Can We Please Get Off The Conspiracy Theories?

Saturday, March 31st 2007
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Fueled by Iran taking 15 British sailors and marines hostage, there’s more conspiracy theories sweeping the internet about how this show down is going to go down.

One of the problems with the internet’s creation of this kind’ve “social news” is that it fails (more often than traditional news) all sorts of criteria for responsibility. That is the trade off for enabling the citizen reporter, for globalizing media, for increasing transparency.

You take the back waters of the internet with a grain of salt (or two or three).

With that being said, as we’ve seen even the “mainstream” media can get swept up in the hysteria, but I doubt you’ll ever find Glenn Beck staking his career on predicting the date and time for the American attack on Iran. *rolls eyes*

Arab sources report the positioning of a Patriot anti-missile battery in Bahrain this week; they say occupancy at emirate hotels has soared past 90% due mostly to the influx of US military personnel. They also report Western media crews normally employed in military coverage are arriving in packs. Thursday, March 29, General Khaled al-‘Absi, Bahrain’s chief of air defense operations disclosed that new alarm networks had been installed and air defense systems upgraded to handle chemical, biological and radioactive attacks.

Moscow sources have predicting that a US strike against Iranian nuclear installations codenamed Operation Bite has been scheduled for April 6 at 4 AM until 4 PM local time. Friday is a holiday in Iran. In the course of the attack, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories. Missiles and air raids will conduct strikes designed to be devastating enough to set Tehran’s nuclear program back several years. The US attack plan reportedly calls for the Iranian air defense system to be degraded, for numerous Iranian warships to be sunk in the Persian Gulf, and for the most important headquarters of the Iranian armed forces to be wiped out. Massive air attacks with the goal of annihilating Iran’s capacity for military resistance, the centers of administration, the key economic assets, and quite possibly the Iranian political leadership, or at least part of it.

It doesn’t help when anonymous mid level foreign “sources” stir the fire, as some no name Russian intelligence bureaucrat did earlier in the week.

If I was a betting man I’d take the field (or even better, no attack at all) against April 6th at 4 A.M. But hey, maybe Government Dirt really has the scoop…breaking a story this big would make the authors like Woodward and Bernstein, only they’re writing from their parent’s basement with the curtains drawn tightly and tin foil wrapped around their heads.