Here’s a correction appearing now at the top of the website version of an A1 story in the Washington Post that ran this morning (hat tip - Allah):

Here’s the original headline:

And the opening paragraphs:

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included “reporting of dubious quality or reliability” that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Feith’s office “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith’s activities as “an alternative intelligence assessment process.”

An unclassified summary of the full document is scheduled for release today in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs. In that summary, a copy of which was obtained from another source by The Washington Post, the inspector general concluded that Feith’s assessment in 2002 that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a “mature symbiotic relationship” was not fully supported by available intelligence but was nonetheless used by policymakers.

At the time of Feith’s reporting, the CIA had concluded only that there was an “evolving” association, “based on sources of varying reliability.”

In a telephone interview yesterday, Feith emphasized the inspector general’s conclusion that his actions, described in the report as “inappropriate,” were not unlawful. “This was not ‘alternative intelligence assessment,’ ” he said. “It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.

Maybe next time, they won’t swallow Levin’s spin whole and slap it on A1 so fast. On the positive side, the Post is at least running a correction, calling it a correction, and placing it prominently at the top of the website. (Take a lesson, Associated Press.) Whether the WaPo correction will appear on the front page of tomorrow’s paper, who knows?

Stephen Spruiell notes that the Post is not the only one with responsibility to make prominent corrections:

As I write this, Chris Matthews is peddling the phony WaPo scoop on Hardball, prattling on about how this report proves that Doug Feith “cooked the intel” to get us into war.

How did the WaPo screw this up so badly?

Allah has some good questions:

1) “They’re calling it a ‘correction,’ but is it really a correction if you’re quoting from an entirely different document than the one you thought you were? And your story kinda sorta hinges on which one it was?”

2) “How vigorous should we expect news networks’ corrections to be once word gets out?”

Whisper, whisper, whisper.

Update: Reader Adam notes that MSNBC — well, good for them — is linking the correction on its website homepage as of 9:01 pm Eastern…

***

Speaking of the Associated Press, it has been blundering on the story, too. I know, you’re shocked. Check Fuzzilicious Thinking, Flopping Aces, Blackfive, and Power Line, where John Hinderaker sums up:

Last night, we noted an Associated Press story about a report that was to be delivered today to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The report, by the Pentagon’s Inspector General, related to Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans and the intelligence analysis that it carried out for the Defense Department prior to the Iraq war. As initially reported by the AP, the Inspector General’s report concluded that there was nothing illegal or unauthorized about Feith’s group, but that it was somehow “inappropriate” for that group to draw conclusions from intelligence data that were different from the CIA’s conclusions.

This morning, Fuzzilicious Thinking pointed out that the AP story was in a state of flux: a later version of the story, by the same reporter, included these two seemingly inconsistent statements:

Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration’s assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.

And:

A “very damning” report by the Defense Department’s inspector general depicts a Pentagon that purposely manipulated intelligence in an effort to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida in the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, says the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Fuzzilicious concludes that the AP finally settled on a version of the article that was well-balanced. This raises obvious questions about the practice of putting out news stories and then changing or correcting them on the fly. Like: how are newspapers who rely on the Associated Press supposed to know when a story is actually finished and accurate?

Perhaps newspapers should start running disclaimers that they assume no responsibility for the accuracy of AP’s information.

***

Related: Jules Crittenden has a round-up.

Ed Morrissey gets to the bottom line:

None of this has anything to do with the war or its intel analysis. Feith and Wolfowitz have served as targets for Democrats for years, and now that they have returned to power, they want to use whatever they can to finish them politically. Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller can’t wait to start holding hearings on the matter, even though the IG explicitly states that no laws were broken and the effort was properly revealed to Congress. This is just another venue for political payback, and nothing more.

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