BEST OF THE WEB TODAY OpinionJournal Wall Street Journal Online BY JAMES TARANTO Monday, February 3, 2003 2:59 p.m. EST
A Laurel for Howell Mohammad Aldouri, Iraq's ambassador to the U.N., appeared on "Fox News Sunday" with Tony Snow yesterday, and "he thanked the New York Times for defending Iraq," blogger Will Veers reports. We went to the transcript (not available on FoxNews.com, but we found it on Factiva) and our TiVo to find out what Aldouri said, and it turns out he was referring to an op-ed piece, which we noted Friday, in which one Stephen Pelletiere pronounces Saddam Hussein innocent of human-rights violations and urges America to stop--this is an actual quote--"picking on" the poor Iraqi dictator. Says Aldouri: This is a part of the American and the British propaganda against my country. . . . Your president, President Bush, mentioned that several times that Iraq, the president of Iraq, poisoned its own people. Pelletiere in the article in New York Times last Friday, and I'm thankful for the New York Times for that, saying that it is not true, Iraq is not poisoning its own people. The Friday piece for which Aldouri is thanking the Times claimed, despite ample documentation from Human Rights Watch and others, that Saddam Hussein did not commit genocide against the Kurds in northern Iraq. It's almost as if a humble Holocaust denier had won public praise from Adolf Eichmann himself. Howell Raines must be beaming with pride. . . .
