The massive roadside bomb that killed 14 Marines Wednesday flipped their 37-ton vehicle on its top and blew it some 40 feet down the road.S'funny -- not long ago we had a flurry of stories talking about the increasingly close ties between Iran and the Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi (installed, as Seymour Hersh clarified, in a U.S.-rigged election). Now we're told that Iran is providing bombs to the insurgents who hope to deep-six Allawi.
Tonight, there’s disturbing information that some of the most sophisticated of these deadly weapons are reportedly coming from Iran.
U.S. military and intelligence officials tell NBC News that American soldiers intercepted a large shipment of high explosives, smuggled into northeastern Iraq from Iran only last week.
And who are Miklaszewski's sources for the Iran accusation? (I mean, aside from unnamed individuals.) One of them, it turns out, is none other than our old pal Michael Ledeen, which is worse than citing Machiavelli. Another named source is Donald Rumsfeld. You believe him, don't you?
A reader informs me that this isn't the only time NBC has recently cited Ledeen for the "inside dope" on Iranian perfidy. Said reader refers to NBC as the "Neocon Broadcasting Network."
Since the Iraq war was founded on a lie (hey, that's what the yellowcake scandal was all about ), and since lies have marked our "progress" over the past two years (remember the staged descent of the Saddam statue? Remember the supposed shipment of night vision goggles from Syria?), why should we trust the latest dirt on Iran? If the neocons were willing to fib us into the last war, they'll fib us into the next war.
One wonders just what Ledeen has to do to get himself discredited in the eyes of the mainstream media. Nobody considers him unbiased. Nobody thinks he doesn't have an ax to grind. And there are (let us try to put this politely) many excellent reasons to doubt his honesty.
Ledeen is a veteran Iran-contra schemer who was also tied, in many published reports, to P2, an infamous quasi-fascist secret society which had infiltrated much of Italy's government and intelligence services. Ledeen played a key role in spreading the proven lie that Bulgaria ordered the attempt to kill John Paul II. (Come to think of it, NBC also did everything it could to promote that hallucination.) Ledeen is still best buds with bank robber Ahmed Chalabi, and with the shadowy Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Despite Ledeen's pro-Israel -- no, let's be more precise: pro-Likud -- pronouncements, his real intellectual leanings go toward fascism, Italian-style.
(By the way, Ledeen's daughter Simone was part of the coalition authority in Iraq -- despite having very few qualifications. But she did have the right last name.)
Most spook-watchers believe that someone within Ledeen's "axis" cobbled together the yellowcake forgeries which rest somewhere near the origin point of the current war. As noted earlier, former CIA terror experts Vincent Cannistraro and Phil Giraldi credit those forgeries to "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." On further questioning, Cannistraro fingered Ledeen.
If that's true -- and the smart money's on Cannistraro -- then we can safely classify Ledeen as a man who values his sick ideology more than he values truth. So why on earth would a mainstream news organization such as NBC cite any of his manipulative spew?
By the way: If you want to know what the American military will face once Ledeen and his buds get the war they so obviously hope to ignite, check out this report in Asia Times. They now have lots and lots (and lots) of increasingly precise long-range missiles. It ain't gonna be so pretty this time, my friends. Very quickly, the nuclear option will become the only option.
3 comments:
This latest is truly absurd. No one could be happier than Iran at the rule of the Iraqi religious majority now in power.
Why in hell would Iran be supporting the insurgents, when they've got exactly what they've been dreaming of for years, in the U.S.-installed Iraqi government?
dark wraith, methinks you're too tightly focused on the facts. The war in Iraq is not going well; the American economy is, despite the manipulated numbers, in tatters; the housing bubble is about to implode; and my instincts are that Mother Nature herself is ready to wreak deserved justice on this country. It isn't that you're wrong, please understand. I have to agree that the Valerie Plame outing is a miniscule issue in relation to the misguided war that has wrought devastation in the cradle of civilization and, not incidentally, killed at least 1800 American soldiers. But one might also argue that even the war itself is small potatoes--a minor overseas military skirmish. And likewise the horrific but casual and virtually unremarked torture of our prisoners of war.
No, the issue is none of these, and all of these. We are simply at the end of the burst of energy that gave us the Enlightenment, the American republic, and the Industrial Revolution. These guys that we're up against,the neocons, are a bunch of posturing clowns. There is absolutely no doubt they will self-destruct, whether over the Plame outing or the war or Gannongate or torturegate or some other nasty misstep or scandal. It really doesn't matter what particular straw breaks the back of their papier-mache juggernaut. It's western civilization that's really at stake. Fight the good fight, as you are doing, but keep an eye on the forest: the worst is yet to come.
dark wraith, I've read some of your four part essay previously. I'll go back for the rest.
Thanks.
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