CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE :

Laundering the 'Truth' : 'The Nation' Defuses a French Bombshell (Cynthia Cotts, July 24 - 30, 2002, Village Voice)

According to the back cover of Forbidden Truth, a bestseller published in France last fall and released in this country last week, a round of "secret diplomacy between the Bush administration and the Taliban" may have provoked Osama bin Laden into launching the September 11 attacks. [...]

With an outrageous premise like that, it's no wonder that chapter six of Forbidden Truth has been touted as the smoking gun that proves Bush's indirect responsibility for 9-11—or that Nation Books, the publishing arm of The Nation, has just published the book in English. What's really interesting is that after The Nation's hard-nosed Washington editor, David Corn, denounced the authors as conspiracy theorists, Nation Books neatly excised the smoking-gun allegations from the text.

The smoking-gun claim first appeared in the foreword of the book's original edition, in which the authors dubbed the 9-11 attacks "aforeseeable" and "tragic" "outcome" of the UN initiative. But the foreword in the Nation Books edition merely states that the 9-11 attacks were "possibly the outcome" of the UN initiative, and soberly calls for "further investigation." A similar text massage was performed at the end of chapter six. [...]

A few months ago, after reading a preliminary translation of the book, Corn wrote an internal memo critiquing it and opposing its publication. In May, he wrote a piece for The Nation that debunked what he calls the 9-11 conspiracy theorists. Describing Forbidden Truth, Corn later wrote, "I have rarely seen such shoddy and lazy journalism," adding that the book is "almost entirely unsourced" and that the authors gave "no sense that they had interviewed any single player in their tale." For The Nation to promote such a book is "just plain exploitative," he told the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the dispute.

David Corn makes for an unlikely hero in these parts and it's a shame that in this day and age just standing up for intellectual honesty passes for a heroic act, but he nonetheless deserves kudos for doing the right thing even though it's brought him into conflict with his publisher.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2002 12:04 AM