Heard this on Fox and Friends, earlier this morning, and now I'm reading it again, through the daily commentary of a local Talk Radio host, Ralph Bristol.

NBC, CNN FOB (Friends of Bush)



Two unlikely informants have thrown a lifeline to President George W. Bush on a story that had (and still has) the potential to explode his chances for re-election. The New York Times ran a front-page story Monday that was quickly repeated by most of the other major media and adopted as the message of the day by the John Kerry campaign. It accused the Bush administration of letting some 380 tons (760-thousand pounds) of explosives disappear from an Iraq weapons depot after the invasion.



As the story circulated through the national news media with little or no resistance, NBC News finally dissented, and CNN picked up the NBC version of the story.



NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, one day after the fall of Baghdad, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops first arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad. According to NBC, while the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing. Conclusion: the 380 tons of HMX and RDX went missing before the invasion.



The New York Times report was based on information it received from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."



Thanks to the imbedded NBC reporters, we know that Mr. Abbas was wrong. If any looting of this particular government installation occurred, it happened before the fall of the Saddam regime. More likely, Saddam allowed the explosives to be moved out of Iraq before the invasion.



The Pentagon said the Al Qaqaa facility was one of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion, and -- after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings -- they never came upon the stockpile.



Prior to the Iraq war, the high-grade explosives at Al Qaqaa had been under the control of IAEA inspectors because the material could be used as a component in a nuclear weapon, IAEA and other U.N. inspectors left the country before the fighting began on March 19.



State Department spokesman Adam Ereli says coalition forces have cleared 10,033 weapons caches and destroyed 243,000 tons of munitions. He says another 162,898 tons of munitions are at secure locations and awaiting destruction. While 380 tons of explosives can cause a great deal of damage, it amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent of the more than 400-thousand tons of munitions that have been destroyed and/or secured.



It is unclear whether John Kerry was aware of the truth of the matter before he hit the campaign trail Monday and said, "this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration."



Neither you nor I would know the truth if not for the honesty of NBC and its imbedded reporters and the news judgment of CNN, which has seen fit to join NBC in setting the record straight.



You may believe that this reporting on the part of NBC and CNN are aberrations that fell through the cracks of the mainstream media's usually reliable liberal filter. Perhaps. I think it is the marketplace at work in an industry whose practitioners are reliably liberal, but unable to resist the call of competition and enlightened self-interest. They will correct each other when it's in their best interest to do so - and it is always in their best interest to do so.



Whether or not the rest of the media (which won't get the same credit as NBC) will correct the record remains to be seen.