Did Maxwell jump or was he pushed?

A new book says that the mysterious death of flamboyant Czechoslovak born British media tycoon Robert Maxwell was not suicide, as it was tentatively ruled at the time, but murder at the hands of the Israeli secret services. The book also alleges Maxwell was an Israeli spy and had links to organized crime in Eastern Europe, and that he was murdered because he was threatening to expose his knowledge of Israeli secrets unless he received Israeli help in propping up his failing businesses. Maxwell died in 1991 when he disappeared from his boat off the Canary Islands just as the complex web of financial deals keeping his businesses afloat was beginning to unravel.

The book, ‘Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy,’ by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, says ‘Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents who boarded his private yacht under cover of darkness and plunged a needle filled with a lethal nerve agent into Maxwell's neck. They then lowered his body off the deck and into the sea.’

Dead Parrot Society

A few days ago The Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote an article explaining that for George W. Bush, "facts are malleable." Documenting "dubious, if not wrong" statements on a variety of subjects, from Iraq's military capability to the federal budget, the White House correspondent declared that Mr. Bush's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy."

Also in the last few days, The Wall Street Journal reported that "senior officials have referred repeatedly to intelligence . . . that remains largely unverified." The C.I.A.'s former head of counterterrorism was blunter: "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements." USA Today reports that "pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda."

Reading all these euphemisms, I was reminded of Monty Python's parrot: he's pushing up the daisies, his metabolic processes are history, he's joined the choir invisible. That is, he's dead. And the Bush administration lies a lot.

Let me hasten to say that I don't blame reporters for not quite putting it that way. Mr. Milbank is a brave man, and is paying the usual price for his courage: he is now the target of a White House smear campaign.

That standard response may help you understand how Mr. Bush retains a public image as a plain-spoken man, when in fact he is as slippery and evasive as any politician in memory. Did you notice his recent declaration that allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power wouldn't mean backing down on "regime change," because if the Iraqi despot meets U.N. conditions, "that itself will signal that the regime has changed"? [More ... ]