More "Journalism" From IPS

Last time we heard from the Inter Press News Service (ISP), they had manufactured a story that put Admiral Fallon calling General Petraeus a “ass-kissing little chicken-shit,” a phrase which the DailyKos picked up and has now made its way into some more respectable blogs. This despite the fact that the report had relied on not a single witness to the conversation, or even anyone who had been in Iraq at the time. Now we get another story from ISP about General Petraeus’s testimony before Congress, which, according to author Gareth Porter, who also reported the ‘chicken-shit’ story “Helps Destroy Bush’s ‘Proxy War’ Claim.” Here’s the lead:

In his prepared statement to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shiite militias into a “Hezbollah-like force” to “fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq”. But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had essentially left Iraq. “The Quds force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity…” Petraeus’s contradictory statements on the Quds force are emblematic of an administration propaganda line that has essentially fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality.