The New York Times is furiously wiping something off its face, and it doesn’t look like egg to me.

Once again, they have been caught simply making up stuff and passing it along, hiding behind the flimsy skirts of the anonymous source routine:

McClatchy Newpapers is reporting that “U.S. officials” are contending that there is “no credible evidence” that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was trained by foreign terrorists. But, wait wait! I would have sworn that two days ago, the New York Times was reporting that evidence of such a linkage was “mounting?” Looks like somebody jumped the gun!

Indeed, on May 5th, the Times published an article entitled “Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Bomb Plot”.
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It’s the same old story, really. There’s a big war on terror story — say, a drone strike or some such thing — and a passel of reporters run to “officials” and write down whatever they say. “Oh, yeah,” Anonymous Source will say, “We got some really bad guys with that drone attack!” Only later, when the reporters take over the ball from the stenographers, do we learn that none of that is actually true, and there’s no way to hold any officials accountable, because they’ve been granted anonymity.

But I think this is my favorite part of this whole saga. In their premature ejaculation, the Times mentions that in “a video on Sunday, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing.” (Follow that link if you like! It’s in the original, and takes you to another page on the Times website with the exact same sentence and link, which, if followed, keeps taking you back to the second page.)

If you want to know what the Pakistani Taliban actually said, here you go:
The group yesterday reversed that earlier position, with one spokesman saying the Pakistani Taliban had nothing to do with the attempted bombing, but adding: “Such attacks are welcome.”

“We have no relation with Faisal. However, he is our Muslim brother,” Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq told the AP in Pakistan by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We feel proud of Faisal. He did a brave job.”

I don’t know about you but this reminds me of the good old days, when the NYT gave free rein to the likes of Judy Miller to lap up stuff from the mouths of anonymous sources with an axe to grind, truth be damned.