CIA Helped Missing Nuke Scientist Make YouTube Vid - what a surprise

CIA Made AWOL Iranian Scientist a YouTube Star:

Shahram Amiri, the long-missing Iranian nuclear scientist who may or may not have defected to the U.S., is headed back to Tehran. But, as a State Department spokesman once joked, he’ll forever live on YouTube. And apparently the CIA helped make sure of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMY-oraOfA

Recall that people claiming to be Amiri have uploaded at least two videos to YouTubegiving alleged first-person accounts of his ordeal. (Amiri has yet to make a public appearance, though he’s expected to once he arrives in
Tehran, perhaps as soon as Thursday.) On one of them, a grainy number
broadcast on Iranian state TV, “Amiri” describes being kidnapped by the
CIA and the Saudi intelligence service during a spring 2009 trip to
Mecca, subjected to mental torture, and taken to Tucson. In the other,
higher-quality video, “Amiri” wears a tweed-looking jacket and recounts
how he’s now an exchange student in the U.S., not a traitor to Iran —
and, implicitly, not a torture victim.

Why the discrepancy in quality between the two videos? According to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference in the Washington Post’s tick-tock of the Amiri denoument, anonymous U.S. officials said the “more polished video” was “crafted with help from the CIA.”

CIA officials have yet to return our requests for comment and
clari...[/b],
screams “These are my current whereabouts.” (It also doesn’t have any
other videos to its credit.) More importantly, the background features
a globe and a chessboard, as if to say, “I am a pawn in an elaborate
geopolitical game.”

Why would the CIA send such a message? Who knows? Very little about this story makes sense so far. And according to Jim Risen of the New York Times, a freak e-mail accidentcompromised most of the CIA’s spy network in Iran a decade ago, something that helped shift U.S. intelligence efforts at retarding
Iran’s nuclear progress to focus on wrecking its underground nuke supply chain. Should Amiri actually have defected, he would have likely have been among the agency’s top human-intelligence assets.

And so the broader message that’s in the U.S.’s interest to send, as an anonymous “U.S. official” blast-emailed reporters yesterday, is one
that “gives the lie to the idea he was tortured or imprisoned.” That’s
quite a live issue given the agency’s recent history of operating brutal off-the-books detention camps — which President Obama formally banned within days of taking office. Why, a man who wears tweed and talks calmly into a camera couldn’t have been mistreated!

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/cia-helped-awol-nuke-scient...

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Comment by JoJo on July 15, 2010 at 7:22am: My advice to Iran--do as the MOSSAD operatives do--Kidnap McCrackers or Lieberpmann or PigPeeLoiusie and see if Americans like them --- begging for mercy- on Iranian You Tube Flicks