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In light of the Newsweek debacle, I thought it apropos to revisit another example of the MSM's willingness to inject stories into the media bloodstream with the intent of trying to damage this president and his administration. I'm referring specifically to The New York Times and the story of Al Qaqaa.First, a little backstory. Three weeks ago I sat on a panel with Clifford May discussing new media. May cited his experience with the Al Qaqaa story as an example of the growing power and speed with which new media can analyze, critique, and rebut charges emanating from the MSM.You...

Let me add this to Byron’s fine story today: The New York Times has never investigated – and never had its ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, investigate – this extraordinarily newsworthy question: Was the Grey Lady manipulated by a UN official, Mohammed ElBaradei, as part of a plot to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election?

A former GI with the 101st Airborne Division who was among the first Americans on the scene at Saddam Hussein's Al Qaqaa weapons depot said Wednesday there was no way the bunkers he inspected housed 380 tons of high explosives as reported by the New York Times. "When we walked into the bunkers that apparently nobody [else] went into, there is no way there were 380 tons of explosives in those bunkers," 101st Airborne veteran Ken Dixon told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" Wednesday night. Instead, said Dixon, the weapons that were left behind at Al Qaqaa were...

New York Times responds to Clifford May column -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scripps Howard News Service (SH) - The following letter by Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, was written in response to a Clifford D. May column that was distributed by Scripps Howard on Oct. 27. Also included is an answer by May to the Keller letter. To the editor: I'm all for freedom of debate, but Scripps Howard owes its subscribers an apology for the commentary it distributed recently under the byline of Clifford D. May. Mr. May - whom you identify as a one-time New York Times...

As a longtime investigative researcher and journalist, I knew that politics could be down and dirty, but I didn't expect (despite premonitions thereof), that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., would betray my son in the same manner that he had betrayed his fellow Swift Boat servicemen, and then all the American servicemen and women who served honorably in Vietnam so long ago. But I was wrong. I thought that he might have a little decency left in him, a decency that would spare the fighting men and women of Operation Iraqi Freedom from his demeaning smears and lies. Al Qaqaa, the...

Russia has become the focus of a US investigation into the removal of special weapons from Iraq in the months leading up to the March 2003 US military invasion.European intelligence has uncovered documents that link Russian spetsnaz troos to the removal of Russian made arms and explosives.Asked if the Russians worked at the Al Qaa Qaa facility where 380 tons of RDX and HMX explosives had been stored, a defense official said:'The likelihood is 99 percent that if the Russians did not work at that facility, they had helped to create a specific task force within Mukhabarat to do so.'

The Los Angeles Times this morning ran an article on the alleged looting of the Al QaQaa explosives. Pivotal to the article, whcih relied on unidentified GI alleged witnesses to the looting, was this: One soldier said U.S. forces watched the looters' trucks loaded with bags marked "hexamine" — a key ingredient for HMX — being driven away from the facility. Unsure what hexamine was, the troops later did an Internet search and learned of its explosive power. "We found out this was stuff you don't smoke around," the soldier said. The trouble is, it's completely bogus. Hexamine isn't an...

Now that Kerry's been soundly defeated, has anyone heard ONE WORD about the missing explosives?

BOMBGATE [Rich Lowry] Word is that the New York Times is working on another controversial story about it that could be in tomorrow's paper. Posted at 06:32 PM ME: I hope they think it was worth it when Bush is in office and their circulation drops. These people are garbage.

Bill Safire’s column today advances the case that UN official Mohamed ElBaradei has attempted to influence an American election by circulating false or misleading information. (Whether he succeeds or not remains to be determined.) Money quote: ElBaradei “has long known about the presence of ‘nuclear trigger’ explosives (evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions?) in one of Iraq's thousands of ammo dumps. But, The Wall Street Journal reports that with exquisite political timing, on Oct. 1 ElBaradei sent a ‘reminder’ to a Baathist science minister renewing the U.N. interest in these particular explosives. That produced a dutiful letter from the Iraqi bureaucrat...

Even after the U.S. military secured some 400,000 tons of munitions, as many as 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for. But with the names of other sites popping up everywhere — al-Mahaweel, Baqouba, Ukhaider, Qaim — experts say the al-Qaqaa stash is only a tiny fraction of what’s buried in the sands of Iraq. “There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons,” said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst and Iraq expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He contends Iraq’s prewar stockpiles “were probably in excess of 650,000 tons.” A nation ‘awash in weapons’ Through mid-September,...

Photos: Northern weapons removed before U.S. arrival Coordinated effort by Saddam's fedayeen to take munitions before allies secured areas Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's fedayeen removed weapons and ammunition from a storage facility in northern Iraq, similar to the al-Qaqaa facility at the center of current controversy, before the U.S. victory and prior to the arrival of the 101st Airborne Division to secure the area, according to photos obtained by WorldNetDaily from an Army intelligence source. Army sources say the removal operations by Saddam's troops at the northern site were coordinated and likely systemic, and could indicate the southern al-Qaqaa...

Geraldo just interviewed Col. David Hunt and allowed him to allege that the al-QaQaa explosives are now killing our servicemen!*&! Perhaps this segment was pre-recorded, but then FOXNews needs to make an announcement and not broadcast the word "Live" in the corner.

FROM A SOURCE CLOSE TO THE CAMPAIGN [10/28 02:07 PM] Just heard from a source close to the campaign, tuned in to the conversations at the highest levels. According to the Bushies, the last few days have seen a huge burst of momentum in their numbers. They think Bush is ahead by a few points nationally. They expect the next round of tracking polls to show a bit of a bump. The internal polls show a significant lead in Florida (outside margin of error) and Arkansas is out of play, with a Bill Clinton visit or without. As for most...

A quick report on this Saturday morning's edition of The Today Show. I'll get into some details below, but here's all people really need to know. Time spent in crucial first half-hour discussing OBL tape: virtually all. Tim e spent discussing missing explosives: virtually none. Joe Lockhart came on and tried to spin things as best he could, but you could see his heart wasn't in it. He knows that as long as the topic is OBL and the war on terror, his man is losing. Mary Matalin was the first guest, and she emphasized the great strides W has...

PARIS A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime. The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops. Much of the controversy has centered around the disappearance of about 380 tons of the powerful HMX explosive....

A high-ranking U.S. defense official said Russian forces "almost certainly" smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, The Washington Times reported Thursday. Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous." The Washington Times, basing its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian special forces had probably helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base. Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the UN's International Atomic Energy...

Since new CIA Director Porter Goss blocked the October Surprise agency left-wingers had prepared against Bush (discussed in "Porter At The Pass" last week), they desperately rigged another one, working with Mohammed ElBaradei at the U.N. What nobody is focusing on in Al Qaqaagate is that the CIA is behind it. The anti-Bush lefties are now known as the "Rogue Weasels" at Langley, and they are frantic to do whatever they can to elect Kerry. They cooked up this entire phony "tons of missing explosives" scandal, sweet-talked the head of the U.N.'s nuclear inspection agency, ElBaradei, to carry their water...

WILKES-BARRE - Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called Sen. John Kerry's criticism of the Bush administration regarding 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq "shameful." Speaking before about a crowd of about 150 packed into the Republican campaign headquarters Thursday afternoon, Giuliani said that by attacking President Bush, Kerry is impugning the performance of American troops. "What's he's saying by inference is that our troops didn't do their jobs. He's blaming it on the president, but the people that were there, the people on the ground, were our military. "He's talking about at most 380 tons of explosives...

I've never understood the Kerry campaign's decision to make Al Qaqaa--that is, an attack on the competence of the U.S. Army, based on essentially no evidence--the centerpiece of the last week of the campaign. On the merits, the issue has fizzled. We now know (although it has not been widely reported) that around half of the explosives in question were surreptitiously removed from the site by Saddam Hussein prior to January 2003; this is acknowledged in the IAEA report of that date. We also know that American troops secured the area starting on April 3, 2003, and thereafter it is...