Reporting on Giuliani ad attacking Clinton, media don't note he blamed troops for missing weapons

Reporting on Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's recent campaign advertisement criticizing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) stance on the Iraq war, numerous media outlets -- including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, MSNBC, and ABC -- quoted from or aired a segment of the video in which the narrator in the ad says: "[J]ust when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them." Yet none of these reports mentioned that Giuliani himself blamed U.S. troops in Iraq for allowing tons of explosives to disappear from a weapons depot at the Al Qaqaa complex south of Baghdad, telling NBC News host Matt Lauer in October 2004: "[N]o matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there."

On the September 14 edition of MSNBC's Tucker, host Tucker Carlson aired the entire Giuliani campaign ad, after which he stated: "Ouch! That was the new Rudy Giuliani ad":

CLINTON: If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interest of our nation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But now that she's running for president, Hillary Clinton has changed her position, even joining with the radical group MoveOn.org in attacking American General Petraeus. Clinton stood silently by when MoveOn.org ran this venomous ad in The New York Times. The same general she called an expert not long ago -- now she is questioning his honesty.

CLINTON: The reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them. General Petraeus and the brave men and women now serving under him deserve an apology -- and our nation deserves better. Senator Clinton, do the right thing, apologize for your comments, and condemn the MoveOn.org ad.

[end video clip]

CARLSON: Ouch! That was the new Rudy Giuliani ad. This comes after Giuliani ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Clinton of spewing political venom during a recent questioning of General Petraeus. Will it work? Is it now a two-person race, Hillary and Rudy?

In a September 15 article headlined "Giuliani Attacks Clinton on War," The New York Times described what was "on the screen," provided the "script," then purported to determine the "accuracy" of the video:

SCRIPT: Senator Clinton speaking before the war in 2002, "If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

The narrator then says, "But now that she's running for president, Hillary Clinton has changed her position, even joining with the radical group MoveOn.org in attacking American General Petraeus. Clinton stood silently by when MoveOn.org ran this venomous ad in The New York Times." Mrs. Clinton is shown at the Senate hearings saying: "The reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief." The narrator says: "Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them. General Petraeus and the brave men and women now serving under him deserve an apology. And our nation deserves better. Senator Clinton, do the right thing. Apologize for your comments and condemn the MoveOn.org ad."

ACCURACY: Mrs. Clinton has always maintained that her support of a Congressional resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq was not an authorization to go to war, but she been faulted by her Democratic opponents for that vote and how it squares with her current criticism of the war. While the Giuliani campaign says Mrs. Clinton "joined" with MoveOn.org in attacking General Petraeus, there is no evidence to suggest that the group colluded with her.

While the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, and ABC's Good Morning America did not quote from or air the entire ad, they all mentioned the narrator's claim that "just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them." From the September 18 Los Angeles Times article:

Giuliani ramped up his attacks last week with a full-page ad in the New York Times that criticized her for not condemning an antiwar ad by a liberal group, MoveOn.org, that mocked Gen. David H. Petraeus. The Giuliani campaign now leads its website with an anti-Clinton video.

"Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them," an announcer says.

Other Republican candidates have adopted a different tone. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said in an interview last spring that Clinton was shocked but appreciative when he apologized to her for saying mean things about her during her husband's tumultuous White House tenure.

From the September 15 New York Post article:

It notes that Clinton had previously spoken favorably of Petraeus' abilities on the battlefield.

"Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them," the narrator says.

"Gen. Petraeus and the brave men and women now serving under him deserve an apology. And our nation deserves better."

From the September 15 edition of ABC's Good Morning America:

LIZ MARLANTES (ABC News congressional correspondent): What's now clear, Iraq will remain front and center throughout the 2008 campaign. For the candidates seeking the White House, the challenge is not only figuring out how to end the war, but how not to get saddled with the blame.

STEVE SIMON (senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations) The war over who lost the war is already beginning. The opening volleys of that debate have been fired.

MARLANTES: Volleys like this Internet ad from Rudy Giuliani.

NARRATOR [campaign ad]: And just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them.

MARLANTES: For Good Morning America, Liz Marlantes, ABC News, Washington.

However, none of these reports mentioned Giuliani's claim on October 28, 2004, that U.S. troops, and not President Bush, were responsible for the missing explosives at the Al Qaqaa weapons depot. Giuliani asserted that "[t]he president was cautious, the president was prudent, the president did what a commander in chief should do. And no matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"

From the October 28, 2004, edition of NBC's Today:

LAUER: Let's talk about the missing explosives in Iraq. As you just heard [former Sen.] John Edwards [D-NC] say, it was a mistake, it may have put U.S. troops in further danger. The president was silent on the issue for two days, speaking out only yesterday about it. Although we don't know all the facts, why doesn't the president just come out and say, "You know what? The explosives were there, now they're not. A mistake was made, I'm commander-in-chief, I take the blame. We won't let it happen again."

GIULIANI: Because of what you just said. For the same reason that [Sen.] John Kerry's [D-MA] national security adviser said, "We don't know. We simply don't know what happened." John Kerry wants to pretend we do know what happened. We don't know what happened. And the best possibility is that those weapons were gone before -- or explosives were gone even before the troops got there. So the --

LAUER: It's not necessarily the best possibility. You know --

GIULIANI: But at least it's an equal possibility. John Kerry hasn't admitted that. Instead, John Kerry became an attack dog. He immediately began attacking the president. He immediately began saying, "There's a terrible mistake. There's a terrible" -- we don't know if it's a mistake or not. The president was cautious, the president was prudent, the president did what a commander-in-chief should do. And no matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough? We don't know the --

LAUER: But if you are commander-in-chief, you are in charge of those troops. And let's just say -- what it does, I think, doesn't it cut to the core of the problem some people have with this president, that he doesn't accept blame and rarely admits to a mistake?

GIULIANI: No it doesn't. Not at all. I think what it shows is that the president is not willing to put blame on the troops when it isn't clear that they should be blamed. Things go wrong in war. Abraham Lincoln had more things going wrong in the Civil War than probably any president -- but you have to stick with it. You have to find out what the truth is. And the reality is that we don't know what happened to those explosives, and they represent a small fraction of the explosives that were destroyed. The New York Times and CBS News, who covered this story, particularly the Times in pointing this story out, has never pointed out in its newspaper that 400,000 explosives like this have been destroyed by our troops since they've been there.