The Man Behind the Buzz

"The toilet incident allegation has been withdrawn, after the detainee was 'reinterviewed.' The detainee was never asked specifically about the toilet allegation in his 're-interview.' Reassured? Still, it's progress to have the military concede what others still refuse to see and what the miitary was denying outright only a week ago. Remember also that at Gitmo, none of the interrogators was an amateur. They cannot pull the Lynndie England defense. Someone somewhere thought this was a good idea. Who? Did anyone explicitly authorize this? Or was it a function of unclear guidelines? In which case, who was responsible for unclear guidelines? Did the memos allowing for far greater leniency in interrogatory abuse have anything to do with this? We currently have many more questions than answers."

Kevin Drum says the issue is not Newsweek but . . . people like me:

"The American media certainly has its share of problems these days, but the state of American media criticism is little short of buffoonish. How is it possible that our press critics have spent two weeks clucking nervously over the fact that Newsweek's source made a mistake about which report he saw the Koran allegations in, thus providing the White House with exactly the cover they needed to avoid responsibility for the fact that it's their disastrous policies that are responsible for what's happening in Afghanistan? Who needs Paris Hilton to distract attention from reality when America's media critics will do it for free?"

Might I remind people that Newsweek retracted the story, apologized for the story and issued new restrictions on the use of unnamed sources?

Power Line's John Hinderaker isn't buying this Washington Post article that challenges Rummy's denial that he had given an order to shoot down those two airheads in the Cessna that buzzed D.C.'s no-fly zone:

"The two officials whom the Post relied on for its original story had no first-hand knowledge of Rumsfeld giving any such orders; they were 'told' that he had done so. Yet the Post's first story clearly implied that the 'two senior federal officials' were relating facts, not hearsay or surmise.

"So the Post's lead sentence -- someone apparently thought it important that Rumsfeld himself had issued the order -- reported anonymous hearsay as fact. What is important here is not so much the error itself; I assume that someone other than Rumsfeld did indeed issue some kind of order authorizing the plane to be shot down under specified circumstances. But it does illustrate, I think, one of the problems with the mainstream media's addiction to anonymous sources. When we don't know who the source is, we can't evaluate whether the source is in a position to know the facts that he claims to be true."

Finally, it's gotten about 0.1 percent of the attention of Arianna Huffington's new venture, but Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is starting a group blog:

"There will be several blogs hosted at TPMCafe. The main group blog is one I've mentioned several times before. So let me share with you who the contributors to the main group blog are going to be. They are: Steve Clemons, David Gelber, Todd Gitlin, Reed Hundt, Ed Kilgore, Karen Kornbluh, Annie Lamott, Michael Lind, Josh Marshall, Judith Shulevitz, Mark Schmitt and Marshall Wittmann. A few others will be joining the group shortly. But that's our roster for our kick-off next Tuesday."

Well, no Diane Keaton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Erica Jong. But some interesting thinkers.