If Tim Noah isnt

If Tim Noah isn’t working on this whopper for his Whopper of Week column I’ll have to have a serious talk with him.

Yesterday on CNN’s Crossfire, former FBI Deputy Director Weldon Kennedy was the designated defender of the FBI. Even in the current climate of rampant Monday-morning quarterbacking, Kennedy seemed, to my lights, painfully unwilling to admit that the Bureau had really made any mistakes.

But check this out. In reference to FBIHQ’s refusal to okay a warrant request to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and other belongings, Kennedy said (and repeated on other CNN shows) …

For example, even in the Moussaoui case, there’s lot of uproar over the fact that the — there was a failure to obtain a warrant to search his computer. Well, the facts now are that warrant was ultimately obtained. The computer was searched and guess what? There was nothing significant on there pertaining to 9/11.

Really?

Look at this apparently-uncontradicted snippet from last week’s Newsweek …

People close to Rowley and her Minnesota colleagues say they were devastated after the attacks, convinced that they could have done more to stop the plot if only Washington had listened. (Moussaoui’s computer, searched after September 11, revealed information about crop-dusting and large jets, and his belongings included the phone number of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta’s roommate.) Rowley herself wanted to interrogate Moussaoui. “She was in favor of a hostile interview,” an FBI agent says. “A little shoving, a little chair slamming.” But her supervisors said Moussaoui, who had invoked his right to a lawyer, was off-limits.

Is this the same as saying up is down or denying that the sky is blue? No, not exactly. And it’s not like Mohamed Atta’s roommate’s phone number would necessarily have busted the whole plot open. And perhaps he’s trying to hang this on finding the number in Moussaoui’s ‘belongings’ and not his laptop. But given the extreme tendentiousness of the comment and the near felonious $%#-covering embodied in it, I think this counts as a Whopper of pretty sizeable proportions.