Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Whopper of the Week: Osama Bin LadenAl-Qaida leader libels Rummy!

By Timothy NoahPosted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2001, at 10:24 PM ET

"After they (the Americans), for no reason, bombed entire villages to scare the inhabitants, the defense secretary said it was the United States' right to exterminate the peoples since they are Muslim and since they are not American."

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--BBC transcript of Al Jazeera's latest Osama Bin Laden video.

Discussion: This column's usual practice is to provide refutation. In the case of a statement falsely attributed to an individual, Chatterbox will ordinarily track down the original quotation in order to demonstrate how it has been garbled and misrepresented. But what do you do when a false attribution comes out of thin air? Chatterbox can't find anything Donald Rumsfeld has said since Sept. 11 that even vaguely resembles what Bin Laden claims that he said. (Maybe it's out there and Chatterbox has missed it.) What Chatterbox can say with great certainty is that if Rumsfeld had ever suggested in any way that the U.S. had the right to exterminate people on the basis of their being non-American Muslims, that would have attracted considerable attention in the press, and probably would have cost Rumsfeld his job. It didn't happen.

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:
Dec. 20: Orrin Hatch
Dec. 13: Osama Bin Laden
Dec. 7, 2001: Henry Kissinger
Nov. 30, 2001: Council on American-Islamic Relations
Nov. 23, 2001: Bud Selig
Nov. 16, 2001: Sara Jane Olson
Nov. 9, 2001: Donald Rumsfeld (item includes retraction)
Nov. 2, 2001: Dick Armey
Oct. 26, 2001: Gale Norton
Oct. 19, 2001: State Department Deputy Spokesman Philip Reeker
Oct. 12, 2001: Clarence Thomas
Oct. 5, 2001: Abdul Salam Zaeef
Sept. 27, 2001: Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, and Dick Cheney
Sept. 20, 2001: Larry C. Johnson
Sept. 13, 2001: Yasser Arafat
Sept. 7, 2001: Tommy Thompson
Aug. 30, 2001: HHS spokesman Bill Pierce
Aug. 23, 2001: Variety Editor Peter Bart
Aug. 17, 2001: Tom Daschle
Aug 10, 2001: Robert Mueller
Aug. 3, 2001: Barbara Olson
July 27, 2001: Jeffrey Archer
July 20, 2001: George W. Bush
July 13, 2001: George W. Bush
July 6, 2001: Sumner Redstone
June 29, 2001: David Brock
June 22, 2001: Edmund Morris
June 15, 2001: George W. Bush
June 8, 2001: Nepali Prince Regent (subsequently, King) Gyanendra
June 1, 2001: Mary McGrory
May 25, 2001: Ari Fleischer
May 18, 2001: York, Pa., Mayor Charles Robertson
May 11, 2001: Ted Olson
May 4, 2001: Rear Adm. Craig Quigley
April 27, 2001: Ben Affleck
April 20, 2001: South Carolina state legislator Chip Limehouse
April 13, 2001: Gray Davis
April 6, 2001: Sumner Redstone
March 30, 2001: Spencer Abraham
March 23, 2001: George W. Bush, Rep. Jennifer Dunn, and/or the Treasury Department
March 16, 2001: George W. Bush
March 9, 2001: Russ Freyman, spokesman, National Association of Manufacturers
March 2, 2001: Paul O'Neill
Feb. 23, 2001: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
Feb. 16, 2001: Oscar spokesman John Pavlik
Feb. 9, 2001: Lynne Cheney
Feb. 2, 2001: Bobby Thomson
Jan. 26, 2001: Denise Rich