By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, June 6, 2001

A couple weeks ago I wrote an article (Shameless Leftist Lies by Robert Scheer) about Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer falsely claiming that the Bush administration was giving money to Afghanistan's extremist Islamic Taliban. I was extremely surprised to learn today that The Nation decided to pick up and reprint Scheer's article.

I've been critical of The Nation in the past, but while I disagree with their ideological focus I really thought the magazine wouldn't possibly let an article like Scheer's end up in print without some minimal sort of fact checking.

After all, if the Bush administration were changing U.S. foreign policy to enter into a partnership with the Taliban to stamp out drugs that would be very big news and, frankly, a huge stain on the Bush administration. Given the severity of the charge I would think the editors at The Nation would spend a few minutes to verify Scheer's claims.

And it's not as if it would have been hard to do. After reading Scheer's column the first time around, it took me all of five minutes to visit CNN's web site and search on "Afghanistan U.S. Aid". A CNN story about this topic turns up as the third link on such a search.

Certainly nobody is infallible, and journalists, newspapers, magazines and web sites are going to make mistakes and let errors slip by. But there's no excuse for letting such blatant and obvious falsehoods pass into print and, now, Internet lore as this story is taking on a life of its own as people are forwarding and linking back to the story in The Nation, assuming that the magazine is a reliable source.

Anyway, here's a copy of a letter I sent to The Nation today about Scheer's column:

Editor, The Nation,

Your magazine recently chose to run an article by Robert Scheer, "Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban," that represented a gross error in judgment on the part of the editors of The Nation.

In that article, Scheer maintains that a) the United States is donating $43 million to the Islamic extremist Taliban movement in Afghanistan, and b) the money will go to help that country fight the drug war. Both claims are outright fabrications.

The $43 million will go not to the Taliban but to the United Nations. The money will not be used to fight the drug war, but rather to try to avert a famine in Afghanistan -- in fact the single largest component of the aid is $28 million worth of surplus wheat. This is hardly a major change in U.S. policy -- the Clinton administration also gave millions of dollars worth of aid in 2000 to the United Nations.

Scheer is either incompetent in his reporting or outright fabricated these allegations. That would be bad enough, but when The Nation chose to reprint Scheer's essay -- apparently without bothering to do even minimal fact checking -- it gave an air of legitimacy to the story which is now spreading rapidly through the Internet.

Only a few weeks ago you published a long speech by Bill Moyers on the importance of journalistic integrity and accuracy. Do those principals simply not apply to the Left?

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