As we wrote 9/29/04 -

In Great Britain, the BBC also questioned the bona fides and the rationale of the Blair argument that Iraqi missiles could cause 9/11-level devastation in England with but "forty-five minutes" of preparation.  The Blair government response to the BBC was a vicious attack on its integrity, accompanied by an extremely vitriolic charge (he called the independent BBC a "cesspool") by the international media mogul and owner of the Jerusalem Post, and now indicted-for-multimillion-dollar-theft Jewish Canadian, but British Lord, Conrad Black.

[ Somewhere in our other musings in Republican Bias in the Media we make mention of a key private dinner in the sumptuous New York townhouse of Bill Buckley with guests Henry Kissinger and his second wife, Rush Limbaugh and his third wife, and Conrad Black.  Somehow missing were Rupert Murdoch and his third wife and Joe Lieberman, who Mr. Buckley had placed in the United States Senate, Mr. Lieberman and his second wife.  To have been a fly on the wall. ]

The Blair/Black assault forced the resignation of several key journalists of the BBC, along with its two top officials, even though the reports of the independent, world renowned broadcaster were factually based and accurate to this day.

[How do you suppose Messrs. Blair & Black would respond to this sentence by, perhaps, the most respected book reviewer in the United States today, Michiko Kakutani*, who, in her article on James Bamford's A Pretext for War, included this quote:  "Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith 'forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel,' which 'was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad.'"]