Who Was NBC's Source For Its Domestic Database Story?
ShareOf course, NBC's Lisa Myers and her investigative unit wouldn't reveal who provided them with the information, most of which is classified.
Here's how the piece begins. Myers: "A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military. A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a "threat" and one of more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" across the country over a recent 10-month period."
The story then cuts to a sound bite from NBC News "military analyst" Bill Arkin, an ex-Army intelligence officer with fantastic sources and a prejudice against unncessarily classified information. Arkin says: "I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far.'"
Who provided NBC News with the database? The story doesn't say.
But we can. Or, rather, Bill Arkin can. It was....
Bill Arkin, who writes on his Washington Post online blog today about the "database -- which I obtained from a military source."
So Arkin obtained the database from one of his contacts and he passed it along to Lisa Myers and her producers.
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