Do You Think This Might Have Something to Do with the Decline of the New York Times?
From today’s Best of the Web at OpinionJournal.com (links that were in original added):
Yesterday we noted that the New York Times had published a page 1 story on Abu Ghraib on the same day that it published a story on page 8 about the murder of a hostage, who, as the Times reported the next day on page 10, was apparently tortured before being slain. Today the Times reports its Abu Ghraib story may have been fake:
The online magazine Salon is challenging the identity of a man profiled by The New York Times in a front-page article on Saturday who says he is the iconic hooded figure in a published photograph who was abused by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004.Salon bases its challenge on an examination of a set of 280 Abu Ghraib photographs it has been studying for several weeks and an interview with an official of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, known as the C.I.D., who says the man identified by The Times is not the detainee in the photograph.
On Monday, Chris Grey, chief spokesman for the investigations unit, asked about the challenge, confirmed to The Times in an e-mail message: “We have had several detainees claim they were the person depicted in the photograph in question. Our investigation indicates that the person you have is not the detainee who was depicted in the photograph released in connection with the Abu Ghraib investigation.
The story raising doubts about the page 1 story appeared on page 17.
Words fail.
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UPDATE: The Times acknowledges it was duped (though they don’t state it in those terms).
