Well, editorial correction is better late than never. At least the NY Times remains somewhat sensitive to its responsibilities as a prominent national newspaper of record.

But the major public policy damage has of course been done.

94 United States Senators out of 100 ducked and ran for political cover in the face of the accompanying right wing not-in-my-backyard propaganda onslaught that was based in major part upon the original misleading Times' news article, refusing to appropriate the funding the Obama administrated sought to close Guantanamo. Cheney quietly snickered in an undisclosed secure location, while the Faux News/Limbaugh crowd noisily gloated at the spectacle of the Democratic Party's beltway Congressional leadership folding under orcestrated media pressure once again.

At last report, there still was a piece of GOP-initiated legislation lurking about somewhere in Congress which would require the legislature and/or governor of every state in which a maximum security prison was located to consent in advance to the transfer of any Gitmo detainees to their chunk of American homeland turf. Since we're temporarily in a mood to make the public record factually accurate, perhaps this proposed bill should be formally re-titled "The Willie Horton Jihadi Fear Monger Act of 2009."

It's simply amazing how the neocons' bluff and bluster and blatant issue-framing demagoguery continues to scatter the Dems in parliamentary disarray.

Bill from Saginaw

I think the sinister message here is that during this century, the NYT has ham-fistedly published disinformational story after story, or alternatively admitted to suppressing significant stories under the rubric of a genteel and professional deference to the government.

Forget the Jayson Stark scandal. There's Wen Ho Lee; Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's stenography; the decision to suppress the warrantless wiretapping story for a year...

Bill Kristol's contribution of astonishingly blatant pathological mendacity is excused by the self-serving distinction editors make between "reporting" and "opinion"-- but that loophole doesn't acquit the Times management from the charge that they tolerate the publication of persistent egregious falsehoods without compunction. That is, the editors don't necessarily deny that their columnists are lying their fool heads off; they're just saying that as a matter of policy, they don't fact-check them.

I consider this convenience disingenuous at best.

That's just off the top of my weary head. But it isn't just the travesty of a commercially prestigious news publisher resorting to such chicanery-- it's that these corrupt organizations have created rituals to cleanse themselves of responsibility, or consequences, each time they're caught with their pants down.

So there exists an extensive and well-oiled apparatus of token introspection, apology, and official remorse or contrition. There are Ombudsmen, or Public Editors to gravely and dispassionately consider questionable content, or sources, or motive.

There are academic and professional watchdogs who call out papers like the NYT when they err.

But is it not the case that when all is said and done, the Gray Lady just gives herself a shot of penicillin and sashays back out the door with a purse full of Kleenex and Vaseline?

Put less luridly: don't the scripted "mea culpa"s and apologies and promises to reorganize to ensure that the offense won't be repeated, etc., serve as lightning rods to channel the outrage and create the APPEARANCE of professional therapy and rehabilitation?

As long as their material doesn't place them at risk of legal liability, civil or criminal, they can go on until Doomsday doing as they wish, admitting graciously "hey, yeah, maybe we screwed up", and paying lip service to what the Roman Catholic prayer known as the Act of Contrition calls, "true contrition for my sins and a firm purpose of amendment".

They don't even have to say ten Hail Marys afterwards.

· Yr Obd't Servant

I take it that the original story had much bigger legs. Five (weeks, months or years) from now most conservatives will still parrot the line that the majority of these people were terrorists before they went to guano, and went back to it after they were released by the 'evil' O. Truth be damned.

Some of Mister Obama's GITMO hostages look much like the pictures of Buchenwald.

If E&P want's to look into a stinking pile of 'you know what' at the Times they can look into this:

“The Games People Play”
(sung by Obama and accompanied by the NYT)

It seems more than a bit deceitful and highly dangerous for the leading newspaper in America that the NYT ‘reporter’ David E. Sanger, who is a principle voice of the "Times" on the issues of the expanding wars in the Middle East and Central Asia is so clearly biased by his formal position in the highly ideological pro-war ‘un-think tank’ CNAS (Center for a New American Security) where CNAS promotes their capture of Sanger (and by implication the "Times") proudly (like a trophy) on their CNAS web-site:

“Senior Writer in National Security

David E. Sanger is Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times and is one of the newspaper's senior writers.”

http://www.cnas.org/people/writer

But I suppose that Sanger is simply following the trail of many other NYT neoliberal war-hawks, who pose as ‘reporters’ for ideological cabals, in the pages of this most self-promoting, deceptive, and disguised shill-sheet of the ruling-elite’s global ‘corporate financial Empire’ wolves posing as an American “liberal/progressive” peace-lamb newspaper.

However, even the deceitful Iraq war cheerleader, Judith Miller, was not a card carrying captive of PNAC when she (and the NYT) help promote the launch of the pre-emptive, aggressive 'war crime' of attacking Iraq.

With all the focus on stripping the bark off of the second-string, imperialist minded ‘Israel lobby’ and its house organ AIPAC, where’s the similar focus on the house organ of the Empire’s corporatist headquarters in the U.S., the New York Times?

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

The stink of Judith Miller will never be expunged from The New York Tombs . . . All The News That Fits The Print.

Gee, what page did the correction run on?

Did it have a nice, big headline over it like the front-page article?

The usual practice of burying these things is a big part of casual and routine journalistic dishonesty.