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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (97519)	5/15/2003 7:26:55 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

France Claims U.S. Is Engaging in Disinformation Campaign nytimes.com [ In which Rummy explicitly denies leaking crap like that detailed in dynamic.washtimes.com to the Washington Times and other such "reputable" sources of right wing dogma, and he vouches for his "building" too. I guess since the Prince of Darkness aka He-who-must-not-be-named doesn't have an office there any more, Rummy may even be telling the "truth", in some plausible deniability sense of the word anyway ] From the IHT story: France took the highly unusual step today of complaining formally that it had been victimized by a campaign of "repeated disinformation," allegedly fed by officials in the Bush administration, that accused the French of providing military and diplomatic aid to Baghdad. The administration denied the existence of any such campaign. "There is, I don't think, any basis in fact to it," said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman. He added: "France is an ally; they're still friends." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose department and supporters are most often cited as a possible anonymous source of the stories, said he knew of no such campaign. "Certainly, there's no such campaign out of this building," he said. . . . Among other things, the challenged stories assert that France and Germany supplied Iraq with precision switches that could be used in nuclear weapons; that French companies sold Iraq spare parts for warplanes and military helicopters; that France possessed prohibited strains of human smallpox; and that France, most recently, helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing them with travel papers. From the Washington Times story: The French government secretly supplied fleeing Iraqi officials with passports in Syria that allowed them to escape to Europe, The Washington Times has learned. An unknown number of Iraqis who worked for Saddam Hussein's government were given passports by French officials in Syria, U.S. intelligence officials said. The passports are regarded as documents of the European Union, because of France's membership in the union, and have helped the Iraqis avoid capture, said officials familiar with intelligence reports. The French support, which was revealed through sensitive intelligence-gathering means, angered Pentagon, State Department and intelligence officials in Washington because it undermined the search for senior aides to Saddam, who fled Iraq in large numbers after the fall of Baghdad on April 9. The "sensitive intelligence-gathering means" apparently weren't in Rummy's "building", though. Perhaps the Washington Times got it from Debka, or maybe even a local "expert". The war is over, but the war propaganda machine won't wind down for a while yet.