Quickly now ... refresh your memory regarding infantile whiner and hacktacular little pissant Brian Lemon's gloating over a total non-story regarding disgraced ex-ABC consultant Alexis Debat. Take your time. I'll wait...
Ah, you're back. Now get a load of this:
The neocon link to the ABC News scandal
As predicted yesterday, the scandal over disgraced ex-ABC News consultant Alexis Debat continues to spin out of control, with major implications for the way that Americans have been getting their news about the flashpoints that could determine war or peace in the Persian Gulf and South Asia...
... blah blah blah ... Hello? What's this?
In the meantime, little attention had been paid to the French journal Politique Internationale -- which published Debat's bogus "interviews" with Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
But the French magazine deserves closer scrutiny. In continuing to connect the dots between Debat and the push for a neoconservative agenda that includes ratcheting up war tensions with Iran, it turns out that a prominent member of the neocon movement has served as editor of Politique Internationale for much of this decade.
Iranian-borm Amir Taheri (pictured at top) -- who edited a leading Iranian newspaper prior to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and has since written for a number of western publications, including several owned by conservative press lord Rupert Murdoch -- has been a leading voice in Politique Internationale. It's not clear what his current role is, but in numerous press reports from 2001 through 2006 he was listed as its editor.
Taheri ... Taheri ... ah, yes ... that Amir Taheri:
And like Debat, Taheri's work has been called into question in recent years. Most notably, Taheri reported in a column in Canada's National Post in May 2006 that Iran had passed a law requiring the country's Jews and other religious minorities to wear coloured badges identifying them as non-Muslims. The story was received wide play in conservative circles, but it was not true -- the newspaper had to publish a retraction the next day.
Just make yourself comfortable and read the whole thing. Hey, Brian ... there's something for you to write about, no? And I'll be expecting that "hat tip."
(Double wag of the tail to e-mailer Tim H.)
LEMON-FLAVOURED SMACKDOWN AFTERSNARK: What I find most amusing about this story is how actual investigative journalists have taken the first clues, and run with them, and have proceeded to untangle a growing scandal regarding the unreliability of neo-con-produced "news", and how that fake news was/is being used to drive American foreign policy.
Brian and MaryT, on the other hand, take the same story and conclude, "The mainstream media gets it wrong sometimes! Ha ha!" Those two would have to aspire to be shallow and superficial.
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