The most obvious one this week was the Sada fable - I've written already about this but in brief it's the one where a bunch of religious right wingnuts cooked up a story about Iraqi WMDs going to Syria in 2002, then got another wingnut to write about it in his newspaper and a bunch of wingnut pundits then duly and gleefully wrote about it.
The guy who says he knows where Saddam's WMD went to is hip-deep in this sordid circle-jerk but gives the whole thing a veil of respectability because...wow...he used to be Saddams deputy chief of the Air Force. Trouble is, he didn't see anything for himself and the "eyewitnesses" he cites want to stay anonymous. Riiiight....
Why didn't he see something? Well one rightwing blogger (an ex-spook) spilled the beans - he was in prison at the time:
he was forced out of the Iraqi Air Force in 1986 (because he refused to join the Baath Party), recalled in 1991 (to interrogate Allied POWs), then tossed into prison himself because he refused Qusai Hussein's order to execute the POWs.Can anyone translate "interrogate" in terms of Saddam's regime? Everybody? Good.
So we've an ex-torturer with friends among the religious right in the US, who didn't see anything and has no evidence for anything but has a book out now published by a religious right organ and ghost written by a well known Dominionist. That's credible...NOT!
It's so not credible it must be a psy-op coming right out of the White House's back door. It has their unmistakable stamp of incompetent lying and expecting credulity from the cheerleaders.
Want another?
Today, the Middle East Newsline had this gem:
A leading U.S. nuclear proliferation expert said Teheran obtained an atomic bomb about a decade ago from the nuclear black market. The expert said Iran sought to produce additional nuclear weapons through technology from Pakistan and other countries.Scary! They already have a nuke! Launch the missiles!
"The one functional device Iran has," Mansoor Ijaz, a U.S. nuclear scientist, said, "is the result of clandestine transfers from Pakistan's rogue black market nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold the Iranians antiquated but highly effective Chinese bomb designs and parts, including spherical shell casings, spherical Krytron detonation switches and empirical software testing modules."
Hang on...who is this Mansoor Ijaz anyway? How credible is he?
Well he does have a background in physics, both nuclear and neurophysics and he's an intimate of the current Pakistani dictatorship. His father, "a prominent American physicist, was an early pioneer in developing the intellectual infrastructure of Pakistan's nuclear program." (So far so good.)
He's a foreign afairs correspondent for Fox News and the National Review. (sniff.)
He isn't actually working as a nuclear physicist and hasn't in fifteen years. He's actually a physicist turned hedge fund manager and investment banker. (sniff, sniff!)
His investment company is "Crescent Investment Group, Inc. whose top advisors and/or directors also include former CIA director R. James Woolsey, Jr." and "Lt. Gen. James Alan Abrahamson (USAF Ret), former director of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative." (sniff, SNIFF!)
"Ijaz has been on the forefront of arguing in his National Review Online pieces that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and he has been advocating to increase U.S. military support for the Pakistani Government, especially the sale of F-16s." (SNIFF,SNIFF!)
His investment company specialises in oil and gas projects. Samuel Berger, NSA for Clinton, felt he was compromised by various deals, including some in Sudan. Of the current administration he said: "As an American citizen with proximity to the President of the United States and senior national security council officials, I have enjoyed their support of my efforts..."
Yup, that's definitely the sordid whiff of utter hawkish bullshit designed by either the White House or the Pentagon to be planted in the Middle East press at this time of tension.
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