"In an alarming exposure of the acceleration and urgency of the American war party's push towards catastrophic war with Iran, Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter terrorism officer, in an interview [1] on 24th July with Anti War Radio debunked the NeoCons' repeated myth of Iran's support for AlQaeda as a pretext for war. Whilst acknowledging Iran's helpfulness in trying to establish security in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Giraldi spoke of the United States' hypocritical and illegal support for terrorist separatists groups inside Iran, and various plans and scenarios which have been drawn up to destroy Iran's military and economic infrastructure by massive bombardment, with the use of nuclear bombs a real and stated possibility."

"For close to two years, the media has stubbornly clung to a long discredited story about the Iranian President’s alleged threat to “destroy Israel” with nuclear weapons Iran doesn’t have and denies any intent to acquire. ‘Wiped off the map, wiped off the map,’ they bleat incessantly, even though his actual words, “The Imam [Khomenei] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” were paralleled with the fall of regimes like the Soviet Union and Iran’s former U.S.-installed monarchy...
Yet the rumor persists. Top respected journalists, advocates for peace and dialogue with Iran, and individual Iranians themselves bring up the misquote regularly, as do noted Iranian-American scholars. The media’s constant drumbeat has even duped top world leaders into believing the myth. On October 29, 2005, the false quote was officially condemned by all 15 Security Council members in a United Nations statement, just following Israel’s prior demand that the Security Council expel Iran from the UN due to the remark...
And yet suddenly, after all this hoopla, at least two of the biggest media titans, the BBC and the Associated Press, appear to be backing away from the incorrect “wiped off the map” quotation they’ve been drilling into people’s minds for so long. It’s happening quietly and undemonstratively, but some recent subtle changes in their presentation indicate a tacit acknowledgement of their previous misreporting."

"The point got buried in many of the news reports out of Vienna, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made a strong appeal Monday for the U.S. to start talking to Iran. He didn't specifically propose that the Bush administration drop its condition that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment program as a precondition to direct Iranian-American talks on Iran's nuclear program. But he made it clear that Washington has to be more creative than it has been to date in finding a way of talking and therefore reducing the chances of war. ElBaradei's views will loom increasingly large in the coming months as the Bush administration pursues an internal debate on whether to use military force to halt Iran's nuclear program. Iran says it is for peaceful nuclear energy purposes, but the Bush administration says it's for making a nuclear weapon."

"Prior to the military invasion of Iraq in 2003, the government and media, for whatever various motives, had engaged in a propaganda campaign that effectively deceived the American people on a massive scale. The propaganda continues to this day, such as the implausible denial that there ever was such a campaign and the fabricated myth that there was an “intelligence failure” leading up to the war. But the propaganda isn’t limited to Iraq. Iran has become a major focus of U.S. propaganda efforts. That this state of affairs continues demonstrates the failure of the American people to learn the most obvious lessons from the course of events that led us to be in Iraq in the first place."

"Unfounded charges sabotage the prospect of bilateral negotiations"

“I saw that story and was amazed that what we call here the ‘Judy Miller syndrome’ has caught on in the UK ‘liberal media.’ Pretty amazing, after the overwhelming evidence of the past five years that the U.S.-Bush government is in the very business of disinformation, and their steady and obvious desire to demonize the Iranians, that this unconfirmed propaganda is treated as news (and not news pathology).” (Email to Media Lens, May 22, 2007)

"The US and Britain are already at war with Iran, have been at war with Iran for a number of years now and are funding anti-Iranian terrorist groups inside Iran in preparation for the fallout that will occur after overt military action is commenced."