tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-58298893058374497482008-03-23T15:40:00.000Z2008-03-23T15:40:00.000Z2008-03-23T15:40:00.000ZPliable:<BR/><BR/>Most Americans have forgotten about Aidan Delgado, if they ever heard of him in the first place.<BR/><BR/>The only reason Delgado’s name rang a bell with me is because, while I was in law school in Washington, a very, very respected Washington journalist, and a close friend of my father, was attempting to verify some of the claims Delgado made to Bob Herbert in preparation for a lengthy article about detention centers in Iraq. That journalist’s article about detention centers duly appeared, but Delgado’s name was not mentioned and Delgado’s claims were not addressed.<BR/><BR/>The New York Times indeed removed Bob Herbert’s column from its website for three weeks shortly after it was first published. There was great comment about this at the time. This was during the period that the New York Times and other news organizations were attempting to confirm Delgado’s allegations, without success. Purely and simply, news organizations learned, with a little digging, that Delgado could not have been present at events he claimed to have witnessed, at which point the media dropped him as a source. After the initial short burst of interest in Delgado had died out and he was no longer in the news, the New York Times put the Herbert column back on its website, no doubt because Herbert’s column was an opinion piece, and not a news story (the latter, under Times standards, would have required extensive corrections).<BR/><BR/>Life sometimes has strange twists and turns. Several months after Delgado’s brief period of notoriety ended, I learned that a friend of mine, a civilian lawyer, had been appointed to the panel investigating Delgado’s claims. Every effort was extended to Delgado to collect evidence and testimony in support of his claims, without result.<BR/><BR/>Persons who have spent considerable time investigating the Delgado allegations—journalists, government investigators, attorneys both military and civilian—have concluded that he is unreliable and, further, that his standardized test scores put into sharp question the authorship of his book.<BR/><BR/>If you visit Delgado’s personal website, you may observe the handful of minor public appearances listed thereon.<BR/><BR/>Aidan Delgado is forgotten here.<BR/><BR/>AndrewDrew80http://www.blogger.com/profile/17848576924497372868noreply@blogger.com