Iran

Reacting to a report that revealed American cigarette exports to Iran have risen tenfold during George W. Bush's time in office, Republican presidential candidate John McCain commented, "Maybe that's a way of killing 'em." He followed this by saying, "I meant that as a joke, as a person who hasn't had a cigarette in 28 years, 29 years." McCain's public joke about killing Iranians was the second of his campaign. Last year at a South Carolina campaign stop, when he was asked if there was a plan to attack Iran, McCain responded by saying "You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?" He then sang "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" before discussing what he believed to be the serious threat Iran poses to Israel's national security.

We know from Scott McClellan, the former White House Spokesman, in his recent book, What Happened, that President Bush insists on discipline in messaging. Although the publics on both sides of the Atlantic have gotten to the point of heavily discounting what he says, the President's desire for control can give us a sense of the thrust of policy. This is certainly true with respect to Iran.

"As they duel over how best to deal with Tehran," Senators John McCain and Barack Obama "are exaggerating what's known about Iran's nuclear program," reports Jonathan Landay. "The U.S. intelligence community ... thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency ... has found no evidence to date of an active Iran nuclear-weapons project." But, in a recent Fox News interview, Obama said, "Iran is stronger now than when George Bush took office," and "they have been developing nuclear weapons." During a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, McCain said, "Tehran's pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an unacceptable risk." Most media have been "failing ... miserably" at calling out the presidential candidates' unsupported Iran claims, notes Columbia Journalism Review. "We launched one Middle East war this decade in part because politicians made claims about an adversary's weapons capabilities that turned out to be wildly inflated -- and the press, for the most part, went along. ... The press has some pretty powerful evidence with which to challenge the candidates on the question of Iran's nuclear program -- the nation needs journalists to do just that."

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher notes that New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon, "who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the U.S. attack in Iraq," has been writing about Iran's alleged involvement in attacks against U.S. service members in Iraq. Gordon's latest article, "Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say," is "based solely on unnamed sources," notes Mitchell.

An article from McClatchy's Baghdad bureau also contradicts Gordon's New York Times piece. McClatchy reports that the Iraqi government "seemed to distance itself from U.S. accusations towards Iran." Iraqi government spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh said the government had formed a committee to find "tangible information" about Iranian activities in Iraq, instead of relying on "information based on speculation." Al-Dabbagh also told Agence France-Press that there is no "hard evidence" of Iranian support of insurgents in Iraq.

Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner has seen this sort of poorly-sourced reporting before in the New York Times as part of the propaganda campaign that led America directly into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq.

The program's Ken Allard in actionIn addition to helping research the "Pentagon's pundits" on SourceWatch -- those retired military officers who took part in the Pentagon program to promote Bush Administration talking points on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Guantanamo detention center and wiretap surveillance programs -- there are other ways you can push back against what one participant called "psyops on steroids." Noting that the program wouldn't have worked without "the enthusiastic participation of the corporate media," FAIR is encouraging people to contact broadcast and cable news executives, urging them "to ensure that the news will no longer serve as a conduit for Pentagon talking points passed off as independent analysis." Free Press launched a campaign to press Congress to investigate the Pentagon program and "determine whether these acts violate federal law prohibiting 'covert propaganda.'"

On Sunday, the New York Times outed the Pentagon's "military analyst program," an extensive effort to cultivate retired military officers as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" spouting Bush administration talking points on Iraq and other hot-button issues. We've compiled a list of known participants, and started SourceWatch profiles on each. Can you help us uncover more about the Pentagon's pundits? What did they say, on what news programs? Do they also lobby on behalf of defense contractors? More information on the program is here. The list of participants is also repeated here, with tips on how to investigate each. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, here and here. Thanks for your help!

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at Putin pushers, Coach in the classroom and how comic books promote Iraqi special forces. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Lincoln Group, spreading their spin beyond Iraq. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

"Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness," reports Gareth Porter. The incident, described by Pentagon officials as a "careless, reckless and potentially hostile" provocation by Iranian boats that nearly led to gunfire, was actually a nonthreatening, "almost routine" encounter that officials in Washington distorted. "The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself," Porter writes. "Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would 'explode' in 'a few seconds.'"

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at how Wal-Mart is moving supposedly outside support in-house, the work of a government agency charged with protecting consumers, and how they aren't, and 2007 journalism that really reeks. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we tell you how drugs and rock n' roll connect Rudy Giuliani and George Bush. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!