Sarin & The New York Times

[darrels joy]

'Very Small Traces'
Imagine if some malicious prankster were to make his way into the offices of the New York Times, find editorial page editor Gail Collins, and pour a gallon of milk over her head. Then imagine if he defended himself by saying he had used only "very small traces" of milk.

Bizarre as it may sound, that's the tack the Times is taking toward the discovery earlier this week of an artillery shell containing sarin in Iraq. Although, as we noted yesterday, the volume of the sarin is between three quarts and a gallon, the Times insists that field tests found only "very small traces of sarin."

The Times continues protesting Saddam Hussein's innocence, suggesting that he did away with his weapons in "a large-scale destruction program" from which only "some residual weapons" may have "escaped"--never mind that U.N. resolutions obliged Saddam to destroy all his weapons and to document their destruction.

Anyway, the Times says, maybe this sarin doesn't really exist. "At this point no one can be certain whether the artillery shell rigged as a roadside bomb really did contain deadly sarin and, if so, what significance that may have."

That's funny, we seem to remember reading somewhere that "the discovery of the sarin-filled shell appears to offer some of the most substantial evidence to date that Mr. Hussein did not destroy all of the banned chemical agent, as he claimed before the war last year." Where was that again?

Oh yes, in the New York Times! But as we noted yesterday, the paper buried the sarin story on page 11. We suppose Collins and her staff can't be troubled to read that deeply into their own paper.

[Seascamp]

At the NYT/Gray Lady, reality has no affect on the sponsored and internally proffered party line. And no, they don?t seem to read their own paper or supervise their employee?s work for accuracy, quality or integrity, and have never been good at giving the impression that they give a rat?s butt about facts or reality.
Alas, they seem to love getting their teat in the ringer and saying, ?Oh, I?m sorry?. Oh well, I suppose that?s one way of running a business and serving up some silly comic opera along the way.

Whilst the NYT is busy trying to snuff this SARIN reality, I see that right now Al Qaeda is making threats and saber rattling about a killer chem. attack in the USA anytime now. I don?t suppose the NYT thought that pronouncement to be news worthy, eh. Maybe they need to e-mail Osama some info on the party line and tell him to hush up for a bit.

Scamp

[Seascamp]

Duplicate of above, deleted, eh.

[darrels joy]

Yesterday on the Neal Boortz Show we learned that there is enough sarin gas in four liters to kill over 60,000 people .

That would make just one gallon of this stuff an arsenal. To the Times, though, it was just a small trace.

[darrels joy]

'Deliberately Targeted'
Buried in a New York Times dispatch on a battle in Karbala, Iraq, is this jaw-dropping paragraph:

Iraq has become one of the most dangerous places in the world from which to report, with enormous potential for journalists to be deliberately targeted by either side or caught in the crossfire.

We guess the weasel word potential makes this something less than a direct accusation, but the Times certainly seems to be implying that coalition troops are trying to kill journalists in Iraq. Is there any evidence for such a thing, or is the Times simply becoming more brazen in its anti-American slanting of the news?

[darrels joy]

All the News That's Fit to Hide
On Friday we quoted the following passage from a New York Times report, posted that afternoon on the paper's Web site, about a battle in Karbala, Iraq:

Iraq has become one of the most dangerous places in the world from which to report, with enormous potential for journalists to be deliberately targeted by either side or caught in the crossfire.

The outrageous implication that the U.S. is deliberately targeting journalists has now disappeared from the story , and it did not appear in the Saturday paper's version of it. If there's been a correction, we haven't been able to find it.

This kind of "reporting" is going to get our military treated the same way that their fathers were treated when returning from Vietnam