Have any US papers repeated the "Blame the French" angle?

[lkinsale]

So far I only saw this claim about the French giving intell to the Brits, and saying they couldn't pass it to us, in Brit papers.

Any sightings of this clunker in the US?

[fairfaxvadem]

1. apparently in the Moonie Times...

Came across a link to it on Buzzflash, I think.

But the story didn't make a whole lot of sense to me after I read it. The point being that the French didn't want to provide any positive info to Bush since they opposed the war.

Whatever...

[lkinsale]

2. What's the moonie times?

NYT?

[fairfaxvadem]

3. the Moonie Times is the Washington Times

Owned by the Rev Sun Yung Moon himself. And a mouthpiece of the right-wing.

[lkinsale]

5. Oh, well in THAT case...

Seems maybe the US papers aren't falling for it?

You know, I noticed an odd little thing way back in the fall. There was a report in some places (yahoo maybe) about some kind of "case of nuclear-components-something-or-others" (I don't remember what it was exactly, but it sounded really important) being discovered smuggled in Turkey (the implication being they were smuggling them into Iraq.) First it was like 200 of these whatevers, then 20, and there was a bit of confusion.

This was reported in the Turkish govt-run paper and picked up by some service on yahoo. I remember being =quite= interested at the time, as the case for the war was being hyped, and this seemed like a smoking gun.

So I kept scanning the US papers, and never found anything about it in NYT or WP. And eventually it just died. Presumably either the Turks made it up, or it was just hyped nonsense. And I was kind of impressed that the major papers never printed a word about it. I figured maybe they checked it out and thought it was not true.

In hindsight, I wonder if it wasn't more along the lines of the Niger stuff, something thrown out there to see if it stuck.

I'm wondering the same thing about this accusation against the French. It seems to me, since the French control the Niger company as I understand it, that they could be logically tarred as having evidence that they withheld out of spite. I'm waiting to see if the NYT reports it, as a kind of benchmark.

Anyway, just thoughts.

[SeattleDem]

4. I saw it on Fox late yesterday

flipping channels, stopped long enough to hear that the French were the source of the forged document and how joyful they must be to be seeing Bush squirm. That's responsible journalism!