And Matt Drudge links their story and adds an alarming photo of a missile launch.

(Oh no, Russia is already sending nukes our way!)

Was Russia really threatening to launch ballistic missiles or order some of its Combined-Arms Armies westward in the direction of the Fulda Gap?

No. Not really.

What the actual story said was:

Moscow argues that the missile shield would severely undermine the balance of European security and regards the proposed missile shield based in two former Communist countries as a hostile move.

“We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Obviously, Russia was merely alluding darkly to its own capabilities of using technical methods to gain an ability to defeat defensive missiles. Russia is threatening a particular kind of arms race not a nuclear first strike or an invasion of Western Europe.

National Enquirer-style misleading headlines may win Drudge and the London Times a few more readers today, but they certainly do not increase readers’ respect for those particular sources. I’d say that they are only trading future readers for some extra ones today.

Michelle Malkin today publicly identified a major case of fraud by one of the most prominent international members of the mainstream establishment media.

The Times (UK), on June 1st, ran a vitriolic anti-US news story, titled ‘Massacre Marines blinded by hate’, based entirely on selective quotation of an interview with Corporal James Crossan, a marine injured in the IED attack, which included a photo of supposed victims of American forces. The photo was actually taken six months earlier, and the bodies were the victims of a massacre by insurgents in a soccer stadium.

That lying bastard who wrote the smear story selectively quotes Crossan speculating, in a video interview with KING5 News in Seattle, on what might have happened after he had been evacuated by helicopter:

I think they were blinded by hate . . . and they just lost control.” Corporal Crossan, who passed out soon after being hit by the bomb in al-Haditha on November 19 last year, said that the unit had a lot of new members. “

They might have got scared or they were just p*****, really p***** off and did it.”

(Note: Crossan is only speculating on why marines might have shot civilians, if they actually had. He dd not witness any such thing personally.)

But he didn’t quote Crossan saying:

Crossan: We used to go out on patrols and have the little kids count the patrols and all that stuff and we couldn’t really do anything except grab them and throw them inside their houses…

KING 5 TV interviewer: Why would you do that? Because you were afraid that the kids were scouting for the insurgents or you thought they were in danger?

Crossan: There are little kids that scout for ‘em. ‘Cuz later that day we, along the main road there, we cut behind a few buildings and the next patrol that went out got hit. And that little kid that was just there and there was people all around. But the day that I got hit they were planning a major attack and it got spoiled, so, and there was like 20 some people, insurgents, that were gonna attack the cop that day.

Then we got hit by an IED and the cops sent out a squad of Marines, and the insurgents just started attacking then, just right off the bat and we just foiled it. We were just driving back from the cop. I remember taking a left and then a right, and then remember waking up from the ground for a split second. And then waking up in the helicopter and then finally knew what happened in the hospital.

KING 5: So after you were injured, also tell me, you lost one of your guys. What can you tell me about him?

Crossan: We lost Lance Col. Miguel Terrazas. He was a good guy. He was from El Paso, Texas. And he was my point man. He was pretty much the guy I went to if I needed anything.

Great work, Michelle Malkin.

The US Government really ought to deport leftwing London Times journalist Tim Reid for this one.