Intro: "The paper has made faulty allegations about Iran's nuclear program without running proper corrections."
United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran, 06/02/11. (photo: File)
The New York Times Misleading Public on Iran
10 January 12
The paper has made faulty allegations about Iran's nuclear programme without running proper corrections.
t's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick the United States into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is misleading the public with allegations that say that the country is developing "weapons of mass destruction".
In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil"), this paragraph appeared:
The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear programme has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign [emphasis my own].
The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear programme has a military objective" is misguided.
As Washington Post's Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9:
Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on the New York Times website, you can't. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?
You can still find the original here.
Indeed (at least at the time of writing), if you go to the New York Times website and search with the phrase "military objective", the article pops right up. But if you open the article, the text is gone. But again, there is no explanatory note saying that they changed the text.
Note that in other contexts, the New York Times claims to be quite punctilious about corrections.
This is not an isolated example in the Times' reporting. On the very same day, January 4, they published another article, attributed to Clifford Krauss ("Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz"), that contained the following paragraph:
Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons [emphasis again my own].
At time of writing, that text is still on the New York Times website.
Of course, referring to Iran's "development of nuclear weapons" without qualification implies that it is a known fact that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But it is not a known fact: It is an allegation. Indeed, when US officials are speaking publicly for the record, they say the opposite.
As Washington Post's Ombudsman Patrick Pexton also noted on December 9:
This is what the US director of national intelligence, James R Clapper, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March: "We continue to assess [that] Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.
To demand a correction, you can write to the New York Times This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . To write a letter to the editor, you can write here. To complain to the New York Times' Public Editor, you write This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
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Comments
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Maybe someday our military will stop shaking in it's boots like a chiwawa digging a hole under a buffalo. Maybe we don't have to beat on our chest every time somebody new steps out into the school yard? Just like Russia long before them, most adults on the earth have families & kids. Their interest doesn't sit in sending their children out to be slaughtered by NATO forces.
That's really only an American movie thought.
Iran has certainly been supporting terrorism, but do they have a capability to develop nuclear weapons? They say they are not doing that, but the credibility they have is never very high since Ahmadinijad makes idiotic statements like doubting the Jewish pogroms in WWII. Who can believe anything he says?
So we are left with apparently the U.S. desire to isolate Iran and put them in a position to make a mistake that will give the U.S. an excuse to go to war again.
Incredible. And anyone with an eye to history might doubt what the U.S. government says about Iran, as well.
Like Abdul Nasser did to the Suez canal in 1956 against overwhelmingly superior combined forces of British, French and Israeli forces especially the navies when, after losing the initial battle, sunk forty ships, blocking the canal until the allied force backed down (as suggested by the UN) and became despised and shunned by former allies around the globe and ending their Imperial ages -in the case of UK and France.
How quickly we, and especially our leaders, who should know better, forget that controlling a strategically vulnerable narrow geographical point is still a strong card, short of using nukes and carpet-bombing in which case we'd be even more despised and alienated around the world than ever if that's possible.
The fact is that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are largely obsolete. Iran is pursuing a failed foreign policy similar to that of North Korea. They will spend a disproportionat e amount of their country's wealth on weapons while isolating themselves from the rational world.
The New York Times along with 90% of ALL TV, Newspapers, Radio & Internet are controlled by 6 corporations and they are all operating from the same playbook. Their purpose is not to inform - but to misinform and sell us on propaganda and hide the truth from We the People.
There are some terrible governments in this world and the US is 2nd to none at being a lying, deceitful and oppressing corrupted a$$holes whose allegiance is to Capitalism (Wall St/Mega-Corps) rather than the Constitution or its people.
The NYT are just doing what they are told to do - spread the lies.
I don't even trust the NY TImes Book Review anymore!
I've been harkening back to the UK instigated, US operated coup on behalf of Anglo-Iranian oil (now BP) against Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 for months now; we're still living with the "blowback"!
Nothing that he or his organization, the IAEA, says can be trusted. For the most part, Yukiya Amano is using the very same bogus evidence that Mohamed ElBaradei, his predecessor, outright rejected as real or hard evidence proving that Iran was out to develop a nuclear weapon.
Whatever Iran is doing right now, including the enrichment of the Uranium, is perfectly legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferatio n Treaty that they were party to. What's ironic is that under the regime of the Shah of Iran, the one that we, the U.S. put in place when we illegally overthrew Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953, we were encouraging him to develop nuclear power for energy purposes. If the Shah was in power today, the U.S. would have no qualms about what Iran is doing.
The nations that make up Europe, the countries that have become what I call pseudo-states of the United States and who jump thru our hoops, should be ashamed of themselves and should never ever refer to themselves as sovereign nations who can make independent decisions for themselves that don't need approval by the U.S.
There is this neo-colonialism game going on - We helped you with Libya -- you will help USrael with Syria, Iran.
The NYT and its journalists as well as most of the other major newspapers and their journalists know the truth, but they will never admit to it publicly. They print what is politically expedient and supportive of our government's agenda for world empire. Just today, another key and important Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered, assassinated, by we all know who. There are only two countries in this world that would do such a thing and Iran knows it; the U.S. and Israel.
The U.S. and Israel have double-standard s. It's okay for us to violate international law anytime that we want and murder innocent people, but don't dare do it to us. Iran will eventually wake up and do to us what we are doing to them.
If Israel and/or the U.S. were to attack Iran with these humongous bunker buster bombs, Iran will launch a devastating counterattack against Israel and rightfully so which could very well lead to a nuclear war because Russia and China will have to get involved since Israel will most probably counterattack Iran with with one or more of its nonexistent nukes.
It's just too bad for Iran that they have our oil and natural gas underneath their soil.
Welcome to hell!
Fox, Erlanger is the main conduit from the neo-cons to the NYTimes. Such reporters are just propagandists. They feed disinformation to the NYTimes, knowing it will be picked up by smaller papers and TV stations across the US.
It ought to be a crime against humanity to deliberately publish propaganda that leads to a war. It is a direct cause of the deaths of many millions of people. Judy Miller is as responsible for the Iraq war as many in the Bush Regime. So in the NYTimes for publishing her trash.
The function of major media like the NY Times, as Chomsky argued many years ago, is to "manufacture consent" among the american people for policies that the ruling elites want. The term comes from Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential journalists in the 20th century or the age of propaganda.
'Course, that we should think the good ole US of A is the only country which is going to pursue weapons that make everyone else afraid of us is evidence we really have no clue as to human survival instincts.
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