Jacob Levy asks a good question – isn’t it strange that, with the exception of the Christian Science Monitor’s Galloway papers, it is the British not the American papers that are making all the running with the big intelligence stories and the ‘secret documents’ in Baghdad?
Is it that American papers are so earnestly reporting the ‘reconstruction story’ that they have forgotten the value of a good dip into the murky past? Or is that none of them have the, ahem, intelligence contacts of the Telegraph and others?
If that is the case, Levy seems surprised the US authorities aren’t encouraging these kind of reports: These are the other side’s secrets, documents with a high probability of embarrassing people the U.S. wants to see embarrassed and confirming news that the U.S. wants to see confirmed.
I wonder though. Could there not also be some documents in Baghdad about things that might acutely embarass people the administration don’t want to be embarassed? Perhaps about people taking tea with Saddam’s people just before the Iran-Iraq war for example? Or meetings with Iraqi officials that went around, say 1991?
There must be tons of great stories for the US market – I simply can’t believe there are only files about Georgeous George’s frequent flying to Baghdad.
What happened to ‘follow the money’ ?
