The Sources James Risen Believes

...have led him astray before:

Several [anonymous] officials," told Risen that a transcript of Zubaydah's interrogation was circulated "within the American intelligence community last year . . . his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties."

Thus, according to Risen's sources, the Bush administration was being duplicitous by not citing Zubaydah's testimony, which supposedly cut against the case for linking Saddam and al Qaeda.

What Risen's sources did not tell him--and we did not learn until more than a year later, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its report on prewar intelligence--was that Zubaydah "also said, however, that any relationship would be highly compartmented and went on to name al-Qaida members who he thought had good contacts with the Iraqis. For instance, Abu Zubaydah indicated that he had heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence."

That portion of Zubaydah's interrogation never made it into Risen's June 9, 2003 account. Why? Because his anonymous sources--the same types he now tells us have the "purest" and "best" motives and who are "patriots"--didn't tell him that.

As Edward Jay Epstein noted in his 1975 book, Between Fact and Fiction, "The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are therefore almost entirely dependent on self-interested 'sources' for the version of reality that they report."

My money's on Colin Powell and Dick Armitage. This has the stink of their wing.