New York Times Pimps NeoCons War On Iran

Lebanon Terror Masters In Iran Training Iraqi Insurgents : The Story Sourced From An Anonymous "Official" Based On Reports Media Is Not Allowed To See

The New York Times is proud to declare itself thoroughly against the War On Iraq, even as it helps set the scene for a War On Iran. A headline from today :

Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say

This 'news' story is very reminiscent of pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times back in late 2002, blithely producing reams of headlines, op-eds and stories light on hard facts but heavy on big claims made by "officials".

The journalist admits that he is quoting from a set of interrogation reports he hasn't seen, and is simply taking the word of the "official" that they are exactly what they are claimed to be :

The "official' summed up the information from the interrogation reports but did not make them available. He declined to be identified because the information had not been released publicly.

If the interrogation reports are so solid on evidence, why wouldn't the "official" put their name to claims of Iranian interference that work in the White House's favour as it tries to undermine Iran? Alarm bells once rang in journalists' heads when any "official" from the government tried to feed them stories based on reports the journalists are not allowed to see.

Not now.

Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.

The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

Material from the interrogations was given to the Iraqi government, along with other data about captured Iranian arms, before it sent a delegation to Tehran last week to discuss allegations of Iranian aid to militia groups.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.

“We have experienced in the past that Iran interfered and has special groups in Iraq, but Iran also had evidence that they were participating in positive ways in security,” Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government spokesman, said in an interview.

“We would like the Iranians to keep their commitment, the commitments they made in meetings with the prime minister and with other groups that have visited them,” he said. “They had made the promise that Iran would be playing a supportive role.”

Iran's clearly not going to leave, or let go, of Iraq. The Iraq government and most Shiites don't want Iran to leave Iraq. They want the United States to leave Iraq.

There has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq. But President Bush and other American officials, in public castigations of Iran, have said that Iran has been consistently meddlesome in Iraq and that the Iranians have long sought to arm and train Iraqi militias, which the American military has called “special groups.”

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

According to their interrogation reports, the militiamen believed that militants from other countries were also being trained at the camp, an impression based on hearing snippets of conversations in other dialects and languages.

They think they might have heard other prisoners talking about such things, in other languages.

“We don’t want to be at war with Iran, and we will not allow anyone to settle their scores with Iran on Iraqi soil,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Mr. Maliki, said Saturday in an interview. “But at the same time, we don’t want Iran to settle their scores with the United States on Iraqi soil.”

Jalaluddin al-Sagheer, a prominent member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite political party, asserted that the Iraqi Shiite politicians would be loath to take any position that would alienate Iran.

“Iran is not an easy country for us,” he said. “We have a long border with them; we have a long history of relations with them; we have strong commercial ties with them and we cannot hurt that because of copies of documents.”

Key Iraqi politicians obviously think the information within the interrogation reports is utter crap, and they don't want to embarrass themselves with the Iranians by having anything to do with what may or may not turn out to be pure propaganda from Israel and the US.