Tehran Times accuses Sy of Sy-ops!

In which Tehran Times (by way of Mehr News) accuses Sy Hersh and John Bolton of "singing the same song":

Spare us the pain of yet another repetition of the "Chicken Little, the sky is falling" syndrome, as journalist Seymour Hersh so accurately stated about his own writings on Iran during a recent edition of the CNN talk show Late Edition.

The substance of the latest 'revelations' of "Preparing the Battlefield", published in the June 29, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, is no more than a rehash of very old news packaged under an alarmist-intended title. The so-called 'facts' do not amount to more than their intended purpose: to further dramatize the threat of military attack against the Iranian people and nation, in the form of the ceaseless psychological warfare, known as psyops, emanating from the Western mass media.

It seems one of the motives in writing this latest 'exposé' of the Bush administration’s well-financed covert operations against Iran was best illuminated in Hersh’s discussion and retelling of the Pentagon’s version of the Iranian patrol boat incident back in January 2008. "Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran, but this mood could change quickly," writes the investigative journalist, citing the Iranian patrol boat incident as a clear example of the "potential for escalation". Although Hersh referred to a Gallup poll taken last November, when seventy-three percent (73%) of the Americans surveyed favored economic means and diplomacy to address the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, compared to only eighteen percent (18%) who favored direct military action, he went on to repeat George Bush’s characterization of the incident as "provocative" and "dangerous" on the day Bush was heading for an eight-day trip to the Middle East. "There was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and outrage at Iran," Hersh wrote.

What was left out of this story was that the purpose of the Bush trip was to gather support for the administration’s sagging efforts to convince some of the Arab governments to comply with the U.S. foreign policy objective of isolating Iran so as to advance the United States’ hegemonic goals in the region. Furthermore, in repeating only a part of the old news, Mr. Hersh neglected to mention that the Iranian government produced actual audio-video footage of the so-called 'provocative' encounter, blowing so many holes in the official version that a week later the Pentagon had to sing a different tune. As we recall, Bush’s efforts, as well as the ridiculous Pentagon version of Navy warships being threatened by five small Iranian speedboats, fell flat on its face, and to this day Iran continues to enjoy a certain stature among its neighbors. [...]

Given the rising tension between Iran and the U.S. these days, which could be read in the price of a barrel of oil, of course, it is politically safer not to downgrade the U.S. threat, but to yield to and resound the Washington-Tel Aviv war drum beats serves the conservative causes of the warmongers in the psyops battleground. It may be worth noting that the day after Hersh’s CNN interview, CNBC, the stock market channel, was giving airtime to John Bolton, a very hawkish neoconservative, spreading his threat that Israel will bomb Iran’s strategic facilities, at the same time Seymour Hersh was being interviewed on Democracy Now. Why are Bolton and Hersh singing the same song? [...]

Sy is evidently naught but a tool of the World Arrogance!

Tags: Sy Hersh, John Bolton, Iran