After Article on 'Kill List,' Rumors Fly Fast Did President Obama really add a 17-year-old girl to the counterterrorism "kill list" maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department? Did his political adviser, David Axelrod, really participate in discussions of which terrorist suspects should be targeted in drone strikes? And did The New York Times include those claims in an article May 29 on Mr. Obama's counterterrorism record? The answers are no, and no, and no. But all of the above has been repeated in thousands of postings across the Internet, as bloggers misconstrued what The Times reported and their errors raced across the Web. On the CBS program "Face the Nation" on Sunday, David Axelrod, a top political adviser to President Obama, was asked by the host, Bob Schieffer, about a report that he had been "present at a national security meeting when the president was making decisions about which terrorist we were going to track down and kill." Mr. Axelrod denied the claim, which Mr. Schieffer suggested had come from The New York Times. In fact, in an article on Mr. Obama's counterterrorism record published May 29, The Times reported that Mr. Axelrod had attended some Tuesday counterterrorism meetings in the White House Situation Room in the aftermath of the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in 2009. It did not say that Mr. Axelrod had participated in discussions of which terrorists should be placed on the so-called "kill list." But that assertion was falsely attributed to The Times article by The Weekly Standard and other conservative media outlets. On the left, too, there were thousands of posts with inaccurate claims about what The Times had reported. Many picked up what a blogger for the conspiracy-minded PrisonPlanet.com wrote on the day the article appeared: that The Times had said Mr. Obama had placed several Americans and a 17-year-old girl, all with alleged links to the branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen, on the kill list. What the article actually said was that Mr. Obama was shown an intelligence document at a Tuesday counterterrorism meeting in January 2010 with the names and photographs of the Qaeda suspects, including some Americans and a 17-year-old girl. The article said that Mr. Obama knew he might be asked to add such terrorism suspects to the kill list - but it did not say he had been asked to do it in this case. Nor did it say that he had done so. Some accounts of The Times story confused two different kinds of meetings. The Tuesday counterterrorism meetings in the White House Situation Room, attended by President Obama, sometimes touch on strikes or additions to the kill list but cover a far broader range of policy issues, according to officials who participate. Separately, there are periodic meetings to consider what are called "nominations" to the kill list, held by video conference, including multiple agencies and 100 or more participants. While those meetings make recommendations to the president through the National Security Council, the president himself does not participate.