Keith Olbermann has "discredited" the Osama-poisoned-my-cocaine-and-all-I-got-is-this lousy-T-shirt theory that we hashed out (snicker) a couple days ago. And if Keith Olbermann says it, you can put in the bank and slap your mama.

I pretty much peed on this story this three days ago. Can I have a damn show on MSNBC now?

I say pretty much because while I'm 99% sure this didn't happen, there is always that crazy one percent possibilty of just really crazy, entropic stuff going down. And there's maybe a two percent chance that something vaguely related to this happened--Hezbollah was busted with their own coke ring in South and North America, remember--and got distorted and passed along to the DEA through intelligence channels. Or perhaps through an arrested Colombian desperate to save himself from prosecution and making up crazy crap to string the feds along.

Wouldn't be the first time that happened. You guys ever heard of the "Dark Horizons" story? Basically, a busted Nicaraguan coke dealer in San Francisco claimed he was running coke for the contras and was under CIA protection. It blew up into this whole big deal and was promptly shown to be screwy...debunked by an independent commission. Then the reporter who broke the story was fired and later shot himself. That doesn't stop this story from remaining an article of faith among the conspiratorial left who are grasping at straw men for reasons to hate our country.

What's irritating to me, though, is the way Olbermann "debunks" this. More below the jump: He talks to two terrorism experts--Steven Emerson and Evan Kohlmann, great guys both, solid on War on Terror stuff, both been linked by the Jawa Report from time to time--who think this is nuts.

That's not, in itself, a debunking, but a criticism. That doesn't prove this is true or false. It might change your beliefs about whether it's true or not, but that's different from showing why it actually could have happened or did happen or did not happen or could not have happen. Even though I happen to agree with them 99% on this, our opinion does not make it so or not so. Feelings and thoughts don't change objective reality. It is a great fallacy of the left, usually, that because many smart people think a thing (or in this case two smart people plus me), it must be so. Well sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't.

If you want to debunk this story, you need to prove it false, not merely unlikely. And the way to do that would be to A: try to review the documents that gave rise to the original NY Post story or B: try to track down "sources familiar with the case" to confirm or disconfirm it (as the Post reporter did.) or, of course, C: dig up an internal memo from the Ochoa brothers' accountant that confirms it. The DEA denies it, at least, so that's one bit of new info. But the Post put its name on the line to say that this is plausible, so it's worth more investigation than just asking the experts what they think before we call the story dead.

Hat tip to Reidblog.

Posted by: seedubya at 03:03 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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