A Response to Glenn Greenwald
- 12.17.2007 - 4:19 PMcross-posted at Middle East Journal
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald thinks that because I was embedded with the U.S. military and al-Fadhily wasn’t that my reporting from Fallujah is less credible. (For the post Greenwald is criticizing, see here.) Specifically he insists that al-Fadhily’s claim that 70 percent of Fallujah is destroyed is more credible than my claim to the contrary.
If the city were 70 percent destroyed it would look much like Dresden did after the fire-bombing. I could not possibly spend a month there without noticing, especially since I moved to a new location inside the city every day. You can believe that I would publish pictures of vast destruction in Fallujah if it existed because that’s exactly what I did when I recently went to Ramadi and Lebanon. I do have a track record of that sort of thing. I have no reason, good or bad, to treat Fallujah any differently.
It would be truly amazing—if not impossible—if I could spend so much time in Fallujah and not notice that 70 percent of it was destroyed.
I recently (sincerely and politely) offered to help Glenn Greenwald get to Iraq safely since he’s a journalist who writes about it so much. So far he hasn’t responded. By his own logic, both al-Fadhily and myself are more credible on the subject than he is. I wouldn’t normally pull rank on a colleague like this, but since Glenn pulled rank over me on al-Fadhily’s behalf, he gets the same in return.
I’ll still help Glenn get to Iraq if he wants so we won’t have to talk to each other like this.
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December 17th, 2007 at 5:02 PM
I think that your body of work speaks most loudly on your behalf.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:12 PM
Michael: I am writing as a 3-time embedded reporter including one stint with the 3/8 Marines in Fallujah just two months after the conclusion Al-Fajr. I was on Humvee patrols in and out of the city, and the claim of “70%” destruction is bogus. Moreover, it is a claim that has steadily grown since the conclusion of that battle. Particularly from war opponents, an assertion of 1/3 destruction was the first “percentage” I heard; next it was 50%; about one year ago, I read that 75% was the actual number. It’s good to know that there has been some “decline” however marginal—must be the result of the Surge!
Seriously, between these claims (which I found bogus and which may be investigated by a close viewing of satellite photos) and the (usually) allied assertion that the destruction was attributable to the indiscriminate use of WP, I had first-time experience with the famous comment (of uncertain parentage) that truth is the first casualty of war.
The claim that embed equals “in-bed” is usually raised in direct proportion to how well the subject reporting comports with the political views of those making the comment. For example, when Kevin Sites took his famous footage inside a Fallujah mosque, that purported to show a US Marine executing a wounded insurgent (the Marine was later cleared) no one claimed that Sites was “in bed” with his PAO. Unfortunately, for honest reporters, their work is evaluated by how useful it is to the media’s, politician’s or blogger’s agenda. Just remember, in a hyper-partisan world, there is always room for more agreement!
December 17th, 2007 at 5:31 PM
Michael,
you give the thoroughly unprincipled Greenwald too much credit by calling him a colleague. Sadly though, he is a typical example of journalists today.
He’s the guy who doctored a letter from the director of the military’s Combined Press Information Center, Colonel Steve Boylan, in an attempt to discredit him. After he pawned it off as being genuine, he was promptly caught by those pajama wearing bloggers we’ve been warned about. He has engaged in sock-puppetry (using aliases that have been tracked to his IP address,) to defend his own fraudulent stories and subsequently denies it when he’s caught. To this day, he defends every journalistic hoax to come out of Iraq that he’s “reported” on, and has never retracted a single lie as far as I could find. He’s defended the hoaxes about Shiites being burned alive, mass beheadings, mass rapes and massacres by US forces, terorist victories, doctored photos, and stories written by fictional Iraqi police captains, just to name a few.
Incidentally, he supports the efforts of terrorist embeds such as Bilal Hussein, while disparaging your own. You should wear his calumny as a badge of honor.
Maybe an offer of sweet mint teas by poolside could entice him to travel to Iraq.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:47 PM
“I’ll still help Glenn get to Iraq if he wants…”
I am cynically tempted to suggest that Glenn Greenwald is sent a one way ticket to Iraq. He is a dishonest pacifist who will not allow facts to get in the way of his ideological inclinations. At the end of the day, Greenwald subscribes to the dogma that the United States is responsible for much of the evil in the world. Our racist imperialism enrages the victims of the Third World. Violence supposedly only makes things worse. Greenwald is easily comparable to those who ridiculed Winston Churchill for warning about the threat of Adolph Hitler during the early and mid 1930s.