It looks like I made a poor choice of an examples in my How To Detect a net.myth in 4 easy steps post the other day.

The original article in American Conservative magazine is available from their website here, so the article itself is real. I must have overlooked it the first couple times I was on the website.

In tracking down an “original sighting” of the article I left a message in Larouche Publications general mailbox after reading their Guns of August press release on the matter. Anton Chaiktin was kind enough to return my call this morning and point me to the original article on the website. Further, he added that White House Chief-of-Staff Scott McClelland was asked about this on thursday and the exchange was picked up by CNN.

I can at least tell that the exchange happened, since full transcripts of the White House briefings are available from the White House website and thursday’s session contains this exchange:

Q: Scott, an article in the American Conservative by Philip Giraldi, former intelligence operative, indicated the Vice President has revamped strategy towards Iran where there are now 300 to 400 missiles targeted various sites in Iran, including tactical nuclear missiles, especially aimed at the Iranian nuclear capabilities. These are now, according to Giraldi, also under command of the theater commander.

Given our problems with Iran and the fact that now that they have decided to go for the full cycle of their peaceful nuclear program, might we be anxious that if there were a terrorist incident here in the United States in any way connected to Iran, that there might be a knee-jerk reaction of utilizing this hair-trigger against the Iranians?

MR. McCLELLAN: One, I appreciate your question. I’m not going to get into accepting anything that you alleged in your comments. I’m not going to get into discussing matters relating to national security of that nature.

Two, in terms of Iran, Iran made some commitments to suspend their uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. We expect them to abide by that commitment. If they were to begin those activities again, they would be violating the commitment they made under the Paris agreement with the Europeans. And we have made it very clear that Iran has a history of hiding their nuclear activities from the international community. That’s why it’s so important that you have some confidence-building measures, or objective guarantees in place, so that they show the international community that their nuclear program is not being used to develop weapons, or that they’re not developing weapons under the cover of a civilian program.

And if Iran is going to violate their agreements, then we would, obviously, be looking at discussing with the Europeans, who have also committed to doing so, looking at going to the Security Council.

So I stand corrected on doubting the veracity of the original quoted article. It is real, and perhaps this post emphasizes my earlier point, now that I’ve found citations outside the original circular linkages.