This is really quite shameful: the New York Times has a piece up by Michael Gordon about how the "surge" is "working". Predictably, he quotes fellow traveler Michael O'Hanlon and writes glowingly of the many successes of the surge.
Before continuing, it's worth noting a bit about Michael Gordon's past misdeeds. With Judy Miller, he co-authored some of the most atrocious pieces about WMD, pieces of which then-NYT ombudsman Dan Okrent wrote:
we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.
Michael Gordon has also been an outspoken advocate for the surge, telling Charlie Rose:
as a purely personal view, I think it's worth ... one last effort for sure to try to get this right. ... I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.
Gordon was criticized by both the then-NYT public editor Byron Calame and NYT Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, both of whom agreed that "he (Gordon) stepped over the line on the ‘Charlie Rose’ show."
Let's now examine one of the many false assertions in Gordon's sloppy piece. Gordon writes:
Critics of the White House have pointed to the Government Accountability Office report released on Tuesday, which asserted that it was unclear whether sectarian violence had decreased. The report cited data on daily, nationwide attacks that had been assembled by Gen. David H. Petraeus’s command. But American military officials note that the G.A.O. assessment did not take account of August, when the most significant gains in reducing violence materialized not only in Baghdad, but also across Iraq.
As Josh Marshall notes:
Gordon himself might have noted that the statistics compiled by the Associated Press showed, on the contrary, a marked increase in civilian deaths in August...I think it's hard to come to any other judgment but that Gordon's is a remarkably credulous account.
Why does the Times continue to publish the insane neoconservative rantings of a discredited report? Why not ask the public editor? Here's his email: public@nytimes.com