Whoa, And... Oopsie... 'The Danger of NSA Spying on Members of Congress' - TheAtlantic

[struggle4progress]

25. It's remarkably dishonest reporting from a conservative writer at the now-conservative Atlantic

People here seem to forget the Atlantic was taken over by neo-cons

Article author Conor Friedersdorf has been a regular contributor to The American Conservative

Jeff Stein, whose CQ article Conor Friedersdorf quotes in this article, was much beloved by the Bush administration for his book Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon, co-authored with Khidir Hamza, an associate of serial liar Ahmad Chalabi, also much beloved by the Bush administration. These three guys played a significant role by providing propaganda support for the recent Bush Iraq adventure

Stein's CQ article was actually a hit piece on Jane Harmon: he claimed in Harman told a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage charges against two officials of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in exchange for the agent's agreement to lobby Nancy Pelosi to name Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee

Haermon's response at the time was The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a ‘scoop’ out of widely known and unremarkable facts

Glenn Greenwald, of course, thought it a major scandal, but it was before his current NSA kick, so his take was along the simpler (but still well-established) Greenwald tack of portraying Dems and Repubs as corruptly in cahoots: ... Harman was captured on an NSA wiretap conspiring with an Israeli agent to apply pressure on DOJ officials to scale back the AIPAC prosecution. But the real crux of Stein’s scoop is that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonazles intervened to kill the criminal investigation into Harman ...

So Conor Friedersdorf is doing what conservatives often do best, trying to revive old discredited stories by pretending to find a new spin. It must be hard to be so short on ideas