Persicus Maximus

Robert Fisk ,has published a number of books and has reported on the United States's war in Afghanistan and the same country's 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fisk holds more British and International Journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. He has written an article on Iran in "The Independent", I would like to publish again. "It's a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits. When the newly installed Ministry of Islamic Guidance asked Harvey Morris, Reuters' man in post-revolutionary Iran, for a history of his news agency, he asked his London office to send him a biography of Baron von Reuter – and was appalled to discover the founder of the world's greatest news agency had built Persia's railways at an immense profit. "How can I show this to the ministry?" he shouted. "It turns out that the Baron was worse than the fucking Shah!" Of which, of course, the ministry was wel...

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam wrote an interesting article in the Guardian, I would like to publish it here... "The strength of the Islamic republic's economy and government are so understated in analysis that errors of policy could follow...... There are two central narratives that presume the Iranian state is likely to collapse under the pressure of sanctions and/or threats of war. In my opinion, both are flawed. The first maintains that Iran is running out of money and that its economy is teetering on the brink. This has been repeatedly presented as an argument in support of sanctions or as an example of the incompetence of the Iranian state. But that narrative does not correspond to the facts. The World Bank set the economic growth of Iran at 3.0% in 2010, and the IMF says nominal GDP grew from $330.5bn in 2009 to $360bn in 2010. The IMF recently wrapped up a visit to Iran and commended the government for early successes with the subsidy reform programme and the advances in the f...

Iraq all over again? Much of the corporate media coverage of a new UN report on Iran strongly asserts that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons. But the International Atomic Energy Agency report does not actually arrive at that conclusion, and many critics contend that the speculations that are in the report are misguided. A USA Today piece (11/9/11) was headlined "UN Agency Issues Red Alert Over Iran's Secret Nuke Program"--with the "red alert" hype coming from a source in the piece, Rep. Ed Royce (R.-Calif.). On CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley reported (11/7/11), "The U.N.'s nuclear agency is expected to report later this week that Iran is on the threshold of being able to build a nuclear bomb." On ABC World News , anchor Diane Sawyer announced (11/8/11): And now, a long-dreaded headline about Iran and nuclear weapons. After a decade of debating whether Iran would build one, a UN report says tonight they will, and it has begun. ABC correspo...

Jana Hensel wrote for the Guardian the following article: “We still don't know a lot about the three rightwing radicals from Thuringia: Beate Z, Uwe M and Uwe B. I try to see it like this: if I had come from the countryside and not from the town, had not only my father but my mother too crashed and burned after reunification, had the tough kids in my school tied up their combat boots with white laces instead of red laces, had their older brothers and sisters beaten up foreigners at bus stops instead of occupying houses in Leipzig-Connewitz and opening galleries – maybe I too would have been on that slippery slope that in most cases starts off harmlessly enough, but can end in disaster all the same. And now 10 people have been killed. I cannot shake the feeling that little more than a very thin line in my CV separates me from the three violent neo-Nazis. They're about my age. And life in eastern Germany in the mid-90s was rough, cynical and nonstop – as if the lethargy, futili...

The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon. But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report [.pdf] but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko , is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives. In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm. It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news report...

I would like to express my concerns over the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 and my opposition to it being brought to the Floor for a vote. Let us be clear on one critical matter: the sanctions against Iran mandated by this legislation are definite steps toward a US attack on Iran. They will also, if actually applied, severely disrupt global trade and undermine the US economy, thereby harming our national security. I am surprised and disturbed that the committee viewed this aggressive legislation to be so bipartisan and uncontroversial that a recorded vote was not even called. Some may argue that we are pursuing sanctions so as to avoid war with Iran, but recent history teaches us otherwise. For how many years were sanctions placed on Iraq while we were told they were necessary to avoid war? Thousands of innocent Iraqis suffered and died under US sanctions and still the US invaded, further destroying the country. Are we safer after spending a trillion dollars or more to destroy Iraq ...