Notes from a former red Republican political strategist who's turned PURPLE...
WELCOME
Don't know if you've read me from the beginning in Oct. of '02 or stuck with me when my posts dropped off after Bush 2.0's re-election in '04 but 2008 is too important an election not
to comment given my unique perspective, so I blog. If you're new here and don't know what the hell I'm talking about, see below.
Way back at the end of 2001 when anthrax started popping up in the mail addressed to various people and news organizations, ABC News reported that the anthrax most likely was coming from Iraq and Saddam Hussein. They quoted 4 separate "confidential" sources to make this reporting. Well, it turns out that the anthrax was coming from inside the U. S. and not from Iraq but that narrative played very nicely with Bush 2.0's desire to overthrow Saddam and if Saddam was the one responsible for the anthrax in our country, that could be a good reason for war. Now, I'm not a big conspiracy theorist and usually don't buy into such but when we know that Bush 2.0 thought about making a U-2 spy plane look like a U.N. plane to try and get Saddam to shoot at them or as Seymour Hirsh recently is quoted as saying that Darth Cheney and company thought about dressing up some speed boats with U. S. special forces in them to draw us into conflict with the Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz, I wouldn't put anything by them. To that end, I believe that ABC News should answer the below three questions (By Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor) so we can see which cronies of Bush 2.0 was spreading these "anthrax from Iraq" claims. Could Scooter Libby have his hands in this pie too? Now for the questions ABC News needs to answer:
1. Sources who are granted confidentiality give up their rights when
they lie or mislead the reporter. Were you lied to or misled by your
sources when you reported several times in 2001 that anthrax found in
domestic attacks came from Iraq or showed signs of Iraqi involvement?
2. It now appears that the attacks were of domestic origin and the
anthrax came from within U.S. government facilities. This leads us to
ask you: who were the "four well-placed and separate sources" who
falsely told ABC News that tests conducted at Fort Detrick showed
bentonite in the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, causing ABC News to
connect the attacks to Iraq in multiple reports over a five day period
in October, 2001?
3. A substantially false story that helps make the case for war
by raising fears about enemies abroad attacking the United States is
released into public debate because of faulty reporting by ABC News.
How that happened and who was responsible is itself a major story of
public interest. What is ABC News doing to re-report these events, to
figure out what went wrong and to correct the record for the American
people who were misled?
Comments