The CBS-New York Times October Surprise

One day before the New York Times endorsed John Kerry, its editorial page further aided the Kerry campaign by denouncing Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcasting Group for what the Los Angeles Times reported as Sinclair’s intention to televise, on its 62 TV stations, the documentary “Stolen Honor.”

This documentary features the testimony of U.S. prisoners of war in Hanoi, including two Medal of Honor recipients. All of them are strongly critical of John Kerry’s 1971 testimony maligning U.S. armed forces still in Vietnam – which, with speeches by Jane Fonda, was loudspeakered into their cells by their North Vietnamese torturers.

This Times attack on Sinclair, followed by similar attacks by the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, led Sinclair to capitulate. So, they televised instead what the late Edward R. Murrow would have described as an “equal-time-for-Judas-and-Jesus” special.

But, “Stolen Honor” is on the Internet, in its 42-minute entirety, and is widely quoted on talk radio, which is destroying the “gatekeeping” of all national news by the Old Big Media, so much of which is the Democratic Party on deadline.

The Times’ anti-Sinclair editorial included the following:

“Sinclair is in dangerous territory. If television companies force their local stations to campaign blatantly, it will not be long before the administrations that have the power to grant licenses begin expecting such favors as a quid pro quo. And the public will question whether it can afford to allow such concentrations of power in the hands of huge media corporations.”

The American public allows the New York Times (a huge media corporation that owns TV and radio stations) to devote half a page to endorsing Kerry. It is therefore dubious indeed that the public will give to print media – and not to electronic media – the First Amendment’s freedom of the press.

Hard on the heels of the New York Times effort deny any national coverage to U.S. prisoners of war – including recipients of the Medal of Honor – this alleged “newspaper of record” joined CBS in an unusually desperate October Surprise.

Page one of the Washington Times reported:

“CBS News apparently had an October surprise of its own for President Bush.

“The network, already reeling from accusations of bias over anchorman Dan Rather’s use of bogus memos to challenge Mr. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record, acknowledged yesterday in a statement that it had planned to air a story critical of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraqi munitions Sunday on ’60 Minutes,’ two days before the presidential election.

“CBS opted to allow it’s ‘reporting partner,’ the New York Times, to run the story Monday, citing concerns over competition, and ran it on its network news Monday night.

“Both news outlets reported that the Iraqi government has told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that 380-tons of plastic explosives, one pound of which can bring down a jet aircraft, went missing during postwar looting.”

This led candidate Kerry to declare:

“‘After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles – where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept.

“‘The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be,’ Kerry said, calling the missing explosives ‘one of the greatest blunders ‘ of Bush’s war effort,” reported the L.A. Times.

“‘Today, the Bush administration must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq. How did they fail to secure nearly 380 tons of known, deadly explosives despite clear warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency to do so? And why was this information unearthed by reporters – and was it covered up by our national security officials?'”

Which begs the question: Would CBS, the New York Times, John Kerry and Joe Lockhart have the public believe that 380 tons of explosives were removed by insurgent terrorists in a covert act?

Compare the claims of CBS, New York Times, Kerry and Lockhart with what was reported from Iraq by NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski:

“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 Qakaa 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 that 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.”

“No materials under IAEA seals were discovered when coalition troops searched site in April 2003. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S.-led forces searched the Qaqaa facility after the invasion. ‘Coalition forces were present in the vicinity at various times during and after major combat operations,’ he said. ‘The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility. While some explosive material was discovered, none of it carried IAEA seals.’

“The Pentagon also said allies have cleared more than 10,000 arms caches since April 2003, destroying more than 240,000 tons of arms and explosives. Another 162,000 tons are awaiting destruction.”

Among widespread critics of the New York Times-CBS October Surprise are two columnists. First, Clifford May:

“The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when U.S. 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 U.S. 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.”

Then, Andrew McCarthy:

“At this point it is scandalous that the ‘newspaper of record’ pretends to be anything other than the daily Kerry campaign talking-points memo.

“In Monday’s score, the New York Times somehow managed – with national juggernaut success – to spin as a debacle for President Bush a story about how Saddam Hussein actually possessed nuclear-weapon detonators and other essential WMD components (i.e., hundreds of tons of high explosives) despite years of just the type of U.N. inspections and international ‘monitoring’ that a President Kerry promises to revive.

“Buried deep within the story, the Times burbled that, notwithstanding U.N. resolutions seemingly to the contrary, Saddam had been permitted by the vaunted international community to horde the explosives because Iraq ‘argued that it should be allowed to keep them for use in mining and civilian construction.’ Naturally, for the Camp Kerry Pamphleteer, the story in all this was that the explosives are missing, not that the tyrant the Times claims was not a threat had them in the first place, nor that this is what Kerry’s ‘global test’ management promises for Iran, Syria, North Korea and hot-spots yet to emerge.”

Can you imagine a United States government filled with Kerry henchmen like those who masquerade as media reporters for the New York Times and CBS?

Think about that horror when you go to the polls on Tuesday.