Bob's Links and Rants

Welcome to my rants page! You can contact me by e-mail: bob@goodsells.net. Blog roll. Site feed.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Okay, so they did have WMD's:
While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried.

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.
-- from Judith Miller's "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert" article in the NY Times on Monday. I basically rejected the article out of hand as nonsense based on the headline, but I didn't realize how ridiculous it was until I read this article from Counterpunch and went back to the Times online and read Miller's article in full. Watching a guy "in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap" point at the sand was her only contact with the so-called scientist.

More from Miller's article:
Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked.


I'd say that Miller, and the Times in general, are so embedded at this point that they will be giving birth to numerous military-fathered offspring next January. That they would run the article at all based on such non-information is appalling. It must recall the "good old days" for Russian veterans of Tass and Pravda.