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Times Watch for May 30, 2003
Columnist Maureen Dowd was “happy” to correct her May 14 distortion of a Bush quote, Paul Colford writes in his New York Daily News column Friday.
“‘It was Ms. Dowd's decision’ to run Bush's comment in full [in her Wednesday column], a Times spokeswoman said. ‘Her intention was not to distort the meaning of the quote. She had received a couple of complaints and was happy to put in the entire quote to satisfy readers who felt it was too truncated.’”
Dowd’s May 28 column indeed contains Bush’s quote in full: "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore."
Compare that to Dowd’s May 14 column, in which she leaves off the third sentence of Bush’s quote and the first three words of the fourth to make Bush look naive: “Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. ‘Al Qaeda is on the run,’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated…They're not a problem anymore.’”
From the full quote, it’s clear that Bush was in no way saying Al Qaeda was spent, and he certainly didn’t say Al Qaeda was “not a problem anymore.”
The Krugman Crack-Up
Continues
Paul Krugman’s Friday column, “Waggy Dog Stories,” is a collection of left-wing conspiracy-mongerings worthy of “satirist” Michael Moore, complete with clichéd references to the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog” to describe Bush’s war in Iraq.
Krugman writes: “The Iraq war was very real, even if its Kodak moments--the toppling of the Saddam statue, the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch--seem to have been improved by editing. But much of the supposed justification for the war turns out to have been fictional.”
For his “Saddam statue” accusation, Krugman appears to rely on an April 9 column by cartoonist and left-wing columnist Ted Rall. (Rall has also wondered if Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash, was assassinated by the Bush administration.) Krugman’s Lynch rescue allegation apparently rests on a now-discredited BBC report.
Krugman goes on to accuse the Bush administration of pressuring intelligence agencies for evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, before again reaching into the past for a final paranoid slam at Bush. “A final note: Showtime is filming a docudrama about Sept. 11. The producer is a White House insider, working in close consultation with Karl Rove. The script shows Mr. Bush as decisive and eloquent….And we can be sure that the script doesn't mention the bogus story about a threat to Air Force One that the White House floated to explain Mr. Bush's movements on the day of the attack. Hey, it's show business.”
For the rest of Paul Krugman’s column, click here.
Friday’s front-page is dominated by one story each from Middle East correspondents James Bennet and Greg Myre--two profiles, with photos, of Palestinian suicide bombers.
“A Scholar of English Who Clung to the Veil” is Bennet’s story on a female suicide bomber who apparently broke through a Palestinian version of the glass ceiling: “At 19, disguised as an Israeli woman in jeans and a T-shirt, she became the first Palestinian woman to blow herself up on behalf of an Islamist group, Islamic Jihad, which has unveiled her face on posters here claiming responsibility for the attack. With that, another barrier tumbled before a phenomenon that is penetrating ever further into Palestinian society after 32 months of conflict with Israel.” The picture caption reads: “Hiba Daraghmeh, the first Palestinian woman to blow herself up on behalf of an Islamist group.” (Not to mention killing three civilians and wounding many more.) Isn’t the Times taking its gender equity obsession a little too far?
Greg Myre’s story, “A Young Man Radicalized by His Months in Jail,” makes the point that Israeli jails, packed with terrorist suspects, are a natural recruiting ground for “militant groups.” By the time Fuad Qawasmeh was released, he had indeed become radicalized and within six months killed himself and two Jewish settlers in Hebron. But a Times copy editor reduces this complexity into a simple, blame-Israel subhead: “An Israeli jail turns a Palestinian into a suicide bomber.”
Now that the suicide bombers have had their front-page play, perhaps the Times can profile the five victims of those two suicide bombers--or at least give their names.
For the rest of James Bennet’s story on the female Palestinian suicide bomber, click here.
For the rest of Greg Myre’s story on the male Palestinian suicide bomber, click here.
Nicholas Kristof’s Friday column, “Save Our Spooks,” mocks what he considers the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “Day 71 of the Hunt for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up. Maybe we'll do better on Day 72. But we might have better luck searching for something just as alarming: the growing evidence that the administration grossly manipulated intelligence about those weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.”
Before Kristof gets too giddy, he might want to read yesterday’s Times, specifically reporter William Broad’s article, “U.S. in Assessment, Terms Trailers Germ Laboratories", which suggests something may have turned up after all. “The Bush administration yesterday made public its assessment of two mysterious trailers found in Iraq, calling them mobile units to produce deadly germs and the strongest evidence yet that Saddam Hussein had been hiding a program to prepare for biological warfare.”
Broad gave details: “The report and briefing, given by four intelligence officials, revealed new details beyond what government officials had previously disclosed about the two mobile factories found by allied forces in April and May. For instance, the officials said they judged that each trailer could brew enough germs to produce, with further processing, one or two kilograms of dried agent each month. While seemingly a small amount--a kilogram is 2.2 pounds--that weight in dangerous germs could cause major havoc if cast to the wind or into a subway. By comparison, the anthrax-tainted letters that killed 5 people and put 30,000 Americans on preventive antibiotics in 2001 each contained about a gram of dried anthrax spores. So the mobile factories, in theory at least, could make quantities of deadly agents up to thousands of times greater.”
For the rest of Nicholas Kristof’s column, click here.
For the rest of William Broad’s article on germ factories, click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org