France Calls U.S. 'Liars', Now Monitoring our Media

When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was asked last month whether France would be punished, he replied "Yes."

Well France

In the wake of the letter from Ambassador Jean-David Levitte sent to the White House, State Department and Congress Thursday accusing the U.S. of conducting a campaign of anti-French lies and slander, France has turned it's attention to America's media, vowing to monitor them for further signs of unfair and untrue allegations, the French say have been leveled them.

And, say the French, the media has been fed false allegations by unknown administration officials.

The accusation drew heated denials from the Bush administration.

"There is, I don't think, any basis in fact to it." said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman. "France is an ally; they're still friends."

According to the International Herald Tribune as reported in Friday's New York Times, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose department and supporters are most often mentioned as a possible source of the news reports cited by the French, told reporters today that he knew of no such campaign.

"Certainly, there's no such campaign out of this building," he said.

The Tribune reported that the French Foreign Ministry says it is instructing its diplomats in the U.S. to monitor the American news media for signs of any orchestrated anti-French campaign. "We have decided to count the untrue accusations which have appeared in the U.S. press and which have deeply shocked the French," Marie Masdupuy, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters in Paris.

As reported yesterday by NewsMax.com

Angry French officials charge that such reports are hurtful to American-French relations. They cite Congressional demands for investigations or punishment of the French as examples of the damage done by the reports. Wrote the Herald Tribune "The diplomats also say such accounts may spawn anti-French actions, some potentially violent. While suggesting no direct link, they said, for example, that a man was attacked and severely beaten in a Los Angeles restaurant because he was speaking French."

The disputed reports are "all untrue, and all serious," and "not acceptable," Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Washington told the Herald Tribune. She did not specifically identify anyone within the administration as the source of the articles, but did suggest that France could only assume that journalists were being truthful when they cited unnamed officials in the administration.

"We don't know who talked to journalists," she said, "but we would like it to stop, because it's inaccurate and it discredits our country."

It could be said that the French have done a pretty good job of discrediting themselves without any help from the U.S.