Recycling Iraq Lies: The Washington Post and the Mysterious Miss Shelton

A. Alexander, July 1st, 2007

Out of the blue, so it seemed, the Washington Post recently published an op-ed piece titled, "Iraq, al-Qaeda and Tenet's Equivocation." It was written by someone named Christina Shelton. As the author appeared to go out of her way to, in the most amateurish and laborious manner imaginable, rehash tired and thoroughly disproved tales of ties between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda; knowing who this Christina Shelton was, seemed central to understanding the true motivation behind the publication.

It should be noted that the contemporary recycling of the Iraq-al Qaeda yarn, is not happening by accident. A recent poll found that 41 percent of the American people continue to believe that, falsely of course, Saddam was somehow tied to the attacks on September 11, 2001. They didn't sanction the poll obviously, but the Bush administration does read and watch the news. They know there remains a healthy portion of the population that the government had intentionally misled and misinformed, who still believes the pre-war lies. That is why this past week, shortly after the poll was released, Mister Bush scurried off to a friendly public gathering among members of the Navy. He wanted to further the administration's latest narrative, a fictionalized theme asserting that al Qaeda is currently overrunning Iraq. It is a claim that not even Mister Bush's own senior intelligence analysts support.