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| Home Front: Politix |
| Kennedy and Hersh Depend on LaRouche for Antiwar Information |
| 2004-05-18 |
| Progressing from the ridiculous to the sublime, the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg memorandum suggests that one staff member pretended to care for his wheelchair-bound wife in order to travel on undercover secret missions. Unfortunately, Kennedy staff members took the LaRouche organization at its word, and dragged the career government employee in for questioning on this allegation. Nice! The following month, I returned from a meeting at the National Security Council to Special Plans’ suite of offices on the first floor of the Pentagon (Kwiatkowski falsely wrote that we worked in the basement). Several colleagues were poring over a fax. Public Affairs had just brought it over, saying that a New Yorker fact checker had inquiries and that Seymour Hersh was planning an expose of our office. We answered his questions immediately. Many of his statements were factually wrong and repeated Kwiatkowski’s mistakes verbatim. But, when the article was posted on the Internet on May 5, 2003, Hersh had not incorporated any corrections; his article is rife with errors. No surprise here... Read the whole thing, and despair at the grand convergence of the idiots. |
| Posted by:Robert Crawford |
| #8 I think Rubin should have written the article so that the story makes sense. Starting right after the sentence I quoted, I became thoroughly lost. There's some deposition. There's some e-mail. There's some wheel chair. There's some people with wrong ranks. There's something about Powerpoint. It's incoherent. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-19 12:15:36 AM |
| #7 RE #6 I don't get your point, Mike. Rubin doesn't attempt a point by point exposee of the various (alleged) mistakes in Hersh's article. Maybe you think he should have, but I think it would have mired him in the details of a sub-plot. Also, I don't really get your first comment, either. eLarson's comment is a good first stab at a summary, doncha think? |
| Posted by: Wuzzalib 2004-05-18 7:21:56 PM |
| #6 Re #4: The basic mistakes described in this article don't have anything to do with what Hersh reported, as far as I can tell. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-18 4:59:48 PM |
| #5 eLarson - Unfortunately I think the Weekly World News is more accurate more often than the "newspapers of record." |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-05-18 3:58:33 PM |
| #4 The key points of the article as I saw them: - Kwiatkowski wanted to get in on the Internet publishing thing and used her position to do so. - She wrote about areas of the Pentagon she had never visited and made very basic mistakes. - Nonetheless, the people who published her work, or took it further, as the case may be, took her at her word, based on her position. Bottom line - In this era of 24-hour, non-stop news, The Scoop is all, and fact checking merely holds you back. In short: Journalism today is so much passing on of whispers from supposedly inside sources. Add to the mix "name journalists", such as Hersh, who long for the good old days when a Republican President could be hounded from office, and you've got "newspapers of record" being on par with the Weekly World News, and Senators spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2004-05-18 1:52:24 PM |
| #3 FOX News? Hello? Can any of you guys or gals pick this up and make it a cohesive story to get it out there? SENATOR BAGOGAS and LOONY LYNDON . . . this is too good! |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-18 11:44:07 AM |
| #2 I went and read (tried to read) the entire article at the Nation Review site. I could follow it until this sentence: "Upon her retirement, Kwiatkowski took her story to Jeff Steinberg, editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, the journal of Lyndon LaRouche’s movement." From that point on, the article is hard to understand beyond the idea that the author doesn't think that Kwiatkowski, Steinberg, Hersh, etc., are reliable. I think the article needed an editor. I can't figure out the narrative that is supposed to be told here. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-18 11:14:38 AM |
| #1 Beat me to it by half an hour! Aaaarrrugh! |
| Posted by: Mike 2004-05-18 11:01:57 AM |