If you're an accountant, you're only as good as your client's last tax return that successfully hid the bulk of his income in an offshore shell company. If you're a journalist, you're only as good as your last report. Not that any of your past transgressions will never come back to haunt you, as they are for ABC News' Brian Ross. The newsman — who in 2001 reported the post-9/11 anthrax attacks might be linked to Saddam Hussein because tests showed traces of bentonite, a chemical linked to Iraq's supposed bio-weapons — has been facing harsh criticism from the likes of Salon's Glenn Greenwald, NYU's Jay Rosen, and the Center for Citizen Media's Dan Gillmor for failing to follow up his report — which was based on the information from three (or four?) "well-placed" government sources — with the acknowledgment that, well, he got everything completely wrong. And that his report might've helped build support for that Iraq war we're still in the middle of!

Nonsense!, says Ross, the upstanding journalist whose credibility has been turned into potato latkes.

Ross is on TVNewser finally owning up to what went down. So what does he tell us? First, that recent suicide death Bruce Ivins was not one of his sources, despite plenty of coincidences that made it possible. Whew, glad that's out of the way.

Also, while Ross first reported, on Oct. 26, 2001, the anthrax tests show traced of bentonite, the White House — and, he says, his own sources — later told ABC News that the tests were wrong, and that "after further chemical analysis it was determined it was a silica, but not bentonite — something they had never seen before but had a brownish color."

The evening of Ross' report, colleague Terry Moran reported the denial, and Ross offered more details in a Nov. 1 story.

So will all this be enough to silence the critics? Maybe. In the beginning, Greenwald & Co. were calling for Ross to out his confidential sources who originally claimed bentonite in the anthrax sample and linked it to Iraq. Ross has denied Ivins is a source and now insists that at the time, his sources were telling the truth — they just happened to have bad information.

Case closed? Hah! But for starters, ABC could retract its bentonite stories — an empty mea culpa, but at least it's something … to keep this story alive.

Earlier: Should ABC’s Brian Ross Out His Anthrax Sources?