Redhanded? The White House Deliberately Lied the Nation To War. What Now?

[stephendare]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/08/08/suskind/

Aug. 8, 2008 | If Ron Suskind's sensational charge that the White House and CIA colluded in forging evidence to justify the Iraq invasion isn't proved conclusively in his new book, "The Way of the World," then the sorry record of the Bush administration offers no basis to dismiss his allegation. Setting aside the relative credibility of the author and the government, the relevant question is whether the available facts demand a full investigation by a congressional committee, with testimony under oath.

When we look back at the events surrounding the emergence of the faked letter that is at the center of this controversy, a strong circumstantial case certainly can be made in support of Suskind's story.

That story begins during the final weeks of 2003, when everyone in the White House was suffering severe embarrassment over both the origins and the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. No evidence of significant connections between Saddam Hussein's regime and the al-Qaida terrorist organization had been discovered there either. Nothing in this costly misadventure was turning out as advertised by the Bush administration.

According to Suskind, the administration's highest officials -- presumably meaning President Bush and Vice President Cheney -- solved this problem by ordering the CIA to manufacture a document "proving" that Saddam had indeed been trying to build nuclear weapons and that he was also working with al-Qaida. The reported product of that order was a fake memorandum from Tahir Jalil Habbush, then chief of Saddam's intelligence service, to the dictator himself, dated July 1, 2001. The memo not only explicitly confirmed that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had received training in Baghdad for "attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy" but also carefully noted the arrival of a "shipment" from Niger via Libya, presumably of uranium yellowcake, the sole export of that impoverished African country.

Very incriminating, very convenient and not very believable. Indeed, it may be hard to imagine that even the CIA at its bumbling worst would concoct such a blatant counterfeit. But there are a few reasons to believe that, too.

On Dec. 14, 2003, the Sunday Telegraph hyped the phony Habbush memo as a front-page exclusive over the byline of Con Coughlin, the paper's foreign editor and chief Mideast correspondent, who has earned a reputation for promoting neoconservative claptrap. As I explained in a Salon blog post on Dec. 18, the story's sudden appearance in London was the harbinger of a disinformation campaign that quickly blew back to the United States -- where it was cited by William Safire on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Ignoring the bizarre Niger yellowcake reference, which practically screamed bullshit, Safire seized on Coughlin's story as proof of his own cherished theory about Saddam's sponsorship of 9/11.

Soon enough, however, the Habbush memo was discredited in Newsweek and elsewhere as a forgery for many reasons, notably including its contradiction of established facts concerning Atta's travels during 2001.

But the credulous Telegraph coverage is still significant now, because Coughlin identified the source of his amazing scoop as Ayad Allawi. For those who have forgotten the ambitious Allawi, he is a former Baathist who rebelled against Saddam, formed the Iraqi National Accord movement to fight the dictator, and was appointed to Iraq's interim Governing Council by the U.S. occupation authorities after the invasion.

Although Coughlin quoted Allawi at some length, neither he nor his source revealed how the Habbush memo had fallen into the hands of the Iraqi politician. But the Safire column made an allusion that now seems crucial, describing Allawi as "an Iraqi leader long considered reliable by intelligence agencies."

Specifically, Allawi was a longtime asset of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had funded his struggle against Saddam for years prior to the invasion. His CIA sponsorship is noted in nearly every news article about Allawi, usually contrasted with the Pentagon sponsorship of his political rival, Ahmed Chalabi, the infamous fabricator of WMD intelligence (and suspected double agent for Iran).

Obviously, Allawi's relationship with the CIA is worth reconsidering today in light of the charges in Suskind's book, even though by itself that relationship proves nothing. There is more, however.

On Dec. 11, 2003 -- three days before the Telegraph launched its "exclusive" on the Habbush memo -- the Washington Post published an article by Dana Priest and Robin Wright headlined "Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks." Buried inside on Page A41, their story outlined the CIA's efforts to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency:

"The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.

"Badran and Ayad Allawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein." (The Web link to the full story is broken but it can be found on Nexis.)

So Allawi was at the CIA during the week before Coughlin got that wonderful scoop. That may not be proof of anything, either, but a picture is beginning to form.

That picture becomes sharper in the months that followed Allawi's release of the Habbush forgery, when he suddenly returned to favor in Baghdad and eclipsed Chalabi, at least for a while. Five months later, in May 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council elected Allawi as his country's interim prime minister, reportedly under pressure from the American authorities. Combining subservience to the occupiers with iron-fisted tactics, he quickly squandered any popularity he might have enjoyed, and his INA party placed a humiliating third in the 2005 national elections.

That was the end of Allawi as a politician, yet perhaps he had already served his purpose. And it might be very interesting to hear what he would say today about the Habbush forgery -- and his broader relationship to the CIA and the Bush White House -- especially if he were to tell his story in a congressional hearing.

Until then there is much more to learn from Suskind's reporting, including new evidence that Bush and other officials knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

[RiversideGator]

Moderators:  Shouldnt this be moved to the National Politics section?

[RiversideGator]

Breaking news?  Right...   

[Midway ®]

I think that as topical breaking news, it's just fine where it is.

It is very sad indeed that the present administration has taken the country down this dishonorable path.

[JaguarReign]

Talk about living in the past. This war started 5 freakin years ago. Let's just get over it. The Iraq War is now pretty succesful and Bush is on his way out; so, I think this is old and obnoxious news.   

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/03/ma_273_01.html

     If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.

     In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become more important over the years), but because it would allow the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny access to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology."

     Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce. Already, over the past several months, Western companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake a claim to that bonanza.

     But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the profits that can be earned there. The administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

     "Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot."

     Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back."

     Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his first encounter with the idea that the United States should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries.

     In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep background briefing," Akins says. "You don't have eight people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time, independently.

     "Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I said on television that anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.

     Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil prices down through "massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate."

     In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

     Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be known as "neoconservatives," and they played important roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in 1991.

     Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the administration has been building on the steps taken by military and policy planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
     In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an "over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command
     In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new U.S. military command authority with responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a "strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War

Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while maintaining its close relationship with the United States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the late Ã"80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom. "The United States was being supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the French, even the Chinese," Freeman notes.

     All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a relationship that had been severely attrited," says Freeman.

     In the decade after the war, the United States sold more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and $16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons, and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

     Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan
     The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's strength in the region. The administration has won large increases in the defense budget -- which now stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian hinterland.

Step five: Iraq
     Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence. It is "highly possible" that the United States will maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time," he said. "When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies."

     Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

     To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into place."

continued at the link above.

I have to disagree with most of this article... while filled with facts the premise that America has imperialist aims in the middle east is at least wrong and at most paranoid.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
     In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf.

This was EXACTLY what Carter said it was.  Following those upheavals policy makers understood that disruptions of this oil supply was harmful to the U.S. and indeed the world.  Carter drew a line in the sand and told possible aggressors (The Soviets and Iranians)what would happen should they try and interrupt the flow of oil.

Step two: The Central Command
     In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities.

A prudent move.  We had NO facilities in the region capable of responding to a threat to the oil fields.  The Saudis and others in the region recognized that their (black gold) was extremely vulnerable.  We offered protection and they accepted.  It is a symbiotic relationship... we need their oil and want its flow uninterrupted...  they need our protection to continue to sell us oil.  This was done in our STRATEGIC NATIONAL INTEREST... nothing more.

Step three: The Gulf War

This one makes no sense... He seems to imply that we caused GW I so we could get permanent bases in the region... If it is not that then he only strengthens my view that the bases and facilities we had prior to Saddams invasion were inadequete to repel a threat to the oil supplies.  The countries of the region saw this also and invited more prepositioning and facilities.  This only makes STRATEGIC sense...

Step four: Afghanistan

I agree completely... Clearly Radical Islamic Fundamentalism is a threat to the stability of the region.

Step five: Iraq

It is "highly possible" that the United States will maintain military bases in Iraq

This statement is true despite the promises being made by some.  While we will undoubtedly withdraw the vast majority of our forces in the near future, airbases and preposition equipment and forces will remain in the desert for a long time.  This is nothing new nor is it sinister or imperial.  Japan, Germany, Italy are but a few countries we maintain forces and facilities. 

[RiversideGator]

NOTE:  This thread is still a matter for the National Politics section.  It is not breaking news but the same old leftist fantasies rehashed in a new article. 

[Midway ®]

NOTE:  Your opinions belong in politics.  But this thread belongs in news.  Your attempt to cover up the revelations that are ongoing in this case are contemptible, incidentally.

Why dont you move it to natl politics so crybaby can delete your posts?

[NotNow]

I would say that this is political opinion.  I have seen no evidence here proving the charges in the headlines or the thread title.  For some truth on the subject, however, look here:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium/

It is up to the individual to decide what the presence of this material means.  There does not appear to me to be any need to fabricate any aquisition of nuclear material.  And BT's narrative of the historical events in the gulf (and common sense I think) are sufficient to dismiss the Mother Jones article.  I've gotta go with RG on this that it appears to be mud thrown at the wall.  This is meant as a small input to this subject, not as an argument for or against the current conflict in Iraq.  

[JaguarReign]

NOTE:  Your opinions belong in politics.  But this thread belongs in news.  Your attempt to cover up the revelations that are ongoing in this case are contemptible, incidentally.

There are no new revelations in this, just the same old same old "Bush lied, people died" crap.

[JMac]

I don't your breaking story has much credibility.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121821851575024905.html

George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time, issued a statement arguing that the claim is not only false but implausible:

    It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the Administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-Al Qa'ida connections that went beyond the evidence. The notion that I would suddenly reverse our stance and have created and planted false evidence that was contrary to our own beliefs is ridiculous.

Suskind continues to stand behind his story--but his sources don't, NBC reports:

    Two former CIA officers denied that they or the spy agency faked an Iraqi intelligence document, as they are quoted as saying in Suskind's book "The Way of the World," published Tuesday. "I never received direction from George Tenet (CIA director at the time) or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document . . . as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book," said Robert Richer, the CIA's former deputy director of clandestine operations.

    Richer also said he talked Tuesday to John Maguire, who led the CIA's Iraq Operations Group at the time and who gave Richer "permission to state the following on his behalf: I never received any instruction from then Chief/NE Rob Richer or any other officer in my chain of command instructing me to fabricate such a letter. Further, I have no knowledge to the origins of the letter and as to how it circulated in Iraq," the statement said.

Suskind's dubious claim has given rise to an even more dubious claim from the fever swamps of the far right--namely The American Conservative, a magazine whose current cover story is an antiwar symposium about World War II. Philip Giraldi, a onetime CIA officer, claims that Suskind's story is true, but the CIA wasn't involved. Giraldi claims that it was the Pentagon, specifically Douglas Feith, then undersecretary for policy, that was behind the forgery.

Feith emails this response:

    The . . . accusation is a nonsensical lie vouched for by an anonymous source and promoted by a writer named Philip Giraldi who lives on the hate-filled fringe of the world of crazy Zionist conspiracy theories. Shame on the people and publications that give credence to such garbage!

Giraldi's assertion could hardly be more thinly sourced; he attributes it to "an extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community." As Giraldi describes it, Suskind's allegation "is correct but . . . a number of details are wrong." It's not clear, however, how Suskind's CIA sources are supposed to have known about this purported forgery if their agency had nothing to do with it.

At any rate, Giraldi's assertion quickly received favorable notice on Angry Left sites like ThinkProgress.com, the latest example of how the fringes of left and right converge.

[RiversideGator]

NOTE:  Your opinions belong in politics.  But this thread belongs in news.  Your attempt to cover up the revelations that are ongoing in this case are contemptible, incidentally.

Why dont you move it to natl politics so crybaby can delete your posts?

I never delete posts which contain only facts or opinion.  Posts which contain vitriol will always be deleted.  Try making your points without insults and your posts will remain.

[RiversideGator]

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/12/daily-show-ron-suskind-talks-liars-impeachment/

click the link to see the lie unveiled.

There is no doubt about it.

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml

Notnow, the lie isnt just about the yellow cake, its about tying saddaam to al quaeda.  The White House directed the CIA to FORGE a fraudulent letter.

Ah yes.  That respected new source, crooksandliars.com.   

Is this really your big source? 

[RiversideGator]

Jmac.

Nice to see you posting on the subject, thanks for the input.  I did want to point out however, that the Investigative journalism work that went into this expose is actually by one of the most respected journalists in the United States, Ron Suskind. Its hardly my story, nor is it the domain of the opinion page of the wall street journal.  Interestingly, Suskind is a former employee of the WSJ and was still working there in the Pre Murdoch days when he won the Pulitzer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Suskind

So, prior to December 17, 2007, you trusted totally the judgment of and information contained in the WSJ?  Interesting to know considering that their editorial stance has not really changed since the purchase by Murdoch.

The American Conservative is hardly a fringe magazine, as you can see from its wikipage here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Conservative,  and I think its a little insane to infer that anyone named suskind is somehow in on the 'world of crazy Zionist conspiracy theories.'  It turns out that Mr. Suskind was born and continues to be, Jewish.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Suskind#Career

Nice attempt to confuse the issue by misstating what was actually said.  However, as you know, the Zionist conspiracy theory bit related not to Suskind but to the originator of this whole nutty story.  Here is the actual quote from the story:

The . . . accusation is a nonsensical lie vouched for by an anonymous source and promoted by a writer named Philip Giraldi who lives on the hate-filled fringe of the world of crazy Zionist conspiracy theories. Shame on the people and publications that give credence to such garbage!

So, Suskind is relying on the conspiracy theories of this Philip Giraldi kook fringe character as his "source".  That was the point.

By the way, you will find that 'credibility' is usually not something you find on the 'opinion' pages of newspapers, especially of a Rupert Murdoch owned publication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Journal#News_Corp._purchase

No, crooksandliars.com is credibility personified.   

In case you werent aware, Murdoch is the same Australian billionaire who created the fox opinion network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

Translation:  Fox News present facts which are inconvenient to the advancement of my leftist ideology so it must be destroyed.

It also bears pointing out that Mr. Suskind has won several awards in journalism, including the Pulitzer despite only having his one career and only being able to rely on his own work.

Are you contending that the fact that a man won an award confers some aura of infallibility on him?

No one in the history of News Corp has ever won a pulitzer for any publication owned by Murdoch after being purchased by News Corp.   Makes you think doesnt it?

The Pulitzer Prize you are referring to is awarded to newspapers.

Awards are made in categories relating to newspaper journalism, arts, and letters. Only published reports and photographs by United States-based newspapers or daily news organizations are eligible for the journalism prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize

Murdoch has only owned a few papers in the US until now, such as the New York Post which has a tabloid format - not a format which is usually Pulitzer fodder.  The WSJ is his first major paper.  Expect him to get a Pulitzer soon.  So, this is really a non-issue.

[RiversideGator]

River, since most of the posts on this thread quote the work of Ron Suskind and the CIA operatives whose entire transcripts have also been made available on line, it doesnt surprise me in the least that you didnt read a damned word of this thread before you began posting in it.

The video, incidentally is of an interview with Ron Suskind,  Who is NOT employed by either crooksandliars or comedy central.

Honestly.  And we are supposed to believe that you are an attorney.

Must be easier work for some than others.

What kills me is that you absolutely do not care that the President of the United States has committed a felony resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans.

But I guess when you are a partisan hack, simple ethics and morality have to take second fiddle to your ideology.

Give me real evidence, Stephen.  BTW, personal insults are not persuasive now or ever.