Andrew being Andrew

The Snarky Bastards make an interesting point in discussing yet another chapter in the Hewitt-Sullivan Death Match:

Sullivan does his readers a disservice in the first place by linking not to the whole interview, but to a truncated version at the Belgravia Dispatch. All the points talked about above, where Ricks hurts his credibility, are missing in the partial transcript Sullivan links to.

Rather than linking to and quoting from the complete interview, Andrew has commented based only on a portion of the interview and says:

So Hewitt accuses Ricks of lying. Because if the truth about Rumsfeld's criminal incompetence has to compete with Hewitt's "no-mistakes-were-made" Caeasarism, then the facts be damned and the reporter's a liar. Ricks or Hewitt? Reality or ideology? I link. You choose.

I think of Hewitt as an American version of Baghdad Bob - you remember, the guy who insisted that U.S. forces were defeated even as U.S. shells were pounding in Baghdad behind him. No, I don't mean the analogy literally - just in so far as it reflects the Christianist inability to deviate from received dogma, even when confronted with empirical reality.

Here we go back to the Snarky Bastards: Hewitt asks Ricks about those statements, and this pops out:

TR- Yeah, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. What I said was accurate, that in an off-the-record conversation with some military analysts, a couple had said to me that they thought it was a smart strategy to leave some rocket pockets in place to help the Israelis shape public perceptions, and give their forces more freedom of maneuver in Lebanon. They weren’t saying it was a bad strategy. They thought it was pretty intelligent, if it were the case [emphasis mine]. But I’ve since heard today from some very smart, well-informed people, that while such a strategy might be logical, and even morally defensible, that they thought the Israeli public just wouldn’t stand for it, and they also expressed personal dismay to me that I had passed on the thought, which they thought was irresponsible.

HH: Do you want to name any of the analysts?

TR: No, it was an off-the-record conversation, and I want to honor that confidence.

So was Ricks, if not lying, perhaps stretching the truth? Perhaps stretching it beyond recognition, or perhaps wandering into the realm of speculation? What Hewitt did here was an effective device that lawyers use in depositions: the lawyer calls someone on a loopy statement and makes him defend it or backtrack. Ricks backtracked, which puts a lot of his work in question, especially when he claims that he’s quoting an off-the-record conversation.

The interview continues. Ricks does quote many people by name, most notably Juan Cole and Robert Kaplan. Military men willing to criticize the media are named, like Major Jay Bocker. Perhaps understandably, the ones unhappy with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) tend to stay anonymous, unless they’re already out of the military, like retired General Eric Shinseki. But given how Ricks backs away from his off-the-record sources regarding Israeli policy, can we trust him when he relies on off-the-record sources regarding American policy?

Hugh is skeptical of what he's hearing from Thomas Ricks at this point, and frankly with good reason. It's the same reason some of us are supremely skeptical of Sy Hersh's anonymous reporting about an imminent invasion of Iran or torture-as-policy. Anonymous sources can't be checked and a reader is left trusting the author. Well, to quote a Bush, "Not gonna do it."

Now, I don't frankly care about Andrew's 'reply' and depiction of Hugh as partisan propagandist; it's Andrew being Andrew. What I don't understand is how and why Sullivan didn't examine the entire interview and relied solely on Greg Djerejian's Reader's Digest Condensed Version.

Was Andrew being lazy or did he really think it didn't matter? Or is it, as Apollo fears, that it was intentional: I hope that the other possibility—that Sullivan knew the whole interview but cited only the partial copy of it—isn’t true because if so, then what we once suspected is true: Sullivan can’t be trusted.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. It was Hubbard, not Apollo. My bad!