Bill Roggio Takes on the Post

At NRO:

Guilt by association. It is a common tool used to discredit those deemed a threat to the established order. Recently, I've found myself on the receiving end of such a tactic courtesy of a piece by Jonathan Finer and Douglas Struck in the Washington Post.

On the day after Christmas, the Washington Post featured an article titled "Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War — U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," of which my recent embed in Iraq was the subject of scrutiny as a military-information operation. It is a fact-challenged article that manages to cast an unfair shadow on my reporting from Iraq.

The piece claims that I had retired from the military, when in fact it requires 20 years of service to retire. I served six years on active duty and two years in the National Guard. The authors report that I was credentialed by the American Enterprise Institute, when in fact this is impossible, as a think tank cannot provide media credentials — this must be done by a recognized news organization. I was credentialed by The Weekly Standard and the Canadian talk-radio show The World Tonight. And finally, contrary to the report, I was not in Iraq when the article was published. I had been home for nearly a week. Each of these items could have been easily confirmed by a simple inquiry.

The incorrect facts on their own can easily be discounted as trivial, but the suggestion that I was credentialed by the American Enterprise Institute certainly implies I was part of some kind of orchestrated right-wing ploy (there go those neocon war hawks again!). But couple the Post's fake "facts" with the misrepresentation of the embed-credentialing process and the blending of my story with military-information operations, and the groundwork has been laid to label me as a tool of the military....