‘I wanna cover this guy’s Lebanon’

SINGAPORE – I know, I know… I said I was tak­ing a break while I get mar­ried, and all, but I’m in Sin­ga­pore wait­ing for a refuel, and I saw that Huff­Post has finally taken down that clown of a jour­nal­ist, W. Thomas Smith Jr. Smith alighted in Lebanon back in Sep­tem­ber for a few weeks and his accounts of my adopted home are ris­i­ble.

I was a source for this story — I called him a “fabulist” — because I always intended to blog on Smith, tear­ing down his crap, but to be hon­est, I was going through a rough blog patch and couldn’t seem to work up the proper dudgeon.

Still, in one of his more fan­tas­tic posts, not men­tioned in the Huff­Post arti­cle, he claimed the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard Corps tried to assas­si­nate an anti-Hezbollah Shi’ite politi­cian with an “acid-weapon.”

I inter­viewed Sayed once. Had cof­fee and sweets with him in his office. Con­ducted a recon­nais­sance mis­sion with one of his armed men and two of mine in one of Sayed’s cars. I rode with him dur­ing a sec­ond recon in another of his cars. And yes­ter­day, mem­bers of the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard Corps (here in Lebanon) attempted to kill Sayed and his fam­ily by sab­o­tag­ing his vehi­cle (the first one I rode in). They planted a delayed acid-weapon on his car’s under­car­riage, which ate through the chas­sis and caused the vehi­cle to basi­cally break in half while he was driving.

As a buddy of mine remarked after that one, “I wanna cover this guy’s Lebanon. It sounds so much more inter­est­ing.” Indeed. Too bad his sto­ries are ridicu­lous falsehoods.

UPDATE: So, some are report­ing that I noti­fied Kathryn-Jean Lopez of Smith’s sto­ries six weeks ago. This is true, how­ever, I sent the email to tank@​nationalreview.​com. Did she get it? Did any­one? Hell if I know since I never received a response. Here’s the text of the email I sent on Oct. 6:

Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.3) Message-Id: <6994FFC1-C88D-4EDB-9C96-47630C6C3C31@mac.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=Apple-Mail-2-701486348 To: tank@nationalreview.com Subject: Accuracy alert From: Christopher Allbritton Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 21:39:27 +0300 --Apple-Mail-2-701486348 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes; format=flowed

Such as this one:

“The gen­eral briefed me regard­ing the bat­tle­field at Nahr al-Bared, near his camp, and what I would see today as the first Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist to visit the site of Lebanon’s defeat of Al Qaeda-affiliate Fatah al Islam.“

Ah, no.

You do know that almost every Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist liv­ing in Beirut has been up to Nahr el-Bared sev­eral times dur­ing and after the fight­ing? I myself filed sto­ries for the Wash­ing­ton Times(http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​times​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​0​7​0​9​0​4​/​F​O​R​E​I​G​N​/​1​0​9​0​4​0​0​2​5​/​1​003) and the Newark Star-Ledger(http://www.long-war.com/Allbrittons_Clips/Clips/Entries/2007/9/3_As_Lebanon_war_re-ignites%252C_a_risky_lie_protects_a_friend.html), the day after the fight­ing stopped — and I was in a hell of a lot more dan­ger than your man is in today. (*Star-Ledger* seems to have archived the story, so that link goes to my per­sonal site, but that’s the story that ran there. WaTimes is still available.)

You know, for a pub­li­ca­tion that went after the New Repub­lic so hard for its soldier-in-Iraq stuff, your guy here is hor­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly inac­cu­rate and sen­sa­tion­al­ist. I’m an Amer­i­can and I never have body­guards and never needed one. He is mak­ing Beirut seem much more dan­ger­ous than it is. He also is — as are you, since I assume he’s expens­ing it —  get­ting fleeced by some Lebanese con artists. He doesn’t need weapons and he’s mak­ing a big prob­lem by car­ry­ing them and pub­licly writ­ing about his “recon mis­sions” in the Dahiyah. That’s not what jour­nal­ists do; it’s what spies do, and by his actions, he’s mak­ing every­one sus­pi­cious of west­ern jour­nal­ists. That is the height of irresponsibility.

Sec­ondly, he’s a liar. Hezbol­lah never invaded east Beirut on the 29^th. And they don’t have 200 “heav­ily armed” mili­ti­a­men down­town. I passed by today. There are about 40 guys down there with no weapons at all. They sit around, smok­ing shisha in jeans and t-shirts.

Per­haps your man in Beirut should not rely solely on March 14 guys and get a wider per­spec­tive. And stop lying and mak­ing care­less errors. It’s your cred­i­bil­ity on the line, after all.

Sin­cerely,
Christo­pher Allbritton

So, that’s out there now for the record.

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