So…I’m reading the Washington Post online and upon first glance at the headline (Iran’s Invisible Nicaragua Embassy) I thought that perhaps the Iranians had somehow stolen Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility and supersized the thing. But no, that’s not the kind of invisible they had in mind:

For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.

"The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton* warned in May. "And you can only imagine what that's for."

But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: "It doesn't exist."

The article continues:

It is not clear where the report of the embassy in Managua began. But in the past two years, it has made its way into congressional testimony, think tank reports, press accounts, and diplomatic events in the United States and elsewhere.  . . . "Who told Hillary that? Someone misinformed her," said Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a leader of the opposition Constitutionalist Liberal Party and head of a legislative foreign affairs committee. "I never cease to be astonished that a country with such intelligence-gathering capacities could fall for such a canard. What now? Is Obama going to start talking about the Axis of Evil?"

Now, there really is a nation that’s building foreign embassies which are unrivaled in scale and cost anywhere in history, One of them just opened in Iraq.  Others are apparently being funded for Pakistan and Afghanistan.  And you can only imagine what they’re for...

*Note: I’m not intending to be overly critical of Secretary of State Clinton here. That’s just what was in the WaPo. It does appear that certain memes get propagated through the higher levels of government and take hold as though they were fact when in fact they are not. Just ask Colin Powell about those weapons of mass destruction, mobile chem labs and unmanned aerial drones we were definitely probably maybe hoped to didn’t find in Iraq.