Posted on 10/26/2004 5:07:22 PM PDT by focusandclarity
(CNSNews.com) - The New York Times on Tuesday defended its report on a missing cache of explosives in Iraq after Republicans accused the newspaper of ignoring the facts in a rush to attack President Bush.
The Times reported Monday that 380 tons of explosives had gone missing from the Al Qaqaa military facility in Iraq, which triggered a swift and harsh attack on Bush from Sen. John Kerry, who quickly produced an ad citing the article.
The Republican National Committee released a compilation of recent news reports on the missing explosives Tuesday, which it said proved that the Times and Kerry campaign were ignoring the facts to attack Bush.
The NBC Nightly News revealed Monday evening that it had an embedded reporter at Al Qaqaa on April 10, 2003, one day after the fall of Baghdad, and that none of the 380 tons of explosives were present.
"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," Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported Monday. "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 Times' spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, issued a statement to CNSNews.com on Tuesday afternoon defending the newspaper's report:
"Our front page story of October 25 reported accurately that a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science & Technology informed the International Atomic Energy Agency in a letter on October 10 that the materials were lost from the Al-qaqaa site after April 9, 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security.'
"The IAEA took an inventory of the materials in January, 2003. In early March, right before the beginning of the war, the IAEA went to the site and found that the seals on the bunkers were still intact.
"Pentagon and White House officials told the Times, as the story says, that the materials vanished sometime after the U.S.-led invasion.
"The Times story also reported that U.S. forces visited the vast site on their way to Baghdad and saw no materials bearing the IAEA seal.
"We are continuing our reporting on the disappearance."
Alright so you're in the newsroom decided how to frame this story and you have two choices...
Report that 380 tons of nuclear grade explosives dissappeared because the U.S troops did not secure them. We will have to accept that the insurgents had access to semi trailers, had built side roads to go around US troops and had stealth technology that stopped our overflights and satelites from seeing them.
OR
Sometime in the leadup to the War, Saddam duped the U.N. inspectors with bogus stickers or moved them after the inspectors were gone. The U.S. got there too late. We will have to accept that Saddam could fool the U.N. and we will have to assume that our soldiers would make it a priority to search and secure a known weapons site.
They chose to guve the benefit of the doubt to Saddam, terrorists and the U.N. rather than their own American troops...
This was an attempt to remove the people's right to choose an elected leader and install and anti-war commander in chief.
Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead !!
The Ghost of Dan Rather Rides Again......
I prefer the creative fiction of scrappleface.com to that of the front page of the NYT.
You are exactly right. This is an attempt to sway a presidential election through a conspiratorial concoction of phony "information" planned and executed by the UN, The IAEA, with the NYT and CBS news acting merely as the propaganda arm of the DNC/Kerry campaign. They know not how close to Civil War II they tread.
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