Times' "Explosive" Scoop: Bombshell or Politically Motivated Dud? -- October 26, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for October 26, 2004

Times' "Explosive" Scoop:
Bombshell or Politically Motivated Dud?

The Times trumpets a two-column lead story by James Glanz, William Broad and David Sanger, "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq," in Monday's edition, a story one week before the election about events that happened at least 18 months ago -- one blaming the Bush administration for letting almost 400 tons of powerful explosives disappear under its nose. Grim news -- but is it true?

From Monday's Times: "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 Times puts Bush on the defensive: "The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country….A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa. But apparently, little was done."

Deeper in, the Times glides right by the possibility that the weapons were already gone by the Times U.S. forces arrived (a point Times Watch will return to): "A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces 'went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal.' It is unclear whether troops ever returned."

In a tonal shift from their usual reports downplaying Hussein's threat, the Times emphasizes Hussein's weaponry in order to expose the administration's alleged failure: "The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for 'high melting point explosive,' 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for 'rapid detonation explosive,' among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for 'pentaerythritol tetranitrate.' The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380 American tons."

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes found a lack of perspective in the Times' story, arguing on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume: "I don't think the Times, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the Times mentions, gives the perspective, that there are actually more than 400,000 tons that have either been destroyed or at least captured and are ready for destruction. I don't think they mentioned those numbers. So the story is really incomplete, overplayed. But it is, as Mort suggested, in line with the stories the Times is running. Clearly, the Times has chosen sides. The Times has become like one of those partisan newspapers in Europe. You know, the Guardian, for instance, promotes Labour. The Telegraph in London promotes the Conservatives. The New York Times supports the Democrats clearly, and it's one thing to have editorial writers who do that and columnists who do that, but this is the news coverage. The story was way overplayed." (Indeed, the Democratic party leaped on the Times story, as did most of the media.)

But lack of context might be the least of the story's problems: A Monday NBC Nightly News report may refute the Times' take.

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News is quoted on National Review Online contradicting the front-page story from that morning's Times: "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 Qaqaa 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."

Miklaszewski concluded (according to quotes taken down by the Media Research Center): "Pentagon officials claim there's no evidence the H.M.X. or R.D.X. have been used in attacks in Iraq. Nevertheless, the explosives are still missing, and President Bush today ordered a full investigation. But one U.S. official tells NBC News that recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes the agency's release of this explosive information, one week before elections, appear highly political."

Neither of those points made it into the Times.

Undaunted, the Times ran a front-page follow-up Tuesday morning from David Sanger, "Iraq Explosives Becomes Issue In Campaign."

Sanger opens: "The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as 'one of the great blunders of Iraq' and said President Bush's 'incredible incompetence' had put American troops at risk. Mr. Bush never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism….Yet even as Mr. Bush pressed his case, his aides tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times….White House officials said they could not explain why warnings from the international agency in May 2003 about the stockpile's vulnerability to looting never resulted in action. At one point, Mr. McClellan pointed out that 'there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.'"

Sanger demands the administration answer accusations from the Kerry camp: "Asked about accusations from the Kerry campaign that the White House had kept the disappearance secret until The Times and CBS broke the story on Monday morning, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said the White House had decided 'to get all the facts and find out exactly what happened in this case, and then whether there are other cases.'"

Sanger reveals how the Republicans are taking it to the Times, and belatedly reveals the possibility the looting of the explosives may have taken place before American troops had even arrived: "On Monday afternoon, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, wrote a letter to supporters saying that 'every day brings a new charge against the president and every charge is pulled right from the headlines of The New York Times.' 'John Kerry will say anything he believes will help him politically,' Mr. Mehlman wrote, 'and today he is grasping at headlines to obscure his record of weakness and indecision in the war on terror.' Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, also contended that The Times had chosen to run the article at the end of the campaign, though he argued that the explosives probably disappeared about 18 months ago. The Times article said it was based on a letter reporting the missing explosives dated two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Iraqi interim government. The Times and CBS confirmed the facts in the letter in an interview with the Iraqi minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar."

Finally there's this intriguing bit, which dovetails with what NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported Monday night: "On Monday evening, Nicolle Devenish, the spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, noted a section of the Times report indicating that American troops, on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, stopped at the Al Qaqaa complex and saw no evidence of high explosives. Noting that the cache may have been looted before the American invasion, she said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated the administration's responsibility."

A caption to a picture of Bush with troops in Nebraska reads: "Mr. Bush did not mention the issue of missing explosives in Iraq."

That's rich, given that Tuesday's Times doesn't mention details of the NBC News report that may negate their two front-page stories.

For the rest of Monday's explosives story, click here.

For the Tuesday follow-up, click here.

The Times Tuesday unveils its ten-page Voter Guide (four pages of which are devoted to anti-Bush ads), and from headlines to photo captions, it has a stark pro-Democratic skew. The next 3 TimesWatch.org items cover topics from
the Voter Guide.

Polarizing Bush, Secretive Cheney

The meat of the Times' Voter Guide Tuesday is a two-page spread on each party's respective tickets, and from headlines to photo captions, the pro-Democratic skew is stark.

Richard Stevenson's article on Bush, "The Bush Philosophy: Resolute, No Matter What" includes this caption to a photo of Bush alone on stage: "President Bush greeting Senator John Kerry after the debate on Oct. 13 in Tempe, Ariz. On issues, Mr. Bush reaches out sparingly."

The article characterizes Bush's "polarizing record": "George W. Bush ran for president four years ago with a strategy intended to round his edges and soften ideology with personality. He was 'a new kind of Republican,' a 'uniter not a divider' and, of course, a 'compassionate conservative,' to recall a few of the slogans that might have left many Americans not entirely certain of what kind of president they were putting in the Oval Office. As he faces the voters this year as an incumbent, Mr. Bush, 58, has assembled a weighty if polarizing record on foreign and domestic policy that leaves no doubt where he stands on the big issues."

After laying out some of Bush's policy anomalies, such as expanding Medicare, he writes: "In pursuing his agenda with a Republican-led Congress, he has mixed charm, strong-arm politics, intense party discipline and a degree of certitude that has been inspiring to his supporters and maddening to his opponents. On many issues, big and small, his approach often seems binary: yes or no, good or evil, with us or against us."

More clichés come in to play: "He can be impatient, peevish when challenged and, as a national television audience learned during his first debate with Senator John Kerry, he sometimes lets anger manifest itself in a scowl. But he tends to sunny optimism, action over contemplation and instinct over detailed analysis…. From the start, he governed as if he had a clear mandate rather a razor-thin victory in which he lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College, and only after the Supreme Court had ruled in his favor."

Stevenson blames the deficit partly on Bush's tax cuts and highlights a Kerry talking point on job creation: "On the home front, Mr. Bush is vulnerable to criticism that his tax cuts have not generated anything close to the numbers of jobs the administration promised. He is, as Mr. Kerry is fond of repeating, the first president since Herbert Hoover to face the voters with a net loss of jobs during his term. In part because of the tax cuts, a huge budget surplus has given way to a substantial deficit. And many other indicators suggest that things have gotten worse rather than better for many Americans. The number of people without health insurance has grown. Poverty levels are up….The bloodshed in Iraq, the economy's inability to generate jobs in large numbers, the tight presidential race, all have taken some of the swagger out of Mr. Bush, but not his basic self-confidence and optimism."

Raymond Hernandez's profile of Vice President Dick Cheney, "Cheney, From Any Perspective, Made His Role Matter," features a fearsome-looking Cheney in the background of a shot of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, a metaphor for the story's theme of the veep working in the background for Bush.

Hernandez asserts: "Mr. Cheney has been widely credited with redefining the No. 2 spot in the White House, a position that he himself declared shortly before taking office in 2001 has 'no real job description.' Mr. Cheney's influence was apparent from the start. He oversaw the review of hundreds of candidates for top jobs in the administration and convinced friends like Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to join the president's cabinet. On the domestic front, he has shaped major policy decisions, most obviously when he led a task force to help set energy policy for the administration. His refusal to disclose the list of lobbyists who met behind closed doors with the task force led to Democratic charges that the Bush administration was one of the most secretive governments in the nation's history."

Hernandez later works in more Democratic criticism: "On a personal level, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are very different. Mr. Bush is the picture of cheer and optimism, while his vice president often projects a grim and unwelcoming image. (To help humanize him, Mr. Cheney has appeared alongside his wife, Lynne, who is buoyant at campaign events around the country.) Democrats argue that Mr. Cheney is one of the most divisive figures in American politics -- a man whom they hold largely responsible for what they call the right-wing extremism of the Bush administration."

For more of Stevenson on Bush, click here.

For the rest of Hernandez on Cheney, click here.

Complex Kerry, Striving Edwards

The Democratic ticket gets a substantially more positive presentation than does the Bush-Cheney team. While the profiles of Bush and Cheney spotlight criticism from Democrats, neither one of the articles on Kerry and Edwards mentions any Republican criticism.

Todd Purdum's analysis of Kerry, "Kerry: Apart From the Crowd," features this cut-out line: "Time and again, he has proved himself most focused in the crunch."

The caption to a photo of Kerry arriving in Arizona for the last presidential debate fawns: "Polls said he outperformed the president."

Purdum's actual story begins: "If John Kerry is elected, he will win with one of the longest but least clear-cut records of any candidate in modern times, with a personal life shaped by early independence and youthful service under fire and a public career that has blended liberal orthodoxies with stabs of skepticism and episodes of sailing against the wind."

Purdum tries to center Kerry as a "pragmatist": "There is every reason to think that he would conduct the presidency with the same calibrated pragmatism that has marked his career as a protester, prosecutor and politician."

He does bring up Kerry's liberal voting record, but only to suggest it's not really all that liberal: "If Mr. Kerry's relationships are complex, so are his ideas. Based on his roll call votes in 2003, The National Journal ranked him the most liberal member of the Senate. But his lifetime voting -- and speaking -- record is considerably more complicated than that ranking would suggest. On some issues, including gun control, gay rights and the environment, Mr. Kerry has a long liberal history. He has earned a lifetime 96 percent 'right' voting record from the League of Conservation Voters. His lifetime score from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is 90 percent, while his rating by the American Conservative Union stands at just 6 percent. But on many issues, Mr. Kerry has taken more nuanced positions. After the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, Mr. Kerry proclaimed himself 'delighted with seeing an institutional shake-up, because I think we need one.'"

Purdum lists more of Kerry's mild rebellions again Democratic orthodoxy, though he admits: "Typically, Mr. Kerry has raised such hot potatoes only to drop them in the face of predictable opposition from Democratic constituency groups." Then there's this on Kerry's curiosity: "But he has not shied away from other thankless and daunting tasks that intrigued him, including the chairmanship of a select committee that in the early 1990's concluded there was no evidence that any American prisoners of war were still alive in Vietnam, which helped pave the way for Mr. Clinton's normalization of relations with that country. Perhaps more than anything else, Mr. Kerry's Senate career has been characterized by curiosity, and he has made a bigger mark as an investigator than as a legislator."

He's just a complex man, says Purdum: "Mr. Kerry comes by his complexities naturally. His mother, Rosemary, was descended from two of New England's most venerable Colonial families, while his father, Richard, came from Czech-Austrian parents who had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism. Mr. Kerry's father was a diplomat and his mother's family lived in France, so Mr. Kerry spent part of his youth in Europe, biking around postwar Berlin. His parents sent him to a Swiss boarding school when he was 11, and he eventually wound up at St. Paul's, in Concord, N.H., where he was a rare Catholic and Democrat in a sea of Episcopal Republicans."

Purdum ends by repeating a theme from his pre-debate Kerry camp moral booster: "But time and again, Mr. Kerry has proved himself most disciplined and focused in the crunch, whether in the brown waters off Vietnam, in the frozen cornfields of Iowa, where his caucus victory against the odds last winter set him off on the road to the nomination, or in the three televised debates this fall, in which polls showed the public solidly believed he outperformed Mr. Bush. If the modern presidency amounts to one perpetual crisis, Mr. Kerry might well have a good idea of just what he is in for."

Reporter Randal Archibold's profile of Edwards carries the sunny headline "In His Rapid Rise, Edwards Carries A Common Touch." The cut-out line is even more fawning: "The odds are against him? The son of a mill worker likes those odds." And the caption to a photo of Edwards signaling to supporters from a bus window reads: "Senator John Edwards's ability to connect helped him in the Democratic primaries."

Archibold's underlying article isn't so nauseatingly sweet, pointing out that his "record of legislative accomplishment is thin." He does give Edwards' associates room to praise the senator: "Behind Mr. Edwards's meteoric rise, associates say, is a flinty determination -- the less kind call it naked ambition -- and discipline that propelled him first in his legal career and then through politics. He was a lawyer who specialized in suing doctors, hospitals and corporations that had harmed average people, and he often took calculated gambles, rejecting settlements to go for the bigger prize a jury verdict might offer and amassing a long trail of success, financially and legally, during 20 years in the courtroom….Harrison Hickman, a fellow North Carolinian who was Mr. Edwards's pollster in the 1998 Senate race and this year's presidential primaries, said the Senate race was just another case of Mr. Edwards's defying odds and doubts."

For more of Purdum on Kerry, click here.

For the rest of Archibold's profile of Edwards, click here.

Ralph Nader, "Dangerous Buttinsky"?

With the election looming, third-party candidate Ralph Nader has become toxic in liberal circles, and the Times is no exception. In Michael Janofsky's "Nader Presses On," the Times again spreads insults about former media hero Ralph Nader, the longtime left-wing "consumer advocate" who threatens to take votes away from John Kerry. The story's cut-out line: "An ethical foe of a dishonest system or a big ego butting in?"

Janofsky writes: "To his followers, he is the embodiment of political principle, the counterweight to a dishonest two-party system that sneers at minor-party candidates. To his critics, he is an anachronistic, dangerous buttinsky, motivated more by ego than civic good. In either case, Ralph Nader is determined again this year to finish what he started, a quixotic run for president that will end uneventfully or, as Democrats fear, catastrophically, costing Senator John Kerry a victory over President Bush just as his run in 2000 helped Mr. Bush defeat Al Gore….In this latest run, Mr. Nader, 70, is driven as much by his left-of-center beliefs as by the cold shoulders from Democratic Party officials and state judges who have hampered his access to ballots and kept him out of debates."

Janofsky wonders if Nader's run is ruining his reputation: "While his wars against the political establishment are well known, they have obscured the progressive positions that are the hallmark of his 40 years in public life as a consumer advocate and politician." The Times certainly seems to feel that way.

For more of Janofsky's profile of Nader, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | Michael Janofsky | Sen. John Kerry | Ralph Nader

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org