Persicus Maximus

M.Sahimi wrote: As we begin 2013, the War Party and its ally, the Israel lobby, are pushing hard to make sure that they get their wish for the New Year, namely, a devastating war with Iran. To them, it is not enough that the illegal unilateral sanctions that the United States and its allies have imposed on Iran are ruining the lives of tens of millions of ordinary Iranians. It is not enough that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians are being threatened with life-threatening illnesses, who cannot get the medicine they need, partly because of economic sanctions. It is not enough that the arts and culture of Iran, particularly a renowned movie industry, are seriously threatened by a lack of funds brought about by the sanctions. The War Party and Israel lobby will be satisfied only if Iran is attacked and destroyed, which will inevitably lead to a much wider war in the entire Middle East. The push is coming from several fronts. The Party and the Lobbyhave staged an...

Philip Giraldi wrote, If there is one word missing from the United States government’s post-9/11 lexicon it is “accountability.” While perfectly legal though illicit sexual encounters apparently continue to rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, leading to resignations, no one has been punished for malfeasance, torture, secret prisons, or extraordinary renditions. Indeed, the Obama administration stated in 2009 that it would not punish CIA torturers because it prefers to “look forward and not back,” a decision not to prosecute that was recently confirmed by Attorney General Eric Holder in two cases involving the deaths of detainees after particularly brutal Agency interrogations. What the White House decision almost certainly means is that the president would prefer to avoid a tussle with the Republicans in congress over national security that would inevitably reveal a great deal of dirty laundry belonging to both parties. The bipartisan willingness to avoid confro...

In the last several years Western civilizations   have found themselves in the midst of more catastrophes than they could ever, in their worst nightmares, have dreamed of. They could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century. Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK the government's lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War - the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention - have been deliberately avoided or ignored. It is the bitterest of ironies that J...

According to John Glaser, the US and some of its European allies “are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria,” according to “a senior US official and several senior diplomats....The US-funded training is going on inside Syria, as well as in neighboring Turkey and Jordan and “involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials,” Last week, Washington began warning about the possibility that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might use his chemical weapons stockpiles against the armed rebellion trying to overthrow his regime. But top Syrian officials vehemently denied this would ever happen, and it appeared obvious that US officials were less concerned with Assad’s unleashing the chemical weapons, and more concerned with the possibility that Islamic jihadists fighting on behalf of the Syrian opposition could get their hands on them. Foreign Islamic extremists make up the bulk of...

A few months after the ridiculous "Cartoon" stand up comedy of Netanyahoo regarding Iran's Nuclear ambitions at the UN general assembly, we see another ill fated attempt at diverting the world attention from Israels disastrous "Iron Dome" soft test with Gaza's primitive Rockets. I leave the explanation to Gareth Porter's article issued on the 30 November.     That Associated Press story displaying a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion — likely leaked by Israel with the intention of reinforcing the media narrative of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons – raises serious questions about the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) claim that it has credible evidence of such modeling work by Iran. The graph of the relationship between energy and power shown in the AP story has now been revealed to contain absurdly large errors indicating its fraudulence. Those revelations indicate, in tu...

News stories on the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report suggested new reasons to fear that Iran is closer to a “breakout” capability than ever before, citing a nearly 50% increase in its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium and the installation of hundreds of additional centrifuges at the Fordow enrichment installation. But the supposedly dramatic increase in the stockpile of uranium that could theoretically be used to enrich to weapons grade is based on misleading figures in the Nov. 16 IAEA report. The actual increase in the level of that stockpile appears to be 20%. The coverage of the completion of the installation of 2,800 centrifuges at Fordow, meanwhile, continued the media practice of ignoring the linkage between large numbers of idle centrifuges and future negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program. The latest round of media coverage of the Iran issue again highlights the failure of major news outlets to reflect the complexity and political subtl...