Well, sort of:
Oct. 21, 2002 | Black feathers on Bill's menu
William Safire, who wrote in September 1998 that he would have to eat crow if his predictions about imminent indictments in Whitewater, Travelgate and Filegate proved false, may now have to take seconds of that unwholesome bird. (And he still hasn't taken a bite of that first moldy carcass.)
Today on the front page of the newspaper that publishes Safire, James Risen shoots down a major story that Safire has been flogging for the past year to implicate Iraq in the September 11 attacks. Specifically, Safire has insisted in seven columns that terrorist ringleader Mohammad Atta met with an Iraqi spy under diplomatic cover in Prague. Those columns, at least, were based on stories emanating from the Czech and American governments. But Safire went much further, repeatedly accusing the CIA and others of consciously trying to cover up evidence of Iraq's cooperation with al-Qaida. Now we know that Czech president Vaclav Havel says there is no reliable evidence to bolster those charges.
Safire is never corrected and rarely corrects himself – no matter how outrageous or absurd his assertions turn out to be. Writing about sensitive, highly disputatious topics, he scorns careful qualifiers such as "reportedly" and "alleged." In addition to his predictions about the indictment of Hillary Clinton, which blew up in his face like a trick cigar, he falsely implicated Clinton aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal in criminal conspiracies. Does anybody know why Safire remains exempt from the standards that govern his colleagues?