Twitter Fight Over Iran

A State Department spokeswoman battled a New York Times story on Iran's nuclear fuel stockpile on Wednesday with a line-by-line challenge of the article on Twitter.

State Department acting spokeswoman Marie Harf tweeted at David Sanger, one of two New York Times reporters who authored a story Tuesday about the stockpile, saying many central tenets of the story were "not true." The pair reported on an assessment from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog organization, that the stockpile had grown by 20%.

Twitter brings out the best in nobody, and this week that includes two of the most prominent people in Washington's national security establishment: New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department senior adviser Marie Harf.

Their Twitter fighting is ostensibly over a technical issue in the Iran negotiations; Sanger had published a story reporting Iran had developed new nuclear fuel, which he suggested was a m