This Is How War With Iran Is Manufactured
via Ilana Novick, a blogger at Truthdig
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 06/11/2019
Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal was a top campaign priority for President Trump, one he accomplished in 2018. In a May 8 speech from the White House, he said the agreement was “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” He also claimed in a tweet the agreement increased Iran’s military budget, which CNN called misleading. When reporters from The Washington Post asked the source of the claim, the White House provided a Forbes article by an Iranian writer named Heshmat Alavi.
Alavi is described in his Forbes contributor biography as “an Iranian activist with a passion for equal rights.” His byline also appears in The Hill, The Daily Caller and The Federalist. The problem, however, is not only that President Trump may be using a misleading claim to support his decision to withdraw from an international nonproliferation agreement, but that the person who wrote about the claim may not exist, according to new reporting from The Intercept.
“Alavi’s persona,” Murtaza Hussain writes in The Intercept, “is a propaganda operation run by the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is known by the initials MEK.”
Hassan Heyrani, a high-ranking defector from the MEK and one of Hussain’s sources, told The Intercept that Alavi’s persona is a group effort “run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK,” who are based in Albania. According to Heyrani, the group writes under a pseudonym partly because MEK abhors individuality. As Heyrani told The Intercept, “… the leader is the first man in the organization, and everything should be under their shadow.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks at Mehrabad Airport, in Tehran, Iran, in September 2018. (Iranian Presidency Office / AP)
Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal was a top campaign priority for President Trump, one he accomplished in 2018. In a May 8 speech from the White House, he said the agreement was “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” He also claimed in a tweet the agreement increased Iran’s military budget, which CNN called misleading. When reporters from The Washington Post asked the source of the claim, the White House provided a Forbes article by an Iranian writer named Heshmat Alavi.
The Rest…HERE
