Alexis Debat: Fake War Reporter?

September 19, 2007

I’m not sure what coverage is like in the news outlets and weblogs you are reading, but I find it surprising I haven’t seen more bloggy coverage of the Alexis Debat debacle (Debatle?)

Alexis Debat was a consultant to ABC and the source of several inflammatory news stories and interviews that now appear to have been faked.

The renewed scrutiny has been driven by revelations about Mr. Debat after a French news Web site, Rue 89, reported this week that an interview supposedly with Senator Obama was entirely made up. Mr. Debat, who could not be reached last night, sent an e-mail message to ABC yesterday saying the allegations against him “are slanderous.”

He told The Washington Post Wednesday that an intermediary had spoken with Mr. Obama. But representatives for Mr. Obama denied that he spoke with anyone connected to Mr. Debat.

Subsequently, other figures whose interviews appeared under Mr. Debat’s byline in the French magazine Politique Internationale have come forward to say they never spoke to him. These included Mr. Clinton; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman; Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft; and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. [ ABC reopens investigations... ]

Debat was also a senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center ( “America’s Realist Voice”) and even worked for the Pentagon with a contract through the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, another think-tank. Debat resigned his Nixon Center post and was apparently fired by the CSBA — although, as you see, he denies charges that he falsified anything.

ABC stopped working with Debat in June when it was discovered he’d apparently falsified his stellar academic credentials. Now they’re wondering how many of the news stories he wrote for ABC are also false. And considering the substance of those stories, I think we can be justifiably concerned:

Over the years, Debat was a source for many ABC News scoops: on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan… Like its competitors, the network has strict ethical rules, with a director of “standards and practices”. Information is supposed to be vetted or reliably confirmed. But fact-checking was not easy with Debat’s scoops as they were always attributed to anonymous sources hiding from within the shadowy world of secret services in Pakistan, France or the US. [ How Alexis Debat Managed to Cheat Everyone in Washington ]

And, of course, dramatic news scoops get picked up and passed around by everyone else. Which stories are being investigated, I wonder, and which stories about national security and terrorism in Iran and Iraq will be “no longer operative” after those investigations are concluded?

On September 2nd on the Sunday Times of London, he revealed secret plans of the Bush administration to bomb Iran “in three days”. Four years ago at the height of French-American tensions on Iraq, he explained how Uday Hussein, son of Saddam, forced two French students on a trip in Baghdad to have sex at gunpoint while being videotaped. Surfing on the ambient francophobia, he said that according to a cable he saw, the French government covered up the incident. “I mean, after all, this is Saddam Hussein’s son!” [ How Alexis Debat Managed to Cheat Everyone in Washington ]

How much of people’s support for the Iraq war — and the hopefully-not-upcoming war with Iran — can be traced back to this person’s reporting? I am sure it would be interesting to know.

Posted in So Called Media