Fruit of the poisoned tree
Exactly one year ago, we reported how TIME Magazine got many of its facts horribly wrong in its reporting on Haditha. We also cited Clarice Feldman’s work in The American Thinker and the blog Sweetness and Light. Let’s look again at how TIME misreported events:
In the original version of this story, TIME reported that “a day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME.”
TIME has since repudiated most of the preceding sentence, in which almost all facts were wrong. In what should have been a red light flashing a warning for all that was to follow, TIME called its source, the “Haditha journalism student,” a “young man.” Here he is:
The mischaracterization of Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi as a “young man” and a “journalism student” should have warned TIME that it was being set up. Alas, TIME was all too anxious to believe that it had unearthed another My Lai courtesy of Mr. Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi and a videotape so important and damning that he did nothing with it for four months — until he found a TIME reporter gullible enough or willing to be complicit in spreading wild, false stories. Consider these items gleaned from the articles we’ve linked to, as opposed to the breathless TIME reporting:
(a) Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi is not a young man, he is 43 years old;
(b) he is not a “budding journalism student”;
(c) there is no such thing as the “Hammurabi Human rights Group”, the fancy sounding group said to have “obtained” the damning videotape — it is Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi himself and maybe one other person;
(d) TIME’s reporting to the contrary, the Hammurabi Human Rights Group is in no way affiliated with Human Rights Watch;
(e) Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi made the video himself and sat on it for four months without doing anything with his so-called damning evidence;
(f) TIME says that it got the video from the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, without explaining that that was just a nom de plume of Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi;
(g) TIME has already retracted its false reporting about “one of the most damning pieces of evidence” in the case;
(h) Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi’s previous employer, Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi, who said that the Haditha victims had been shot at close range, had previously been arrested by American and Iraqis and had lodged numerous complaints against the American military;
(i) the US soldier who has provided corroboration for a “massacre” though he was not an eyewitness, Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones, never mentioned it until he was arrested for stealing a truck while drunk and crashing it into a house, at which point he claimed PTSD and offered his story;
(j) another reporter who claimed civilian deaths in Haditha, Ali al-Mashhadani, had been previously arrested and imprisoned for five months for helping insurgents, and might be the brother of Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi’s partner in the so-called Hammurabi Human Rights Group;
(k) for a little perspective on the Sunni insurgency stronghold of Haditha, consider this Guardian story of how children cheer for “double-bills” of public beheadings, and that DVD’s of disembowlings are distributed to kids.
Ask yourself a question: if TIME can’t get its source correctly identified, and if that source himself is highly suspect, why should anyone eat of the fruit of that poisoned tree? But, alas, our own military lawyers did.