"Ireland today reminds me of Berkley in the 1960s," George Dempsey said in an interview from his home in Sacramento. The country's main media is awash with anti-Americanism while directly benefiting from the economic and political backing from Washington, he added.

"They tell lies," Dempsey said of both the reporters and editorial writers at the Irish Times.

He maintains in his book "From the Embassy," which is due out next month, that falsehoods about American foreign policy written in Irish newspapers inflamed the hearts and minds of radical Islamists across the Middle East.

"The contortions they perform in presenting American foreign policy and factual distortions" are not confined in this digital age to readers in Ireland, said Dempsey.

He singled out two particular incidents to make his point.

After the first Gulf War, Dempsey said, the Irish Times ran a multi-part series on the effect of leftover depleted uranium in Iraq.

"They said it was causing Iraqi children to get cancer," Dempsey writes in his book.

He said professors at Trinity in Dublin and other scientists disputed this claim, but that such rhetoric helped produce the suicide bombers of Sept. 11.

The other point distorted in the Irish media, Dempsey mentions, is an alleged mischaracterization of the UN-sponsored Iraqi Oil for Food program.

According to Dempsey, the program worked well to provide enough food and medicines to the Iraqis, but that RTE, the Irish Times and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen led the Irish people to believe that people were "starving" despite knowing differently.

Dempsey, who worked for the rival Sunday Independent in Dublin for several years after leaving the diplomatic service, insisted that he finds the intelligentsia, or "elite Irish political class," culpable, rather the Irish people.

"They're a gutless bunch," he said of those who find themselves with bylines in the Irish Times or the subjects of that paper's writers.

He said the media has misled the Irish people into believing that "hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed in the first Gulf War." And that even now, they continue to mischaracterize U.S. foreign policy issues.

Dempsey said former Taoiseach Charles Haughey was less worried about deaths in Iraq and more concerned with getting "full commercial freight charges" for allowing the U.S. to use Shannon airport during the first Gulf War.

He expects to be derided by some once the book is released and he goes to Ireland for a book tour..

"[Labor Party politician] Michael D. Higgins will splutter with rage and many of the more responsible professors and academics will stay out of the debate for fear of their careers," he said.

Educated at Berkley, Harvard and Oxford, Dempsey also served in the army before joining the foreign service. He describes himself as a Kennedy Democrat who did not vote for George W. Bush.

"I know people want to believe that I am just a conservative Republican, but I'm not," he said.

"From the Embassy" will be published in Ireland in June by Liffey Press.