Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi writes in a Jan. 9 WorldNetDaily article:
While concern has mounted that former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense should be blocked because of past expressed hostility for Israel, little attention has been given to CIA-nominee John Brennan’s view of Islam.
In a speech delivered Aug. 9, 2009, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies that is archived on the White House website, Brennan said using “a legitimate term, ‘jihad’ – meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal” – to describe terrorists “risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”
In fact, terrorism and religious experts agree that Brennan is correct in not referring to terrorists as "jihadists" because jihad has a legitimate non-violent context in Islam and, as Brennan pointed out, it would reinforce the idea that the U.S. is fighting against Islam and not terrorists.
Corsi also complains that Brennan said that "U.S. foreign policy should encourage greater assimilation of the Hezbollah terrorist organization into the Lebanese government." But he failed to report that the goal of doing so is to encourage the group's moderates and move the organization further away from committing terrorist acts.
But Corsi isn't done trying to falsely delegitimize Brennan. In a Jan. 8 article, he goes through various contortions of guilt by association to link Brennan to "what many suspect was an effort to sanitize Obama’s passport records." Corsi names none of the "many" who "suspect" this.
According to Corsi, Brennan in 2008 was the head of a company with a government contract with the State Department, and one of its employees was reprimanded for breaching the privacy of the passport records of Obama and John McCain. Corsi goes on to state that "a well-placed but unnamed source" told "investigated reporter" Ken Timmerman "that the real point of the passport breach incidents was to cauterize the Obama file, removing from it any information that could prove damaging to his eligibility to be president." This then turns into a tale of a drug dealer who supposedly had "information related to the State Department employees who had breached Obama’s passport records" but who turned up mysteriously dead.
Corsi, by the way, has no proof any of this is connected -- he's just trying to keep his increasingly discredited anti-Obama conspiracy theories alive.
From there, Corsi jumps to suggesting conspiracy theories about Obama's 1981 visit to Pakistan, which he allegedly disclosed "Two weeks after the report that Obama’s passport records had been breached." Corsi hyperventilates: Did Obama use an Indonesian passport to travel to Indonesia and Pakistan in 1981, and was he concerned the breach of his passport records might end up disclosing such information, if true?
Of course, Corsi doesn't bother to mention that it was not just possible but fairly easy to travel to Pakistan in 1981 on a U.S. passport.
Such shoddy, biased reporting by Corsi is just one of the many reasons why nobody believes WND.
