WASHINGTON POST DISINFO DINOS TRAMPLE EMBEDS

The relentless editorial campaign the Washington Post appears to be waging against attempts to portray progress in Iraq hit a speed-bump as a Post reporter who had refused an embed assignment is now being challenged by bloggers because he wrote that embeds are encouraged to write propaganda for successful American operations and programs in Iraq.

The MSM dinosaur Post’s reporting has been frequently bested by Iraqi bloggers in the savvy Pajamas Media and by brave US embeds serving in hot-spots like Anbar Province. Meanwhile Post shirkers cower in the Green Zone e-mailing rumors and second-hand picked-over tidbits often deriving from Iraqi and Al-Qa'ida disinformation.

The latest Post disinformation
article was written by Jonathan Finer, who is described as a member of "the Washington Post Foreign Service."

Often enough, this means he is a Post emissary who embeds himself in the Green Zone getting news from often questionable Arab sources. I just wonder just how fluent is Finer’s Arabic, since most of the first-hand Arab news consists of subtle indirection and often inflections in dialect from the finely-nuanced Arabic language.

When Finer did contact blogger Roggio, the embed accused of enthusiasm for some military operations and for actually working for money, it was by e-mail once, since Finer would hardly risk his WaPo butt outside heavily fortified areas. [This was true when I was in Vietnam, when the tradition began of TV and print reporters hanging around Saigon hotel bars swapping rumors that often generated interesting if hardly accurate copy.]

Finer’s commissioned hit-piece tries to foist two untruths on the WaPo reading public, most of whom are already predisposed to believe the worst when it comes to Iraq, or anything about America, for that matter.

The first is that bloggers do it for the money [as if scribblers like Finer do it solely for Peace Corps type idealism].

The second is that bloggers are gulled into putting out positive stories by military when they are shown successful projects or accompany successful operations. The subtext of all these WaPo and NYT hit-pieces against bloggers and embeds is that they are somehow being suborned by clever military public affairs officers or getting along to go along by being compliant or giving our side the benefit of the doubt in often murky and turbulent situations.

The Finer article is more than just a repeat in a long line of WaPo disinformation against the embeds who routinely write better and more accurately than the [with a couple of notable exceptions] WaPo Foreign Service reporters in-country.

There is a more immediate reason. You can bet the real motive for commissioning this misleading WaPo piece derives from the fact that the MSM’s search for another Tet was recently thwarted by bloggers like Roggio, whom in this case the Post tries to discredit and take down by inaccurate and misleading personal attacks.

Remember that although Tet was an overwhelming American military victory, the American media managed to turn it into a psychological defeat. The Butternut WaPo and NYT in-country corps is looking for another Tet, a Dienbienphu, any sort of American reverse they can parlay into a victory for defeatism. Their campaign to Frenchify the American military until they are as feminized as Canadians looks for that “tipping point” they can tag as a US defeat in the field.

But not this time. As Finer’s piece loiters aimlessly toward a conclusion, Finer lets the cat out of the bag:

When news organizations began reporting about the insurgent activity in Ramadi on Dec. 1, Roggio posted "The Ramadi Debacle: The Media Bites on Al Qaeda Propaganda."
"The reported 'mini-Tet offensive' in Ramadi has turned out to be less than accurate," he wrote, citing information provided by Pool. "In fact, it has been anything but."

On Dec. 15, when Iraqis voted in nationwide elections, Roggio reported from Barwana, a Western town where turnout was far heavier than in Iraq's constitutional referendum held Oct. 15.

"Barwana, once part of Zarqawi self declared 'Islamic Republic of Iraq,' " he wrote, "is now the scene of al-Qaeda's greatest nightmare: Muslims exercising their constitutional right to chose their destiny."

The Washington Post lost a major cred point in its disinfo war inside Iraq while paradoxically it continues to triumph on the Beltway battleground where its tag-team WWF combo with the NYT has Rove and DeLay on the ropes.

As a result of losing cred in their Ramadi/Tet scam, Post editors sicced attack puppy Finer on Roggio and other bloggers.

These unfortunate truth-tellers were obstacles in the Post Iraqi in-country defeatist agenda and were targetted by a spurious blogging-for-money disinformation piece.

Of course, the Chardonnay set will swallow it, but the Post had better get bigger and better dogs out there in the field who are not too timorous to venture out of the Green Zone and file real honest copy.

Or else the embeds will continue to clean their clocks ten times out of ten..

Perhaps the Post should send a self-described "traveler" like Robert Kaplan who can write honest narratives like Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground by actually embedding themselves as fellow-travelers and not some high-hat "journalist" looking down his nose at facts that do not please the newsroom and Len Downie.

Maybe The Washington Post Foreign Service will describe occasional US successes, just for a change.