04 January 2010

Kamm the Scamm and the Nuclear Trigger Hoax

Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com on pseudo-intellectual, genocide-denier and cluster bomb supporter Oliver Kamm today. This comes after Phil Giraldi and Gareth Porter exposed the Times hoax of a document purporting to prove Iran's work on a nuclear trigger, and George Maschke,  a legal translator in The Hague and Doctor in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, confirmed the fake.

(By the way at the Times original article note how Murdoch media support each other. We have Murdoch's Times journalist being interviewed on Murdoch's Sky News journalist.)

I say hoax because the Times described the document they posted as "Iran's nuclear trigger: document in full". They also have a link to a translation of the document: Iran's secret nuclear trigger document: full translation.

So here we have the word 'full' twice. Once to refer to the Farsi document, and the other to refer to the translation.

Yet according to Kamm  its "your mistake in assuming that the document that you read online was the document in its original form. It was in fact a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document. The original document contained a lot of classified information. The Times did not publish the original document, because of the danger that it would alert the Iranian authorities to the source of the leak. The full version of the document is in the hands of the IAEA."

Nowhere do the Times forewarn that this is the case, that the document they posted online is a fake.

The propaganda is steadily being piled on Iran. Gone are the bungled efforts of the Bush administration. Now we have 'smart power' in the White House -  far more accomplished at building cases for war just look at Kosovo.

"We must use what has been called smart power — the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural — picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy." Hillary Clinton, Senate Confirmation Hearing for the position of Secretary of State 13 January 2009.

Its not very smart using the Times and Kamm though. A definite own goal.

3 comments:

David Sketchley said...

My comment sent to Kamm's blog:

"George Maschke, the whole of your comment is undermined by your mistake in assuming that the document that you read online was the document in its original form. It was in fact a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document. The original document contained a lot of classified information. The Times did not publish the original document, because of the danger that it would alert the Iranian authorities to the source of the leak. The full version of the document is in the hands of the IAEA."


This is hilarious.

The Times links quite clearly to the Farsi document with these words: "Iran's nuclear trigger: document in full".

And to the translation: "Iran's secret nuclear trigger document: full translation."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6955351.ece

So the question is, why does the Times claim the document published is the 'document in full' and the translation provided the 'full translation' when according to Kamm it's "a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document"?

Someone hasn't got their story straight.

David Sketchley said...

Here is Kamm's pathetic reply, as usual it never touches on any of the relevant points at all:

""Sketchley" is David Sketchley, a periodic correspondent who alternately denies the Srebrenica massacre and threatens me with libel action (though despite having the details of my libel lawyer, which I provided to him, Sketchley has disappointingly never followed through on this). I note merely that he is unable to distinguish the concepts of a transcript and a forgery. His libels are so casual that even Media Lens deletes them when he tries to post them to its message board."

Of course the Times has never stated that what they published was a 'transcript', and that the 'transcript' was only of "the relevant parts of that original document" meaning that the Times claim that what they published was the "full document" is false and misleading, a direct contravention of clause 1 of the PCC Editors' Code of Practice':

"1 Accuracy

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures."
http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html

For this reason I have made an official complaint to the PCC.

David Sketchley said...

Oh yes, and what Kamm fails to mention is that what I posted to the Media Lens Message Board was Raimondo's article from Antiwar.com. The reason? Because Raimondo called Kamm a 'liar', a term Kamm himself has used against Chomsky.