The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
‘For My Next Trick, Monkeys With Typewriters Produce Shakespeare’
“Plumber Uses Snake With Camera to Find Cat in Wall”–headline, Associated Press, May 18
The Last Roundup
Do you remember the big roundup of Muslims after 9/11? Neither do we, but Adam Liptak of the New York Times seems to think he does. Here’s how Liptak describes Javaid Iqbal, the losing party in a case the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday:
Mr. Iqbal, a cable television installer on Long Island, was among thousands of Muslim men rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks. Some, considered to be “of high interest,” were held in a special unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
How many “thousands of Muslim men” were “rounded up”? A 2004 Salon article titled “The Prisoner-Abuse Scandal at Home” puts the figure at 0.768 thousand. A report critical of the Bush administration … puts the number as high as 1.2 thousand–enough to make Liptak’s use of the plural accurate, but only technically so.
These sources, like the New York Times, were unsympathetic to the Bush administration. Unlike the news pages of the New York Times, they were openly unsympathetic. Also unlike the New York Times, they seem to have adhered to some standard of precision in their factual claims.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
