Shades of "Nurse Nayirah"

Remember her?

She was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.

She falsely claimed to be a nurse's aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.

Well,"Nurse Nayirah," meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:

Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

“I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”

………

Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.

“Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.

………

Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.

Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and

A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”

This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.

A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.

………

A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.

FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”

Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”

Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.

The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.

H/t Crooks and Liars.