Did a fake website rewrite history?

Previously, I've voiced my suspicion that America's hysterical reaction against Iran's election was ginned up. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man supposedly robbed of the presidency, is an old Ghorbanifar pal and a familiar figure from the bad old days of Iran-contra. He also killed 30,000 political prisoners in one year. Compare that figure to Saddam Hussein's estimated lifetime total of 200,000.

The American media's reportage on Iran depended on Twitter "tweets" of unverifiable origin and dubious veracity. (See also here.) Many media organs -- including AP, the NYT and National Public Radio -- cited a website called Tehran Bureau. This was a blogspot site -- like Cannonfire -- which became a repository for those aforementioned dubious tweets.

NPR labeled Tehran Bureau "one of the most reliable sites" for news on Iran, as if such were the assessment of journalists who had spent time in that nation and who were well-versed in Iranian affairs.

Tehran Bureau now looks rather mysterious. Such, at least, is the purport of this expose by Foreign Policy Journal.

Tehran Bureau was announced in a press release on February 26 – little more four months prior to the election.

The site was (is?) run by one Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, a lawyer/journalist with an interesting background:

Niknejad, who was born in Iran and lived there until age 17, is a lawyer-turned-journalist. As an M.S. student at the Journalism School, she specialized in newspaper reporting. The following year, Niknejad earned an M.A. in journalism with a focus on politics.

She has reported for the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, California Lawyer and PBS/Frontline. Most recently, she was a staff reporter for the new English-language newspaper The National in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Niknejad is a syndicated columnist with Agence Global and a freelance producer and consultant on Iran to ABC News.

This Boston Globe profile offers more:

This past September, she returned to Boston from nearly a year of reporting for an English-language newspaper in Dubai - a major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran - and resolved to launch a blog.

This lady does get around. Her stint at a "listening post" should raise an eyebrow or two.

For what it is worth, the Iranians say that the CIA has been running an anti-Iran destabilization effort out of Dubai. See, for example, here.

As noted above, Kelly wrote for The National, which is run by Martin Newland, previously of the highly conservative Telegraph Group. This site finds some amusement in the fact that Newland receives a very handsome salary for editing a paper that has only 2000 paid subscribers. That's a clue -- a really obvious clue -- as to what's actually going on.

Kelly herself has written:

If Iranians are suspicious of journalists, it’s partly because our reporting jobs can seem like the perfect cover to gather intelligence.

Gee. Where would anyone get that idea?

Here's an interesting factoid from the Foreign Policy Journal investigation:

Curiously, the domain TehranBureau.com is owned not by Niknejad, but by Jason Rezaian. Even more curiously, that domain name was created on June 12, 2008 – exactly one year to the day before Iran’s presidential election, and months before Niknejad says she set up Tehran Bureau in 2008, which was several months before she actually announced the launch of Tehran Bureau on Blogspot, which was prior to its actual move to TehranBureau.com.

And yet, despite having had the name registered for a year before the election, there’s no indication the domain was actually in use before Niknejad’s Tehran Bureau came along.

Remember, the site was set up four months before the election, yet the URL was registered a year in advance. I believe that she was still in United Arab Emirates in June of 2008. (A May, 2008 story in The National carries her byline.)

In a very strange interview, Kelly says that her columns for Tehran Bureau were carried by Agence Global, and that she has been a consultant on Iran for ABC News. That last item on her CV reminds me of this bit of skullduggery involving ABC.

In the same interview, she denies receiving any backing whatsoever for her blog. Nevertheless, she had big plans for it:

I would like Tehran Bureau to become the news source of record on Iran.

As soon as it’s feasible, Tehran Bureau will also feature video and audio programs. Further the down the road, I hope Tehran Bureau will air television programs, documentaries and even venture into book publishing.

She said those words mere weeks ago. Yet at this time, the site displays...nothing. Or almost nothing. Only one post remains from Tehran Bureau's brief time in the sun.

As noted earlier, much of the reportage on that site consisted of dubious Twitterings. Now, researchers will not be able to judge just how dubious those reports were. The evidence has been hidden. Scrubbed.

We often saw this kind of "news" operation spring up during the Cold War era. For old spook-watchers like yours truly, publications like Tehran Bureau have always conveyed a Certain Intriguing Aroma.

(As always, nothing in this post should be construed as an endorsement of Iranian theocracy.)