January 5, 2006
A few paragraphs from the article in the New York Observer
by Gabriel Sherman and Sheelah Kolhatkar on James Risen's book, "State
of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" (my
emphasis in bold): ". . . the book raises the question of how much of Mr. Risen's material - about W.M.D., for instance - was in The Times' hands but kept out of print until the arrival of State of War.
The Times' becalmed post–Judy Miller positioning notwithstanding, it's
hard to imagine the paper's explanation for its W.M.D. bungle - which
was largely attributed to Ms. Miller's bad sources - holding water if
reporting from Mr. Risen was coming in at the same time that tended to
contradict her accounts.
Certainly, his reporting on W.M.D. as it appears in State of War does just that.
Call him the Anti-Woodward: Though the Washington Post
reporter made famous in the Watergate scandal received information
about Plamegate, he kept it from his editors. But Mr. Risen, according
to several sources at The Times, couldn't get his material into
the paper fast enough. It's impossible to tell what material Mr. Risen
had on W.M.D. while working the national-security beat in 2002 and
2003. Either way, however, the material he has gathered for this book,
while keeping his reporting position at The Times, is some stunning stuff."
and:"According
to Mr. Risen's book, a C.I.A. agent approached a middle-aged woman
named Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi-born doctor living in Cleveland who had
left Iraq in 1979, with a top-secret mission. The C.I.A. asked her to
travel to Baghdad to extract information from her brother, who was
believed to be a 'key figure' in Saddam's nuclear-weapons program. Ms.
Alhaddad did, and was told in no uncertain terms by her brother that
Saddam's nuclear program 'has been dead since 1991.' Later, 'CIA
officials ignored the evidence' from Ms. Alhaddad and many family
members of other Iraqi weapons scientists who'd been sent on similar
missions, Mr. Risen writes. The chapter ends with her brother watching
Colin Powell's February 2003 televised presentation to the United
Nations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with shock."
and:". . . according to current and former Times sources familiar with the Washington bureau, Mr.
Risen was gathering reporting from sources in the prewar period that
cast a skeptical light on Saddam Hussein's alleged W.M.D. stockpiles,
but either couldn't get his stories in the paper or else found them
buried on the inside pages."
and, in case you think the Bush Administration really knows what it says it knows about Iran:"His
book ends on a slightly ominous note. In the last chapter, he describes
a massive error committed in 2004 by a C.I.A. officer charged with
handling communications with the agency's spies in Iran. After a
mistaken data transmission, a double agent handed over the names of all
the C.I.A.'s operatives in Iran to Iranian security officials, who went
and arrested many of them. It left the C.I.A. virtually unable to
gather intelligence about nuclear activities in Iran. Mr. Risen
describes the incident as an 'espionage disaster' that, 'of course, was
not reported in the press.'"
This is just confirmation of what
we already knew: as part of a massive Zionist conspiracy involving
Israeli agents planted in the Bush Administration, the New York Times published a long series of lies about alleged Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Times,
from at least one of its own reporters whose reporting they stifled,
knew these stories to be lies, but published them anyway in order to
force an illegal and immoral war that is going to cost American
taxpayers at least one trillion dollars. Americans should send the Times a bill for that trillion bucks. Why anyone would continue to buy this lying rag is completely beyond me.
|
