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Whopper of the Week: Weldon KennedySee no evidence, hear no evidence, speak no evidence.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, June 7, 2002, at 1:30 PM ET

"[E]ven in the [Zacarias] 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."

—Former FBI deputy director Weldon Kennedy, on CNN's Crossfire, June 3.


"People close to [FBI whistle-blower Coleen] 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 [to their pleas for a search warrant]. (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.)"

—Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, "Are The Feds At Sea?" June 3 Newsweek.


"Amid the latest revelations about FBI and CIA lapses prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, congressional investigators say it is now clear that the evidence that lay unexamined in Zacarias Moussaoui's possession was even more valuable than previously believed.

"A notebook and correspondence of Moussaoui's not only appears to link him to the main hijacking cell in Hamburg, Germany, but also to an al Qaeda associate in Malaysia whose activities were monitored by the CIA more than a year before the terror attacks on New York and Washington."

—"Hill Probers Upgrade Evidence Gathered From Moussaoui," Washington Post, June 6.

(Thanks to Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Web log. Click here and here for Marshall's original items.)

Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
May 31, 2002: Ari Fleischer
May 23, 2002: Condoleezza Rice
May 17, 2002: Robert Mueller
May 9, 2002: Karl Rove
May 3, 2002: Gen. Richard Myers
April 25, 2002: Donald Rumsfeld
April 18, 2002: George W. Bush
April 11, 2002: The Rev. Robert J. Banks, archdiocese of Boston
April 5, 2002: George W. Bush
Mar. 29, 2002: Major League Baseball
Mar. 21, 2002: Billy Graham
Mar. 14, 2002: INS commissioner James W. Ziglar
Mar. 8, 2002: Robert Zoellick and the U.S. steel industry
Feb. 28, 2002: Al Sharpton
Feb. 22, 2002: Olympic skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne
Feb. 14, 2002: Kenneth Lay
Feb. 8, 2002: Enron spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney
Jan. 31, 2002: Monsanto
Jan. 24, 2002: Linda Chavez
Jan. 17, 2002: George W. Bush
Jan. 10, 2002: Simon & Schuster
Jan. 4, 2002: The Associated Press

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

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