Remember the story a couple of months ago, that various documents had turned up showing that a British M.P., George Galloway, had taken payoffs from the Iraqi government. Well, as it turns out, one set of the documents turned out to be forgeries.

Many visitors to this site don’t spend every waking hour, either at the office or in their mom’s basement, glued to the blogosphere. For those of you who don’t know who George Galloway is, he is a bete noire among the far right, a left-wing British politician who was publicly opposed to our great adventure in the Persian Gulf. After the war, a journalist for an English tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, “discovered” documents purportedly linking Galloway, through a Jordanian third-party, to a scheme in which he was to be paid a percentage on barrels of oil sold by the Iraqi government. A couple of days later, the Christian Science Monitor published an article concerning documents that showed direct payments to Galloway.

The usual suspects in the b-sphere jumped all over this; for them, it proved that a “Fifth Column” actually existed, that opponents of the war were acting not out of sincere disapproval to aggressive action, or out of skepticism at the tall tales concerning WMD’s, but out of a desire to coddle fascist dictators. In combination with the “mass graves” argument, it was an effective rejoinder to those who had any questions about the direction of American foreign policy.

As it turns out, though, the documents published by the CSM were forgeries. Their source had been an Iraqi general who had also attempted to pass forged documents implicating Galloway to another English tabloid. Since the forged documents had been potentially more damning, dealing as they did with direct payments to the M.P., rather than efforts by a third party to obtain some bakhsheesh using Galloway’s good name, that would have seemed to stick a fork in the “scandal”. After all, the “self-correcting” mechanism that is supposed to be inherent in the blogosphere, that is supposed to make what we do the next stage in the evolution of journalism, would demand that those bloggers who hyped the story in the first place make the appropriate apologies, retract their earlier posts, and hopefully promise to be more careful (and more skeptical) in the future.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the response has been to downplay the CSM’s retraction, even asserting that the article “authenticates” the Telegraph’s documents. No references to their earlier posts, when they based so much of their attack on the tangible “proof” that Galloway had taken bribes from Saddam Hussein; instead, it is as if their original post had never been published. How Rainesian. Blogosphere loses.

In fact, in order to keep this story going, they use a bit of dowdification in citing the CSM article. The Monitor alluded that the experts they employed to analyze their documents also reviewed copies of the Telegraph’s documents, and concluded that they “seemed genuine”. This gets trumpeted to mean that those experts had determined that those documents were not forgeries. But, in fact, the article doesn’t conclude that.

For one thing, the Monitor’s experts were dealing with copies of the documents, and could not therefore make any analysis as to the ink, the paper or any other aspect that might have called the original documents into question. More importantly, however, was the context in which the experts reviewed the copies of the Telegraph documents. According to the Monitor, the determination made by the experts concerned whether the Monitor documents and the Telegraph documents were textually consistent with other documents generated over the years by the Iraqi government. Their expert concluded that while the Monitor documents were too neat, seemed to advance too quickly through the bureaucracy to be genuine, and were too direct in naming the officials in question, rather than using euphemisms, the Telegraph’s documents were “…consistent, unlike their Monitor counterparts, with authentic Iraqi documents he [had] seen.”

The above passage is the only reference to the alleged authenticity of the documents purported to have been discovered by the Telegraph. What isn’t mentioned is that the above review only called into question the authenticity of the Monitor documents; it wasn’t until they analyzed the ink and paper that they concluded that the documents in question had been recently generated, and were therefore forgeries. No such review was done by the Monitor’s experts on the Telegraph documents. It is therefore disingenuous to suggest that the Telegraph documents were authenticated, when the originals weren’t even reviewed. And, of course, where two of the three sets of documents contemporaneously discovered on this subject turned out to be forgeries, a fair-minded observer might wonder about that third set.

No one blames the bloggers in question for running with the story when it first came out. It was juicy, it seemed to come from a reliable source, and it allowed them to smear their adversaries without a second thought. However, if the blogosphere is going to maintain its credibility, it must be quick not only to respond to errors, but to make the appropriate retractions when we make mistakes. Our blogs are our own little newspapers, and the permalinks we set are our sources. If we screw up, then we are obligated to go public, and not stonewall behind bogus interpretations of the truth. That sort of thing makes bloggers no better Jayson Blair.