Corrections

For the record:

Wesley Clark didn’t spread the rumor about John Kerry.

We also spoke to a couple other reporters and pieced together what happened: at a press conference at a Nashville restaurant, Clark made a passing reference to an upcoming National Enquirer story about Kerry’s past. The story wasn’t about an intern at all, and Clark brought it up in the context of his own campaign plans. He was staying in, he said, in part because the expected story might damage the Kerry campaign. According to one reporter, it appeared Clark didn’t have any idea what the allegations might be.

There’s a commercial on Bush’s campaign website that claims that Kerry took “more special interest money than any other senator.” That’s a very difficult statement to defend. (The commercial is still there.)

When you combine money from paid lobbyists and PACs–which makes sense, since they’re both conduits for “special interests”–Kerry actually ranks ninety-second out of 100 U.S. senators. That doesn’t make him pure, but it makes him purer than most serious candidates for the White House. And it puts him on a different planet from President Bush, who accepted more money from lobbyists last year alone than Kerry has in the last 15.

There was a commonly circulated story that Saddam Hussein used to murder people by lowering them into industrial plastic shredders. It should not add any luster to the terrible dictator’s reputation to point out that this story was thinly sourced at best. (via No More Mister Nice Blog)

Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam’s most notorious jail. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, “does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us”. But Clwyd tells me: “We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it.”

This is all that Indict had to go on – uncorroborated and quite amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder, Clwyd responds: “Who are you to say that chap is a liar?”…

An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The Iraqi, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes the prison as “horrific”. Part of his job was to attend to those who had been executed. Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been shredded? “No.” Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a shredding machine used to execute prisoners? “No, never. As far as I know [hanging] was the only form of execution used there.”

Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came when she was shown a dossier by a reporter from Fox TV. On June 18, Clwyd wrote a second article for the Times, citing a “record book” from Abu Ghraib, which described one of the methods of execution as “mincing”. Can she say who compiled this book? “No, I can’t.” Where is it now? “I don’t know.” What was the name of the Fox reporter who showed it to her? “I have no idea.” Did Clwyd read the entire thing? “No, it was in Arabic! I only saw it briefly.” Curiously, there is no mention of the book or of “mincing” as a method of execution on the Fox News website, nor does its foreign editor recall it.