The question of the circumstances behind Princess Diana's death are not particularly of interest to me, but I did listen very carefully to news reports of the final report issued this week. The little factoid that intrigued me? That Diana was allegedly under surveillance by Secret Service at the time of her death. Remember, Diana died in 1997, so this would have taken place during the Clinton Adminstration. I'm sure you can imagine how the wingnut media ran with that.
Glenn Greenwald provides an excellent roundup of their hackery:
People like Mickey Kaus, David Frum, Glenn Reynolds, and National Review's Andrew McCarthy and Byron York have spent the last week disseminating claims that the Clinton administration eavesdropped on Princess Diana. They've been insinuating all sorts of wrongdoing based on these reports, all which came from unreliable British press accounts.
Some of them -- Kaus and York in particular -- were spewing all sorts of speculative accusations that the Clinton administration broke the law and that the real target of the eavesdropping was Diana's boyfriend, New York billionaire Ted Forstmann. That led Kaus to speculate that the whole thing was all a plot by Hillary, because Forstmann was a potential rival for her Senate seat and she wanted to eavesdrop on his conversations with Diana for that reason.
The official British Government investigative report was released today, and as it turns out -- and as was painfully predictable -- the whole story is a sham, completely untrue.
