In October ‘04, Brent Bozell’s fake news service, CNS News, was leaked a number of alleged Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that allegedly proved the Bush Administration’s WMD claims and the story that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots. CNS said that the translated docs were vetted by three unnamed experts, two of whom turned out to be Laurie Mylroie and Bruce Tefft (usual-suspect pseudo-experts with an agenda) while the third was almost certainly Bill Tierney, a right-wing loon par excellence with a storied career as a self-claimed US torture-interrogator, a Terri Schiavo hysteric, and paranormal WMD-inspector. Tellingly, although CNS News talked up the documents, they were very cagey about releasing them, claiming that they didn’t want them to be ‘altered or misrepresented’ by other parties on the Internet, whatever difference that would make with a solid primary source. Smart money said that they didn’t want anyone to see that they were holding a very weak poker hand. All the documents are now available in holographic form in the Arabic original, and by all reasonable accounts they don’t seem very interesting.
But there are supposedly 2 million or more of these docs archived in (I believe) Qatar and elsewhere, of which only a small percentage has been translated, and the story has been widely broadcast via the usual wingnut channels that somewhere amidst them is the vindication of every right-wing canard about Saddam Hussein and the stated reasons for the war. References to the docs have turned up frequently, and many people have pushed stories about them during the past year or so, including a veritable menagerie of the cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs wingnut community. Laurie Mylroie seems to appear with a sulfurous bang wherever they’re mentioned, and the Move America Forward foundation — the boldest and most flagrantly silly of the “nonpartisan” GOP front groups — picked up on the CNS News story, batted it around for awhile, and apparently couldn’t find much to do with it, absent any hard evidence to distort.
Nice work. Morons.