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Part of the Left’s hatred for President George W. Bush has involved a historical blurring of the war in Iraq. The latest case is the allegation that American troops, when they liberated Baghdad in April 2003, were not welcome as liberators. This inaccurate appraisal was leveled again on Tuesday evening by Barack Obama for the second time in consecutive presidential debates. Both times, Obama criticized John McCain for predicting that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated..., Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."

When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward. “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we...

FOR A FEW FLEETING moments Monday night--what should have been vivid and affecting moments--television coverage of President Bush's final State of the Union address fastened on the image of a mother and daughter from Moshi, Tanzania. They sat, their faces alive with hope, in the first lady's box seats. Viewers were not told, and no one seemed inclined to tell them, that Tatu Msangi and her daughter Faith quite literally owe their lives to the Bush administration. After Msangi became pregnant, she went to a clinic at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center and learned she was HIV-positive. Five years ago...

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA STEVEN J. HATFILL, M.D., : : Plaintiff, : : Civil Action No. 03-1793 (RBW) v. : : ALBERTO GONZALES, et al., : : Defendants. : ________________________________ MEMORANDUM OPINION Currently before the Court is the plaintiff’s Motion to Compel Further Testimony from Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Allan Lengel, Toni Locy, and James Stewart [D.E. # 157]. Also before the Court are several motions to quash subpoenas by1 various media companies: American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post, and Newsweek, Inc.’s Motion to Quash [D.E. # 152]; Motion by...

When I asked two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof about his guiding moral doctrine, he hummed, hawed and ahhed for a few seconds before he offered this line: "I don't think I have any sort of, you know, particularly unusual or even sophisticated moral doctrine. I think it is more a matter that I try to push people to care equally about injustices that are a long way away versus those that are next door." Many deem Kristof to be an intellectual figure looked to for moral insight and guidance. Readers see him as...

Poor David Brooks. By all rights, the moment should have been his. It was last Wednesday night, the first big hometown fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani, and the Sheraton New York ballroom was resplendent in faux-folksy glory. A thousand Republicans had come to toast (and fund) the candidate whom the New York Times columnist has compared to Teddy Roosevelt, lauded as a "courage Poor David Brooks. By all rights, the moment should have been his. It was last Wednesday night, the first big hometown fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani, and the Sheraton New York ballroom was resplendent in faux-folksy glory. A thousand...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Lawyers for a former Army scientist suing The New York Times for libel said Friday that an editor at the paper warned columnist Nicholas Kristof to remove incriminating passages from a column that raised suspicions that Steven Hatfill was involved in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Kristof left the passages in the May 2002 column despite the warning, said lawyers for Hatfill, who claims that a series of Kristof columns that year falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax mailings that left five people dead. The editor's warning to Kristof was voiced in an e-mail uncovered...

Scooter Libby has responded to Joseph A. Wilson's Motion to Quash a Subpoena Libby isued to him as a "precaution" to assure he'd be available to tesify if necessary at the forthcoming criminal trial. Case 1:06-mc-00560-RBW Document 4 Filed 01/03/2007 Aside from citing the relevant strong legal precedent in his favor, detailing his efforts to accommodate Wilson's travel schedule and deriding as factually absurd the claim that the subpoena is meant to harass Wilson and affect his civil case against Libby as to which there is a pending Motion to Dismiss, Libby sets out the factual reasons why Wilson may...

A federal judge gave the New York Times a brief reprieve from an order forcing it to identify confidential sources for columns about the 2001 anthrax attacks, but the paper could still face the possibility of being held in contempt of court as soon as tomorrow. Judge Claude Hilton of Alexandria, Va., issued a two-day stay of a magistrate's order that would have required the Times to name the sources by yesterday. The order came in a libel suit filed by a former Army scientist, Steven Hatfill, who claims he was defamed by five columns written by Nicholas Kristof in...

A federal judge has ordered the New York Times Co. to disclose the confidential sources used by Nicholas D. Kristof in columns that explored whether a former Army scientist was responsible for the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks. The ruling, made public yesterday, came in a lawsuit filed by the former scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, contending that the paper defamed him in a series of Kristof columns in 2002 that identified him as a "likely culprit." Hatfill has been identified by authorities as a "person of interest" in the anthrax-spore mailings that killed five people and sickened 17. No one has...

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is Paula Jones -- if with national security credentials and Beltway savoir-faire. Both women filed iffy lawsuits that seemed more designed to discredit a president than to prevail in a court of law. Jones never could prove that then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton hurt her career as a state worker after he allegedly sexually harassed her. Hence, there were no economic damages, as Judge Susan Webber Wright noted when she ruled against Jones. The suit filed last week by Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, against Bush biggies -- Veep Dick Cheney, Cheney's former...

After years of denial, Sami Al-Arian has finally admitted it: he has pleaded guilty to a charge of “conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds to or for the benefit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially Designated Terrorist” organization. He has agreed to accept deportation. In his 2002 defense of Al-Arian, Eric Boehlert wrote: “The al-Arian story reveals what happens when journalists, abandoning their role as unbiased observers, lead an ignorant, alarmist crusade against suspicious foreigners who in a time of war don't have the power of the press or public sympathy to fight back.” Reality is just the...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed a former Army scientist to proceed with a libel lawsuit against The New York Times that claims one of the paper's columnists unfairly linked him to the 2001 anthrax killings. Steven Hatfill sued the Times for a series of columns written in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof that faulted the FBI for failing to thoroughly investigate Hatfill for anthrax mailings that left five people dead. In a 6-6 decision, with one judge not participating, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to produce a majority of judges needed to grant a rehearing and...

Response to "Bush should support genocide pact" by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 9-26-2005 by Dennis Fishel If anyone ever asks me to run for president, I'm not going to know whether to laugh or cry. Not that I have much to worry about, you understand; retired mailmen-turned-novelists aren't normally on the candidate short list. Still, given that the media voodoo dolls of George W. Bush look like pin cushions these days, it can't hurt for any of us to have an escape plan should our friends and cohorts unaccountably decide we might look good in Oval. When the dogs at...

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PLOT THICKENS [John Podhoretz] Time Magazine has a new story about the revelation of Valerie Plame's name -- a story that, despite Time's own bizarre spin, reinforces the claim that Karl Rove and others learned that Joseph Wilson was married to a CIA operative from the media. "As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration," writes Massimo Calabresi. Later, he...

Appeals court reinstates anthrax libel lawsuit Thu Jul 28, 2005 6:22 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court reinstated on Thursday a libel lawsuit by former U.S. Army scientist Steven Hatfill against The New York Times Co. over a series of columns that he said implicated him in the deadly anthrax mailings in 2001. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal judge's dismissal of the lawsuit that claimed that columns by Nicholas Kristof published in 2002 defamed Hatfill and caused him emotional distress. "At this stage of litigation,...

Some of us in the news media have been hounding President Bush for his shameful passivity in the face of genocide in Darfur. More than two years have passed since the beginning of what Mr. Bush acknowledges is the first genocide of the 21st century, yet Mr. Bush barely manages to get the word "Darfur" out of his mouth. Still, it seems hypocritical of me to rage about Mr. Bush's negligence, when my own beloved institution - the American media - has been at least as passive as Mr. Bush. Condi Rice finally showed up in Darfur a few days...

Dear, oh dear! Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, laments, “the climate for freedom of the press in the United States feels more ominous than it has for decades.” He urges vociferous protest and a federal shield law for journalists—this because two journalists have been ordered to jail for refusing a judge’s order to reveal their sources. Both hacks are free pending appeals. Although I was in Albania for a short visit 25 years ago, I was unaware that freedom of the press was about to be curtailed in the Land of the Free. Kristof admits that judges do...

RICHMOND, Va. The federal appeals court in Richmond is scheduled to hear arguments this morning in an appeal filed by Steven Hatfill, a former researcher at Fort Detrick in Maryland. He wants the court to reverse a lower court ruling dismissing his lawsuit against The New York Times. He claims he was libeled by insinuations that he was responsible for the anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 others in 2001.

I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall. He is an American insider, a man working in the military bio-weapons field. He's a skilled microbiologist who did not aim to kill anybody or even to disrupt the postal system. Rather, he wanted to sow terror. Like many in the bio-warfare field, he felt that the government was not sufficiently attuned to the risks of anthrax, so he seized upon the opportunity presented by Sept. 11 to get more attention and funding for bio-terror programs like those that have been his career. How do I know all this? ...

The American Witness By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: March 2, 2005 American soldiers are trained to shoot at the enemy. They're prepared to be shot at. But what young men like Brian Steidle are not equipped for is witnessing a genocide but being unable to protect the civilians pleading for help. If President Bush wants to figure out whether the U.S. should stand more firmly against the genocide in Darfur, I suggest that he invite Mr. Steidle to the White House to give a briefing. Mr. Steidle, a 28-year-old former Marine captain, was one of just three American military advisers...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Poipet, Cambodia — After I purchased Srey Mom from her brothel for $203 a year ago and brought her back to her village, the joy was overwhelming. Her parents and siblings had assumed she was dead, and they shrieked and hugged and cried. I had doubts about the other sex slave I had purchased, Srey Neth, whom I wrote about on Wednesday - and who in fact is thriving and is now preparing to become a hairdresser. But I was pretty sure that Srey Mom would make it. So I'm devastated to say that a year later, I found Srey...

BATTAMBANG, Cambodia A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide. Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her. I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages. Now I've come back to find out how they coped with freedom. At first, it turns out, everything...

MEERWALA, Pakistan — I'm still trying to help out President Bush by tracking down Osama bin Laden. After poking through remote parts of Pakistan, asking for a tall Arab with a beard, I can't say I've earned that $25 million reward. But I did come across someone even more extraordinary than Osama. Usually we journalists write about rogues, but Mukhtaran Bibi could not be more altruistic or brave, as the men who gang-raped her discovered. I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century, equivalent to the struggles against slavery in the 19th century or against totalitarianism in...

Nicholas Kristof comes back for Round 2 against the Swiftvets, this time disguised as a "stop the mud" plea to both sides in the election. Unfortunately for Kristof, his latest offering is almost as fact-challenged as his last, and the equivalencies he draws between the two campaigns are at best obscure and at worst deliberately ridiculous: True, Democrats have also engaged in below-the-belt attacks. Some of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Michael Moore film, was the liberal equivalent of the anti-Kerry smears. Its innuendos implying that Mr. Bush arranged the war in Afghanistan so backers could profit from an oil pipeline were...

Nicholas Kristof on the assault weapons ban and nuclear terrorism.NICHOLAS KRISTOF can't make up his mind about who's more dangerous: al Qaeda or gun-toting Americans. Kristof recently wrote two columns on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, his conclusion being that we are now more vulnerable to nuclear attack than ever before. In his August 11 column, Kristof speculated that, if a 10-kiloton nuclear device exploded in Times Square, "it would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden . . . the United Nations," and so on. He concluded that the casualty figure would be approximately 500,000 dead, and...

Former Army Scientist Sues New York Times, Columnist By Jerry Markon Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 14, 2004; Page A07 The former Army scientist identified by authorities as a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks sued the New York Times Co. and columnist Nicholas D. Kristof yesterday, claiming the paper defamed him in a series of columns that identified him as the likely culprit. The lawsuit, filed by Steven J. Hatfill in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, said Kristof identified him as the anthrax killer to "light a fire" under investigators in their probe of the anthrax-spore...

So is President Bush a liar? Plenty of Americans think so. Bookshops are filled with titles about Mr. Bush like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places" and "The Lies of George W. Bush." A consensus is emerging on the left that Mr. Bush is fundamentally dishonest, perhaps even evil — a nut, yes, but mostly a liar and a schemer. That view is at the heart of Michael Moore's scathing new documentary, "Farenheit 9/11." In the 1990's, nothing made conservatives look more petty and simple-minded than their demonization of Bill and Hillary...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...

Watching presidential politics lately, I've been thinking back to when I was 13 years old and had my heart broken for the first time. It was 1972, and I was antiwar and infatuated with Senator George McGovern. But as I handed out McGovern leaflets in Yamhill County, Ore., I was greeted as if I were the Antichrist. Soon afterward, Mr. McGovern was defeated in a landslide. As Howard Dean will probably be, if the Democrats nominate him. It is, of course, the Democrats' privilege to stand on principle, embrace the man they admire most and leap off a cliff together....

<p>Much of the discourse on Iraq continues to be dominated by myths - provable falsehoods that happen to confirm the prejudices of the antiwar crowd and/or those disposed to think our mission is failing now.</p> <p>The mythos now culminates in the notion that a patriotic Iraqi "resistance" is slowly gaining ground against a hated occupation. But the distortions go back much farther.</p>

The New York Times -- unrelenting champion of the underprivileged, mighty battler against all corporate evils, and vehement opponent of Republican tax cuts for the "rich and powerful" -- lives by a far more self-serving motto:All the corporate welfare that's fit to collect.You won't see it reported on the Times' front page, so here's the scoop: The Gray Lady is a greedy leech, siphoning off millions of dollars in state taxpayer subsidies for private real estate development disguised as a public good. Now, the company stands to benefit from a federal tax-exempt bond program intended to help businesses devastated by...

Baghdad’s Useful IdiotTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote “The Stones of Baghdad” from Baghdad back in October, but it’s even more disturbingly relevant now. Blogger Dean Esmay went down the memory hole to dredge up the words Kristof (one hopes) would rather not have penned: “After scores of interviews with ordinary people from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions: 1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly outside the Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him gone. 2. Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam,...

April 10, 2003, 7:45 a.m.Hall of ShameMedia recriminations after VB Day.By NR Staff o many pundits, pols, and, yes, celebs, said so many wrong — and downright silly — things about the war in Iraq, prewar. We knew that back then, but now that Baghdad has effectively been liberated by the U.S.-lead Coalition, we provide a handy snapshot of what was said by some of those who should be looking down and making their apologies. Included here are Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and Barry McCaffrey, the latter one of the retired-general second guessers Vice President Dick Cheney dubbed “embedded...

What's Good For France is Good For America Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times on January 31, 2003, entitled "flogging the French. Basically saying that the French may not be right (wink), but America is wrong. He claims America is wrong because the Europeans say we are wrong and "proves" it by citing an internet poll on a European website. He buttresses his claim by quoting novelist John le Carré, who says, "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember." What it comes down...

Despite growing evidence that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were the work of foreign entities and perhaps even persons closely tied to the Sept. 11 terrorists themselves, federal investigators continue to pursue the theory that an American scientist was behind the crimes – an approach not all critics are buying. The cornerstone of this evidence, according to many knowledgeable observers and scientists, is "the fact that during the 1980s the United States government allowed biological pathogens to be sold to the Iraqi government." Indeed, export records provided by the American Type Culture Collection lists several pages of biological substances sent to...

Why didn't the Bush administration connect the dots and take aggressive measures before 9/11? For the same reason we're not doing so today: distractions and a lack of urgency. Forget about the blame game — for it's just that kind of distraction. It's more important to look ahead and try to block the next attack. Where are the dots today? One dot is Osama bin Laden's fervent efforts to obtain bio-weapons, reflected in the lab he was building near Kandahar, Afghanistan, to produce anthrax. Another dot is Iraq. Hazem Ali, a senior Iraqi virologist involved in his country's bio-weapons program,...

This isn't going to be a cute column. It may be a bit long. Some things need saying, so I'm going to say them. Recently stories have appeared in the press implying that Steve Hatfill, among other things a former ebola researcher at the Army's biological-warfare research center at Fort Detrick, Md, sent the notorious anthrax-bearing letters to people around the country. The implication is that he is a murderer. I know Hatfill socially, though we are not intimate. We met years back in Washington at a party held by a common friend. We have the occasional beer, bump into...

A little late to the game, but hopefully still of interest. (Full article at site.) Nicholas Kristof's NYT's handwringing column "Chicks With Guns," about the formation of a woman's pro-gun group at a Mass. woman's college, is full of simplistic assumptions without evidence. "There's abundant evidence that having more handguns also means more gun thefts, more armed robbery, more suicide and more murder." In Japan, where Kristof used to live, "there were only 28 gun deaths (murders and suicides combined) in 1999….By contrast, the United States had 26,000 gun deaths in 2000." If Kristof is right and there is "abundant...