In today's New York Times report (2/22/12) about Khader Adnan--the Palestinian hunger striker challenging Israeli "administrative detention" practices--reporter Isabel Kershner allows this:

An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called the deal over Mr. Adnan "a workable arrangement" since ultimately he will be almost completing his four-month term of detention.

"We faced a dilemma," the official said. "On the one hand we did not want any harm to come to him, or the wider danger in that. On the other hand it is not healthy to set a precedent that every time a Palestinian terrorist goes on hunger strike, he gets a get-out-of-jail-free pass."

The "deal" is a reference to Israel's offer to free Adnan by mid-April.

The anonymous Israeli official is declaring Adnan a terrorist. If Israeli officials know this to be the case, they need not detain him without charge. They could bring a case against him for being a terrorist.

The Times is granting anonymity to a government official to declare Adnan is a criminal. This violates, among other things, the Times' own standards on granting anonymity.

And earlier this month the Times granted anonymity to a U.S. official who equated journalists who report on civilian casualties in Pakistan to Al-Qaeda sympathizers: "Let's be under no illusions--there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al-Qaeda succeed."

Is the Times' new policy on anonymity is that it should be granted rarely, but that a special exception be granted for government officials who want to smear those who challenge their power?

James Traub seemed a little bummed in a Sunday New York Times op-ed ("The End of American Intervention?," 2/18/10), that military cuts and changing priorities will mean fewer humanitarian interventions in America's future.

So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the world, but also less harm.

A leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention," Traub doesn't waste many words on the "harm" produced the by two decades of them, but he seems pretty sure about the "good." For instance, he writes that the post-Cold War period "raised the question of whether and when we would resort to force," a question he says was answered "when the Clinton administration felt compelled to respond to political chaos in Haiti and mass violence in the Balkans. Force could be used in pursuit of justice."

Traub doesn't mention that Clinton's Haiti intervention promoted anti-democratic forces (Extra! Update, 12/94) and that U.S. interference eventually scuttled that nation's democracy (Extra!, 7-8/06), bringing more chaos and bloodshed. Or that the bombing in the Balkans resulted in even more deadly recriminations against the people the US/NATO forces were allegedly protecting (Extra!, 1/08).

In fact, a close look at Traub's record shows he is generally supportive of U.S. military adventures whether they are dressed up with the "'humanitarian" label or not. From his lofty perches at the New York Times, Foreign Policy and elsewhere, Traub has seldom met an intervention he couldn't embrace. He supported early on an intervention in Darfur  (PBS Frontline interview (11/20/10) and Kyrgyzstan ("Not Too Late to Save Kyrgyzstan,'' Foreign Policy, 6/22/10).

But he was willing to scuttle set aside the "humanitarian" qualification to get at Libya, as he wrote in a Foreign Policy piece last year (3/11/11) headlined "Stepping In: Libya Doesn't Meet Any of the Criteria for a Humanitarian Intervention. We Should Do It Anyway."

The U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003 was launched over supposed weapons of mass destruction, but in a 2005 book review (New York Times, 10/30/05), Traub tried to argue that the Iraq War was started for humanitarian reasons, that "the case for war did not actually depend on the threat of imminent attack--even if the White House said otherwise."

But even the premise of Traub's Times op-ed, that the future will necessarily see fewer U.S. interventions, seems suspect. For instance, he doesn't mention the U.S.'s expanding use of drone missile strikes, or the increasing number of nations in which U.S. special forces are deployed--while it was 60 nations at end of the Bush administration, according to Nick Turse (Tomdispatch, 8/3/11), "By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120."

According to Traub, the White House is currently pivoting away from the Middle East to prioritize the Pacific and China. Reflecting on the challenge of China, Traub writes, with no apparent irony:

China is an emerging power, and once having found their footing, emerging powers usually seek to expand at the expense of their neighbors. The world is accustomed to dealing with this kind of problem, which involves persuading the bumptious power that its interests lie in cooperation rather than in confrontation.

But who's going to persuade a bumptious United States to abandon its policies of constant confrontation?

Bombing Iran could be a real strain for Israel, reports Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times ("Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets," 2/19/12).  No one's sure they can pull it off, what with the logistics involved:

Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran's air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously--and use at least 100 planes.

Everyone apparently agrees on the task in front of Israel, as Bumiller puts it: "Given that Israel would want to strike Iran's four major nuclear sites...."  Killing Iranians and spreading radioactive material over their countryside isn't an issue for the Times, where Iran seems to exist only as an obstacle to Israeli strategic interests.

But, Bumiller reports, the job could exceed Israel's offensive capabilities, raising the question of whether the U.S. might be "sucked into finishing the job." A job she's not altogether unexcited about:

Should the United States get involved--or decide to strike on its own--military analysts said that the Pentagon had the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the United States has plenty of refueling capability. Bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.

Perhaps the most telling line in Bumiller's cold, skewed accounting of the potential risks of an attack on Iran is in her peculiar notion of what would constitute a state of war:

Iran could also strike back with missiles that could hit Israel, opening a new war in the Middle East, though some Israeli officials have argued that the consequences would be worse if Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon.

War would ensue the instant Iran responded to being bombed? This is not only bizarre wording, it ignores the low-intensity war that has been waged against Iran over the past few years, including explosions at nuclear facilities, the assassination of its scientists and the arming of insurgent groups in Iran's border areas.

Huffington Post reporter Michael Calderone (2/17/12) has a fairly comprehensive look at the way media are covering Iran (I wish he'd cited FAIR's long record on this; perhaps next time). The point is that Iran coverage looks a whole lot like Iraq coverage, circa 2002. Really bad, in other words.

Calderone gets a pretty revealing comment from an insider:

One national security reporter, who has covered the intelligence community and Iran but was not authorized to comment, says that pre-Iraq War coverage and recent Iran coverage are "terrifyingly similar."

"I don't think we are falling totally back into where we were before, but I do think you're seeing, in some corners of our profession, we're making the same mistakes we made a decade ago," the reporter said. "We're taking things at face value and we're rushing to get ahead of a story that we don't know where it's going."

The piece is worth a read. But I was struck by the on-the-record comments at the end from a veteran investigative reporter:

NBC investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, who co-authored Hubris, a 2006 book on the selling of the Iraq War, said that "it's unfortunate that the experience in Iraq has so colored the debate on Iran, as to perhaps make it more difficult to focus on what the real issues are."

"People who are skeptical about claims about an Iranian nuclear program will point to the Iraq experience," Isikoff added. "That doesn't mean they're right and it doesn't mean they're wrong. It just means, it's just a historical fact that we're going to look at these issues through the lens of the misleading claims that were made about Iraq."

I think that's completely upside down. To the extent that the Iraq experience at all "colors" the Iran debate, it's made people--not necessarily journalists--more skeptical of what politicians and pundits are saying. Contrary to what Isikoff seems to be saying, skepticism need not be "right"--journalism isn't about placing bets on a particular outcome. As FAIR was arguing in 2003, we did not know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. What we could know was that efforts to find them were turning up empty, and that the claims by U.S. officials could not be independently substantiated.

Skepticism is essential to good journalism,  and it was in short supply in 2002. If there is more of it now, that is nothing but a positive development.

For years prominent corporate media pundits have told us that the world--and the media--would embrace a dramatic, non-violent Palestinian resistance movement. If only such a movement--perhaps led by a Gandhi-like figure--were to finally emerge, we are told, the media coverage will come, and sympathy from across the world will strengthen support for the Palestinian cause.

This is nonsense--there has been non-violent Palestinian resistance for years. But that fact hasn't stopped pundits like Time's Joe Klein, as recently as last year,  from wondering why Palestinians haven't found their Gandhi. Or New York Times columnist Tom Friedman from writing a column (5/24/11) arguing that if Palestinians would simply adopt peaceful resistance  "it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there."

Or consider New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing (7/10/10) under the headline "Waiting for Gandhi," that if Palestinians would finally pursue nonviolent resistance, "Those images would be on televisions around the world."

"So far there is no Palestinian version of Martin Luther King Jr.," Kristof wrote--though he singled out one possible candidate, activist Ayed Morrar, who "spent six years in Israeli prisons but seems devoid of bitterness."

Perhaps that is the standard--jailed by the Israelis, but not bitter.

But what about someone, right now, resisting Israeli detention practices? Someone whose hunger strike is attracting attention around the world? That is Khader Adnan. As Ali Abunimah tells his story:

The 33-year-old Palestinian baker, husband, father and graduate student has refused food since December 18, a day after he was arrested in a nighttime raid on his family home by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank. He has lost over 40 kgs and his wife Randa and young daughters have described his appearance as "shocking."

Adnan, whom Israel says is a member of Islamic Jihad, was given a four-month "administrative detention" order by the Israeli military--meaning that he is held without being charged for any crime or trial, a practice continued by Israel that dates back to British colonial days.

Yesterday an Israeli military court rejected Adnan's appeal against the arbitrary detention. Having vowed to maintain his hunger strike until he is released or charged, the judge--an Israeli military officer--might as well have sentenced Khader Adnan to death, unless there is urgent international intervention.

Though the life in his body hangs on by a thread, his spirit is unbroken.

The pundits who tell us that they crave a dramatic nonviolent Palestinian narrative can write the story of Khader Adnan, who has drawn comparisons to celebrated Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.

But they are not writing his story. His plight is sparsely covered in the U.S. corporate media, and would seem to go unmentioned by these pundits who seem eager to tell stories like his.

It might lead one to believe that Friedman and his ilk don't really mean what they write.

A cover that declares a "War on Christians" is bound to get some attention.

Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk "about Muslims as victims of abuse," because really it's the other way around:

A wholly different kind of war is underway--an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

To suggest that a genocide is underway is, of course, a serious charge. And Hirsi Ali alleges that it is widespread:

In recent years, the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.

To make matters worse the media have been cowed into silence, due to "the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation--a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia--and the Council on American-Islamic Relations." She writes:

Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called "Islamophobia"--a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

So there is a genocide underway, and there are specific groups obscuring this fact and steering media away from covering this horror--in effect making them complicit in the genocide.

This is a remarkably serious charge. It is rather shocking to see it printed in a national magazine with so little evidence.

Ali's piece is accompanied by a large graphic (which doesn't appear to be online) labeled "Terrorist Attacks on Christians in Africa, the Middle East and Asia." According to the graph, there were 45 such attacks in 2010. Violence of this sort is tragic; the anecdotes Hirsi Ali cites from Nigeria sound horrific.

But is it a genocide? And is the violence directed against Christians on the basis of religion? It is hard to see how one could make such a leap. In Egypt, for instance, Hirsi Ali points to an incident where Christian protesters were killed by state security forces. Hundreds have been killed in similar circumstances in Egypt over the past year.  They were not all Christians, and they were not killed in a drive to stamp out members of a particular faith.

Hirsi Ali finds similar evidence elsewhere: "Since 2003, more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone." Of course, Baghdad has suffered terrible violence since the U.S. invasion and occupation. It is unclear why these particular deaths, a small percentage of total killings in Baghdad, should be considered part of a genocidal Muslim campaign against Christians. She adds that "thousands" of Iraqi Christians have fled their homes. But millions of Iraqis have done the same, across ethnic and religious lines. It's hard to conclude that anti-Christian genocide is the story that is being kept out of the media by the likes of CAIR.

Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must "please get our priorities straight.... Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world."

It's hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.

The media coverage of Iran is terrible, and seems to be getting worse--see Glenn Greenwald's latest piece on the ABC and NBC nightly newscasts.

And today the New York Times (2/15/12) tells readers this about Iran's nuclear program:

The new uranium enrichment plant, known as Fordo, has raised Western concerns because it is buried deep underground, making it more impervious to scrutiny.

That struck me as odd, since Fordo is, like other Iranian nuclear facilities, regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the Times seems to know this, since a few paragraphs later, correspondent Rick Gladstone reported:

Last month, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, confirmed that Iran had started uranium enrichment at Fordo.

The "problem" with Fordo is not that it is "impervious to scrutiny." The problem is that it could be very difficult to bomb. (The facility is "in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States," as the Times magazine recently reported.)

Elsewhere in the paper, the Times casually notes that "Iranian saber rattling is increasing the sense of instability in the Middle East."

Alexander Cockburn's latest piece at CounterPunch (2/10/12) included this from a tipster:

I was visiting ABC News the other day to see a friend who works on graphics. When I went to his room, he showed me all the graphics he was making in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Iran; not just maps, but flight patterns, trajectories and 3-D models of U.S. aircraft carrier fleets.

But what was most disturbing--was that ABC, and presumably other networks, have been rehearsing these scenarios for over two weeks, with newscasters and retired generals in front of maps talking about missiles and delivery systems, and at their newsdesks-–the screens are emblazoned with "This Is a Drill" to assure they don't go out on air (like War of the Worlds).

Then reports of counter-attacks by Hezbollah in Lebanon with rockets on Israeli cities--it was mind-numbing. Very disturbing--when pre-visualization becomes real.

Does that kind of thing actually happen? Well, yeah.

CBS "practiced" covering a U.S. bombing of Iraq back in 1998--and the footage was apparently fed to a satellite (L.A. Times, 2/20/98):

CBS jumped the gun Friday on a possible U.S. attack on Iraq: The network inadvertently transmitted a practice news report via satellite that could be picked up by television stations and viewers with special equipment.

To try out new graphics for combat coverage in the event the U.S. goes forward with the threatened bombing of Iraq, CBS anchor Dan Rather was rehearsing with Pentagon correspondent David Martin over a closed line between CBS's New York headquarters and its Washington news bureau. The report was mistakenly sent up to a communications satellite.

The conventional understanding you get from the media is that Israel is worried that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a serious threat to the country's existence.

Is that really what's happening, though? Another interpretation is that Iran might want nuclear weapons not to launch any such an attack but to prevent an attack on its country--nuclear deterrence, in other words. (Of course, it's important to note that there is currently no evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.)

I was struck when I heard Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman bring up some of these ideas on NPR's Talk of the Nation on January 30. Bergman is no outsider critic of Israeli policy; when he appeared recently on the NewsHour (1/12/12) and was asked about the assassination of Iranian scientists, his answer was: "I don't know. And even if I knew, I would tell you that I don't know."

Here's what he said on NPR, appearing to talk about his New York Times magazine piece on Israel and Iran:

NEAL CONAN: Chris, thanks very much for the call. Israel itself possesses, what, 300 nuclear weapons we believe, maybe more? Why does not deterrence work? Israel, of course, would retaliate if Iran were to use a nuclear weapon.

BERGMAN: I would assume that--oh, I know that most of Israel's leaders do not believe that Iran is going to use nuclear weapons against Israel. The problem is not the nuclear threat. The Iranians are not stupid. They want to live.... And I think that most leaders, and me personally as well, see that there are only a few people who believe that Iran would be hesitant enough to--sorry, brutal enough and stupid enough to use nuclear weapon against Israel.

The problem is that once Iran acquires this ability, it would change the balance of power in the Middle East. And a country that possesses nuclear weapon is a different country when it comes to support proxy jihadist movement. And these Israeli leaders afraid would significantly narrow down the variety of options from the point of view of Israel, just to quote one example coming from Minister of Defense Barak, when he said, just imagine--he told me in a meeting we had on the 13th of January in his house--said, just imagine, Ronen, that tomorrow we go into another war with Hezbollah in Lebanon like we did in 2006, and this time we are determined to take them out. But Iran comes forward and say, to attack Hezbollah is like attacking Iran, and we threaten you with nuclear weaponry.

Now, Minister of Defense Barak says it's not necessarily that we would be threatened not to attack, and we would decide to cancel the war, but it would certainly make us think twice.

In other words, Israel's position might be that an nuclear-armed Iran could make it harder to have future wars. That's a very different discussion from the one we're having now.

Alarmist corporate media coverage of the "threat" from Iran is everywhere, thanks to a Senate appearance yesterday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Clapper said very little in his remarks that would justify the propagandistic coverage we're seeing.  His main point was that Iran could launch attacks if it felt threatened. It is hard to see how this is particularly surprising. Clapper pointed to the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. as evidence that Iran seems more eager to assert itself, perhaps even inside the United States. But there were many people who raised serious questions about that rather implausible scenario (which involved hiring a Mexican drug gang to carry out the assassination).

As the Wall Street Journal reported (one of the few corporate outlets I saw pushing back against the official alarmism):

There is still widespread doubt that an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was authorized at the highest levels in Tehran, said Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"If that's the only data point, I think it's a stretch to conclude that the regime is now looking to commit acts of terror on U.S. soil," he said.

That kind of caution was in short supply on the network newscasts. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (1/31/12) announced:

Iran's threat. Not just the nuclear program. Tonight, U.S. intelligence warns Iran may be prepared to strike on American soil.

Williams called Clapper's testimony  a "chilling new assessment about the scope of the threat from Iran." As correspondent Andrea Mitchell explained,  "Experts warn that the U.S. is even more vulnerable than Israel if Iran retaliates or launches a pre-emptive bomb plot.... Soft U.S. targets like embassies throughout the Persian Gulf, and 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan, next door to Iran."

It wasn't until the end of Mitchell's report that any notes of caution were sounded:

Still, intelligence officials told the Senate today they don't think Iran has taken the final step, deciding to build a bomb. But Israel does think Iran has crossed that red line, and U.S. officials say if attacked, Iran would not hesitate to retaliate against both Israel and the U.S.

So Iran is a substantial threat, though then again it might not even be developing the weapons the U.S. and Israel claim are in the works. And really, the "threat" seems mostly that Iran might be ready to respond to an attack on its country--something virtually any country in the world would do.

But for sheer propaganda value, ABC World News' January 31 broadcast would be tough to top.

First, start with alarming graphic:

Then Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz announced, "The saber rattling from Iran has been constant."

Match that with threatening B-roll footage from the enemy country. Weapons  on display at a military parade, for instance:

Iran "may be more ready than ever to launch terror attacks in the United States," Raddatz explained. Cue footage of apparently menacing soldiers:

Don't forget to show the enemy county's leader (or, rather, a close approximation) meeting with other Official Enemies. Like this:

And why not one more, while reminding viewers that such figures "have little love for the U.S.":

It's important to remember, amidst all this hoopla, that it is U.S. military officials and the president who have regularly threatened that "no options" are "off the table" in dealing with Iran. That is code for using nuclear weapons--and Barack Obama's latest repetition of that apocalyptic threat got a standing ovation from Congress.

It is hard to argue honestly that the real escalation  is coming from the Iranian side. But that's what propaganda is for.

During an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski (1/25/12), NBC's Today host Ann Curry said this:

Well, one of the key topics that we have been hearing a lot about is all of this concern about Iran. You know what's been happening, the concerns, the tensions in the Straits of Hormuz, the concerns about Iran's rise in its efforts, everybody believes, in creating nuclear power--not only nuclear power, but nuclear weapons. Are we headed, in your view, based on all you know, for war with Iran?

Of course "everyone" doesn't believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. More to the point, no one has been able to show that they are. It's important to ask questions about whether we're headed towards war with Iran. But journalism that treats allegations about Iran as facts doesn't do anyone any good.

Evaluating reporting and commentary about Iran could be reduced to one simple rule: There is no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. Statements that suggest otherwise are misleading. Reports that fail to point this out are doing readers/viewers/listeners a disservice.

That sounds simple enough. But don't tell that to the outlets that are being criticized over their Iran reporting.

Take NPR and PBS, both of which were singled out by the group Just Foreign Policy.

A few days ago (1/10/12), the FAIR Blog featured a post criticizing the PBS NewsHour for a deceptive report on Iran. The report introduced a quote from Pentagon chief Leon Panetta with this statement by PBS anchor Margaret Warner: "The Iranian government insists that its nuclear activities are for peaceful energy purposes only, an assertion disputed by the U.S. and its allies."

Panetta's quote immediately followed: "We know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, do not develop a nuclear weapon." My point in that blog post was that right before he said this, Panetta had made a very candid admission about Iran, one that would no doubt be surprising to most corporate news consumers: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

The fact that the NewsHour would clip this statement from his soundbite was troubling. PBS ombud Michael Getler responded (1/12/12) by agreeing that we had a point:

I think FAIR makes a good journalistic catch in calling attention to the fuller quote by Panetta on CBS. It was a very brief and clear statement by the Defense secretary on an important point about whether Iran is actually developing a nuclear weapon.

And NewsHour foreign affairs and defense editor Mike Mosettig editor agrees that "it would have been better had we not lopped off the first part of the Panetta quote."

But Getler thinks it was unfair to to call the PBS edit "dishonest," and he explains why:

The logical understanding that NewsHour viewers--and anyone who has been following this subject--would draw from the portion of the Panetta quote that was used is that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon but that they are developing a "nuclear capability" and that the U.S. warning, as Panetta expressed it, is not to cross "our red line" and actually develop a weapon.

So viewers who are paying close attention to Iran coverage (and who are hopefully tuning out the rhetoric coming from many of the Republican presidential candidates) would know that when Panetta was saying, "We know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability," he meant that they were not trying to develop a nuclear weapon--even though the program had edited out his very straightforward explanation of what is actually known about the state of Iran's nuclear program.

This is a curious argument. One of the things that made Panetta's comment so revealing was that it represented a break from the usual chatter about Iran--even within the Obama administration. That's precisely what made it newsworthy. PBS seems to think its viewers should have to read between the lines in order to arrive at the accurate assessment about Iran's nuclear program they left on the cutting room floor.

Now to NPR.

The criticism of Robert Naiman and Just Foreign Policy centered on NPR reporter Tom Gjelten's statement that "the goal for the U.S. and its allies...[is] to convince Iran to give up a nuclear weapons program." The suggestion, it would seem, is that Iran is indeed pursuing such weapons.

But NPR ombud Edward Schumacher-Matos (1/13/12) sees it exactly the other way around. He writes:

The story didn't say or imply that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. As Bruce Auster, the senior editor for national security, notes, "The story was about how the sanctions are designed to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons program, which automatically suggests it may not have one."

Does NPR really think that the best way to inform its listeners is to assume that when people hear a report about forcing Iran to "give up a nuclear weapons program," these listeners should fill in the blanks themselves so as to arrive at an entirely different meaning? That every time you hear something about Iran's "nuclear weapons program," that is really code for "the-nuclear-weapons-program-that-may not exist-since-there-is-no-evidence-that-it-exists"? That'd be an unusual burden to place on listeners.

For good measure, the ombud throws in another defense of the NPR report by pointing out that the "quote carefully refers to 'a' program--using the indefinite article--and not the definite 'its' or 'the' program." Again, NPR listeners: If you hear one of the reporters use the word "a," remember that could be a reference to something that doesn't exist. Got it?

Last month the group Just Foreign Policy alerted readers to a Washington Post feature that was headlined "Iran's Quest to Possess Nuclear Weapons."

The Post changed the headline, and ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in with a column (12/7/11) saying that

the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Pexton added that Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman  "and his Web army were right. The headline and subhead were misleading."

At the Post's editorial page, these facts apparently don't matter. Their editorial today (1/11/12) about Iran sanctions closes with this:

Iran may be feeling some economic pain, and it may be isolated. But its drive for nuclear weapons continues.

How many "Web armies" will it take for the editorial page to get the facts right?

As if tensions between the United States and Iran weren't high enough, here's PBS NewsHour anchor Margaret Warner (1/9/12):

The Iranian government insists that its nuclear activities are for peaceful energy purposes only, an assertion disputed by the U.S. and its allies. On CBS yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta repeated international demands that Iran stop enriching uranium.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE LEON PANETTA: But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us. They need to know that, if they take that step, that they're going to get stopped.

The way that's presented you'd think that the United States has evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapon. Leon Panetta's soundbite is from his appearance on Face The Nation on Sunday. But the NewsHour removed one key phrase; right before Panetta says, "But we know," he said this:

Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.

So Panetta's statement--that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon--is being used to argue that the United States disputes Iran's long-standing contention that it not building a nuclear weapon.

FAIR's latest Action Alert (1/6/12) urges activists to contact the New York Times about its repeated assertions, contrary to the available evidence, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Feel free to leave copies of your messages to the Times in the comments thread here, along with any thoughts on the alert.