Topic: WorldNetDaily
Two years ago, WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein served as a de facto spokesman for the dying Mubarak regime in Egypt, uncritically peddling the dictator's party line and even making sure members of Mubarak's regime got a copy of an Obama-bashing book Klein wrote.
In that same vein, Klein has been toying with promoting the views of another Middle East dictator embroiled by a popular revolt, Bashar al-Assad. He cranks that up in a May 30 WND article touting the missiles Assad says he bought from Russia:
The Syrian government already has received a first shipment of S-300 air defense missiles from Russia and is waiting for more, stated President Bashar al-Assad in a television interview today.
Assad told Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station that Syria “has got the first batch of Russian S-300 missiles” and “the rest of the shipment will arrive soon.”
Citing Arab intelligence sources two weeks ago, WND was first to report that S-300 missile batteries had reached Syria.
Klein countered his credulous promotion of Assad's claimed weapons acquisition with only a single statement that "Israeli security sources said two weeks ago there was no information to support the Arab claim."
Meanwhile, even Fox News reports that according to "two senior U.S. officials privy to sensitive intelligence matters," Syria "does not yet have advanced surface-to-air missiles from Russia." It turns out that Klein was relying on a botched translation of Assad:
Although Assad was initially quoted as saying "Syria has received the first shipment of Russian anti-aircraft S-300 rockets," a subsequent transcript was inconclusive.
"There are many arms agreements between us and the Russians from a long time," the later transcript stated. "The Russians are committed to their agreements. All that was agreed with Russia will be implemented and part of it has been already done. We and the Russians are in agreement and we will continue to be like this."
We're not big fans of anonymous sources, but Fox's anonymous sources seem much more trustworthy than Klein's especially given Klein's long history of using anonymous sources to smear his political enemies and benefit his political friends, there's no reason to believe that Klein is doing anything here other than to try and help the Assad regime, despite its murderous record in the Syrian civil war.
In other words, Klein is putting his personal partisan agenda ahead of the truth. As if we expect any different from him and WND.
