Coincidence or plagiarism? The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd claims a controversial line from her Sunday column was borrowed from a friend, but Dowd didn’t know the friend read them on the website Talking Points Memo.

Dowd was criticized on the word mirroring by two bloggers (thejoshuablog) and then the Huffington Post, and later responded to allegations in an email to the Huffington Post, according to Marcus Baram. In that email, the veteran journalist explains how the "lifted" line in her Sunday column about torture and Iraq was the same as Josh Marshall’s TPM blog — but insists she wasn’t intentionally plagiarizing.

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Dowd’s online column originally read like this:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Here’s Talking Points Memo’s editor John Marshall on Thursday:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.