Progressive Blogs Pushing “Shadow CIA” Spin on Iran

by Scott Creighton

This is just a quicky here... DailyKos and many other "Progressive" blogs are really pushing this "election fraud in Iran" thing.  Problem is, most of their info is coming from what they call "leading farsi sites", not very concrete. The neo-con/neo-lib think tanks have been running "pro-democracy" sites in Iran for years. Their goal is not really democracy, unless you think of Chile under Pinochet as "democracy". The candidate who lost is one of the wealthiest men in the world. He left his elected position in Iran years ago under suspicion of wide-spread corruption. He is a free-market zealot who wants to open up the trade restriction, privatize everything including the oil production, and establish a privately owned central banking system like our Federal Reserve. He is in fact, just another version of the Shaw.

Now what we have is the "progressive" sites rampaging through the news cycle, reporting anything they get spoon-fed from an "inside source" as fact. The problem is, if you consider the source, chances are, much of this may not be fact.

Burson-Marsteller has made it clear that they need to pay more attention to the blogs when spinning up stories. If you remember what happened in South Ossetia, the MSM was running the BM approved PR campaign that the evil Ruskies had invaded, right up until the blogs started putting out the truth about what really happened over there.

This time around it would appear that they decided to go with the "bottom up" spin - take their lies straight to the blogs, then let the MSM feed off of them, thus giving their message more lasting "street" credibility.

One article I was reading Daily Kos cited an Ayatollah who was resigning in protest... that isn't really the case. And the source is anything BUT "progressive"... here is the root of that story...

Stratfor is reporting that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, has resigned. Though unconfirmed, the report is saying that Rafsanjani is resigning from his position as head of the Expediencey Council, NOT his position as the leader of the Assembly of Experts, which has oversight responsibility over the office of the Supreme Leader and would be responsible for naming Ayatollah Khamenei’s successor.  D. D.

Stratfor is a policy oriented global intel service, run out of Austin Texas by a "conservative republican", Dr. George Friedman.  Friedman has connections with the RAND corporation and the US Army War College.  His organization, Stratfor, is described this way...

At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Stratfor made its "breaking news" paragraphs, as well as some notable analyses predicting likely actions to be taken by al-Qaeda and the Bush administration available freely to the public.

is a private intelligence agency founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas. Barron's once referred to it as "The Shadow CIA".  Wiki

Stratfor's client list is confidential, but the company's publicity list includes Fortune 500 companies and international government agencies.

Friedman works with Fred burton on this little project...

Burton has most recently been appointed to the Texas Border Security Council on September 11, 2007 by Governor Rick Perry.  Wiki

That's right, the "shadow CIA" is helping our "progressive, liberal" blogs flood the web with stories about the Iranian election fraud.

And Burson-Marsteller is laughing all the time. They figured out how to beat the progressive blog-o-sphere... feed it and ignore the MSM to start with. That makes the people running the liberal blogs feel important and they will rush to get the stories out there to "scoop" the other sites, who are also being spoon-fed by the PR company in a round-about way.  Pretty smart.