NEW YORK: Attempting to blunt buzz in the blogosphere about an alleged "Spy for Saddam," the Associated Press released a retort late Monday by Linda Wagner, director of media relations and public affairs, terming the charges "absurd."
The AP statement explains the background. It follows.
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All the information in a handwritten Arabic document from Iraq that some blogs claim to be evidence that an AP employee worked for Saddam Hussein was actually published and distributed worldwide as a wire story [in 2000] by Associated Press two weeks prior to the date on the document.
Since the information in this AP story was distributed worldwide, it would be absurd to consider its substance as espionage. Speculation by the blogs rests entirely on use of the term "one of our sources" in the Iraqi document. However, an AP employee who provides a government official in any nation with a copy of a published AP story is providing public information, not espionage services.
Additional background:
A number of blogs have posted items with speculative headlines such as: "Did The AP Have A Spy For Saddam?" and "Hussein's AP Spy?" and " The AP Gave Saddam Information."
The source for these speculative headlines is a document that has been posted by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center as one in a collection of unclassified documents from Iraq, captured by the U.S. military. The document's description on this government site is "Correspondence and Handwritten Intelligence Reports Issued by Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) regarding UNMOVIC training on inspection of Iraqi weapons." The document, dated July 25, 2000, is handwritten in Arabic....This U.S. military site is an unsecured public web site that can be found at: http://70.168.46.200/ .
According to a prominent disclaimer on the site's home page: "At the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office has created this portal to provide the general public with access to unclassified documents and media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available." ...
AP's own translation of the Arabic in the document indicates that all the points of information in it come from the AP wire story below, which was distributed worldwide on July 12, 2000. The sources for nearly all the information in the AP story were U.N. officials, except for one sentence about the reaction of Iraqi officials to a potential U.N. inspection.
In the Iraqi document, an introductory sentence written in Arabic and translated by AP, states: "We have learned from one of our sources (in whom the degree of trust is good) who works for the American news agency Associated Press that the agency transmitted the following through the computer system in its branches in the countries of the world."
