Politico's Ben Smith, who has done some terrific reporting on this year's presidential race, has an item up on John McCain and evil. In it Smith suggests McCain is fudging facts -- or at least being careless -- for dramatic effect. The headline on the brief story, which occupied a spot on Politico's highly-trafficked front page, read :"McCain Cites Questionable 'Evil' Story." Did he?
At the Saddleback Forum on Saturday night, Rick Warren asked McCain: "Does evil exist? And if so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it or defeat it?" McCain's response was not a surprise: "Defeat it." And after speaking about the evil of radical Islamic extremism, he offered this short anecdote as an example:
Not long ago in Baghdad, Al Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace, and by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn't evil, you have to tell me what is.
Smith writes that "the horrifying story that terrorists used two women with Down Syndrome to carry bombs was a sensation in February, but The New York Times later suggested it hadn't happened that way."
According to the Times: "Psychiatric case files of two female suicide bombers who killed nearly 100 people in Baghdad this month show that they suffered from depression and schizophrenia but do not contain information indicating they had Down Syndrome, American officials said Wednesday."
Smith concludes that the story behind McCain's claim has thus been "cast into doubt."
But has it? Smith demonstrates something McCain did not claim -- that the women suicide bombers had Down Syndrome. (The Times article says it's "unclear" that they did.)
McCain never said they did. He said only that the suicide bombers were "mentally disabled." And, judging from the disorders cited in the Times story, they were. (The Social Security Administration's criteria for "disability evaluation under Social Security" includes schizophrenia and depression under "mental disorders." See here.
McCain was right.
