The media's October surprise

CBS is at it again. Fresh off its "60 Minutes" forged Texas Air National Guard documents fiasco, the network was prepared to run a story damaging to the president on October 31, two days before the election (reminiscent of the 2000 Bush DUI story that ran the weekend prior to election day). The story, apparently too hot to hold, however, ran yesterday in the New York Times.

The story, in a nutshell, is that the U.S. military failed to guard an ammunition dump in Iraq and 380 tons of explosives disappeared from that site. Senator Kerry was quick to jump on the story, labeling it "one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," and further claiming that the "unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics has now allowed this president to once again fail the test of being the commander in chief." Wow. Almost as if George W. Bush himself should have been standing post at al-Qaqaa.

It seems, however, that the story may have been too good to be true. Last night NBC News ran a story stating that an NBC crew was embedded with the Army's 101st Airborne Division that arrived at the site on April 10, 2003, one day after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. According to this MSNBC report, "troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives." The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making it impossible to blame the disappearance of the explosives on looters who ransacked the depot following the fall of the regime, and therefore the fault of a lax U.S. military. From ABC's The Note:

"An NBC News report last night suggested that those explosives went missing before April 10, 2003 — before U.S. troops ever got to the site in Iraq, leading to an avalanche of push-back from the Bush campaign last night. If the 101st Airborne Division was indeed there one day after liberation and they could not find any of the high grade explosives, that does cast doubt on the suggestion that the Bush Administration's alleged failure to plan for post-war eventualities was to blame.

"(Timing is a critical issue here: the Times story yesterday include this paragraph: 'Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "'the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security.'"' (emphasis ours).

"The NBC story does not exonerate the president, but it does add context that rebuts, at least to some extent, the most hyperbolic charges that we heard yesterday."

Then there is this intriguing post from Cliff May at The Corner:

"Sent to me by a source in the government: 'The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.'"

CBS has no credibility to begin with after its "fake but accurate" smear on the president. The NYT just published a full-throated endorsement of Kerry, and has been scathing it is coverage of Bush throughout the campaign. And now there is the strong possibility that those two "news" organizations may have conspired with a U.N. agency to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election by floating a false story which, if CBS had its druthers, would have run 24 hours before the election with no opportunity to correct the record. Shameful.

But they ran with it a week early and got caught with their figurative pants down. Surprise!