'Very Small Traces'
Best of the Web Today - May 19, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
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Imagine if some malicious prankster were to make his way into the offices of the New York Times, find editorial page editor Gail Collins, and pour a gallon of milk over her head. Then imagine if he defended himself by saying he had used only "very small traces" of milk.
Bizarre as it may sound, that's the tack the Times is taking toward the discovery earlier this week of an artillery shell containing sarin in Iraq. Although, as we noted yesterday, the volume of the sarin is between three quarts and a gallon, the Times insists that field tests found only "very small traces of sarin."
The Times continues protesting Saddam Hussein's innocence, suggesting that he did away with his weapons in "a large-scale destruction program" from which only "some residual weapons" may have "escaped"--never mind that U.N. resolutions obliged Saddam to destroy all his weapons and to document their destruction.
Anyway, the Times says, maybe this sarin doesn't really exist. "At this point no one can be certain whether the artillery shell rigged as a roadside bomb really did contain deadly sarin and, if so, what significance that may have."
That's funny, we seem to remember reading somewhere that "the discovery of the sarin-filled shell appears to offer some of the most substantial evidence to date that Mr. Hussein did not destroy all of the banned chemical agent, as he claimed before the war last year." Where was that again?
Oh yes, in the New York Times! But as we noted yesterday, the paper buried the sarin story on page 11. We suppose Collins and her staff can't be troubled to read that deeply into their own paper. |
