New Smoking Gun Of Pre-War Manipulation?
Let's hope this 'smoking gun' gets more media respect than the Downing Street one.
Smoking Gun on Manipulation of Iraq Intelligence? 'NY Times' Cites New Document
Ever since the Democrats briefly closed the U.S. Senate from view earlier this week, to protest alleged Republican foot-dragging in probing Bush administration pre-war manipulation of intelligence, the press has been asking: So what new evidence do the Democrats have in this matter?
Tomorrow, in its print edition, The New York Times starts to answer the question, with reporter Douglas Jehl disclosing the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It shows that an al-Qaeda official held by the Americans was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the basis for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002.
It declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda's work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports...
al-Libi? Scooter Libby? Coincidence??!... Possibly.
posted by BlueDuck @ 6:41 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I guess there was no new news this weekend that the NY Times needed to fill the slot on the front with a story the conservative Weekly Standard had been following/debunking over a year ago. And they followed up on it in April and today.
Of course back when Senator Levin first raised these allegations of exaggerated connections, he placed the blame on the "intelligence community." But that would only get you page A13 in the Times. If you want front page, above the fold you gotta blame Bush.
Well the Weekly Standard is hardly an unbiased place of journalistic integrity. It's the official neocon rag. This was was the baby of the Kristol gang and whether the NY Times is right or not here, I'm generally not inclined to take seriously the war defenses of the Standard.
Then again, the Times has its own issues with war coverage in the wake of the Miller revelations, so the whole thing is likely a big mess
I was mearly pointing out that this story is more than a year old and the NY Times is trotting it out like it's "new" news or something.
Ohh, ok. Well I think the Times was reporting it now as a 'Is this what the Democrats closed Congress to discuss?' type of thing.
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