The Washington Post is at it again, committing... journalism:
Just two days after Donald Trump implied that President Obama sympathized with terrorists, provoking a backlash that included members of his own party, the presumed Republican presidential nominee declared himself “right,” based on a published report claiming administration “support” for the Islamic State.
The [Breitbart - lol] story was based on a declassified 2012 cable written by a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, addressed to about two dozen military and national security agencies and officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Labeled as “information report, not finally evaluated intelligence,” it refers to “the general situation” in Iraq and Syria in the early days of the armed insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It describes al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State precursor, as part of the anti-Assad opposition, and notes that opposition forces fighting in eastern Syria are backed by “Western countries, the [Persian] Gulf states and Turkey.”
But the document appears to be an initial intake of spot intelligence from the early days of the Syrian civil war. That intelligence had not yet been vetted or verified. Trump’s embrace of Breitbart’s interpretation of the cable fits a pattern of careless handling and circulation of facts, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Such missteps have piqued concerns among foreign policy experts and Republican strategists about Trump’s understanding of complicated policy issues and his fitness for office. (our emphasis)The Post's Fact Checker also looked into this debunked Breitbart/ Judicial Watch (lol) bit of ratf*cking and rated it "4 Pinocchios."
This follows on a pattern we noticed the other day: that the Post is now clearly characterizing neo- fascist nitwit Donald "Rump" Trump's (a.k.a., Cheeto Jesus) statements as, shall we say, divorced from reality. Some media outlets occasionally adopt a similar approach to debunking the dangerous lies and fear- mongering coming from Cheeto Jesus (here's CNN's Jake Tapper, for example), but turning around the decades- long media tradition of anodyne "both siderism"/ "he said, she said" is not going to come easily. Perhaps the clear and present danger of a Trump presidency is serving to clear the minds of these "journalists."
