Yet Another Journalistic Oops.

It appears that again the New York Times and John Kerry have stuck their feet squarely in their mouths, this time over explosives in Iraq.

The NYT reported yesterday that Iraqi authorities reported 380 tons of missing high-explosives from a facility.

The jist of the story is that there is a weapons facility called Al Qaqaa that Hussein used to store a large amount of two types of high explosives. The IAEA had been monitoring the site and had sealed it so that the explosives could remain under their observation, since the explosives were prohibited materials under several UN Resolutions.

Well, yesterday, the story broke that Iraqi authorities hadreported to the US and the IAEA last month that the facility was empty and had been looted “due to lack of security”.

Needless to say, John Kerry leaped right on this story yesterday morning saying,

“After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles – where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept. Today we learned that these explosives are missing, unaccounted for and could be in the hands of terrorists…The unbelievable incompetence of this president and his administration has put our troops at risk.”

That’s a serious accusation.

Except that there’s a problem. The story doesn’t appear to be entirely true.

NBC reported yesterday evening that they had reporters embedded with the 101st Airborne, who were the first troops to arrive at Al Qaqaa on the second day after troops entered Iraq. The reporters verified what the troops saw: there were no such explosives there. Though there were large amounts of other munitions, the important stuff – the RDX and HMX – was gone.

Now, more facets of the story are coming out, as they often do. It appears that the Iraq had, prior to the invasion, used some of the sealed explosives for mining and construction purposes. The IAEA could only verify the presence ot the explosives to January, 2003 – two months before the latest invasion.

It turns out that the story was a joint effort between the NYT and CBS News – the same two groups that teamed up to break and run the Abu Ghraib story. CBS didn’t run the story because they didn’t feel it was ready to go, though the NYT did.

It appears that CBS News’ caution was warranted. The story wasn’t at all ready for print, considering that NBC knocked it down in a matter of hours just by checking with its embedded reporters.

My own take on this is that, yet again, the Times has taken on the job of trying to knock dents in the Bush campaign and give the Kerry campaign plenty of ammunition for the day’s news cycle. I noted back when it happened how the Times had run more than 30 days’ worth of front-page stories about Abu Ghraib, even after it was clear that the case had been well known (and even reported nearly a year before the photos came to CBS) and was under investigation.

It sure looks to me that the Times rushed this story to print and it got knocked down pretty easily. I’ve yet to see a retraction or correction, though. In fact, the newspaper is carrying an editorial in full-throated support of their story, as if NBC’s story never existed. I’d expect nothing less from them.

Yet people gripe when Sinclair wanted to run a documentary about John Kerry that showed him in a less than flattering light. To them, that’s biased. Favorable documentaries like one which ran recently on dozens of public television stations or stories like this are just objective journalism.

Calibrate your dictionaries accordingly.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush