The Tapped blog points to some funny Ahmadinejad videos on YouTube and guesses "it’s part of somebody’s propaganda war efforts."
Indeed it is. The person under the pseudonym FardaRoshanAst who posts those videos says:
Most of the videos that i’ve host the past 10 months are from the Iranian Resistance Television, Simaye Azadi (INTV – Iranian National Television – www.iranntv.com).
The domain iranntv.com is registered by:
Registrant:
Linear Communications
Nasrin Saifi
1164 Solano Ave. #120
Albanay, CA 94706
US
Email: hamid@azimi.net
Hamid’s email address domain aszimi.net is registered as:
Administrative Contact:
Azimi, Hamid mardom@IRAN-E-AZAD.ORG
Iran-E-Azad
PO BOX 7862
BERKELEY, CA 94707-0862
US
(510) 528-0605
The Congressional Research Service in a 2004 report on Foreign Terrorist Organizations (pdf) says on page 65ff:
The State Department continues to resist pressure to remove the MEK from the FTO list. On August 15, 2003, the State Department added the group’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCR)296 to the group’s designation.
296Their website is located at [http://www.iran-e-azad.org/english/ncri.html].
Hamid Azimi, who registered the site where these videos are copied from, is obviously a member of the pseudo-marxist cult MEK. Neocon Michael Rubin has quite a complete account of its history and denies any neocon support for its action. But the White House lauds it as a source of intelligence:
At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran’s hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.
Nasrin Saifi, under whose company the iranntv.com site is registered, was at one point the president of the Association of Iranian Women in northern California.
The Hill reported in 2004:
The MEK has often created fictional philanthropic and social organizations to convey legitimacy. In a 1994 dossier on the group, the State Department noted that “many of these member groups are actually shell organizations, established by the [MEK] in order to make [it] appear representative and … popular.
“Likewise,” the report continued, “the [MEK] has formed associated groups with benign names, such as the ‘Association of Iranian Scholars and Professionals’ and the ‘Association of Iranian Women.’”
[…]
A website for US for Democracy and Human Rights in Iran, yet another program sponsor, is www.defend-maryam-rajavi.org. Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the MEK, was arrested in Paris last year on terrorism charges. The group’s site was registered to Hamid Azimi, once president of the Southern California Society of Iranian Scholars and Professors, another MEK front group.
So most of the videos posted, according to the poster himself, are provided by a TV station that is run by an organization designated as terrorist.
As some are valuing the MEK service as intelligence source, I wonder who pays the organization for distributing those videos …