spiritsoup's Blog

Iran's Photoshopped Missiles Are "Glorified Scuds"
Ridiculous merry-go-round over fake photos and the real facts behind Iran's non existent weapons program

The events of the last two days surrounding the Iranian missile tests once again highlight that the perception of any threat Iran poses to the U.S. and even to Israel is wholly manufactured and has been blown out of all proportion by the Western media and, by proxy, the two presidential candidates.

Several defense analysts reiterated yesterday that the missile test, far from being a show of strength on the part of the Iranians was another reminder of their supreme lack of fire power.

Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said:

"In terms of capability, they claimed the Shahab-3 could travel 2,000 kilometers carrying a one-tonne warhead. This is very unlikely."

“The Shahab-3 normally has a range of 1,300 kilometers and the range can be extended to 2,000 kilometers but it would require a much lighter warhead."

As Pepe Escobar of the Asian Times points out, "Experts disagree on the merits of the Shahab-3 - a copy of the North Korean Nodong; for some it's not that less erratic than a glorified Scud."

In a nutshell, not only does Iran not have any nuclear warheads to fire at Israel, it doesn't even have the missiles to put them on.

This tallies with the report of the International Atomic Energy Agency and even the US's own National Intelligence Estimate, seemingly now completely forgotten, which have both declared that an Iranian weapons program does not exist and has not existed for at least five years.

And now we come to the missiles that never were.

Despite both the Iranian state media and our own lamestream repeaters having reported that Iran fired a barrage of missiles over two days, defense officials have since admitted that only one missile was fired yesterday and seven, not nine were fired on Wednesday.

The reason one further

missile was fired a day late was because it failed on the first day, a fact that was handily photoshopped out of photographs and replaced with a clone of one of the other firing missiles before being released to the media (see above).  {Note the halo of brighter blue around the missile.}

The doctored image, said to have been released to the AFP by Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, went on to appear on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

AFP retracted the photo yesterday afternoon and throughout the day, according to the New York Times, several news sites including LATimes.com and MSNBC.com denied knowledge of where the photograph had originated.

Meanwhile the London Times sat on the fence and ludicrously cut the picture in half!! Now there's only two missiles!

This all only came to light because the blog site little green footballs noticed the doctoring and ran a story on it, a fact that the mainstream media ignored altogether. The Washington Post briefly ran a piece on the fake photo with a credit to LGF, but has since removed the story from their website.

Several experts on photography have now agreed that the photograph was digitally manipulated.

Who altered the photograph? who knows, but clearly it was done in order to cover up the embarrassing fact for Iran, and anyone who would want to continue hyping an imaginary Iranian weapons threat, that one of their "glorified scuds" failed.

If Iranian state authorities were responsible for the missile fakery, then they are either incredibly stupid or are now desperate to make it seem they have more military might than reality has proven. Either way this does not bode well for the rest of the world.

“I know that these missiles are part of a threat to wipe Israel off the map, but now they've proved that they have the Photoshop capabilities to do it.” one NY Times commenter succinctly offers.

"Clearly someone thought four missiles would be 33% more scary than three." another suggests.

In closing, consider the following.

Israel has recently spent the last two months conducting huge military exercises involving more than 100 F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, openly declaring them as dry runs for a strike on Iran, and has also openly declared war with Iran to be "Inevitable."

Add to this the fact that Congress is considering an absolute blockade of the entire country of Iran, and punishment for any country or any business group trading with Iran.

And where is it written in our Constitution that we are to be the protectors of Israel?  Or that we should be the ones to fund them?  Maybe if we left the region, the neighboring nations would actually take care of these issues themselves using their money, resources and manpower.

We also have, according to Congressman Ron Paul, members of Congress quietly wishing to preemptively nuke Iran.

Israeli war minister Ehud Barak will visit Washington next week to meet with top U.S. government officials and President Bush in what some are suggesting will be the final planning session in anticipation of a military strike on Iran.

None of these things are considered by the controlled media to be provocations, but a test of substandard missiles by Iran, Photoshopped to cover up it's partial failure, has made the front pages everywhere as an impending and deadly threat.

Inevitably, the two presidential candidates have added their own seasoning to the same bubbling cauldron of B.S.

John McCain, who earlier this week joked that rising exports of US cigarettes is "a good way to kill Iranians", stated that "Iran's most recent missile tests demonstrate again the dangers it poses to its neighbors and to the wider region, especially Israel." He also ludicrously used Iran's missile test as a way of vindicating the establishment of U.S. missile "defense" shields in the Czech Republic and Poland, countries Iran couldn't hit even if it wanted to (which would take some explaining if it decided it did).

In fact, while McCain declared the missile test a grave threat to Eastern Europe, the Russians used the same event to claim the exact opposite!

MCain's presidential "opponent" Obama, repeated a call for "coercive diplomacy" and stated "The threat from Iran's nuclear program is real and it is grave."

The Iranian threat is so grave and real that it has to be photoshopped, wildly exaggerated and repeatedly blown out of all proportion by every arm of the corporate media before anyone will buy it.

The one fact I have yet to hear any media outlet, Mainstream or otherwise mention is that I find it odd that every country we have invaded or are looking to invade are out side of the International Central Banking System. And if human history has shown us anything it's that the International Bankers have funded governments on both sides of every war since the rampage of Napoleon through Europe during the late 1700's. And nothing...absolutely nothing is more profitable for those that produce money (at interest) for governments then war, for never was there a country that would not spare any expense to win the out come of a war. Even if it means bankrupting their people to do it.