The New York Times prides itself on ethical journalism. The company boasts a 57-page “handbook of values and practices” for its newsroom. “Our greatest strength,” the paper intones, “is the authority and reputation of the Times.”

Last year, former Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald received one of countless honors showered on The Ethical, Authoritative Paper’s staffers: a University of Oregon award for ethics in journalism. Eichenwald was cited “for preserving the editorial integrity of an important story while reaching out to assist his source, Justin Berry, in reporting on Berry’s involvement in child pornography.” The judges praised Eichenwald for going beyond reporting and helping Berry escape the pornography trade and facilitating Berry’s participation in prosecuting the adults in the porn ring.

Eichenwald and Berry appeared together at a congressional hearing, on the “Today” show with Katie Couric and on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, where the crusading Eichenwald was credited with “Saving Justin.” The University of Oregon judges were “impressed” by the ethical decisions Eichenwald and The Ethical, Authoritative Times made – as well as by their “transparency.”

But now, the rest of the story: Turns out Eichenwald forked out $2,000 to Berry, who was the primary source and subject of Eichenwald’s massive Times investigative cover story on webcam child porn in 2005.

Eichenwald failed to disclose the payment. The Times admitted the payment only after it “emerged” in a criminal trial last week related to Eichenwald’s story. The payment was made in June 2005. The story was published in December 2005. The Times didn’t acknowledge the lack of disclosure until March 6, 2007, when it revealed in an Editor’s Note:

“Mr. Eichenwald did not disclose to his editors or readers that he had sent Mr. Berry a $2,000 check. … The check should have been disclosed to editors and readers, like the other actions on the youth’s behalf that Mr. Eichenwald, who left the Times last fall, described in his article and essay.”

Eichenwald and The Ethical, Authoritative Times have offered explanations for the payment that don’t pass the sniff test. These rationales certainly wouldn’t get past the Times’ own editorial olfactory nerves if any of its competitors had committed the very same sin.

Eichenwald now says he and his wife hatched a plan as “private citizens” to give the money in order to learn the teenager’s real name and address. “If I can prove, based on that information, that this is a minor, we will contact law enforcement. Otherwise, we will invest the money in hopes of drumming up more information and luring out more information that might prove the point,” he explained on media blogger Jim Romenesko’s website.

The paper also says Eichenwald was just trying to maintain contact with the boy out of concern for his safety and wasn’t acting as a journalist when he sent the money. But in a sidebar published with his December 2005 story, Eichenwald struck a far different tone. Less humanitarian, more investigative and journalistic:

“The only way to know if Justin was real, I decided, was to meet him in person. And to do that, I had to win the confidence of whoever was answering to his screen name. At the Times, it is standard practice for a reporter to identify himself at the outset, but doing that too soon would mean I might never know the truth. I decided to try to engage this person in conversation and persuade him to meet with me. At that time, I would disclose my identity and only then would I begin the real reporting that could be used in an article. …

“Soon thereafter, I proposed meeting in Los Angeles, and Justin agreed. My wife, Theresa, whom I had kept abreast of what was happening, worried that this could be a setup, and made me promise to take precautions. I did, but when I saw Justin at the airport, I was reassured. Although he was 18, he looked much younger and did not seem physically capable of harming me.

“I immediately identified myself as a Times reporter, and Justin, though taken aback, continued to speak to me; for more than an hour, we discussed my background, until he was willing to proceed. Over the next two days, I interviewed the person I now knew was Justin Berry.”

The boy’s family has now repaid what has morphed from rescue money to a loan to a not-loan. Claims Eichenwald:

” … [T]he money was not provided for information, and was not provided to a source. The money was not a ‘loan’ (loans are given with the expectation of repayment. There was no such expectation when the money was given.) The money was not paid in exchange for Justin meeting with me.”

Eichenwald says Berry bought toys with the money. But he also says Berry “had taken good money and turned it into bad.” Huh?

Eichenwald is also incensed that anyone would challenge his excuses. He claims he was “overwhelmed” and forgot – until his memory was apparently restored during a criminal trial. He told Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman it just “slipped my mind in the flood” of events. “Paying for news is the quick, simple line that people are using,” Eichenwald said. “But it’s not what happened.”

Can you imagine how loudly the media ethics mavens would moan and snicker if anyone other than the New York Times provided such convoluted justifications for checkbook journalism?

“[I]t is essential that we preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias,” the Times’ code of ethics lectures. Do as I say, not as I do, eh, Gray Lady?

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Last week, I wrote about the Gathering of Eagles – veterans, active-duty troops, bikers, activists and ordinary citizens coming to Washington, D.C., on March 17 to hold a counter-protest against tens of thousands of anti-war extremists demanding immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Washington state this week, the peace brigade held a dress rehearsal at the Port of Tacoma – where they showed support for our troops by taunting the Stryker Brigade and local police guarding against obstruction of the convoys headed to Iraq. More than 300 Stryker vehicles and other equipment are being moved from Fort Lewis to Iraq in support of the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division’s upcoming deployment as part of the ongoing “surge” and counterinsurgency efforts. The Strykers are equipped with slat armor to protect the troops from rocket-propelled grenades.

Yes, the same ilk that purport to care so much about the troops not having enough armor and protection stood and jeered at those deploying to bring more protection to their fellow soldiers in Iraq.

Such patriots, aren’t they?

Members of the anti-military mob shouted condescendingly at our volunteer soldiers rolling past them: “Free the troops!” “No justice, no peace!” “You don’t have to go!” One lunatic with a bullhorn urged Stryker Brigade members to disobey their commanding officers and sneered: “Your sergeant is a douche bag!”

Such patriots, aren’t they?

These same bullies staged obstructionist protests at the Port of Olympia in Washington last year, blocking gates to prevent convoys from passing and attempting to tear down fencing following the arrival of a large military ship bound for Iraq. In April 2003, “peace” protesters waged similar attacks in Oakland, Calif., where they attempted to shut down a port involved in shipping military supplies to soldiers. The Bay Area anti-war brigade set out deliberately and specifically to prevent private businesses from fulfilling their federal contracts with the Department of Defense and U.S. Agency for International Development related to the war and post-war reconstruction in Iraq.

Such patriots, aren’t they?

A mother of one of the Tacoma soldiers who rode silently past the spittle-spewers wrote to me earlier this week after seeing anti-war video of the mob scene uploaded on YouTube:

“My son was one of the Stryker soldiers who was moving the equipment to the port that night.

“These people are protesting the shipment of Strykers. Strykers are what keep our infantrymen alive in Iraq. They are agile, strong, and the newest ones have very accurate firepower. Once again, the moonbats say they support our troops, but not the war. They show it by insulting the troops’ intelligence, calling their NCOs names, and telling them that they will die for nothing. Nice. I personally like to tell my son that he will come home alive and we will be reunited. These protesters sounded more like spoiled, self-centered, obnoxious brats to me. Yet, at the end of the line, there stand our troops. They are carrying the weight of the free world on their shoulders and they get to hear this mindless drivel before they deploy.”

“The last big protest was at the Port of Olympia last year. The moonbats did damage to a fence around a yard that protects military equipment. The Strykers they were protesting that day were Strykers that were equipped with medical intervention equipment. The protesters were marching against medical supplies that our soldiers need desperately, and once again the very equipment that keeps our soldiers alive. It seems that there are two populations of people who hate Strykers: moonbats and insurgents.”

Question their patriotism? You bet I do.

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How many times have you sat in front of the television over the last four years, watching anti-war activists march on Washington, chase the ROTC off your local college campus, vandalize war memorials, insult the troops and wreak havoc under the surrender banner?

How many times have you thought to yourself: What can I do?

Here is the answer: Get off the sofa and join the Gathering of Eagles on March 17 in Washington, D.C. On that day, well-funded, celebrity-studded anti-war groups plan to march to the Pentagon on a protest route that will take them past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and climax in calls for immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, destruction of America’s “global military machine,” shutdown of the enemy combatant detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney (plus an end to “colonial occupation” in “Palestine, Haiti and everywhere” for good measure).

Last time the left-wing, peace-loving fun bunch came to town, their minions gone wild threw rocks at a military recruitment office in D.C’s Dupont Circle neighborhood and at a local Fox News van, broke through a Capitol Hill police security cordon, spray painted the Capitol grounds with impunity, desecrated the Lone Sailor statue that stands watch at the U.S. Navy Memorial and reportedly spat at disabled Iraq war veteran Josh Sparling as he voiced his support for his fellow troops.

There were tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators at that event last month. You know how many showed up with Sparling to counter the far left? Forty.

Now, imagine our troops getting word of that count. They’re walking the talk, committed to the long, hard mission of counterinsurgency in Iraq and abroad, risking life and limb – and only 40 of their fellow Americans bothered to represent them in the nation’s capital?

The Gathering of Eagles, an impromptu coalition of veterans’ groups, pro-military organizations and Internet activists, wants to right the wrong. “We are a non-violent, non-confrontational group. We look to defend, not attack. Our focus is guarding our memorials and their grounds,” they explain. “We believe in and would give our lives for the precious freedoms found in our Constitution. We believe that our freedom of speech is one of the greatest things our country espouses, and we absolutely hold that any American citizen has the right to express his or her approval or disapproval with any policy, law or action of our nation and her government in a peaceful manner as afforded by the laws of our land.”

What the Eagles will not stand for, however, are “violence, vandalism, physical or verbal assaults on our veterans, and the destruction or desecration of our memorials. By defending and honoring these sacred places, we defend and honor those whose blood gave all of us the right to speak as freely as our minds think.”

Sgt. Artie Muller, founder of Rolling Thunder, the POW/MIA advocacy group, has called on his 80-plus chartered chapters to turn out. Move America Forward, the grass-roots, nonprofit, pro-military charity, is launching a caravan from California March 8 to join the Eagles and will bring flags from across the country for the event. The Nam Knights will be there, too. Bill Devereaux, a member of the South Jersey Viet Nam Vets Association, wrote to tell me he had “appropriated a bus on which 40 of our members will be attending the event.”

Daniel McPeters, an Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom veteran, e-mailed that “at least a dozen of my brothers will be attending this vigil of necessity and representing those not able to be present. This has needed to happen for 30-plus years. Anyone that supports our troops and their cause should try to make it out, or contact their local veterans post and spread the word. The silent ones need not be silent anymore.”

Cindy Sheehan has responded to the Eagles by deriding them on the Gold Star Families for Peace website as “Rightest [sic] America Haters” who are “brainwashed and propagandized.”

The question isn’t, “What can I do to respond to the Sheehanistas?” The question now is, “What will you do?”

Get off the darned sofa and show your support. March 17. Washington, D.C. Find out more at the Gathering of Eagles website.

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Look out: Hillary Clinton is pulling the armor cloak from her rhetorical closet again. As long as she pairs it with a skirt, Italian designer Donatella Versace approves. But for any leading presidential candidate with a shred of integrity, this political wardrobe malfunction goes in the “fashion don’t” column.

In her latest campaign video, Hillary attacks the Bush administration for sending soldiers off to battle unprotected: “Promises just aren’t enough anymore. After almost four years, longer than we were in World War II, our troops still don’t have all the body armor and armored vehicles and other equipment they need. It’s a disgrace.”

Whenever leftists need to show they really, really do care more about the troops than their political opponents, they pull out this armor card. A Rumsfeld-bashing reporter bragged about coaching a soldier into spotlighting the armor gap two years ago. And last year, ignoring rank-and-file soldiers’ own observations about the trade-offs between weight and mobility, Hillary excoriated the Bush administration as “incompetent” for not weighing down the troops with extra body armor. Now, the Army is being pummeled again by vultures and opportunists with no clue about the complexities of military logistics.

The Democrats’ latest talking point involves a reported shortage of armored Humvees in Iraq. The armchair generals of the New York Times editorial board waxed indignantly about the story last week – lambasting the “Army, the National Guard and the Marine Corps” for being “caught constantly behind the curve” on armor upgrades. The Times’ editorial titled their anti-Bush tirade, “Not supporting the troops.” The meme has penetrated from Hillary and Ted Kennedy down to every last, lowest-level Democratic strategist looking to burnish pro-military credibility.

But the Army reminds its critics that it began the war on terror “with equipment shortages totaling $56 billion from previous decades. In the last several years, the Army has transformed itself more than any other military in history and rapidly acquires ever-improving equipment on a scale not seen since World War II.” In Iraq alone, officials report, “the Army has gone from a low of 400 up-armored Humvees to nearly 15,000 up-armored Humvees patrolling neighborhoods, protecting troops and mitigating risk from most types of enemy munitions. As of this date, the Army has produced enough Frag Kit No. 5 Retrofit kits to outfit every Humvee in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands of these kits are being flown into theater every month and they are being installed in theater, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure soldiers have the best protection available.”

Capt. Aaron Kaufman of the Dagger Brigade at Forward Operating Base Justice, the unit my Hot Air partner Bryan Preston and I embedded with in Baghdad last month, told me: “This is simply another red herring. All of the trucks that leave the FOBs either possess interim FRAG-5 armor kits or the Objective Kits. … Every truck we have is baseline an M1114 or M1151 up-armored HMMWV, not a modified M998 or M1025 (standard HMMWV, no armor). The same type of reporter writes these articles, one you can refer [to] as a Green Zone Sniper. I have personally been impressed with how quickly the Army gets newly developed equipment and technology to the soldiers in the fight.”

Capt. Matt Schoenfeldt, who serves as a gunner in Iraq’s Diyala province, also sent me his reaction:

“I would first like to point out that this is just one more attempt by the liberals to take an extremely complicated situation, look at one small aspect of the story, and then invent the story that they [want] to tell. We have over 70,000 M1114 Up-Armored HMMWVs in theater right now. With that said, it is remarkable that we would be able to retro-fit this number of vehicles with armor in this short time period while still conducting 24-hour combat operations. … In addition to the upgrades to all of these 70,000-plus M1114s, the Army has upgraded every vehicle that travels out in sector; from ballistic glass for Track Commanders on tanks and Bradleys, to armored doors and glass for support vehicles, and everything in between. There is not a single vehicle that goes out in sector that has not been upgraded for threats specific to Iraq.

“The armored upgrade program is a tremendously successful program and has saved thousands of lives. This story on the armor upgrades has been taken by the media and other uneducated members, and painted a very successful and impressive program as a failure. It is an appalling lack of fact-checking by the media and others that should be informed on the issue.”

T.F. Boggs, a sergeant in the Army Reserves who recently returned from his second deployment to Iraq, summed it up: “We have come so far since the early days of the war that the armor issue is a joke. Only those who don’t have a clue about the reality of the war in Iraq make it an issue.”

Put another way: The empress has no clothes.

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I have good news for everyone offended by the description of Sen. Barack Obama as “articulate.” He has quickly shed any claim to that label. Indeed, Obama’s remarks this week about American troops killed in Iraq were a bumbling, incoherent mess. You may now refer to him officially as the Inarticulate Barack Obama. (As for judging his current level of cleanliness and brightness, you know that’s Joe Biden’s milieu.)

At one of his opening presidential campaign events on the Iowa State University campus this weekend, Obama pandered energetically to the anti-war crowd. With his smooth voice rising and thousands of fans goading him on, he proclaimed: “We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and to which we have now spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

Yes, “wasted.” Squandered. Pointless. Down the drain. Meaningless. Video footage of the speech shows Sen. Obama delivering his scripted words carefully and confidently. No umms or ahhs or pauses as he argued that each and every member of the military who volunteered to serve and died in Iraq “wasted” his/her life.

This revealing slip of Obama’s tongue and mind – or “Obamanation,” as conservative blogger Scott Johnson at Power Line calls it – did not play well among countless service members and their families who actually support their mission and sacrifice. Who repeatedly volunteer to go back even after the war has taken a turn for the worse. Who believe their work enhances their children’s and our children’s safety. Who risk their lives purposefully and of their own free will. Despite every best effort of the Democrats, media and anti-war movement to infantilize or demonize them, their voices are heard.

Listen to the father of Marine Sgt. Joshua J. Frazier, who was killed by a sniper in Iraq last week on his third tour of duty: “He believed in the United States and believed what he was doing was right. He gave his life for what he thought was the right thing to do,” Rick Frazier said.

Remember the words of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, who died in a 2005 firefight in Ramadi: “Obviously, if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq, … I don’t regret going; everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, [but] it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people so that they can live the way we live [and] not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.”

Several days after taking flak for his disparaging comments dishonoring such heroism, Obama blubbered about what he really meant.

”I was actually upset with myself when I said that, because I never use that term,” he told the Des Moines Register. Well, then what dastardly saboteur slipped it into his well-rehearsed stump speech? What supernatural force produced the guttural noise that glided effortlessly from his voice box through his lips and pronounced the term “wasted”?

“What I would say – and meant to say – is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Obama told the New York Times and other reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.” As opposed to pulling out precipitously?

Obama offered the standard “sorry-if-I-offended-anyone” disclaimer: ” … I would absolutely apologize if any of them felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they’d shown. You know, and if you look at all the other speeches that I’ve made, that is always the starting point in my view of this war.”

Except on the first day of the biggest campaign of his life, that wasn’t the starting point. The starting point of his discussion on the troops in Iraq began with the letter “w” and ended with “-asted.”

“Even as I said it,” Obama claims, “I realized I had misspoken.”

So what, one wonders, prevented him from immediately correcting himself there on stage, as thousands cheered the term he now says he immediately regretted?

Words fail.

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Angry, left-wing Washington Post blogger William Arkin considers American troops in Iraq who believe in their mission “mercenaries” who are “naive” and should be thankful they haven’t been spit upon yet. Curdled Democrat Sen. John Kerry thinks those soldiers, who volunteer for service, didn’t “make an effort to be smart” and are “stuck in Iraq” because of their intellectual deficiencies. At the last anti-war spasm in Washington, liberal peace-lovers vandalized a military recruitment office – repeating an act of destruction taken by rock-wielding thugs across college campuses and at ROTC headquarters nationwide.

So, who inspires these troop-bashers? Whose courage do they cheer? Whom do they call “hero”?

Not the American soldier on the battlefield, willingly and freely putting his life on the line for his beliefs, his family, our country, security and freedom.

No, their idea of a military hero is Army Lt. Ehren Watada. Did Watada take a bullet for his comrades? Rescue innocent civilians from insurgent forces? Throw himself on a grenade? Ambush a terrorist sniper nest? No.

Watada’s the soldier who went on trial this week for defying orders to be deployed to Iraq – after volunteering for duty. For those deficient in English, here’s the meaning of volunteer: “To perform or offer to perform a service of one’s own free will.” Hundreds of anti-war groupies, including actor Sean Penn, showed up to cheer Watada.

Watada was scheduled to leave Fort Lewis, Wash., for his first tour of duty in Iraq last summer. Instead of getting on the bus with his fellow soldiers, he announced he would not go and denounced the war as “unjust” and “illegal.” He was the only military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq with Fort Lewis’ 4,000-member Stryker Brigade. The anti-war propaganda machine kicked into full gear for Watada, with coordinated press conferences in Tacoma, Wash., and Honolulu, where Watada grew up.

Some of Watada’s hometown neighbors are sick of his intellectual disingenuousness. Writing in Watada’s hometown newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, retired Col. Thomas D. Farrell, who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005-2006, retorted:

“How can anyone seriously claim that our military involvement in Iraq is illegal when both Congress and the U.N. have taken the steps to authorize it and allow it to continue to this day? Lt. Watada argues that he has the right to make his own personal assessment, notwithstanding whatever Congress and the U.N. may do. If he’s right, why not make our personal assessments about how fast is safe to drive, or how much tax is our fair share? The answer is obvious: Anarchy would prevail, and the rule of law – the basis of all real freedom – would cease to exist.”

The only thing illegal here is Watada’s willful refusal to obey orders. Watada is just the latest in a line of losers abandoning their men, their mission and the rule of law. The left calls this “dissent.” The rest of us call it what it is: Desertion.

Many military observers say they smelled a rat when they first heard of Watada’s story. Watada graduated from Hawaii Pacific University in 2003, joined the Army shortly after, went to Officer Candidate School and incurred a three-year obligation. Wrote Navy Officer Robert Webster:

“This guy graduated from college and then joined the Army, going to Officer Candidate School, after we had already started the Iraq campaign just to claim it was an ‘illegal’ war when his unit is called to go. Smells funny to me. In my mind, either the Army gave a commission to an idiot not aware of current events or he planned this all along.”

Soldiers making calculated political statements against their own troops? Wouldn’t be the first time – cough, cough, John Kerry. Idiot or schemer, Watada deserves a stiff, strong penalty for his lawlessness. An excellent proposal put forth at the military blog Op-For:

“Relieve him of operational duties and send him to work at Walter Reed, to handle the in- and out-processing of wounded veterans.”

Yes, where the real heroes are.

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Let us contemplate some wisdom from a media ethics expert quoted by the New York Times this week:

“To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. ‘If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,’ said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.”

No, he wasn’t talking about the Associated Press’ (and the Washington Post’s and the Los Angeles Times’ and the New York Times’) anonymous stringers relying on unnamed and unreliable sources reporting (or rather, rumor-mongering) on the war in Iraq.

No, he wasn’t talking about the anonymous reporter identified only as “an Iraqi employee of the New York Times from Najaf” in three stories just this week, which quoted various unnamed Iraqi clerics, residents and officials.

No, professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor – see, transparency’s not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network’s immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn’t originate the story.

Unlike, say, CBS News, Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memos.

Meanwhile, CBS News has another potential controversy on its hands involving unnamed sources that Whitehead and the New York Times won’t get around to flogging.

On the left-wing MediaChannel.org website, supporters of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan published a mass e-mail she had sent out asking for “help.” She had filed a report on recent Iraqi and U.S. troop action along Baghdad’s Haifa Street, but complained that it “only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored.” The report featured a masked “Haifa Street resident” who “blamed the fighting on the U.S.” A CBS spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com that the story, which included footage of sprawled corpses of men in Iraqi Army uniforms, had been deemed “too graphic for an evening news audience.”

This didn’t mollify the correspondent-turned-activist, who asked her friends to send CBS a message that her piece wasn’t “too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore.” Logan has done much good work on the ground in Iraq, but her extra-curricular lobbying was a bit much even for some of her colleagues. “I think anything that happens internally should stay internal,” the network’s spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com.

What does deserve external airing, however, are Logan’s glaring omissions from her online piece. Nibras Kazimi, a Hudson Institute scholar and blogger at Talisman Gate, took a close look at Logan’s Jan. 18 report and recognized the grainy corpse footage “obtained by CBS.” He says it matched an eight-minute video published online Jan. 7 by an al-Qaida propaganda arm under the title “Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday’s Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad.” Indeed, many of the video images (available here) are identical.

At the time, Kazimi notes, “the Iraqi military claimed that some of its soldiers were cornered on Haifa Street and killed after running out of ammunition. This incident set off the subsequent battles there. Al-Qaida also released written statements at the time taking credit for the initial phase of fighting. … The footage ‘obtained by CBS’ is identical to that put out by al-Qaida. But Logan makes no mention of al-Qaida’s video and does not address the implication that the footage she used was off an al-Qaida video. And if it’s not off the al-Qaida video, then how did she get footage identical to the one used by al-Qaida? This needs to be explained.”

But “the most damning indication of journalistic incompetence,” Kazimi blogs, is that “Logan makes no mention about the affiliation of these insurgents fighting on Haifa Street. Not even the slightest mention is made that al-Qaida is taking credit for the fighting there. On the contrary, the audience is treated to a blanket accusation by an anonymous civilian (wearing a headdress in the insurgent manner) denouncing the Americans and the destruction they’ve brought to bear on Haifa Street.”

Was Logan a willing tool or an ignorant fool? Either way, the story is – as she says herself – “too important to ignore.”

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Last week, I embedded with U.S. Army troops at Forward Operating Base Justice in northern Baghdad. Outside the wire, we toured the slums and met with neighborhood leaders inching toward self-sufficiency in al Salam. We sipped chai with a sheikh who condemned terrorists on all sides. We watched residents bicker over a civil affairs blanket drop in Khadamiyah. We sat with slimy Mahdi Army apologists in Hurriya. We stopped by a Sunni insurgent enclave, which soldiers I patrolled with dubbed a “sniperville,” in al Adil.

There’s nothing glamorous or romantic about these missions. No one will make a movie about our men and women in uniform engaged in the tedious, painstaking business of moving Iraq toward stability and governability. But if the war is to be won – if security is to be established and the foundations of a civil society bolstered – this is ground zero. The troops I met ask only three things of their fellow Americans back home: time, patience and understanding of the enormous complexities on the ground.

In Washington, counterinsurgency theory, or COIN, is a neat, elite intellectual abstraction. Since coalition forces simply can’t catch and kill every insurgent lurking in the populace, the theory goes, it’s up to the military to persuade the Iraqi people to turn on the insurgents, join the political process and help themselves. At FOB Justice – former headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless military intelligence unit, the site of the dictator’s execution by hanging and home to the Dagger Brigade 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division – COIN is a vivid, hands-on reality. Here, a task force of brainy commanders, brawny patrol officers, courageous Arab-American interpreters, wizened trainers and intel gatherers, baby-faced convoy drivers and grim-humored gunners attempts to put President Bush’s “winning hearts and minds” idealism into daily practice.

Modern war in the Middle East is no longer as cut-and-dried as shooting all the bad guys and going home. We are fighting a “war of the fleas” – not just Sunni terrorists and Shiite death squads, but multiple home-grown and foreign operators, street gangs, organized crime and freelance jihadis conducting ambushes, extrajudicial killings, sectarian attacks, vehicle bombings and sabotage against American, coalition and Iraqi forces. Cell phones, satellites and the Internet have allowed the fleas to magnify their importance, disseminate insurgent propaganda instantly and weaken political will.

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatibility of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of “grim milestone” and “daily IED count” media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.

The everyday bravery and consummate professionalism of the troops I embedded with have strengthened my faith in the U.S. military. These soldiers are well aware of the history, culture and sectarian strife that have wracked the Muslim world for more than a millennium. “They love death,” one gunner muttered as we heard explosions in the distance while parked in al Adil. Nevertheless, these troops are willing to put their lives on the line to bring security to Iraq, one neighborhood at a time.

They have teamed with Sunni and Shia, Iraqi civilian and soldier alike to establish local government structures and security framework districts. “We are not here to build the Iraqi Security Forces,” Lt. Col. Steven Miska, deputy commander for the Dagger Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, said. “We’re here to grow them. You can’t just plant and walk away.” Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice added: “It’s not a six-month or year-long process, especially when you’re talking about training the Iraqi forces.”

The troops I met scoff at peace activists’ efforts to “bring them home now.” But they are just as critical of the Bush administration and Pentagon’s missteps – from holding Iraqi elections too early, to senselessly breaking up their brigade combat team, to drawing down forces and withdrawing last year in Baghdad and Fallujah, to failing to hold cities after clearing them of insurgents. They speak candidly and critically of Shiite militia infiltration of some Iraqi police and Iraqi army units and corruption in government ministries, but they want you to know about the unheralded good news, too.

Every day, Iraqi army trainees risk their lives and their families’ lives to come to work at FOB Justice. Residents of Khadamiyah approach the base with tips. Schools are re-opening; neighborhood councils are sharing intelligence. “All those things are coming together,” Capt. Stacy Bare, civil affairs officer, said emphatically.

Winning the counterinsurgency battle is not just about keeping Iraqis safe. It’s about keeping Americans safe – by sending a message that the mightiest military in the world cannot and will not be outwitted and outlasted by the fleas. On the emblem of the Dagger Brigade are two imperatives: “Continue mission!” and “Duty first.” These troops are committed to their mission. They deserve our commitment to them.

Michelle’s embed tour in Iraq, with her HotAir.com colleague Bryan Preston, was sponsored by the New York Post. Video reports of their Iraq journey can be viewed at HotAir.com.

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