Four different stories involving Iran in some nefarious affairs were published last week. They have all one thing in common. There is actually no proof that Iran was or is involved in any of these.

On Tuesday the Financial Times ran a story about alleged Uranium in Syria which was then speculated about as having been moved to Iran. But the big issue here is that no one has ever seen the alleged 50 tons of Uranium metal Syria is said to have had and there is absolutely no proof that it ever existed. But the well known expert David Albright of the the Institute for Scary Iran Stories (formerly Institute for Scary Iraq Stories) looked at satellite pictures of some place where that Uranium was allegedly stored and found that some trees had been cut in the area. As Mark Hibbs asks:

The FT account this morning appeared to insinuate that the “gradual removal of a large orchard for no apparent reason” near Marj as-Sultan constituted suspicious behavior. Tree-cutting as a signature for nefarious nuclear activity?

Surely it must be. David Albright says so. But funny how he didn't mention that the place he suspects is, since late November, in the hand of the insurgents.

Also on Tuesday the New York Times ran a story that blames Iran for Denial of Service attacks on computer systems of several U.S. banks:

The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

But there is zero proof in the piece that these attacks were done by Iran. Indeed a Sunni hacktivist group has long claimed to be responsible for these attacks as a protest against some youtube video. While some alleged experts and anonymous government officials told the NYT that only a state could have done the attacks real experts know that this is untrue:

"I don't consider any attack I can do in my spare time as 'nation-state-sponsored,'" said Robert David Graham, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Errata Security.

The attack, while large in size, was pretty primitive. A freely available PHP script injection toolkit named ItsOKNoProblemBro was used to highjack a large number of servers which then made a large amount of secure http requests to the banking machines. Any decent computer science student with some programming and system administration background can launch such an attack with only a few hours work.

"ItsOKNoProblemBro is far from sophisticated malware. It's really rather simple," said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior anti-virus researcher with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab. "Going strictly by the publicly known technical details, I don't see enough evidence to categorize this operation as something only a nation-state-sponsored actor could pull off."

And:

"I don't think there's anything about these attacks that's so large or so sophisticated that it would have to be state sponsored," said Prince, the CloudFlare CEO. "This very well could be a kid sitting in his mom's basement in Ohio launching these attacks. I think it's dangerous to start speculating that this is actually state sponsored."

But surely we must blame Iran for having the sophistication of "a kid sitting in his mom's basement in Ohio".

Another Tuesday story by the Associated Press was about a long missing former FBI agent who was last seen in Iran:

Two years after a hostage video and photographs of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson raised the possibility that the missing American was being held by terrorists, U.S. officials now see the government of Iran behind the images, intelligence officials told The Associated Press.

That piece tries to somehow blame the Iranian government for the abduction of the man who went to investigate about some international cigarette smuggling for a private client.

The tradecraft used to send those [photos and videos] was too good, indicating professional spies were behind them, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly.

So taking cell phone pictures and sending them via email is "too good" to be done by non-state actors? What please, of the following steps the piece mentions, could not have been done by just anyone?

U.S. operatives in Afghanistan managed to trace the cellphone used to send the photographs, officials said. But the owner had nothing to do with the photos, and the trail went cold.

…
[The video] was sent from a cyber cafe in Pakistan in November 2010.

…
In the background, Pashtun wedding music can be heard.

the sender left no clues to his identity and never used that email address again.

Yeah, that all looks "professional" and it is thereby impossible that anyone but those nefarious Iranians could have abducted someone who investigates international cigarette smuggling rings, taken cellphone pictures of him and email those from Pakistan. Who is supposed to believe that?

Another "blame Iran" story runs in today's New York Times: A Trail of Bullet Casings Leads From Africa’s Wars Back to Iran According to the story someone sold unmarked small arms ammunition to some state actors, like the Kenyan police, which then found its way into the hands of some non-state actors in Africa.

But the only "proof" that the ammunition, which isn't even illegal to deal with in the first place, is from Iran, is that it has the same packaging than some ammunition which was, three years ago, allegedly smuggled from Iran to Nigeria. Wooden boxes and camouflage-green wrapping paper are seemingly only used by Iran. Also, the AK-47 ammunition found in Africa fits the technical description of the AK 47 ammunition Iran, like some 50 other countries, produces. Surely it can only be Iran that makes AK-47 ammunition that fits the well known specifications?

These four stories, all in the same week, blame Iran for this or that without any proof. All these stories base their claims on this or that anonymous U.S. official or secret intelligence. All these stories are pretty likely to have no Iran involvement at all.

But the Obama administration, which provides those anonymous officials, seems to be in full "blame Iran" campaign mode now. The media, led by the New York Times, are again the ever willing messengers used to brain wash the public with such dubious stories. Iraqn is bad, bad, bad. And we need to bomb, bomb, bomb it now. What, if not this, could be the purpose of this nonsense?