They told you Iran’s missiles were being swatted from the sky. They told you the Iron Dome was holding, the Patriot batteries were working, US and Israeli air power was surgical and winning. They told you this on the ABC. They told you this on Sky.
They were telling you nonsense.
MIT Professor Ted Postol — the man who proved the Patriot missile failed in the Gulf War while presidents were claiming a 97 percent success rate — has now established that current intercept rates against Iranian missiles run at a few percent at most. The systems are depleting. The decoys are multiplying. The official story is, in his own carefully chosen word, a fraud.
The first casualty of war is truth. But the deeper insight, the one Phillip Knightley identified fifty years ago, is that the lies are not random. They serve purposes. And right now, they are serving purposes that Australians have every right to examine.