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.
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.
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.
This story has no legs...I hope this was what they were counting on for the "October Surprise".
If all this seems so confusing (one main stream media debunking another main stream media's story), just remember one thing. Kerry is not suppose to win.
The only way Kerry's campaign makes sense is to understand he is not in this to win, but to weaken the President and by extension the Republican party.
The Democrats are not stupid, misguided perhaps, but not stupid. They know that a liberal senator has little chance in winning a national election. If you look at the most recent history, the Democratic candidate always attempts to move to the center and present himself if not a conservative, at least as a moderate.
Kerry, if anything has moved further to the left. He has had close to thirty years to put his Viet Nam baggage away. A few speeches at a VFW convention where he admited he was wrong would have gone a long way to inoculate him from things such as the Swift Boat Vets ads, but he never did, and in fact he stands by his actions.
Instead of being against the war, he could have tried to be more of a hawk, sure he would have lost some on his extreme left, but would have picked up some of the mushy middle.
But by indicating he would turn over the security of the US to the UN he makes it difficult for some Democrats to vote for him (they may be socialist, but they have families and loved ones, and they understand that the UN can not protect themselves, let alone the US, even if they wanted to, which they don't.)
No, when the history of this election is written, it will be one of motivation, what was the motivation of John Kerry to run?
When the CBS/memogate affair occured a few weeks ago a number of people (including here)indicated it was Karl Rove at work, I laughed it appeared so ludicrous. Now with this one, it would not surprise me if Rove is doing these tricks and I love it. October surprise indeed.
I think the Guard memos was the intended October surprise. The dims had to run it early to save the sagging skerry at that time. So they've had to trot out weaker and weaker ones since they used the big gun early.
60 Minutes Correspondent Ed Bradley reports the U.N. says it warned the U.S. government the munitions site might be looted shortly after the invasion.
I believe this will be the MSM's fall-back position. They will say Bush should have expected this and moved to protect it.