Crooks and Liars: ABC’s Brian Ross Cooks Up A Dangerously Inaccurate Story About Hasan and Al Qaeda
ABC’s Brian Ross has a history of bizarre “scoops” (like this one, when he announced that Hillary Clinton had indeed been in the White House the day Monica went down on her knees). And yet, ABC News is still proud to have him as their chief investigative correspondent, for some odd reason.
Now he overreaches on yet another story, this one claiming Nidal Malik Hasan attempted to contact al Qaeda. You heard it all over the news, right? Via Gawker:
Ross’ report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to “make contact with people associated with al Qaeda” took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan’s attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, “Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan’s Contacts with al Qaeda,” said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:
The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan’s e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.
ABC News’ Brian Ross has a breathtaking record of recklessly inaccurate, overhyped stories that don’t live up to the headline. His scoop yesterday about Nidal Malik Hasan’s “attempt to reach out to al Qaeda” was one of them. [more...]