Wednesday, February 08, 2006

They Got Iran's Nuke Plans From A Bloke Down The Pub

Read today's Washington Post article on Iran's "sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft...designed for an underground atomic test that might one day announce Tehran's arrival as a nuclear power."

Scary, huh?

Now read it again, carefully.

First, if they are so sure, why is no-one willing to put their name to this? It's all "anonymous sources" stuff. Well that one's easy. It's because they aren't sure at all or already know it's a hoax but are putting it around the media in the comfortable knowledge that it will soon become part of the myth about "slam dunk intelligence" on Iran that "everyone knows".

Second, all the information on this and other "shocking revelations" released over the last year and more have come from a single laptop which was provided by "an Iranian opposition group" - which in BushSpeak means the utterly nutterly Mujahedeen e-Kalqh.

I ask you, what's the chance of even a top Iranian scientist having information on adapting missiles, building a nuclear test site and uranium refining when standard security precautions would suggest compartmentalizing it?

Now what's the chance of this hypothetical scientist being allowed to keep all that information on a laptop which can be pinched by some liberty-loving second storey man, then given to another freedom-loving Iranian who then "walks in" on U.S. spooks and hands the whole thing over? All Iran's nuclear secrets just there for the asking, like Hagrid being handed a dragon's egg by a stranger down the pub.

Think Iranian security is that dumb? Think they've never even read a Tom Clancy or LeCarre book?

I didn't think so.

(That's just the most basic of the problems with this so-called intelligence. The Next Hurrah blog has a whole lot more.)

The laptop and the information it holds is a clear hoax. Whether the hoax is being perpetrated by the MeK and U.S. spooks are just too willing to believe or whether it was made up from whole cloth in Virginia will doubtless be discovered after the Iran War.

No comments: