Saturday, October 13, 2007

Former Iraq Commander: 'Reporters Feed From a Pig's Trough'

Update: Full text of speech - MSM reports were even more duplicitous than I thought.

Update II: the Press coverup begins with lies of omission.

Big surprise; David Cloud of the New York Times deliberately mischaracterizes the speech, redacting all mention of the first twelve or thirteen paragraphs excoriating the MSM.

Steven Komarow is much, much less than honest in his writeup for the Associated Press.

At the Washington Post, Josh White's nose grows another few inches.
Updates end

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded Coalition forces in Iraq from June '03-June '04, then was forced into retirement because of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, lashed out at the Bush administration, Congress, and the Press Friday.

We'll turn to the Army Times, which isn't shy about reporting everything the ex-General had to say, and focus on the fond words he had for reporters before the MSM dumps them down the memory hole

This is the Army Times lead paragraph:
The former top commander of forces in Iraq lambasted reporters Friday for having “agenda-driven biases” he called “a threat to democracy,” and then laid out the Bush administration and Congress for bad planning and no clear end state for the war in Iraq.
Sanchez wasn't done:
Sanchez said his career was a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

He berated the room of about 30 to 40 reporters, saying he had been portrayed as a “liar” by people who had never met him...

...He said some poor strategic decisions in Iraq had become “defeats because of the media,” and that some reporters feed from a “pigs’ trough.”

He lamented the media’s treatment of Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Brown resigned from FEMA after accusations that he had mishandled the hurricane...

He said the partisan politics of Congress are “killing soldiers,” and that the focus needs to be not at Capitol Hill, but in Iraq. And, he said, the media’s coverage of partisan politics was driving a wedge in democracy. He called for newspapers to run corrections more prominently and noted that television and Internet outlets often don’t run corrections at all.
Sanchez also had much bad to say about the Bush administration, but you'll be able to get that, endlessly from the MSM, once they finish sanitizing the rest of Sanchez's remarks.

One wonders what General Hooker would have had to say about President Lincoln and General Grant in say, 1864.