Wikileaks: "...US government ravenous for any scrap of information about Iran, no matter how incomplete or contradictory"

(Cables, here)

"They are based on phone calls to and emails from sources inside Iran, interviews with members of Iranian rock bands on tour in neighboring countries, foreign journalists who've recently been to Iran, and conversations with Iranian businessmen, academics, and former officials traveling outside their homeland. One cable even recounts an Iran watcher's chats with truck drivers crossing the border into Turkmenistan....... .... Anyone who will talk to an Iran watcher "is someone who wants a (U.S.) visa, who wants money, is an expatriate, or someone with an explicitly anti-Islamic Republic agenda," said Flynt Leverett, a former White House and CIA official who's now a professor of international affairs at Penn State University."The whole concept is really flawed," said Leverett, a long-time critic of U.S. Iran policy. "It's almost structurally designed to make sure we get skewed information."

....... But mostly the cables are an avalanche of information: on why Iran scotched the visit of the U.S. badminton team; on Iran's planned car exports to Turkey; on how a single Iranian company controls the market for Iranian pilgrimages to the Shiite Muslim shrine in Karbala, Iraq...."