Official comment on the Afghanistan battlefield reports released by Wikileaks would have us believe that they contain nothing new. But, many important facts never made it into the official reports, writes Noah Shachtman, who witnessed one of the battles. The reports, often providing little more than place, date and the number of enemies killed, leave out details that, Schactman acknowledges, include the most disturbing and important. He surmises, generously, that the lack of detail was unintentional.

In fact, from the early days of the Iraq war to the present battles in Afghanistan, war reports have whitewashed and manipulated the truth in order to better serve official US propaganda. Looking farther back, to the Vietnam war, we see reports, similar to these, that emphasized casualty figures--an emphasis that was intentional, high-level, and led to mass murder in Vietnam.

It’s really very simple, as anybody can attest who has ever seriously looked into a ‘scandal’ promoted by a right-wing news outfit: They do not scruple to lie, misrepresent, distort, deceive, selectively misquote, omit necessary context, and conceal critical information in order to score a partisan point. Nothing they say should ever be trusted without independent verification. Indeed my experience is that very rarely is it worth the bother even to try to verify their claims, so egregiously inaccurate and hyperbolic are their arguments. Such people view themselves as playing a role in the conservative propaganda machinery headed by Fox News and radio-ranting luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh. As such, they will fall over backwards to excuse even the most repulsively dishonest and manipulative behavior by their fellow partisans.

Almost incredibly, it appears that the Obama White House and much of the conventional media figured this obvious truth out only within the last day or so, after falling for yet another transparent fraud committed by the notorious huckster Andrew Breitbart. I would have thought that the last 19 years furnished ample evidence that right-wing media has little more than contempt for mamsy-pamsy standards of truthfulness and integrity – ever since it produced and flogged around a grossly misleading public opinion poll in order to boost the nomination of Clarence Thomas after he’d been accused of sexual harassment.

A case study

There shouldn’t be any doubt that right-wing media ‘scandals’ should be greeted with extreme skepticism, and yet the naïve continue to stumble along without ever taking a good hard look at how these frauds are perpetrated. So here is an example, chosen almost at random from the many daily ‘scandals’ flogged by right-wing blogs. Like so many other ‘scandals’ promoted by conservatives since 2008, this piece is transparently race-baiting. It has also been reproduced and quoted widely and uncritically. But above all, it’s marked by preposterously misleading assertions. The post is predicated entirely on the assumption that readers will not check the source material and discover its deceptions.

The author, William Tate, argues that the “Obama administration…faces a new [racial] bias claim” from the TARP Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky. Tate would have us believe that Barofsky charges Obama with ensuring that GM and Chrysler dealerships were slated for closure based upon the race/gender of their owners.

Wonder of wonders, Tate is being deceptive. What follows are three obvious ways in which Tate has tried to mislead.

This morning political commentators are all atwitter about James Risen’s NYT article about mineral reserves charted in Afghanistan by a USGS survey. In years to come these reserves could turn Afghanistan into another Saudi Arabia, we’re told. Bloggers have lapped this “news” up.

Risen presents the information as if he had a major scoop.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

In fact, however, the survey was conducted between 2004 and 2007. Risen claims that it’s results were ignored until recently, when the Pentagon “came upon” the geological survey data while looking for ways to boost the country’s economy.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

Utter nonsense. In 2007 the Afghan government touted the survey to the world. In the time since then, it has been working to attract international developers for its copper and iron reserves – which appear to be the most valuable and accessible ones. Already in 2007 a Chinese company won a competition to lease the largest copper mine, agreeing to pay the Afghan government $400 million per year in taxes.

It’s hard to conceive that in the foreseeable future Afghanistan will be able to derive more than a few billion dollars per year in taxes/mineral royalties by exploiting its reserves to the fullest possible extent. For comparison, the current Afghan GDP is thought to be around $16 billion. In 2007, the UNODC estimated that opium accounted for half of the country’s ‘licit’ GDP, or about $4 billion. So mining is not going to turn Afghanistan into a rich state much less eliminate the opium trade.

Risen and his sources are trying to sell us a pipe dream.

Now that many prominent Republicans are denouncing the McCarthyite smear campaign against DOJ attorneys being orchestrated by Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and William Kristol are scrambling to recast themselves as innocuous good-government types. Indeed. Their attacks were simply misunderstood, they say. KAS never meant to impugn the loyalty or “values” of the lawyers hired by the Obama administration, its leaders began to claim late last week. Instead they just wanted DOJ to release the lawyers names. Later, when the names had been released, it turned out that they just wanted DOJ to explain whether those attorneys were working on any issues related to Guantanamo prisoners. It’s just a call for transparency, you see, not at all a political hatchet job - as Kristol helpfully explained in his characteristically dismissive tone:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that another left-wing advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, is circulating a letter condemning what the letter describes as “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy.” The Human Rights Watch letter mischaracterizes the “attacks” as saying “that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees.” In fact, the main issues in the debate have been whether Congress and the public are simply entitled to know who these lawyers are, and the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department.

In other words, Cheney and Kristol hope to wriggle free of the McCarthyism charge because the KAS ad smeared the DOJ attorneys with innuendo, which is after all subject to interpretation. Unfortunately for KAS, however, its campaign also dealt in deliberate lies as I pointed out last Thursday here. At the time I emailed KAS spokesman Aaron Harison asking him to explain the assertion in question. Though he’s a veteran of John McCain’s rapid-response team from the 2008 election, Harison still has not responded to my query more than three days after I sent it to him.

Lies must be awkward things to walk back.

The knee-jerk analysis of Instapundit is generally so slipshod as to merit no notice, but this op-ed is remarkable by even his own low standards. Glenn Reynolds argues that whereas the vast majority of Americans think the federal government lacks the consent of the governed, nearly two-thirds of our political rulers imagine that they do have this consent. And the other third who don’t “presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.” He construes a revolutionary scenario from this alleged chasm in perceptions (which somehow he likens to Schlitz beer), though Reynolds holds out hope that America can be “transformed” now without violence.

The chasm into which he thinks the country’s political structure is tumbling, however, is a figment of his own illiteracy.