The Latest Spin

One of the greatest disappointments in this election is the overall poor quality of journalism both here, south of the border, and in the world beyond. I can accept that the fact that journalists and editors have bias, but in the current election news cycle they seemed to be more concerned with how to spin a story rather than to get on with the job at hand and report the story. I am nothing but a code challenged blogger hack, I have a full-time job and family responsibilities. No one pays me to write and I have a very finite amount of time, resources, and access to information, and yet, I seem to spend more time hunting down references than the alleged professionals.


Monday night I posted reports based on a reporter who was embedded with the 101st Airborne and arrived with the troops at Al Qaqaa on April 10th. Yesterday, the embedded NBC reporter was busying back tracking the original broadcast from Monday night and claimed there was no thorough search of the facilities in the rush to reach Baghdad.

Yesterday Drudge Report posted an article that CBS was running with the same munitions story with an eye to air the piece on the eve of the election but the NY Times broke the story first.

The irony is that CBS had already broken this story on April 3, 2003:

U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex just south of Baghdad. "It is clearly a suspicious site," Peabody said. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues at sites where the U.S. thought chemicals weapons might be hidden. "And although there are no reports of actual weapons being found, there are constant finds of suspicious material," Martin said. "It obviously will take laboratory testing to find out exactly what that powder is." The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study.

The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said. "Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said. Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare. He also said they discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents.

The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18. The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa. During the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. jets bombed the plant. Troops also discovered what they believe is a training center for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare in Iraq's western desert, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Friday.

Read the rest.

If George W. Bush is relected on November 2, 2004, what on earth will MSM publish – that the UN declares John Kerry the winner and the general assembly has passed a resolution to this effect, and American citizens should respect the authority of the United Nations in governing their lives?

Tipped off by Powerline)

Update: Captain's Quarter has found more sources from the briefing on the Qaqaagate munitions and does anyone know what Baghdad Bob is doing now?