The Guardian has retracted 2 sharply critical stories that appeared in the
last week (too bad!, I'll have to treat their material more cautiously).
First, the Wolfowitz "oil" quote & next, the story about Powell & Blair
meeting at the Waldorf where they expressed serious doubts about
intelligence backing his UN speech:
1:
Thursday June 5, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,3604,971436,00.html
A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading
"Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US
deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said
that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that.
He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ...
difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no
economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In
the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic
collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the
military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq."
The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which
to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated
the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.
2: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,967508,00.html
The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and
Clarifications column, Thursday June 5 2003
In our front page lead on May 31 headlined "Straw, Powell had serious
doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims," we said that the foreign
secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at
the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr Powell addressed the
United Nations on February 5. Mr Straw has now made it clear that no
such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for
suggesting it did.
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