Liberals lie about WAPO

This lie, debunked by the quotation they cite to prove it, is all over the web this morning.

Washington Post, citing anonymous Baltimore PD document, says Freddie Gray severed his own spine

This is what they quote the Post saying, to support that claim.

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

As for myself, it seems to me the witnesses reported belief Gray was "intentionally trying to injure himself" derived from a possibly mistaken and baseless interpretation of the noise of Gray "banging against the walls," assuming that actually happened at all, a point I set aside for now.

The point here is that reporting the contents of a document is not citing it as proof of anything, much less its own contents.

What is the liberals' real problem?

That the Post did not express sufficient skepticism about the contents of the document, or spend enough effort convincing readers they ought to be suspicious of the blue gang suborning perjury.

To fill the gap, a famous blogger of the left, Steve M, provided these reasons for suspecting the testimony was thus mendacious and arranged.

Jesus, you don't have to be an angry young demonstrator to be skeptical of this Washington Post story by Peter Hermann. 

Do you have even a passing familiarity with mid-century noir, James Ellroy, Richard Price, John Gregory Dunne? 

That should be enough. 

Has it not penetrated your consciousness in all your decades on this earth that police departments circle the wagons when one of their own is accused of wrongdoing -- especially when the accusations are accurate -- and that it's routine to promise favorable treatment to a dumb schlub in lockup who'll play ball?

See?

It happens in some of the best fiction of our time, so it's a pretty good bet it's happening in Baltimore.

That's all the Post writer had to say.

As for me, my takeaway from that Post story is a bit different.

From the story it certainly seems likely to me that the police broke or at least severely damaged Gray's back by kneeling on him before they put him into the van.

And leaving him to bounce around during a rough ride ("banging against the walls," as that witness statement says), a gratuitous act of cruelty, might have finished the job begun by the kneeling officers and severed his spine.

If, on the other hand there was no erratic drive and Gray was quiet in the van as originally reported then it appears the damage to Gray's spine was done entirely by the police before the ride.

Obviously the kneeling was intentional, though the video cannot tell us whether the officers intended such or any serious damage.

Manslaughter, at least?

It's tricky because it's the job of police to use force the use of which would be illegal for civilians.

Standards for criminal or civil liability for consequences may be different, too.

But I certainly would hope that does not amount to carte blache.

Lately, we have seen cops let go without even a slapped wrist in too many cases of police killings, and given our own past experience and public knowledge of how this stuff goes we have to think that handful of cases, given high publicity only because the victims were black and the cops white, are only the tip of a much larger iceberg in which both the perpetrators and victims of police thuggery and even murder come in all colors and sexes.