Corrections from the past week.

Corrections from the past week.

Corrections from the past week.

Slate's mistakes.
March 26 2004 4:00 PM

Corrections

In the Mar. 26 "Today's Papers" column, Sam Schechner misstated the Senate's vote total on the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. The bill passed by a vote of 61-38, not 68-31.

In the March 25 "Movies" review of Dogville, David Edelstein misstated the location where Lars von Trier shot the film. It was Sweden, not Denmark.

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A March 23 "Ballot Box" by William Saletan quoted Richard Clarke as saying on the March 21 edition of 60 Minutes (according to a CBS transcript):

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI or the head of the CIA, the attorney general, had to go to the White House and sit in the meeting and report on all of the things that they personally had done to stop the al-Qaida attack. So they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally, finding out all of the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the attorney general might have found out that there were al-Qaida operatives in the United States. FBI at lower levels knew. Never told me. Never told the highest levels in the FBI.

Clarke's book, however, says on Page 236 that the presence of al-Qaida operatives was known by the CIA, not the FBI. Clarke writes:

Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States. I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree, red lights and bells should have been going off. They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism. I certainly know what I would have done, for we had done it at the Millennium: a nationwide manhunt, rousting anyone suspected of maybe, possibly having the slightest connection.

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The book version, which is the correct version, has been appended to the article. A subsequent article by William Saletan, published prior to receipt of a note flagging the error, originally and incorrectly said that the agency that knew two al-Qaida operatives were in the United States in the summer of 2001 was the FBI.

The March 23 "War Stories" originally identified former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as the author of The Price of Loyalty. In fact, Ron Suskind wrote the book: O'Neill was his chief source.

In the March 19 "Sandbox," Ann Hulbert misspelled Herbert Mason Hedberg's name as Hedberger.

A March 16 "Culturebox" incorrectly cited research from Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin. Based on her findings gathered from Massachusetts birth records, the number of college-educated women keeping their name has dropped from 23 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2000, not from 27 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2004, as originally stated.

A March 12 "Sandbox" about gay parenting stated that the same percentage of young adult children of homosexual and heterosexual mothers identified themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In fact, the researchers found that two out of 25 adult children of lesbian-headed households identified as gay or lesbian, compared to zero out of 20 children of straight mothers—a statistically insignificant difference.