As should be expected, the neocons have shifted from one preposterous lie to another in order to prepare the way for eventually inflicting mass murder, mayhem, and misery on the people of Iran.

“In an effort to build congressional and Pentagon support for military options against Iran, the Bush administration has shifted from its earlier strategy of building a case based on an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program to one invoking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) purportedly manufactured in Iran that are killing US soldiers in Iraq,” writes Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story. “According to officials—including two former Central Intelligence Agency case officers with experience in the Middle East—the administration believes that by focusing on the alleged ties between IEDs and Iran, they can link the Iranian government directly to attacks on US forces in Iraq.”

Call it aluminum tubes redux. No doubt, in two or three years, after Iran suffers the horrific fate of Iraq, there will once again be rumblings in the media that the Iran IED accusations were not only baseless, but yet another primary example of the duplicitous nature of the neocons. Recall, as well, that the last time around the CIA argued that 100,000 high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq allegedly attempted to purchase demonstrated Saddam Hussein was feverishly and methodically working toward the objective of nuking grade school kids in Pocatello, Idaho. Of course, it did not matter at the time that technical experts from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge, Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, found this claim ludicrous.

Indeed, the entire “case” against Saddam Hussein was fixed around the “policy,” that is to say the neocon plan to mass murder extraordinary numbers of helpless and enfeebled Iraqis, emerging from the barbarity of more than a decade of medieval sanctions, a regime that cost over a million lives—more than 500,000 of them children—well “worth it,” as Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously averred.

In 2005, Bush admitted to employing Hitler’s Big Lie, that is to say a series of lies so “colossal,” as Hitler explained in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf, that the public accepts all manner of crimes in their names by way of willful ignorance. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda,” said Bush, obviously taking his cue cards from the neocons.

Now we have the Big Lie in regard to Iran, as preposterous and nonsensical as Iraq’s illusory weapons of mass destruction.

“The US military has provided credible evidence that the specialized IEDs known as explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which have been killing US troops in Iraq, appear to have been manufactured in Iran. Intelligence and military officials caution, however, that there is nothing tying the weapons directly to the Iranian government, nor is there a direct evidentiary chain of custody linking the IEDs to Iran,” Alexandrovna continues. Even so, this “is viewed by some in the Bush Administration as sufficient justification for taking military action against Iran,” that is to say “sufficient justification” to butcher Iranian grandmothers and toddlers.

“The origins of the [IED] theme of Iranian complicity strongly suggest that it was a propaganda line aimed at reducing the Bush administration’s acute embarrassment at its inability to stop the growing death toll of U.S. troops from shaped charges fired at armored vehicles by Sunni insurgents,” notes Gareth Porter. “The U.S. command admitted at first that the Sunnis were making the shaped charges themselves. On Jun. 21, 2005, Gen. John R. Vines, then the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters that the insurgents had probably drawn on bomb-making expertise from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s army,” not the Iranians.

But never mind—the neocons can count on the fact the average American does not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite, the former engaged in resistance and the later not, preferring instead—with the exception of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia and a handful of other Shia renegades—to fence sit and even participate in the U.S. imposed puppet government.

As usual, in now standard neocon fashion, the original story of the resistance manufacturing the IEDs morphed into Iranian complicity. Bush and the neocons—or rather the neocons—made the decision “to start blaming its new problem in Iraq on Tehran. On Aug. 4, 2005, Pentagon and intelligence officials leaked the story to NBC and CBS that U.S. troops had ‘intercepted’ dozens of shaped charges said to have been ’smuggled into northeastern Iraq only last week’” and the “NBC story quoted intelligence officials as saying they believed the IEDs were shipped into Iraq by Iranian Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah, but were ‘convinced it could not have happened without the full consent of the Iranian government.’” In short, it was a big enough lie to begin a process that will result in thousands of dead Iranians and yet another depleted uranium killing field.

“A senior intelligence official told Raw Story Tuesday that the CIA had stepped up operations in the region, shifting their Iran focus to ‘other’ approaches in preference to the ‘black propaganda’ that Raw Story ‘has already reported on,’” explains Alexandrovna. “The source would not elaborate on what these ‘other’ approaches are,” although this should be a no-brainer.

No doubt at least a few people in Iran understand what happens when the CIA shifts it focus. “The CIA did exactly what was asked of it in Iran, deposing a mildly nationalist regime that was a minor irritant to US policymakers,” writes Mark Zepezauer. “In 1951, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, “the most popular politician in the country,” was elected Prime Minister of Iran. His major election plank was the nationalization of the only oil company operating in Iran at that time-British Petroleum. The nationalization bill was passed unanimously by the Iranian Parliament…. Though Mossadegh offered BP considerable compensation, his days were numbered from that point on. The British coordinated an international economic embargo of Iran, throwing its economy into chaos. And the CIA, at the request of the British, began spending millions of dollars on ways to get rid of Mossadegh,” resulting in the installation of Reza Pahlavi, the son of a Nazi collaborator. Pahlavi the lesser unleashed SAVAK, a secret police force with “the worst human rights record on the planet, and that the number and variety of torture techniques the CIA had taught SAVAK were ‘beyond belief.’”

Iran has plenty of company, however. Since the “national security” organization was established in the late 1940s, it has sabotaged governments in Guatemala, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Brazil, Greece, the Congo (now Zaire), Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Iraq, and elsewhere.

“There’s a lesson in all of this,” John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, reflected nearly two decades ago. “And the lesson is that it isn’t only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it’s people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don’t know it’s going on, although the information is there for us to know… And we’re just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we’ve slaughtered and for all the people we’ve tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they’ve slaughtered and killed.”

Indeed, “we are responsible for doing these things,” and we will be responsible for whatever nastiness the neocons inflict on the Iranian people, as we have allowed these psychopaths to take over the government, same as the Nazis seized the reigns of control before them.

Of course, if one is plugged into Borg News, and is more concerned about allegations of abuse on the “reality show” Kid Nation, he or she cannot be said to be responsible—as responsiblity requires a conscience—or even cognizant, for that matter.