So how do you set up a joint CBS News, New York Times investigation — of Al Qa Qaa, or anything else?
We see this in today’s Al Qa Qaa story in the NYT:
What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times, working with the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” reported that the explosives at Al Qa Qaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.
Who calls whom to set up such an investigation? Were both organizations given the El Baradei letter at the same time? Was there a conference call among the Gang of 500? Who formulated the idea for a joint investigation and when? I thought news organizations competed with each other to get stories, that they normally were rivals. Not so in the case of Al Qa Qaa, apparently. So how did a joint investigation come to be?
Who is the Mary Mapes of this story? Jill Abramson and whom?
ADDENDUM
The reporting in the NYT story cited above appears to be contradicted by a CBS story with an earlier date. The colonel’s remarks in the NYT story are April 10, while an earlier CBS story of April 3 reported that US soldiers had surveyed Al Qa Qaa and found many things, including suspicious white powder. Perhaps contradicted is not the right word. The colonel who talked to the Times may well have not searched for anything, since, among other things, it had been done a week earlier, according to CBS reports. And the NYT’s colonel added:
A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.
Were those pesticides are Al Qa Qaa or somewhere else. That would also be interesting to know.