Monday, September 09, 2002

Just so we know which reporters and reports not to trust.

First, a blast from the past.




Columnist Gene Lyons--who has written widely, for Harpers magazine, the Internet journal Salon, and in book form, exposing the right-wing elements behind Whitewater and the Starr investigation--reveals a link between Starr's office, the Wall Street Journal and ABC television.

Lyons recalls that on April 23, 1998, Susan McDougal appeared before a Little Rock grand jury to answer questions about the Clintons and Whitewater. Her refusal to testify that day forms the basis for the current trial on criminal contempt charges.

That same day an op-ed column appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline "When Susan McDougal Almost Talked," written by Chris Vlasto, a producer for ABC News. The column opened with the lead sentence, attributed to Susan McDougal: "I know where all the bodies are buried." In his account, Vlasto claimed that McDougal had insinuated to him in off the record remarks in 1994 that she had dirt on the Clintons.

McDougal has denied ever being alone with Vlasto during a meeting in New York or talking to him about "buried bodies." Her account is backed by two other witnesses. But at her grand jury interrogation last year, Starr's prosecutors presented the Wall Street Journal article--published that very day, through coordination between the independent counsel and the Journal's editorial office--as proof thatMcDougal was hiding important facts about Whitewater. With jurors watching they placed the article in front of McDougal, drawing attention to the headline. Prosecutors later introduced the op-ed piece as evidence.

Vlasto's personal role raises many questions. It is highly unusual, to say the least, for a network television producer to write an article in a competing medium about what a source allegedly told him in confidence. His column was not Vlasto's only effort, not merely to report on events, but to shape them. According to Jim McDougal, after his Whitewater conviction Vlasto approached him and urged him to cooperate with the special prosecutor."You don't have to go out this way," Vlasto said. "If you walk in to see Ken Starr, he will greet you with open arms."

In his capacity as an ABC journalist Vlasto produced the reports by correspondent Jackie Judd about the semen-stained dress saved by Monica Lewinsky. Last week Judd and Vlasto were joint recipients of an award from theRadio and Television Correspondent Association in Washington for having the best "scoop" of 1998. The source of this report was undoubtedly Starr's office, which knew of the dress from the testimony and tape recordings supplied by Linda Tripp.



And one from just a year ago.


On October 26, ABC News ran a special report by Brian Ross, declaring that Iraq had been conclusively linked to the anthrax in a letter sent to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Ross reported that the spores found on the Daschle letter were “nearly identical to those discovered in Iraq in 1994. ABC NEWS also has learned that at least two labs have concluded the anthrax was coated with additives linked to the Iraqi biological weapons program.”

Ross claimed that “five well-placed and separate sources have told ABC NEWS that initial tests have detected traces of bentonite and silica, substances that keep tiny anthrax particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together—making them more easily inhaled.... As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.”

Ross has produced more than one television “exclusive” which served US interests in relation to Iraq. When he worked as an investigative reporter for NBC News, he filed a report in April 1990 on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain nuclear “triggers” from Western high-tech firms, a story which clearly required the tacit or active collaboration of American intelligence agencies.

Also significant is the identity of one of the report’s producers: Chris Vlasto. He was last in the news when he was identified as a media agent of the right-wing operatives who engineered the Clinton impeachment. Vlasto picked up the tab for a celebratory dinner for Paula Jones and her Christian fundamentalist attorneys the day they succeeded in hauling Clinton before a grand jury and compelling him to testify under oath about his sexual history, including answering questions about Monica Lewinsky.



UPDATE: Ooops, left off the punchline. I am the worst Blogger ever!





For ABC's Claire Shipman, interviewing Saddam Hussein's mistress was nothing like chasing the Monica Lewinsky story.

"We're not in Clinton territory here," Shipman says -- even if the interview with Parisoula Lampsos did include her claim that the Iraqi leader uses Viagra. And that Hussein could be romantic, though he had four other mistresses.

Shipman and producer Chris Vlasto say they spent months verifying Lampsos's account with U.S. and European intelligence officials and other Iraqi defectors (without a blue dress, they had to work hard). But even more interesting is how they tracked down the 54-year-old woman for Thursday's "PrimeTime Live."

Vlasto, working with the opposition Iraqi National Congress, waited for days in a Middle East country he declines to name until two Iraqis drove him at high speed to a safe house. There he conversed with Lampsos through an Arabic translator, learning only later that she speaks limited English. The fact that both are of Greek descent didn't hurt.

"What made her credible is she actually said nice things about Saddam," Vlasto says. "That and the level of detail convinced me to go back to ABC and say, 'We've got to do this woman!' "

Shipman met with Lampsos in May at a safe house outside Beirut. The Iraqi dissidents "thought it would be easier for Parisoula to talk to a woman, that it was hard to explain why she was the mistress of a dictator," she says.

Vlasto, who helped break some of the Lewinsky scoops, says Lampsos agreed to show her face because the dissidents believe that going public will make retaliation by Hussein's forces less likely. "Unlike Lewinsky, it was life and death. She's risking her life to do this interview," he says.

The two days of discussions ranged from Hussein's sex life to his hiding of chemical weapons to what Lampsos describes as his fondness for watching videotapes of his enemies being tortured. "This may be the hardest interview I've ever done," Shipman says. "It was exhausting. She was so emotional and so scared."