Letters to the Editor
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Are they that clever?
That the administration used the cunning tactic of simultaneously disseminating misinformation through back-channels and deploying 'counter-misinformation' through official channels may mitigate their folly, but it does not excuse it -- Ktwdawg
While reading Glenn's analysis on the previous ABC thread, my thought was that it was odd that ABC should have been pushing this bentonite business at the same time that the White House was denying any definite link between the anthrax attacks and Iraq. With the White House so keen to run with the equally bogus aluminum tubes or Nigerian yellowcake stories, right up to and including the somewhat dangerous outing of Valerie Plame, why would they deny this story? Were there crossed wires somewhere in the administration? Were the results of the actual tests on the anthrax samples already too widespread to deny, and if so, was there no Valerie to smear? Were ABC's four sources really not in the propaganda loop?
I missed the bentonite story at the time -- I'd already concluded that the President was likely to go after Iraq, and that his eagerness to do so clearly had nothing to do with 9/11, and as a consequence, I wasn't watching much television -- but I do remember a lot of speculation that an American expert on bioweapons was considered an oddball who might know more than he was saying, and was a person of interest to law enforcement as a result.
Apart from the simple explanation of hyperventilation and stupidity -- both available in copious quantity on network television, then and now -- what possible explanations requiring a conspiracy could be of more than passing concern here?
Ktwdawg's is the most diabolical, and possibly not beyond the intellectual means of a Cheney or the neocon geniuses around him who consider themselves master manipulators of our electoral sheep, but neither of them is exactly what you'd call subtle, and you'd expect that by now we'd have found their fingerprints, just as we did in the Plame case.
So who else might have fed ABC this tripe; Iraqi exiles eager to keep the war train rolling, non-administration government officials who were worried that the source of the anthrax was domestic, and didn't want to see the White House's narrative muddied by multiple enemies? Could ABC itself have simply been too eager to please, and mistaken in its interpretations of what its reporters were told, or could it have been in the grip of Disney neocons of its own?
Never having worked in Washington, either for the media or for the government, I have no real idea which, if any, of these theories is plausible, but as with Kennedy assassination theorists, some of whom sound perfectly expert, and well-supplied with credible evidence, yet don't pass the smell test in a number of ways perceptible to someone who wasn't born yesterday, I find it hard to believe that these ABC stories were planted in accordance with some over-arching narrative by some shadowy Washington apparat. More likely there was a great deal of sheer stupidity involved, and that stupidity is what Schneider would prefer not to have exposed.
Maybe Ktwdawg is right, in other words, but I doubt we'll ever really know, unless ABC itself comes clean.