Josh Marshall Has a Secret
Joshua Micah Marshall is tanned, rested, and ready to get back in the blogging swing of things after a brief hiatus. And he’s running quite the teaser today. After referring to the story in today’s Financial Times that purports to reveal important details about where the forged Niger yellowcake documents at the heart of the “16 words” scandal came from (By the time you read this…), he says this:
That’s what the FT says.
I hear something different.
In fact, I know something different.
My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today — specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved.
I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can’t. But, for the moment, I can’t.
So, my take on this is that he’s working on some big article for the actual media, as opposed to this silly bloggy hobby he dabbles in on the side, and we all have to wait for said real article to appear to learn the point of all this coy hinting.
If Marshall were a Bush supporter offering tidbits about the latest smoking-gun evidence that Iraq had WMDs or al Qaeda had close operational ties with Saddam, I’d be making exaggerated wanking motions right now. But he’s not. As far as my obsessive following of his commentary over the last year or so tells me, he doesn’t pull this sort of thing without having the actual goods to back it up. So I’m (tentatively) hopeful that that’s the case here. And I’m looking forward to having that view confirmed or disconfirmed in the days ahead.
June 28th, 2004 at 1:09 pm
Why all the secrecy? He’s not only not saying what’s going to come, but he’s not saying why he’s not saying… What reasons could he have for such a high level of secrecy?
And is this going to be Good For Bush, or Bad For Bush? I would imagine that anything Josh comes up with is going to end up in the latter camp, but you never know.
I would imagine that there wouldn’t be such a high level of secrecy if it weren’t Bad, and maybe that’s what he intends me to think, because that sort of secretive information is sexy.