Over the past few days, the long-time claim of The New York Times that it is the newspaper of record was finally and absolutely demolished.

How did this happen?

On Sunday, in a Page One three-column above the fold story entitled Terror Suspect’s Path From Streets To Brig, The Times reported on the life of terror suspect Jose Padilla. The 6,280 word story begins by telling us of the four years that Padilla spent in juvenile detention following his murder of a Mexican immigrant. After this it recounts Padilla’s arrest on two charges related to an incident in which he pulled a gun on a man whose driving he disliked.

A succeeding paragraph of the piece reads:

Pleading guilty to both sets of charges, Mr. Padilla got out of jail after 10 months. It was the summer of 1992, he was 21, and he did not end up behind bars again until the F.B.I. took him into custody nearly ten years later. He also did not, as Mr. Ashcroft stated, travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan “subsequent to his release from prison.” He spent the six years after his release —- from jail, not from prison —- living in Florida.

The meaning of the passage appears clear. Anxious to justify his detention of Mr. Padilla, who is a U.S. citizen, as an enemy combatant, the Attorney General of the United States falsely claimed that Padilla had gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Implied but not stated directly by Ashcroft is the suggestion that Padilla went to these countries to train with Al-Qaeda. The Times intimates that this also is doubtful.

Yet, much further along in the story, after we’ve learned that interrogated Al-Qaeda members had identified Padilla as one of their number, there’s mention of an airplane flight Padilla took from Karachi, Pakistan.

So was the Attorney General lying or not? Had Jose Padilla been in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whether for terrorist training or some other reason?

When I spoke to Deborah Sontag, The Times’ reporter credited in the piece’s byline, she claimed that her words had been changed in the editing process. Ms. Sontag claims that the paragraph’s syntax is clear and that it does not suggest what it obviously does suggest: that Ashcroft deliberately slandered Padilla by making up accounts of his trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sontag says that she merely meant to suggest that the term “subsequent” was “liberally” employed and misleading as Ashcroft used it, granted the passage of time between Padilla’s second release from detention and his later trips.

Since the article’s publication, The Times has not published an apology, a clarification or a correction. Additionally, the passage can be currently found online in The Times online edition in its original form. Indeed, it seems that until now no one had even noticed the mistake. In fact, Ms. Sontag was baffled by my questions when I first brought the matter up with her.

Now it’s hard and not necessarily meaningful to determine who at The Times is responsible for the blunder.

Ms. Sontag’s long history of incompetence has been widely written about already. Among her most famous howlers was a 6,000 word piece claiming that Yasser Arafat really believed in co-existence with Israel, and that he had not rejected Ehud Barak’s peace overtures. This July 2001 article somehow neglected to mention the fact that Arafat had called for “jihad” only days after signing the Accord. Likewise, it somehow forgot to point out, in contravention of the Accord, that the Palestinian Authority had printed and broadcast documents like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. And it somehow failed to acknowledge Mr. Arafat’s guidance of the Al-Aqsa terror brigades, an obvious violation of the Accord.

When I tried to ask Ms. Sontag about her past writing and the coverage the paper had done of other Mideast issues, she refused to answer any more questions and referred me to The Times’ public relations department.

That said, she gives the impression (on the phone at least) of being a pleasant, polite person — albeit one who unfortunately suffers from various delusions from which she draws comfort, fantasies she is hardly eager to give up, and misconceptions that color her writing and reporting.

But the real issue with respect to this latest goof is not whether the blame should justly be placed at her feet or at her editors. The issue is this: The Times falsely accused the Attorney General of the United States of making things up and for two days no one noticed!

A paper that can make such an error without attracting immediate and sustained attention is not a newspaper of record and probably hasn’t been one for a long time.