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Kennedy Touted Anti-Bush Spy Hoax
More than a week after the story was exposed as a hoax, Sen. Ted Kennedy has yet to apologize for touting false claims from a University of Massachusetts student who said officials from the Department of Homeland Security visited his home and repeatedly interrogated him after he tried to obtain a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book." In mid-December, the unidentified student instigated the hoax by describing the phony grilling to reporters for the New Bedford Standard-Times. The story appeared on Dec. 17, the day after the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was monitoring the phone calls of U.S. residents suspected of communicating with terrorists abroad. In a Dec. 22 op-ed piece for the Boston Globe, however, Kennedy conflated the Times report along with the U. Mass student's bogus allegation to blast the Bush administration for what he insisted was an illegal invasion of privacy. "Just this past week," Kennedy wrote, "there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he had gone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto. Following his professor's instructions to use original source material, this young man discovered that he, too, was on the government's watch list."
Story Continues Below "Incredibly," the top Democrat fumed, "we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorists." He demanded "a thorough and independent investigation of these activities." However, on Dec. 24 the Times-Standard reported: "The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for 'The Little Red Book' by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story." The revelation left Sen. Kennedy uncharacteristically silent. Asked if he shouldn't have verified the incendiary account before citing it in print, Kennedy spokeswoman Laura Capps insisted to the Boston Globe: "Even if the assertion was a hoax, it did not detract from Kennedy's broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance." Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Inside Cover Stories
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