When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been… But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for [Richard] Perle, [James] Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.

Now Benador's clients are working just as hard to get the U.S. to invade Iran. One of her clients is Amir Taheri, who is a "commentator for CNN." (CNN does not publish a list of commentators, which is extremely suspicious. What are they hiding?) Taheri became infamous this week for writing a bogus story claiming Iran just passed a law requiring Jews to wear yellow stripes.

Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar.

There was absolutely no basis for this claim - Taheri pulled it straight out of his ass - and it was denied immediately by Maurice Motamed, the representative of the Iranian Jewish community in Iran's parliament. But because it served the neocon propaganda purpose of demonizing Iran, Taheri's Big Lie instantly circulated throughout the global neocon conspiracy, including Rush Limbaugh, the Jerusalem Post and NewsMax.