Sorry, but Robert Gibbs is right to defend the Obama administration against the British press, and my friend James Delingpole is for once barking up the wrong tree. Even the most respectable British papers have a penchant for stories that are “too good to check,” and this is as true of the Telegraph as of any other U.K. paper. I would especially doubt any British news story that concerns America’s armed forces and purported atrocities thereby. This is true even of the BBC (It was the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan who, trusting his Iraqi pal “Comical Ali” infamously insisted that the coalition was lying when it said it had reached Baghdad airport in early April 2003.), and I would be the surprised if the Telegraph is correct in its claims about the Abu Ghraib “rape” photographs . . .
See my article, “When Facts Get in the Way.” British newspaper writing is famously more vigorous and readable than its American equivalent. But this comes at a price: There’s a good chance that anything you read in a British newspaper isn’t true . . .