Static on the Left

"The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie 'All the President's Men.' His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere -- from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself -- would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' 'Marathon Man' and 'The Princess Bride.'

"This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage."

Journalists aren't the only ones with unnamed sources, as the American Prospect's Laura Rozen reports:

"Countdown to Terror, Representative Curt Weldon's sensationalistic new book about his personal struggle to combat the Iranian terrorism threat despite the alleged resistance of the CIA, is based entirely on the Pennsylvania Republican's freelance communications with a secret source he code-named 'Ali.' Much of Weldon's book, which will be released next week by Regnery Publishing, consists of reproduced pages of comically overwrought 'intelligence' memos faxed from the Iranian émigré's Paris location to Weldon's office between 2003 and 2004.

" 'Dear Curt,' reads one memo excerpt from 'Ali' published by Weldon. 'An attack against an atomic plant by a plane, the name mentioned, but not clear it begins with "SEA" . . . [Seattle?].' Another reads: 'Dear Curt: . . . I confirm again a terrorist attack within the United States is planned before the American elections.'

"But in an exclusive interview with The American Prospect, Weldon's 'Ali' -- who was identified in an April article by me and Jeet Heer as Fereidoun Mahdavi, a frail, elderly former minister of commerce in the shah's government and a longtime business associate of Iran-Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- said he was stunned and perplexed to learn that Weldon had used his information to write a book, emphasizing that Weldon never even told him about the book.

"Mahdavi also said that the bulk of the information that he had provided to Weldon was originally sourced from none other than Ghorbanifar, the subject of a rare CIA 'burn notice' after the agency found him to be a 'fabricator' more than two decades ago during the Iran-Contra affair.

" 'Many information that I have given to Weldon is coming from Ghorbanifar,' said Mahdavi, who was reached in Paris by telephone on June 6. 'Because Ghorbanifar used me, in fact, to pass that stuff because I know he has problems in Washington.' "

For some reason, this isn't getting as much attention as Deep Throat.

Harry Shearer, press critic for the Huffington Post, has a problem with MSNBC:

"Wouldn't cable news channels think twice about tainting their (cough) credibility with promotional announcements that are demonstrably false? No, they wouldn't.

"All winter long, MSNBC -- home of a quarter million regular viewers nationwide -- ran elaborately produced promos that said 'America's watching MSNBC.' America was so not watching MSNBC that Osama Bin Laden was rumored to be hiding out on the set of 'Scarborough Country.' Yesterday, the channel was awash with promos for Chris Matthews' 'Hardball,' whereon Russell Crowe was supposed to be 'breaking his silence' on the (cough) incident in New York. Might that be the same silence he broke on Letterman the night before? Might indeed.

"Finally, not lying, just depressing: MSNBC's promos for Tucker Carlson's new program, 'The Situation' . . . in which Carlson critiques his own promo for focusing on his bow tie -- ironic self-awareness there -- but remains mute at the real sales pitch: 'So fast, it's changing the pace of news.' Yes, a good analysis there, the problem with television news is that it's too damn in depth. You go, Tuck."

I'll reserve judgment till the show actually airs.

Finally, here's why the FBI needs more Jews. John Nields, writing about his prosecution of Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, for approving black-bag jobs against Weatherman radicals, relates the following:

"At the home of a lawyer at a major New York law firm -- whose brother was a Weatherman -- the agents copied what they thought was coded writing they found on some cards and sent the copies to the FBI lab for cryptanalysis. It turned out that the lawyer had been taking Hebrew lessons. The lawyer produced the original cards at the trial and demonstrated that the FBI could have 'decoded' the Hebrew without cryptanalysis by flipping the cards over and reading the English translation on the reverse side."

Oy!