There is, of course, an alternative to the strong conclusion that these documents are outright frauds: a weaker conclusion that they could be from some relatively isolated, out-of-power clique. The Iranian equivalent of Gaffney and Rumsfeld during the Clinton years, reduced to ill-informed speculation with no pretense of official cover. Such a group might well be far enough out of the loop to account for the inconsistencies that Gareth meticulously works his way through.

Of course the possibility of this is relatively slight. But if it were the case, then there’s the further possibility that our willful misreading of these documents as part of the official Iranian military program could ironically turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy: our crazies and their crazies empowering one another to the detriment of everyone else concerned–not to mention hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders.