A really shitty piece from David Sanger (NYT). Quds force plots "from Yemen to Latin America." And this:“The Saudi plot was clumsy, and we got lucky,” another American official who has reviewed the intelligence carefully said recently. “But we are seeing increasingly sophisticated Iranian activity like it, all around the world.” Much of this resembles the worst days of the cold war, when Americans and Soviets were plotting against each other — and killing each other — in a now hazy attempt to preserve an upper hand.
Unless he is talking about the proxy wars like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, he is way off base. Killing each other's intelligence officers was off the table to avoid snowballing reciprocation. That's why the lobby at CIA had relatively few stars on the wall until quite recently.
And this is just really special:
To many members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — and, by the accounts of his former colleagues, to the Israeli leader himself — the Iran problem is 1939 all over again, an “existential threat.”
“WHEN Bibi talks about an existential threat,” one senior Israeli official said of Mr. Netanyahu recently, “he means the kind of threat the United States believed it faced when you believed the Nazis could get the bomb.”
On another subject, was funny seeing coverage of the "Vengeful Librarians." (If they were really vengeful, we would have been toast for exposing way back when that bit about how they deal with bloggers - sending requests for info to embassies, etc.)
Finally, this smells a lot like one of those cases of emailed disinfo that spreads urban legends for metric marking. (Or aren't we supposed to mention these?)
PS: Now we know why Herman Cain instituted his policy of not allowing his campaign staffers to speak to him unless spoken to. ;-)
