Posted on 07/09/2003 4:04:00 PM PDT by Doug Thompson
Damn, I hate it when I've been had and I've been had big time.
In 1982, while I was working for Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, a man came up to a me during a gathering in Albuquerque and introduced himself as Terrance J. Wilkinson. He said he was a security consultant and gave me a business card with his name and just a Los Angeles phone number.
A few weeks later, he called my Washington office and asked to meet for lunch. He seemed to know a lot about the nuclear labs in New Mexico and said he had conducted "security profiles" for both Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs. Lujan served on the committee with oversight on both labs and he offered his services if we ever needed briefings.
We already had nuclear experts on the committee, on loan from the Department of Energy, and we never used Wilkinson for briefings but we kept in touch over the years. He said he had served in Vietnam with Army Special Force, worked for Air America, later for the FBI and as a consultant for the CIA. He said he had helped other Republican members of Congress I called some friends in other GOP offices and they said yes, they knew Terry Wilkinson.
"You can trust him, he's one of the good guys," one chief of staff told me. When I left politics and returned to journalism, Wilkinson became a willing, but always unnamed, source.
Over the last couple of years, Wilkinson served as either a primary or secondary source on a number of stories that have appeared in Capitol Hill Blue regarding intelligence activities. In early stories, I collaborated his information with at least one more source. His information usually proved accurate and, over time, I came to depend on him as a source without additional backup.
On Tuesday, we ran a story headlined "White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes." For the first time, Wilkinsson said he was willing to go on the record and told a story about being present, as a CIA contract consultant, at two briefings with Bush. He said he was retired now and was fed up and wanted to go public.
"He (Bush) said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said in our story. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."
After the story ran, we received a number of emails or phone calls that (1) either claimed Wilkinson was lying or (2) doubted his existence. I quickly dismissed the claims. After all, I had known this guy for 20+ years and had no doubt about his credibility. Some people wanted to talk to him, so I forwarded those requests on to him via email. He didn't answer my emails, which I found odd. I should have listened to a bell that should have been going off in my ear.
Today, a White House source I know and trust said visitor logs don't have any record of anyone named Terrance J. Wilkinson ever being present at a meeting with the President. Then a CIA source I trust said the agency had no record of a contract consultant with that name. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever heard of this guy," my source said.
I tried calling Terry's phone number. I got a recorded message from a wireless phone provider saying the number was no longer in service. I tried a second phone number I had for him. Same result.
Then a friend from the Hill called.
"You've been had," she said. "I know about this guy. He's been around for years, claiming to have been in Special Forces, with the CIA, with NSA. He hasn't worked for any of them and his name is not Terrance Wilkinson."
Both of his phone numbers have Los Angeles area codes but an identity check through Know-X today revealed no record of anyone named Terrance J. Wilkinson ever having lived in LA or surrounding communities.
His email address turns out to be a blind forward to a free email service where anyone can sign up and get an email account. Because it was not one of the usual "free" services like Hotmail, Yahoo or such, I did not recognize it as one (although you'd think that someone like me would have known better).
The bottom line is that someone has been running a con on me for 20 some years and I fell for it like a little old lady in a pigeon drop scheme. I've spent the last two hours going through the database of Capitol Hill Blue stories and removing any that were based on information from Wilkinson (or whoever he is). I've also removed his name, quotes and claims from Tuesday's story about the White House and the uranium claims.
Erasing the stories doesn't erase the fact that we ran articles containing informattion that, given the source, were most likely inaccurate. And it doesn't erase the sad fact that my own arrogance allowed me to be conned.
It will be a long time (and perhaps never) before I trust someone else who comes forward and offers inside information. The next one who does had better be prepared to produce a birth certificate, a driver's license and his grandmother's maiden name.
Any news publication exists on the trust of its readers. Because I depended on a source that was not credible, I violated the trust that the readers of Capitol Hill Blue placed in me.
I was wrong. I am sorry.
© Copyright 2003 by Capitol Hill Blue
So, we've narrowed it down to the 3.5 billion humans on the Planet Earth and the three guys on the Russian Space Station.
Well, I got three more flower beds weeded and I have been thinking while pulling up thistles and spurge.
As I said, we have now three examples of people who turned on the conservative/Republicans after they had used us as cash cows. I am asking myself if this is a coincidence. My answer is after three instances, no.
If I were wanting to get information from the people on the right, I would send double agents in to win confidence and get information.
Now, I will get some tin-foil to make a complete outfit.
I always wondered about Klayman and why he was never able to follow through - figured he was a straw man only out for the attention but it has happened the same way a few times now. Hmmmm
Worse, the mythical source might even disappear with some scrubbing like we're seeing now, so that it becomes virtually impossible to clear up the myth, because the mainstream press isn't going to get interested in whether or not some obscure web site's stories were fabricated. The mainstream media is too big and egotistical to admit thay were duped by some obscure web author's story, too stupid to see how the circle of deception works, and too unethical to care.
Instead of the mainstream media doing real investigative journalism and breaking new information, it's extremists fabricating myths and using the laziness of the mainstream media to sugarcoat it for the consumption of people who wouldn't ever trust something like "Red Flags Weekly" as a source.
IOW, any player who wants to smear Rice can do like they do with anyone else they have ever smeared.
It's like them trying to scapegoat Tenet (and there have been concerted efforts to misquote him since 911) for the Africa comment- because "we went to war on false data Bush presented in the SOTU address" - when the Congress, including the Democrats, had already voted for it long before the SOTU address. If there are pending investigations on Iraq and african nations, Tenet can't use them to defend himself publicly because they are, obviously, classified, and for the protection of operatives in the field, he had better keep his mouth shut, because congress can't, and some of the least trustworthy people in the DNC are on the Senate intelligence committee.
And this is like what the Democrats pulled with their intel briefings- which were also attended, of course, by Republicans on the committee. The Democrats would come out in the weeks after 911 and claim they "weren't told," when in fact they were at the very same committee meeting where they and the republicans were told. They then tried to claim there weren't enough briefings to answer their questions, when Rumsfeld had briefings with them several times a week and they could ask him questions at any time. These Democrats are chronic liars.
You would think they would start to wonder why they think their ideology is superior if they have to lie about these things so blatantly just to sustain it.
The rats will probably try to plaster Rice with blame for not planning for every one of the infinite ways a free and open society like ours is threatened, and there were threats on everything from our nuke labs to assassinations. You know, the Democrats will try to tell us all how Rice should have done something in the months after she was confirmed- when after all, the Democrats spent eight years trying to warn us about "domestic terrorists" citing the constitution at traffic stops, hanging pictures of aborted fetuses on things, sawing their otherwise legal shotguns a quarter inch too short, or wearing penny loafers to protests demanding that ballots be counted in public and in front of the media. The conservatives had fair warning from Clinton that as soon as the Democrats left office, condi Rice should quickly attend to Al Qaeda because the democrats were just too busy. (Pardon the sarcasm) :o)
Good grief,this should say "they can always assign to her some..."
Lefties, asses, lefties, asses, what's the diff.
Well said, all around.
And now it's time for those of us who haven't done so already to roll up our sleeves, because the Devil's been busy in our backyard.
I know exactly what you mean. I came in late, too, and this particular thread has an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio, meaning that nearly every post requires a fair amount of reading and digesting before proceeding.
I almost never jump into threads that have reached post numbers in the four digits, but I'm glad I did in this case because, as Samwise Gamgee might put it, "Now there's an eye-opener and no mistake!"
So welcome, friend, to this thread's Latecomer's Club. Be sure to fill out a name tag and introduce yourself. :^)
I like that line. Should be the line of the week.
It's time for ALL of us to ban together and work diligently to get GOPERs eleceted in '04. With only the slimest of a majority in the Senate and far too many " moderates " ( liberal Republicans ) in far too many seats in both Houses, our ONLY goal has to be to re-elect President Bush and to give him a HUGE majority in both Houses. Then and only then, will we get more of what all Conservatives want.
It's impossible to roll back 60+years of the creeping Liberal SOCIALIAM in a brief spam of one or even two terms. Like the Dems, we have to accept incrimentalsim. We didn't get here over night and the mess can't be undone in the blink of an eye.
Right now, we have a great shot at reshaping the Supremem Court and add Conservative judges all over the country as well. So, roll up those sleeves, contribute money,time,and effort as never before. The Devil won't be our undoing, if we don't let him be.
As for getting to work in the real world, I feel compelled to quote Ned Flander's mom: "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
There are, of course, a few things I do here and there to make the world a better place. Voting against socialism is among them. However, in an ideological war, exposing evil ideologies and promoting good ones is a frontline assignment.
I am now looking into ways I can do that more effectively, aside from my humble and nascent blogsite. If any pan out, you'll hear about it. :^)
In the end, however, the most important thing any of us can do is keep telling the truth, telling it loudly, and telling it often.
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