What’s up with Business Insider’s wacky foreign coverage?

On its Military and Defense page, the popular news site Business Insider is featuring two stories today by one F. Michael Maloof, who is blurbed as a "staff writer for WND’s G2Bulletin, and a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense."

Story No. 1: Citing Russian sources, the headline claims that "Russia Is Massing Troops On Iran’s Northern Border And Waiting For A Western Attack." The story goes on to say that "The Russian military anticipates that an attack will occur on Iran by the summer and has developed an action plan to move Russian troops through neighboring Georgia to stage in Armenia, which borders on the Islamic republic, according to informed Russian sources."

The news "comes from a series of reports and leaks from official Russian spokesmen and government news agencies who say that an Israeli attack is all but certain by the summer," Maloof continues. "[S]ources say that Russian preparations for such an attack began two years ago."

Story No. 2 alleges that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is basically in league with the Islamic Republic of Iran and is seeking a strategic alignment with the ayatollahs in Tehran. "For years," Maloof writes, "Shi’ite Iran has been a major financial supporter of the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and quietly worked for some two years with the group to oust Washington-backed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last year." He goes on to claim that "Analysts say that Iran’s Shi’ite form of Islam has more appeal among Egyptian Sunnis than among Sunnis in other Arab countries." I’ve not seen any credible analysts make either claim before — and it’s worth noting that the Egyptian media is rife with anti-Shia invective these days.

This is the kind of questionable reporting you normally see on conspiracy-theory websites, not an ostensibly respectable outlet like Business Insider.

Who is F. Michael Maloof? Careful followers of the Iraq war’s aftermath may remember that he, along with fellow analyst David Wurmser, was tasked by Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith after 9/11 with finding links between Iraq and al Qaeda. "Saddam used al-Qaeda as an indirect conduit because he needed plausible deniability," Maloof later said — a claim that was hotly disputed within the U.S. intelligence community at the time and widely discredited after the invasion, including in a 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report. Maloof’s security clearance was revoked, though his allies continued to defend his work. ("The Wurmser-Maloof work was professional: carefully researched, organized, and well presented," Feith wrote in his memoir.)

And what is G2Bulletin? According to its website, "Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin is your independent, online intelligence resource edited and published by the veteran newsman and founder of WorldNetDaily.com. Each week he taps his vast network of international intelligence sources to bring you credible insights into geo-political and geo-strategic developments."

Yes, that WorldNetDaily, one of the main "birther" websites promoting the false idea that President Obama was not born in the United States.

My question is: Why Is Business Insider publishing this stuff?