Robert Parry: NYT Replays Its Iraq Fiasco in Syria

from Consortium News:



NYT Replays Its Iraq Fiasco in Syria
December 20, 2013

Exclusive: Much like the Iraq WMD fiasco in 2002-03, the New York Times has taken sides in the conflict in Syria and is ignoring evidence that undercuts its indictment of the Assad regime as the guilty party in the Aug. 21 Sarin attack outside Damascus, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


The New York Times continues to pump up the case blaming the Syrian government for the Sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, despite the collapse of its earlier front-page indictment based on the now discredited “vectoring” of two rockets which the Times suggested were launched from an elite Syrian military base.

The Times’ “vectoring” argument, which was also pushed by Human Rights Watch in its bid to get the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Syria, has fallen apart for a variety of reasons, including analyses showing that the rockets had much more limited range than the Times assumed; the United Nations’ disclosure that one of the two projectiles struck a building before landing (thus negating the Times’ certainty about its flight path); and the lack of any Sarin or other chemical warfare agents at one of the two sites (leaving only one flight path of a Sarin-laden rocket and thus no intersecting azimuths).

The Times’ front-page “vectoring” article of Sept. 16, thus, represents another major embarrassment for the so-called newspaper of record, similar to other high-profile errors such as the “aluminum tube” story in 2002 which helped clear the way for the Iraq War and the Times’ dismissive reporting on Contra-cocaine trafficking in the 1980s and 1990s although even the CIA’s inspector general later admitted the scandal’s veracity.

Yet, despite the legs having been knocked out from under its “vectoring” story, the New York Times has made no effort to correct the record or even acknowledge the contrary evidence. Instead on Thursday, it ran another dubious story trying to prop up its case against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/20/nyt-replays-its-iraq-fiasco-in-syria/