WASHINGTON—France took the highly unusual step today of complaining formally that it had been victimized by a campaign of "repeated disinformation," allegedly fed by officials in the Bush administration, that accused the French of providing military and diplomatic aid to Baghdad. The administration denied the existence of any such campaign.
"There is, I don't think, any basis in fact to it," said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman. He added: "France is an ally; they're still friends."
And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose department and supporters are most often cited as a possible anonymous source of the stories, said he knew of no such campaign. "Certainly, there's no such campaign out of this building," he said.
The French complaint underlined the depth of ill feelings that still divide the two long-time allies weeks after the end of the United States-led war against Iraq, which France opposed.
The French made their complaint in a letter from Ambassador Jean-David Levitte that was sent to the White House, the State Department and the Congress. In addition to the letter, which was first reported by the Washington Post, the Foreign Ministry in Paris took an unusual step of its own, instructing French diplomats to monitor the American news media for signs of orchestrated anti-French disinformation.
"We have decided to count the untrue accusations which have appeared in the U.S. press and which have deeply shocked the French," said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Marie Masdupuy, according to a report by Reuters.
Among other things, the challenged stories assert that France and Germany supplied Iraq with precision switches that could be used in nuclear weapons; that French companies sold Iraq spare parts for warplanes and military helicopters; that France possessed prohibited strains of human smallpox; and that France, most recently, helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing them with travel papers.
The stories have been rankling French diplomats for months.
They see such reports as not just hurtful to American-French relations, especially since several have been seized on by members of Congress to call for investigations or punishment of the French. Paris also sees the stories as possibly linked to dangerous eruptions of anti-French sentiment. While they suggested no direct link, French officials did cite the example of a man who they said was attacked and severely beaten in a Los Angeles restaurant because he was speaking French.
The challenged reports are "all untrue, and all serious," and "not acceptable," said Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Washington.
Ms. Loiseau did not specifically point to anyone in the administration as the source of the articles, but she said that France could only assume that journalists were being truthful when they cited unnamed sources in the administration.
"We don't know who talked to journalists," she said, "but we would like it to stop, because it's inaccurate and it discredits our country."
The administration, while denying the French allegation, has made no secret of its deep unhappiness with France's adamant opposition during the Iraq debates at the United Nations, and later when it sought to block NATO assistance to Turkey during the Iraq war.
|
If
you have come to this page from an outside location click
here to get back to mindfully.org |