Even worse, according to the Congressman, “We find Iranians making inroads in South America with Bolivia and Venezuela. Iranians have no business in the Western Hemisphere.” The paranoia around Iran is so great that relatively small trade deals between South American countries and Iran is viewed as a threat. Not to be outdone, Pence offered this nightmare scenario on Iran: “This is a perilous time with the menacing pronouncements of Ahmadinejad. God forbid the next Holocaust will not require camps but one missile and one bomb and 17 minutes of flight. Americans, Democrats and Republicans, are coming together to place more pressure on Iran until it abandons nuclear weapons.” Thunderous applause ensued. Some in the crowd even raised their hands in the air, presumably to pay homage to an Iran-hating God.

Hess’ hit-squad training story should be assigned to journalism classes for the next generation to open a discussion about what went wrong with American journalism before and during America’s overtly imperial war in the Middle East. And Hess should be seen as a stunningly clear illustration of what happens when a reporter gives up any pretense of independence from the national-security state.

Porter’s article does a great job of deconstructing Hess’ piece and reporting on Iran in general.   I also flagged that story when it came out.

GRAHAM: If you’d lost an Iraq, the biggest winner would’ve been Iran, the topic we’re talking about. They were ready to fill the vacuum of a failed state in Iraq, al Qaeda would’ve claimed victory and every moderate voice in the world—it’s about moderation and extremism.

Graham’s statements are an indicator of the intellectual bankruptcy of the far right and also highlight a profound ignorance of the region—or a willingness to lie for a political agenda. Iran is a nation with a majority Shi’i, Persian population. Al Qaeda is a radical Sunni, international, fringe organization. Al Qaeda considers Iran a great enemy. Al Qaeda in Iraq has consistently threatened Iran and al Qaeda’s top leadership even considers Iran a common enemy between the United States and al Qaeda.

Similar statements were made prior to the Iraq war in trying to link al Qaeda to Iraq. Not only were they discredited long ago, but more evidence is now surfacing that those statements were based on deliberate and cynical attempts by the White House to manipulate public opinion.

Graham also raises the specter of “the vacuum.” For more on that, see this video.

Iran is complex by anyone’s standards. Even journalists who have spent decades reporting on it struggle to understand it fully. Yet many Westerners think they know a lot about Iran because it shows up in the headlines so often.

This report is the result of our April 2008 conference “Iran 360:   Exploring Politics, Economics and Society in a Global Hot Spot,” supported by the United States Institute of Peace.  

So long as Moscow now moderates its ambitions, our contacts suggest that Washington wants an early resolution of this episode. This will include forcefully persuading Georgia to accept a residual Russian presence in Georgia. Should Moscow not scale back its actions, then the potential for escalation cannot be discounted. As a White House official explained to us: “This is a very appealing issue for Americans. We don’t like big nations bullying small ones.”

16/08/08 “ICH” – — It is clear from recent articles in the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times [1, 2] that the heated discussion during the five hours of the July 19th Geneva conference between Iran and P5+1 may have had a lot to do with the ultimate dismantling of the enrichment and heavy water facilities after a specified period of suspension and the so called freeze-for-freeze. Freeze–for-freeze was an idea originally proposed by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Elbaradei, who demanded that Iran not install any new centrifuge while the existing ones are still spinning. In return, the P5+1 countries would not seek new sanctions as long as the negotiations would continue.

Asking for the dismantling of Iran’s sensitive nuclear facilities has always been the US position. This is exactly what the influential senator Richard Lugar of Indiana stated almost two years ago: “The US final goal is not suspension, but dismantling of Iranian enrichment facilities at Natanz.” (more…)

And yet, while AEI’s in house team of foreign policy hands (Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka, etc.) has noticeably restrained itself from as aggressively publicly promoting a military option on Iran as might be expected, still it is home to those such as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton who says whatever he wants — almost always predictably disparaging of a diplomatic solution to any crisis from North Korea to Iran. And as a longtime loyal home for many who were associated with the most hawkish positions of the Bush administration (Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Lynn Cheney and formerly her husband), it’s hard to imagine that it was any extreme ideological position which would have prompted the departure. And Ledeen was described as always a good fundraiser for the think tank. So his departure is somewhat perplexing.

Ledeen is not alone in being scarcer at the influential think tank of late. Former Reagan administration Pentagon official Richard Perle is often in France and rarely makes public appearances at AEI any more; but there’s no talk of Perle leaving AEI, although his role there is largely “emeritus” the associate described. Ledeen is now the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a small Washington think tank headed by former Republican National Committee spokesman Cliff May.

Michael Ledeen has been pushing war on Iran for a very long time and was an enthusiastic advocate of the Iraq war.  Before the Iraq war, he said:

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.

Ledeen explains his departure from the AEI and into the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as a “freedom scholar” after returning from a cruise in Alaska at his site “Faster Please.”

… I always thought it was stupid to go to Alaska in August. I love August in Washington, I adore hot and humid and so Washington is a dream come true for me. Plus, no Congress, which means much less traffic, and you can get tables in restaurants. Plus, I moved my office from AEI after twenty happy years, to Cliff May’s rising Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It seems a good fit, it puts me in the same sandbox as Andy McCarthy and other terrific people, and I love the email address: michael(at)defenddemocracy.org I mean, that’s what I’m all about. …

While the recent anti-Obama book by Jerome Corsi, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions), will debut atop the New York Times bestseller list, many in the media are challenging the book, noting its numerous falsehoods as well as its author’s track record, which includes a slew of bigoted posts on the conservative website Free Republic and co-authorship of a discredited book attacking Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. The media’s reaction to The Obama Nation stands in stark contrast to coverage of that 2004 book, Unfit for Command. As Media Matters for America has noted, the media were sharply criticized for taking too long to challenge Unfit’s numerous smears and falsehoods.

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher calls the book by the Swiftboat author a “swift kick to his credibility.” Eugene Robinson talks about Corsi’s “vicious lies” and “concocted venom.” Kenneth Vogel of Politico says that Corsi’s “wild theories, vitriol and dogma..have called into question his credibility.”

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC says “You may remember Corsi for his sober allegations that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, that John Kerry is both a Jew and a Communist, and his allegations that Muslims actually worship Satan. You may remember Jerome Corsi for his recent book attacking the liberal myth that oil is a finite resource, since he, Jerome Corsi, has learned how to make new oil.”

There are many more accounts of Corsi’s debunked credibility that are available at Media Matters.

Corsi has been pushing war with Iran for many years now. It bears mentioning that Corsi is the author of Atomic Iran—if you haven’t read the book, the picture on the cover serves as a good indicator of Corsi’s simplistic sensationalism, demagoguery, fear-mongering and racism.