http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003696041&imw=Y
January 14, 2008
'NYT' News Article Contradicts Claim on Iraq in New Kristol Column
By E&P Staff
NEW YORK
His first column for The New York Times' op-ed page last Monday held a
major attribution "error", and then the paper's public editor called
his hiring a "mistake."
Now a key claim in William Kristol's second column for the paper has
been undercut by a news article at the Times a few hours later.
Kristol in his column, which hailed the success of the "surge" in
Iraq, concluded with this trump card:
Now the Iraqi government has agreed on de-Baathification, a key gain
that proves his point and pretty much destroys the Democrats' stand.
But now at www.nytimes.com comes a kind of corrective from the paper's
Solomon Moore in Baghdad.
It opens:
"A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the
first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of
deadlock, there were troubling questions — and troubling silences —
about the measure’s actual effects.
"The measure, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, is meant to
open government jobs to former members of the Baath Party of Saddam
Hussein — the bureaucrats, engineers, city workers, teachers, soldiers
and police officers who made the government work until they were
barred from office after the American invasion in 2003.
"But the legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a
document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some
Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former
Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security
ministries.
"Under that interpretation, the law would be directly at odds with the
American campaign to draft Sunni Arabs into so-called Awakening
militias with the aim of integrating them into the police and military
forces. That plan has been praised as a key to the sharp drop in
violence over the past year and as being the most effective weapon
against jihadi insurgents like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
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Harry
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