Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

More than 8,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have deserted since the Iraq war began, USA Today reported Tuesday.

"Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters to discourage antiwar sentiment," wrote reporter Bill Nichols.

" 'The last thing (Pentagon officials) want is for people to think ... that this is like Vietnam,' said Tod Ensign, head of Citizen Soldier, an antiwar group that offers legal aid to deserters."

Mr. Ensign is full of horse manure, as Mr. Nichols demonstrates in his story. The data show desertions have plunged since 9/11, and are much lower than during the Vietnam war.

The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in the 2001 fiscal year, but only 3,456 in 2005, Mr. Nichols noted. In 1971, the Army reported 33,094 desertions, 3.4 percent of its total force. In 2005, desertions represented just 0.24 percent of 1.4 million of active service members.

Mr. Nichols also quoted military spokesmen who said most deserters desert for reasons unconnected with political protest, and most return voluntarily.

Though it ran under a headline that emphasized the negative, the USA Today story is an example of journalism as it ought to be. Mr. Nichols reported a fact relevant to the war on terror, and put it into context.

The opposite is true of "reporting" by most news organizations in the wake of the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra Feb. 22. Journalists who accused President Bush of "cherrypicking" intelligence to support the war in Iraq have cherrypicked facts and quotes to give the false impression there is civil war in Iraq.

"Much of the reporting has exaggerated the situation," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday. "The number of attacks on mosques had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated. The behavior of the Iraqi security forces had been mischaracterized."

For instance, The Washington Post reported on Feb. 25 that 120 Sunni mosques had been attacked in retaliation for the destruction of the Golden Mosque, holy to the Shiites. In a March 3 news conference, Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said:

"We can confirm attacks on about 30 mosques around the country, with less than 10 of those mosques moderately damaged, and only two or three severely damaged. We visited eight mosques (in Baghdad) that were reportedly damaged. We found one broken window in those eight mosques."

Exaggeration and misinformation are hallmarks of chaotic situations, and it is hard for journalists who do most of their reporting from the safety of their hotels to sort fact from fiction. But Secretary Rumsfeld noticed a pattern in the errors:

"Interestingly, all the exaggerations seem to be on one side," he said. "The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and give heart to the terrorists."...