"The press is not running with this en masse the way they did with all the earlier nonsense, but it's all over the rightwing noise machine so there will be plenty of people who believe this crap. Still, it's a small comfort that the mainstream media is getting a little less easily played."
* greg sargeant has more:
As Atrios notes, the story got "shot down rather quickly," but it "will remain in circulation in wingnuttia and elsewhere forever."
Yes -- especially since those who initially pushed the story still haven't backed off of it. Over at the web site of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which played a key role in promoting the story, you can still find the press release touting the center's letter to United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan demanding an investigation. I can't find a single word on the site about the fact that the story's fallen apart -- not even in their Iran watch section."
* Jim Lobe describes Benador as follows:
"When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been… But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months."
Asia Times, August 15, 2003.
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