hoopla Posts

Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence.org (I have here: CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist.

Oh yes, and the Iraqi chemical weapons trucks? They were actually for weather balloons just like the Iraqis claimed. It's kind of pathetic that Saddam Hussein was telling the truth a lot more than President Bush was. Here is _New York Times'_ piece on the "Iraqi hydrogen trucks that were actually just making hydrogen":www.nytimes.com/2003/08/09/international/worldspecial/09WeAP.html. It's another embarrasing retraction for U.S. and British intelligence and another example of Bush Administration war hawks seeing what they wanted to see. The new revelation in the _Times_ article: a majority of the Defense Intelligence Agency engineering team inspecting the trucks had come to doubt the chemical weapons story by May 28. That was the day the CIA & DIA jointly release a white paper that said the intelligence teams inspecting the trucks had concluded they were designed for chemical warfare. That report started a hoopla--weapons found!--yet now we know the DIA inspectors themselves weren't in agreement. So what happened? Was it the higher-ups in the DIA administration who just ignored the actual reports from their engineers. Meanwhile the Bush P.R. folks throw a bone to ever faithful true believers who still wait for the Great Pumpkin, er..., WMDs. The plot thickens, as they say.