||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JEFF STEIN, CQ - U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of
Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower,
starting in 2002. This may well be news to many people, even though
Wright revealed the taps himself in a sprawling, 15,000-word article on
electronic surveillance in the Jan. 21 edition of The New Yorker
magazine. . .
As far as I can tell, only Pam Hess of the Associated Press picked up on
Wright's confrontation with spy chief Michael McConnell over the phone
taps, and no major paper ran it. The version of her story that The
Washington Post printed recounted McConnell's telling Wright that water
boarding would be "torture" if it were done to him, but dropped the five
paragraphs Hess wrote on the eavesdropping. The New York Times and Wall
Street Journal skipped Wright's wiretap account altogether. . .
In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the
course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning
account of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an
article on al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
"They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, he recounted.
"They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England
who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were
jihadis, former members of Zawahiri's terror organization in Egypt, and
they wanted to know what we were talking about.
What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that
his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.
"Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,
they said.". . .
Neither the FBI nor the Office of the Directorate of National
Intelligence would comment on the incidents Wright described. . .
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002661145
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JEFF STEIN, CQ - U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of
Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower,
starting in 2002. This may well be news to many people, even though
Wright revealed the taps himself in a sprawling, 15,000-word article on
electronic surveillance in the Jan. 21 edition of The New Yorker
magazine. . .
As far as I can tell, only Pam Hess of the Associated Press picked up on
Wright's confrontation with spy chief Michael McConnell over the phone
taps, and no major paper ran it. The version of her story that The
Washington Post printed recounted McConnell's telling Wright that water
boarding would be "torture" if it were done to him, but dropped the five
paragraphs Hess wrote on the eavesdropping. The New York Times and Wall
Street Journal skipped Wright's wiretap account altogether. . .
In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the
course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning
account of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an
article on al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
"They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, he recounted.
"They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England
who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were
jihadis, former members of Zawahiri's terror organization in Egypt, and
they wanted to know what we were talking about.
What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that
his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.
"Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,
they said.". . .
Neither the FBI nor the Office of the Directorate of National
Intelligence would comment on the incidents Wright described. . .
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002661145
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment