In the recent CBS News article titled U.S. Working To Sabotage Iran Nuke Program, the author notes the following:

Sources familiar with the U.S. effort against Iran tell CBS News that U.S. intelligence agencies have run several programs in recent years, employing different techniques, including modifying components in hard-to-detect ways and making subtle changes to technical documents and drawings, rendering them useless.

as well as:

It’s impossible to say the extent to which Iran has discovered any industrial espionage. Any technical problems that Iran experiences in its program, some of which were the result of its own speed-up effort, Iran may attribute to foreign espionage.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing that Iranian Intelligence personnel don’t read CBS News or else, gosh, I guess they’d know what’s up. I am somewhat dumbfounded by the strange sense of — for lack of a better term — “observer disconnect” represented here, when in fact the observer is not disconnected. Does anyone else share my bewilderment at the paradox of an American news source saying point blank “America is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran doesn’t really know that yet.”?? It’s things like this that make me say, “dude, wtf?”

An article in the People’s Daily Online (note: Chinese news) ran the headline: Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie “300″ for insulting Persian civilization. I get a mental image of the scene in 300 where the Iranian Persian emissary with the big whip gets his hand lopped off (and then talks about arrows blotting out the sun, about one minute into the trailer). The article goes on to talk about the new movie as being “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture.” That makes me smirk for many reasons, namely:

1) Said Iranian official gives Hollywood waaaay too much credit if he thinks there is some conspiracy with the U.S. government to defame the Iranian culture. One would not exactly describe Hollywood’s relationship with our government leaders as a love affair. Besides, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is doing a way better job of defaming Iran than Hollywood ever possibly could.

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