Salon opens D.C. bureau, hires Sid Blumenthal, adds partners
Those who wrote off Salon should think again. Today the independent news site announced a series of ambitious editorial initiatives, including the opening of a new Washington D.C. news bureau under the direction of Sidney Blumenthal and new relationships with The Guardian of London and the new progressive radio network, Air America.
Blumenthal, who was named Senior Vice President for Editorial Development and Washington Bureau Chief by Salon, is a former assistant and senior aide to President Clinton; author of "The Clinton Wars" and five other books; and former staff writer for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He is also currently a columnist for The Guardian of London.
As part of its expansion, Salon announced that it has agreed in principle to a content-sharing arrangement with The Guardian of London, under which the two publications will exchange news stories daily to be posted on each others' Web sites.
Salon also plans to contribute daily to the new progressive radio network, Air America, providing "The Salon Story of the Day."
As an example of the "unintimidated news" Salon's Washington bureau plans to bring to its readers, on Wednesday Salon published an inside account of how intelligence was twisted in the rush to the Iraq war, by a retired lieutenant colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski, a Near East specialist, formerly assigned to the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. In her 5,500-word-long account, Kwiatkowski writes: "I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policy makers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.... I observed how the distorted intelligence and sharpened political talking points were funneled to the Office of Vice President Cheney."
Salon also said in its annoucement that on Thursday it will publish the first of several advance excerpts from "House of Bush, House of Saud," a new book by Craig Unger that explores the relationship between the two dynasties, and whose explosive contents have been embargoed. In the first installment, Unger, who has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, will supposedly expose new details on the flights approved by the Bush White House that carried members of the bin Laden family and other prominent Saudis out of the U.S. to Saudi Arabia after September 11. Salon will publish for the first time the manifest of the passenger list and identify one passenger as a suspected al Qaeda funder who was aware ahead of time of the September 11 attacks.
On Friday, Salon will publish an exclusive report on the Texas investigation of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his political operatives that reporter Lou Dubose (co-author of "Shrub" and "Boy Genius") believes may send some of them to prison, shaking up Texan and national politics.
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