The NY Times is intellectually honest….a bit

From today’s New York Times “Corrections” page:

A front-page article on Tuesday about criticism voiced by American military officers in Iraq over war plans omitted two words from an earlier comment by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps. General Wallace had said (with the omission indicated by uppercasing), "The enemy we're fighting is A BIT different from the one we war-gamed against."

I don’t view this as a minor mistake. The first version has the connotation that the general was shocked or surprised by the nature of the enemy; the correct version “a BIT different” take a more positive tone in the line of “adjustments need to be made.” I don’t want to make too much about this, but it was this kind of error that launched a thousand “quagmire” articles.