In 2006, when Tom Cotton was a 29-year-old Army officer in Iraq, he accused two New York Times reporters of helping terrorists kill American troops and called for them to be thrown into prison. Cotton made his unhinged claims against journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in an open letter condemning their story on the government’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. “Next time I hear that familiar explosion—or next time I feel it—I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance,” he wrote in the letter, which was published on a right-wing blog. “I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place…behind bars.”
The letter, which also called for the prosecution of then Times executive editor Bill Keller, was widely praised in conservative outlets, giving Cotton an early taste of the fame that could come from dunking on the free press. He has revisited the tactic repeatedly, most recently this week, when he appeared on the Senate floor to defend Israel’s campaign in Gaza—in particular its bombing of the Associated Press offices over the weekend. “Why is the Associated Press sharing a building with Hamas? Surely these intrepid reporters knew who their neighbors were,” Cotton said. “Did they knowingly allow themselves to be used as human shields by a U.S.-designated terrorist organization? Did the AP pull its punches and decline to report for years on Hamas’s misdeeds?”
He continued: “The AP has some uncomfortable questions to answer, yet the AP and its fellow journalists are in high dudgeon about Israel’s wholly appropriate air strike. Leave it to whiny reporters to make themselves the story and the victim when terrorists are shooting missiles at innocent civilians.”
For context, the Israeli military has yet to offer public evidence that the AP building also housed a Hamas intelligence outfit. AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt has denied this characterization, stating that there was “no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building. This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.” What’s more, Israeli officials have not even claimed that journalists working in the targetted building had ties to Hamas—a claim that Cotton seemingly fabricated by himself, much like with his open letter in 2006.
When contacted by the Hive regarding Cotton’s claims that the AP is supposedly allied with Hamas, a spokesperson for the agency highlighted “a hard-hitting story by AP Gaza correspondent Fares Akram from last month, about Hamas and its torture methods” and reaffirmed that there was no known Hamas activity occurring in the building. “This is something we check as best we can. We do not know what the Israeli evidence shows, and we want to know,” the spokesperson said, adding that the AP “aims, as always, to report what is factually happening to the best of our ability. This is and always has been the case in AP’s coverage of the Middle East and everywhere else in the world.”
The AP and a watchdog group have called for an independent investigation into Israel’s bombing of the AP building, which also housed Al Jazeera and other media outlets, and on Monday, Pruitt reiterated that call in a new statement. “Had we seen any credible information that our journalists were at risk or our ability to report the news accurately and fairly was compromised, we would have taken action to address the situation,” he said.
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