US channel foxed by the fake war hero

As a distinguished lieutenant colonel who had served in Vietnam, been part of the mission to save US hostages in Iran and had won the Silver Star for bravery, Joseph Cafasso seemed like the perfect consultant to help Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel with its war coverage.

There was only one problem: the military experience of the "colonel" now appears to have been 44 days in a boot camp in New Jersey in 1976, followed by an honourable discharge at the rank of private.

For more than four months, Mr Cafasso was part of the Fox News team covering the war in Afghanistan. His impressive range of contacts in the military stemmed, he suggested, from his time in the elite special forces, the US equivalent of the SAS. He walked with a cane and made reference to it as a consequence of his experiences in Vietnam.

But an investigation by the New York Times indicates that his military career started and ended 25 years ago. Fox News has now parted company with Mr Cafasso, but claims that none of the information he supplied to it has so far turned out to be wrong. In an email to the New York Times, Mr Cafasso claimed that he was the victim of "political assassination by a group of self-centred individuals with their own political agendas".

The revelation is an embarrassment to Fox, which has been trying to combat claims of conservative bias in its coverage of world events.