'NYT' Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims

By Greg Mitchell

Published: February 10, 2007 10:30 PM ET Friday updated Saturday
NEW YORK Saturday’s New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. The author notes, “Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile.”

What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.”

Sound pretty convincing? Well, almost all the sources in the story are unnamed. It also may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Gordon wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, “aluminum tubes” story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows.

When the Times eventually carried an editors’ note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and
noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper "gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program."

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I saw on the news today (all day long and every news channel) photos of what appeared to be 81 mm motar rounds supposedly "made in Iran" in 2006. Why would Iranians use English characters and not Islamic characters or Farsi and why would they use a date 3-2006 taken from our Christian calender instead of their own Islamic calender in which the date would read something like 1427? Could it be that the Iranians were just trying to make it easier for the english speaking world mass media to finger them for manufacturing these mortar rounds just last year so they wouldn't be mistaken for much older leftovers or pre COTW invasion mortar rounds captured by the Iraqis? No one in the mass media that has been running this story over and over again today have asked these questions so far as I know. One might think the so called "liberal" media would be all over this just because they "hate Bush so and are out to get him" as I have heard so many here say over the years, so why aren't they?

This photo was taken from an article in the UK Telegraph.

Looks like more sloppily fabricated bogus neocon intell/evidence to me. Remember the yellowcake claims and how that turned out? Totally bogus fabrication.

George W. Bush

 

Revealed: IRA bombs killed eight British soldiers in Iraq

Terror devices used by the IRA in a vicious murder campaign in Ulster blew up British servicemen as the world blamed Iran

By Greg Harkin, Francis Elliott and Raymond Whitaker

Published: 16 October 2005



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 soldiers, who were targeted by insurgents as they travelled through the country, died after being attacked with bombs triggered by infra-red beams. 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.

<snip>

Britain claims that the bomb-making expertise now being used in southern Iraq was passed on by Iran's Revolutionary Guard through Hizbollah, the revolutionary Islamist group it sponsors in Lebanon.
But a former agent who infiltrated the IRA told The Independent on Sunday that the technology reached the Middle East through the IRA's co-operation with Palestinian groups. In turn, some of these groups used to be sponsored by Saddam Hussein and his Baath party.




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