NYT--Why Accuse Iran of Meddling Now? (Anonymous!) U.S. Officials Explain

[TexasLawyer]

NYT's Michael Gordon again rises to defend the administration against the naysayers who claim this Iran stuff is old news and is politically inspired either to deflect from administration errors in Iraq or build the case for war with Iran.

No, no we've got it all wrong, say the "American officials." Mr. Gordon's looking more and more like the new Judith Miller-- stenographer for the administration's anonymous sources.


Why Accuse Iran of Meddling Now? U.S. Officials Explain

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: February 15, 2007

<snip>

Among possible explanations for the timetable, some critics have suggested, is that the White House is making its assertions now in an effort to blame Iran for the deteriorating situation in Iraq, or that President Bush is trying to lay a legal and political groundwork for a military strike against the government in Tehran, which he singled out in 2002 as a member of the “axis of evil.”

In recent interviews and in a military briefing on Wednesday in Baghdad, American officials have offered a more direct explanation for the timetable: attacks with the device have increased sharply in recent months, prompting the United States to react, and then to justify its actions.

According to one military official, reports of the “explosively formed penetrator,” as the weapon is known, first surfaced in late 2003. But attacks with the device have steadily increased since then. The last quarter of 2006 was a particularly dangerous period in terms of attacks with the device, with a new high reached in December. As the attacks have gone up, so have the American casualties. Since 2004, at least 170 Americans have been killed and 620 wounded in attacks with the device. But a significant number of those casualties occurred in the last part of 2006.

Faced with stepped-up attacks, military officials said they began to carry out raids to try to disrupt efforts to train and equip Shiite militants with the weapon. That led to the detention of Iranian officials — and questions from the Iraqi government, the public and the press about why the American military was capturing and detaining Iranians, including some officials who said they were diplomats.

American officials assert that the raids produced additional evidence implicating a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the Quds Force, in supplying the devices, a charge Iran has denied.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15timing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[AlCzervik]

1. is this the Michael Gordon they may or may not be a voice activated tape recorder?

[TexasLawyer]

2. Yes-- that was the joke

He's such a tool that that bit of satire was actually believable.

[TexasLawyer]

10. Michael Gordon was on the aluminum tube story too!

Hadn't realized that 'til I read this:

Alexander Cockburn

Sold to Mr Gordon, another bridge!
February 15, 2007

It requires no special skill to sell Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of the New York Times, the Brooklyn Bridge. All you have to do is whisper down the phone to him that the transaction will occur at a background "briefing" by anonymous intelligence sources and a "senior official" or two.

One would think that it would require astonishing rhetorical ingenuity on the part of the sales team (in fact, operating out of the U.S. Defense Department) to keep on selling Gordon the Brooklyn Bridge, long after the deed from the first sale has been pronounced an obvious fraud.

But it's not so strange, really. Your true sucker is a vain fellow, who can never accept the evidence of his own gullibility and who therefore regards each successive purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge as a sound investment, certain to re-establish him in the public eye as a man with a keen eye for a good deal. He thus becomes psychologically and professionally a captive of the bridge salesmen.

On Sept. 8, 2002, the New York Times editors published Gordon and Judith Miller's fictions concerning aluminum tubes in Iraq supposedly part of Saddam's nuclear program. Much, much too late this bout of bridge-buying on the part of the Times duo prompted widespread derision, and finally the embarrassed Times editor banned Miller from bridge-buying altogether.

<snip>

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2007/1499

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. Name the officials or cease & desist.

If they are willing to give up this kind of information then they sure as hell ought to be able to identify themselves. This is all bullshit.

[AlCzervik]

4. i think the unnamed source is actually the general they quoted but i bet he

wanted the other info to be "unnamed military officials".

[TexasLawyer]

6. Maybe-- but the Maj. Gen.'s name isn't attached

to any substantive assertion-- just stuff like:

"the decision by American military officials to put forward the evidence in a full-scale briefing was not an easy call, according to Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV"

and sometimes the anonymous reference is to a single official and sometimes the reference is plural.

[AlCzervik]

8. i'm just guessing.

[The_Casual_Observer]

7. They have some scam going about how there is all these additional

details that they can't reveal because it would scotch the operation. I would wager that not only isn't there any more details, but that the ENTIRE thing is a fabrication and fraud. That god damn peter pace guy isn't even willing to keep still & lie about it. It has all the earmarks of a greedy persian ex-pat chalabi guy/CIA caper.

[gratuitous]

5. Dammit, I won't stand for a failure of nerve!

This war with Iran is not going to just sell itself!

I caught some of the coverage on ABC News tonight, and I thought I'd slipped into a time warp, with all the troubled-looking white men, sporting their furrowedest brows and frowniest faces, solemnly intoning that al Quds was the most dangerous threat to America the country had possibly ever seen. And oddly enough, I don't think any of them had heard of al Quds before today.

But boy, was it scarey. If you, you know, hadn't seen the movie before.

[TexasLawyer]

9. W-- "preposterous" to think Iran isn't doing what we say it's doing

Well, at least there's one NAMED administration official pushing the specifics of the Iran weapons story-- W himself.

Bush Declares Iran’s Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain

<snip>

Speaking at a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Bush dismissed as “preposterous” the contention by some skeptics that the United States was drawing unwarranted conclusions about Iran’s role.

He publicly endorsed assertions that had until now been presented only by anonymous military and intelligence officials, who have said that an elite branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps known as the Quds Force has provided Shiite militias in Iraq with the sophisticated weapons that have been responsible for killing at least 170 American soldiers and wounding more than 600.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html?hp&ex=1171515600&en=8bfa0fe1c806a923&ei=5094&partner=homepage