The NYT publishes an essay on Iraq by Obama, then rejects one by McCain

This one is all over the internet:

CNN
Power Line
Fox
USA Today

How to write a New York Times article to make it seem like women work harder than men

It's simple. You just have to include information that supports your thesis, while leaving out information that supports a different thesis . . .

The NYT reveals the name of KSM's interrogator

. . . against his wishes, and also against the wishes of the CIA.

Is nothing sacred?

The NYT ignores yet another gaffe from the Obama campagin

If your only news source is the NYT, you won't know anything about this. Because they haven't mentioned it at all.

Obama campaign gaffes are so common that I'm starting a new blog about them.

The NYT wants you to believe that foodborne disease is on the rise

Last year, the NYT published a claim by Paul Krugman that

Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.

Just in case we hadn't gotten the message, Krugman repeated himself yesterday on the editorial page:

Bad Cow Disease

By Paul Krugman

“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”

That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology . . . .

What about reality? Are we really facing a resurgence of foodborne disease? Enter the Centers for Disease Control, which keeps statistics on foodborne diseases. They track both cases and outbreaks. Going through their reports, and graphing their numbers, we end up with the following (click the chart to enlarge it):


Turns out foodborne disease has been more or less steady over the past eight years. Due to a methodological change at the CDC in 1998, prior data cannot usefully be compared. As expected, there is significant year to year variability. There may be a slight downward overall trend -- but the data are noisy enough that it's difficult to be sure.

Immediately after posting this, I will write the NYT, informing them of their error and linking to this post. If any correction is forthcoming, I'll post it on the blog.

Hat Tip: Alex Tabarrok

The NYT Blames Conservatives for a False Rumor Started on a pro-Hillary Blog

I cannot improve on the way Times Watch has exposed this deception.

The New York Times Supports Constitutional Rights for Terrorists, but not for Conservatives

Normally, this blog will deal with factual distortions at the NYT. That is, our main concerns are the times when the NYT alters reality in order to support its political bias.

However, two recent articles in the NYT is so galling that I am making an exception.

An article in the June 12 NYT was originally entitled "Out of Step with Allies, US Defends Freedom to Offend." So they were saying that the First Amendment makes us "out of step"?

Apparently this was too much even for the NYT, as the online version of the article is now entitled "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech".

In paragraph 7 of the article, we learn what draws the NYT's ire:

Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Times then goes on to discuss Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan -- Mark Steyn.

To be sure, the article for which Steyn is on trial in Canada is provocative stuff, and some will find it hateful. But what about the Times' own article? Might Steyn find it to be provocative and hateful to be one of three major examples in an article, when the other two are Nazis and the KKK? Should the Times be prosecuted for doing such a thing?

And what about the Times' false, provocative, and hateful coverage of the Duke Lacrosse Case? Or the Times' false and provocative assertion that Saddam was not training terrorists? Should they be prosecuted for that?

Or is provocative speech unacceptable only when it is directed at minorities? Leaving Duke Lacrosse players, Mark Steyn, and George W. Bush [the implicit target of the Saddam assertion] all as fair game?

While the Times does quote from both sides of the dispute, it is clear enough that they want the reader to be on the side of regulation -- why else would they pick, as their other two examples, the KKK and the Nazis?

To go along with its assault on the First Amendment, the Times has an editorial celebrating the extension of habeus corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, up to and including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This Supreme Court did this in the Boumediene case, by a 5-4 vote, on purely Constitutional grounds, as Congress had passed, and President Bush had signed, a law explicitly denying that right.

As far as legal precedent is concerned, during all of the nation's past wars, the military has had the power to keep POWs locked up until the conflict was over. The present conflict is different from others, both in terms of the nature of the enemy, and in the conflict's likely duration. But does that justify forcing the military to fight at a tremendous disadvantage?

To make matters perfectly clear, here is a passage from Justice Scalia's dissent, describing the activities of certain released Guantanamo detainees:

In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.

These are the people whom the Court gave habeus rights in its decision. And the NYT lauds that. Meanwhile, it publishes a news article which is thinly disguised criticism of Mark Steyn's First Amendment protection. Go figure.

Hat tip: CounterColumn

Uncorrected

The NYT's pattern of non-corrections is revealing.

Here, we pointed to the overwhelming evidence that the NYT was incorrect when it asserted that Saddam was not training terrorists. Furthermore, I wrote the NYT about the matter, so it should have been aware of its error. Yet no correction was forthcoming.

Here, the widely-read Durham-In-Wonderland blog pointed to numerous inaccuracies in and critical omissions from the NYT's lengthy front-page story about the Duke Lacrosse case. Collectively, these omissions and falsehoods made it appear to a reader of the article that the prosecution might have a case. This was false. Again, the NYT must have known that its reporting was incorrect, as numerous people wrote it about the issue. Yet it did not correct its errors -- and even later claimed that its coverage of the case "generally fairly reported both sides".

Here, Countercolumn wrote about the NYT's false assertion that the Surge did not make Iraq safer for American troops. Again, we know that the NYT was aware of its error, because as Countercolumn discusses, the author wrote to Countercolumn that he saw nothing to correct.

To summarize:

Three times, the NYT printed something that was out and out false. We are not talking about matters of opinion -- but rather about indisputably incorrect factual statements.

All three times, the NYT was made aware of its error.

Yet on none of the three occasions did the NYT correct itself. Furthermore, on two of the three occasions, the NYT or one of its employees explicitly examined the issue and declined to find fault on the part of the NYT.

The Petraeus Ad, 9 months on

Remember this?

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?

Cooking the Books for the White House

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was "tangible progress" in Iraq and that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward." and last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, "We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress."

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence . . . .

More importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war . . . .

That ad appeared, at a discount, in the NYT 9 months ago today. It is now indisputable that the central premise of the ad was wrong. According to any measure you care to use (Iraqi civillian casualties, US military casualties, suicide bomb attacks, and so on), violence is way down.

And yet, bizarrely, the NYT at times still appears wedded to the central theses of the ad. For example, a May 26 article claimed:

But the tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers.

An editorial appearing on the same day said called the Iraq war an "unwinnable war."

The NYT's attitude even extends to book reviews -- it hypes a book whose title describes the war as a "fiasco", while ignoring a heavily-footnoted inside conservative account.

One could sum up the situation by saying that even though the NYT didn't write the ad, the NYT's coverage of the war has tried to support the central theses of the ad. Even though one of those theses ("the surge has failed") has now been proven false, and the other one ("unwinnable war") is looking more and more likely to be false as well.

More on Saddam and Terrorism

After my prior post, I wrote the NYT, telling them that their editorial's claim was false. I am unaware of any correction on their part -- and the online version of their editorial remains uncorrected.

There is an lengthy, footnoted report on Saddam's support of terrorism here. The report discusses his support of Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas as well as his financial support for the families of Palestinean Suicide Bombers. It includes photos of original documents.

The NYT is taking questions about its use of anonymous sources.

This seems like an ideal moment to take on the NYT for its routine evidence-free assertion that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is "homegrown". I sent a letter to askthetimes@nytimes.com asking about this. The text of my Email is below. If I receive any reply, I will post it here.

The NYT has routinely described Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as "homegrown".

http://query.nytimes.com/beta/search/query?query=homegrown+Qaeda+Mesopotamia&srchst=cse

What is the evidence for this assertion? And why does the NYT routinely make this assertion without examining the extensive evidence that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a part of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda:

* Would a "homegrown" organization choose a foreign leader?
* The Suicide bombers of Iraq are mostly foreigners. The biggest group is Saudi. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/world/middleeast/22fighters.html?pagewanted=print
* Yet the senior American military officials said they also believed that Saudi citizens provided the majority of financing for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. "They don't want to see the Shias come to dominate in Iraq," one American official said. [From the above article]
* In response to various questions regarding the structure and relationship between the various "Emirates" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, al-Zawahiri explained, "the Islamic State of Iraq [an Al Qaeda front group], the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-and I would add to them the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus-are individual Islamic emirates that do not yield to a single ruler… Shaykh Usama Bin Laden is a soldier of the Emir al-Mumineen, Mullah Mohammed Omar, may Allah protect him, and all of those you have cited help and cooperate with each other in order to support Islam and the jihad." Al-Zawahiri was also quick to defend Al-Qaida factions in Iraq, Algeria, and Afghanistan in the face of various critics. According to Dr. al-Zawahiri, "the methodology of the Islamic State of Iraq [is] among the purest banners and methodologies in Iraq… I ask those who have doubts about the Islamic State of Iraq: what is the point of destroying an Islamic state that has arisen after such a long wait in the heart of the Muslim world?" http://www1.nefafoundation.org/documents-aqstatements.html
* The Conflict between the Islamic State in Iraq and the Islamic Army in Iraq. The Islamic Army's complaints about the Islamic State basically amounted to that the Islamic State was a foreign group with foreign goals. [references easy to find via google]

If you are not yet convinced, I could provide more evidence.

The NYT says Saddam was not training terrorists

And Editorial ironically entitled "The Truth about The War" published today started out as follows:

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

The Times is correct when it writes that Saddam had abandoned his WMD programs. However, the portions I have put in boldface above are flat-out false. First of all, there are the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, which plainly show that Saddam was a threat to people other than his own citizens. Secondly, captured Iraqi documents make it clear that Saddam Hussein was nurturing numerous terrorist organizations, and this nurturing did include training terrorists, with intended targets both inside and outside of Iraq.

A report containing numerous translations of captured Iraqi documents is available here. The following excerpt from the Table of Contents gives a good idea of the contents of the report:

I.  Terror as an Instrument of State Power
     A.  Infrastructure for State Terrorism            1
     B.  State Sponsorship of Suicide Operations       7
II. State Relationships with Terrorist Groups             13
     A.  Managing Relationships                        13
     B.  Nurturing Organizational Relationships        15
     C.  Outreach Program                              20
     D.  "Quid Pro Quo"                                24
III.Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases                       27
     A.  The Abu aI-Abbas Case                         27
     B.  Attacks on Humanitarian Organizations         30
     C.  Destabilizing Saudi Arabia and Kuwait         35
IV. The Business of Terror                                41
     A.  Venture Capitalists for Terrorists            41
     B.  The Terror "Business" Model of Saddam Hussein 42

In regards to the specific question of training, here is a portion of one translated document, from page 8 of volume 1:

[24 August 2002]
The National Command's office of the General Secretariat made clear in its Top Secret letter #1244 of 8/1/2002 that such cases will be dealt with in the future in light of the contents of the letter of the Presidency of the Republic's Secretary Top Secret and Immediate letter #474 of 1/29/1998. [p]aragraph 3 states that "Through the process of training, it is possible to select those suitable for suicide operations and those who truly wish to volunteer for suicide operations, given that their training will take place during the Summer vacation of schools and universities.

For another example, here is an excerpt from an internal Iraqi report on the status of Iraqi commandoes in Saudi Arabia [It naturally stands to reason that such people would have been trained in Iraq.]:

Commando Commissioner Police [NAME WITHHELD] has been sent to
settle. We are preparing to send other groups from Unit 999.
1st Lieut. Special Forces, [NAME WITHHELD], to stay in Riyadh City for the following purposes:
1. Monitor Kuwaiti Ruling Family and take the chance of eliminating some of them.
2. Collect information on vital American and Saudi target"s.
We prepared commando, [NAME WITHHELD], to be in Abu Dhabi [capital of the United Arab Emirates] for the following missions:
1. Collect vital information on the Emirates and other enemy nations
in the area.
2. To monitor the ruler and his son and to collect information on them
Previously we sent a Palestinian, [NAME WITHHELD], to Riyadh so he can eliminate the Kuwait ruling family. He is still there.

The NYT goes after Karl Rove on the flimsiest of evidence

without mentioning just how weak that evidence is.

Yesterday's Times had an editorial demanding that Rove testify under oath about the Siegelman affair:

In a recent appearance on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Karl Rove was asked if he had a role in the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute Don Siegelman. The former Democratic governor of Alabama was convicted and sentenced to more than seven years, quite possibly for political reasons, and there is evidence that Mr. Rove may have been pulling the strings.

And what was that evidence? Later in the article, the Times gets around to mentioning that:

After Mr. Siegelman’s conviction, Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer, swore in an affidavit that she had heard another G.O.P. political operative, Bill Canary, boast in a phone call that his wife would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman and that Mr. Rove was involved in the planning. Mr. Canary’s wife is Leura Canary, the United States attorney for Montgomery, and her office prosecuted Mr. Siegelman.

In light of this, Ms. Simpson's credibility, or lack thereof, becomes crucial. What is remarkable about the Times' editorial is that it ignores the extensive evidence that Ms. Simpson cannot be believed.

Power Line detailed that evidence in a March post here. One highlight:

Simpson has told her story to 60 Minutes and to congressional investigators. But there are discrepancies.

* What was the nature of the dirty trick she was allegedly pulling on Siegelman. According to 60 minutes, she was trying to photograph him in sexually compromising positions. But a search for the letters "sex" in her lengthy congressional testimony about the affair comes up empty. Which version is correct?
* Did Simpson ever meet Rove, or not? She told 60 minutes that she had. And 60 minutes said that he had personally asked her to go after Siegelman. But in her congressional testimony linked above, she never mentioned any personal meeting with Rove. Instead, she talks about getting requests from Rob Riley and Bill Canary, whom she believed had received the requests from Rove. Again, which is it?

Not only that, but every single person with knowledge of her allegations says they are not true. Even Don Siegelman.

I've only scratched the surface here of reasons why Simpson is not a credible witness. Power Line goes into much more detail.

At any rate, the point is -- if the New York Times is going to use Simpson's "evidence" as a reason to demand testimony under oath from Rove, it owes it to its readers to check out her credibility. Furthermore, according to Power Line, several NYT employees read that blog -- so the NYT ought to have known since March that Simpson's testimony is simply not believable.

The Big Lie Campaign continues

The New York Times is at it again today -- describing, without evidence, Al Qaeda in Iraq as "homegrown", while ignoring evidence to the contrary:

“If the Iraqis are comfortable, we are comfortable, too,” General Thomas said of the negotiated surrenders of insurgent leaders sometimes described as members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American officials say is led by foreigners.

Aside from the inherent absurdity of this sentence (would a homegrown group choose a foreign leader?), the Times is ignoring all sorts of recent evidence. First of all, there was this article, widely reported on the Web (but not in the NYT) about six Mosul youths who were forced to train as suicide bombers:

Iraqi army: 6 teens trained as suicide bombers

The Associated Press

Monday, May 26, 2008

BAGHDAD: The Iraqi military on Monday displayed a group of weeping teenagers who said they had been forced into training for suicide bombings by a Saudi militant in the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Four of the six boys were lined up for the media at police headquarters in the northern city of Mosul, where they said they had been training for a month to start suicide operations in early June.

The United Nations and the Iraqi and U.S. militaries say they fear that al-Qaida in Iraq is increasingly trying to use youths in attacks to avoid the heightened security measures that have dislodged the group from Baghdad and surrounding areas.

The youths, three wearing track suits and one with a torn white T-shirt, began crying as they were led into the police station.

"The Saudi insurgent threatened to rape our mothers and sisters, destroy our houses and kill our fathers if we did not cooperate with him," one of the youths, who were not identified, told reporters in Mosul, where security forces are cracking down on al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents.

And then there is this article, also widely reported (but also not in the NYT) about a group of mostly French militants convicted for sending fighters to Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Paris court convicts 7 on terror charges

PARIS (AP) — Seven men were convicted on terror charges Wednesday in Paris for helping funnel fighters to Iraq — a case that exposed how the war has sucked in radical youths from Europe.

The judge handed down sentences of up to seven years in prison. The suspects — five Frenchmen, a Moroccan and an Algerian — were convicted of "criminal association with a terrorist enterprise," a blanket charge used in many French terrorist cases that carries a maximum 10-year prison term.

Most acknowledged going to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, or planning to go, but all denied involvement in a cell accused of recruiting French fighters for Iraq's insurgency.

The men went on trial in March after years of investigation by French authorities. The case struck a nerve because it demonstrated how young devout Muslim Frenchmen were abandoning what they saw as bleak prospects in secular France for Iraqi battlefields. It also raised fears that French fighters could use those battlefield skills in terror attacks back home in Europe.

France strongly opposed the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq but has struggled to fight homegrown terrorism. France is home to western Europe's largest Muslim population: about 5 million people.

Investigators said the alleged network funneled about a dozen French fighters to camps linked to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They say the network sought to send more recruits before al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. At least seven French insurgents have died in Iraq, some in suicide bombings, police said.

The New York Times Says it Supports a Strong Military

while supporting a bill that would gut that military by causing veterans to leave, while increasing the number of new, untrained recruits.

From a recent editorial:

This page strongly supports a larger, sturdier military. [emphasis added].

Big Lizards has an informative and entertaining explanation of why it is ludicrous for anyone supporting this bill to claim they want a "sturdier" military.

Figures Don't Lie, but Liars Do Figure

An article in the May 26 NYT contained the following paragraph:

But the tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers. Last year was the bloodiest in the five-year history of the conflict, with more than 900 dead, and last month, 52 perished, making it the bloodiest month of the year so far. So far in May, 18 have died.

Here is a bar graph of American deaths in Iraq. You can enlarge the graph by clicking on it. (Raw data are available here.)



As you can plainly see, US casualties went way down after the surge troops finished arriving in June, 2007. So the the first (thesis) sentence of the quoted paragraph is an outright lie.

As for the rest, the NYT is making true but misleading statements designed to cause the reader to believe the false thesis. That is, it is true that 2007 was the bloodiest year of the war for American soldiers. But this is because of casualties suffered during the first half of the year (which in turn were caused by the wave of violence instigated by Al Qaeda). And that wave of violence, which started in 2006, was a reason for the surge, not the result of it.

And yes, April has been the worst month of 2008 so far in terms of American casualties. But any year will have a worst month. So regardless of whether the worst month of 2008 so far were January, February, March, April, or May, this would not tell us anything about how successful the surge was or wasn't in terms of reducing American casualties. So it is misleading for the NYT to publish this paragraph in a way that makes it appear that this sentence supports its thesis.

Hat tip: Countercolumn

Pure Fantasy on the Editorial Page

The New York Times wants the USA to lose in Iraq. But today's editorial takes this a step further.

President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it.

He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break . . . .

There are a lot of problems with this editorial, as Big Lizards explains here. But I want to focus on their statement that the Iraq war is "unwinnable".

Has the NYT's editorial board been reading their own news pages? For example, we have this article about how things are going in Basra:

Divining a Lesson in Basra

By STEPHEN FARRELL

BASRA, Iraq — On Basra’s Corniche, the boulevard past which the mingled waters of the Tigris and Euphrates flow into the Persian Gulf, there is a collective sense of relief these days.

With the death squads in hiding and Islamist militias evicted from their strongholds by the Iraqi Army, few doubt that this once-lawless port is in better shape than it was just two months ago.

And then there is this article about how things are going in Sadr City:

Iraqi Troops Take Charge of Sadr City in Swift Push

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD — Iraqi troops pushed deep into Sadr City on Tuesday as the Iraqi government sought to establish control over the district, a densely populated Shiite enclave in the Iraqi capital.

The long-awaited military operation, which took place without the involvement of American ground forces, was the first determined effort by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to assert control over the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood, which has been a bastion of support for Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel cleric.

The operation comes in the wake of the government’s offensive in Basra, in southern Iraq, which for the time being seems to have pacified that city and restored government control.

The Iraqi forces met no significant resistance. By midday, they had driven to a key thoroughfare that bisects Sadr City and taken up positions near hospitals and police stations, institutions that the Iraqi government is seeking to put under its control.

By early afternoon, Iraqi troops were stationed in large numbers in many parts of the district. Numerous Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers were parked on street corners, with relaxed-looking soldiers sleeping in their vehicles or looking out to the street through steel hatches. Other soldiers manned checkpoints, some of them chatting with children . . .

In other words, the Iraqi army went into Sadr City to flush out the Mahdi Army. And the Mardi Army didn't even resist!

"unwwinnable", indeed!

The NYT's Contrasting Treatment of Conservative and Liberal Books on the Iraq War

Power Line has a post on the New York Times' failure to review or even mention an important new book on the Iraq war. Not surprisingly, it is a conservative book. In the Times' world, it is convenient to pretend this book does not exist.

I thought it would be interesting to follow up by looking at the Times' treatment of other books on the Iraq war. I did a search on Amazon for the top books on the Iraq war. Here are the first five books that came up. All five were about the most recent Iraq war. I classified the books as liberal/antiwar, conservative/pro-US, or neither.

1. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks. Liberal.

2. War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas J. Feith. Conservative.

3. Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope by Michael Yon. Conservative.

4. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. Liberal.

5. House to House: an Epic Memoire of War by David Bellavia. Conservative.

I then used searches on the Times' site to determine how the Times covered each book. Here is what came up:

Liberal Books:

Fiasco
The NYT published two separate reviews of Fiasco:
One
Two

A search came up with approximately fifteen articles that mentioned Fiasco. I say "approximately" because with 32 hits from the search (some of which are not articles), it takes a fair amount of work to determine exactly which hits correspond to articles.

Some quotations from the reviews give an idea of the NYT's attitude towards the book:

devastating new book about the American war in Iraq

absolutely essential reading

gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic [war] that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope.

offers a comprehensive and illuminating portrait of the willful blindness of the Bush administration to Iraqi realities

Ricks has done his homework

In general, the Times' coverage of Fiasco was extensive and approving.

The Three Trillion Dollar War

The NYT has mentioned this book twice. In an editorial entitled The Suffering of Soldiers, the Times mentioned the book in the following sentence:

As the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made clear in “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” their analysis of Iraq, the medical toll of a war rises in a swelling curve for many decades after the shooting stops.

An opinion piece about the war entitled The $2 Trillion Nightmare extensively quoted the author to make the point that the war was costly. One example:

Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

Conservative Books:

War and Decision:
An opinion piece about a speech by Feith mentioned the existence of the book. The piece described the author, the speech, and the audience

The dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet
The dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet
Former Rummy gopher
wooly-headed hawks
an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss

The NYT also published a brief opinion piece by Feith and mentioned the book's existence in its description of Feith. The piece, which is entitled "Legislation's Limits", makes the point that Congress should examine more than just legislation when deciding how effective or ineffective the Iraqi government has been. The timing is interesting -- earlier, the Times had extensively criticized the Iraqi government for failing to pass important legislation. Now that the Iraqi government has started to pass such legislation, the NYT needs to shift focus in order to maintain its criticism.

As for the other two conservative books, the NYT has not mentioned their existence at all.

Analysis

The contrast is interesting, isn't it? The NYT made approving use of both liberal books. In one case, the use was extensive; in the other, it was minimal. As for the conservative books, the NYT completely ignored two of them. The third (War and Decision) was mentioned in one lengthy piece mocking its author, and mentioned neutrally in once opinion piece which the Times was using to shift the focus away from an area which it had criticized in the past, now that successes were being had in that area.

A tale of two gaffes (again)

If you read the New York Times, you know all about Dan Quayle's inability to spell "potato." Indeed, a search for articles containing the words "Quayle" and "potatoe" brings up 24 articles on the Times site.

So, when Obama said that he had been in "fifty-seven states, I think one left to go . . . . Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to", precedent would suggest that the Times should have reported on this regularly and often.

Of course they didn't. As far as I can tell, they haven't mentioned it at all. When I searched for articles containing the words "Obama" and "fifty-seven" on the Times' site, I did find three articles. But none of them mentioned the gaffe.

"Bogus" arguments about who loves America

In an opinion piece, the Times said this today:

And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

I have highlighted the part I want to take issue with in this post. What, exactly, is "bogus" about the arguments over who really loves America?

Rev. Wright
Michelle Obama

The NYT Mischaracterizes the dispute between Obama and McCain

over talking, without preconditions, with leaders of rogue nations.

To make a long story short, the Times blog left off the "without preconditions" part, then went on to quote Obama's attempt to justify himself, also leaving off the "without preconditions" part. For the long version, see the writeup at Big Lizards (who broke the story).

The Big Lie Campagin continues

Here is the Times on Saturday, describing Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Iraqi and American security forces believe that Mosul is the last urban stronghold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is foreign-led.

As documented here, the Times frequently describes Al Qaeda in Iraq in precisely the above terms. As usual, the Times gives no evidence to support its claim that the group is "homegrown". And as usual, it ignores the overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- much of which is summarized at the above link.

A tale of two gaffes

If you are a regular reader of the New York Times, you know that John McCain mistakenly said that Iran has been supporting Al Qaeda. You know this because the NYT reported it several times. Here, in no particular order, are some NYT articles which report McCain's error.

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight

One might formulate the hypothesis that the NYT believes that gaffes by Presidential candidates are newsworthy. If, for example, John McCain were to say that the USA can't invade Iran because we don't have enough Arabic translators, one imagines the NYT would be quick to point out that Iran's principal language, Persian (also known as Farsi), is unrelated to Arabic.

Recently, Barack Obama gave us a test of this hypothesis. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Cape Girardeau, MO, on May 13, 2008, Obama started to make the point that by having troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US was overstretching its capacity for Arabic translators. Obama was forgetting that Arabic is not a major language in Afghanistan. The major languages there are Dari (a dialect of Persian) and Pashtun, followed by Uzbek, Turkmen, and several other minor languages.

Now Obama got around to correcting himself. So his confusion was only momentary. If you are interested in seeing exactly what happened, here is a link to the video.

Still, a gaffe is a gaffe, and it ought to be newsworthy. Like McCain's gaffe, Obama's showed confusion about local politics and culture. And how did the New York Times treat it?

They didn't. If you go to the NYT's search page, and search for Obama Afghanistan Arabic, you do get two hits, but they are both from before May 13, when Obama made his mistake.

And by the way, returning to the NYT's coverage of McCain's Al Qaeda gaffe, eight mentions were apparently not enough. Here are some more:

nine
ten
eleven

And that's not all. In link number six above, the NYT claimed that McCain repeated his gaffe at an April meeting of the Foreign Armed Services Committee. The only problem with that one is that, as Power Line reported here, he didn't.

It seems that, when it comes to gaffes by Presidential candidates, the NYT's treatment is far from even handed.

The NYT's reports on a French ring that sent fighters to "homegrown" Al Qaeda

The New York times continues to routinely describe Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia [i.e, Iraq] as "homegrown". We expose this campaign here. For a recent example of the NYT's continuing use of the "homegrown" descriptor, see page 2 of this article.

In light of this, this article, also from the New York Times, is strange:

May 15, 2008

French Court Convicts 7 for Helping to Send Youths to Join Jihadist Fight in Iraq

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

PARIS — A Paris court sentenced seven men to prison terms of up to seven years on Wednesday for helping to send French youths to fight alongside insurgents in Iraq, ending a four-year investigation into a jihadist recruitment ring.

The men — five French, one Algerian and one Moroccan — were tried on charges including criminal association with intent to commit terrorism.

Jean-Julien Xavier-Rolai, the prosecutor, had accused the group of sending about a dozen young Frenchmen to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed in an American airstrike in 2006, after funneling them through radical religious establishments in Syria and Egypt.

If Al Qaeda in Iraq is homegrown, why are they getting fighters from France, after those fighters pass through radical religious establishments in Syria and Egypt?

Furthermore, the article says the French sponsors were arrested in 2005, and had been under police surveillance for a least a year at that time. So their activities must have started very soon after the 2003 invasion.

I don't know about you, but this sure doesn't sound like a homegrown Iraqi group to me.

A comprehensive, fact-based overview of media bias

While not about the Times specifically, this overview is easily the best discussion I've seen of media bias in general.

The New York Times puts false words into John McCain's mouth

and once its mistake is exposed, its correction is rather strange. Power Line has the details. Links:

One
Two
Three
Four

The New York Times publishes, without challenge, a false assertion by the Obama campaign

The New York Times published a false claim from the Obama campaign. The New York Times did not challenge the claim, or in any way clue its readers in that the claim might be false.

I cannot improve on the way Little Green Footballs has exposed this distortion. See here.

The New York Times publishes a misleading claim of racial bias in the death penalty

[The following post originally appeared here on April 30, 2008.]

Yesterday's New York Times had an article about a study of the death penalty in Harris County, Texas. The article began as follows:

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.

Yet Harris County’s capital justice system has not been the subject of intensive research — until now. A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.

But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.

The last sentence (which I have highlighted in bold) is the main point of contention. The article eventually quotes someone who is suspicious of the study's methodology. But a reader would have to go deep into the article to see that quote. And the article fails to point out the worst flaws in the study.

To see what is really going on, you need to look at the study itself. You can find it here. A few facts jump out:

First of all, as the article notes, of 100 defendants indicted for capital crimes in Harris County, 27% of the blacks and 25% of the whites were sentenced to death. No bias there.

However, after controlling for the mitigating and aggravating factors such as the heinousness of the crime, the study found bias.

But the study measured the mitigating and aggravating factors by looking at newspaper coverage of the case! So what if the newspaper coverage depends on the assailant's race? Many people have complained that a murder in a white area is big news, while a murder in a black area is not. So if the white area murderers get more thorough newspaper coverage than the black murderers, the study is going to find more aggravating factors, which makes the white murderers appear "worse" than the black ones, which in turn makes it appear unfair that they are sentenced to death at an equal rate.

That's not all. The study also reports that there were plea bargains in 38% of the cases with white defendants, and only 28% of the cases with black defendants. In capital cases, it is common for the defendant to agree to plead guilty if the prosecutor is willing to take the death penalty off the table. The statistics suggest (but do not prove) that the white defendants are more willing to plea bargain. Now, all other things being equal, a group of defendants that is more willing to plea bargain should be sentenced to death less often. But this is a result of the decisions of the defendant's themselves.

So you have a study which started with a situation that looks raceially neutral (27% of black capital defendants sentenced to death vs. 25% of whites). There are several confounding factors. Based on the newspaper coverage, the heinousness of the murders committed by whites appears to be worse than the heinousness of the murders committed by blacks. So the study controls for heinousness. Based on plea bargaining data, whites appear to be more willing to plea bargain than blacks. But the study's author, who realizes that a conclusion of racial bias will get more press than a conclusion of no racial bias, elects not to control for the defendant's willingness to plea bargain. And lo and behold, the study ends up concluding that there is racial bias.

The study's author is rewarded with coverage in the New York Times.

The Big Lie Technique at the New York Times

[Note: the following originally appeared on April 20. 2008 on my prior blog Green Eggs and Bacon.]

I did a google search for New York Times articles containing the word "homegrown" and the phrase "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia". Google says there are "about 3,190" hits! It seems that the New York Times describes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia [or Iraq] as "homegrown" very often.

That many hits are unwieldy. For one thing, it is difficult to tell how many articles generated all those hits. To get a sense of what is really going on, I did an advanced search limited to the past week.

At first, Google said there were "about 177" hits. But when I looked at them more closely, it turned out that there were 12 [correction: 11 -- one of the 12 is old.] articles and one photo description published during the past week containing the word "homegrown" and the phrase "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." These articles are all linked below:

24 Iranians, Held for Illegal Entry, Escape from Iraqi Prison by Alissa J. Rubin
Accounts Differ Sharply on U.S. Attack in Iraq by Alissa J. Rubin
Attacks Kill 39 in Iraq; Massacre Details Emerge by Alissa J. Rubin
Bomb Kills Dozens at Iraqi Funeral by Erica Goode
Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier in Baghdad by Alissa J. Rubin and Stephen Farrell

Bush Sees Iraq Progress From Troop Buildup by Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Dozens Killed in Bombings in Four Iraqi Cities by Alissa J. Rubin
Execution Case Tests Iraq's Bid to Ease Divide by Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Alissa J. Rubin
Joint Chiefs Nominee Questioned on Iraq by Mark Mazzetti
McCain, Iraq War, and the threat of 'Al Qaeda' by Michael Cooper and Larry Rohter

Pictures of the Day, April 18
Two Different Accounts of Deadly Airstrike in Baghdad by Alissa J. Rubin
U.S. Investigates Civilian Toll in Airstrike, but holds Insurgents Responsible by Paul von Zielbauer

I've listed the author next to each article. As you can see, five of the twelve articles were written by Alissa J. Rubin. Two were written by Rubin and someone else, and the remaining five were all written by different reporters. In all, a total of nine different reporters contributed to the twelve articles. So whatever is going on, it's not limited to a single reporter, or even to a small group.

Next, I took a look at the sentence which made the Al Qaeda reference. Below, I have reproduced the sentence of each article which refers to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as "homegrown".

They said that the Iraqis who were killed were trying to defend their town from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni militant group that American intelligence believes has foreign leadership.

The group, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent organization with some foreign participation, had previously effectively controlled the neighborhood.

American military forces have engaged in major operations in the province for the past month and have succeeded in dislodging from Baquba Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a home-grown group with some foreign involvement that has claimed a loose affiliation with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

Sheik Amir Habeeb al-Khaizaran, a member of Parliament whose brother is the head of the Azawi group, said that the two men mourned at the funeral were killed by other members of their tribe who were loyal to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia , the homegrown Sunni insurgent group.

The American military warned Friday that intelligence reports indicated that “numerous” members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says has foreign leadership, “have entered the Baghdad area with the purpose of carrying out vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or suicide-vest attacks.”

But he argued, as he has in the past, that reconciliation was taking place at the local level, and that Shiite and Sunni leaders were beginning to cooperate with one another to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is foreign-led.

“The security forces in the province are very good, but their biggest challenge is that they are fighting Qaeda, insurgency and other gangs and armed groups,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Rubaie, the chief of operations for Diyala Province, referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group.

If the government executes him, it risks alienating potential allies in the fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is foreign-led.

The officers said the American and Iraqi militaries had made gains against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led.

It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that, according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and direction from senior Qaeda leaders.

American forces also announced that they had killed a man they described as a senior terrorist in an airstrike in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, on Tuesday. The military said that the man, Abu Osama al-Tunisi, was a leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group whose leadership has foreign ties, according to American intelligence.

The military said that the man, Abu Osama al-Tunisi, was a leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group whose leadership has foreign ties, according to American intelligence.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.

In each case, I have put the group's description in boldface. Interesting, isn't it? Every time, Every time, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is described as "extremist", not "terrorist". Every time, the times claims without evidence that it is "homegrown", without supplying any supporting evidence, and also without mentioning the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And if the patently obvious fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is foreign led is mentioned at all, it is attributed to "the American military" or "American intelligence" -- thereby allowing a reader who is suspicious of the American military and intelligence to doubt the truth of that assertion.

The New York Times distorted the Duke Lacrosse Case.

An oldie, but very telling. At a time when it was obvious that the Duke 3 were innocent, the NYT tried to persuade its readers that they might be guilty. For details, see here.