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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (94395)	1/9/2005 12:46:59 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793808

Instapundit - EVERY WEEK, NEWSWEEK SPAMS ME with press releases about its new stories. I usually ignore them because by the time they're out they're already old news to blogosphereans. But this piece, with its combination of blatant bias and factual inaccuracy, seems so typical that it's worth a comment. Excerpt: Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success-despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. Er, maybe because the Iran-Contra scandal had to do with overthrowing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, rather than the guerrilla war in El Salvador? I mean, I know all those people look alike to the folks at Newsweek, but this is either inexcusable sloppiness, or simply a stretch to try to bring in more stuff that might make it look bad. The whole piece is like that, and it's unfortunately typical. I don't know whether this sort of thing is a good idea or not -- I can see arguments both ways -- but this story goes out of its way, as usual, to get the digs in before getting around to mentioning the actual arguments. I guess I should be glad, though: Usually it's all about Vietnam. At least this story is bringing things 20 years closer to the present.