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Monday, February 12, 2007 |
LATimes: "U.S. defense and intelligence officials sought Sunday to bolster the charge that Iran was providing arms to Shiite Muslim militants in Iraq, displaying munitions and weapons fragments that they said constituted evidence that Tehran was contributing to Iraq's violence.
They also alleged that a group under the command of Iran's supreme leader was behind the smuggling of weapons across the Iran-Iraq border.
The briefing, held under unusually secretive circumstances, featured three U.S. officials, none of whom would be identified, and two tables laden with what they said were uniquely Iranian military hardware and weapons fragments."
So the disinformation campaign has started.
The same story had appeared earlier.
Newshog: "[In October last year] the British media were full of the accusations that improved IED's using motion detectors as triggers were being sent to Iraq from Iran. They were being sent, according to British claims, to the Sadr militia - an organisation that the US has gone out of it's way to placate. Just as now, absolutely no evidence was brought forward to show that the Iranian government were at all involved... and then the kerfuffle suddenly stopped. Why?
Well, it was discovered that the new, deadly IED's were using a British design that had been stupidly given to the IRA by British intelligence and then passed around various terror groups the IRA were allied with. Major egg on faces - story dropped. As the Independent on Sunday reported:
Eight British soldiers killed during ambushes in Iraq were the victims of a highly sophisticated bomb first used by the IRA, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
The bombs were developed by the IRA using technology passed on by the security services in a botched 'sting' operation more than a decade ago.
This contradicts the British government's claims that Iran's Revolutionary Guard is helping Shia insurgents to make the devices."
CounterPunch: "In a very interesting analysis last month, the former chief of staff of the Russian Army, Gen. Leonid Ivashov, predicted a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran by this April. 'Within weeks from now,' he wrote, 'we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc.' I'm afraid this has the ring of truth."
Vladimir Putin: "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force - in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.
We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations."
1:02:45 PM 
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Economist: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, 'The Caged Virgin', which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being 'married off'. In 'Infidel', however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. 'It was the worst news of my life,' Ms Hirsi Ali writes.
Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in 'Infidel' are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West's tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit."
Hirsi Ali thrives on controversy and knows how to profit from everything she says or lies about. She works now for the extreme right-wing think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
12:43:34 PM
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© Copyright 2008.
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