Posted on 10/26/2004 7:09:58 AM PDT by KMC1
EDITOR SHOWS DISGRACEFUL, FAULTY, AND PARTISAN BIAS: When John Kerry took to the campaign stages early on Monday citing the New York Times piece on the issue of the missing weapons in the AlQaQaa facilities something struck me as strangely odd. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time but the Senator seemed overly confident about the facts so I waited.
What is developing now is a complete picture of harsh coordination between the New York Times, its now disgraced editor Jill Abramson, and the false and incomplete story that the Times ran, in their attempt to assist John Kerry.
This is one news organization that learned nothing from CBS, Dan Rather, and Memo-gate.
The claim that Kerry began implenting based on the Times' story is that the administration was in essence negligent in guarding or destroying explosive munitions to the amount of something like 380 tons. Kerry's claim is now that Iraqi looters and insurgents were able to covertly remove the explosives (some of which are powerful enough to trigger nuclear weapons - yet Kerry didn't believe that Iraq had WMD's).
But late yesterday - NBC blew a hole wide open into Kerry's explanation. As the KerrySpot reported:
NBC News: Miklaszewski: "April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qaqaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq." (NBC's "Nightly News," 10/25/04)
The question now becomes why didn't the NewYorkTimes run a clarification explaining their badly incomplete story from yesterday. One other fact left out of the original story was that to date the U.S. and Coalition forces have destroyed or prepared for destruction roughly 400,000 tons of weaponized material.
Which brings us to this important observation from FOX NEWS last night. If large trucks were loaded to the gills with the materials described it would take 38 trucks to make off with the full stockpile. Coalition forces have destroyed nearly 40,000 trucks worth of materials. In other words the amount missing is LESS THAN one percent of what has already been or is presently being destroyed.
Jill Abramson could have done comparative research to discover the truth about not only when the weapons had actually gone missing. Her reporters could have chosen to put it in its proper context in terms of the scope of what coalition forces have accomplished.
She instead chose to run a story that was deliberately incomplete, contextually false, and purposefully drove to mislead the readership of her paper - all for the sake of allowing John Kerry a bloviating moment to try to pump up his failing bid for the White House.
Her refusal to run any form of clarification today only signals a stubborn turn in the editor's thinking that she no longer has a public duty to free and fair reporting of the facts.
Just heard on Fox News - Kerry is about to speak at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and first third of the speech is repeated claims from these now proven false assertions.
This could be big; really big.
The MSM has been disgraced in this election.
212.556.1234
Mr Bush should just be very direct and charge collusion between the media and Kerry.
Rush pounded them/this yesterday and I will trust he will do so again today.
It IS big already- but the RNC/Pentagon/White House MUST get this into "sound-bites" that smash this story to pieces.
Apparently, the NBC Today Show doesn't know that NBC News has written that this information is false. NBC News wrote the article yesterday and the Today Show repeated the false allegations today. It's not a matter of right hand vs left hand, it's a deliberate attempt to smear the president.
I wouldn't be surprised if his buddies at the UN were in on it also.
I heard that the New York Times used the same fact checker as CBS. He used to star with Ronald Reagan on Bedtime For Bonzo.
Nothing on the CNN, MSNBC or FOX web sites about this story. I see no evidence of blowback, unfortunately.
We have to turn this around and keep the heat on the MSM...they deliberately tried to use this to embarrass Bush. Now they've dropped the story altogether. Need to remind the public that there WERE WMD's.
Kerry is STILL using that story! FOX just showed him at a Kerry campaign rally--and Kerry is still using it on national TV!
I get so tired of the GOP, The Bush/Cheney Campaign and most pubbies being so milquetoast. Why do we let things lie? What happened to the Sandy Berger "pants-gate" scandal, Dan Rather scadal, etc.
See my tagline.
I'm hoping the Sandy Berger "pants-gate" is our Oct. Surprise. Arrests any day? The D's did it in '92 to Bush 41.
CBS called NYT their "partners".
Why is the NBC story getting minimal (almost no) press?????
what is their phone #...anyone know?
They'll let it swellif they think it will go away, but we'll just get more PI$$ED!
I see the number...Sorry
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