This is just shocking!
** The AP is using “friends” of the Iranian Regime as their experts to bash US policy and push the regime’s propaganda!
It is always disgusting to see the lengths the media will go to push their anti-US/anti-Bush agenda but today’s use of suspected agents to bash the US is way over the line!
Not only does the AP bash military officials for their statements on Iran but the AP is also using well known Iranian apologist Trita Parsi, for one, in bashing US policy on Iran:
An intensifying US campaign against Iran
It was Iran, warned Madeleine Albright, then-US envoy to the United Nations, that had forged a “tactical alliance” with a Somali warlord and “terrorists” in Sudan. Intelligence sources for the first time spoke of smuggled Iranian weapons. In Mogadishu, journalists were told that Iranian agents were training Somalis to make car bombs. But no proof was ever presented.
US charges against Iran’s role in Iraq are mounting. But analysts say that a history of unsubstantiated US claims against Iran should serve as a cautionary tale. The lesson to be drawn is not that Iran is guiltless in Iraq, they say, but one of restraint as a familiar drumbeat sounds.
The latest step in the Bush administration’s intensifying campaign to depict Iran as a disruptive force in Iraq is a decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard force a “terrorist” group. That label, and a push for more UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, and continued charges of training, funding, and supplying anti-US militants in Iraq, experts say, could harm Iraq security talks between US and Iranian diplomats in Baghdad.
“The Americans are blaming Iran for everything that goes wrong, even if it’s not Iran’s fault, and Iran does the same with the US,” says Trita Parsi, the Washington-based author of the forthcoming “Treacherous Alliance: Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US.”
“Decisionmakers in Washington are by-the-minute limiting their own maneuverability in how to deal with Iran, [thereby] making it more difficult to put the relationship on a positive track,” he says…
The result of this buildup of US allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq could also prove to be a prelude to war: “If you can make the case that Iranians are actually killing Americans, that makes it extremely difficult for those opponents of military action to depict the administration as warmongering,” adds Parsi, also the head of the National Iranian American Council.
Iranian officials deny undermining US efforts in Iraq, though senior officers note that US forces throughout the Gulf and in Iraq and Afghanistan are often within Iranian missile range. Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi vowed this week that “America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future.”
Some hard-liners in Iran, who today exert strong influence over every power center in the Islamic Republic, welcome the steady drumbeat from Washington as proof of US ill intent, says Hadi Semati, a political scientist in Tehran.
“I haven’t seen this level before [of] a systematic [US] propaganda campaign, partly disinformation, partly probably true, but exaggerating it … to blame Iran for everything,” says Mr. Semati, who recently spent three years at think tanks in Washington. “It reinforces the idea that people have in this town [Tehran] that any discussions on Iraq are purely tactical, and that the Americans are not serious.”
The Iraq effort “is already a failure,” says Semati. “Blaming Iran serves a purpose of partially, or even mostly, from the perspective of hard-liners in Washington, making the situation look better.”
…”This administration has a track record of doing what it thinks is right, and doing it regardless [of the facts]…. The debate is far less about ‘Can it be true?’ or ‘Can it not be true?’ ” says Parsi. The bigger picture, he says, is a regional power struggle between a strengthening Iran and an America weakened by debacle in Iraq.
Front Page Magazine ran a brilliant piece in April , “Iran’s Oil Mafia”, on several of the Iranian agents working in the US.
This is what the Iranian newspaper Aftab wrote about an interview with Trita Parsi in 2006, via that FrontPage article:
The government-owned newspaper Aftab published an interview with Trita Parsi on December 28, 2006 that underscores Parsi’s efforts on behalf of the Iranian regime..
Translation: “The conflict between Iran and the West on Iran’s nuclear file has entered a critical state. The government must now utilize all the possible resources to defend the national interest. In this, we have not paid enough attention to the potentially significant influence of the Iranian American society in moderating the extremist policies of the White House. In comparison of this untouched potential to the influence of the Jewish lobby in directing the policies of Washington in supporting Israel, we see the difference between what is and what could be.”
There is much more about Trita Parsi’s regime connections at FrontPage.
Here is more on Trita Parsi the leader of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) by one reader from an earlier post:
I woke up this morning to this wonderful expose of one of the most deceptive propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic in the West, the largest Iranian-American organization in the US, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
The true nature of this group headed by the mullah’s voice, Trita Parsi, is finally exposed…
Furthermore, I might add that I have seen Trita Parsi plus being paraded around by CNN, PBS and NPR as a “Middle East” expert and he has also become the darling of the rabid left who often cite his propaganda to back up their assertions in anything supports and relates the murderous mullahs’ agenda. Trita Parsi et al are extremly dangerous because they have an uncanny talent to torture logic, facts and reason to mind-bending extremes in order to have clueless politicians (Baker, pelosi et al) to believe monumentally ridiculous “explanations for terrorist acts committed by the IR”.
Is it too much to ask the Associated Press to use Iranian experts who are not working with the regime in Iran for their articles?
This AP article is not only factually misleading- It is openly promoting the propaganda of the Iranian Regime!
Previously:
Mullah Friends & Apologists in the US “Outed” at Front Page
Mullah Apologists Hope to Ban
California Legislation Wednesday
UPDATE: (Friday PM) In the comments:
Just this week, NIAC board member Mohammad Navab wrote a comment on our site saying that he was not a board member for the Campaign Against Sanctions And Military Action In Iran (CASMII), as an article we had written alleged, and upon double checking CASMII had blanked any reference to him on their site. (But there was still the google cache.)
** You can check out the details HERE.
The moral of the story is, they are very concerned about public scrutiny, so keep the pressure on!
