Once upon a time the press was so proud of its skepticism

* Once upon a time the press was so proud of its skepticism. That has gone out the window when it comes to anyone willing to speak ill of the U.S. military. Case in point: New York Times reporter Hassan M. Fattah, who on March 11 penned a profile of one Ali Shalal Qaissi--a man who claimed to be the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner pictured atop a cardboard box with wires attached to his fingers.

As it turned out, Qaissi--who now peddles his tale for a living and features the hooded silhouette on his business card--was not the man in the photograph, as the Times acknowledged in a subsequent editors' note. In admitting their error, the editors' excuse was that "lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him" and "human rights workers seemed to support his account." Nevertheless, the editors wrote, in 2004 military investigators identified the man on the box as someone else, according to at least one newspaper report. To discover that report, the Times would only have had to search its own archives. But that would require more skepticism than our credulous press seems able to muster these days.

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