Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Back? To the Fight?
Dan Froomkin has a nice piece on last week's wave of "Released Guantanamo detainees are going back to the fight!!!" stories—and how many in the media seem to have learned nothing from the last time the Pentagon trumpeted a wave of released-detainee recidivism (except, you know, they couldn't back up their numbers, and many of the detainees weren't known to be honest-to-gosh terrorists in the first place, and in some cases "returned to the fight" meant nothing more violent than "wrote an angry letter to the editor"). Says Froomkin, "Gullible, amnesiac journalists are a dangerous thing. Is our profession really incapable of learning anything from its mistakes?"
To be charitable, I suppose it's only ineptitude if you don't think it's your job to fall for official propaganda.
