The Post Submits Its 2009 Entry for ‘Worst Investigative Reporting’
Suddenly, size matters.
That’s the central conclusion of a lengthy Washington Post article Monday that sought to assess the national security implications of Iran’s 2007 move into leftist Sandinista President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua.
The newspaper’s badly belated first weigh-in on the Islamic Republic’s most northern presence in the Americas wound up fixating on a curious detail: the physical size of the Iranian embassy there.
Was it a huge mega-embassy, as some U.S. officials have said? A smallish embassy? Something mid-range but perhaps aspiring to be architecturally grandiose?
The Post’s writers, offering no basis for such a wacky thesis, seem to have been guided by their own inexpert, uninformed extrapolation: that the bigger the physical facility, the more serious a threat can be posed. Conversely, the smaller the facility, the slighter the threat.
The Post’s conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly? No “super-embassy.” Therefore, no security threat from the Iranians.
“The mysterious, unseen giant embassy,” the Post report concludes high up in the fifth paragraph after a big windup, “underscores how Iran’s expansion into Latin America may be less substantive than some in Washington fear.”
The story then sought to inject something like an ultimate irony. The only giant mega-embassy around Nicaragua is … the American one.
No national security establishment experts are quoted anywhere in the story setting forth this link between mission size and threat. As a reporter, I’m always open to credible new ideas and information. But in my many years of national security reporting, this is the first I’ve ever heard that building size could be so imperiling.
The first red flag here is that this striking new postulation seems to be coming only from people like me, other reporters. One can only suppose that the Post reporters did not consult academics and counterterrorism experts about this idea because they would have been laughed right out of the room.
As I’ve written here before, I was the first and for too long the only American reporter to have actually gone to Nicaragua to investigate Iran’s move into the country. My main conclusion was that so much stealth and secrecy surrounded the Iranians that outside observers could only resort to speculation about Iranian intentions, good and evil.
I’ve been to the Iranian embassy in Managua, described it in my writings, and published pictures I took of it.
For the record, I assessed the thing from every possible angle not blocked by 12-foot-high walls. I even climbed to the top of a neighboring building, creeping around on a creaky roof high above the street, to get a good look at the new mission’s grounds.
I don’t know the square footage. But the Iranians have set up in a sizeable mansion in the tony Las Colinas neighborhood of Managua. The mansion was bigger and nicer than anything I’ll ever be able to afford, like all the other huge mansions in the neighborhood. The grassy grounds around it are parklike with a lot of tropical trees and foliage. It’s no mega-embassy, like the Post’s big investigation of the Iranians in Nicaragua ultimately concluded.
But when it came time to write my story, I didn’t bother mentioning facility size because, well, to be quite candid, the notion that its size might indicate national security threat levels, or much of anything at all, was just too ludicrous to get onto my radar.
The typical Washington Post journalist prefers to believe that Iran is not a threat to the United States. Their existential view of the world is essentially utopian. Enemies really don’t exist. They are people who only need to be understood. Our allegedly past imperialistic actions are the reasons why the Iranians are angry. Ignore them—and they will eventually get to like us. The elites who graduated from our “best” schools will not face reality until it’s too late. At this point in time, we can hope that the Post soon goes bankrupt and closes.
Intellectually, it’s becoming apparent that liberals long ago surrendered the idea of the United States of America being a sovereign nation.
That accomplished, erstwhile enemies evaporate into nothingness and the smallest thing we may now do to protect ourselves or assert our own nationhood is considered hostile action against all those other NICE sovereign nations.
I guess this also indicates that North Korea is not a nuclear threat—only one person there is allowed to pull the trigger!!!
The embassy may not be big but you should see the safe houses! You can see where the Post was going with this. As Obamaphiles, they are convinced that the USA is the biggest threat to, well, everyone and the size of US embassies, everywhere, proves that. Couldn’t just be the simple fact that for every person that wants to emigrate to Iran, there are about billion times that many who would like to come to the USA and for every Iranian tourist who needs help, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans travelling. Plus, great nations tend to have great symbols. Nah.
The persians will get their feet burned in latin america. Jesus has many believers there. Soon America will have her hands severed, not my human hands, she will not be able to feed herself. Be prepared.. get your houses in order
This piece of investigative reporting will have strong competition for the worst of 2009. The WaPo investigation of their own pay-to-play salons was so bad their ombudsman had to expose it as a total lie.
At least this risible farce about small countries not posing a threat to the US can quote the Clown-in-Chief, Barack Obama, who agrees with them.
I wonder if small nuclear weapons are considered a threat by these blind fools.
It’s so strange that the WaPo – presuming it pursues and publishes its stories in good faith – fails to see that Iran piggybacks on the Russian network of alliances. This is similar to the bizarre international community “see no evil” approach to the Iranian nuclear program: they seem to believe Russia, who is building their program, will veto that program. Why is there always so much public stupidity when it comes to Russia and its alliances? So much “just don’t look”?
This concept is nothing new with the former msm. It,including the Washington Compost,think it is a great media voice because of its size. Instead they are the voice of bafoons magnified.
Who ever said the WaPo did journalism?
In this day and age, all it takes is one, ONE well-positioned Human being to change anything.. And that’s not talking about hierarchy, that just means right person, right place, right resources available to..
That Party of One.
As for your being in Nicaragua, impressive.. A friend and I drove to and said “hey” to the final border guard station to Nicaragua from Costa Rica’s side in the early 90′s just to be able to say we did.. Very, very somber completed bucket list item because of its ongoing (reported) history along with my memory being that of a very high presence of weaponry.. Can’t imagine the view from the country’s physical inside..
Cyber hugs from Talking Rock..
Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Don’t ask questions. The One has it covered. All he has to do crank up the old teleprompter to allay all fears, put on a smile and the MSM swoons, with tingles running up their legs. Iran setting up a base in Nicaraqua? Not to worry. The One has told us it’s no big deal.
I took a Spanish class with the Iranian ambassador and his son back in the early 90′s at Universario CentroAmerica in Managua shortly after Ortega had lost the election to Chamarro. They were a jovial pair, until one day our teacher suggested that he invite our class to his house which he bragged about quite a bit. Suddenly the ambassador’s Spanish ability deteriorated, and he became ‘confused’. I am not sure if this teacher was naive or just a ball buster. I just laughed being the only American in the room and said in English that they certainly weren’t free to do any such thing.
Come to think of it, the Soviet embassies in several Eastern block countries were not immense structures
either. Those countries had their own governments
military forces. Maybe the Post is on to something.
Embassy size may indicate large known national interests (e.g. the large Canadian embassy in DC, or the large US embassy in Iraq), but it bears no relation to those interests meant to be kept unknown. There’s a difference between overt and covert national interests. Who would draw attention to their covert ops by building a sprawling embassy compound? I’m sure many of our Cold War embasseis where covert ops were launched from were small precisely to keep as low a profile as possible.
The WaPo journalist was either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid to use such a simpleton argument to downplay this potential threat to America. Using his inane logic, we should’ve had nothing to worry about on 9/11, as there was no large army coming ashore in New York and Washington, just 19 guys on 4 separate planes.