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I think you will enjoy this new article from Virtual Citizens titled "Who was first? A non-reporter broke the NSA “sex-spying” story. Then broadcast media followed.".

Of the hundreds of corporate and independent media outlets that falsely claimed this week (October 6-10, 2008) that ABC News broke a story about NSA spying, that I, David Swanson, first posted on AfterDowningStreet over a year ago (July 2007), only the guys at McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder, the same people who have done better reporting on Iraq than any other corporate journalists) have had the decency to put out a correction, and only the Sacramento Bee has posted it:

“A McClatchy Newspaper story on Page A13, Friday, 10 October 2008, about two former U.S. military linguists who alleged that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on the private telephone calls of American military officers, journalists and aid workers wrongly credited ABC News and “Democracy Now!” as the first to interview Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk.   Blogger David Swanson wrote about Kinne on July 1, 2007, and about Faulk on May 20, 2008.”

Why did McClatchy mention Democracy Now! (DN)? It was because DN phoned media outlets and complained that the report that ABC made the scoop was wrong, because they, DN, had broken the story.

This is what disturbs me the most. I like DN.  I have been a guest on the show. But I broke the story about NSA spying on Americans and illegal wiretaps almost a year before they did.  DN has never covered most of the major news in the scandal.  The team at DN only covered the bit about the targeting of journalists in the Palestine Hotel, a story they had been interested in and covering for years.

Nevertheless, I have contributed to Common Dreams and Truthout, but now various outlets just repost news from ABC, without corrections, no further reporting, and no apologies like the ones I’ve gotten from McClatchy.

And all McClatchy has wanted to do is apologize. Representatives at McClatchy told me they did nothing wrong because, while ABC might have taken the trouble to Google the names of its sources at the NSA, knowing full-well that I had reported on those people, McClathcy did not, so according to them, they practiced good journalism.  This is worse nonsense than it first appears, because what I want McClatchy and other outlets to do is not to mention my name, but to report the news that ABC has not reported.

The American public was lied into a war and the U.S. military killed journalists, intentionally, who were not playing along. And there are people available to bear witness to those facts.  Kim Zetter at Wired was willing to mention the evidence on the Palestine Hotel in her latest article, but not the evidence of press propaganda and efforts in furtherance of Bush administration war lies, especially not the evidence of lies involving the government of Israel.  Zetter did mention a fax from the Iraqi National Congress that I had reported, and she did her own reporting, which is more than anyone else has done.  If a single person at any major corporate media outlet did as good a job as Zetter or DN, a lot more Americans would know more about the crimes their country has committed.

So it is important that we somehow communicate this simple fact: A piece of news is not less newsworthy because the Disney Corporation does not cover it.

These are the facts I want reported:

1. WMD Lies

Adrienne Kinne describes an incident just prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq in which a fax came into her office at Fort Gordon in Georgia that purported to provide information on the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  The fax came from the Iraqi National Congress (remember, the English speaking, Iraqi ex-pats on the CIA payroll), who favored invasion.

The fax contained information that required translation and transmission to President Bush within 15 minutes. But Kinne had been eavesdropping on two non-governmental aid workers driving in Iraq who were panicked and trying to find safety before the bombs dropped. Kinne focused on trying to protect them, and was reprimanded for the delay in translating the fax.  She then challenged her commanding officer, Warrant Officer John Berry, on the credibility of the fax.  Berry told Kinne that it was not her place or his to challenge such things.  In fact, Kinne said that none of the other 20 or so people in the unit questioned anything.  (Kinne dates this incident to the period just before the official invasion of Iraq or possibly just after.  She says that because the U.S. engaged in so much bombing prior to the official invasion, she cannot be sure of the exact date).

2. Targeting Journalists in the Palestine Hotel

Many of the people, including Americans, whom Kinne spied on were journalists.  These included journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad that later showed up on a list of targets.  Again, Kinne says, she expressed concerns to her superior, letting him know that the military should be informed or the journalists should be warned to move to another location. Kinne says that Berry brushed her off.  He was, “completely behind the invasion of Iraq. He told us repeatedly that we needed to bomb those barbarians back to kingdom come.”  Ultimately Berry was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer.

3. More WMD Lies

David Murfee Faulk says that in May 2004 he found an extremely large text file containing grid coordinates for alleged chemical weapons sites in Iraq.  Faulk showed it to his supervisor, who was surprised.  But he was not surprised that the file existed, only that it had not been deleted. The supervisor said that he believed all such files had been deleted, and that there had been a great many of them.  In fact, according to this supervisor, U.S. Special Forces had gone to the locations and found nothing. Faulk’s supervisor told him, that is what usually happens when you get something from the Israelis.  “Four out of five times it’s complete and total bullshit.”

I asked CIA analyst Ray McGovern what he made of these accounts.  McGovern said that there is “no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.  Reporting from liaison services always needs to be taken with utmost reserve. Such caution is required, especially, when intel comes from the Israelis, the more so since they have unique access to the White House and Pentagon.  In effect, the Israelis are able to circumvent the intelligence bureaucracy that is designed to vet and evaluate raw intelligence and prevent unverified reports … lest [we] be misled.”

With regard to other pieces of Israeli “intelligence” on Iraq’s mythical weapons of “mass destruction,” McGovern said: “most of the Israeli ‘intelligence’ on chemical weapons in Iraq was of little or no value.  Worse still, data like coordinates for suspected chemical weapons-related sites could not be evaluated by objective intelligence analysts because the key function of imagery analysis was ceded by the CIA to the Pentagon in 1996.  What Sergeant was going to tell Rumsfeld that Israeli sources … or the likes of [Ahmed] Chalabi were not worth what Rumsfeld was paying for?  At the same time, if truth was not the objective, but reports on alleged WMD-related sites came in, well, then the Israelis were performing a useful service for the likes of Doug Feith …”

McGovern found it perfectly possible that “evidence” of the sort that Faulk stumbled upon was voluminous: “The neuralgic search for WMD pointed up the problem. U.S. chief WMD-searcher, David Kay (a Bush appointee), has told lurid stories of being awakened in Iraq at all hours by people working in the office of the Vice President: ‘Hey we got new coordinates; check them out!’”

McGovern recalled one instance of someone speaking openly about the quality of Israeli “intelligence.”  When John Negroponte was Director of National Intelligence, reporter Robert Siegel, of National Public Radio, asked Negroponte to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.  “I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do [is] give you the worst-case assessment,” Negroponte said.

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Sources

July 1, 2007, AfterDowningStreet.org Breaks Story of NSA Whistleblower Adrienne Kinne http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183

May 13, 2008, Democracy Now picks up the story of Kinne http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer_reveals_us

May 19, 2008, AfterDowningStreet.org Breaks Story of NSA Whistleblower David Murfee Faulk http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/33525

October 9, 2008, ABC News picks up both stories with a focus on phone sex http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5987804&page=1

October 10, 2008 Congress notices, yawns, scratches its ass, goes back to what it had been doing. Talk shows make jokes about the phone sex.

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