Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had this wildly preposterous comment to make yesteray:
"I want to speak generally about some reports I've witnessed over the past few years in the British media. And in some ways, I'm surprised it filtered down," Gibbs began. "Let's just say if I wanted to look up -- if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champion's League cup, I might open up a British newspaper. If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it'd be in the first pack of clips I'd pick up."
"You're not going to find very many of these newspapers and truth within 25 words of each other," Gibbs continued.
Three words for Gibbs: Downing Street Memos, first published in the British press, and scarcely (if at all) even mentioned in those "truthful" American media Gibbs is presumably fond of. Or perhaps just two words would suffice: Judith Miller. There are, without question, literally thousands of other examples.
And what caused this outburst? Because the Telegraph quoted General Taguba talking about rape photos from Abu Ghraib, photos the public hasn't seen. And now Taguba is "denying" the quote. Yes, what a denial:
"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said -- but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.
So the essence of the story, that horrible photos is exist, he's actually confirming. It's only the question of whether these were precisely the photos the Obama administration is refusing to release, as if we care about that detail.
Reprinted from Left I on the News