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French wants lies to stop { May 16 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63343-2003May16.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63343-2003May16.html
French Official Wants 'Lies' to Stop
By KIM HOUSEGO
The Associated Press
Friday, May 16, 2003; 8:43 AM
PARIS - Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said in an interview aired Friday that France wants "lies and calumny" published in both the U.S. and British press to stop.
To that end, Paris is taking an inventory of press accounts about France with plans to show they are untrue, de Villepin said in a France Inter radio interview taped Thursday night and aired Friday.
De Villepin stepped forward to personally address what France claims is a campaign of disinformation against it, revealed to U.S. officials this week in a letter from France's ambassador to Washington.
The letter by Ambassador Jean-David Levitte was sent to officials of the Bush administration and members of Congress. It was meant "to open up to them about the difficulties we are encountering and ... so that such lies and calumny stop," the minister said.
However, de Villepin broadened the charge, saying the British media, too, had carried disinformation.
"There is, in the American press and in the British press, a great number of articles, information that was without foundation, untruthful," the foreign minister said in the radio interview.
Among stories cited in the ambassador's letter were alleged French weapons sales to Iraq and a report last week that French officials provided passports to Iraqis trying to escape the U.S.-led invasion. Levitte called these "denigration and lies."
"We felt the need to make an effort of explanation to our American friends, and we will also do this with our British friends," de Villepin told France Inter.
"We can't accept that such criticism against France (further) develops," de Villepin said later from Brussels. The remarks were aired on France 2 television.
White House spokesman Sean McCormack denied there was any "organized effort" to plant information against France.
The accusation was the latest episode in months of tensions between Paris and Washington. Relations between France and the United States have plummeted since Paris took the lead in opposing the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Britain was the United States' prime partner in the war.
De Villepin was on the front line in the dispute over the war, arguing the French case at the U.N. Security Council.
France will "take an inventory of this untruthful information and provide all the elements which clearly show that all of this is based on nothing," de Villepin told France Inter. Like the ambassador's letter, the minister noted that the alleged false information "often" was based on "internal sources" in the Bush administration.
"Between friends, between allies, it is important to have a relationship based on frankness, hiding nothing, explaining oneself," de Villepin said. "On the other hand, lies and calumny must not be accepted."
"We must avoid ... being governed by rumor," he added.
© 2003 The Associated Press
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