a joint project by the Intercept & the NYT

Via the Intercept (8:31):

Calling all sleuths who are intrigued by Media Brands!  Both versions I’ve linked below are far too long for me to read, rather than scan, although at least the NYT version doesn’t include the massive, eye-searing photos the Intercept version does. 

Here are a few questions readers and watchers might want to consider:  How were TI and the NYT able to verify these 700 pages of documents as ‘authentic’ (albetit Maz Hussain’s claim at DN! below)?  Is this simply more anti-Iranian (‘now “our new enemy” a Risen said) Imperial agitprop?  Given they’d allegedly been ‘leaked’ to TI anonymously, who had ‘leaked’ them?  Were they hacked or even created by enemies of Iran?  That would be a long list, yes?

Also, are the contents of the documents even true?  Or just some peevish (perhaps Sunni) dissident’s point of view?  All we see are little artistic mock-ups like this.

The joint project is titled at the Intercept: ‘A Spy Complex Revealed; Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq’, by James Risen (formerly reporting for the NYT and LA Times, see link at the bottom*), Tim Arango, Farnaz Fassihi, Murtaza Hussain, Ronen Bergman, November 17, 2019, the intercept.com

And at the New York CIA Times: ‘The Iran Cables: Secret Documents Show How Tehran Wields Power in Iraq; Hundreds of leaked intelligence reports shed light on a shadow war for regional influence — and the battles within the Islamic Republic’s own spy divisions’, by Tim Arango, James Risen, Farnaz Fassihi, Ronen Bergman and Murtaza Hussain (White Helmets lover), Nov. 19, 2019, nytimes.com

On Nov. 18, Amy Goodman (another White Helmets lover) had interviewed Murtaza Hussain, which is where I’d run into the story, (both video and transcript at the link.)

“An unprecedented leak of secret intelligence reports from inside the Iranian government has shed new light on how Iran has taken control of much of the Iraqi government in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion. The documents from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security were leaked to The Intercept, which then partnered with The New York Times on reporting the story. The leak includes 700 pages of intelligence documents from 2014 to 2015. The documents reveal that a number of Iraqis who once worked with the CIA went on to work with Iranian intelligence. We speak with Murtaza Hussain, a reporter at The Intercept who worked on the project. “The macro story here is that the United States shattered Iraqi society, and then Iran came in to pick up the pieces,” he says.” [snip]

MURTAZA HUSSAIN: The source’s identity is unknown to us. They identify themselves as somebody who was upset about the Iranian role in Iraq today. And as many of us know, Iran has a very powerful role in Iraqi politics. And these documents, in fact, shed light on what the source described. Iran has close relationships with Iraqi elites. In many ways, they have negated the sovereignty of that country and manipulated it in such a way that their interests are predominant over the interests of the Iraqi people. And we’re seeing this today manifest in ongoing protests in Iraq against the political elite, which is viewed as beholden to Iran. And while this is widely known, it has not been seen in black and white until this day.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, the U.S. considers Iran its enemy. They would have an interest in destabilizing the government and making Iran look bad. How do you know this isn’t some kind of U.S. source for these documents?

MURTAZA HUSSAIN: The documents, although they show Iranian manipulation of Iraqi politics, do not portray Iran in a negative light per se. The impression that comes from the documents, of Iranian intelligence agents, is one of professionalism, pragmatism, and not an interest in destabilizing Iraq, but rather an interest in stabilizing the country in a way which still facilitates their interests. They’re not planning to ethnically cleanse it of certain groups or cause it to plunge into chaos. They want a stable Iraq in which all the different minority communities are reconciled to the existing order. And they want to defeat extremist groups, and they want a stable Iraqi economy, which is in their own interests, as well, too. So, while the documents shed light on Iranian activities, the activities they show are very much like U.S. government aims. They have similar aims, although their means, in some sense, are different.”

It turns out that there are Five Stories ballasted by the documents:

MURTAZA HUSSAIN: So, the first story is an overview of Iran’s influence in Iraqi politics. It lays out the significance of the documents as a whole. And that story is published jointly by the Times and The Intercept. The second story is about the Iranian covert war against ISIS between the period 2013-2015. It shows how Iranian spies had infiltrated ISIS at the highest leadership level. They had assets giving them communications of ISIS leaders. They were arming ISIS’s enemies”, etc.

The third story is about a secret summit that took place in Turkey between the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Muslim Brotherhood. This summit was intended to forge a joint front, over sectarian differences, to combat what was seen as a shared enemy of Saudi Arabia’, etc.

“The Changing of the Overlords,” article four.  So, this story is an op-ed, written by myself and my colleague Jeremy Scahill, laying out everything that’s happened in Iraq since 2003, since the U.S. invasion, which was basically an extinction-level event for the old Iraq. The Iraqi regime was destroyed by the United States. It was shattered into pieces, as I said. And then, those pieces, out of them came extremist groups, came Iranian proxies. We have not seen an end to violence that began in 2003 to this day.”, etc.

MURTAZA HUSSAIN: Went to Iraq to report the stories, to verify the veracity of documents, to visit many of the sites on the ground, to retrace the steps of Iranian spies, and particularly to map out the Iranian war against ISIS behind the scenes as it happened in 2014, 2015. We saw the impact, especially northern Iraq, of the Iranian presence. And at the time, Iran had a better reputation. It was helping Iraqi Kurds fight ISIS. But then, in 2017, there was a falling out over Iraqi Kurdish independence. And now there’s a very bitter legacy of the Iranian presence there, and the training and weapons and intelligence support they provided has mostly been washed over by the role they played in supporting the central Iraqi government and crushing Kurdish independence. So, the traces are still there, but the political landscape has changed, and it’s continuing to change as time goes on.”

The rest is here.

From a synopsis at middeeastmonitor.com, Nov. 18, 2019, here’s the Big Beef:

“The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Major General Qasem Soleimani, visited Iraq to persuade an ally in Parliament to help Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi maintain his position.

Iraqi sources: Iran intervened to prevent overthrow of Adil Abdul-Mahdi

The report reveals how Abdul-Mahdi was groomed by and begun to work closely with Iran in 2014 while he was Iraq’s oil minister, and how his “special relationship” was connected with that of former Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi who also worked in support of Iran.”

Among the paltry 208 comments (most devolved into food fights over morales and maduro) on the Intercept version, many had waxed skeptical:

ThomPrentice

Good to see that the OmidyarIntercept has finally come out from the dark shadows to show it is a MajorPlayer in the CIA ratline of media eagerly subservient to US neoliberal austerity imperial capitalism and world domination…if the trashcanning of the Snowden files didn’t already make that clear

Photosymbiosis (in part)

Incidentally, if you want to compare and contrast Wikileaks and the Intercept, note that Wikileaks makes documents available to the public (not flushing them down the drain like the Intercept did with the Snowden NSA files). Here’s the Wikileaks Syria archive, for example:  https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/

The_Wolf

Relevant disclosures are notably lacking from all of the Intercept Iran cables stories.
Here’s a start: (wd:  his links are worth scanning, at least)
https://iranian.com/2018/11/28/pierre-omidyar-a-dangerous-billionaire-backer-of-the-resistance/
https://ir.usembassy.gov/pierre-omidyar/

Ronniemitchell1

As soon as I saw James Risen’s name on the article  I came straight to the comment section.

Dan Potter

Iran’s rise as a power player in Iraq was in many ways a direct consequence of Washington’s lack of any post-invasion plan.

Note that–according to these authors–the mistake was the lack of a post-invasion plan, and not the disastrous and criminal invasion itself.  This and other crafting in this article serves to either obscure or excuse US behavior, while painting a sinister portrait of Iran, with Iranians and their informants who “lurk” in the airports, and meet in “dark alleyways”.
And from the Twitterverse and elsewhere:

@ejmalrai

When a country, that is not the US, is establishing allies in another country among locals, it becomes a "BIG" news.

The US is having vassals in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Oman and in every country it can. So what is the big deal here?

When a country, that is not the US, is establishing allies in another country among locals, it becomes a "BIG" news.

The US is having vassals in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Oman and in every country it can. So what is the big deal here?

Elijah J. Magnier‏ @ejmalrai · Nov 18

#US is trying to use this "secret" doc, thinking it can add fuel on the protestors' fire. This shows once more how naive/ incompetent is the US in dealing w/ #IraqProtests.

My advice to the US: If you jump on your head, protestors have a domestic agenda, careless about you.

Elijah J. Magnier‏ @ejmalrai · Nov 18
The #US is also trying to send a message to #IraqProtests that @AdilAbdAlMahdi is weak and can't control his commanders even if the officer in question (retired now) was serving under #US ally and anti-Iran PM Haidar Abadi.

*A James Risen, Russia-gate and Julian Assaange compendium is here at theburningplatform.com, April 24, 2019  One Outtake:

“That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else.

Risen also alleges that the unproven Russian hacks were passed over by Barr in his memo on the report. Not only is this incorrect, but also Risen apparently has forgot that the investigation was about Trump’s collusion with Russia to do something illegal and the investigation found that no such thing occurred. Risen, like the rest of the presstitutes and even Greenwald himself, takes for granted that the unproven Russian hacks happened. Again we see that the longer a lie is repeated the more it becomes true. Not even Greenwald can detect that he has been bamboozled.”

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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wendy davis's picture

highlighting this to embed:

Iran declares war on the USA’s covert influence in Iraq’, 8/07/2019 by Elijah J Magnier he opens:

When US officials visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi, they had two requests: first, to close all commerce and financial exchanges with Iran to strangle the Iranian economy and bring it to its knees. The second was to neutralise the Iraqi groups (known as Hashd al-Shaabi) which sympathise with Iran and carry a similar ideology.

The Iraqi Premier is aware he is being pushed into the heart of two minefields, Iranian and American, and therefore he cannot just walk straight into these fields. He has decided to reject the first US demand because Iraq has religious, commercial and energy bonds with Iran. He is refusing to transform Iraq into a US-Iran battlefield where no winner can be expected to stay on his feet, including Iraq. He wants to force the US administration to back down and agree to provide Iraq with waivers to buy Iranian gas and keep commercial exchange flowing.

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wendy davis's picture

but i'd been working hard on it, and had decided that it was almost ready for prime time. ; ) and then i'd forgotten that there was a Debate last night, and another day of Impeachment Theater.

but i will add these things:

and of course killing sanctions are war as other means, as well as regime change by other means. you smell any CIA flaks in those protests? and gee, why not re-join the JCPO, and where the hell are you all, EU? you really must know that iran never meant to have a nuclear bomb, yes?

'normal nation'? pompeo's brain? abby normal:

[video:https://youtu.be/yH97lImrr0Q?t=12s]

destabilizing.Iranian.activity #O.M.G.

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@wendy davis @wendy davis on c99ers.
Do you mind clarifying it for me(us)?
We all have different interests, not necessarily the debates, not necessarily the impeachment hearing, and we may not be interested is what the Intercept/NYT has to say about your topic, or any topic.
I see many commenters and essayists here that write brilliant, up to the minute content, and they are swinging hard left, but never rude to middle or hard right.
I didn't watch the debates. I didn't watch the impeachment stuff.
I think most people here did not, either.
I am of the opinion we want news that is of interest, and that hasn't been covered.
I saw your essay on your blog, and your back and forth with Big Al, and what I didn't see was any other comment by any of your registered commenters.
It is on the front page here, which is a badge of honor, so please, wear it thusly.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

wendy davis's picture

@on the cusp

c99ers, amiga, but i'm not surprised you've chosen to take it that way, given your past barbed comments to me. an here i'd thought a few weeks ago that we'd reached some sort of détente. guess not. ; )

i was just saying that it was a silly day to post it, given the two prevalent themes of the day. i'll add that for personal RL reasons, today wouldn't have worked for me. but one doesn't need to have watched the debates nor the impeachment hearings to read and comment in the coverage, does one?

but yeah, the commentariat at the café has shrunk mightily, and i do know the reasons some of the erstwhile commenters have disappeared, including the fact that some would rather comment at larger venues on similar subjects so that their responses will be more widely read.

on edit: also, health reasons, and i admit i'd banned three obvious anti-semites in the past, and recently finally quit responding to a drunken man who continually rambled at length about himself w/ Q's akin to 'why should i care about this news?' on every diary until he left. i had pleaded w/ him to not do that, but to no avail. another couple i'd asked to move on, as well.

i will say that i covered the first two days of the Impeachment Inquiry myself, but mainly as satire, as i believe snoopy had done here.

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
or “outside influence” destabilized the South in the Sixties with the civil rights movement …

I wanted to reinforce the U.S. commitment to helping #SaudiArabia defend itself in a time of destabilizing Iranian activity.

People forced to live under the Saudi clan’s cruel and crude feudal rule couldn’t possibly be chafing under the yoke and getting uppity for their own reasons — it’s gotta be those Iranian outside agitators.

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

analogies, miz lizard, and thank you. and that 'destabilizing activity' of course includes the lie that iran has always wanted to build nuclear bombs, and is further enriching uranium toward that end not because thee US pulled out of the JCPOA, nor that the EU isn't helping, etc. which is why i was glad to have found that Tweet by FM zarif.

you may remember as well that saudi arabia was just put on the board of governors of the IAEA, and with the death (some posit he was assassinated) of yukiya amani...he'll need to be replaced. my understanding is that the US's choice factors in to the decision heavily. amani was apparently 'too cozy with iran' and had always found them in compliance with the terms of the agreements.

one of the worst parts of trump's presidency for me is his tight relationship with the crown prince of KSA, and of course...bibi, likud, and moving the US embassy to jerusalem, claiming that israel owns the golan heights, and so on.

but Iran! evil Iran!

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wendy davis's picture

tonight's closing song is a bob dylan cover by playing for change (world peace thru music) that seems just right:

There must be some kind of way out of here,
Said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth...

So let us not talk falsely now
The hour's getting late...

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UHHc7POovg]

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wendy davis's picture

his ‘The bloodbath in Baghdad’, 19 November 2019, bill van auken wrote:

“The New York Times, ever the pliant propaganda tool of US war aims, helped to promote the anti-Iranian narrative by publishing on Monday what it claimed was a “trove” of secret Iranian intelligence cables illustrating Iranian ties with various actors in the Iraqi government. A purportedly unknown source—perhaps within the US intelligence apparatus—provided the alleged cables to the Intercept, which handed them off to the Times.

While the US pursues its regional war aims in Iraq, and the Iranian government strives to suppress social unrest that it fears could—and with the recent protests over fuel price hikes already has—spread across its borders, the upsurge in Iraq points to a new way forward in the Middle East. Masses have taken to the streets to pursue their class interests and fight for social equality against a political elite that has promoted sectarian divisions.

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wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis

FWIW to van auken's link, wondering about his second paragraph. i'd gone to her account for a different reason, but good on her for knowing this i'd never known (or remembered, at any rate):

but my guess is that it's a confirmation that Spooks are on the ground in Iran as well as many of us have sensed.

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immediately wondered if it was anti-Iran propaganda. The timing seems convenient for the neolibcons. And the involvement of the NYT always triggers the bullshit detector when it comes to foreign policy and prospective war profits. I can't say that I have gone through the available material to see if it passes the smell test yet though.

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wendy davis's picture

@entrepreneur

instincts are good, and i can't begin to fault you for trying to make sense of all that written material at both sites, which is partially the reason i'd given the middel east monitor link, but also because the NYT is often behind a paywall after what is it? 4 free hits?

but as the Intercept has become more of a tool of the Imperium over time as well, to me inquiring into media brands is very important. 5 intercept fearless journalists had trashed, smeared, and lied about julian assange in the past, as well, accidentally busted reality winner's single document leak, same w/ jeffrey sterling (james risen was in that mix) as well w/ their 'secure drop' thingie. so... thanks for reading this much, caring, and commenting, entrepeneur.

for me, as i've indicated, the NYT is often a CIA mouthpiece, as well.
on edit: you may remember that the Slimes had published 'news' that anonymous (generals, spooks?) had been told by trump that he seriusly meant to withdraw from NATO, eading to the Defense of NATO (thus AFRRICOM, as well?) oh, yes the house passed it in monumental fashion, no one dissented to the senate version. Is there any more imperiaist an organization on the planet?

but i'd meant to add more to the need to question other US-dominated institutions and organizations, like the OPCW, and i'd thought caitlin johnstone had covered the second whistleblower of the suppressed reports on 'assad gassed his people in douma' (and elsewhere?) but it may have been i hadn't scrolled far enough down her twit account.

i have the first one in my files, but iirc, they said the gassing was likely done by al qaeda, and the subtext was: the White Helmets.

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wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis

'The Hugely Important OPCW Scandal Keeps Unfolding. Here’s Why No One’s Talking About It.’, Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 16, 2019

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is now hemorrhaging evidence that the US and its allies deceived the world once again about yet another military intervention, which should be a front-page story all over the world. Yet if you looked at American news media headlines you’d think the only thing that matters right now is indulging the childish fantasy that Donald Trump might somehow magically be removed from office via supermajority consensus in a majority-Republican Senate.
CounterPunch has published an actual bombshell of a report by journalist Jonathan Steele containing many revelations about the OPCW scandal which were previously unknown to the public.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/15/the-opcw-and-douma-chemical-weap...

Steele is an award-winning reporter who worked as a senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian back before that outlet was purged of all critical thinkers on western imperialism; he first waded into the OPCW controversy last month with a statement made on the BBC revealing the existence of a second whistleblower on the organisation’s investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria.”

...........................................
huge snip, but this is great:
..........................................

If you ask Syria narrative managers like The Guardian’s George Monbiot or The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, this isn’t a big story because even if Assad wasn’t responsible for the Douma incident, it doesn’t matter because he’s still a very bad man. But this is an extremely intellectually dishonest obfuscation on their part, because this has nothing to do with whether or not Bashar al-Assad is a nice person.

The OPCW covering up its findings exculpating the Syrian government on Douma wouldn’t be significant because it would mean that Assad is a good person, it would be significant because it would mean the US deceived the world about yet another military intervention. And it would make it much harder for the US to manufacture public support for other military interventions in the future.”

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wendy davis's picture

popular resistance newsletter:

‘Iran’s ‘only crime is we decided not to fold; Foreign Minister Zarif sketches Iran-US relations for diplomats, former presidents and analysts’, Pepe Escobar, asiatimes.com, Nov. 21, 2019 it’s long, but he opens:

“Just in time to shine a light on what’s behind the latest sanctions from Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a speech at the annual Astana Club meeting in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan delivered a searing account of Iran-US relations to a select audience of high-ranking diplomats, former Presidents and analysts.

Zarif was the main speaker in a panel titled “The New Concept of Nuclear Disarmament.” Keeping to a frantic schedule, he rushed in and out of the round table to squeeze in a private conversation with Kazakh First President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
During the panel, moderator Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, managed to keep a Pentagon analyst’s questioning of Zafir from turning into a shouting match.

Previously, I had extensively discussed with Syed Rasoul Mousavi, minister for West Asia at the Iran Foreign Ministry, myriad details on Iran’s stance everywhere from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. I was at the James Bond-ish round table of the Astana Club, as I moderated two other panels, one on multipolar Eurasia and the post-INF environment and another on Central Asia (the subject of further columns).

Zarif’s intervention was extremely forceful. He stressed how Iran “complied with every agreement and it got nothing;” how “our people believe we have not gained from being part of” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; how inflation is out of control; how the value of the rial dropped 70% “because of ‘coercive measures’ – not sanctions because they are illegal.”

He spoke without notes, exhibiting absolute mastery of the inextricable swamp that is US-Iran relations. It turned out, in the end, to be a bombshell. Here are highlights.”

...........................................................
the highights seem to be a longer version of the Tweet of Zarif’s letter to the EU i'd embedded, and it’s good he’d spoken again about this section:
.............................................................

Time for HOPE
Zarif identifies three major problems in our current geopolitical madness: a “zero-sum mentality on international relations that doesn’t work anymore;” winning by excluding others (“We need to establish dialogue, we need to establish cooperation”); and “the belief that the more arms we purchase, the more security we can bring to our people.”

but again, it demonstrates how and why iran is under the gun of the Western Imperium in so many ways, what the crippling sanctions (war by other means) have done to the economy, as well as causing me to wonder if there aren't CIA and other agent provocateurs at play in the protests, both in iran and in iraq. too many reports rely on facts from AP, compromised human rights organizations, and...CNN? ;- )

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