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First he found WMDs in Iraq– now Jeffrey Goldberg finds ‘Jihadists did this in Norway’

This is funny. Flapola nails Jeffrey Goldberg, and then Goldberg amends his post w/o saying as much, and then… well, it’s too complicated for me, but apparently Glenn Greenwald is after Goldberg, and some folks are going after Jim Fallows for assailing Jennifer Rubin for the same thing– wrongly blaming Norway on Muslims without any evidence– and not going after his colleague Goldberg. (Bear in mind, Goldberg’s bad reports from Kurdistan in the New Yorker, suggesting that Saddam was getting WMDs, helped paved the way to the Iraq war)… Flapola:

On Friday July 22, Jeffrey Goldberg posted “Mumbai Comes to Norway”. The link is to a cache of the original version of the post. The text reads:

“I’m following news of the Norway attacks like the rest of you, and am curious to see, among other things, Norway’s response. I hope it is not to pull troops out of Afghanistan; this would only breed more attacks. So, why Norway? It doesn’t seem likely, on the surface. There are many countries with more troops in Afghanistan than Norway; and there are several countries whose newspapers have printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. My first reaction is two-fold: 1) Jihadists did this in Norway because they could. Norway is pretty well-known among homeland-security types for being among the softer, less-defended countries of the West, and 2) Norway is making moves to expel a jihadist called Mullah Krekar, who is one of the founders of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from Saddam’s intelligence services. This could be a message about his coming deportation.”

Flapola continues:

When events demonstrated how reckless he’d been, Goldberg added a third paragraph raising the possibility of right-wing terrorism. By not labeling this as an update, he left readers to conclude that he was just exploring multiple theories rather than using the massacre to make a bold pronouncement about the worldwide jihadist danger. Later that evening, beginning around 8 PM, Goldberg began adding 4 further paragraphs on stray thoughts, each of which he did carefully label as an “UPDATE”. At the same time he also added “(UPDATED)” to the title. So he was capable of noting updates when there was nothing to be gained from not doing so.

On Saturday, Goldberg posted a roundabout defense of his decision to rush to judgment, “On Suspecting al Qaeda in the Norway Attacks.” It is characteristically disingenuous, particularly about what he had written in “Mumbai”.

On Monday, when he learned (via James Fallows) that I had found cached evidence that he’d made those unacknowledged changes to “Mumbai”, Goldberg hurriedly added another update to the post. This was the aforementioned bizarre explanation for not having labeled the first revision as an ‘update’. It is so ridiculous it really needs to be seen to be believed.

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