For anyone foolish enough to think the media will admit error, here's how the AP is (not) handling the corrected quote, in a story entitled " U.S. Strategy Shifts in Iraq Weapons Hunt (no byline) posted at 10:26 AM today on Excite:
Meanwhile, comments from senior U.S. defense officials about Iraq's weapons have revived controversy in Europe over whether the war was justified.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
The magazine's reporter did not tape the telephone interview and provided a slightly different version of the quote in the article: "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may have been destroyed before the war.
"It is also possible that they (Saddam Hussein's government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz suggested Washington fabricated weapons claims, and an aide to the defense secretary, speaking on condition of anonymity, insisted their remarks had been misinterpreted.
However, the remarks were widely published in Europe and were seen by skeptical Europeans as a tacit admission that the United States overstated Iraq's weapons threat.
Interesting -- and most likely, intentional, juxtaposition -- first give an abbreviated Pentagon version of the taped quote (which still puts it out of context), then give the reporter's untaped version. No big deal, right?
You REALLY ought to post that as a separate thread, highlighting in the headline that the AP is covering up and spinning the Vanity Fair fraud story. Then I can ping the NYTimes Schadenfreude list!