Over on the Telegraph there is a sort of press release from the Foreign Secretary, Mr William Hauge, talking up the threat of Iran. There is no critical reporting in this sychophantic piece of 'reporting' at all so we'll supply it here.

1. Hague claims "Because they [Iran] are clearly continuing their nuclear weapons programme"

In fact the view of Western intelligence is that Iran is building the capability to build a nuclear bomb but is not actually building a bomb. They would have two options for the nuclear material; the plutonium from the Bushehr reactor or uranium which they have enriched. The Russians control the former and the plants where the enrichment takes place are all under IAEA surveillance, in line with the NPT. It would be very difficult for them to proceed to build a bomb and impossible to do so undetected. It is fraudulent to say as Hague does that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

This is what Peter Jenkins, who used to be Britain's representative at the IAEA had to say: It seems that Iran is investigating what it would take to build a bomb. Just doing this increases their political influence. The West does not want Iran to increase their political influence in a region where so much of the oil comes from. Telling their populations that they are crippling Iran with economic and fiscal sanctions and are planning to bomb them because they (Iran) are increasing their influence in the region, is not possible, in countries nominally (purely nominally) democractic, lawful and peaceful. So they are telling their populations that Iran is building a bomb.

2. Hague is also apparently 'concerned' that Iran could drop a nuclear bomb on Britian:
This talk of Britain being 'in range of nuclear weapons' is scaremongering of the worst sort. It is reminiscent of Jack Straw's absurd claims about Britian being at risk from Iraq's proposed ballastic misiles with nuclear warheads before the Iraq war. In that case M16 would have known full well the feeble state of the Iraqi missile program; they couldn't get them to fly straight, even up to 150 km, and were nowhere near a ballistic missile.[2] The only nuclear materials they had, some parts for a centrifuge system, turned up after the invasion buried in someone's back garden.[3] It was a fiction worthy of any totalitarian state which seeks to totally deceive its own population. Hague is no better.

There have also been a number of stories in the press recently; the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US, an Iranian attempting to smuggle nuclear materials on a plane from Russia to Tehran, who mysteriously was not caught, for example. There is no way of knowing to what extent these are a) CIA plots, b) real attempts by some players within Iran or c) a combination of the two e.g. some freelance bungling by a loose operator dressed up by the CIA to look like an official plot. The recent bomb attack attempts in Georgia and Thailand and attack in India look on the surface more planned - by someone. We don't know who.

There is also a pattern of stories being placed in the compliant press by intelligence agencies. Here is one about Iran 'strengthening its ties to Al Qaeda': Iran and Al Qaeda. Of course this is reminiscent of stories about Iraq'a links to Al Qaeda in the run up to the 2003 invasion. (Completely fictitious; the US cited for example the presence of Al Ansar, a group sympathetic to Al Qaeda, in northern Iraq, as evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq without telling the American people that in fact Saddam Hussein had been trying to eliminate this group).

In short then we are seeing all the usual preparations for a war, in particular the usual massaging of domestic public opinion to believe a false narrative.