Meanwhile, in La La Land.....

According to Melanie Phillips, the NIE report is part of some wide ranging conspiracy theory taking in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United States. Here's a little taster:

On this blog on December 5, I floated the theory that the US had done a deal with both Iran and Saudi Arabia to produce calm in Iraq in return for a promise not to bomb Iran and to serve Israel to them on a plate. Now Debkafile -- whose bulletins, based on intelligence sources, are not reliable but often contain more than a germ of truth -- is reporting a grander version of the same theory. It claims that a Washington-Tehran understanding is in the making, brokered by Saudi Arabia.

[extract]

True? It sounds horribly as if it may be. And there is another dimension to all this. The picture above says it all. Saudi Arabia, which is aghast at Iranian power, appears to have reached the same conclusion about the US -- that it has now totally lost its bottle. Saudi can no longer rely on the US to do what Saudi wanted it to do -- to destroy the Iranian regime. So it has now given up on the US and is doing the next best thing: cosying up to Iran itself. If you can't beat them, make deals with them seems to be its motto.

Hilarious. Isn't it time a tin hat was added to Melanie's picture?

In all seriousness, John Pilger made an excellent point when I witnessed one of his recent talks. It is far easier, and takes less time, to expose the lies of the Daily Mail, The Sun etc than it is to go for the big guns like the BBC, The Guardian etc. The former are no real challenge in terms of identifying the weaknesses in their arguments and exposing them. The latter, on the other hand, buries its establishment bias much further beneath the surface. On this evidence, it really is too easy to expose Phillips' piece as utter fantasy. There's no challenge here. The kind of people who believe this believe there is some vast Jewish conspiracy controlling the world, or that 9/11 was a plot cooked up by the government and there is a secret hanger where all of those who were 'on the planes' are being hidden. Utter lunacy.