The Telegraph and British Intelligence. posted by Richard Seymour

The Telegraph is fond of delivering splash front pages, usually composed by their enterprising journalist, Con Coughlin. I just wanted to adumbrate a few of the ways in which this illustrates something crucial about the relationship between intelligence and the media. I'll just outline the facts in ordinal fashion:

1) The Telegraph last year produced a shocking expose of the links between Mohammed Atta and Saddam Hussein :

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

It turns out that this story was nonsense , an old story backed up by a fraudulent set of documents.

This story was written by Con Coughlin, and he recycled it for Front Page magazine at the same time.

2) Con Coughlin also produced shocking evidence that the 45 minute claim may be accurate, producing an Iraqi colonel who not only said he believed the claim may have come from him, but also suggested that the weapons had been hidden away. Moreover:

"Forget 45 minutes," said Col al-Dabbagh "we could have fired these within half-an-hour."

Colonel al-Dabbagh was, the article notes, a spy for the Iraqi National Accord, an organisation responsible for flooding world media sources with inaccurate and contrived stories on Saddam Hussein's alleged threat to the West. No indication of who provided Coughlin with his source, but it raised some eyebrows among military and intelligence experts at the time, and has subsequently proven to be false . Even though his article proved very swiftly to be more full of holes than Tupac, he persisted in churning out guff with the same claims .

3) Con Coughlin has a history of accepting phoney stories from MI6 and then going on to lard them with falsehood.

His stories collapse almost as soon as they are erected, and it has to be judged that he is one of the worst journalists operating in Britain right now, lacking both critical judgement and integrity. The question that imposes itself with immediate, compulsory force is: why does the Telegraph persist in employing someone so patently incompetent and why does it still use his stories to make splash headlines?

Fill in the blank yourself.