Conyers Initiates Investigation into Intel Forgeries
August 21st, 2008House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, has released a series of letters initiating the Judiciary Committee’s review into allegations that senior administration officials approved the creation of fabricated documents to deceive the American public about the nuclear threat posed by Iraq in 2003.
The Committee contacted a number of administration and intelligence officials seeking their cooperation with its review, including former CIA director George Tenet. You can read the letters here on the committee’s Website.
Questions center on an alleged scheme to create a bogus letter in late 2003, linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, in a follow-up to Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, which includes an account of how the mysterious letter originated, according to this account from the independent ConsortiumNews.com.
Interestingly, this controversy was the subject of the first AP story out of D.C. filed by former Birmingham News reporter Brett Blackledge, and let’s just say he takes something of a pro-Bush White House position in the story, not the stance of a skeptical, objective reporter.
CIA officials deny fake Iraq-al-Qaida link letter
We report. You decide.
Do you tend to believe Suskind? Or Blackledge?
Tags: Brett Blackledge, WMD
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
The Bush administration’s denial of falsifying the “evidence” of WMDs in Iraq is patently false.
I was a member of the first Congressional delegation to visit Iraq after we resumed bombing under Clinton, with other staff members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in 1999. The administration tried to prevent our trip, but we persisted.
After that trip and much more research, I am fully convinced that the administration knew there were no WMDs there.
Brett Blackledge, a reporter who in his previous joy was deeply involved in the media and Republican harassment of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, which was driven by Karl Rove, is discredited here in the state of Alabama.
Blackledge is only one example of the serious right-ward shift of the Post since I worked in Congress.
When a journalist becomes a toady for the government, he discredits the media for which he works, in this case the AP.