Talk:Kenneth R. Timmerman
Has he done anything else?
Articles for Deletion debate
This article survived an Articles for Deletion debate. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 01:11, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
An update...
Mr. Timmerman is also being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.
--JJ
is that so? a man who "works to instigate an armed conflict" (according to this wikipedia page)... for the peace prize? maybe one day i'll win it myself, but that will be after i instigate world war 3 of course.
Editor Janes Defense Weekly - Timmerman misquotations
http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2006/03/exclusive-neocon-expert-caught-out.html
Monday, March 27, 2006
Exclusive: Neocon Expert Caught Out Over Iran Warmongering On March 23rd, Kenneth R. Timmerman writing for Frontpage Magazine made an astonishing pronouncement: In January, Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that Middle East intelligence sources had confirmed a story appearing in the German newspaper Bild on Dec. 16, 2005, alleging that Iran had acquired Russian-made nuclear warheads through North Korea.
The warheads had equipped SS-N-6 submarine-launched missiles. U.S. intelligence sources privately confirmed these reports to me. [Emphasis Mine] If true, this claim would blow the current brewing crisis over Iran's nuclear program wide open, change the game entirely...and Jane's is the definitive military sourcebook, whatever it said would normally be impeccably sourced.
However the Jane's article that Mr Timmerman cites doesn't appear to mention nuclear warheads at all, just the missiles. In fact, it notes that analysts are puzzled by the Iranian purchase: "Although the technology is 40 years old, the SS-N-6 SLBM is a very complicated missile, which is not easy to copy and does not align with the current Iranian efforts," Uzi Rubin, former director of Israel's Ballistic Missile Defence Organisation, told JDW. It's actually fairly likely that Iran bought the missiles to help along it's nascent satellite-launch program.
But...no mention of the purchase of actual "nuclear warheads" in the "non-subscriber extract" (which is all you can read without paying), which would have been cataclysmic front page news worldwide if Jane's had actually said such a thing.
On Friday I emailed Jane's asking their editors if they would like to comment on what appeared to be an extreme misrepresentation of their article. Today they wrote back, attaching a full copy of the article so we all knew what we were talking about: Dear Sir,
You're quite right: we were talking missiles and not warheads. I pasted in the full article below and copied in our communications manager should the Timmerman material lead to any further complications or misquotations regarding our reporting.
Many thanks for drawing this to our attention.
Yours sincerely,
P J R Felstead Editor, JDW The chances of this being an accidental misinterpretation by Mr. Timmerman seem slim to me. He isn't some know-nothing opinionator, but rather a very well connected and very well informed neoconservative figure. According to his Wikipedia entry he is an expert in military matters, having written for various defense journals in the past. He runs his own defense and security consultancy, Middle East Data Project, Inc. It takes a lot of mistake for such an expert to see a report of the aquisition of nuclear warheads in an article that says no such thing. Were he capable of a simple mistake of this magnitude, then his credibility as an expert would surely be seriously undermined - something that news organisations such as FOX News and the UK's Daily Telegraph might have to take into account when citing him as an authoritative source or consultant. (Actually that Telegraph story also uses two other sources of extremely questionable credibility.) Congress might want to bear it in mind too when next he testifies before them.
(They might also wish to consider Mr. Timmerman's claim that "Separate sources in the U.S. and Iran have told FDI recently that the Iranian regime is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006." An event that singularly failed to happen.)
Yet the possibility that Mr. Timmerman deliberately cited spurious sources for a false claim is even more worrying. Given bono fides of Mr. Timmerman's kind, there would surely have to be a serious motive behind any such lie.