skippy the bush kangaroo: from little acorns mighty liars do grow

Saturday, January 30, 2010

from little acorns mighty liars do grow

the brad blog graciously sends us the harshbarger report detailing the results of former mass att gen. scott harshbarger's investigation into james o'keefe's "sting" operation of the acorn offices. it turns out those inflammatory videos were highly edited and manipulated:

the unedited videos have never been made public. the videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of mr. o’keefe’s and ms.giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which acorn employees are responding. a comparison of the publicly available transcripts2 to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions. to date, the videographers have declined or ignored our interview requests.

worse, it was obvious, from reports given by acorn employees after the fact, that o'keefe was unable to get embarrassing moments from acorn in reality, and probably edited the videos to obtain the results he wanted. for example:

in san diego, the acorn employee who met with the videographers does not speak english as his first language. his colleagues usually converse with him in spanish. in the released video, his participation amounts mostly to nodding or saying “ok.” it is difficult to determine what this employee is responding to because the videographers statements are obscured by a voiceover inserted later. at one point during the meeting, the acorn employee attempted to call the police. at other points, he attempted to take pictures of the videographers with his cell phone. following the interview, he called a relative in the national city police department to report the incident. according to a statement released by the national city police department:

“on august 20, 2009, an acorn employee contacted his cousin, a national city police detective, to ask him general advice regarding information he had received about possible human smuggling. in response, the detective contacted a law enforcement officer serving on a federal task force that specifically deals with human smuggling. the task force officer said he needed more specific details to move forward. this message was related to the acorn employee. the acorn employee responded several days later and explained to the detective that police assistance was not needed because the information he initially received was not true and what had happened to him was a ruse.”

so, we're sure o'keefe's current brou-ha-ha w/sen. landrieu's phones is all a big misunderstanding.

yeah, right.

posted by skippy at 10:01 AM |