Kerry Lied
Millions Died
Posted on 10/26/2004 8:11:36 AM PDT by icecold
NYT's October Surprise Collapses October 26, 2004 04:33 AM
Yesterday, the New York Times did a fine service for the Kerry campaign by publishing a carefully timed hit piece describing how tons of explosives have gone missing from a site in Iraq.
This morning, the story is imploding, with NBC News leading the charge to point out that the explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived just a day after the fall of Baghdad. (Bizarrely, CNN has this as their lead story online, and it is nowhere to be found on MSNBC's front page).
(Excerpt) Read more at truthlaidbear.com ...
Yesterday, the New York Times did a fine service for the Kerry campaign by publishing a carefully timed hit piece describing how tons of explosives have gone missing from a site in Iraq.
This morning, the story is imploding, with NBC News leading the charge to point out that the explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived just a day after the fall of Baghdad. (Bizarrely, CNN has this as their lead story online, and it is nowhere to be found on MSNBC's front page).
But the Times didn't just do a shoddy job of reporting and failed to identify the possibility that the explosives were gone before our troops arrived. It's worse than that: they did find that out, they just buried it deep in the story and, apparently, never bothered to follow up on it.
Here's Page 1 of the online version of the NYT story yesterday, where they wonder why nothing was done by U.S. forces to protect the site:
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.
And then, buried on Page 3 of the story, we find the answer:
A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal."
This matches perfectly with the NBC story:
NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.
While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.
This morning, the NYT appears bent on continuing the error, running a story titled Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign (gee, wonder how that happened). In that story, the Times is forced to acknowledge that they did, in fact, know about their error in advance:
On Monday evening, Nicolle Devenish, the spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, noted a section of the Times report indicating that American troops, on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, stopped at the Al Qaqaa complex and saw no evidence of high explosives. Noting that the cache may have been looted before the American invasion, she said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated the administration's responsibility.
"John Kerry presumes to know something that he could not know: when the material disappeared," Ms. Devenish said. "Since he does not know whether it was gone before the war began, he can't prove it was there to be secured."
But still they won't give up, and run with the bogus story in this morning's editorial, which sniffs:
James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in Iraq that the United States failed to secure. The United Nations inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United States took over the job. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so bent on proving his theory of lightning warfare that he ignored the generals who said an understaffed and underarmed invasion force could rush to Baghdad, but couldn't hold the rest of the country, much less guard things like the ammunition dump. (Emphasis mine)
The reporters' names who worked the original story are right there, but the other name that bears mentioning is Jill Abramson, the Times' Managing Editor. Ensuring that a story like this is properly vetted falls squarely in the ME's realm of responsibility, so I think it's fair to ask Ms. Abramson what happened here, and why she's allowing her news pages to become an adjunct to the Kerry camapaign's attempts to smear Bush's record on Iraq.
awwwwww.....
It is now reported elsewhere that even the papers themselves were phony.
Why don't they call it the Oct 25th Surprise, since they have a new one everday.
Amen!
FYI...
New York Times - 212.556.1234
Jill Abramson - abramson@nytimes.com
The liberal MSM busted again and again.
Okay, so they were busted. But who's actually going to report it, besides Fox and Drudge?
I like the title. Kerry put all the money in the bank on this story and it collapsed on its head.
I wonder if Bill Clinton knew this story would collapse because he mentioned nothing about it yesterday.
Kerry shill Ambassador Marc Ginbsburg (fox contributor) says the issue is "we didn't have enough troops on the ground, even Bremer said so", etc etc. I sure hope the Republicans will hit back - this false story should be a help for Bush, not for Kerry!
CNN has buried the story and made it look like a "controversy". You have to read down a few paragraphs to get to the nitty gritty.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives.intl/index.html
(OK, they did go 7 games in the LCS)
Millions Died
So John Kerry has acted on bad intelligence (or the lack of it). The question is will he admit his mistake and apologize? Hmmmm?
I love it when a plan falls apart.
1) Is that all they got left?
2) Does Karl Rove have anything to go?
I noticed CNN is also stating this is a false story. Who would have thunk CNN would carry this info. Something don't seem right.
"Okay, so they were busted. But who's actually going to report it, besides Fox and Drudge?"
I'm wondering the same thing. Kerry, MSNBC reports, is today still demanding an explanation from Bush about the missing munitions. "What else isn't he telling the American people?" Kerry screeches.
Kerry seems to think pretending the story is true works just as if the story were true.
"Something don't seem right".
And it is: Where is the outrage?
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