I was glad to see that Mr (Frank) Whitaker, press officer of the US embassy, issued a correction

for his Feb 17 letter .

In his letter, Whitaker had claimed a retraction by the St Petersburg Times reporter Jean Heller and the satellite imagery analyst Dr Peter Zimmerman of their 1991 story that commercial satellite photos showed there was no Iraqi army poised o­n the Kuwait-Saudi border. This story contradicted a claim by the US government that a massive Iraqi force was poised along the border to invade Saudi Arabia. This claim enabled the US government to convince Saudi Arabia to allow stationing of US troops.

The St Petersburg Times article became o­ne of the top news stories to come out of the 1991 Gulf War about US government disinformation. It has been cited in numerous articles, books, and websites in the years since 1991. If this article had indeed been recanted, it would have been pretty big news, at least in independent media and journalism circles.

The US State Department had contacted the reporter and imagery analyst to get their comments for Whitaker, for his Feb 17 letter. Whitaker's correction attributes the mistake to things getting mixed up when the reporter and imagery analyst's comments were passed from office to office within the State Department. o­n such a big news story as this, to mistakenly start with two separate reaffirmations of the original story, and innocently end up with a recantation of the original story, is hard to believe. It is more probable that the information passed across a desk whose occupant was less than innocent.

Perhaps US Ambassador (Marie) Huhtala should look into this matter more deeply before she tells us that "Of course, our country (the US) has never been involved in disinformation", as she told malaysiakini in her Feb 7 interview

.