BREAKING: Conned big time "CIA Witness" to White House Lying about Intel story found to be FRAUD

In 1982, while I was working for Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, a man came up to a me during a gathering in Albuquerque and introduced himself as Terrance J. Wilkinson. He said he was a security consultant and gave me a business card with his name and just a Los Angeles phone number.

A few weeks later, he called my Washington office and asked to meet for lunch. He seemed to know a lot about the nuclear labs in New Mexico and said he had conducted "security profiles" for both Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs. Lujan served on the committee with oversight on both labs and he offered his services if we ever needed briefings.

We already had nuclear experts on the committee, on loan from the Department of Energy, and we never used Wilkinson for briefings but we kept in touch over the years. He said he had served in Vietnam with Army Special Force, worked for Air America, later for the FBI and as a consultant for the CIA. He said he had helped other Republican members of Congress I called some friends in other GOP offices and they said yes, they knew Terry Wilkinson.

"You can trust him, he's one of the good guys," one chief of staff told me. When I left politics and returned to journalism, Wilkinson became a willing, but always unnamed, source.

Over the last couple of years, Wilkinson served as either a primary or secondary source on a number of stories that have appeared in Capitol Hill Blue regarding intelligence activities. In early stories, I collaborated his information with at least one more source. His information usually proved accurate and, over time, I came to depend on him as a source without additional backup.

On Tuesday, we ran a story headlined "White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes." For the first time, Wilkinsson said he was willing to go on the record and told a story about being present, as a CIA contract consultant, at two briefings with Bush. He said he was retired now and was fed up and wanted to go public.

"He (Bush) said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said in our story. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

After the story ran, we received a number of emails or phone calls that (1) either claimed Wilkinson was lying or (2) doubted his existence. I quickly dismissed the claims. After all, I had known this guy for 20+ years and had no doubt about his credibility. Some people wanted to talk to him, so I forwarded those requests on to him via email. He didn't answer my emails, which I found odd. I should have listened to a bell that should have been going off in my ear.

Today, a White House source I know and trust said visitor logs don't have any record of anyone named Terrance J. Wilkinson ever being present at a meeting with the President. Then a CIA source I trust said the agency had no record of a contract consultant with that name. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever heard of this guy," my source said.

I tried calling Terry's phone number. I got a recorded message from a wireless phone provider saying the number was no longer in service. I tried a second phone number I had for him. Same result.

"You've been had," she said. "I know about this guy. He's been around for years, claiming to have been in Special Forces, with the CIA, with NSA. He hasn't worked for any of them and his name is not Terrance Wilkinson."

Both of his phone numbers have Los Angeles area codes but an identity check through Know-X today revealed no record of anyone named Terrance J. Wilkinson ever having lived in LA or surrounding communities.

His email address turns out to be a blind forward to a free email service where anyone can sign up and get an email account. Because it was not one of the usual "free" services like Hotmail, Yahoo or such, I did not recognize it as one (although you'd think that someone like me would have known better).

The bottom line is that someone has been running a con on me for 20 some years and I fell for it like a little old lady in a pigeon drop scheme. I've spent the last two hours going through the database of Capitol Hill Blue stories and removing any that were based on information from Wilkinson (or whoever he is). I've also removed his name, quotes and claims from Tuesday's story about the White House and the uranium claims.

Erasing the stories doesn't erase the fact that we ran articles containing informattion that, given the source, were most likely inaccurate. And it doesn't erase the sad fact that my own arrogance allowed me to be conned.

It will be a long time (and perhaps never) before I trust someone else who comes forward and offers inside information. The next one who does had better be prepared to produce a birth certificate, a driver's license and his grandmother's maiden name.

Any news publication exists on the trust of its readers. Because I depended on a source that was not credible, I violated the trust that the readers of Capitol Hill Blue placed in me.

I learned during Florida elections 2000 and 2002 - trying to get our message out to the people through the Florida press - that the mainstream press is in league with the DNC. It was surreal. Gannett, owner of many Fla. "hometown" papers and local TV news outlets, and AP Florida regularly printed unverified accusations (lies), and DNC opinion as 'news' while ignoring postive, verifiable records of achievement, press releases, endorsements from the right

All through the clinton years the media displayed a stunning willingness to believe exactly what the dems and clinton administration would say.

Earlier on the thread was a brief diversion as some of us recalled the Stephens/Riady/Huang connection to the clinton White House.

I clearly recall as these events were revealed being shocked at how the media remained stonefaced as they would report the story always taking the tone that the dems say there is no "there there" and besides the American People want to trust and believe their president and picking on all of these appointees amounted to harrassment, yada yada yada.

Now we have an administration who is constantly having their statements twisted and is presented in news reports as not worthy of trust. We are told it is the American Way to scrutinize American Presidents. Fine. Scrutinize should not be distortion. And where was this scrutiny with clinton.

Fortunately truth has a way of percolating to the top--perhaps not as quickly as some of us would like--but it will always out.

But much evil is done by putting these false reports out. Witness the cretins at DU and this other forum linked here (Calpundit). Once the false propaganda is out some will always believe it no matter the debunking.

Without knowing any more than what I've read in your post here, let me react to what appear to me to be a few problems...

On a certain level, I don't much care if the Dem talking points are lies or not. Of course honesty matters, but what I mean is that regardless of the reason I disagree with their points, the point is that I disagree, so I want to disagree as effectively as I can.

The way to do that, the way I generally try to approach any discussion, is to determine on what premises their talking points rest. Premises are the load-bearing beams of argumentation. I can ignore 90% of what someone says by focusing on their premises and kicking at them until they fall, bringing down the whole edifice of their argument. The 10% that remain are lingering, jumped-to conclusions, emotional attachments, and subconscious biases, which are all far more easily dealt with after the premises are dispatched.

One thing the Democrats do very well is determine where best to strike populist chords with the American Public. They do this through the much-maligned dark arts of focus-grouping and polling. They've consistently outflanked the GOP in this way since after the 1994 Election, which, not coincidentally, was the last time the GOP seized the initiative in determining the populist pulse of the country.

The exception to this is the post-9/11 era. However, I attribute that less to a concerted Republican strategy than to the fact that the aftermath of a Historical moment well beyond the control of either party (that is, 9/11) played strongly to traditional Republican populist strengths in the areas of foreign policy and patriotism. That the Republicans used this to their advantage was more a matter of maintaining their post-9/11 momentum than to the striking any pre-emptive populist note with the electorate. Appropriately so, to be sure.

We're now, however, in a pre-2004 period, and I'm not convinced that the post 9/11 momentum will be sufficient to achieve hoped-for victories in that election, particularly not now, since the bar for an effective Senate majority has been raised by the Democrat judicial filibusters, and, to my mind, an ineffective GOP strategy for confronting them.

In light of that, I look at what you've told me about the RNC and the Bush-Cheney talking points, and I have some concerns. First, I don't trust the RNC at all, as they have proven themselves congenitally averse to any sense of populism since after the Gingrich insurgency of 1994, which lasted all of a year and a half before Newt was co-opted, only to fail spectacularly in that in the '96 and '98 elections. Time and again, the RNC gives every impression of being beholden to the Rockefeller country clubbers, whose only cognizance of populism is manifested in a disdain for those of us caddies and groundskeepers who have the poor taste not to shut up and do as we're told.

Second, the over-emphasis on Bush-Cheney (which I'm taking not only from your post, but also from the behavior of the RNC and many of the cheerleaders in this microcosmic forum), seems to me to be remarkably short-sighted. Certainly, the talking points ought to serve the purposes of their re-election, but a personality-based tunnelvision isn't going to help turn this country around in the long term. On January 20th, 2005, Bush and Cheney will, at best, be lame ducks with a mandate of a debatable shelf-life.

At that point, I presume, the RNC will coast on inertia until their new personality du jour emerges.

Yet, even if 2004 is a victory for us, its fruits will only last for a season unless we plant the seeds for future victories now. We can do that with talking points that establish populist premises that play to Republican advantage, as well as mounting assaults on Democrat premises.

Let's take an example, one that is largely moot because of the Republicans' failure to establish populist beachheads in the second half of the 1990s; that is, the idea of a prescription drug entitlement. The Democrats took the populist initiative with the premise that: drugs are expensive + seniors need drugs + seniors can't afford drugs = someone, like the federal government, needs to buy these drugs for seniors. So, the consequent premise was established that to prove one cares for seniors, one must support paying for their prescription drugs. President Bush conceded this premise in the 2000 campaign, and thereby gave up that ground to the Democrats. This tactic has been called, with no sense of irony, "taking the Democrats' issues away," to make something a Republican issue.

Did President need to give up this ground to get this "victory?" How could the he and GOP have effectively countered this? Preemptively.

The undeniable point of the welfare state is that it doesn't pay for anything, it merely transfers wealth. Anyone who gets out more than they put in is getting it not from the government, but from an anonymous taxpayer somewhere. The key to undercutting the Democrat premise is to put a populist face on that anonymous taxpayer. The Democrats know this, that's why, in their lexicon, taxpayers are "the rich." Not only are they "the rich," they are "the rich, right now."

But that isn't the truth at all, and the real face of that anonymous taxpayer isn't "the rich, right now," it's our kids and grandkids, in the future. They are the ones who will be obligated to fund the wealth transfers of the welfare state to pay for the prescription drug giveaway. That will get people's attention, to be sure, but it's not enough to close the door on the established populist premise of the Democrats. This is:

President Clinton's 1994 budget contained an actuarial projection (can't remember if it was CBO or GAO) of the tax burden on future taxpayers, our kids and grandkids, based on the outstanding obligations of the welfare state, into the period of the babyboomers' retirement. Not surprisingly, Medicare and Social Security were the biggest tickets, and it was projected that those future taxpayers would need to fork over about 82% of their incomes to support those programs.

82%. Our kids and grandkids. At the point when some entity has prior claim of 82% of your income, you are their slave. How populist is it to enslave our children? Yet, that's the reality which underlies the premise of the Democrats’ welfare state.

Those actuarial predictions disappeared the next year, just in time for the budget showdown between Clinton and the GOP Class of '94. However, I recall seeing an independent projection of what the future tax burden would have been had Clinton acceded then to the GOP's "draconian" demands: 80%. As it was, the GOP was successful in getting the number down to 81%.

Now, while we definitely need new numbers and have had some balanced and very unbalanced budgets since then, I've yet to see any plan that addresses the future tax burdens of our children to pay for the largesse offered in the way of entitlements in order to procure votes from election to election.

Doesn't it seem a better approach would be to get out of this cycle of bidding for votes? Wouldn't it be better to actually take the Democrats' issues away by denying to them their premises and establishing populist premises of our own, which play to our advantage? In the current model, we accept their premises and are left to fight interminable defensive battles on grounds of the Democrats' choosing. Talking points that continue in that mode, even if momentarily successful, only perpetuate the waste of energy.

Effective talking points are like seeds. Plant now, harvest later, and feast. If we decide now on the menu, we’ll know what seeds to plant.

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.