In a rambling “business” column today, Michael Hiltzik unleashed his usual scorn for all things non-liberal. In his eagerness to bash the Bush administration over its response to hurricane Katrina, he drifted into … detention policy?

Leaving aside that these questions should have been answered long ago as part of our post-9/11 establishment of crackerjack emergency preparedness, the Bush administration is not famous for standing on legal ceremony when it wishes to achieve something: Witness the detention of nameless thousands of supposed terrorists at Guantanamo Bay …

According to the Department of Defense, 505 detainees are currently at Guantanamo, and 245 have been transferred to other countries or released. That’s a total of 750 — not Hiltzik’s “thousands.”

Human rights groups do not dispute that figure.

Hiltzik recently tried to deride critics of what he called the LAT’s “supposed liberalism,” saying such an assertion was an “ignorant partisan trope.” We don’t have access to Hiltzik’s brain to know where his belief in the paper’s neutrality comes from, so we just have to rely on what we see. Today’s poor fact checking reinforces our “ignorant” belief in the LAT’s lefty bias.

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More in our ongoing Hiltzik watch here. Surprisingly, today’s column failed to blame the Schwarzenegger administration for anything.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 10:36 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.