Tom Friedman’s column today, while not the most asinine thing I’ve read from him this month (high bar, I know), contained this remarkable nugget:

This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis.

Now, a couple of thoughts.

The first would be that, as far as I am aware, this is a completely false statement. None of the 19 hijackers were Pakistanis. The planners were basically Saudi and Egyptians. And the financiers — well I don’t know enough about the attack to know who the financiers were, but I’m pretty sure if any of them were Pakistani, I would’ve heard about it from a source other than Tom Friedman nine years after the fact. So yes, I’d be happy to amend this post with more information, but for now, I’m calling it bullshit.

The second point would be Pakistan has more than enough actual responsiblity for various terrorist attacks that it’s quite stupid to blame Pakistanis for something they weren’t actually involved in. If you want to bring Pakistanis into it, use any number of other attacks (Faisal Shehzad being the most recent, though he was technically American but you know what I mean). But of course, those attacks wouldn’t jive with the various rhetorical devices Friedman loves so dearly, so they must be abandoned for this fiction. Friedman loves boiling complicated problems down into nifty little phrases that ostensibly show how remarkably adroit his analytic capabilities are but in actual fact show that he’s simplistic and naive, and this one is no different.

The third point would be I’m used to flat out lies coming from the Washington Post op-ed page (George Will on global warming anyone?) but not on the NYT page. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly enamored with that crowd (Frank Rich is basically the only one I really enjoy and trust). But usually their untruths are more half-truths, capable of being seen this way or that. But this one is completely and utterly false, which makes me wonder if a correction will be issued. Surely someone more important than me will be able to point this error out to the NYT? Assuming they do, a correction would be befitting, no?