377 tons… 3 tons… What’s the difference?

CYA Update: WaPo’s Howard Kurtz writes,

The principal uncertainty about the story involves the timing of the ammunition’s disappearance. The White House says the explosives may have gone missing while Saddam Hussein still controlled Iraq.

“Sure there’s a possibility” that happened, [New York Times Executive Editor Bill] Keller said, “and I think the original story accounted for that possibility. . . . I don’t think we’ve ever claimed there was a definitive answer to what became of this stuff.“

Elsewhere in the interview, Keller blames his paper’s overly hasty reporting on–guess who?–bloggers.

Update: Elsewhere in the Times, Tom Brokaw curses those damned bloggers again over Ra^thergate.

When “60 Minutes” reported on documents purporting to show Mr. Bush received preferential treatment in the Air National Guard, questions about the documents’ authenticity originated and caught fire on the FreeRepublic and PowerLine blog Web sites; mainstream outlets followed. CBS News admitted two weeks later that it could not authenticate the documents. The NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recently likened the tone of the Internet coverage of the CBS National Guard report, presented by the anchor Dan Rather, to a “political jihad.”

In an interview last week Mr. Brokaw said CBS News had clearly made mistakes. But, he said, “I think there were people just lying in the Internet bushes, waiting to strike, and I think that particular episode gave them a big opportunity.”