Social conversation led to bin Laden death story

Guardian:

An informal chat between two diplomats at a social gathering in Pakistan appears to have been the trigger for a worldwide flurry of speculation over the weekend about the possible death of Osama bin Laden.

The regional French newspaper l'Est Republicain quoted a leaked document from France's intelligence service DGSE on Saturday saying that Saudi secret services were convinced the al-Qaida leader had died. The document, dated Thursday, had been sent to the French president, Jacques Chirac, and other top French officials, the newspaper said.

But according to Alexis Debat, a former French intelligence official, the report was based solely on a conversation between a French diplomat and a low-level Saudi diplomat at a social function in Islamabad. The French diplomat had felt obliged to pass on the details to headquarters in Paris. "There is no hard information the report is true," Mr Debat told ABC News.

...

The leak apparently gave the report more credibility than it deserved. While it is possible that the leaker had motives beyond passing on gossip, this report suggest that was the effect of his leak.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more