[antimedia] antimedia: ABC seems to be working on....

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Posted by antimedia:
ABC seems to be working on....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1176870988.shtml


   ....the [1]hypocrites of the year award.

     It was a simple letter, just more than 100 words on two pieces of
     paper.
     But this singular document became one of the key pieces of
     evidence, the smoking gun, touted by the Bush administration to
     justify the invasion of Iraq. It's also the same piece of
     "evidence" that led to a perjury conviction for Vice President Dick
     Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis Libby.
     The July 2000 letter, which was obtained from Italian intelligence
     services, appeared to be an official correspondence from the Niger
     government to the president of Iraq, confirming a deal to sell 500
     tons of pure uranium to Iraq annually.
     But if the CIA had done a simple Internet search on some of the
     terms used in the letter, the agency would have quickly learned
     that it was a forgery.
     Instead, the letter was later cited by President Bush in his 2003
     State of the Union address as proof that Saddam Hussein was
     determined to build nuclear weapons, justifying a preemptive
     invasion of the country.
     That revelation is one of the central themes of "The Italian
     Letter," a new book by Washington Post editor Peter Eisner and
     journalist Knut Royce.
     "That document has mistakes in it that are sufficient to show that
     it's impossible that this operation could be real," Eisner told
     ABCNEWS.com. "Anybody, you or I, could have taken this and
     fact-checked this thing and we would have learned that this was
     nonsense. We would have learned that the organization in the
     letterhead hadn't been in existence for many years, that the person
     who signed it last served in that post in 1989 and that the court
     in Niger had been renamed in 1990." (Highlighting mine.)

   Someone who makes the patently false claim that Bush cited the forged
   letter in his SOU address should be the last person on earth to be
   lecturing others about fact-checking.
   The media's famous "fact checking" has brought us so many lies it's
   difficult to even list them in one post. Fake photographs, faked
   documents, completely faked stories -- the list is endless and
   disgusting. Wilson's lies. Kerry's Vietnam experiences. Rathergate.
   Reutersgate.
   You pompous asses have absolutely no room to talk.

References

   1. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3012688