Lefty blogger Josh Marshall (who some say is the sock puppet of Clintonista  Sid ("Vicious") Blumenthal seems to be operating under some weird curse this election cycle. Earlier this election season I showed how he was the first to leak the now—exploded phony Bush TANG memos story which destroyed Dan Rather and Sixty Minutes.
 
He's done it again. Sunday afternoon he wrote about tons of high density explosives left unattended and now missing at Qakaa.  Sure enough, Monday morning the NYT gave prominent play to the story (burying a lot of details , including the fact that the IAEA itself had unsealed the locks on the storage site, no one knew when the stuff had disappeared,and that the story itself was a year old rehash.)
 
The desperate Kerry campaign made this the theme of the day, and Marshall spun it out all day.
 
This time the curse worked really fast.    By early evening, the National Review reprinted this story from NBC:
 
NBC News: Miklaszewski:  April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq. (NBC's Nightly News,10/25/04  
 
Once again a phony story has been presaged by a Marshall preview, and this time it snagged the Democratic candidate as well as a major media member, the New York Times.Qakaa,indeed.

Clarice Feldman    10 26 04