunni who converted to the Shiite branch of the faith while studying in the holy Shiite city of Najaf in 1995. Mr. Dulaimi, the report noted, was picked for the operation because he "allegedly trained in Iran on how to conduct precision, military style kidnappings."
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