NY Times: Iran seeks no Nukes !

The New York Times ran a front page article on Saturday reiterating the consensus view of the U.S. military and intelligence community regarding Iran’s nuclear program, splitting from usual mainstream media coverage which has hyped fear that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. The U.S. assessments that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has demonstrated no intention of doing so has been reported often on independent sites and many other alternative news sources, but only now, after successive pronouncements by high level officials going against the grain of the hawkish rhetoric on an impending Iranian bomb has the Times given the issue substantial space.

“Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier,” the report said. “The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” The report points to testimony from James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all in agreement that there is no military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. This reportedly contradicts Israeli assessments and lately those of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which stirred up controversy over Iran’s program, claiming they are “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear materials and activities in Iran.”

But “intelligence officials and outside analysts,” the Times reports, believe “Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call ‘strategic ambiguity.’ Rather than building a bomb now, Iran may want to increase its power by sowing doubt among other nations about its nuclear ambitions.” Iran is operating under constant threat from the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. has Iran militarily surrounded, has conducted covert attacks along with Israel, constantly threatens Iran with preemptive military strike, etc. In this environment, Iran has tried to abstain from developing nuclear weapons while having the know-how needed to get there; this essentially is an attempt to have a deterrent without actually having a deterrent.

As Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the IAEA, said in 2009 “I believe the Iranians have made a decision to go for a nuclear weapon, but they are absolutely determined to have the technology because they believe it brings you power, prestige and an insurance policy. Despite this consensus view in the U.S., Washington has continued to isolate Iran, to heap crippling economic sanctions on Iran to support Israel – and refuse to criticize it – even while Tel Aviv has supported terrorist operations against Iranian nuclear scientists. Amid intense pressure from various Western foreign policy elites to wage war on Iran, perhaps to install an obedient regime, the intelligence has removed the one possible pretext: an Iranian nuclear weapon. And even the mainstream news media is now reporting it….. I’d say well done Iran and keep up the stamina.

A little reminder, just in case !

The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.
But the history of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on carrying out inspections at the Parchin military testing center, as well as a previous IAEA-Iran work program agreement, suggests that Iran is keeping permission for such a visit as bargaining leverage to negotiate a better deal with the agency.
The IAEA statement Wednesday emphasized the fact that the mission to Tehran had been denied permission to visit the site at Parchin. That prompted Associated Press correspondent in Vienna George Jahn to call Iran’s refusal to agree to an IAEA visit to Parchin “stonewalling” and evidence of “hard-line resistance” to international pressure on its nuclear program.

International Herald Tribune blogger Harvey Morris wrote that Iran’s strategy was to “play for time.”
But access to Parchin was discussed as part of broader negotiations on what the IAEA statement called a “document facilitating the clarification of unresolved issues” in regard to “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. The negotiations were focused on what cooperation the IAEA is demanding and what the agency is ready to offer in return for that cooperation.
Judging from past negotiations between Iran and the IAEA, Iran is ready to offer access to Parchin as well as other sites requested by the agency as part of an agreement under which the IAEA would stop accusing Iran of carrying out covert nuclear weapons experiments.
The IAEA’s position in the negotiations was revealed by the AP’s Jahn, who reported that the agency mission had hoped to get Iranian agreement to meetings with “scientists suspected of working on the alleged weapons program” and to “inspect documents related to nuclear weapons work.”
The September 2008 IAEA report said the agency had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports (on the Shahab-3 missile) examining in detail modeling studies….”
Iran has rejected such demands as threatening its legitimate national security interests, in violation of the IAEA statute.
The scientists that the agency is demanding to see are publicly known officials of Iran’s military research institutions. Even before Israel had begun assassinating Iranian scientists, Iran had made it clear it will not give the IAEA physical access to any individual scientists.

The IAEA wants to visit a specific site at Parchin because of information from an unnamed member state, cited in its November 2011 report, that Iran had “constructed a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments” — tests of nuclear weapons designs without the use of fissile material.
The report said the construction had been carried out at Parchin military complex in 2000 and that the IAEA had satellite imagery that was “consistent with” that information, meaning only that there were structures that could have housed such a vessel at Parchin in 2000.
The previous history of IAEA inspections at Parchin make it clear, however, that Iran knew it had nothing to hide at Parchin after 2000.
In 2004, John Bolton, the point man in the George W. Bush administration on Iran, who coordinated closely with Israel, charged that satellite imagery showed a bunker at Parchin appropriate for large-scale explosives tests such as those needed to detonate a bomb that would use a neutron trigger.
Bolton put heavy pressure on the IAEA to carry out an investigation at Parchin. A few months later, Tehran agreed to allow the agency to select any five buildings and their surroundings to investigate freely.
That gave U.S. and Israeli intelligence, as well as IAEA experts, an opportunity for which they would not have dreamed of asking: they could scan satellite imagery of the entire Parchin complex for anything that could possibly suggest work on a nuclear weapon, including a containment vessel for hydrodynamic testing, and demand to inspect that building and the grounds around it at their leisure.
In January 2005, an IAEA team visited Parchin and investigated the five areas they had chosen, taking environmental samples, but found nothing suspicious. In November 2005, Iran allowed the IAEA to do the same thing all over again on five more buildings of its own choice.
The Iranian military and nuclear establishment would never have agreed to such terms for IAEA inspection missions at Parchin — not once but twice — if they had been concealing a hydrodynamic test facility at the base.
Other information suggests that no such vessel ever existed at Parchin. The November report claimed the IAEA had obtained information on the dimensions of the containment vessel from the publication of a foreign expert identified as someone who worked “in the nuclear weapons program of the country of his origin.”
That was a reference to Vlachyslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian scientist who has acknowledged having lectured in Iran on theoretical physics and having helped the country build a cylinder for production of nano-diamonds, which was his research specialty. However, Danilenko has firmly denied ever having done any work related to nuclear weapons.
The claim that the dimensions of the putative bomb-test chamber at Parchin could be gleaned from a publication by Danilenko is implausible.
The report said the bomb-containment chamber at Parchin was “designed to contain the detonation of 70 kilograms of high explosives.” Danilenko’s patented 1992 design for a cylinder for nano-diamond production, however, was built to contain only 10 kg of explosives.

Former IAEA weapons inspector and nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley has pointed out, moreover, that a container for only 70 kg of explosives could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design.
The negotiations on a “framework” for Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA recall the negotiation of a “work program” in August 2007 aimed at resolving a series of issues on which the IAEA Safeguards Department suspected links to nuclear weapons. The issues included experiments involving the extraction of polonium-210, plutonium experiments, and possible military control of the Gchine uranium mine.
In previous years, Iran had failed to provide sufficient information to overcome those suspicions. But after the negotiation of the “work program,” Iran began to move with dispatch to provide documentation aimed at clearing up the six remaining issues.
The IAEA acknowledged that all six of the issues had been effectively resolved in two reports in late 2007 and early 2008.
The reason for the dramatic change in cooperation was simple: the IAEA had pledged that, in return for Iran’s resolving the six issues, “the implementation of safeguards in Iran will be conducted in a routine manner.” That was seen as a significant step toward finally getting a clean bill of health from the agency.
But the IAEA instead then began focusing its questioning entirely on the purported Iranian documents of unknown origin and doubtful authenticity which the IAEA called the “alleged studies.” With thanks to G.Porter.

Tony Blair's Criminality

In the kabuki theater of British parliamentary politics, great crimes do not happen and criminals go free. It is theater after all; the pirouettes matter, not actions taken at remove in distance and culture from their consequences. It is a secure arrangement guarded by cast and critics alike. The farewell speech of one of the most artful, Tony Blair, had "a sense of moral conviction running through it," effused the television presenter Jon Snow, as if Blair’s appeal to kabuki devotees was mystical. That he was a war criminal was irrelevant.
The suppression of Blair’s criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce’s Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the "moral and legal pandemonium" in the wake of 9/11 is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alistair Campbell, Cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them.
Advocates such as Peirce, Phil Shiner, and Clive Stafford-Smith have ensured the indictment of dominant powers is no longer a taboo. Israel, America’s hitman, is now widely recognized as the world’s most lawless state. The likes of Donald Rumsfeld now avoid countries where the law reaches beyond borders, as does George W. Bush and Blair.
Deploying sinecures of "peace-making" and "development" that allow him to replenish the fortune accumulated since leaving Downing Street, Blair’s jackdaw travels are concentrated on the Gulf sheikhdoms, the US, Israel and safe havens like the small African nation of Rwanda. Since 2007, Blair has made seven visits to Rwanda, where he has access to a private jet supplied by President Paul Kagame. Kagame’s regime, whose opponents have been silenced brutally on trumped-up charges, is "innovative" and a "leader" in Africa, says Blair.

Peirce’s book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and wilful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair’s assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist. "Human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations’." Whole societies were reduced to "splashes of color" on a canvas upon which Labor’s Napoleon would "re-order the world."

The very concept of war was wrenched from its dictionary meaning and became "our values versus theirs." The actual perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, mostly Saudis trained to fly in America, were all but forgotten. Instead, the "splashes of color" were made blood-red – first in Afghanistan, land of the poorest of the poor. No Afghans were members of al-Qaeda; on the contrary, there was mutual resentment. No matter. Once the bombing began on 7 October 2001, tens of thousands of Afghans were punished with starvation as the World Food Program withdrew aid on the cusp of winter. In one stricken village, Bibi Mahru, I witnessed the aftermath of a single Mk82 "precision" bomb’s obliteration of two families, including eight children. "TB," wrote Alistair Campbell, "said they had to know that we would hurt them if they don’t yield up OBL."
The cartoon figure of Campbell was already at work on concocting another threat in Iraq. This "yielded up," according to the MIT Center for International Studies, between 800,000 and 1.3 million deaths: figures that exceed the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the genocide in Rwanda.
And yet, wrote Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiqués reveal no dissent." Interrogation that included torture was on "the express instructions … of government ministers." On 10 January 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed his colleagues that sending British citizens to Guantánamo Bay was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective." He rejected "the only alternative of repatriation to the United Kingdom." (Later appointed "justice secretary," Straw suppressed incriminating Cabinet minutes in defiance of the Information Commissioner). On 6 February 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that he was in "no hurry to see any individuals returned to the UK [from Guantánamo]." Three days later, Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw wrote, "We need to do all that we can to avoid the detainees being repatriated to the UK." Not one of the people to which they refer had been charged with anything; most had been sold as bounties to the Americans by Afghan warlords. Peirce describes how Foreign Office officials, prior to an inspection of Guantánamo Bay, "verified" that British prisoners were being "treated humanely" when the opposite was true.
Immersed in its misadventure and lies, listening only to their leader’s crooned "sincerity," the Labor government consulted no one who spoke the truth. Peirce cites one of the most reliable sources, Conflicts Forum, run by the former British intelligence officer Alastair Crooke, who argued that to "isolate and demonize [Islamic] groups that have support on the ground, the perception is reinforced that the west only understands the language of military strength." In wilfully denying this truth, Blair, Campbell and their echoes planted the roots of the 7/7 attacks in London.
Today, another Afghanistan and Iraq beckons in Syria and Iran, perhaps even a world war. Once again, voices such as Crooke’s attempt to explain to a media salivating for " intervention" in Syria that the civil war in that country requires skilled, patient negotiation, not the provocations of the British SAS and the familiar, bought-and-paid-for exiles who ride in Anglo-America’s Trojan Horse. (By J.Pilger)

War Drums Beating !

Michael S. Lofgren wrote: "For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; U.S. elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence which had guided U.S. policy during the cold war, and which the U.S. government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

It is curious that the world already has over 100 Islamic bombs: those possessed by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It is even more curious that Pakistan may have had a maximum of 30 to 50 such weapons at the time of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on this country which resulted in a shotgun marriage between Washington and Islamabad. A decade of partnership with the United States netted Pakistan about $20 billion in aid money and at least 50 more nuclear devices; anyone who knows anything about the fungibility of money will conclude that the United States partially funded Pakistan's nuclear buildup, knowingly or not. Pakistan's government has also been credibly linked to sponsorship of terrorist organizations that have operated outside its territory. But Iran, we are told, is different. A window is closing, and it is closing not in two years but in six months. And we had better leap through it before it is too late.

In the past, I have been skeptical about imminent war, e.g., in 2003-06, when the neo-conservative chickenhawks around President Bush were crowing about how "real men want to go to Teheran," meaning somebody else's husband or son should suit up and invade Iran. At the same time Seymour Hersh was churning out articles in the New Yorker about the possibility of an attack on Iran. After about the third article, I began discounting the possibility of war. But present circumstances have a different quality.
During this presidential campaign season, there is on the GOP side the most toxic warmongering political dynamic imaginable: one that makes Bush look like a pacifist in retrospect. President Obama for his part is trying to triangulate à la Bill Clinton between the GOP, a Democratic base that is mostly antiwar but politically ineffectual, Israel, the military-industrial complex, and his polling numbers. Obama may feel he can slide through the next nine months with ever-tightening sanctions and a strategy of tension short of war, but the government of Israel is attempting to force the pace with increasingly hyperbolic predictions. It is also evidently manipulating Congress (e.g., the director of Mossad meeting with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week). Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the U.S. news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press -- the Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples -- like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

No historical analogy is remotely close to being perfect, but in terms of the psychology of the actors, this circumstance resembles the July Crisis of 1914 and the blank check Berlin issued to its client in Vienna. Germany (per Bismarck's previous statecraft) was a sated, status quo world power that would gain nothing by war, regardless of what its neurotic and impetuous Kaiser thought. Its weaker client, Austria, was always fretting about its relative demographic decline amid a hostile Slavic sea -- does that sound familiar? Accordingly, it was constantly egging on Berlin about the "Slavic menace" that was around (and within) Austria's borders. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo was like the Iranian nuclear program -- a red line that the Slavic (read: "Iranian") menace had crossed. Something "had" to be done, and Berlin gave its client a blank check to issue an ultimatum so extreme as to force war, a "preventive" war whose scope snowballed because of an unbroken chain of miscalculations into the First World War.

Fast forward to the present: we have roiling instability in the Middle East because of the Arab Spring (see: Egypt); an unreliable Shiite-run U.S. client state in Iraq; a borderline civil war in Syria; and U.S ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice hectoring two world powers, China and Russia, over their Syria policy (regardless of how heinous the Syrian government's behavior is, it is not obvious that the United States will better secure the future cooperation of two permanent U.N. Security Council members by having its ambassador publicly saying these two powers' votes "disgusted" her. For that matter, how eager will Russia and China be to pull America's chestnuts out of the fire if our brinkmanship over Iran gets us into unforeseen difficulties?). And finally,the U.S. and Iran are reprising the Gulf of Tonkin in the Strait of Hormuz. All these factors compose a a brew potentially so toxic that one would think it would give even the most belligerent chickenhawk pause before quaffing it.

Washington's political class is apparently counting on the short memory of the electorate: it is barely a month and a half since we withdrew the last combat forces from Iraq, and already we have incessant agitation over Iran. America's Iraq adventure took seven years, cost 4,500 U.S. military deaths, likely well over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, and sent a trillion dollars down the drain. And that one was going to be a cakewalk, remember?"

Another War on the Cheap (Philip Giraldi)

There has been altogether too much stuff in the media lately about how Iran is not really a threat to anyone and how even some prominent Israelis don’t really believe that they have to go to war (or have Washington go to war on their behalf). It was perhaps inevitable that there would be some pushback to again stoke the fires and make the case that Iran is indeed evil incarnate and on the verge of obtaining an apocalyptic weapon.

Not surprisingly, some of the latest pushback comes from the redoubtable Ethan Bronner of The New York Times in his article “Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation,” which appeared on the paper’s front page on Jan. 26. Bronner, whose son has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, is the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief and covers much of the Middle East. He lives in Israel, and his objectivity has often been questioned, but the self-proclaimed newspaper of record has refused to consider replacing him with someone less openly tied to Israel and its interests.

As a former intelligence officer, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to create and spread disinformation. Journalists are frail creatures with big egos who want to get an important story that no one else has. What could be better than to get something fresh from a well-placed, unnamed government source? Who cares if it is phony? Bronner, who has been in Israel for four years, is no doubt a confidant of a number of Israeli officials who perceive value in the careful cultivation of a New York Times journalist willing to hew closely to the Netanyahu government’s line. When Mossad sees Bronner walking their way, it’s like Hanukkah coming early.

All of that said, Bronner’s current agenda is clear right from the get-go, as reflected in his apparent endorsement of the view that Iran “has called for Israel’s destruction and … finances and arms militant groups on Israel’s borders.” He reports that “Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism, and sky-high oil prices.” Thanks to Bronner’s report, the whole world can no doubt breathe a sigh of relief. Attacking Iran will produce few or no consequences. And who is telling us that? No less than Israel and The New York Times, one an interested party in minimizing concern over the damage that such a war would cause and the other a newspaper that prints all the news that fits its point of view.

Bronner actually cites one source by name to make his case. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a November speech that “the retaliation [from Iran] would be bearable.” And then Bronner is off to the races with “eight current and recent top Israeli security officials” who are, alas, unnamed. One opines, “Take every scenario of confrontation and attack by Iran…” before delivering his judgment that Tehran having a nuclear weapon would greatly complicate Israel’s possible responses. Excuse me, but even Bronner and his Israeli friend should realize that Iran has not been talking about attacking anyone — the threats to attack have all been coming from the Israeli side for the past five years and more recently from a gaggle of American presidential wannabes. Any “confrontation and attack” by Iran would be retaliation.

And then there is the support provided by the article about to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. An advance copy was graciously given to Bronner. The piece argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is a bluff. Bronner does not mention that Tel Aviv University is state-run, and the Institute he cites advertises itself on its own website as having “a strong association with the political and military establishment.” The paper is the work of the former head of military intelligence and the ex-Iran expert from Israel’s National Security Council. So we have government and still more government confirming what the Israeli government itself apparently wants everyone to believe.

Why would Iran not retaliate in the strait? To avoid a confrontation with the U.S. Navy, according to Bronner’s Israeli experts. But what if Iran did not agree with that assessment? Bronner does not go there, but he does cite another think tank, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Begin-Sadat is government-funded and is based at state-supported Bar-Ilan University. The Center conducts “policy-relevant research on strategic subjects, particularly as they relate to the national security and foreign policy of Israel.” Its non-nonpartisanship is reflected in its current promotion of a “recent important new study by Prof. Haim Gvirtzman, based on previously classified data, [that] refutes Palestinian claims that Israel is denying West Bank Palestinians water rights.” It has also published an article titled “Palestinians: Invented People” by Professor Michael Curtis.

The Begin-Sadat Center obligingly argues that “The threat to Israel of missile warfare is somewhat exaggerated, and public discourse on this issue should reflect realistic assessments. At this stage, missile attacks would be able to inflict only limited physical damage on Israel.” Bronner quotes an anonymous retired official who adds that Iran’s reaction “will be nothing like London during World War II.” That was the German blitz that killed 20,000 Londoners, so it is perhaps reassuring to believe that it will not be like that, but the analysis is based on what Saddam Hussein did in 1991 and the effectiveness of the 4,000 primitive Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah in 2006. The United States and Israel have both been claiming that Hezbollah now has nearly 40,000 rockets and missiles, including sophisticated Grads, that can reach any target in Israel with considerable accuracy, so who is fooling whom?

To be fair to Bronner, he does note here and there along the way in his article that some officials and “experts” disagree with the conclusions he is reporting, but the piece overall seems intended to promote yet another war that can be fought on the cheap. The underlying premises are that Iran can be attacked, that its nuclear program can be seriously damaged, and that Tehran will either not opt to or be unable to retaliate in any meaningful way. And even if it does retaliate, it will not be too bad for Israel, and the United States would be impacted even less.

To say that this is very dangerous thinking would be to understate the case, particularly as Bronner demonstrates that it appears to be what is driving the Netanyahu government. Fear-mongering is the name of the game when citing the underlying concern that Iran might be about to obtain a nuclear weapon and might then be tempted to use it, a “what if” piled on a “maybe” to justify a preemptive war. It is not merely coincidental that Bronner cites Netanyahu’s apparent belief that the so-called Iranian threat is equivalent to “the Nazis who tried to eliminate the Jews.” And the piece concludes with the Israeli prime minister speaking on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying, “I want to mention the main lesson of the Holocaust when it comes to our fate. We can only rely on ourselves.”

Someone should remind Bronner that while he is promoting an Israeli viewpoint he is writing for an American newspaper and audience and should address the serious question of what Washington’s options might be if Netanyahu does take action. Israeli self-reliance is a wonderful thing, if only it were true. The United States has been tied hand and foot to Israeli policies and would be drawn inexorably into anything that Tel Aviv starts. The confident assertion that Iran would be unable to retaliate effectively might prove as reliable as the claims made in 2002 that there would be a “cakewalk” in Iraq.