Wired News publishes CQ’s insistence that their reporting on this falafel fiasco was right all along.
Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column was published. After conferring further with them upon receipt of your letter, Mr. Stein and Congressional Quarterly stand by the column.
The FBI’s San Francisco office was given repeated opportunities by Mr. Stein to respond to his column before it was published, and declined. An FBI spokesman in Washington did respond, choosing neither to confirm nor deny the existence of the program, and his comments were included in the column. An after-the-fact denial is of less use to readers than one that could have run with the column, but, in the interest of fairness, we will publish it with Mr. Stein’s next column.
Dear Cyrus. Do you mind writing anything about the new Iranian project “Hello Yahoo mail” that is a communal movement against the Yahoo removal of Iran’s name from its list of countries? Iranians have decided to remove their Yahoo accounts in protest against this immoral action and it was broadcasted by the most important elites of mainstream media around the world…