Faulty Sources Isikoff & MSM previously used: Karen Kwiatkowski & Patrick Lang

[1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400

From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005):

This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources.

In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq interviewed Kwiatkowski based on her press statements and found that she could not give a single example to back up any of her allegations.

Simply put, she had never been to the unit she described nor as a Morocco desk officer, had she attended any Iraq planning meetings. But Isikoff accepted her word without criticism and without asking the basic questions an investigative reporter should.

(pp.282-283 accessible at: http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/13jul20041400/www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec9.pdf)

Isikoff was more interested in badmouthing the Pentagon than in evaluating his sources. His editors allowed him to get away with it because it was fashionable to badmouth Feith and the Bush administration.

Now people are dead. Not only Isikoff, but his editors should resign over his pattern of fabrication. - Michael Rubin

You Must be Likud! - Anti-Jewish rhetoric infects the West by Michael Rubin NRO Contributor

Sources remain anonymous when they have something to hide, or when they do not have the courage to speak their convictions outright.

The records of frequent anonymous intelligence and defense sources give cause to doubt.

Former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Patrick Lang, for example, has argued that Likud controls America. He told associates that Undersecretary of Policy Douglas Feith sought to make the Middle East safe for Jews by a process of "de-Arabization."

Several journalists have relied on Lang as a source as did television networks that used him as an analyst.

Most did not mention that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, Lang was a registered agent of a foreign government.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon official, is another anonymous source who has used a cloak of anonymity to peddle falsehoods.

Her writing betrays her bias and fringe ideology. She has claimed, for example, that there was a "neo-conservative coup" within the Pentagon and that officials strove to build a "greater Zion."

Kwiatkowski has bragged that she was the anonymous source for exposes by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, and for Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau.

She claimed insight into events and offices in which she has no first-hand knowledge.

Much of what Kwiatkowski told these publications was innuendo or outright fabrication. [snip]

Michael Rubin - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (formerly at the DOD). http://www.nationalreview.com/rubin/rubin200405190844.asp

I had a unique perspective as the LaRouche-Kwiatkowski conspiracy about my office grew. I was first alerted to the various conspiracies by journalists who, having known me from my time in academia and think tanks, asked me to confirm theories which, in retrospect, probably originated with Kwiatkowski.
I said the allegations had little basis in reality. But a few journalists said they had an "inside source," and continued to pursue the conspiracies; several found their way into print, corroborated by sources like Lang and retired intelligence professionals like ***Vince Cannistraro, Ray McGovern, and Judith Yaphe on the Lang distribution list. ------ From post #13

OCTOBER 21, 2003 : (PLAME NAME GAME/WILSON-NIGER-YELLOWCAKE FLAP - See PHILIP AGEE, RAY MCGOVERN, LYNDON LAROUCHE) The "scandal" over the naming of a CIA agent demonstrates the enormous liberal bias of the major media. The liberals were not concerned when pro-communist activists were naming CIA agents for the purpose of destroying secret operations against the Soviet Union and its client states. In fact, journalists relied on people such as CIA defector Philip Agee, who specialized in naming the names of CIA operatives, for stories. The federal law that prohibits the naming of agents under cover was passed in response to the activities of Agee and his associates.
Today, however, it has become a major controversy that one or two Bush administration officials have named a CIA employee to a respected conservative journalist, Robert Novak, who published the information. What those officials were doing, in their conversation with Novak, is far different than anything that Agee and his media collaborators ever did.
Incredibly, Agee, who wrote the book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," has come to the defense of Joe Wilson, whose wife’s employment by the CIA was revealed by Novak. Agee now runs a travel services business in—of all places—Havana, Cuba. Agee calls the outing of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife "dirty politics."
The affair is depicted as an attempt by the administration to take revenge on Ambassador Joseph Wilson for opposing Iraq policy. But the name of his wife was provided in the context of the administration trying to explain why Wilson was picked by the CIA to conduct a mission to investigate the Iraq/uranium matter. This is a potential conflict of interest with a possible partisan motivation. What’s more, as Internet writer Darren Kaplan points out, such a selection might violate the federal anti-nepotism statute, which prohibits federal employees from even recommending the appointment of family members for jobs. The real story, the Wall Street Journal reports, is whether a group of CIA bureaucrats is "hoping to defeat" Bush by undermining his foreign policy and whether the Wilson mission was part of that effort.
A group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, representing former CIA employees, has fanned the flames of this controversy. But its spokesman, Ray McGovern, has some explaining of his own to do. He admits that he has given permission to reprint his articles critical of the Bush administration to publications associated with Lyndon LaRouche. McGovern, who had a 27-year career in the CIA, says researchers for LaRouche "do some fairly good work" and he sees "no downside" to them using his material. He claims to know nothing about LaRouche.
That’s hard to believe. Larouche is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, again, and served time in prison on financial fraud charges. He has said that Bush and Cheney should be declared insane. Back in 1976, LaRouche called for bringing into being "a new Marxist International throughout the capitalist sector" and, before the first Persian Gulf War, he issued a statement calling for support for Iraq.
------ "CIA Defector Defends Joe Wilson," By Cliff Kincaid , AIM Report, October 21, 2003

*** Side note : Vince Cannistraro is going to be testifying at the Tampa trial of Sami al Arian- jury selection was just completed today I believe.

Interesting web of relationships there. Another item is that VIPS is basically in the mold of Agee's old group Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5, started with the aid of the VVAW):

Security Risk for CIA: Plumbing the depths of Anthony Lake's dubious past

Lake's longtime IPS/CNSS comrade Morton Halperin was also thickly involved for many years with infamous CIA traitor Philip Agee. It was Halperin who flew to London to testify in Agee's behalf when he was being deported as a security risk. And it was Halperin who wrote an apologia in the Washington Post defending the actions of Agee and his rabidly pro-communist publication, CounterSpy, after they had contributed to the assassination of Richard Welch by revealing the Athens CIA bureau chief's identity and home address. Working with Agee at his Soviet- and Cuban-backed Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate were other prominent confreres of Lake's IPS/CNSS fellowship, including Robert Borosage, Nicole Szulc [cf. the NYT's Tad Szulc, who wrote an article that threatened to compromise the Bay of Pigs invasion--Fedora], and Victor Marchetti. Marchetti, another "defector" from the CIA to the Marxist IPS agenda, was also a cochair of an anti-intelligence panel at the same September 1974 CNSS "Covert Operations" conference mentioned above that featured Lake and Halperin. It was this aspect of Halperin's vita which provided the main evidence to scotch his confirmation to the Defense post. Shouldn't these same troubling connections be a major bone of contention in considering the suitability of an aspirant to the highest intelligence post in the land?

This article (from a Marxist site and written with a slant sympathetic to Agee, so take it FWIW; I assume the same information is available elsewhere minus the spin) mentions that British intelligence investigated Hosenball and Agee's links to an alleged KGB operation:

Searchlight and the State

The memo, written by Gable followed, he says, a lunch with a Security Service employee in May 1977. The nature of the official material received and recorded by him — mixed with large amounts of random gossip — indicates that much of it was coloured by phone-tap information and informer's reports. It consists almost entirely of libellous untruths about a group of 'target' individuals — the 'ABC' Official Secrets defendants, American deportees Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball, and several of their acquaintances. In certain respects, material from Special Branch had been deliberately falsified to mislead Gable and his employers. The timing of the memo showed clearly an intense interest on behalf of MI5 in manipulating events surrounding the Agee/ Hosenball case and the beginnings of the 'ABC' prosecution. . .The person most frequently, and libellously, mentioned in its pages was not directly involved in either case: Phil Kelly, a journalist acquainted with both sets of accused men. . .Gable wrote: "The arrest of Campbell / Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security sources, they inform me in strictest confidence that for about four years Campbell/ Berry/ Kelly and others have been systematically gathering top-level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological matters as far as the state is involved, had done four years detailed research into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services but those of other NATO countries. He has also gone to people who work on top security contracts and started off by asking them about open commercial work their companies do and then gradually asked them for information on top secret work, including that on underwater detection hardware, which he clearly knows is beyond the pale. Politically it appears the group have no guiding light or line, but Kelly is the KGB man who reaps the goodies gathered by other people…". . .

"Thomas is married to Oscie Thomas, a lawyer with AT&T. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the son of publisher Evan Thomas II, and the grandson of Socialist leader Norman Thomas."

Thanks Fedora. . .it should not seem amazing. . .but, yet, it does. .

EThomas has been around forever, it seems; just do not recall this part of his personal history being shared. . .

Certainly an aspect that facillitates doubt as to the credence of Newsweek's neutral 'just an honest mistake' posturing.

Certainly, along with the other info provided in this thread; it should at least make it more difficult for Newsweek to ignore/spin their own truth.

Of course, it is not news to them; or any of the rest of the MSM. . .

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.