# Posted 12:20 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

KAY RESIGNS, SAYS NO WMD IN IRAQ: This is definitely a page one story, but it's still quite amazing how different the NYT and WaPo describe it. After a few paragraphs that get out the basic facts of what Kay said, the NYT observes that

Dr. Kay's statements undermined one of the primary justifications set out by President Bush for the war with Iraq. Mr. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly cited Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons as a threat to the United States, and the lack of evidence so far that Saddam Hussein actually had large caches of weapons has fueled criticism that Mr. Bush exaggerated the peril from Iraq.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said the administration stood by its previous assessments that Mr. Hussein had both weapons programs and stores of banned weapons.

"Yes, we believe he had them, and yes we believe they will be found," Mr. McClellan said. "We believe the truth will come out."

Message: Bush lied. McClellan still lies. Now, if you scroll down another ten paragraphs or so, you'll find McClellan saying something about UN Resolution 1441 and how Saddam was in material breach. But who really cares about that?

Over at the WaPo, the money graf also comes after some basic introductory facts. It says:

The transition from Kay to [new team leader Charles] Duelfer underscores a change in emphasis in the U.S. hunt for banned weapons. While Kay began his search with expectations of finding stockpiles, Duelfer has said the mission now is to discover when and how such stockpiles were eliminated.

A good argument can be made that the WaPo is going a bit soft on the administration here. McClellan's quote is so ridiculous that it should have shown up in the WaPo article, albeit toward the end. At minimum, you'd think McClellan would say something like "There is no evidence yet that Saddam had a stockpile of WMD, but we refuse to rule out that possibility until we know exactly what happened to the weapons he had in 1998." Lest you think the WaPo is going too soft, it does report in its second paragraph that

The CIA announced officially yesterday that Charles A. Duelfer, a former senior U.N. weapons inspector, will succeed David Kay, who is resigning after nine months of unsuccessful searches for banned weapons in Iraq. Duelfer, who as a private academic said the Bush administration's prewar allegations on Iraq's weapons were "far off the mark," said yesterday that his goal is to reconstruct Iraq's "game plan" for its weapons and weapons programs.

It's interesting to note that one of the two authors of the WaPo article is Walter Pincus, a veteran national security correspondent not known for pulling his punches. For those of you old enough to remember Mr. Pincus (or have written dissertations on the role of the media in US foreign policy), you'll know that he is the one who turned American production of the neutron bomb into a major controversy in the late 1970s. More specifically, the controversty resulted from Pincus' profoundly misleading description of the bomb as a weapon that killed people but left buildings standing.

Actually, the weapon (if used) would have destroyed a tremendous number of buildings and other physical structures, but less than would've been destroyed by standard nuclear weapons. The purpose of this modification was so that the weapon would do moderately less damage in heavily populated areas such as Central Europe, thus making the process of reconstruction somewhat easier. Until Pincus turned the neutron bomb into a front page story, it had consistent bipartisan support and was considered entirely uncontroversial. Incidentally, Pincus worked at the NYT while all this was going on.

I guess the message here is either that Pincus mellowed with age or that the NYT is trying to be fair and balanced, just like Fox. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion