Sceptical About Iran's Superweapons

I've already written about the "stealthy missile with multiple warheads" hoax. The dead giveaways are the announcement before the exercises began that the launch would be of a Shahab-2 missile - something the West already knows about and which isn't stealthy - and the name "Fajr-3" which actually applies to a 45km range unguided artillery rocket.

Now the Pentagon has confirmed, according to the World Peace Herald running a Washington Times story, that "the Iranians' test was a Shahab-2, Tehran's designation for the Scud-C missile, which has a range of up to 310 miles. It was not a new missile as Iranian press reported."

One up for the Newshog.

That first claim was followed by others for super-effective torpedoes which smelled fishy to me (no pun intended). Now there's another one I'm utterly sceptical about. A supposed new stealthy flying boat, shown on Iranian TV. Have a look. The thing is not stealthy - it has odd edges and struts sticking out all over. It's also only about 18 feet long - about the length of a decent missile itself. It's a hoax, folks.

Brian Whitman, a US DoD spokesman, put it plainly - "the Iranians have been known also to boast and exaggerate their statements about great technical and tactical capabilities,"

Since both pronouncements come from the same source - Brigadier General Hossein Salami of Iran's Revolutionary Guard - I am treating every other announcement he has made about a new superweapon (i.e. all of them) as hoaxes too. The man's a plain liar.

What is more worrying for me is that the current American gusto for war with Iran, whipped up by the Bush administration and the neocons, has even the big media companies repeating these claims of Iran's wholesale without a single critical thought. They are the big bad boogy man, you see - and all claims of their threat to America must be true...