Howdo I surf with no direction home ?

Alarmed by the Judith Miller fiasco (and greedy for technorati track backs) I recently switched my Netscape home from www.nytimes.com to www.washingtonpost.com. Then I learned about mr Run Amok. Now where can I go for excellent news and information. I feel like Rolling Stone.

Keep it up and I will drop our journals of record for the journal of records

(dumb pun due to Michael Kinsley some time ago).

I learn

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

[snip]

as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

neglecting to mention a failed lie detector test would seem to render moot the distinction between deception and cherry picking no ?

Still more sureal, John Rendon, the founder of the Iraqi National Congress campaigned for McGovern before he campaigned for Chalabi (and they called Kerry a flip flopper). It doesn't look like the whole Rendon family has flipped since

Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology.

The flip flopper and they guy who loves flipper are brothers under the skin

More seriously the article shows, not only, that the Bush administration supressed key information when selling its war, but also that contracted out propaganda is official US policy and that, when it is denounced, only the acronym of the publicly funded propaganda agency is changed.