The Guardian Fully Retracts BOTH Powell/Straw Story AND Wolfowitz "It's All About Oil" Story

The Guardian ^ | June 5, 2003

[Stultis]

O.K. The Guardian's retraction is in their "Corrections and clarifications" for Thursday, June 5:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,3604,971436,00.html

[veronica]

All the Leftie rags are getting their heads handed to them these days, metaphorically speaking. :))

[LurkerNoMore!]

I think you done good.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The best evidence so far, two trailers that might have been used to make bio-weapons, hardly constitute a serious threat.

Might have?, can they describe some other purpose for these mobile labs?

And why all the pesticides around Military Base. The nurseries in Bagdad said they couldn't afford to buy pesticides!!!!

See this thread:

FAS (Fed Am Scientist) Report: Iraqi Precursor Chemicals Stored Separately for Weapon-side Mixing

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

This was a calculated move by the Guardian. They put these stories with wild allegations on the front page, then put the retraction on page D16 in a block the size of a postage stamp.

[Consort]

The Guardian will now have to change its name to The Gaudian.

gaud
\Gaud\, n. [OE.] deceit; fraud, artiface; device.

[bigghurtt]

I find it funny that instead of facing the fact she really is just untalented, it has to be the right-wingers at it again.

remember when she left SNl how she gave all those interviews saying that the show was a "boys club" and inhospitable to women trying to come up? it was late revealed that she actually showed up late, left early, didn't like to write, was always complaining, and tried to ruin good skits and faulty grounds.

an example of the last...there was a skit where garafalo would show up as a female alien and would offer the humans any knowledge they wanted, but the male humans only wanted to make sexual comments...I think any moron could see the point of the skit was that men are shallow, one-track beings, but she refused to be in the skit on the grounds it was demeaning to women. I'll be happy when this no-talent hack disappears.

[gulfcoast6]

What do you expect from CNN, true to course.

[Chi-townChief]

The Guardian has been fully discredited long before this story.

[Stultis]

The Utne Reader has now pulled their Guardian based regurgitation of the Wolfowitz "War for Oil" claim as well. (Although I wonder if it made it into the print edition? I get the impression not; that it was a "web special". This was also the case with the Guardian article.)

The lib press is getting smarter about damage control with the "don't let this happen to you" object lesson they are getting from the Old Grey Whore. 'Course for many this will just mean lying more carefully.

I posted the text of the Utne Reader peice on another thread, in this message. Unfortunately they do not send you to the correction if you go to the link for the original article. You just get a typical "page no longer available" notification.

The retraction is here:

Correction
—By Staff, Utne.com
June 2003 Issue

Yesterday, we cited a story in the Guardian newspaper that quoted U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as saying the U.S. invaded Iraq for the oil. We removed that story from our website today after the Guardian issued the following correction:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil” misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, “The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.” The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

[YaYa123]

Just this morning on C-Span, a caller gave this Wolfowitz quote, so a retraction will be meaningless. It will still be "out there", repeated ad nausum, until it attains the status of truth. GRRRRRRRR

[Stultis]

Just this morning on C-Span, a caller gave this Wolfowitz quote

Which one? The second War for Oil one we got to quick enough that it never made hard copy ('cept in those German sources), and even other "responsible" news sites that ran internet stories based on The Guardian have pulled them. You'll probably still find the uncorrected internet article posted on CommonDreams.org, an islamist website, or the like, but it never got distributed as widely as the first misquote.