Thanks to
acerimusdex for the find.
An article on Friday about the failure of European Union investigators to confirm the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe misstated the interim findings of a separate inquiry conducted by the Council of Europe, a human-rights monitoring organization. Those findings, reported in January, said that the council had not uncovered evidence that such centers had ever existed, but that there were enough indications to justify continuing the inquiry. The findings did not assert that no rights abuses had been uncovered.
Remember
this?
The New York Times changed the earlier accurate version of a story on testimony on secret CIA prisons in Europe (a story first reported in depth by Dana Priest and for which she won the Pulitzer Prize) by the EU counterterrorism chief Gijs DeVries, to an inaccurate version that favored the Bush Administration.
. . . someone in the Times did not like [the original] accurate reporting, and instead rewrote the story, to make it both inaccurate and more favorable to the Bush Administration. The later edited version of the story stated that:
Mr. de Vries said the European Parliament investigation had not uncovered rights abuses despite more than 50 hours of testimony by rights advocates and people who say they were abducted by C.I.A. agents. A similar investigation by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion in January -- though the leader of that inquiry, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said then that there were enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.
(Emphasis suppied.) Notice the two changes to inaccuracies favorable to the Bush Adminsitration: (1) The statement about the January Council of Europe report is no longer attributed to DeVries; (2)the statement is treated as FACT, when the earlier story plainly marked it as INACCURATE.
But, lo and behold, a correction:
Correction: April 26, 2006
An article on Friday about the failure of European Union investigators to confirm the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe misstated the interim findings of a separate inquiry conducted by the Council of Europe, a human-rights monitoring organization. Those findings, reported in January, said that the council had not uncovered evidence that such centers had ever existed, but that there were enough indications to justify continuing the inquiry. The findings did not assert that no rights abuses had been uncovered.
Ok, so it didn't change the world, but a victory of sorts, no?
