This video from CNN in the USA is called Seymour Hersh on planned invasion of Iran.
By David Walsh in the USA:
On Monday, June 25 the New York Times published an “Editor’s Note” correcting an article in its Sunday edition. The note hardly answers the questions raised by the “corrected” article.
Sunday’s front-page story, “Iran Cracks Down on Dissent, Parading Examples in the Streets,” is accompanied on page 9, where the story continues, by a large, rather sensational photograph taking up five columns. The Times’ caption reads, “A police officer forced a young man whose clothes were deemed un-Islamic to suck on a plastic container Iranians use to wash their bottoms.”
The ninth paragraph of the piece, by Neil MacFarquhar, asserts, “Young men wearing T-shirts deemed too tight or haircuts seen as too Western have been paraded through Tehran’s streets by uniformed police officers who forced them to suck on plastic jerrycans, a toilet item Iranians use to wash their bottoms. In case anyone misses the point, it is the official news agency Fars distributing the pictures of what it calls ‘riffraff.’ Far bloodier photographs are circulating on blogs and on the Internet.” The image on page 9 is presumably one of the Fars photographs in question.
The modest correction Monday [see here; scroll down] explains that “the man in the photograph, according to widespread Iranian news reports, was one of more than 100 people arrested recently on charges of being part of a gang that had committed rapes, robberies, forgeries and other crimes. The caption published on the web site of the news agency, Fars, had said only that the man was being punished as part of a roundup of ‘thugs’ in a Tehran neighborhood.”
On the Times’ web site, the article’s headline has been amended simply to “Iran Cracks Down on Dissent,” and the paragraph about the youth guilty of wearing “too tight” T-shirts and Western haircuts being paraded through the streets of Tehran has been eliminated.
In its defense, the newspaper’s editors complain that the “current repression has made reporting in Iran difficult. In this case, the Times relied on an interview with a researcher for a nongovernment agency that no longer operates within Iran, who said the photograph was evidence of a more visible police role in public crackdowns on what the authorities consider immoral behavior. The reporter then wrongly interpreted what the researcher said as applying to a crackdown on dress, and incorporated the erroneous interpretation into the body of the article, without giving any indication of the source for it.
“These errors could have been avoided with more rigorous editing. The article should not have said that young men had been paraded through the streets for wearing un-Islamic dress, and the headline over it should not have said that dissenters were being paraded as part of the crackdown.”
A strange business, especially as this involved a leading story in the Sunday edition of the newspaper, its most widely and carefully read edition. (The Times’ circulation on Sundays is 1.6 million, as opposed to its daily total of 1.1 million, nearly a 50 percent difference).
Who, precisely, was MacFarquhar speaking to? “A researcher for a nongovernment agency that no longer operates in Iran.” Have we not heard from this type of individual before?
In advance of the US invasion of Iraq, a variety of stories appeared in the American media, a number of the most important in the New York Times (more on that below), detailing Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. The sources were often “unnamed” Iraqi exiles. All of the claims proved to be fiction.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 