As an aside, Having a French news agency as a source ....

No comment necessary.

Sh**ter's of the opinion that the U.S. media had performed splendidly as of late ... well, except for that commie-lib-Islamofascist rag, the N.Y. Times, which had the perfidy to recant their previous coverage of the Iraq war buildup.....

Cheers,

[Glenn, from the post]: Worse, despite noting that "there has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq," the article does not contain a single skeptical word about any of these accusations, nor does it quote a single "expert" who questions or disputes them.

[our resident eedjit]: Well duh, the info is from questioning of prisoners who should know.

Did they get it by waterboarding, or did we send them to Egypt for 'questioning' like we did with al-Libi?

The reason our resident eedjit Sh**ter doesn't 'get it' here is that he's still of the impression that the WoMD were "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat", and that Salman Pak was everything that Rush Limbot said it was. You know, that bit, "Eh ... uh ... won't get fooled again" has as a prerequisite that you actually figure out that you got fooled the first time.

Cheers,

from second half of article:

this one so good it needs to be cited in entirety:

"An American official said that an Iraqi who facilitated the militiamen’s travel to Iraq was also captured and confessed that he had been paid by an Iranian. 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. "

"American officials say"

"American experts say"

"according to American officials"

"The Bush administration, ... has cited "

"Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Mr. Maliki, said"

"Jalaluddin al-Sagheer, a prominent member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite political party, asserted..."

"According to American officials"

"American officials say"

for one.

I presume this was directed to me.

I'm no fan or supporter of Israeli occupation. But I'm also firmly entrenched in the reality-based community.

If you can give me a historical example of a nation in a dominant military position voluntarily ceding control of their own destiny to those they perceived as their enemies, I'd love to see it.

Worse, despite noting that "there has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq," the article does not contain a single skeptical word about any of these accusations, nor does it quote a single "expert" who questions or disputes them. -- greenwald

...the info is from questioning of prisoners who should know. Does GG expect other sources to contradict closed interrogations? -- shooter242

prisoners who should know ...what? On whose word do you rely for this assertion?

My guess is that "GG" expects a high level reporter at a U.S. newspaper (who had 2 stringers' help for this article, see bottom of p. 2) to find someone to critique/assess the U.S. government's assertions regarding the status and words of these alleged "prisoners who should know". His expectations had little to do with the contents of the U.S. government's interrogation reports; it had everything to do with the expectation that an independent news agency assess the information in that report independently.

You were correct in your assessment that I finished reading the Gordon article after my first post; somehow I'd gotten the impression it was a time-devouring monster in excess of 10 pages. (Everybody: It's only 2 pages long! An easy read.)

The arguments made in the article about why Iran allegedly employs Hezbollah men to teach Iraqis guerilla tactics seem quite sound. They believed native Arab speakers would do better as teachers for reasons of both language and "culture". (What goes unmentioned in the article about the "cultural" issue is that the Quds experts who might teach these Iraqis directly might also have been on the frontlines in the Iraq-Iran war ~20 years ago, personally killing these young mens' fathers and uncles. It's a very good reason for farming out the training to Hezbollah operatives.)

This latter analytical point is one that Gordon might have brought up in the article; it would only have supported the government assertions he presented. But, even supportive "background" like this was not included. And the reader was slapped with HEZBOLLAH! 4 times in the headline and first 3 paragraphs of the article.

It's organized like a piece of agitprop, shooter242; it should therefore be critiqued as such.

As long as the Israeli government can persecute a minority under its authority and control (Palestinians, let's say), then the Jews will be safe from persecution by that minority if that minority were ever to become a majority.

Gotcha. Good to know.

I don't know how else to read it:

Any actual expert on the region, or any sincere person with even passing familiarity with it would know that genuine peace has always been easy to achieve, it requires Israel to abandon all its settlements and occupied territories, allow for the return of the refugees and compensate them for their dispossession. It also means granting equal rights to the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The so called "peace process," nothing of the sort, is merely a way to enshrine the dispossession of the Palestinians using unpopular but pliant and hand chosen collaborators like Mahmud Abbas.

Even if Israel were to incredibly accept minority status for its Jewish citizens, where is the evidence that this would lead to regional peace? Would this eliminate the problem of Sunni dictatorships, of sectarian disagreements, of regional national ambitions?

I don't think so.

Full right of return would make Israeli Jews the minority in Israel. Now maybe the Palestinians would suddenly forget all those decades of rhetoric about driving the Jews into the sea and suddenly become happy and peaceful partners with their Jewish minority.

I don't know (and, to be honest, for purposes of his Iraq reporting, don't much care about) Nir Rosen's views on how best to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But I definitely did not understand the quote you provided to be one where he advocated "Full right of return."