"US 'Intelligence' Chief Caught Using Fake Email Story In Speech"
".... McConnell's speech. He opened it, as many speech-givers do, with a funny story. It was about a historical radio conversation at sea that begins with one voice advising a ship to change course 15 degrees to avoid a collision. The ship replies that the initial radio voice should be the one to change course.
And it escalates from there, each suggesting the other change course until the ship captain announces that he's navigating a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier accompanied by numerous other ships and orders the first voice to change course immediately.
To which the first voice replies, "Dear Captain. The next move is your call. This is a Canadian lighthouse."
Hilarious, especially to Canadians accustomed to Americans throwing their weight around the way Americans do without thinking. "The point of my story," McConnell told his attentive audience at Johns Hopkins University, "is always know who you're talking to."
And maybe also know what you're talking about. McConnell opened that sea story by saying, "Now this is... true. I was in the signals intelligence business where you listen to the people talk and so on. This is true. It’s an actual recording."
It turns out our audience of loyal Ticket readers includes Brooks Jackson, whom many will remember from his long career at AP and CNN, where he made a well-earned national reputation verifying the claims and ads of politicians.
He's since retired and operates a priceless online resource known as FactCheck.org that still monitors the facts thrown around in our nation's political dialogue. (i.e. Is Barack Obama's statement true that CEOs earn more in 10 minutes than average workers in a year? No.) We recommend the site.
Jackson was struck by McConnell's radio exchange story. He started mining his vast resources. And you'll never guess what he found and e-mailed to us. The radio exchange story that the Director of National Intelligence, a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy and former director of the National Security Agency, said was "true" and "an actual recording" is, in fact, a phony. Untrue. False. Urban naval legend. Never happened.
Nearly 11 years ago the United States Navy posted an item on its website debunking the story.
Now, if the Director of National Intelligence (or his intelligent speech writer) doesn't know what's on a government website belonging to the director's own former branch of the military, what else do you suppose they don't know?"
--Andrew Malcolm
