On Syria, the NYT Still Doesn't Get It [View All]

[reprehensor]

On Syria, the NYT Still Doesn't Get It

by Robert Parry

It’s finally dawning on the New York Times how thoroughly it was spun on the fictions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but the “newspaper of record” is showing the same credulity about the emerging Syrian crisis.

“Some deeply troubling facts about the murder of Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister, have now been established by a tough and meticulous United Nations investigation,” the Times wrote in an Oct. 25 editorial demanding punishment for top Syrian and Lebanese officials supposedly implicated by the report.

But the problem with the Times editorial is that the report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is anything but “meticulous,” reading more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the evidence. (See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report}.”)
[br />Mehlis’s report, for instance, fails to follow up a key lead, the Japanese identification of the Mitsubishi Canter Van that apparently carried the explosives used in the Feb. 14 bombing that killed Hariri. The van was reported stolen in Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct. 12, 2004, but Mehlis’s report indicates no effort to investigate how the vehicle got from the island of Japan to Beirut.

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