Monday, March 01, 2004
The Man kidnapped Aristede! And other urban folk tales. The lefty Democracy Now! radio program has the inside scoop on the purported kidnapping, thanks to charges by Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson, based on desperate calls from the exiled Haitian leader. This is the same Maxine Waters who promoted the now-discredited story that charged the CIA with selling crack to inner cities to fund the Contras. But as the American Enterprise Institute noted, "There have been other high-profile cases in the media recently that didn't involve actual fakery but rather extreme carelessness bordering on dishonesty. For instance, the "Dark Alliance" series published by the San Jose Mercury News in late-1996. These stories alleged that CIA operatives working with Nicaraguan contras had started the crack epidemic in America's inner cities. Other news organizations launched investigations to try to substantiate reporter Gary Webb's claims and could not. By mid-1997, Webb had resigned and the Mercury News retracted nearly all of the stories' allegations. Disturbingly, though, Webb published a book repeating the retracted claims which became popular among left-leaning conspiracy theorists and began to show up in college curricula." Waters wrote the forward to this book.
UPDATE: Aristede is telling the kidnapping tale to the AP, too. That doesn't make it any more reliable a claim. Let's hope the mainstream media assigns some investigative reporters to find the truth behind these seemingly wild assertions.
UPDATE: Aristede is telling the kidnapping tale to the AP, too. That doesn't make it any more reliable a claim. Let's hope the mainstream media assigns some investigative reporters to find the truth behind these seemingly wild assertions.
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