FOX News Channel chief political correspondent Carl Cameron doctored a quotation by Senator John Kerry (D-MA) to cast Kerry as a flip-flopper. On the August 18 edition of Special Report with Brit Hume, Cameron showed a clip of Kerry's recent speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) annual National Convention, in which Kerry criticized President George W. Bush's proposal to pull back 70,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Europe and Asia. Cameron then contrasted Kerry's criticism with a quotation from an August 1 appearance by Kerry on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos in which, Cameron claimed, Kerry had pledged to “reduce U.S. forces in precisely the way President Bush has proposed.”

From the August 18 edition of FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume:

KERRY: [in a video clip] Why are we withdrawing unilaterally 12,000 troops from the Korean peninsula at the very time that we are negotiating with North Korea, a country that really has nuclear weapons? This is clearly the wrong signal to send at the wrong time.

CAMERON: But Kerry himself suggested, less than three weeks ago, that, if he were the president, he would reduce U.S. forces in precisely the way President Bush has proposed. Quote, “I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops. In the Korean Peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps.”

But the quotation Cameron read was doctored. Cameron read two sentences from Kerry's August 1 interview on This Week as though Kerry had spoken them consecutively, omitting two intervening sentences that would have indicated the context and meaning of Kerry's remark. The full transcript of the August 1 edition of This Week shows that Kerry's call for an “enormous reduction” in troops was actually a reference to troops in Iraq, not in Europe and the Korean peninsula. Here's the full quotation, along with some context:

STEPHANOPOULOS [voice-over]: After a rain-soaked rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Kerry and [Senator John] Edwards came to our ABC bus to talk about the campaign ahead, President Bush, taxes, and Iraq.

[...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you promise that American troops will be home [from Iraq] by the end of your first term?

KERRY: I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops. We will probably have a continued presence of some kind, certainly in the [Middle East] region. If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there [Iraq] but elsewhere in the world. In the Korean peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps. There are great possibilities open to us.

Had Cameron read the full quotation, it would have been clear that Kerry's promise of an “enormous reduction ... in the level of troops” was an answer to a question about troop levels in a specific region. The full quotation also reveals that Kerry's proposal to “change the deployment of troops ... elsewhere in the world,” including South Korea, was contingent on successful diplomacy. Indeed, this emphasis on diplomacy as a precondition for troop redeployment is consistent with Kerry's recent criticism of the Bush's proposal to withdraw troops from South Korea unilaterally rather than using possible withdrawal as a bargaining chip in the Bush administration's ongoing negotiations with North Korea.

Later in the program, the “FOX All-Star Panel” picked up on Cameron's distortion. Kicking off the panel discussion, host Brit Hume again played the clip of Kerry's VFW speech and contrasted it with the doctored quotation from his This Week interview. Morton M. Kondracke (Roll Call executive editor and co-host of FOX News Channel's The Beltway Boys) tried to note that Kerry was referring to Iraq in the August 1 quotation, but he apparently did not have the full August 1 transcript in front of him; Hume and Fred Barnes (Kondracke's Beltway Boys co-host and executive editor of The Weekly Standard) shouted him down:

KONDRACKE: On that quote from ABC, the significant major reduction sounded like he was talking about Iraq during the first term. He didn't say significant major reductions from Korea and Europe, although he did say reductions in the full quote.

[...]

BARNES: He mentioned both of them on ABC. Yes.

KONDRACKE: But the first part of the quote has to do -- sounds like it has to do with Iraq.

[...]

HUME: Did you look it up and see? I mean...

BARNES: I don't see the word...

HUME: Where is Iraq mentioned? Iraq is not mentioned, is it?

BARNES: No. But Korea is.