Michael Gordon of the New York Times spreads anti-Iranian hype, says alexander cockburn |
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A good conman, so the saying goes here in the US, can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. Tyros in this art could well start with Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of the New York Times. All you have to do is whisper down the phone to him that the transaction will occur at a background 'briefing' by anonymous intelligence sources and that the deed of sale has been signed by 'a senior official'.
Gordon's most notorious 'bridge' purchase involved the aluminium tubes, helpfully identified to him and his co-purchaser, Judith Miller, as mechanical equipment to be used by Saddam Hussein in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The New York Times editors duly witnessed Gordon and Miller's aluminium tube purchase and published their glowing account of the transaction on September 8, 2002.
After lying low for a while, and letting Miller |
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They needed Gordon to
boost Bush’s
anti-Iranian propaganda drive |
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take the heat, Gordon (left) was back late last year, flourishing a new purchase, namely the famous 'surge'. And then, on February 10, the Times excitedly announced another major purchase by Gordon.
The story was from the usual salesfolk, unnamed 'American officials'. They needed Gordon to boost Bush's anti-Iranian propaganda drive by promoting a story that Iran is now supplying Iraqi Shia with a deadly new weapon called an 'explosively-formed penetrator' (EFP) which is the war's 'most lethal weapon', now killing American boys in their Humvees, Bradleys and even Abrams tanks.
There are two problems with this. First, the people doing almost all the killing of American troops in Iraq are not Shia but Sunni, therefore unlikely to have been supplied by Iran.
Second, explosively-formed penetrators are a not-so-recent variant on the 1885 Munroe Effect, the original idea behind the so-called 'shaped charge'. Conventional shaped charges are a copper (or other metal) funnel inside a cylindrical casing with the open end
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