Big Government Takes A Big Gamble By Sticking To Report Of Mullah Omar’s Capture

by Frances Martel | 2:35 pm, May 11th, 2010

» 6 comments

Early yesterday evening, the biggest victory in the Afghanistan War quietly slinked onto the internet– brought to you by the site made famous for sending a fake pimp and prostitute to expose ACORN’s alleged ties to child sex trafficking. Big Government exclusively broke the news that Taliban leader and close Osama bin Laden ally Mullah Mohammed Omar had been captured by Pakistani authorities, but with no further evidence than the words of “key intelligence sources,” they’re going to have to do a better job of convincing the media that the story is true.

According to Big Government‘s Brad Thor:

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately. From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.

Today, as a reinforcement of yesterday’s report, Big Government ran a column by Jed Babbin analyzing the repercussions of having someone like Omar in custody, and warning that an interrogation on the part of the American government would be detrimental because he “would be Mirandized and pushed into the civilian criminal justice system where he, and his ilk, manifestly don’t belong.”

Unlike the type of reports Big Government and it’s sister sites specialize in, there was no undercover James O’Keefe, pimping his way into a secret cache of Pakistani intelligence. There was no video evidence of Taliban members throwing eggs at a Tea Party bus. There really isn’t any sourcing, either, other than unidentified “key intelligence sources.” The story and its style deviate significantly from what the Big sites usually do. Unsurprisingly, Big Government isn’t getting much support from the mainstream media. In fact, even among default allies like RedState and Hot Air, there seems to be a level of skepticism. RedState reported it with a question mark and made sure to point out Thor’s credentials as a “best-selling novelist.”

Allahpundit at Hot Air went through a list of reasons to believe the story— namely that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had commented that she believed Pakistani authorities had information on the Taliban they were refusing to share— and reasons not to believe the story (“how come this hasn’t leaked? Nothing against Brad Thor, but this is so tippy top secret that he knows about it when the NYT, WaPo, and even Hillary Clinton don’t?”). Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic also reported it with extreme skepticism, but other than these sites, no one seems to have picked the story up.

Reporting the story is a peculiar decision to make on the part of the Big sites (Big Journalism ran it, too), as they usually stay away from major foreign policy journalism. Not to mention that by Brad Thor breaking it, he is putting professional provocateur Andrew Breitbart‘s reputation at risk, as well. Breitbart’s sites have rarely broken a story without video evidence, and the Big sites usually shy away from news from outside the US, with the exceptions of denouncing Che Guevara‘s war crimes or updates on Hugo Chavez‘s crackdown on the Venezuelan media. If he’s right, Breitbart will have branched out as a legitmate source on military intelligence and beaten all of the mainstream media to the punch; if he’s not, he just gave all of the media– not just his enemies– carte blanche to ignore anything and everything he says, a risk that doesn’t seem to be worth the short-term increase in web traffic.

Andrew Breitbart, Big Government, Brad Thor, foreign policy, Hot Air, Mullah Mohammed Omar, Mullah Omar captured, Pakistan, redstate, Taliban

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Scerpella/1022068347 Dan Scerpella

Pardon the digression but its hard to go on reading when scant words into this article, Martel speaks falsehoods.

“brought to you by the site made famous for sending a fake pimp and prostitute to expose ACORN’s alleged ties to child sex trafficking.”

First, Big Government (Breitbart) sent no one anywhere. They were approached by O Keefe once he and Giles had already shot all the videos in the different ACORN offices that would ultimately appear on Big Government.com. O Keefe contacted Breitbart for assistance and advice in how to release the videos in a way the main stream media couldn’t summarily dismiss. The strategy was startlingly effective. Watch ACORN run for cover, tell lies, watch the denials uncritically accepted and and regurgitated by the friendly media, then simply release the new video proving the mendaciousness of ACORN and the foolishness of their trusting acolytes in the MSM. Given ACORN’s current status, it appears they were successful.

Second, O Keefe and Giles were not attempting to establish ACORN’s ties to child trafficking but like any “60 Minutes” sting you’ve ever seen, dangle a carrot for unethical dishonest operators to see how they react. One “bad apple” would have been easy to dismiss and not entirely unexpected. But in city after city, case after case, O Keefe and Giles were welcomed by ACORN workers apparently unfazed and by any reasonable assessment accustomed to illegality who in many cases went quite out of their way to be helpful in aiding the two impostors to defraud the government and engage in a criminal and immoral enterprise. Its not hard for one to see an organization with endemic corruption.

Ultimately, no amount of spin or dismissive deflections of the events like Martel’s could obscure the truth and today ACORN finds itself essentially insolvent. Its clear the organizations operations will continue in new groups but that is beside the point. This story if broken by young fresh liberal Woodward and Bernstein wannabes about some corrupt and largely conservative favored organization would have earned them a well deserved Pulitzer Prize. Here on Mediaite, all it gets is a dishonest dismissal.
badr

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/202412.php

An overseas intelligence source has confirmed to the Jawa Report that Mullah Omar has been captured as originally reported by Brad Thor.

You can wait for the New York Times to catch up if you’d like, we don’t mind.
Jim R

“This dramatic spike in public attention led us to
conduct a study of how the media covered the ACORN controversy. We
analyzed all stories about ACORN (647 total) from 2007 and 2008 by 15
news organizations, including USA Today, New York Times, Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN,
MSNBC, National Public Radio (NPR), NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), and
three local newspapers representing cities in which ACORN has a
long-time presence: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune,
and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The pattern we discovered in the 2007-2008 coverage of
ACORN resembled the formula that we observed in the flow of news
coverage about the hidden camera story.

We found that conservative “opinion entrepreneurs” –
primarily business and conservative groups and individuals – set the
story in motion, the conservative media (e.g., Fox News, conservative
talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and his many local counterparts,
conservative magazines like the National Review, the Washington Times,
the Washington Enquirer, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street
Journal) heighten the sense of urgency with an unwarranted amount of
coverage, and the mainstream media report the same allegations with
largely the same conservative frames, usually without investigating
their veracity.

§ 95.8% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged
involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially
efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of “voter
fraud” to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans that were
already documented at the time. Thanks to a House Judiciary Committee
investigation that released in August 2009 more than 5,000 pages of
White House and Republican National Committee e-mails and transcripts
of closed-door testimony by Karl Rove, former Bush senior advisor and
deputy chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, former White House counsel,
we now have further evidence that Rove personally orchestrated an
attack on ACORN. He insisted that a number of U.S. Attorneys prosecute
ACORN for voter fraud, even if there was no evidence for it. When one
of them, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, investigated
the situation and discovered that ACORN had not engaged in any fraud,
he refused to prosecute the group. Rove quickly got Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales to fire him, part of a pattern that ultimately led to
the resignation of Gonzales in 2007.

Still, the politics-laden meme of
ACORN-as-criminal-enterprise continues to pulse through the news media,
almost context-free. But, as Congress and foundations pulled funding
from ACORN with recording-breaking speed after the revelations of the
hidden videos, it is worth considering the significant role of ACORN in
the under-reported world of low- and moderate-income families. In
cities throughout America, ACORN’s local chapters have organized
low-income people to improve everyday conditions in their communities.
ACORN members have battled slumlords, school bureaucracies, and rip-off
retailers. ACORN campaigns—which involve negotiations, confrontation,
and voter mobilization—have resulted in better code enforcement of slum
housing, safer traffic conditions, greater parent involvement in public
schools, closings of crack houses, job training programs for former
welfare recipients, more parks and playgrounds in inner city
neighborhoods, and new laws (such as inclusionary zoning) to create
more affordable housing.”

“Christopher R. Martin, professor of
journalism and communication studies at the University of Northern
Iowa, and Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics
and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program at
Occidental College , are co-authors of “Manipulating the Public Agenda:
Why ACORN was in the News and What the News Got Wrong.”

I think Mr. Breitbart’s reputation is secure, whether this is false or he’s just screwing up a secret operation and making us less safe.
BigSurveyor

“Big Government Takes A Big Gamble By Sticking To Report Of Mullah Omar’s Capture”

Ummm, I guess Big Gamble’s pay-off sometimes huh Mediaite?

How do those words taste?
NYCRetired

“There was no video evidence of Taliban members throwing eggs at a Tea Party bus. ”

?????????????????????????

Zip up
Your bias is showing
http://MsUnderestimated.com MsUnderestimated

So how’s that “big gamble” paying off now for Breitbart, Mediaite? Why so quick to second guess? Wow… just un-freakin-believable. Pissed you didn’t get the intel first? I normally love this site, but this article just screamed “waaaah! why didn’t we get this first?”

Suckas!