380 Tons of Explosives Destroys Last Remaining Iota of New York Times' Credibility

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXCII

Formerly reputable newspaper joins DNC527CBSNews as purveyor of failed hit pieces on George W. Bush.

Note, Faithful Reader, how the three authors are credited twice in this shameless, foolish hatchet job at NYT, yesterday:

October 25, 2004

TRACKING THE WEAPONS

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes." ....

James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq, for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna, and David E. Sanger from Washington and Crawford, Tex. Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad.

In case you didn't notice the byline

By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

the editors helpfully add a tag line right beneath it:

This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

I think Jim & Bill & Dave thought their names were going to go down in journalistic history as the names of the geniuses who finally found the way to torpedo the second term of Bush-Cheney. Yippee! Hooray! Yahooooo!

Oops.

The very same day, NBC Nightly News blows them out of the water, as Jim Geraghty relates at NRO's Kerry Spot, yesterday:

.... “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. 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 U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04) ....

Nobody at LAT notices the jig is up before they, too, run with a shameless, foolish hatchet job, today.

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

White House Downplays Missing Iraq Explosives

By Mark Mazzetti and Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writers

October 26, 2004

WASHINGTON — The White House acknowledged Monday that nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives were missing from a weapons facility that American forces failed to guard after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, raising fears that the munitions could be given to militants or used for attacks against troops in Iraq.

U.S. officials say the explosives — which are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear bomb — may have been looted from one of Saddam Hussein's bomb-making plants when U.S. forces worked to pacify Baghdad and other restive cities.

White House officials downplayed the significance of the missing explosives. But coming eight days before the presidential election, the disclosure reverberated through the campaign, with Democratic nominee Sen. John F. Kerry calling it one of President Bush's "great blunders" in Iraq....

Mazzetti reported from Washington and Farley from the United Nations. Times staff writers Greg Miller and Tyler Marshall in Washington, Edmund Sanders in Baghdad and Michael Finnegan in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

Matt Drudge reports, yesterday, that NYT got the "scoop" by beating CBS to the punch:

.... The source behind the NYT story first went to CBSNEWS' 60 MINUTES last Wednesday, but the beleaguered network wasn't able to get the piece on the air as fast as the newspaper could print. Executive producer Jeff Fager hoped to break the story during a high-impact election eve broadcast of 60 MINS on October 31....

CNN notes today how this story affected presidential politics immediately, and takes a quite unexpected shot at Kerry whore Joe Lockhart:

Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived

NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time

(CNN) -- The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a network embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material had already vanished by the time American troops arrived....

Political fallout

With the U.S. presidential election eight days away, news of the missing explosives quickly became campaign fodder.

Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry immediately seized on the information to accuse President Bush of incompetence in failing to secure the material, charging that "this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration."

But in the wake of the NBC report, the Bush campaign fired off a statement saying that Kerry's criticism of the president over the missing material has "been proven false before the day is over."

"John Kerry's attacks today were baseless," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. "He said American troops did not secure the explosives, when the explosives were already missing."

Schmidt also said that Kerry "neglects to mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that are either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed" in Iraq.

But Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart fired back with a statement of his own, accusing the Bush campaign of "distorting" the NBC News report.

"In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame," Lockhart said. "It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report.

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux and Elise Labott contributed to this report.

For the sake of journalistic history, let's review the names of the players in this journalistic two-step hit-piece, who invented covered the story from just about every conceivable angle while ignoring the most important aspect: the falsehood of the original claim that the administration & military failed to safeguard what was, in fact, never in our custody.

New York Times: James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq, for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna, and David E. Sanger from Washington and Crawford, Tex. Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad. Los Angeles Times: Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington and Maggie Farley from the United Nations. Times staff writers Greg Miller and Tyler Marshall in Washington, Edmund Sanders in Baghdad and Michael Finnegan in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

Too bad the staff at NYT & LAT don't read The Blog from the Core; they could have found a crucial bit of information here a couple of years ago:

Important note for reporters: it is not a scoop if it is not true.

P.S. It seems there may be even more chicanery afoot than already realized:

Sent to me by a source in the government: “The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

P.P.S. The Truth Laid Bear blogs a round up.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 10/26/04 08:26:29 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.