NYTimes Bites on Gadhafi "Dead Daughter" Ploy

Do you notice the December 14 New York Times story about Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's 4 year-old daughter, killed in the 1986 U.S. bombing raid on Libya? Craig Smith reported, in a story on Gadhafi's son, that he was "just 14 in 1986 when American bombs destroyed his home and killed his 4-year-old sister. Despite that harsh experience he has emerged in the past few years as the new, Western-friendly face of this former pariah state."

The trouble is that Gadhafi never had a 4-year-old daughter and his son never had a 4-year-old sister.

USA Today's Barbara Slavin, who was in Libya at the time, set the record straight. "His adopted daughter was not killed," she said. "An infant girl was killed. I actually saw her body. She was adopted posthumously by Gadhafi. She was not related to Gadhafi."

USA Today has even gotten the story wrong. There was never any evidence that Gadhafi had a daughter.  A photo of his family before the bombing showed that he only had sons.  But the claim about the "death" of his adopted daughter was advanced after the bombing to generate sympathy for Gadhafi.  Foreign affairs reporter Barbara Slavin of USA Today was in Libya at the time, and she set the record straight.  She recently told us, "His adopted daughter was not killed.  An infant girl was killed.  I actually saw her body.  She was adopted posthumously by Gadhafi.  She was not related to Gadhafi."  Yet we found a story from January 25th of this year, posted on the USA Today website, that referred to the 1986 attack, which "killed 37 people, including Gadhafi's adopted daughter…"  One of the amazing things about this story is that the age of Gadhafi's daughter keeps changing.  She has been described as 18 months old or 3-years-old.  We found a story by Roland Flamini of UPI that referred to her being seven-years-old.