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James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.

Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.

The New York Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt, thinks Ethan Bronner should be reassigned from the paper's Jerusalem bureau for the duration of his son's service in the IDF. He bases his recommendation mostly on avoiding the appearance of bias -- rather than any actual bias in Bronner's reporting.

The paper's editor, Bill Keller, disagrees:

It is, in addition to those things, a sign of respect for readers who care about the region and who follow the news from there with minds at least partially open. You seem to think that you... can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can't. I disagree.

Not to turn this into a media criticism blog, but I agree with Hoyt -- and with Evan, who wrote about Bronner last month.

Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based news and opinion Web site that covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, believes it may have indirect confirmation that the son of New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner was "recently inducted" into Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

Electronic Intifada received a tip about Bronner's son -- similar to one which surfaced on the Internet months ago -- over the weekend and sent an e-mail to the Times inquiring about the tip and whether Bronner believed that, if true, it would be a conflict of interest.

Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira, in a bit of brusque, failed PR, responded with this:

Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked lawmakers on Monday to suspend their winter vacation so that they can vote on a new list of cabinet nominees, reported Alissa Rubin of the New York Times.

On Saturday, Afghanistan's 246-member Parliament approved just seven of Karzai's 24 nominees, rejecting the rest. Six of those approved were incumbents, including the ministers in charge of defense, interior, finance, education and agriculture, who are believed to have strong American report, Rubin reported over the weekend. However, seven of those rejected were also incumbents.

Observers interviewed by the Times are ambivalent about the political standoff, calling it both a positive sign of legislative independence and a potentially significant problem in a country that is struggling mightily to put together a responsive government.

The New York Times adds another data point to the ongoing saga of Blackwater, reporting today that the company's private mercenaries have participated in CIA "snatch and grab" raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater expert-in-residence at the Nation, reported last month that an ongoing Blackwater operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is helping plan and possibly execute U.S. military operations against Taliban and Islamist insurgents in those two countries.

More recently, Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky has written that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was actually a CIA asset - an agent on the payrolls.

Combined, the press is starting to put together a pretty frightening story - a private branch of the military and intelligence communities, available for hire but not subject to oversight or governmental regulation. What does it mean when a country outsources its lethal force, and should I, as a U.S. citizen, be troubled that this work is being carried out in my name, though I have very little power to stop it?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a final peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority, not any interim deals, and says that such an agreement will require "courageous leadership," says Jerusalem Post columnist Herb Keinon.

Bibi that PA President Mahmoud Abbas "should not be 'counted out,'" Keinon writes. Forgive my cynicism, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere near "final-status" negotiations without Abbas, and Bibi isn't going to bring Abbas back in unless he freezes settlements.

Sept. 21. That's when Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghanistan assessment leaked in the pages of the Washington Post. More than 50 days ago. As Gregg noted in his post on Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's cables, the degree of leaking that's taken place in the meantime has been extraordinary.

Folks, this is what happens when you take a decision that everyone thought had been made months ago (see: the "Af-Pak" strategy review) and then spend a month, or more, diving back into it. People with vested interests are going to move to protect those interests, and the parlor-game-loving Washington press corps, if its doing its job, will start convincing people to spill the goods.

But let's knock down a couple conclusions that are getting drawn from the latest leak - the Eikenberry cables.

What happens when an American reporter speaks some uncomfortable truth to a cloistered Afghan mullah? New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise has the answer in a blog today.

First, the scene: Mullah Shamsullah, 36, is being driven home to his village in a Times SUV. He rides in front, Tavernise and another woman in back. He has been dominating the conversation in a paternalistic fashion. Talk turns to the election, and Shamsullah claims that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an infamous and violent Afghan mujahid who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, would win if another vote were held.

"Do you know who Hekmatyar is?" he asked me, grinning.

I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of [the same] messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.

"He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," I said loudly over the hum of the car's engine.

Readers of the Majlis know that we prefer clear-headed thinking to sensationalism and facts to rumors. We try to hold all sides of an issue equally to account and we sympathize not with identity groups, but with ideas.

And so as Maj. Hasan's Muslim faith becomes more and more of a story, it becomes harder to keep it at a distance. Religion is a toxic subject, but if we're being honest with ourselves, we must discuss the roles it plays in society.

Some days, when some ridiculous story breaks on American soil - for instance, Mark Sanford - Gregg and I joke about trying to find an angle for the Majlis so we can jump into the shark-infested, cable newsy waters of a major developing scandal.

The horrific Thursday shooting at Fort Hood began as a very sad version of such a story but now seems to have stepped over the line into legitimacy.

The New York Times is reporting that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the killer, may have shouted "Allahu akbar" before shooting. Allahu akbar, which means "God is great," has a variety of uses in the Arabic-speaking Muslim world. It could be a positive expression, but the use that has become more familiar, at least to me, since Sept. 11th is as something of a rallying cry for insurgents and Islamist terrorists. Allahu akbar is something one hears, for instance, on pirated Taliban videotapes, as insurgents in the mountaintops of Afghanistan shakily record the final seconds of a suicide car bombing.

I'm always curious about stories like this one, filed by reporter Rod Nordland on Tuesday in the New York Times. They seem too perfect, too absurd, too much of an amazing journalistic find to be true. So part of me says that the reporters who write these stories must have had to cut corners or shade the facts to make them so great.

And yet, I know that's probably not true. I know that, in all likelihood, the government of Iraq really has spent nearly $100 million purchasing thousands of hand-held wands and really has implemented them for routine use at hundreds of checkpoints to screen for bombs and guns in lieu of physical inspections, despite the retired and active U.S. military personnel who say they have "no confidence" in the wands, and that the devices function "on the same principle as Ouija board."

According to Nordland, Iraqi officials can't get enough of the things:

"Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs," said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives.
...
"I don't care about [DOD equipment tester] Sandia [Labs] or the Department of Justice or any of them," General Jabiri said. "I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Incumbent President Hamid Karzai, who won around 55 percent of the vote in the now-discredited Aug. 20 elections, has conceded that massive fraud occurred and will agree to a recount to be set for Nov. 7, within the two weeks mandated by the country's constitution. But at least one news agency is reporting that he and chief rival Abdullah Abdullah have agreed to share power in a coalition government.

The New York Times, citing anonymous officials and its own analysis, is reporting that incumbent President Hamid Karzai will lose a whopping 874,000 votes in the recount of Afghanistan's fraudulent August election, shrinking his share of the total to somewhere between 48 and 49 percent and necessitating a runoff.

Gregg has already written about Karzai's disappearing margin of victory and the byzantine recount decision, overseen by the joint United Nations/Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission and released yesterday, that is making it disappear.

Byzantine or not, what makes the ECC's recount fun for the whole family is the fact that the organization is releasing basically all of its data in raw form. That means you too can spend endless hours deducing where the fraud took place, from the comfort of your own home. Here's how to do it (bonus points if you can tell us how the Times got to the number 874,000):

The New York Times has published the first in a five-part series by David Rohde detailing his seven months as a prisoner of the Taliban. If my Twitter feed is any indication, we're all going to use this series to reaffirm our existing biases about Afghanistan!

Taliban-connected insurgents launched bold daylight assaults on two remote American bases in the eastern Nuristan province of Afghanistan on Saturday, the New York Times reports.

The attack on the joint outposts in the Kamdesh district left eight Americans and four Afghan police dead, the Times says, making it the deadliest day for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in more than year. The Times compares Saturday's brazen assault, in which around 300 militants took part, to the infamous battle near the village of Wanat in 2008, where nine Americans died and which prompted a rethinking of U.S. military strategy.

Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal reported on the attacks on Saturday, and his sources in the military and intelligence community tell him that Al-Qaida soldiers fought alongside Taliban forces, who were led by local Taliban "shadow" governor Dost Mohammed.

In the first 100 days after Gen. Stanley McChrystal took command of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, he spoke to President Obama just one time. That changed on Wednesday, when McChrystal appeared in the White House Situation Room via secure video to discuss Afghanistan strategy with Obama and "an array of cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, generals, diplomats and advisers," the New York Times reported.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama listened to military brass, who discussed gains made by the insurgency, and diplomats, who detailed the results of the troubled Afghan election, which was marked by claims of vast fraud on the part of the winner and incumbent President Hamid Karzai. "Mr. Obama focused his questioning on the current threat posed by al Qaeda and whether a resurgent Taliban would give al Qaeda leaders a new haven to regroup," an administration official said, according to the Journal.

Like most revelations in matters of politics and intelligence, the disclosure today of a "secret" Iranian nuclear facility came as a surprise to the general public but not to those in positions of power.

"American officials said that they had been tracking the covert project for years," the New York Times reported in a well-sourced story .

In fact, President Obama has received briefings on the facility dating back to last winter, after he won the November presidential election and began the transition from the Bush administration. That makes his strategy over the course of the last 10 months even more impressive.

Anthony Shadid, the famed Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, is jumping ship (along with his wife) for the New York Times.

Shadid, the Post's Baghdad bureau chief, and Nada Bakri, his wife and a Post Baghdad staffer, will join the Times' Baghdad bureau in January, according to the Editor & Publisher blog "E&P Pub" (h/t Media Bistro).

Shadid won a Pulitzer Prize for the Post in 2004 for his reporting from Iraq and was a finalist in 2007. He also wrote some of the most informative stories about the 2006 Israel-Hizballah conflict in Lebanon, at least of those that were appearing in Western media.

Shadid is a big snag for the Times, which evidently wanted him on board badly enough to hire both him and his wife as staff writers. Shadid adds to the Times' already stacked foreign correspondents corps, which includes Robert Worth, Michael Slackman, Nazila Fathi and Ethan Bronner.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the United Nations General Assembly today, and he will likely be greeted by thousands of protesters. The New York Times reports that Iranian expatriates - or the "diaspora," as the Times calls them - are rallying before and during Ahmadinejad's speech, which is scheduled to begin around 5 p.m, to protest the likely fraudulent June election and the government-sponsored violence that followed.

President Obama will give his own speech around 10 a.m., and though the chances of the two meeting are slim, it is possible. See a video of the moves Obama might have to break out if the unlikely event occurs, after the jump.

Egypt's decision to cull its entire pig population as a swine flu defense tactic has backfired in one very smelly way: The unofficial garbage collectors who used to use the pigs to clean up organic waste are now forced to let garbage rot in the streets.