The best stories in The New York Times often involve the Gray Lady’s self-flagellation over a doozy of a mistake, and Saturday was one of those days. The paper was crowded with confessions, explanations and apologies over a disgraced podcast called “Caliphate” that went off the rails and into the weeds of fiction.
Over 12 episodes in 2018, the program promoted the false boasts of a Pakistani man living in Canada who claimed he murdered and beheaded people as a member of Islamic State in Syria. The man, Shehroze Chaudhry, who went by the name Abu Huzayfah, also told tales about terrorist leaders using maps to plan attacks on Western targets and aiming for another 9/11. “They wanted to outdo Al Qaeda,” Chaudhry warned.
