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"Highly Debat-able": journalist fabricates Iran attack story, Obama interview
Stephen Spruiell, National Review
Alexis Debat, who stands accused of faking dozens of interviews and news stories, is the same guy who was quoted as a "security expert" in this explosive article in The Sunday Times just a few weeks ago:
THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for "pinprick strikes" against Iran's nuclear facilities. "They're about taking out the entire Iranian military," he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: "Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same." It was, he added, a "very legitimate strategic calculus".
This article was linked on Drudge and prompted a big-time lefty freakout. At the time, I was highly skeptical that this guy would be in any position to know what U.S. military was planning to do about Iran. That was before learning about his serial fabrications. At this point it's hard to believe any story based on this guy's word.
De[moon]bat just admitted to faking an interview with Barack Obama:
A former ABC News consultant fired last year because he couldn't authenticate academic credentials is at the center of a new dispute over apparently faked interviews with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and others.
The consultant, Alexis Debat, quit the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, on Wednesday after Obama's representatives claimed an interview with the senator appearing under Debat's byline in the French magazine Politique Internationale never took place. The interview quoted the Democratic presidential candidate as saying the Iraq war was "a defeat for America."
Pelosi, Gates, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all said they never gave interviews that appeared in the magazine under Debat's byline, ABC News' Web site, the Blotter, reported on Thursday.
Debat acknowledged to The Associated Press on Thursday that he never conducted any of the interviews published under his byline. He said he hired another reporter, Rob Sherman, to conduct the Obama interview. He said he translated the remarks and sent them in to the French journal, which published it under Debat's byline. . . .
Politique Internationale editor and political scientist Patrick Wajsman . . . called Debat "a grand liar" and said he had hired a lawyer to pursue "all possible measures" against him. "We are the first victims. I am falling from the moon," he told The AP. "We were betrayed." . . .
Posted by: Mike 2007-09-14 |
