Bloggers have been coming down hard on Sarah Boxer's NYT column on Iraq The Model. Boxer went looking for Iraqi blogs and found one that is pro-American. After digging around a little more, she found some aspertions on the character of the brothers who write the blog. This fit her own pre-conceptions.

There are so many problems here it is hard to list them all. Boxer's main research on Iraq the Model seems to have been limited to reading the Martini Republic, an anti-Bush blog. Comments there made her so suspicious of Iraq The Model that she assumed that it is nothing but a CIA front.

hen I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A C.I.A. operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? Until he picked up the phone, he was just a ghost on the Internet.

The proof, according to Martini Republic:

One of the principal bloggers there, Joseph Mailander, had some questions for the Iraqi brothers. He wanted to know whether someone in the United States government or close to it had set up the blog. (The Web host, based in Abilene, Tex., is called CIATech Solutions.) And what about the two brothers' tour of the United States? Did the American government "have a shadow role in promoting it?"

The "CIA" stands for Complex Internet Applications. Iraq The Model is hosted by Blogspot which in turn is owned by Google. Blogspot is a free blogging service and is used by a lot of blogs including this one. (For the record, I am not part of the CIA, either).

A strange bit of reasoning reported by Boxer:

What kind of frauds? One reader suggested that the brothers were real Iraqis but were being coached on what to write. Another, in support of that theory, noted the brothers' suspiciously fluent English. A third person observed that coaching wasn't necessary. All the C.I.A. would need to do to influence American opinion was find one pro-war blog and get a paper like USA Today to write about it.

Martini Republic pointed out that the pro-war blog was getting lots of attention from papers like The Wall Street Journal and USA Today while antiwar bloggers like Riverbend, who writes Baghdad Burning, had gone unsung. Surely Iraq the Model did not represent the mainstream of Iraqi thinking?

This all gets a little surreal when you follow the link to Baghdad Burning. If the brother's fluency in English is suspicious then what are we to make of Baghdad Burning's fluency?

Boxer gets hung up on the fact that Ali, one of the three brothers left Iraq The Model. Her interpretation is that Ali felt used by the American right. She never got a quote from Ali to confirm this, though.

After the article came out, some bloggers including Jeff Jarvis unloaded on Boxer:

Ms. Boxer, don't you think you could be putting the life of that person at risk with that kind of speculation? In your own story, you quote Ali -- one of the three blogging brothers who started IraqTheModel -- saying that "here some people would kill you for just writing to an American." And yet you go so much farther -- blithely, glibly speculating about this same man working for the CIA or the DoD -- to sex up your lead and get your story atop the front of the Arts section (I'm in the biz, Boxer, I know how the game is played).

How dare you? Have you no sense of responsibility? Have you no shame?

I think that this is an overreaction. Boxer starts out with the CIA speculation but eventually admits that the blog is the real thing and the Washington Post did at much to put the brother's lives in danger by running a story about the other two brothers meeting Bush but, like I said, Boxer's story has lots of problems.

What it comes down to is that there are Iraqis who think that America setting up a democratic government is a good thing. There are also Iraqis who worry more about current conditions. Right-leaning and left-leaning sites each quote the side that supports their own views. What seems to confuse Boxer is that both are valid views. Having a say in your government is a good thing but it is also nice to have reliable power.

The real question - does Boxer get paid for this lazy trash?

Iraq the Model has a few choice things to say about the article.

Over on Capitol Hill, Barbara Boxer was publicly humiliating herself at the Rice hearing.

Well, you should read what we voted on when we voted to support the war, which I did not, but most of my colleagues did. It was WMD, period. That was the reason and the causation for that, you know, particular vote.

If you didn't read when you voted on it then you should have at least found out what was in it before you quoted it. CrushKerry.com has the entire text. They come up with seven reasons including WMDs. Some, such as Saddam's suppression of the Kurds and his efforts to hinder arms inspectors, cannot be argued against.

Barbara Boxer is also the only senator who supported questions about the election. I wonder if she bothered to read anything on this before voting on it?

Nightline did a piece on the election last night. Their conclusions? Nixon won in 1960 and Bush won in 2004.