:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 4.26.2003 ::
:: For your consideration ::
From The Age, Australia:
The spooky provenance of the smoking gun that backfired
The fact remains that the Iraq war has been a boon for forgers and peddlers of misinformation.
Take the phoney war's great hoax: the dossier that Colin Powell finally presented to the UN in early March as "proof" that Iraq had imported illicit uranium ore from Niger. For months before that, the Bush Administration kept the file close to its chest, citing it constantly, but seldom letting anyone take a closer look.
Now, quietly, quite a few people are paying it a good deal more attention, including a handful of congressional investigators. Far from clearing up the mystery, however, the digging has only deepened it. What investigators have achieved isn't much, having teased just a few tantalising strands of truth from a dark web of deceit - but for laymen, the whodunit is as captivating as a le Carre novel.
"Who falsified this?" chief weapons inspector Hans Blix demanded last week, arguing that his team should be readmitted to occupied Iraq. "Is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?"
posted by me
:: 10:47:00 AM [+] ::
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