Correction:Caught by AmericaBlog, stumbled on by me via Eric Jaffa at SpeakSpeak News: NBC News busted for a major "oopsie..." Apparently the network altered the transcript of an "NBC Nightly News" interview by Andrea Mitchell of NYTimes reporter James Risen. Here's how it went, according to Jaffa:
Andrea Mitchell interviewed him for the January 3 edition of “NBC Nightly News.” The interview was longer then the video which NBC aired. NBC put the transcript of the full interview online, but then took out part of it.
The deleted portion:
Andrea Mitchell: You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
James Risen: No, no I hadn’t heard that. How NBC explains the deletion:
Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on ‘NBC Nightly News’ nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry. (Same story updated with NBC's confirmation that they're investigating the possible Amanpour-tapping by TV Newswer, ht to ThinkProgress) ... Now you may recall that Ms. Amanpour, probably CNN's best overseas journalist, had been critical of the news media's conduct during the Iraq war, including her own cable outfit. Amanpour claimed about a year ago that the press succumbed to a "climate of "fear and self-censorship" fostered by the Bush administration and its self-appointed mouthpiece, Fox News, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
If she was wiretapped, which again, we can't know because the administration conducted its surveillance without even informing the FISA court, it would give more credence to the Wayne Madsen scenario described in this previous post, whereby several journalists including Risen and Sy Hersh (not to mention menbers of Congress and even employees at the NSA) were targeted by administration espionage programs. Tin foil hattery? Maybe. But remember that this crowd even felt the need to spy on Quakers, Catholic relief workers and vegans...
Update: Read AmericaBlog's update here, in which John Aravosis takes us down the logic path if the Amanpour wiretap allegation turns out to be true...
Why would Bush do this? Because, as I reported a few weeks ago, journalists have some of the best contacts out there and it's not unusual for journalists to talk to both sides of the story, or in this case, the good guys and the "evil doers." What a better, if not illegal, way to find the terrorists and their associates?
But before you say "yeah, go for it," consider the implications of tapping Christiane Amanpour's phones:
1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.
2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.
3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.
4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.
5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.
6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour. ... Read on, it gets worse...
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