Iran propaganda

1. The new Chalabi. This expose by Laura Rozen is a must-read. The neocons engineering war in Iran have long had a major problem: They don't have a faux-de Gaulle to prop up as the leader of Iranian resistance.

Iran’s best-known dissident, journalist Akbar Ganji, rejected invitations to meet with administration officials on a recent U.S. visit, and asked instead to see the United Nations’ Kofi Annan and Noam Chomsky. “I advocate change of the regime in Iran,” Ganji told me in July. “But that regime must be changed by Iranians themselves.”

A perfectly responsible stance. Obviously, Ganji won't do.

Solution: The necons have groomed a callow youth named Amir Abbas Fakhravar (pictured here with a cigar-chomping Michael Ledeen) and have presented him to the world as a former political prisoner who escaped from Iran's "notorious Evin prison."

Unfortunately, others in the Iranian dissident community claim that Fakhravar was really a non-political prisoner and something akin to a serial liar.

“As far as the other political prisoners were concerned, he was an antenna for the security of the prison and for the security services,” Bina Darab-Zand, a recently released human rights activist, told me when I reached him in Tehran in late August. Nasser Zarafshan, one of Iran’s most prominent human rights attorneys and also recently released from Evin, echoed that claim. “He has been working for the police,” Zarafshan says. “In prison, everybody knows that.”

Somehow, he got hold of a phone in prison and kept in contact with the Americans. Now in America, he claims to have received a literary prize that does not exist. He also claims that "any movement whatsoever" by the Americans against Iran will cause the Iranian people to revolt against their Islamofascist oppressors.

Riiiight. They're just going to love us once we've dropped a few nukes on their noggins.

Obviously, this young sharpie thinks that if he plays ball with the guys who want to steal Iran's oil, he'll one day be the nominal leader of his country. What's left of it.

1. Lying about Iran and Iraq. You may recall our previous discussion of the most inane falsehood about Iraq to spew from the American department of propaganda: That neighboring Iran has been supplying the Iraqi insurgency with weapons. Why would the Iranians want to destabalize a pro-Iranian government?

A British team patrolling that border has been looking into this claim of weapons trafficking. And sure enough, they have found no evidence to support Dubya's nonsense.