Press Release Reporting on Missile Defense

Conn Carroll / May 28, 2009

At National Review Institute’s Media Malpractice, Heritage senior fellow James Carafano takes the Washington Post to task for their sloppy reporting reporting on missile defense:

Where the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith are not flat out wrong in their May 19 article “U.S.-Russian Team Deems Missile Shield in Europe Ineffective”, they are flat out lazy. First the facts.

The EastWest Institute recently released a report titled “Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Potential: A Joint Assessment by U.S. and Russian Technical Experts.” The report concludes that a ballistic missile threat from Iran is not imminent, and that planned US missile defense would not be effective and threaten US-Russian cooperation.

Warrick and Smith wrote that “[m]oreover, if Iran were to build a nuclear-capable missile that could strike Europe, the defense shield proposed by the United States ‘could not engage that missile,’ the report says. The missile interceptors could also be easily fooled by decoys and other simple countermeasures, the report concludes.” This statement is factually incorrect. (more…)