Once again we throw mud at Iran hoping some will stick… Staying true to form, Odierno alleges Iranian interference in Iraq, this time it’s over the SOFA…

US commander says Iran trying to bribe Iraqis

…Odierno said Iran was working publicly and covertly to undermine the status-of-forces agreement that the US and Iraq are about to conclude and that must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, the paper said.

"Clearly, this is one they’re having a ‘full court press’ on to try to ensure there’s never any bilateral agreement between the United States and Iraq," it quoted him as saying, using a basketball expression. [...]

Odierno said, however, he had no definitive proof of the bribes, but added that "there are many intelligence reports" that suggest Iranians are "coming in to pay off people to vote against it," The Post reported.

It is ironic that Odierno may actually be right about the allegations of bribery, but, so what? As he is also quoted saying…

"We know that there are many relationships with people here for many years going back to when Saddam was in charge, and I think they’re utilizing those contacts to attempt to influence the outcome of the potential vote in the council of representatives," the general continued.

Wow, what an astounding observation, Odierno… And who might be those contacts you are fretting over…? Maliki, himself? All the ISCI Parliamentarians, Kurds, Sadrists, and/or Badr members…? C’mon, get real! Many of them were in Iran during Saddam’s rule… Don’t you remember the red carpet treatment Ahmadinejad received in Baghdad recently?

This reminds me of the EFP’s…

The US claim that Iran was behind their growing use in Iraq was the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s case for an Iranian "proxy war" against the US in early 2007.

Soon after that, however, senior US military officials conceded that EFPs were in fact being manufactured in Iraq itself, although they insisted that EFPs alleged exported by Iran were superior to the home-made version.

The Bad Intel…

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. [...]

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,"… In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.

The Laptop computer…

Ritter explained how the IAEA report was drafted.

“Information has been provided to the IAEA by member nations, intelligence information. Now the IAEA has to be very circumspect when it says this but we all know that it’s basically intelligence provided to the agency by the United States of America, a nation openly hostile to Iran, a nation that has a track record of fabricating, exaggerating, and misrepresenting intelligence data. The data that’s been provided to the IAEA has derived from a laptop computer which even the IAEA claims is of questionable providence,” he said.

I could go on with further mud slinging efforts, but, you get the idea…!

Meanwhile, in good news for us taxpayers, and, the Iraqis in general…

Webb Seeks Freeze on Iraq Propaganda Effort

U.S. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia wants the Pentagon to freeze up to $300 million in contracts with companies the military is hiring to place pro-U.S. news stories and entertainment programs in the Iraqi media .

Webb wrote Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Thursday to ask that the deals be suspended until they can be reviewed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and the next presidential administration. A freshman Democrat, Webb sits on the Armed Services panel.

With the United States in "a grave economic crisis" and Iraq’s government carrying a $79 billion budget surplus drawn from oil exports, "it makes little sense for the U.S. Department of Defense to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to propagandize the Iraqi people," Webb wrote.

Gates was traveling outside the United States on Thursday. Pentagon spokesman Chris Isleib said in an e-mail that the Defense Department will give "serious consideration" to Webb’s proposal.

Hopefully, saner minds will prevail and we’ll be rid of this $300 Mil. boondoggle…