Driven by its eagerness to discredit the Bush administration, the New York Times has misread a recent Justice Department report on alleged government abuse of terror suspects. More important, the paper’s front-page smear set off a chain reaction of imitation news articles across the country, parroting the Times’s error. Thus has the war on the war on terror been waged—with misrepresentation, group-think, and blinding bias. The Times announced on July 21 that the Justice Department’s inspector general had “received 34 complaints of civil rights violations by department employees that it considered credible.” Lest the reader miss the significance of this...