NBC Correspondent remembers Victoria Toensing
Forgive me folks for not doing a proper diary on this, but its 2 AM and I’m out of steam for the day. I did however want to offer it up to the DKOS community as a "backgrounder" piece on the lovely and talented Victoria Toensing.
The Riechwingers are grasping at straws after the Plame hearings today and Ms. Vickie is playing a prominent role in their latest diatribes. A major hat tip to litigatormom and her excellent dairy:
Victoria Toensing is a very very bad lawyer (edited, w/ mea culpa)
by litigatormom
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Here is an excerpt from:
Washington File
Enter the secretive Victoria
Friday, March 16, 2007 | 03:36 PM ET
By Henry Champ
"On October 7, 1985, four heavily armed men, claiming to represent the Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. They were demanding the release of 50 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
To prove they were serious about their mission, the hijackers shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled 69-year-old American tourist. Klinghoffer, who was wheelchair-bound, was thrown overboard into the Mediterranean.
What followed was a series of massive American security and diplomatic missteps. Egyptian forces captured the Achille Lauro but then, claiming they didn't know Klinghoffer had been killed, let the hijackers go free. The leader of the PLF, Abu Abbas, turned up days later in Italy but again was freed and disappeared before American authorities could arrest him.
In the hubbub, Washington was under considerable public pressure for failing to protect American citizens and for allowing terrorists to score what they would claim as a military coup.
At NBC, with the help of our Mideast sources, we managed to find Abbas. With an NBC crew in tow, I flew to a Middle East country and interviewed Abbas. We got him to admit to ordering the hijacking, and the killing of Klinghoffer because, Abbas told me, Klinghoffer was attempting to incite other passengers to resist.
To get the interview we had made one commitment: That NBC would not reveal the meeting place.
Enter Victoria Toensing.
NBC was protecting terrorists, she said. And with that charge a huge public debate over freedom of the press broke out. People took sides. There were demands that the NBC reporter (me) and crew return to Washington to appear before a grand jury.
Changing the story
It always seemed to me that most people felt NBC had done a decent journalistic job in tracking down Abbas, that we elicited a confession from those involved and showed them for the thugs they were.
Still, the debate played for days. Toensing knew what she was doing. The NBC debate overshadowed the stories about American failures in the Mideast or screw-ups chasing terrorists.
The truth was any tinpot government security service would have been able to track a four-person television crew leaving Heathrow Airport for the Middle East. I met Victoria Toensing years later at a Washington function and she told me exactly where we had met with Abbas and who his henchmen were.
Now Victoria is testifying at the Valerie Plame hearing. Her job is still the same — to change the nature of the way the story is perceived.
http://www.cbc.ca/...
There’s more to the story and a big thanks to a real journalist Henry Champ!