The Guardian Apologizes

As we have repeatedly noted, the left both here and abroad is utterly without principle or regard for truth in its desperate effort to negate America’s victory in Iraq. One of the leaders of this effort has been the Guardian; it has led the forces of those who claim President Bush and Prime Minister Blair lied to their respective peoples about Iraq’s weapons. Its reports have been circulated and repeated throughout the American and British press.
On May 31, the Guardian highlighted one of its most famous attacks on the paper’s front page: It claimed that just before Colin Powell’s U.N. speech, he and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where both men “expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq.” Powell reportedly expresssed particular concern about intelligence being presented by the Defense Department, and said he hoped their claims about weapons of mass destruction would not “blow up in their faces” when the truth came out. The Guardian’s article, which triggered a world-wide furor, was purportedly based on transcripts of the meeting “being circulated in NATO diplomatic circles.”
This morning, the Guardian retracted and apologized for its story. Apparently Straw was not even in New York at the time of the alleged meeting, and the “transcripts” were either bogus or non-existent.
Meanwhile, InstaPundit noted that yesterday’s silly article about Paul Wolfowitz ostensibly telling an Asian audience that the Iraq war was all about “oil”–see our post from yesterday–has disappeared from the Guardian’s site. Sure enough, I checked and found that not only is the Wolfowitz article not on the current site, it has mysteriously disappeared from the Guardian’s archives. No apology for that one yet, however.
Will these fiascoes chasten liberals and cause them to be less reckless in their efforts to smear President Bush and Prime Minister Blair? I doubt it.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses