The Schmidle Muddle of the Osama Bin Laden Take Down
registan.net
registan.net
A flat lie. I saw him interviewed last Monday on PBS's Newshour program and the interviewer asked him how he developed the story and whether he had talked to the SEALs on the mission in person. Schmidle replied to the latter question with a categorical and unambiguous denial; he could not have been more straightforward. This article is a hit piece that attempts to deceive its readers for traffic, but which has no basis in fact.
See for yourself: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec11/binladen_... at 05:05-05:30
The real question: how in the heck did the New Yorker vet this thing, from a fact-checking standpoint? The New Yorker has what's likely the most venerable fact-checking process in the magazine business. Most magazines have dismantled much of their dedicated fact-checking staffs to cut costs. The New Yorker, however, has soldiered on (as far as I know). So how were these details squared? How is it possible to ensure veracity of details, such as those fingering the events inside the helicopter, without a primary source?
I tend to believe much of the spirit of the story. But this is not a ripping book account of the raid (where more liberties are expected to be taken), this is the New Yorker. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...
But in that case, most of the main players had died, and so the reader already knows that he's getting details that come from letters and interviews...but we know that because we know who the main players are in the first place...In the New Yorker piece, all sources have been muddied up, deliberately, so that even if you know that no SEALs were talking, it still seems like this is a comprehensive report. But for all we know, this could be the Navy's public information officer. Or Pres. Obama himself. Neither of which would be considered the best sources for an end-all what-really-happened in-depth article.
Note that "fact-checking" is actually quote verification and/or finding someone else who says that she believes the same thing.
For example, the "rockets can't work in space because there's nothing to push against" bit in the 13 January 1920 NYT editorial trashing Goddard (mentioned in http://astronauticsnow.com/history/goddard/index.html) could easily have survived "fact checking".
The society and sports pages are the only places where you can rely on journalists wrt facts.
Why is it instantly deemed a conspiracy theory when people are questioning of matters such as this? Healthy skepticism is good in most discussions, and I would hope that the HN crowd would be open to having a good debate about these topics.
The author having more details than seems plausible is one thing. The idea that fundamental parts of the story are wrong is quite another and would of course be a charge made against the official story disseminated at every news outlet thus far. Since the "official" (if we are taking this to be the official story now) is already fairly damning if you are an Osama sympathizer (it was a kill only mission, he was shot unarmed, body was dumped in the ocean), I don't see any reason for it to be appreciably false and I certainly wouldn't spend any thought on it unless extraordinary evidence came to light. The simplest explanation is almost always right and conspiracy theories are almost always wrong.
As for "The simplest explanation is almost always right", I would tend to agree with you on matters of science. But in the tense and complex political landscape of US foreign policy in the Middle East, the true story is almost certainly going to be far more complex then what will be presented in the news. If your final judge of accuracy is simplicity, then I can fool you easily by telling you a simpler lie then the one you are currently believing.
"I don't believe the story this reporter wrote because I don't trust the source(s)" is a totally valid opinion, but anything further than that is just a "What-if" fest unless someone wants to put forth a specific alternate hypothesis, or question specific facts from the article.
"You shouldn't believe in this story because I don't trust the source(s)" adds a little info (especially with a "here's why"), but in the case of something as complicated as a government is probably just going to cause a flame war, _even if you're right_.
No it isn't.
I'm one of the original downvotes, and I also (rather rudely) replied to one of your comments.
I think the reason for the squelching of most of the discussion was because the tone of the questioning comments _was_ pretty conspiratorial. Comments like "Bollocks. Pics or it didn't happen", comments that treat "the government" like one coherent person, accusing people who believe the story of acting in a way that's "unscientific" and undirected "look deeper" sentiment tend to get shot down pretty quickly. (Note that these weren't all made by the same person, but they all got downvoted in the same thread.)
The posts that started with "Why did they report that XYZ?", instead of "Why should we believe that this happened at all" generated pretty good discussion. The distinction is somewhat subtle, but it's important for community management.
The claims against his character that the journalist makes at the beginning do not seem substantial enough to cast him as a liar.
Even more so, the parts of the story that do not add up, in the author's eyes, seem problematic but not totally unresolvable. For example, I don't think it's too farfetched to think that they may inventory the contents of the SEALs' pockets before departing on a mission.
The author of this piece also seems to imply that there is no good reason for the journalist not to reveal his sources, which is of course totally wrong, especially for something like this.
Lastly, the author totally ignores the fact that she is accusing of complicity a magazine known for the quality of its fact-checking. I would think it's safe to say the author's deception would have either have had to be astonishingly good or the new yorker to be particularly malicious for the accusations here to be true. One of those may be the case, but she should explicitly say that she is questioning the ability of the New Yorker's fact-checking team.
I guess at the end of the day, it's still worthy of questioning and investigating, but to me this article comes off as the argument of someone with an ax to grind more than an investigation.
It's not to say that these background sources are wrong. But they're getting pretty filtered info...the after-action report which consists of the compiled recollection of the actual operators.
Again, that report may be 100% truth, and it may even contain known unknowns and concerns of the operators. But can the spec ops officer who talked to the reporter be trusted to have summarized that summary correctly?
Let's say Obama was the New Yorker's secret source. No one would argue that he is not an authoritative and extremely important source regarding the OBL killing. But he is just one source, far removed from the action (remember that there was no helmet cam or otherwise-indoor video), with a definite vested interest in having the first detailed examination of the incident looking good for the WH.
That this author did not do the former suggests a lack of precision that is quite unlike the New Yorker, particular insofar as the subtle "tropes" that its articles occupy are concerned. Even a byline like "Rumors from Pakistan" could have allowed the article to be appreciated at face value without the claim to factual detail that was made.
To wit, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/freelance-jour...
"[New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David] Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. 'The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,' he said. 'I know who they are. Those are the rules of the road around here. We have the time to do this. There isn’t always time' for publications with shorter deadlines to do the same checking."
And that's what factcheckers do...help protect reporters from their own mistakes and also, protect the magazine from bad reporters.
In terms of secret situations, they do this by checking with the source. What happens when the source says exactly what the reporter recorded him/her saying, but the source him/herself is mistaken and there's no other way to check for that?
For example. The New Yorker's story has this statement:
>“There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)
How does one factcheck this? You can call the source who will verify to you that yes, the reporter has quoted him correctly. Then you can call the administration who can also say, Yes, we have stated that OBL could've surrendered.
So what's truth and what's falsehood? The "truth" is that both parties here stands by their statements. If you want to know the truth about what shooting orders the operators really had, you would either ask an operator himself, or his immediate commanding officer. But the fact-checker doesn't have access to these, so while some anonymous source says that the mission was all about shoot-to-kill...we don't know if this article really gets us closer to the truth of that, and no fact-checker can help here.
I'm surprised too that the NY published such a weakly fact-checked account but a lot of the Christine Fair commentary reads like scoop envy.
Honestly, I was just waiting for a "Based on a true story" disclaimer at the end.
Active Military/Security Types with that high level of security clearance do not direct or indirectly talk to the press no matter what country they serve..it does not happen.
In the US there is several layers of liaisons to the press in the Military forces.
At no time would there be primary sources for this story..so that means that New Yorker did not just fail to run fact checking but ran duck and covered knowing full well there were no primary sources.
Let's stop lying NewYorker as there are times when non primary sources is all you have to a story..
and that in fact the Bin Laden probably was dead years ago already, waiting to be exposed when government needs a popularity boost
The main things why its not believed that he was killed then is that no part of the body was shown to the public ( remember Saddam Husseins teeth and examination was shown all over the world ) and the burial was suspicious too ( thrown into the ocean within hours ? )