lolgaxe wrote:
It's hard to ever really take Fox News serious, ever, but after they nearly broke their arms patting themselves on the back from taking credit for the 60 Minutes interview that ended up being completely false you'd think they'd not stick their necks out so far again.
I'm not sure how critiquing the NY Times piece is sticking their necks out at all. It's a critique. It's the NYT sticking its neck out with a story that is at best misleading and at worse a clear desire to rewrite the facts in order to fit into a narrative helpful to a future political campaign. When Fox News and Huff Post agree that your piece is factually questionable (to varying degrees), it's a good bet that your facts are questionable.
As to the piece itself, the whole Al Queda link or no link thing is really a meaningless distinction. Al Queda hasn't been a single cohesive until for nearly a decade, and wasn't really then either. Today, it's so splintered and factioned that you can argue that any Islamic terrorist group engaged in active Jihad against the US and its allies is "linked to Al Queda". And you could take every single one of those groups and argue similarly that there is "no link to Al Queda", based solely on how restrictive your definition of Al Queda is.
At the end of the day, what the group called itself, or who they reported to, or worked actively with, is somewhat irrelevant. When the point of saying "They're an Al Queda related group" is to say "it's an Islamic extremist group engaging in terrorist acts against the US", getting technical about what exactly comprises "Al Queda" kinda misses the whole point.
And the bigger issue is that while we can debate endlessly over whether we can technically call the group that engaged in the attacks "Al Queda linked", there is no evidence outside of wild speculation from within the US itself that the video in question had anything at all to do with the attack. It was an absurd claim when it was made and it's even more absurd now.