Regular visitors to this site are quite familiar with what Walid thinks about the smear merchants at CNN – not much. Anderson Cooper, the same CNN anchor who aired Drew Griffin’s hit piece on Walid last year, is now delving into the claims made by five congressmen – led by Michele Bachmann – that there is justification for looking into the loyalties of some high-ranking officials in various government agencies / departments.
Via CNN:
Last year, CNN launched a smear campaign against Walid when it sent reporter Drew Griffin to Rapid City, SD to do a hit piece, which attempted to do little more than question Walid’s motives for doing what he does.
Subsequent to that two-part report airing, it was learned that none other than the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) was involved. Here is the relevant excerpt from our rebuttal to CNN:
We have also learned thru unimpeachable sources that CAIR operatives secretly worked with CNN in carrying out this political assassination of Mr. Shoebat.
You’ll notice in the aforementioned report on the letters sent to various Inspectors General by Bachmann and four other Congressmen that there is a similar effort to smear those involved. The first man interviewed by Cooper is Alex Seitz-Wald, of Salon.com, whose argument (if you can call it that) is that the only connection Huma Abedin has to the Brotherhood is “through her dead father” and a person he was “supposedly connected to”. That person Seitz-Wald refers to but doesn’t name is an Al-Qaeda godfather named Abdullah Omar Naseef and there is no “supposedly” involved.
Note how Seitz-Wald completely ignores the membership of Huma’s mother in the Muslim Sisterhood; he also ignores the fact that Huma’s brother – Hassan Abedin – served as a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), though his name no longer appears on the OCIS website. Any guesses as to who serve(s)/(d) as Chairman of the Board at OCIS during Hassan’s time as a fellow?
Of course, another person interviewed by Cooper in this piece was James Zogby, a man who came to the defense of Ziad Abu Ain, a fact that should perhaps make Zogby less than objective.
Via the Middle East Forum:
He (Zogby) first attracted national media attention in 1979, when he campaigned on behalf of the National Emergency Committee to Defend Ziad Abu Eain to prevent the extradition to Israel of a member of Yasir Arafat’s Al-Fatah organization accused of taking part in a 1979 bombing in Tiberias, killing two Israeli teenagers and wounding thirty-six other Israelis. Zogby’s effort failed and Abu Eain went on to spend four years of a longer sentence in an Israeli jail (and was released in the prisoner exchange of 1985, when Israel traded 1,500 Palestinians for three of its soldiers).
The first 1:50 of this clip mirrors the clip above, which cuts away to Cooper’s interviews. Here, Cooper identifies the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney as Bachmann’s primary source for information.