Persicus Maximus

Tony Blair's Criminality

2012-02-18T04:16:00.002+01:00

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 !

2012-02-09T13:57:00.002+01:00

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)

2012-02-02T13:07:00.003+01:00

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.

Egypt, Year One !

2012-01-25T12:02:00.002+01:00

One year after the fall of Mubarak, the force that was once praised as “the protector of the revolution” has seen a plummeting of popular legitimacy, with Egyptians angered by the SCAF’s impromptu, opaque decision-making, its increasingly brutal tactics and its apparent unwillingness to cede power. Since taking charge of the country, the SCAF has worked to ensure that in any government handover to a civilian authority, it will preserve its own political and economic autonomy and maintain its de facto status as a state within the state. In short: to stop governing Egypt and go back to simply ruling it.
The violence that led to the blinding of Harara was sparked in early November, when Deputy Prime Minister Ali El Selmi proposed a set of “constitutional principles” ahead of Egypt’s parliamentary elections. The Selmi Document, as it became known, gave the SCAF extraordinary powers to intervene in the constitution-writing process, which is tentatively scheduled for completion by May 15 (an impossibly short time, according to many observers). These include the authority to appoint eighty of 100 members of the constituent assembly charged with drafting it, the right to object to certain provisions and the power to appoint an entirely new assembly if a constitution is not drawn up within six months. It also stipulates that the military’s budget remain secret and gives the SCAF exclusive authority to approve any legislation on the army’s internal affairs.

The document caused an uproar, prompting the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by a wide range of parties and activists, to call for a massive protest in Tahrir Square. The demonstration, on November 18, marked a public break by the Muslim Brotherhood from the ruling generals it had thus far cozied up to—an important challenge to the SCAF. But its significance was eclipsed by what happened the next morning when the Central Security Forces, the notorious black-clad riot police used for years by Mubarak, stormed Tahrir to attack a few dozen protesters. Thousands of people descended on the square in solidarity. Downtown Cairo was transformed into a battle zone, the air saturated by a white fog of tear gas. At least forty-two people were killed and more than 3,000 wounded over five days of clashes.
The crackdown was one of the most violent episodes in a year that has seen what Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch describes as “new patterns of violations and an attempt to control the political space.” The military and security forces have engaged in vicious regular assaults on protesters, using live ammunition, rubber bullets, birdshot and astonishing amounts of tear gas. In the most shocking display, the military fired live ammunition into a protest of Coptic Christians and their supporters in October and drove armored personnel carriers at high speeds into the crowd. At least twenty-seven people were killed and about 300 wounded in the single bloodiest day in Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster.
Nearly ninety people have been killed participating in demonstrations in the past three months alone. Protesters under arrest have been severely beaten and sometimes tortured with stun guns. Soldiers have gone so far as to subject several female demonstrators to forced “virginity tests.”
* * *
“I never used to feel scared of protests before the revolution,” says Salma Said, a well-known activist who has been participating in protests for years. “But now, after everything that’s happened, I am very, very scared. Before, there was this idea that there’s some stuff they can’t do, like shoot us. They never did in my lifetime. This happens very casually now.”
The SCAF has also made twin use of a fully compliant state media apparatus to demonize the protest movement and champion official policy while intensifying a crackdown on press freedoms—assaulting journalists, jailing bloggers and raiding TV stations. It has also targeted civil society, most recently by raiding up to ten local and international NGOs.
In the face of increasing levels of state violence and repression, a sustained protest movement has emerged, continuing its calls for change. “It’s turning out to be a much more radical revolution,” says Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent activist and blogger who was jailed for nearly two months by a military court in October. “People want a change that is more fundamental, and they are expressing that in their actions constantly.”

This steady resistance has seen important results. Over the first seven months of SCAF rule, nearly 12,000 civilians were tried in hasty military courts—more than the total number during Mubarak’s thirty-year reign. The trials marked “a huge deterioration in terms of due process rights,” according to Morayef, and activists and human rights lawyers launched a grassroots campaign that catapulted the issue from the margins of the activist community to the center of the political sphere. Today civilians are rarely referred to military courts, though the practice has not been entirely abolished. Activists have also launched a guerrilla media campaign to counter the SCAF’s blanket denials of wanton violence against protesters, setting up portable screens in public spaces across the country to air footage of army abuses.
In the midst of the November unrest, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, in power since March, resigned, only to be replaced by Kamal al-Ganzouri, a 78-year-old who served as prime minister under Mubarak. Hundreds of protesters marched toward Parliament for an indefinite sit-in. But in Tahrir, the protests were largely defused by the start of parliamentary elections on November 28, held in three rounds and lasting more than six weeks. Nevertheless in December, in the middle of the voting process, the military attacked the sit-in—leading to the first sustained street battle involving army soldiers since the revolution. At least seventeen protesters were killed and hundreds were injured. Scenes of soldiers beating protesters made headlines around the world, including the now iconic image of a young woman being dragged and stomped on, her abaya pulled over her head to expose her stomach and bra.
Today, there are four twelve-foot concrete walls blocking Tahrir Square from Parliament, the cabinet and the interior ministry. Erected by the SCAF to put an end to the clashes, the walls have become an emblem of the military’s blunt tactics. “It’s very symbolic of the way they try to solve problems,” Said says. “The walls are the problem, not the solution.”
As parliamentary elections drew to a close in mid-January, the Muslim Brotherhood–led alliance had captured about 45 percent of the seats, while ultraconservative Salafist parties, surprisingly, garnered roughly 25 percent. Liberal parties came in a distant third. The first session of Parliament is scheduled for January 23, two days before the first anniversary of the revolution, and many fear it will be toothless, cutting compromises and allowing the military to return to barracks with its privileges safely enshrined in the new constitution.
“The question is, Will Parliament, the only elected authority we have right now, pick a confrontation with the SCAF?” says Abd El Fattah. “If they choose to remain silent, they will give the military a green light to use even more violence against protesters.”
The SCAF says it will hand over authority to civilians after a presidential vote in June, but protesters are demanding they quit power sooner. On January 14 presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading reform advocate and Nobel Peace laureate, announced his withdrawal from the presidential race—a dramatic move protesting the military council’s failure to put Egypt on a path to democracy. “We feel the former regime did not fall,” ElBaradei said in a statement. “My conscience does not permit me to run for the presidency or any other official position unless it is within a real democracy.”
Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather in Tahrir on January 25 to commemorate the revolution that reverberated around the world. This time, the chant that will echo throughout the square is one that has become the revolution’s new clarion call: “Down with military rule!” / With thanks to S.A. Koddous a “Democracy Now” correspondent from Cairo.

Creating Terrorists !

2012-01-19T14:16:00.002+01:00

Defenders of the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, which declares the entire world to be a “battlefield” against terrorism and authorizes the U.S. military to detain indefinitely anyone suspected of being a terrorism supporter, have claimed that the White House will only use its new power carefully and with due process. Opponents note that the White House has never hesitated to use any new authority, no matter how outrageous, and that the trend of law enforcement and security agencies is to expand on powers granted, not to rein them in or limit them. The track record of the Obama administration on civil liberties is particularly bad, as it has broadened its definition of war powers, reneged on its promise to close Guantanamo Prison, and supported numerous dubious terrorism prosecutions. It has also become adept at silencing critics through the repeated exploitation of the state-secrets privilege, which effectively dismisses any case accusing the government of abuse or malfeasance.
So let us accept that the government now has the power to send a team of military police to anyone’s home in any state in the Union and can demand that that person surrender without any recourse to a lawyer or judicial due process. The military can then detain the individual incommunicado for any length of time and can presumably send him to Guantanamo for special confinement, claiming that the reason for the detention is support of terrorism, which can be almost anything, including a letter to the editor of the local paper complaining about the goonery of the Transportation Security Administration. Once in detention, the suspect only has such options as are granted to him by the military. He cannot see a lawyer, cannot invoke habeas corpus or other constitutional privileges, cannot confront any witnesses against him, and cannot challenge any information prejudicial to him even if it is hearsay or fabricated. In other words, the accused can be arrested for no reason and held indefinitely without any protections that enable him to push back against being detained. Most people would consider a criminal justice system that permits such detention ipso facto a police state.

Now let us accept for a moment that the White House and Justice Department are well-intentioned and will not use their newfound authority to detain anyone in a questionable fashion. The expanded powers will only be used to detain foreign terrorists who are caught in flagrante, more or less. That would be fine, perhaps, but for one small problem. Because the definition of a terrorism supporter has become enormously elastic, it can be stretched to include anything. If the whole world has become a battlefield, speaking out or acting against powerful vested interests can be dangerous because those interests can turn around and exploit the system to label one a terrorist. And once you are labeled a terrorist, your constitutional rights vanish and you might as well sit around and wait for that knock on the door — or, rather, for the door to be kicked in.
That is what House Resolution 3131 is all about. It is titled, in part, “To direct the secretary of state to submit a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization….” The bill then goes on to assert that the two flotillas in 2010 and 2011 opposing Israel’s blockade of Gaza were terrorist actions. But the only problem is that it relies on information from the Israeli Intelligence and Information Center to do so, meaning that Congress is deferring to a foreign government organization to make a judgment that directly impacts that selfsame government. And the Israelis are not shy about calling someone a terrorist, if it suits the narrative they are trying to present. They describe a Turkish organization involved in the first flotilla in 2010, known by its acronym IHH, as linked to al-Qaeda and Hamas based on evidence that no one else in the world accepts, apart from Congress, that is. The Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara was clearly aiming to take on the Israeli navy, armed to the teeth with “100 metal rods, 200 knives, 50 wooden clubs, and a telescopic sight for a gun.” In reality, the rods were torn from the ships rails when the heavily armed Israeli commandos boarded at night from helicopters. The knives were pocket knives and utility knives from the vessel’s galley, and the clubs were broken from deck chairs to repel the attackers. I will not speculate on the telescopic sight, but there was not a real weapon anywhere on board. The Israelis killed nine Turks, shooting several in the head at close range, including an American citizen. Congress has yet to express its outrage at the Israeli action — quite the contrary — and Hillary Clinton’s State Department has been silent, apart from warning the subsequent 2011 flotilla that the American embassy would do nothing to protect U.S. citizens aboard.

Regarding the second flotilla of July 2011, HR 3131 goes on to state that “Greek authorities boarded ships and took into custody several individuals, including Captain John Klusmire of the ship Audacity of Hope as it violated Greek Coast Guard orders by setting sail without permission.” Klusmire is a U.S. citizen who was not breaking any American law, it should be noted. He was later released by the Greek authorities.
The bill concludes with its “Sense of Congress,” surely an oxymoron if there ever was one: “the secretary of state shall submit … a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization … [to] include information on … the sources of any logistical, technical, or financial support for the Gaza flotilla ships, including the Audacity of Hope, that were to set sail from Greece on July 1, 2011.”
I personally know a number of organizations that provided material or financial support to one or both of the Gaza flotillas. I also personally know that none of those organizations support violence against the state of Israel and that the people behind them believed then and now that they were exercising their constitutional rights in speaking out and acting nonviolently against what they and most of the world regard as an illegal and immoral blockade of Gaza. But, if the bill passes in Congress, a bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of State will now be able to call those people and their associated groups “terrorists,” and Hillary Clinton will be able to confirm that judgment to Congress. Next step is the MPs at the door.
If people cannot see what a slippery slope all of this is, they not thinking very clearly. HR 3131 is admittedly still sitting in congressional committee, but it has some very powerful sponsors, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, who heads the Foreign Affairs Committee and is a rabid supporter of Israel. The bill not only indicts whole groups of people exercising their constitutional rights and labels them “terrorists,” it even names one American who was, at the time, breaking no U.S. law. Klusmire’s only crime was to “set sail without permission” — in Greece. It was clearly a bogus charge manufactured to suit by a vulnerable Greek government desperately needing international loans and under pressure from the United States and Israel.
Klusmire’s real crime was to oppose a powerful interest group, the Israel Lobby. To do so these days is to invite a charge of terrorism support with the option of being arrested by the Pentagon and locked up somewhere at the pleasure of the president of the United States. How low have we sunk, Mr. Obama? You portray yourself as a man of honor and a defender of constitutionalism, but you have opened the gates to lawlessness and authoritarian rule. And even if you are as benign as you depict yourself, you have provided the legal tools for those who might follow you — the Gingriches, the Perrys, the Bachmanns, and the Santorums — to possibly do much, much worse. (By P. Giraldi)

US 1000 year Reich !

2012-01-15T19:18:00.001+01:00

The US Department of Defense recently promulgated a new "defense" guidance document: "Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." I use scare quotes because it just doesn’t seem quite right to use "defense" to describe a document that — like its predecessors — envisions something like an American Thousand-Year Reich.
The greatest shift in emphasis is in the section "Project power despite Anti-Access/Area Denial Challenges." The "threat" to be countered is that China and Iran "will continue to pursue asymmetric means to counter our power projection capabilities."

That refers to a long-standing phenomenon: What Pentagon analysts call "Assassin’s Mace" weapons – cheap, agile weapons that render expensive, high-tech, weapons systems ineffective at a cost several orders of magnitude cheaper than the Pentagon’s gold-plated turds. In the context of "area denial," they include cheap anti-ship mines, surface-to-air missiles, and anti-ship missiles like the Sunburn (which some believe could destroy or severely damage aircraft carriers).
Thus the Pentagon defines as a "threat" a country’s ability to defend itself effectively against attack or to prevent an enemy from putting offensive forces into place to attack it. Yes, you read that right: to the American national security establishment, it’s considered threatening when you prepare to defend yourself against attack by the United States. It’s the perspective of a Family Circus character: "Mommy, he hit me back!" That kind of double standard is pretty common in the National Security State’s assessment of the world.
What can one say of a situation in which America runs a military budget equal to the rest of the industrialized world put together, maintains military bases in half the countries around the globe, routinely intervenes to overthrow governments, rings China with military bases — then solemnly announces that China’s military establishment is "far larger than called for by its legitimate defensive needs?"
Considering that the US considers its "legitimate defensive needs" to encompass outspending the other top ten military powers in the world combined and maintaining the ability to preemptively attack any other country in the world, it’s hard to guess what the Pentagon’s criterion is for determining China’s "legitimate defensive needs." But it’s safe to say "legitimate" defensive forces don’t extend to the ability for China to defend its territory against attack from the main actual threat facing it: A global superpower trying to turn China’s neighborhood into a battlefield.

And how about attacking Saddam for "making war on his own neighbors" – when the US actively supported his invasion of Iran in the 1980s? Not to mention the US Marines waltzing in and out of most of America’s Caribbean "neighbors" throughout the middle of the 20th century. Did they have "incubator babies" in Nicaragua and Costa Rica back in the 1930s?
To Washington, any country capable of resisting American attack, or of "defying" American commands (whether under a UN Security Council figleaf or not) is by definition a "threat." And any country inflicting significant losses on US military forces, in the process of defending itself against American military attack, is guilty of aggression (against US attempts to "defend our freedom," one presumes).
American perceptions of "self-defense" and "aggression" are as distorted as those of Nazi Germany. When the only way you can "defend yourself" against another country’s "threat" is to go to the other side of the world to fight it, because it lacks the logistical capability to project military force more than a few hundred miles outside its own borders — and the main "threat" is its ability to fight back when you attack it — you know something’s pretty messed up. (With thanks to K.Carson.)

6,000,000 !

2012-01-10T21:08:00.002+01:00

As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another,” and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq. He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.

This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Iraq. There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam. These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.

Our lack of acknowledgment is less oversight than habit, a self-reflective reaction to the horrors of war and an American tradition that goes back decades. We consider ourselves a generous and compassionate nation, and often we are. From the Asian tsunami in 2004 toHurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Americans have been quick to open their pocketbooks and their hearts.

However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops. When concern for the native populations is expressed, it tends to be more strategic than empathetic, as with Gen. David H. Petraeus’s acknowledgment in late 2006 that harsh U.S. tactics were alienating Iraqi civilians and undermining Operation Iraqi Freedom. The switch to counterinsurgency, which involves more restraint by the military, was billed as a change that would save the U.S. mission, not primarily as a strategy to reduce civilian deaths.

The wars in Korea and Indochina were extremely deadly. While estimates of Korean War deaths are mainly guesswork, the three-year conflict is widely believed to have taken 3 million lives, about half of them civilians. The sizable civilian toll was partly due to the fact that the country’s population is among the world’s densest and the war’s front lines were often moving.

The war in Vietnam and the spillover conflicts in Laos and Cambodia were even more lethal. These numbers are also hard to pin down, although by several scholarly estimates, Vietnamese military and civilian deaths ranged from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, with the U.S.-led campaign in Cambodia resulting in 600,000 to 800,000 deaths, and Laotian war mortality estimated at about 1 million.

Despite the fact that contemporary weapons are vastly more precise, Iraq war casualties, which are also hard to quantify, have reached several hundred thousand. In mid-2006, two household surveys — the most scientific means of calculating — found 400,000 to 650,000 deaths, and there has been a lot of killing since then. (The oft-cited Iraq Body Count Web site mainly uses news accounts, which miss much of the violence.)

The war in Afghanistan has been far less violent than the others, with civilian and military deaths estimated at about 100,000.

The numbers can be confusing because some estimates include only those people killed by direct violence; others include deaths from “structural” violence — such as those resulting from a destroyed health-care system. That we do not have an official way of accounting for the dead is one sign of the uncaring attitudes that have accompanied our wars.

It is difficult to obtain accurate mortality figures during wartime, but the best way might be to commission a consortium of public health schools — the most qualified institutions that study violence — to conduct household surveys every year.

The lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is also shown by these civilians’ absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries. The entertainment industry portrays these wars rarely and almost always with a focus on Americans.

A few nonprofit organizations have sprung up to deal with the wars’ victims — notably the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a Washington-based group founded by Marla Ruzicka, an aid worker who was killed in Iraq in 2005. Such efforts rarely register with the American public, however.

Pollsters, meanwhile, have asked virtually no questions of the public about foreign casualties. But on the rare occasions when they do, the results have been striking. A 1968 Harris poll found 4 percent favored an end to the Vietnam war because of harm to civilians. A University of Michigan pollster concluded: “More and more Americans now think our intervention was a military mistake, and want to forget the whole thing.”

On Iraq, when an Associated Press survey asked Americans in early 2007how many Iraqis had died in the war, the average of all answers was 9,890, when the actual number was probably well into the hundreds of thousands. In several polls in 2007 and 2008, Americans were asked whether we should withdraw troops even if it put Iraqis at risk of more civil unrest; a clear majority said yes.

Today there is virtually no support for helping rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan — no campaigns by large charities, no open doors for Iraqi refugees. Even Iraqis who worked with the American military are having trouble getting political asylum in the United States and face a risk of retribution at home. The U.S. response to so many dead, 5 million displaced and a devastated country is woefully dismissive.

Even civilian atrocities tend to fade quickly from view, or else become rallying points for the accused troops. My Lai, where about 400 Vietnamese were murdered by a U.S. Army unit in 1968, at first shocked the nation, but Americans quickly came to support Lt. William L. Calley Jr. — who was later found guilty of killing 22villagers — and the others involved. More recently, eight Marines were charged in the 2005 Haditha massacre in Iraq, and none has been convicted. (The last defendant’s trial started this past week.) Indeed, each atrocity that fails to alter public opinion piles on to further prove American indifference.

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives.

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplanwrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military’s code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound? It was Geronimo.

The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put these foreigners at risk of violence. President George W. Bush, to his credit, disavowed these wars as being against Islam, as has President Obama.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

These attitudes have consequences. Perhaps the most important one — apart from the tensions created with the host governments, which have been quite vocal in protesting civilian casualties — is that indifference provides permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions.

There are costs to our global reputation as well: The United States, which should be regarded as a principal advocate of human rights, undermines its credibility when it is so dismissive of civilian casualties in its wars. Appealing for international action on Sudan, Syria and other countries may sound hypocritical when our own attitudes about civilians are so cold. Korean War historian Bruce Cumings calls this neglect the “hegemony of forgetting, in which almost everything to do with the war is buried history.”

Will we ever stop burying memories of war’s destruction? More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding. When we build the memorial for Operation Iraqi Freedom, let’s mention that Iraqi civilians were part of the carnage. Count them, and maybe we can start to recognize and remember the larger tolls of the wars we wage. By John Tirman.

9/11 again !

2012-01-01T11:42:00.003+01:00

Behind a mysterious Dec. 22 Associated Press story about “finding of fact” by a district judge in Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al-Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11 attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters.
The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided testimony. What it didn’t say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by U.S. intelligence as “fabricators” and that the two “expert witnesses” who were supposed to determine the credibility of those defectors’ claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with Islam.
The ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to U.S. courts over the years, in which “default judgments” have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the families.
The only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran. One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them.
“A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions”
The lawyers and the “expert witnesses” behind the accusation of Iran in regard to 9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by Iranian “defectors” several years ago that they had personal knowledge of Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot. The lawyers produced videotaped affidavits by three such defectors who were identified, with a dramatic flourish, as Witnesses “X,” “Y,” and “Z.”

In the one public hearing held on the case, the lawyers revealed the identity of purported former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi — probably a pseudonym — and described his testimony that he had received a series of “coded messages” from a former colleague in the Iranian government in the late summer and early fall of 2001 warning that a terrorist attack against the United States was being planned and that it was a plan that had been concocted by Tehran in the late 1980s.
Although the judge and the public were being led to believe that this is somehow new information going beyond what was known by the 9/11 Commission report, it is, in fact, very old information and has long been completely discredited. Mesbahi’s story doesn’t hold up, for several reasons, and the most obvious is that, despite his claim that he was warned nearly a month before the 9/11 attacks that civilian airliners would be crashed into buildings in major U.S. cities, including Washington and New York on Sept. 11, he never conveyed that information to the U.S. government before that date.
In October 2001, Mesbahi claimed to right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, as reported in Timmerman’s 2005 book, that he had tried calling the legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in Berlin but was “unsuccessful in several attempts.” But he did not claim any other attempt to reach a U.S. consulate or the U.S. embassy in Germany by fax, e-mail, or letter before Sept. 11, nor did he go to the U.S. embassy in person to convey this warning. He told Timmerman that he called an Iranian dissident contact in the United States who, he believed, had contacts with U.S. intelligence agencies only some hours after the attacks on New York and Washington.
It wasn’t the first time Mesbahi had claimed inside information about Iranian involvement in a terrorist attack only after the attack had taken place. He had told investigators working on the December 1988 terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal to carry out the attack on the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. Unfortunately for his credibility, however, he had not come forward with the allegation until after the bombing had happened.
He had also provided affidavits to Argentine investigators in the case of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, claiming his well-informed friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the decision to bomb the Jewish Community Center had been made at a meeting attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993.
But in fact, by his own admission Mesbahi had not worked for Argentine intelligence since 1988, and the FBI’s Hezbollah Office’s James Bernazzani, who had helped the Argentine intelligence service with the investigation in 1997, told me in a November 2006 interview that American intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the continued high-level access to Iranian intelligence officials throughout the 1990s and beyond that he was claiming. They regarded him as someone who was desperate for money and ready to “provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran,” according to Bernazzani.
Mesbahi wasn’t even consistent in the story he told about the alleged “coded messages.” In an interview with Timmerman, Mesbahi stated that he had gotten two messages from his contact, one on Sept. 1, 2001, and a second three days later. And Timmerman wrote that his alleged contact had “phoned him again” on Sept. 4, indicating that Mesbahi had made no reference to an elaborate scheme to send coded messages through articles in Iranian newspapers.
But in his affidavit to the 9/11 court case, he said he had gotten three messages — on July 23, Aug. 13, and Aug. 27 — and that the coded messages were placed in newspaper articles. Timmerman, who referred the lawyers to Mesbahi, discretely avoided pointing out the huge discrepancy between the two stories, which clearly indicates that Mesbahi fabricated the tale of messages in newspaper articles to make it more dramatic and convincing.
The second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed he had been an officer of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security and had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001, attended by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Osama bin Laden’s son Saad bin Laden. He also claimed to have seen replicas of the twin towers, the White House, the Pentagon, and Camp David in the entry hall to the main headquarters of the MOIS with a missile suspended above the targets and “Death to America” written in Arabic (rather than Farsi) on the side.
Like Mesbahi, Zakeri also first told his tale to Timmerman, who recounts it in his 2005 book. Zakeri, who apparently defected from Iran in late July 2001, claimed he had told the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 26, 2001, about the alleged meeting and replicas, warning them that he believed the Iranians and al-Qaeda were planning an attack on those targets that would occur Sept. 11. But CIA officials denied categorically to Timmerman that Zakeri had given any such warning to the embassy and called Zakeri “a fabricator of monumental proportions” and “a serial fabricator.” Zakeri failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003, according to Timmerman.
Crackpot Hate-Islam Extremists as “Expert Witnesses”
Significantly, no reputable retired intelligence analyst on Iran was asked to help judge the testimony of the Iranian defectors. Instead, Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft, both former CIA covert operations case officers, were invited to be “expert witnesses,” in large part to view the videotaped testimony of the three Iranian defectors and assess their credibility.
Based on the record of their public statements, however, they were selected for that role because they could be counted upon to endorse the defectors’ allegations of Iranian involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks and any other assertion, no matter how outlandish, that suggested Iranian guilt.
Lopez has been linked with the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration and the pro-Likud Party extreme right ever since she became executive director of the Iran Policy Committee in 2005. Through a series of policy papers issued that year, the Committee sought to support from outside the push by a group of pro-Likud officials within the administration for a policy of regime change in Iran.
In particular, the Committee called for using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq, or MEK, the armed opposition group listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group because of its assassinations of U.S. officials during the regime of the shah and bombings of large civilian events in Iran. The MEK had long enjoyed close working relations with Israel but not with the United States, and the State Department had continued to oppose delisting and alliance with the MEK against Tehran, as proposed by the Defense Department and the vice president’s office.
Since 2009, Lopez has been a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, founded and headed by notorious Islam-hating extremist Frank J. Gaffney. One of Lopez’s projects has been to stir up public fear over an alleged threat to America — not from al-Qaeda attacks, but from subversion by Muslim-Americans. She is one of a number of authors of a book published by Gaffney’s Center in October 2010 called Shariah: The Threat to America, which declares, “The United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known as Shariah (Islamic Law).”
Revealing the project’s anti-Islam paranoia, the book asserts, “Shariah dictates that non-Muslims be given three choices: convert to Islam and conform to Shariah, submit as second class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed.”
In a videotaped talk she gave on Feb. 23, 2011, Lopez said Muslims “believe they should be in charge of the world.” The main threat from Islam, she said, is “stealth jihad” waged by Muslims who “hide behind a moderate image” but whose “purpose is still the same” as that of al-Qaeda.

A second aspect of Lopez’s work for Gaffney has been to intimidate opponents of the hard-line policies toward Iran — and especially the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) — by accusing them of being covert lobbyists for Iran.
Tefft, who retired from the CIA’s Operations Division in 1995, is even more explicit in arguing that there is a worldwide war against Islam. “We are fighting a 14-century war against Islam and its adherents, Muslims,” he declared in an interview with the right-wing website FrontPageMag in October 2007. “And it is a war that they have declared on all non-Muslims….” Islamic ideology requires Muslims to “make the world Islamic under the Caliphate, and to convert, kill or enslave all non-Muslims.” When the interviewer suggested that there are “moderate Muslims,” Tefft responded, “I don’t think so…. Were there ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ Nazis?”
Tefft referred to the way “the West” had “prevailed” over Islam with the “defeat of the marauding armies of Islam at the Gates of Vienna in 1529″ and added, “We need to recall that period … and again contain Islam to its existing borders.”
When asked by this writer in a phone interview last week if he had been aware of the advocacy of Islamophobe arguments by Lopez and Tefft, Thomas Mellon Jr., one of two lead lawyers in the case, did not answer directly, but said, “To the extent that you are accurate, we would say, fine, take them out.” He insisted that the lawyers for the case had not relied on any one of the 10 “expert witnesses” listed on the case.
Also playing a central role in weaving the tale of Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks for the court case was the right-wing author and anti-Iran activist Kenneth R. Timmerman. According to the lawyers’ brief on the case, it was Timmerman who sought out one of the attorneys, Timothy B. Fleming, and brought to his attention the three Iranian “defectors” who claimed personal knowledge that Iran was involved in the planning of 9/11.
Like Lopez, Timmerman has been linked with hard-line pro-Likud organizations and involved in efforts to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Along with Joshua Muravchik and a group of Iranian exile foes of the Islamic regime, he established the Foundation for Democracy in Iran in 1995.
Timmerman has also expressed views sympathetic to the hate-Islam movement. His 2003 book, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War Against America, portrays the United States and Israel as innocent victims of a vicious campaign against the West by whole Islamic societies that refuse to accept the U.S.-Israeli narrative on terrorism. And his new novel, St. Peter’s Bones, has been praised by notorious Islam-hater Robert Spencer for revealing the “long-hidden origins of Islam.”
The “Material Support” and “Save Haven” Ploys
The most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former staff members of the 9/11 Commission — Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell, and Janice Kephart. They had all worked on the section of the 2004 report that had given heavy emphasis to the fact that Iran had not stamped the passports of Saudis who later became hijackers in the 9/11 attacks when they entered Iran. The section had suggested that this and other evidence could indicate Iranian complicity in the plot, even if it could not yet be proven.
In their affidavits to the court, those three former staffers, two of whom (Snell and Kephart) are lawyers, argue that Iran’s failure to stamp the passports of the al-Qaeda operatives constituted provision of “material support” to al-Qaeda in executing the 9/11 attacks. U.S. anti-terrorist law specifies that the provision of “material support” to terrorists includes any “service” to terrorists if the provider is “knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out” a terrorist action.
However, a key piece of information in a different chapter of the 9/11 Commission report shows that Iran’s failure to stamp passports was not intended to aid al-Qaeda. On page 169, the report says that, in order to avoid the confiscation by Saudi authorities of passports bearing a Pakistani stamp, the Saudi al-Qaeda operatives “either erased the Pakistani visa from their passport or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports.” In other words, the Iranian practice of not stamping visas directly into passports applied to everyone. And since, as the Commission report acknowledged, there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the existence of that policy did not support the thesis of Iranian “material support” for the al-Qaeda plot.
The Commission staff went back to the two senior planners of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, in July 2004, to ask them specifically about the Iranian failure to stamp the passports of the hijackers, but, strangely, the Commission report gives no indication of what they said about whether the Iranian practice was intended to assist al-Qaeda. Either the staff never asked the question, or the answer was ignored because it contradicted the line that those staff members were pushing in 2004 and are still pushing today.
The former Commission staffers also joined right-wing activists in highlighting the intelligence Commission report statements that “an associate of a senior Hezbollah operative” was on the same mid-November flight from Beirut to Tehran as a group of future hijackers and that Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran had been “expecting the arrival of a group [from Saudi Arabia] during the same time period.” The former staffers insist that these could not have been coincidences and that they had to mean that Iran was involved in the al-Qaeda plot.
The argument that the presence of an “associate” of a top Hezbollah official on the same flight as future al-Qaeda hijackers could not have been a coincidence is absurd. There were obviously many “associates” of top Hezbollah officials, most whom would have had occasion to travel to Iran frequently. The statistical likelihood that one of them would be on the same flight as the future hijackers would not be so small as to merit suspicion.

And the very same section of the Commission report provides a clear explanation of the anticipation of a group traveling from Saudi Arabia to Iran that reveals the conspiratorial interpretation as dishonest. It says that a senior Hezbollah operative — said to have been Imad Mughniyah — visited Saudi Arabia in October 2000 to “coordinate activities” there, that he planned to assist a group traveling to Iran in November, and that intelligence reports showed the planned visit to Iran involved a “top Hezbollah commander” and “Saudi Hezbollah contacts.”
But that didn’t stop the lawyers for the case from twisting the Commission report to fit the desired narrative: “The ‘activities’ that Mughniyah went to coordinate,” clearly revolved around the hijackers’ travel, their obtaining new Saudi passports and/or U.S. visas for the 9/11 operation, as several of them did, as well as the hijackers’ security, and the operation’s security.”
Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s senior intelligence officer on the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and had previously been the senior analyst at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, was categorical about the matter when I interviewed him in 2006. The facts detailed in the Commission Report about passports, travel of the hijackers through Iran, and the presence of a Hezbollah official on one of the flights “don’t show Iranian collusion with al-Qaeda,” he told me.
The lawyers’ brief refers to “the existence of a secret network of travel routes and safe houses” worked out from the mid-1990s onward as being “confirmed by al-Qaeda military chief Saef al Adel in a May 2005 interview.” That implies that secret arrangements on such “travel routes and safe houses” were made between al-Qaeda and the Iranian government. But al-Adel said nothing of the sort. He made it clear in his interview with a Saudi journalist that the Iranians who helped them with housing and logistics were not connected with the Iranian regime.
The “expert witnesses” and the lawyers carefully skirt the fact that in the latter half of the 1990s — at a time when the United States was officially still “neutral” on the civil war in Afghanistan — Iran was providing funding, arms, and other support to the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban regime that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were helping to keep in power.
That Iranian support for the Northern Alliance was still ongoing when the organization’s chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated Sept. 10, 2001, by two Arabs posing as journalists. The leader of the CIA’s post-9/11 covert paramilitary team in Afghanistan, Gary Schroen, reported that there were two IRGC colonels attached to the commander of the Northern Alliance, Bismullah Khan, when the CIA team arrived. Nevertheless, Lopez and Tefft as well as Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who boasts of his “close personal contacts” with senior Israel intelligence and military officials, cite reports supposedly originating with German intelligence that Iran helped al-Qaeda operatives carry out the Massoud assassination.
All the “expert witnesses” insist vehemently that Iran continued to provide “safe haven” for al-Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after 9/11, allowing them to direct terrorist activities against Saudi Arabia in particular. But that accusation merely recycles the claim first made in early 2002 by Bush administration officials seeking to prevent negotiations between the United States and Iran and push for the adoption of a regime-change strategy in Iran.
The central pretense of the neoconservative “safe haven” ploy was that, if any al-Qaeda operatives were able to function in Iran, Iran must have deliberately permitted it. But the United States has been unable to shut down al-Qaeda’s operation in Pakistan after a decade of trying, despite the cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence service and the drone coverage of the tribal areas. If the same criteria applied to Iran were to be applied to the Bush administration and the government of Germany, they could be accused of having provided “safe haven” for al-Qaeda operatives prior to 9/11.
In fact, after U.S. complaints about al-Qaeda presence in Iran in late 2001, Tehran detained nearly 300 al-Qaeda operatives and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures, and fingerprints to the United Nations. Iran also repatriated at least 200 of those detainees to the newly formed government of Afghanistan.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker revealed last year that, in late 2001, Iran had been willing to discuss possible surrender of the senior al-Qaeda officials it was detaining to the United States and share any intelligence it had gained from its investigations as part of a wider understanding with Washington. But the neoconservative faction in the administration rejected that offer, demanding that Iran give them the al-Qaeda detainees without getting anything in return.
Iran’s crackdown on al-Qaeda continued in 2002-03 and netted a number of top officials. One of the senior al-Qaeda detainees apparently detained by Iran during that period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran’s operations against al-Qaeda had “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan.” The arrests included “up to 80 percent” of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s group, he said, and those who had not been swept up were forced to leave for Iraq.
In further negotiations with the Bush administration in May 2003, Iran again offered to turn over the senior al-Qaeda detainees to the United States in return for the MEK captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. The Bush administration again refused the offer.
By 2005, a “senior U.S. intelligence official” was publicly admitting that 20 to 25 top al-Qaeda leaders were in detention in Iran and that they were “not able to do much of anything.”
In 2008, one U.S. official told ABC News that administration officials had not been raising the al-Qaeda issue publicly, because “they believe Iran has largely kept the al-Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate.”
But in the world of the right-wing Islam-hating extremists and others pushing for confrontation with Iran, reality is no obstacle to spinning tales of secret Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda. (by Gareth Porter)

Outsmarted !

2011-12-17T14:12:00.003+01:00

The recent US diplomatic anti Iran movements like the stories of planned attacks on Saudi diplomats in the US and raising of long solved nuclear issues once again... next to many many other other irrational and angry moves have their roots in the US being positively outsmarted by a combination of Iraqi and Iranian long term diplomatic moves that finally safeguarded a complete US withdrawal of Iraq. We found an article that exactly emphasized on this issue. The article by Gareth Porter is as follows..

"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues.

Maliki needed Sadr’s support, which was initially based on Maliki’s commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.

In early June 2006, a draft national reconciliation plan that circulated among Iraqi political groups included agreement on "a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq" along with the build-up of Iraqi military forces. But after a quick trip to Baghdad, Bush rejected the idea of a withdrawal timetable.

Maliki’s national security adviser Mowaffak Al-Rubaei revealed in a Washington Post op-ed that Maliki wanted foreign troops reduced by more than 30,000 to under 100,000 by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of "most of the remaining troops" by end of the 2007.

When the full text of the reconciliation plan was published Jun. 25, 2006, however, the commitment to a withdrawal timetable was missing.

In June 2007, senior Bush administration officials began leaking to reporters plans for maintaining what The New York Times described as "a near-permanent presence" in Iraq, which would involve control of four major bases.

Maliki immediately sent Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to Washington to dangle the bait of an agreement on troops before then Vice President Dick Cheney.

As recounted in Linda Robinson’s "Tell Me How This Ends", Zebari urged Cheney to begin negotiating the U.S. military presence in order to reduce the odds of an abrupt withdrawal that would play into the hands of the Iranians.

In a meeting with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in September 2007, National Security Adviser Rubaie said Maliki wanted a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) that would allow U.S. forces to remain but would "eliminate the irritants that are apparent violations of Iraqi sovereignty", according Bob Woodward’s "The War Within".

Maliki’s national security adviser was also seeking to protect the Mahdi Army from U.S. military plans to target it for major attacks. Meeting Bush’s coordinator for the Iraq War, Douglas Lute, Rubaie said it was better for Iraqi security forces to take on Sadr’s militias than for U.S. Special Forces to do so.

He explained to the Baker-Hamilton Commission that Sadr’s use of military force was not a problem for Maliki, because Sadr was still part of the government.

Publicly, the Maliki government continued to assure the Bush administration it could count on a long-term military presence. Asked by NBC’s Richard Engel on Jan. 24, 2008 if the agreement would provide long-term U.S. bases in Iraq, Zebari said, "This is an agreement of enduring military support. The soldiers are going to have to stay someplace. They can’t stay in the air."

Confident that it was going to get a South Korea-style SOFA, the Bush administration gave the Iraqi government a draft on Mar. 7, 2008 that provided for no limit on the number of U.S. troops or the duration of their presence. Nor did it give Iraq any control over U.S. military operations.

But Maliki had a surprise in store for Washington.

A series of dramatic moves by Maliki and Iran over the next few months showed that there had been an explicit understanding between the two governments to prevent the U.S. military from launching major operations against the Mahdi Army and to reach an agreement with Sadr on ending the Mahdi Army’s role in return for assurances that Maliki would demand the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In mid-March 2007, Maliki ignored pressure from a personal visit by Cheney to cooperate in taking down the Mahdi Army and instead abruptly vetoed U.S. military plans for a major operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Maliki ordered an Iraqi army assault on the dug-in Sadrist forces.

Predictably, the operation ran into trouble, and within days, Iraqi officials had asked General Suleimani to intervene and negotiate a cease fire with Sadr, who agreed, although his troops were far from defeated.

A few weeks later, Maliki again prevented the United States from launching its biggest campaign yet against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. And again, Suleimani was brought in to work out a deal with Sadr allowing government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.

There was subtext to Suleimani’s interventions. Just as Suleimani was negotiating the Basra cease fire with Sadr, a website associated with former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezai said Iran opposed actions by "hard-line clans" that "only weaken the government and people of Iraq and give a pretext to its occupiers".

In the days that followed that agreement, Iranian state news media portrayed the Iraqi crackdown in Basra as being against illegal and "criminal" forces.

The timing of each political diplomatic move by Maliki appears to have been determined in discussions between Maliki and top Iranian officials.

Just two days after returning from a visit to Tehran in June 2008, Maliki complained publicly about U.S. demands for indefinite access to military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private contractors.

In July, he revealed that his government was demanding the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops on a timetable.

The Bush administration was in a state of shock. From July to October, it pretended that it could simply refuse to accept the withdrawal demand, while trying vainly to pressure Maliki to back down.

In the end, however, Bush administration officials realized that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was then far ahead of Republican John McCain in polls, would accept the same or an even faster timetable for withdrawal. In October, Bush decided to sign the draft agreement pledging withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011.

The ambitious plans of the U.S. military to use Iraq to dominate the Middle East militarily and politically had been foiled by the very regime the United States had installed, and the officials behind the U.S. scheme, had been clueless about what was happening until it was too late."

Flip The Pyramid Blog !

2011-12-13T07:44:00.004+01:00

We would like to reflect a publication and quote their discoveries. There were already speculations on the airlifting of almost 20,000 multinational mercenaries who fought in Lybia into or along the Syrian border regions via Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Nevertheless, here is another account;

"According to first-hand accounts and reports provided to Boiling Frogs Post by several sources in Jordan, during the last few hours foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, began to spread near the villages of the north-Jordan city of “Al-Mafraq”, which is adjacent to the Jordanian and Syrian border.

According to one Jordanian military officer who asked to remain anonymous, hundreds of soldiers who speak languages other than Arabic were seen during the past two days in those areas moving back and forth in military vehicles between the King Hussein Air Base of al-Mafraq (10 km from the Syrian border), and the vicinity of Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border, such as village Albaej (5 km from the border), the area around the dam of Sarhan, the villages of Zubaydiah and al-Nahdah adjacent to the Syrian border.

Another report received from our source in Amman identified an additional US-NATO Command Center in “al-Houshah,’ a village near Mafraq.

Our Iraqi journalist source in London provided us with the following related information:

“Some of the US forces that left the Ain al-Assad Air base in Iraq last Thursday, did not come back to the USA or its base in Germany, but were transferred to Jordan during the evening hours.”

The above information was further corroborated by our correspondent and advisor Nizar Nayouf who interviewed an employee in the London-based office of Royal Jordanian Airlines:

“At least one US aircraft carrying military personnel landed in the Prince Hassan Air base located about 100 km to the east of the city of Al-Mafraq.”

Earlier last week, Jordanian news websites disclosed that “Western officials have requested the King to allow establishing an electronic spy station in the north of Jordan (near the Syrian border) in order to access the Syrian army and contact Syrian high-rank officers for convincing them to make a military coup or (at least) rebel against the regime”.

Nizar Nayouf, BFP advisor and correspondent on Syria in London, had the following statement on Al-Mafraq:

“The al-Mafraq air base, which now includes Air Force Academy, was a starting point for “conspiratorial activities” by Jordan, The UK and Israel against Syria in the past, particularly in the 1960s. In September 1968, a Syrian commando Major, Salim Hatoom, who fled to Jordan with a number of officers after a failed coup attempt, established a camp from which he started a rebel military against the then left-wing government of Syria under president Nureddin al-Atassi and Salah Jadid. By the end of 1970s and early 1980s, the Syrian Islamic Brotherhood and their military wing “At-Taleeah al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah” (the Islamic Militant Vanguard) used the same base for its military struggle against president Hafez a-Assad regime, in which they were being trained by the Jordanian and Israeli intelligence agents, and cars were being bombed before they were sent to the streets of Syrian cities for the killing of innocents and undermining state facilities.”

Mr. Nayouf went on to emphasize the irony of the situation:

“I guess history repeats itself but as farce…Last spring, that tens of Syrian soldiers, who fled to Jordan, were transferred to a camp west of the Jordanian city of “Salt”, in which officers from Israeli military intelligence (AMAN) began the investigation with them under the supervision of the Jordanian military intelligence. This was to extract information from them on issues related to the development of the Syrian army, weapons and training, especially after 2006.”

Jorge Montt glacier retreat

2011-12-09T14:02:00.002+01:00

A Glacier is a large persistent body of ice that forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its melting phase over many years, often centuries. Its level and speed of melting in recent years have been alarming to say the least. Underneath is a truely schocking clip of "Montt Jorge" in Chile, where we can see a Glacier melt in a period of 12 months.

Watch and make your own thoughts...

Avtobaza !

2011-12-06T12:09:00.006+01:00

An interesting article from Stephen Trimble catches one’s eyes; it states or rather suggests Iran’s usage of a Russian Jamming system with regards to its downing of a US Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It immediately jumps into one’s eyes, that it could all have been a counter measure making sure Iranian and Russian engineers get access to electronic technologies they are supposed to. One is no specialist on such issues but it seems Iran must act very carefully on the information it extracts or uses from this downed RQ-170. The technology could well be a tracker if implemented guiding the observer to the sources of defense....one never knows. Whatever the case we publish his article for your information.

"Could this be the smoking electron in the alleged unmanned air vehicle (UAV) incident over Iran?

The original reports that Iran "shot down" a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel appear to be misleading. Iranian news agency reports credited the army's electronic warfare unit with bringing down the UAV, but apparently in a way that limited the amount of damage on landing or impact.

Only six weeks ago, Russia announced delivering the Avtobaza ground-based electronic intelligence and jamming system (shown above) to Iran. Most Russian weapons exports to Iran are blocked, including the proposed transfer of the S-300 surface to air missile system. But there is a key difference between a SAM battery and a jamming system. The S-300 can vastly complicate a strike on an Iranian nuclear site at Natanz or Qoms. A jamming system, such as the Avtobaza, is unlikely to be used to defend such a site because it could interfere with the radar of the S-300 or the Tor-M1 SAM battery.

The Avtobaza, moreover, is designed to jam side-looking and fire control radars on aircraft and manipulate the guidance and control systems of incoming enemy missiles. It would be the perfect tool to target and perhaps infiltrate the communications link that allows a UAV to be controlled from a remote location.

The incident, of course, has not been confirmed with visual evidence of the allegedly captured RQ-170. Unlike 50 years ago, when the Soviet Union shot down the Lockheed U-2, the Iranians will not be able to produce a captured Francis Gary Powers. In 1961, the Soviets appeared to destroy their credibility by releasing imagery of the wreckage of the wrong aircraft -- a luckless MiG possibly shot down by mistake in the fusillade aimed at Powers' U-2. When the Soviets produced Powers, who survived and was captured, the world finally had undeniable proof.

So there is no script in the propaganda textbook for these kinds of incidents. They tend to evolve in their own way. Iran may never produce evidence to back up their claims, or they might later today.

Interestingly, the International Security Assistance Force has made no effort to deny Iran's claims. Instead, the NATO headquarters in Kabul issued a statement acknowledging the loss of one of their UAVs over western Afghanistan last week. The statement also suggested the Iranians may have simply found the misplaced UAV for them. It may be important that NATO officials did not deny Iran's claims that the UAV was the RQ-170, which is known to operate from Kandahar where it was originally spotted."

Robert Fisk.

2011-11-30T20:49:00.006+01:00

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 well aware.

Britain staged a joint invasion of Iran with Soviet forces when the Shah's predecessor got a bit too close to the Nazis in World War Two and then helped the Americans overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 after he nationalised Britain's oil possessions in the country.

This was not a myth but a real, down-to-earth conspiracy. The CIA called it Operation Ajax; the Brits wisely kept their ambitions in check by calling it Operation Boot. MI6's agent in Tehran was Colonel Monty Woodhouse, previously our Special Operations Executive man inside German-occupied Greece. I knew "Monty" well – we co-operated together when I investigated the grim wartime career of ex-UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim – and he was a ruthless man. Woodhouse brought weapons into Iran for a still non-existent "resistance" movement and he eagerly supported the CIA's project to fund the "bazaaris" of Tehran to stage demonstrations (in which, of course, hundreds, perhaps thousands, died) to overthrow Mossadegh.

They were successful. Mossadegh was arrested – by an officer assiduously done to death in the 1979 revolution – and the young Shah returned in triumph to impose his rule, reinforced by his faithful SAVAK secret police whose torture of women regime opponents was duly filmed and – according to the great Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal – circulated by CIA officers to America's allies around the world as a "teaching" manual. How dare the Iranians remember all this?

The mass of US secret documents found after the American embassy was sacked following the Iranian revolution proved to the Iranians not only Washington's attempts to subvert the new order of Ayatollah Khomeini but the continued partnership of the American and British intelligence services.

The British ambassador, almost to the end, remained convinced that the Shah, though deeply flawed, would survive. And British governments have continued to rage about the supposedly terrorist nature of the Iranian government. Tony Blair – even at the official inquiry into the Iraq war – started raving about the necessity of standing up to Iranian aggression."

Anyway, the Iranians trashed us yesterday and made off, we are told, with a clutch of UK embassy documents. I cannot wait to read their contents. For be sure, they will soon be revealed.

Get the facts straight on Iran!

2011-11-22T21:15:00.003+01:00

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 financial sector, which is boosted by a buoyant stock market.

The argument that Iran is economically isolated does not hold either. According to the most recent Unctad report, foreign direct investment to the country has increased exponentially from $1.6bn in 2008 to $3.6bn in 2010.

This does not mean that there are no serious economic problems in the country; there are many and they range from corruption to structural inefficiency. It means that there is another side to the Iran story that is subdued for ideological reasons. Ultimately, the US and to a lesser extent the European Union are disqualifying themselves from the Iranian market during a period of intense economic calamity. China and Russia say "thank you".

There are also several "soft" factors that feed into the relative stability of the Iranian economy. The country has secured a place among the technological innovators in the region, primarily due to systematic investments in a functioning research and development infrastructure. The number of scientific publications in Iran has increased from 736 in 1996 to 13,238 in 2008, the fastest such growth in the world.

As a part of the comprehensive plan for science, Iran plans to establish a nanotechnology centre and allocate 4% of GDP to research and development. As a consequence of these policies, Iran has become a force in stem-cell research and satellite technology. A few weeks ago, it successfully launched the Rassad satellite and sent its first bio-capsule of living creatures into space in February using the Kavoshgar-3 (Explorer-3) carrier. By 2019, Iran plans to send its first astronauts into space.

The second dominant narrative, closely interlinked with the previous one, prophesies the impending demise of the Islamic republic. This is comparable to similar predictions about the downfall of the Castros who have been in power in Cuba for almost six decades now. Yet the idea that the Iranian state is collapsing is ideologically opportunistic and remote from the political realities in the country.

To my mind, there are several interdependent reasons why the Iranian state remains relatively stable, at least in the short to middle term:

• There is no all-encompassing rule by a single party that suffocates political dissent in total

• There is no absolute absence of popular accountability

• There is no military and intelligence sector that is not ideologically committed to the state/system

• There is a committed base supporting that state and there is no real penchant within the country for revolution, even by the repressed opposition.

More importantly, there is no over-dependency on the west that would yield a legitimacy crisis (as in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Zine al-Abidine Ben-Ali's Tunisia and under the shah) and there is no subservience to Israeli demands. The Iranian government's strident emphasis on "national independence" continues to garner support within Iranian society. Hence, the confrontation over the nuclear file is repeatedly stoked up in order to fan the flames of Iranian nationalism.

These are conclusions that are largely subdued in many analyses about Iran. Instead, there exists an entire literature of instant expertise that is tied to the politics of the moment. If the analysis of a country is wrong the policy prescriptions are bound to be wrong too. Afghanistan and Iraq are very good examples of that relationship between the absence of sound knowledge on a country and strategic failure."

Iran & Failure of Skepticism !

2011-11-20T18:45:00.003+01:00

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 correspondent Jim Sciutto added that the IAEA found Iran has "been carrying out activities whose sole purpose can only be the development of a nuclear weapon." Sawyer closed the segment by pleading, "Anything else out there to prevent this, to stop it? Is it too late?" She added: "So much for Ahmadinejad claiming it was only nuclear power plants, always nuclear power plants."

On NBC's Today show (11/9/11), viewers were told that the "UN reported for the first time Tuesday that Iran is conducting secret tests with the sole purpose of building nuclear weapons."

"A dreaded headline on Iran," declared ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/13/11). "UN weapons inspectors reveal new evidence the country is working on a nuclear weapons device. Can the United States do anything to stop it now?"

An Associated Press piece (11/9/11) referred matter-of-factly to Iran being "on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead," and a Washington Post piece (11/14/11) about a Republican presidential debate mentioned ways to "deal with Iran’s apparent nuclear weapons program." A USA Today story (11/14/11) referred to a "United Nations report confirming Iran's nuclear ambitions" and "the strongest finding yet that Iran is going ahead with a bomb making program." In Time magazine, Joe Klein (11/21/11) wrote, "Even the UN's extremely cautious International Atomic Energy Agency now believes Iran is working on a nuclear weapon."

This rhetoric wildly overstates the actual findings of the IAEA report.

The first part of the agency's November 8 report declares--once again--that Iran is not transferring uranium for use in a military project.

The more explosive allegations that media are focusing on are contained in an annex that attempts to lay out evidence that has been circulating for years. The IAEA report stresses concern over allegations over past activities; very little of the report is dedicated to research that could be describing as ongoing. Indeed, the media is focusing primarily on the IAEA's speculation about what might be ongoing research that could be related to a military program.

But how definitive are the IAEA's findings? As columnist and University of Southern California chemical engineering professor Muhammad Sahimi wrote (Tehran Bureau, 11/9/11):
The most important part of the report deals with alleged work on high conventional explosives, not for conventional weapons, but supposedly for use in triggering a nuclear device. The report discusses in detail fast-functioning detonators, known as "exploding bridgewire detonators" (EBWs), which are needed in nuclear weapons. By the IAEA's own admission, Iran informed the agency in 2008 that it had developed EBWs for use in conventional and civilian applications.

Sahimi points out that the IAEA report admits that "there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few, for detonators like EBWs." The IAEA report also focuses on design and computer modeling research that it suggests Iran may have pursued. The insinuation is that this research has nuclear dimensions, but there is no solid evidence that this is the case. As Sahimi wrote, some of the apparently worrisome computer modeling
could very well relate to Iran's conventional-warhead missile program that it has never hidden, but has in fact boasted about. Even the IAEA acknowledges such a possibility. The agency itself does not even allege that the enumerated activities are related to a nuclear warhead, but that "they are highly relevant."

Some media coverage suggested the strongest evidence came in the form of a Soviet scientist who allegedly helped Iran with crucial detonator research. The Washington Post (11/7/11) reported that the IAEA was focused on "a former Soviet weapons scientist who allegedly tutored Iranians over several years on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction."

What the Post did not report was that the scientist in question, Vyacheslav Danilenko, is a well-known researcher in the field of nanodiamonds--the creation of synthetic diamonds that can be used for a variety of industrial pursuits, including oil drilling, an activity that produces the majority of Iran's exports. Inter Press Service reporter Gareth Porter (11/9/11) detailed Danilenko's decades of research in this field, which requires the large-scale detonation chambers that news reports suggest are possibly part of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons research program.

An early critique of the Post story was posted at the Moon of Alabama blog (11/7/11), which noted that Danilenko's nanodiamond research was indeed mentioned in the IAEA report--but missing from the Post's story. The reporter who wrote the Post piece, Joby Warrick, followed up on November 14 with an article focused Danilenko's research--including the background missing from the first piece. Warrick wrote:
Evidence is often ambiguous, as the same technology can sometimes have peaceful as well as military applications. In the case of Danilenko, the scientist’s synthetic-diamonds business provided a plausible explanation for his extensive contacts with senior Iranian scientists over half a decade.

This time around, the Post included Danilenko denying that he had anything to do with a nuclear weapons program. But the paper seemed mostly unconvinced--calling his work, for example, "his diamond-making scheme."

As in the run-up to the Iraq War, it was certainly possible to report skeptically on the Iran intelligence. The Christian Science Monitor's Scott Peterson wrote an excellent report (11/9/11) that began:
The latest United Nations report on Iran's nuclear program may not be the "game changer" it was billed to be, as some nuclear experts raise doubts about the quality of evidence--and point to lack of proof of current nuclear weapons work.

The article quotes former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, who is dismissive of the agency's analysis. And an NPR Morning Edition segment (11/9/11) began by noting that the agency's new report "was much anticipated, because advanced reporting suggested the IAEA had concluded definitively that Iran is engaged in a full-scale nuclear weapons program. Turns out the report does not say that."

Anyone wondering about the lessons learned from Iraq could find two newspaper editorials, both published November 10, instructive. The New York Times, under the headline "The Truth About Iran," called the IAEA report "chillingly comprehensive" and cheered the agency for standing firm: "The agency did not back down, and neither should anyone else." The Washington Post editorial began:
The International Atomic Energy Agency has now spelled out in detail what governments around the world have known for a long time: Iran's nuclear program has an explicit military dimension.

The paper declared that the IAEA report "ought to end serious debate about whether Tehran's program is for peaceful purposes."

The idea that a journalistic outlet would declare this debate over is profoundly troubling--and suggests that in the corporate media, few lessons have been learned from the Iraq debacle

B.A.F (“Brown” Army Faction) !

2011-11-17T19:02:00.002+01:00

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, futility and hypocrisy of the 80s in the GDR, together with the disappointments of the reunification period, had found bodily form in us as adolescents.
Still a student, after the fall of the wall you had to decide whether you were "left" or "right". Nothing more sensible was about. That's how we dressed, chose what bars and clubs we went to, the demonstrations we took part in: left or right. You knew the ones on the other side, from the lower classes, from the sports club, a son or daughter of a former colleague of your parents. Have you heard, he's one too? That's how it was. You knew someone who had stolen a car, set fire to a vacant house, peddled drugs, kept a weapon stashed under the bed. The Leipzig-based writer Clemens Meyer depicted this era well in his novel Als Wir Träumten ("When We Were Dreaming"), which was praised by critics for its portrayal of the so-called underclass. In truth, many of us were there. It has little to do with the underclass; more with the feeling of being lost, which was stronger than the feeling of being an individual.

The more innocent among us moved to the inner city and stole clothes or bicycles. That was just going through puberty. But it can get to a point where you lose all proportion. In September 1997, the trio, who were still living in Jena, planted their first bomb. In front of the local theatre police found a pipe bomb filled with 10g of TNT. Only the detonator was missing.
It's odd that this simple story of drift is not being told now. Odd that it's not being asked: under what conditions could young people be so radicalised that calling them an "underground" seems legitimate? These questions, however, would point to the heart of a debate on East Germany that we've grown increasingly tired of over the years. It's already gone wrong so often. Instead of open and critical soul-searching in both parts of the country, recriminations flew, east against west, back and forth: it was more about ideologies than biographies, and in it always hovered a whiff of racism based on ethnic origins. Just think back to the false alarm of Sebnitz in 1997, when a six-year-old half-Iraqi boy was allegedly drowned by skinheads in the public baths of Sebnitz, an eastern town. It later transpired that the testimony of witnesses was false and the death an accident. Reporters just hadn't researched the story properly.
Now, what has clearly come to light about the "Zwickau cell" is becoming taboo. One no longer asks why nine out of 10 victims shot to death were in the area of the former Federal Republic (West Germany), and whether this was more than just a coincidence.

Instead, the debate is over the failures of the security authorities. That must be cleared up, for sure. But haven't the teachers, the parents, the friends, the politicians, the institutions all failed? Can it not also be asked, equally fairly: at what point, at what time did we lose these children? Children that we were glad to think belonged to the generation that came out winners from German reunification.
But with the phrase "Brown Army Faction", a name has already been slapped on them, a label that shuts down the real debate before it can start. The East German neo-Nazis now appear as children of a West German movement – the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group – which they have no link with whatsoever. The Brown Army Faction label is no accident, but much rather reveals, yet again, the same old point of view. It's still the history of the old Federal Republic that thrusts itself into the centre of attention and sets the standards for comparison.
The history of the Red Army Faction, which now steps forward in a kind of renewed escalation, is permitted to repeat itself only as a "brown" variant (a Nazi uniform reference). But is it really a generational conflict that underlies the group's violent acts? Does it separate the West German post-war parents from the East German reunification parents much more than it brings them together?
We won't get answers to any of these questions if we don't slowly start to buy into the idea that East Germany has its own history, which starts before 1989 and is about more than just reunification. When we start to tell this story too, we start to establish new social and political realities. That would be the opposite of "underground". “

Desperate lies !

2011-11-10T20:46:00.005+01:00

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 reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed “Member State” on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.

Albright gave a “private briefing” for “intelligence professionals” last week, in which he named Danilenko as the foreign expert who had been contracted by Iran’s Physics Research Center in the mid-1990s and identified him as a “former Soviet nuclear scientist,” according to a story by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post on Nov. 6.
The Danilenko story then went worldwide.
The IAEA report says the agency has “strong indications” that Iran’s development of a “high-explosions initiation system,” which it has described as an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon, was “assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin.”
The report offers no other evidence of Danilenko’s involvement in the development of an initiation system.
The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well-known for its work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.
However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that specialized in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was among the scientists in the “gas dynamics group” at the Institute who were “the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960.”
Danilenko’s recollections of the early period of his career are in a chapter of the book Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties, and Applications, edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2007.
Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko’s center at the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were later used at major “detonation nanodiamond” production centers.

Danilenko left the Institute in 1989 and joined the Institute of Materials Science Problems in Ukraine, according to the authors of that chapter.
Danilenko’s major accomplishment, according to the authors, has been the development of a large-scale technology for producing ultradispersed diamonds, a particular application of nanodiamonds. The technology, which was later implemented by the ALIT company in Zhitomir, Ukraine, is based on an explosion chamber 100 square meters in volume, which Danilenko designed.
Beginning in 1993, Danilenko was a principal in a company called Nanogroup, which was established initially in Ukraine but is now based in Prague. The company’s website boasts that it has “the strongest team of scientists,” which was involved in the “introduction of nanodiamonds in 1960 and the first commercial applications of nanodiamonds in 2000.”
The declared aim of the company is to supply worldwide demand for nanodiamonds.
Iran has an aggressive program to develop its nanotechnology sector, and it includes as one major focus nanodiamonds, as blogger Moon of Alabama has pointed out. That blog was the first source to call attention to Danilenko’s nanodiamond background.
Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country.
The report states that the “foreign expert” was in Iran from 1996 to about 2002, “ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds.” That wording suggests that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran.
The report says the expert “also lectured on explosive physics and its applications,” without providing any further detail about what applications were involved.
The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko’s nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the “former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist” story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.
The tale of a Russian nuclear weapons scientist helping construct an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon is the most recent iteration of a theme that the IAEA introduced in its May 2008 report, which mentioned a five-page document describing experimentation with a “complex multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount of high explosives in hemispherical geometry” and to monitor the detonation.

Iran acknowledged using “exploding bridge wire” detonators such as those mentioned in that document for conventional military and civilian applications. But it denounced the document, along with the others in the “alleged studies” collection purporting to be from an Iranian nuclear weapons research program, as fakes.
Careful examination of the “alleged studies” documents has revealed inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud. But the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to treat the documents as though there were no question about their authenticity.
The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.
Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world opinion on the Iranian nuclear program by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents. Israeli Foreign Ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced.
In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a document from a member state had convinced him that the “alleged studies” documents were genuine. Albright said the state was “probably Israel.”
The Jerusalem Post‘s Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had “provided critical information used in the report,” the purpose of which was to “push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran.” /By Gareth Porter.

Iran Sanctions Act StepToward War ! (By Ron Paul)

2011-11-05T14:37:00.002+01:00

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 and then rebuild it?

These new sanctions against Iran increasingly target other countries that seek to trade with Iran. The legislation will severely punish foreign companies or foreign subsidiaries of US companies if they do not submit to the US trade embargo on Iran. Some 15 years after the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 failed to bring Iran to its knees, it is now to be US foreign policy to threaten foreign countries and companies.
During this mark-up one of my colleagues argued that if Mercedes-Benz wants to sell trucks to Iran, they should not be allowed to do business in the United States. Does anyone believe this is a good idea? I wonder how the Americans working at the Mercedes-Benz factory in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama would feel about banning Mercedes from the United States. Or perhaps we might ask the 7,600 Americans who work in the BMW factory in Spartanburg, SC how they would feel. Should the American consumer be denied the right to purchase these products? Is the United States really prepared to take such aggressive and radical action against its NATO ally Germany?
Likewise, the application of the sanctions in this legislation would have a dramatic impact on US commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia and China, who both do business with Iran. It would impose strong sanctions on these countries and would prohibit foreign business leaders – and their spouses and children – from entering the United States. Do we want to start a trade war – or worse – with Russia and China?

The Iran Threat Reduction Act authorizes what will no doubt be massive amounts of US taxpayer money to undermine the Iranian government and foment another "Green Revolution" there. We will establish and prop up certain factions over others, send them enormous amounts of money, and attempt to fix any resulting elections so that our preferred candidates win. Considering the disturbing aftermath of our "democracy promotion" operations in places like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, where radical forces have apparently come out on top, it may be fair to conclude that such actions actually undermine US national security rather than bolster it.
Sanctions do not work. They are precursors to war and usually lead to war. They undermine our economy and our national security. They result in terrible, unnecessary suffering among the civilian population in the target countries and rarely even inconvenience their leaders. We must change our foreign policy from one of interventionism and confrontation to cooperation and diplomacy. This race to war against Iran is foolhardy and dangerous. As with the war on Iraq, the arguments for further aggression and war on Iran are based on manipulations and untruths. We need to learn our lesson and reject this legislation and the push for war.

A man who knew too much !

2011-10-25T20:08:00.002+02:00

Whether the NATO countries -- who had only a few years ago welcomed Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi back into the international fold in exchange for his renouncing his chemical and nuclear weapons programs and allowing U.S. and British experts to come and help dismantle them -- played any role in what certainly appeared in first reports from the scene to have been the summary execution of the Libyan dictator will
probably never be known. What the video evidence does prove is that the Libyan revolutionary forces did not find him already dead or killed by a NATO airstrike; nor does the initial claim that he was killed in "crossfire" between insurgent forces and diehard regime loyalists stand up to even the most minimal scrutiny.
NATO does acknowledge that its planes bombarded the convoy in which Qaddafi was fleeing the city of Sirte shortly before it was intercepted on the ground by the insurgents, but it has denied it even knew he was there. If that is true, and the French, British, and Americans did not try to make their own luck, then they certainly were very lucky indeed.

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.
He would have had much to tell, for this cooperation was extensive. In the war against the jihadis -- a war to which Qaddafi regularly claimed to be as committed to prosecuting as Washington, Paris, or London -- links between Libyan intelligence and the CIA were particularly strong, as an archive of secret documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch researchers has revealed. If anything, the CIA's British counterpart, MI6, was even more involved with the Qaddafi family. As the Guardian reported in early September, it was Sir Mark Allen, then the director of the counterterrorism section of MI6, the British overseas spying agency, who was the key figure on the Western side in the secret negotiations to get Qaddafi to give up his WMD programs. The Guardian story further laid out how, after failing to become director of MI6 in 2004, Allen went into the private sector, becoming a senior advisor to the Monitor Group, a consulting firm that was paid huge fees by Qaddafi to burnish his image around the world, and, while they were at it, helped Saif (who had been his father's initial envoy to MI6) research his PhD thesis for the London School of Economics (LSE). Allen was also an advisor to BP, helping the oil giant secure major contracts in Libya from the Qaddafi regime.

The idea that Allen was the only senior Western official to establish such close ties with the Libyan dictator and his family is ludicrous. To the contrary, both the British and French governments were soon falling all over themselves to curry favor with a newly "respectable" Qaddafi. The Daily Mail reproduced a facsimile of the letter that, while prime minister, Tony Blair wrote to Saif Qaddafi to help him with his research for his LSE doctorate. Both during Blair's premiership and that of his successor, Gordon Brown, Britain aggressively pursued sales of military equipment, up to and including warships, to the Libyan regime, and sent members of the elite Special Air Service (SAS, the equivalent of the U.S. Delta Force) to help train Qaddafi's forces in counterterrorism tactics. Not to be outdone, Sarkozy, to the consternation even of many members of his own cabinet, invited Qaddafi to Paris in Dec. 2007, for an official state visit, the upshot of which was billions of dollars in contracts from Libya won by French firms.
To be sure, when the Libyan uprising began, it was Sarkozy who was the driving force behind the NATO intervention that -- though it was ostensibly carrying out United Nations Security Council resolutions to protect Libyan civilians from Qaddafi and his forces under the new doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) -- soon far exceeded its mandate. The Libya intervention revealed itself to be based on the premise that, in Libya at least, R2P and regime change could be one and the same. Moreover, from the beginning of the air campaign, NATO warplanes repeatedly targeted Qaddafi, his sons, and their families. As early as May, General Sir David Richards, the chief of the British defense staff (that is, the equivalent of our head of the Joint Chiefs), told the Daily Telegraph that while NATO was not targeting Qaddafi directly, "If it happened that he was in a command and control center that was hit by NATO and he was killed, then that is within the rules."
Many outside observers were convinced even at the time that NATO was in fact desperately hoping to kill Qaddafi since it was clear by then -- especially during a period when the tide seemed to shift back and forth between Qaddafi's forces and the rebels -- that he would not relinquish power, no matter what offers were made to him in exchange for doing so. Their suspicions were confirmed when a member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Mike Turner (R-Ohio), revealed that he had been told by Admiral Samuel Locklear, the U.S. officer commanding NATO's Joint Operations Command in Naples, Italy, that NATO forces actually were actively targeting Qaddafi.

Qaddafi's death in such a strike would have offered a neat ending then for the West and for the Libyan insurgency, many of whose leaders, it should be remembered, served Qaddafi long and faithfully, enjoying his favors for much of their careers. Qaddafi certainly knew enough about their sins to make the prospect of what he might say during a trial before the ICC a cause for anxiety. His death, coming as it seems to have done, at the hands of Libyans rather than NATO, makes an even neater ending now.
Qaddafi is dead, the Arab Spring has one more jewel in its crown, and the doctrine of humanitarian military intervention, whose reputation has rather faded of late, seems to have acquired a whole new bloom. The Arab masses thirsting for democracy, the Western powers using their power in support of this morally irreproachable goal -- what could be more edifying?
And so, ever since it became clear that Qaddafi's reign was over, the great and the good have been indulging themselves in an orgy of self-congratulation. Qaddafi alive would have been the ghost at that particular banquet, threatening at any moment to spoil the fun. Dead, he poses no such threat. It is unlikely that even the thorough investigation into the circumstances of his death that has been called for by Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and seconded by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, will change this fundamental equation. And even if Qaddafi was not targeted and, as Omran al-Oweib, the electrical engineer-turned-rebel leader who commanded the forces that finally caught up with Qaddafi in a tunnel just outside Sirte, continues to insist, really was killed in a crossfire, leaders like Sarkozy, Blair, Brown, and the Bush State Department must surely be sleeping better these last few nights. Whether they deserve to is another question entirely. (Thanks to D. Rieff )

Here is the actual footage to the Lynching of Qaddafi.

Framing Iran !

2011-10-17T20:35:00.009+02:00

Not even Rumsfeld and Cheney in their heydays could come up with such nonsense about Iran as Obamas election strategists came up with. Whatever the case, Iranians in diaspora specially those living and working in the USA should become very vigilant should they receive an offer too good to be true, the answer should be no thank you officer even if it comes from their business partners they‘ve known for years. These business partners could have been shepherded into it without knowledge as people are when pushed around in a black operation. All Iranians living abroad, even the few dozen that rejoice and applause this idiotic nonsense, should be fearful of this precedent, they could well be the next on the list.

Iran is being set up and this set up did not even have to be an elegant one (as in this case). Everybody in Europe, and without exception(to add to the flavor), knows this to be a scam from A to Z... but as always some have to believe, or at least claim to, due to party policies or because their interests (political or financial) are dependent on those claiming this masquerade..... so they simply pretend their shock and hope it goes away. On the contrary,it does not go away.... a lie such as this has to be pushed and pushed and those openly doubting it would risk being run over or sidelined, bullied and blackmailed into accepting the one and only objective of this theater. A new war.

The supposed actor of this so called “plot” is an alcoholic fornicator, whose greed for money and drugs brought him into a trap set up for him solely because of his national origin. An open Bank (money) transaction (impossible due to sanctions) is supposed to have financed a terrorist act and etc etc….. every single word is a lie and made up to claim and pretend the US to be successful in fighting terror. (they usually frame someone inside their borders or in one of their satellite states, then make a tam tam).

For all world to understand, Iranians do NOT have the same methods as the USA and Israel, whose constant assassinations of Iranian scientists seem to have been conveniently pushed out of their news outlets……. simply because the corporates that own the medias also finance and own the campaigns of many Senators and Presidents. Furthermore, the abduction of citizens of different nationalities from third countries some of whom never turn up should not be forgotten….. Do not allow some political criminals think and decide for you again, your last inaction regarding a political “Lie” (Iraq’s WMD) brought you the Iraq war and now “Karma” is taking away your money and your homes from you !.………..

Iranians do NOT assassinate……Iranians have a different modus operandi…. If you must know, Iranians merely cut the horns of their enemies and send them into their gardens to graze…. for some to admire and others to deter. Why on earth do you think Iran has constantly been growing and politically expanding despite of a massive and unparalleled western animosity, because Iran always leaves a bridge behind for its enemies …. Something the US never considers and always makes itself new enemies along the way with its irresponsible accusations, policies, assassinations and wars.

Personally I do not think the Americans know enough about Iran to be able to differentiate between right and wrongs they get to hear about it. The informations they receive are 100% disinformation and they are there to create and secure a war in the near future. Yet again Israel and their lobby in the USA, the AIPAC has been masterminding or rather stultifying the Americans to have the US boys and girls fight Israels fight. A friend once said “The relationship between Israel and US has evolved into a kind of toxic relationship where one side must constantly humiliate itself in order to prove 'that you really love me'. Nothing less than shame will suffice to demonstrate US devotion to Israel. Like all romances it isn't based on reality but a shared illusion that becomes more important than reality itself.”

There is a prayer tablet from Dariush the Great in Persepolis, it says: “ O Lord protect Iran from its enemies, from drought and from lies” it seems now Iran to be in need of protection more than ever, above all from “Lies” against it.
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Musings of a Self-Hating Jew by SAUL LANDAU !

2011-10-12T10:46:00.001+02:00

63 years ago most Jews rejoiced over the birth of Israel. Some thought it would become the place where a new vision of socialism with justice and equality would arise. Clearly, not all Jews believed that – or in those values.

Six plus decades later, the idea that Palestinians also deserve their own nation with UN recognized boundaries has caused a panic reaction from the Israeli government and its supporters throughout the world – including the President of the United States as he opposed the idea at the UN last month.

Why the panic? Look at comparative maps of Palestinian territory as outlined by the UN in 1948, with what’s left of that land today. The maps show Israel has stolen most of it — to build settlements for Jews only.

Jews like me and my friends throughout the western world do not want to migrate to the Promised Land (Zion now equals much of Palestinian territory). We don’t want to live amidst Israeli settlers, many of them self-righteous and very superior (chosen by God?) and oblivious to or even proud of what they’ve done to Palestinians.

Decades of Israeli sponsored ethnic cleansing – forcing Palestinians from their homes, villages and land — opened the way to the vast Jewish-only housing developments on Palestinian land. Those who denounce those illegal land grabs get denounced as “anti-Semites.”

Israel, once a land of egalitarian Kibbutzes has turned into an aggressive and right wing nation run by religious Orthodoxy and desires for ever more territory. Look at the map.

Friends abroad wonder how a right wing Israeli government and its US fan club (the Israeli lobby, American Israel Political Action Committee and its offshoots) has converted the US Congress into blind supporters and the President into an obedient servant.

President Obama disgraced himself and his office when he bowed to the patrons of Israel by threatening a veto of Palestinian statehood in the UN Security Council. His world status shrank. The Arab world especially witnessed the once all-powerful United States following Israeli demands – a far cry from impartial leadership in a no-fabled peace process.

How can Obama expect anyone to believe he will promote a peace plan? Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to use those words as he expands settlements into Palestinian territory. Obama’s plan seem akin to continuing his obedience to the demands of a widely condemned (by the UN) nation.

Indeed, in September Washington sent bunker-busting bombs to Israel. Washington continues to insist on curbing Iran’s non-existent nuclear threat while while ignoring Israel’s real potential to do immeasurable damage to the region and the world.

After decades of Palestinian struggle, Obama has implied those people are not yet ready for or do not merit their own state. Is he implying they are inferior to Jews? Does it mean Washington recognizes the stolen (occupied) territory as officially Israeli property? Does he justify the second-class status of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the colonial condition of those in the occupied territories? The implication is clearly yes.

Thanks to his servility to Israel combined with events in the Arab world Obama has presided over the end of US dominance of that region. The kiss-ass Arabs (Mubarak and Ali of Tunisia) have gone into the garbage pile of history. The King of Jordan and the oily Saudis and Kuwaitis can no longer obey Washington’s dictates and hope to retain the tiniest modicum of respect from their people.

Phrases etched into journalese like “peace process,” “Camp David” and “Oslo Accords” will become forgotten or turned into sick jokes.

What Israel and apparently Washington fear is a state that looks like Swiss cheese, pieces of land cut off by large Israeli settlements, patrolled by Israeli soldiers and without independent access to its own water, military establishment or even airports.

Does Israel have a right to exist? It exists. It has 200 nuclear weapons. The question is: can the majority of people and nations force Israel (and the US) to allow for the existence of Palestine.

To such a question the Israeli government and its fan club scream “anti Semitism” a response to all criticism of Israel. This has earned me, and thousands of others, the title of “self hating Jew.” On the list you’ll fnd Noam Chomsky and Woody Allen.

David Horowitz now makes lots of money with Freedom Center and DISCOVERTHENETWORK.ORG, “dedicated to exposing the interconnected web of left-wing activists, organizations, journalists, and financiers that wage political warfare against the United States and her founding ideals.” In 1970, Horowitz, then a super leftist in love with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and far more revolutionary than thou, approached me at a benefit screening for the Black Panther legal defense fund where I showed my FIDEL film.

“Is this all you’re going to do for the Panthers?” he asked, implying that my limited commitment meant low moral status.

He has turned from ultra-leftism in the 1960s and early 1970s into an ultra-rightist and zealous Zionist. Horowitz once scorned less than ardent revolutionaries and non-vegetarians. He now excels at changing left passion for right passion, but not for a sense of humor.

One trait that helped survive so many centuries of persecution was their ability to laugh at themselves. Israeli expansionists of course can still make sick jokes about occupying Palestinian territories, which give Jews everywhere a bad name.

Fact Checker !

2011-10-06T20:09:00.007+02:00

A Glenn Kessler finally took it upon himself not to pretend formal disgust at claimed rhetorics attributed to Iranian officials any more, allegations that divert all possible attention from the very essence of a blunt and comprehensive real time definition of the Middle east problem. At least of an Iranian perspective. Here he decided to thoroughly check the facts of the allegations ...

“Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it
off of the map.”
— President Obama, speech to the U.N. General Assembly, September 21, 2011

“It was only perhaps three weeks ago that the president of Iran once again said that Israel should be eradicated off the face of the Earth. As you recall, it was about in 2005 when he [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] said before that Israel -- he would use a nuclear weapon to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.”
— Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), September 19, 2011

“Outrageous statements by Ahmadinejad, such as a pledge to wipe Israel off the map, made it easier to keep that coalition together. Germany had been considered the weak sister of the group, but after Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel, the historical burden of the Holocaust made it difficult for Germany to appear too sympathetic to Iran.”
— Glenn Kessler (aka The Fact Checker), “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), page 188.

“The Islamic Republic’s proposal to help resolve the Palestinian issue and heal this old wound is a clear and logical initiative based on political concepts accepted by world public opinion, which has already been presented in detail. We do not suggest launching a classic war by the armies of Muslim countries, or throwing immigrant Jews into the sea, or mediation by the UN and other international organizations. We propose holding a referendum with [the participation of] the Palestinian nation. The Palestinian nation, like any other nation, has the right to determine their own destiny and elect the governing system of the country.”
— Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, October 2, 2011

Almost unnoticed, Iran this week joined the United States and Israel as one of the few countries in the world to oppose the statehood bid at the United Nations by the Palestinians. As the Tehran Times noted, the Iranian supreme leader “condemned any measure which would lead to the recognition of the Israeli regime and would ignore the legal right of the Palestinian people to their homeland.”
In other words, Iran continues to oppose the two-state solution. But does this mean that Iran wants to destroy Israel — “wipe it off the map” — as is commonly cited? This is certainly the conventional wisdom, as seen in the statements above. But a colleague at The Washington Post, spotting the Bachmann and Obama statements during the U.N. festivities last month, suggests that it is this widely cited statement by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was actually a mistranslation.

The Facts

The firestorm started when Nazila Fathi, then the Tehran correspondent of The New York Times, reported a story almost six years ago that was headlined: “Wipe Israel ‘off the map’ Iranian says.” The article attributed newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks to a report by the ISNA press agency.
The article sparked outrage around the globe, with then-President George W. Bush and other world leaders condemning Ahmadinejad’s statement. The original New York Times article noted that Ahmadinejad said he was quoting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, but that aspect was largely overlooked.
Then, specialists such as Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project pointed out that the original statement in Persian did not say that Israel should be wiped from the map, but instead that it would collapse.
Cole said this week that in the 1980s Khomeini gave a speech in which he said in Persian “Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” This means, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” But then anonymous wire service translators rendered Khomeini as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the face of the map,” which Cole and Nourouzi say is inaccurate.
Ahmadinejad slightly misquoted Khomeini, substituting “safheh-i ruzgar,” or “page of time" for "sahneh-i ruzgar" or “arena of time.” But in any case, the old translation was dug up and used again by the Iranian news agency, Cole says. In fact, that’s how it was presented for years on Ahmadinejad’s English-language Web site, as the Times noted in a somewhat defensive article on the translation debate.

But the story doesn’t end there. Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that Iranian government entities began to erect billboards and signs with the “wipe off” phrase in English. Joshua Teitelbaum of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs compiled an interesting collection of photographs of these banners, such as one on the building that houses reserve military forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world,” the sign reads in English.
Teitelbaum’s report, while written from a pro-Israel perspective, includes a number of threatening statements about Israel that are similar in tone to Ahmadinejad’s controversial statement.

In 2000, Khamenei stated, “Iran’s position, which was first expressed by the Imam [Khomeini] and stated several times by those responsible, is that the cancerous tumor called Israel must be uprooted from the region.” He went on to say in the same speech that “Palestinian refugees should return and Muslims, Christians and Jews could choose a government for themselves, excluding immigrant Jews.”
Sadjadpour, who has closely studied the statements of Khamenei, said that the supreme leader has spoken more on the question of Israel than any other issue, which is remarkable given that Iran shares no border with Israel and that the Jewish state has virtually no impact on the daily lives of Iranians. Sadjadpour said Khamenei has been consistent, stating repeatedly that the goal is not the military destruction of the Jewish state but “the defeat of Zionist ideology and the dissolution of Israel through a ‘popular referendum.’”
Of course, an Israeli might conclude that such an outcome would be the destruction of the Jewish state in any case.

Anwar al-Awlaki !

2011-10-03T12:43:00.002+02:00

Justin Raimondo has always been one of my favorite and objective reporters, and here I would like to redistribute one of his articles on the recent targeted killing of a US citizen.

"The assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki sets the kind of precedent that Americans will come to regret, but for now they cheer, like Romans hailing a death in the arena. Richard Miniter, writing in the Obamaite – and aptly named – Daily Beast, avers that not only was the killing legal, it was also “wise.” He writes:

“President Obama’s targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and died in Yemen fighting for al Qaeda, is a victory for America and for common sense.”

As if our all-wise and all-powerful President personally stalked and killed his prey, mano a mano. Obama is “like Lincoln,” says Miniter, who ordered the deaths of his fellow Americans in a vicious civil war – but a more accurate analogy is, perhaps, the Roman emperor Commodus, who personally fought in gladiatorial contests, and, as Wikipedia relates, “For each appearance in the arena, he charged the city of Rome a million sesterces, straining the Roman economy.”

According to the US government, al-Awlaki was murdered because he “inspired” others to attack the United States through his preaching over the internet. He was also supposedly personally involved in planning the activities of the “underwear bomber.” No evidence of his guilt has ever been released: it’s all secret, along with the list of individuals marked for death by US authorities.

Yet this alleged “terrorist” wasn’t always so notorious: indeed, right after the 9/11 attacks he was summoned to Capitol Hill to lead a prayer vigil for Muslim congressional staffers, and was invited to the Pentagon to lecture on Islam. The idea was to find a “moderate” Muslim, who was “vetted” by the authorities, to “reach out” to the Muslim community, Fox News reports. The event was reportedly a luncheon, during which al-Awlaki denounced al-Qaeda, and, although “harassed” by audience members, “handled it well,” according to one eyewitness.

The trail of the “terrorist” imam leads us to the 9/11 hijackers, two of whom were devoted communicants of al-Awlaki’s San Diego mosque. So great was their devotion that they followed him to Falls Church, Virginia, when the imam took up his duties at a local mosque. He had also been investigated as early as 1999 for links to bin Laden’s organization. So why was al-Awlaki invited to the Pentagon?

We will never know the answer to that question, but what we do know is this: his phone number was found by German police in the possession of one of the hijackers, and the FBI tried to set him up with a prostitution bust, but backed off. Somehow he managed to get out of the country and flee to Yemen before the feds could get their hands on him – and there the murky trail of the “terrorist” imam drops off into the abyss….

The dreaded “conspiracy theorists” are going to have a field day with the al-Awlaki killing: they’re already headlining “Pentagon Asset Anwar al-Awlaki Killed in Yemen.” I’ll let them have their fun, and simply note that, in Washington, as in ancient Rome, one can quickly lose favor, and find oneself at the business end of a javelin – or a drone. It all depends on the whims of the Emperor President, who may embrace you one day and sentence you to death the next. Caprice is the chief operating principle of our “wise” rulers.

The assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki sets an important precedent, one that will go down in our history as a shameful moment, a turning point, when the policy of endless war empowered the President to kill his own countrymen without benefit of trial. Any American, whose “preaching” purportedly “inspires” a terrorist act is now fair game for our Praetorians. The first time we take out an American citizen on American soil, on the mere suspicion that he may be a “terrorist,” our legal eagles will point to the al-Awlaki case as justification. That a citizen of this country may be put on a list that marks him for death, without public trial, seals the doom of our old republic. Obama’s partisans hail his great “victory,” while their neoconservative rivals do the same – and there is no one left to wonder what has happened to the Constitution.

As America enters a period of travail, when the prospect of economic and civil turmoil becomes all too real, this precedent is terrifying. That the President may order the death of an American without due process of law means that the concept of law is no longer operative: it signals the end of the America we knew, and loved, and the beginning of … something else.

Here I draw your attention to a similar conclusion discussed by Chomsky.

Deception is a state of mind...

2011-09-29T18:51:00.002+02:00

First aired on BBC2 sometimes in 1992, It reveals the secret state sponsored terror networks operating in Europe. This is about an extreme right wing secret organization operated by the CIA,MI6 through NATO. It killed hundreds of Europeans and blamed many deaths on left wing groups such as Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades or other famous left wing groups.

They were known as stay behinds and were given efficient military equipments for sabotage operations against the Soviets in invaded countrieson, however they were used and implemented in western Europe on different levels Instead .
This operation was named “Gladio” and its killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for causing fear amongst national political classes to follow suit on known US policies…. “Deception is a state of mind an the mind of the State” (James J. Angleton)

Watch and make up your own minds !

Seven Faces of a Civilization

2011-09-19T19:07:00.001+02:00

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

2011-09-18T07:15:00.003+02:00

A Brian Brady wrote in "The independent", Tony Blair's shadowy links with Muammar Gaddafi were thrust into the spotlight again last night after it emerged that he met the former Libyan dictator twice for secret talks in the run-up to the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
A collection of documents found in Tripoli have revealed that Mr Blair was flown to Libya twice on one of Colonel Gaddafi's private jets after he left office in the UK, according to a report in The Sunday Telegraph. In the letters and emails, Mr Blair's private office repeatedly refers to Gaddafi as "The Leader".

The meetings, in 2008 and 2009, came at a time when Libya was threatening to cut all business links with the UK if Abdelbaset al-Megrahi stayed in a British jail.
The correspondence, between Mr Blair's office, the British ambassador in Tripoli and the Libyan ambassador in London, raise possible conflicts of interest regarding his roles as Middle East peace envoy, philanthropist and consultant.
The former prime minister, who brought a US billionaire to one of the meetings, makes no reference to the trips on any of his websites.
Mr Blair's office last night denied that the visits were business-related. A spokesman confirmed that Megrahi's situation was raised at the meetings, but insisted that Mr Blair always told the Libyans that the prisoner's status was a matter for the Scottish Executive. Megrahi, who has cancer, was eventually released on health grounds in August 2009 after doctors judged that he had only three months to live.
But Pam Dix, whose brother died in the Lockerbie bombing, said yesterday: "These meetings ... are disturbing, and details of what was discussed should now be made public. I am astonished Tony Blair continued to have meetings like this out of office."

The meetings took place at a time of intense negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi's regime over Megrahi's release, after he was convicted of murdering 270 people in the single biggest terrorist atrocity committed in Britain.
In both 2008 and 2009, the documents show Mr Blair negotiated to fly to the Libyan capital from Sierra Leone, in a jet provided by Colonel Gaddafi. In 2008, Mr Blair, having met the Libyan leader, arranged to fly on to Luton on a Libyan jet.
The first letter was sent on writing paper headed "Office of the Quartet Representative", Mr Blair's title as a Middle East peace envoy, which he took up after he resigned as prime minister in June 2007.
The letter, written on 2 June 2008, was sent to Omar Jelban, Libya's ambassador to Britain. It was written by Gavin Mackay, then based at Mr Blair's London office in Grosvenor Square, and stated: "Let me begin my [sic] saying that Mr Blair is delighted that The Leader is likely to be able to see him during the afternoon of 10 June and he is most grateful that the Libyan authorities have kindly offered an aircraft to take him from Freetown to Tripoli and back to London."
Details of the 2009 meeting with colonel Gaddafi are contained in an exchange of emails between Victoria Gould, Mr Blair's events organizer, and Sir Vincent Fean, former British ambassador to Libya. The correspondence shows Tim Collins, a billionaire friend of Mr Blair, attended.

A spokesman for Tony Blair said last night: "Tony Blair has never had any role, either formal or informal, paid or unpaid, with the Libyan Investment Authority or the Government of Libya and he has no commercial relationship with any Libyan company or entity.
"The subject of the conversations during Mr Blair's occasional visits was primarily Africa, as Libya was for a time head of the African Union; but also the Middle East and how Libya should reform and open up. At the time, governments around the world were engaging with Libya."

As a matter of fact, some of the still left overs of the old Middle East pro Western guards (Saudi Arabia and some other Persian Gulf Arab tribal leaders calling themselves Kings and etc.) should start finding new Bank accounts and friends. Look at what happens to used up servants ( Bin Ali, Mubarak, Saleh and now Gaddafi).... Here a little clip

Client-Statehood !

2011-09-08T20:34:00.002+02:00

The Obama administration has endorsed a plan that would keep 3,000-4,000 American troops in Iraq past the December deadline to withdraw, although the full remaining presence there will be much larger. Just how large isn’t yet certain, but the numerous agencies and jobs planned for the future of Iraq could mean many thousands more armed men that will not be classified as “troops.”

After months of jostling the Iraqi government into allowing a large US military force to remain after the full withdrawal date specified under the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, the Obama administration publicly voiced support for this plan without having received the permission of the Iraqi Prime Minister or Parliament. Some elements of the Obama administration and the Pentagon pushed for tens of thousands more troops to remain. The few thousand troops would reportedly be left to provide training and support to Iraqi Security Forces as well as “filling in gaps” in Iraqi defense capabilities. An additional force of private military contractors, numbering somewhere between 5,000-7,000, would also remain in order to provide security for an expanded diplomatic and contractor presence.
The reduced level of troops is possible in tandem with the expanded diplomatic mission because the US has been largely successful in its intentions in Iraq, setting in place the intended political, military, and economic elements for Iraq to become a long-term client state instead of a warfront. As the New York Times reported this week, the debate over specific numbers and figures is to some extent unimportant. “The administration has already drawn up plans for an extensive expansion of the American Embassy and its operations, bolstered by thousands of paramilitary security contractors.” Iraq may rival long-time client, Egypt. “An Office of Security Cooperation,” reported the Times, ”like similar ones in countries like Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq’s security forces” for an indefinite period.

The State Department is expected to have up to 17,000 employees and contractors for this ongoing diplomatic presence, which has been described as necessary to provide “situational awareness around the country, manage political crises in potential hotspots such as Kirkuk, and provide a platform for delivering economic, development and security assistance.” Cutting through the bureaucratese, this means essentially to maintain Iraq’s client-state status.Providing housing, workspace, medical facilities, and security for a legion of civilian workers this large requires exorbitant funds, expansive land use, and construction not yet finalized in most areas.
According to the most recent Quarterly Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq, the Department of State “will assume primary responsibility for a planned $6.8 billion operation” carried out “from 11 locations around Iraq, including three consulates and the world’s largest embassy.” Responsibilities also include carrying out “two of the largest Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programs in the world and to spend the $2.55 billion in Iraq Security Forces Fund (ISFF).” As detailed in a declassified, partially redacted State Department document, a “fleet of 46 aircraft” will be “based and maintained in Baghdad, Basra, and Erbil” and will include 20 medium lift S-61 helicopters, 18 light lift UH-1N helicopters, three light observation MD-530 helicopters, and five Dash 8 fixed wing aircraft. Flight and landing zones, maintenance hangars, operation buildings, and air traffic control towers, along with maintenance and refueling will all be a part of the contracted construction operations.

Agreements will be negotiated with Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan to secure authorization for continuous Embassy flight plans between the three countries, which all contain a massive presence of US military, diplomatic, and contractor personnel. The State Department’s $3.7 billion request for Iraq in FY 2012 includes funding for integrated programs of economic management as part of this so-called withdrawal plan. The United States Agency for International Development, alongside the United States Department of Agriculture, will continue to oversee sectors of Iraq’s economy, especially its natural resources, as agreed upon in the secretive Strategic Framework Agreement.

Signs are that the Iraqi government will conform to US wishes on the size, scope, and nature of the continuing American presence in Iraq. Given the political, military, and economic infrastructure set to be implemented by Washington post-2011, it is also likely that Iraq may soon become another prosaic Middle Eastern state under the US domain of influence.(With thanks to John Glaser)

The CIA !

2011-09-06T15:56:00.002+02:00

Hannah Gurman wrote ;
From the coups that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende in the Cold War to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the CIA has built a solid reputation as an extralegal agent of international sabotage and murder. Since the agency’s creation in 1947, successive U.S. presidents and their national security advisers have furthered this reputation, using the CIA for dirty work and then denying any wrongdoing in public, while the truth waits for decades until files are declassified. The agency did not declassify the documentary proof of its involvement in the 1973 assassination of Allende until 2003, and its internal analysis of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion was not released until Aug. 2, 2011, more than 50 years after the event. There is an age-old tradition of push and pull between the national security establishment, which insists on secrecy, and transparency advocates and the public, which have a right to hold leaders accountable for their use and abuse of executive power in matters of foreign policy.
In recent months, the Obama administration appears to be tinkering with the established script, although not fundamentally departing from it. Since the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, it has increasingly put the CIA into the public spotlight, underscoring the agency’s central role in the administration’s evolving counterterror strategy. Killing a member of al-Qaeda is far more palatable to most Americans than killing a democratically elected leader of a country that posed no threat to U.S. security. Thus, recent news of the CIA’s unmanned “precision strikes” against top al-Qaeda operatives might appeal to the sizable segment of the U.S. public that no longer supports the idea of a large-scale ground war but still believes in a militarized approach to the Global War on Terror.
At the same time, however, the CIA continues to engage in its established tradition of suppressing information that would damage it or the administration’s reputation. This information deserves public attention, precisely because it points to a link between the agency’s activities and the proliferation of al-Qaeda, directly undermining the argument being advanced by the Obama administration.
In the Spotlight
Obama is not the first president to enlist the CIA in attempts to justify his policies in the War on Terror. In January 2003, George W. Bush gave his now infamous State of the Union address in which he claimed that British intelligence had found evidence that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa. We all know how that story turned out. By 2004, the Valerie Plame scandal had become engrained in the public imagination, and Bush could no longer use the CIA to gain public support for his policies in Iraq or, for that matter, in Afghanistan. As the years went by and bin Laden remained at large, interviews with former CIA agents, including Michael Scheuer, who headed intelligence operations aimed at capturing the al-Qaeda leader, lambasted the administration’s systematic failure to heed the advice of intelligence experts. Bush’s brief attempt to publicly exploit the CIA collapsed under the weight of mutual distrust and the realities of the CIA’s marginalization.
Obama’s emphasis on the central role of the CIA in his counterterror strategy is intended in part to underscore the difference between his approach and that of his predecessor. The president’s May 1 speech announcing the death of bin Laden linked the success of the mission to the centrality of the CIA, suggesting a direct contrast with the Bush administration: “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda.” Obama made a point of crediting the intelligence community, along with the Special Forces that carried out the operation: “Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”
While the CIA does not officially acknowledge its drone campaign in Pakistan, the Obama administration has continued to credit the agency in successful operations against al-Qaeda’s top leadership, including the Aug. 22 killing of its second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. Without referring directly to the CIA, Obama’s remarks about the upcoming tenth anniversary of 9/11 suggest a counterterror strategy that is low on ground troops and heavy on CIA drone and Special Forces operations. “We’re taking the fight to al-Qaeda, ending the war in Iraq and starting to bring our troops home from Afghanistan.”
Continued CIA Censorship
These efforts to publicize the CIA’s recent accomplishments should not be confused with a broader effort to achieve transparency. When it comes to withholding and censoring information about its tactics, it’s still business as usual at the CIA. On Aug. 25, The New York Times reported that the agency censored large portions of a forthcoming book by former FBI agent, Ali H. Soufan. Soufan claims that the CIA withheld information from the FBI about the presence of two known terrorists in the United States who later participated in the 9/11 hijackings. The book also details the CIA’s adoption of increasingly brutal interrogation tactics after 9/11.
Although much of this information has already been published in congressional hearings and reports, as well as the memoirs of other officials, the agency has long attempted to keep as much of it as possible under wraps. In 2005, it destroyed at least two videotapes documenting such interrogations, including that of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in CIA custody after 9/11. Such activities in the months immediately before and after 9/11 might be dismissed as ancient history. But the CIA-controlled drone war on al-Qaeda is currently in full swing in Pakistan. The administration has been quick to publicize the success of these efforts. But because the drone campaign remains officially secret, the CIA does not release the full data on casualties.
In June, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, told the press that strikes against al-Qaeda operatives in the Af-Pak region are “exceptionally precise and surgical” and bragged that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” in the last year. Brennan’s laughable claim is contradicted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which recently released the conclusions of its in-depth investigation of civilian casualties in the drone campaign in Pakistan. The Bureau reported that there have been 295 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 (243 of them during the Obama administration) with the total number of people killed between 2,309 and 2,880, including 392-783 civilians — 82 in 2010 and 47 in 2011.
Instead of owning up to these figures, which come from respected news outlets, NGOs, and eyewitness accounts, the CIA has attempted to discredit the study, accusing its sources of having links to the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) and making vague accusations about the study’s methodology. On its website, the Bureau provides a comprehensive explanation of its approach, which itself contrasts with the CIA’s refusal to detail the source and logic of its arguments. As this example suggests, Obama’s counterterrorism advisers would like to have it both ways: they want to highlight the achievements of the CIA in order to gain public support for the administration’s strategy but at the same time deny the public the information it would need in order to assess that strategy.
The Obama administration will likely follow a similar tack with respect to the drone campaigns targeting al-Qaeda leaders outside of the Af-Pak region — in North and West Africa, as well as the Middle East. In June, outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly confirmed reports that the agency’s drone campaign had extended into Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, framing these developments as a critical part of the progress being made against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). But as evidence of civilian casualties in these campaigns emerges, the agency will continue to resort to its established code of secrecy.
Blowback
As long as the CIA exists, it will never be a transparent organization. But as with WikiLeaks and other debates about transparency, the issue ultimately is not about secrecy itself. Rather, it is about the substance of the secrets being kept and how they compare to the official line about the progress being made in the war against al-Qaeda.
According to the official narrative of the Obama administration, drone strikes, night raids, and other targeted attacks carried out by the CIA and Special Forces are the solution to winning the war against al-Qaeda, which will in turn curb the broader threat of radical anti-American/anti-Western Islamist movements. This narrative only makes a modicum of sense if you leave out precisely the kind of information that the CIA is keeping secret.
During the Bush administration, critics of the CIA’s interrogation tactics, including John McCain, argued that any short-term “gains” produced by the torture of terrorism suspects would in the long run be far outweighed by the damage to America’s reputation, only benefiting organizations like al-Qaeda.
The same argument could and is being made about the current CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, where most studies show the local populace has an overwhelmingly negative perception of the campaign. The lawsuit of Pakistani journalist Kahrim Khan against the CIA for the deaths of his relatives in a drone attack is just the most visible example of the anti-American animus fueled by the drone campaign.
Some of the staunchest criticism of the official narrative comes from former members of the U.S. intelligence community who question the increasing obsession with killing al-Qaeda officials and with the drone campaigns used to do the job. In an Aug. 14 op-ed in The New York Times, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair wrote, “Qaeda officials who are killed by drones will be replaced. The group’s structure will survive and it will still be able to inspire, finance, and train individuals and teams to kill Americans.” Meanwhile, “As the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan.”
Because such arguments do not disclose official secrets, but rather common sense, the CIA has no power to censor them. Thus, in a devastating piece in The National Interest, Michael Scheuer, who knows more about al-Qaeda than just about anyone in the West, rails against the Obama administration’s triumphalism over the death of bin Laden. “Al-Qaeda’s indispensable, long-term, and utterly reliable ally,” he writes, is “Washington’s interventionist foreign policy,” which “remains the group’s true center of gravity. It is a galvanizing force which cannot be harmed, let alone destroyed, until U.S. leaders in politics, the media, religion (especially evangelical Protestants), the military, and the academy begin to accept the truth; that is, the United States government is hated by most Muslims for what it does in the Islamic world, and not for how Americans think and behave at home.”
Scheuer’s analysis is what the intelligence community refers to as “blowback.” Former intelligence analyst Chalmers Johnson, in a 2000 book of that title, warned against the “unanticipated consequences of unacknowledged acts in other people’s countries.” According to this logic, the CIA’s ramped-up role in the war against al-Qaeda may ultimately do more to sustain than defeat the enemy.
The CIA goes to any length to ensure that its shady dealings remain in the dark. But there’s nothing its selective censors can do to erase the human cost of blowback.

Demonizing Ghaddafi !

2011-09-03T10:38:00.003+02:00

Diana Johnstone is the author of “Fools Crusade” and here is an article from her in which I think the case of Lybia is being shown to us unfiltered. It ought to scare us to realize how the world has developed since the fall of the Soviet Union or better said in the absence of a bi polar world.
She wrote;
“The current ideology to justify aggressive war is based on a dogmatic dichotomy between Democracy and Dictators. The pro-war party in the West has been shifting the center of international law and order from the United Nations to a more exclusive club of “democracies” which alone have “legitimacy”. The core of this club is the English-speaking world, plus Israel, the European Union, and Japan. This “International Community” of democracies is understood to possess the unique moral right to decide when the leader of any country outside their charmed circle may be denounced as a “dictator” and overthrown with the help of a NATO bombing campaign.
This ideology assumes that Democracies respect human rights, whereas dictators by definition are criminals who systematically violate human rights and may be contemplating “genocide against their own people”. Certain details, such as the fact that the United States has the largest prison population in the world in both absolute and relative terms, and uses convicts for cheap labor in the arms industry, are not allowed to interfere with this dualistic world view.
The mainstream media maintain this dichotomy by sustained bias in their coverage of countries labeled “dictatorships” – which may include some countries whose leaders are in fact elected, such as Venezuela, Russia, Serbia under Milosevic, Belarus, but who attempt to follow policies contrary to the dictates of the self-designated “International Community”. Not all such countries may actually by attacked militarily, but the image created will make military attack easily justifiable if and when the time comes.

Selective reporting reduces the country to its Dictator and a minority of “pro-democracy protesters”. The Dictator is portrayed as a criminal, with no virtues that could possibly justify any popular support within his own country.

The case of Libya illustrates the way this works. Decades of one-sided media coverage firmly established Libyan leader Moammer Gaddafi as an insane criminal. To the Western public whose only knowledge of Libya came from Western media reports, it would seem obvious that the Libyan people must unanimously want to get rid of such a leader.
It is obvious that there are people in Libya who hate Gaddafi and want to get rid of him. What is not obvious is exactly what they want to put in his place and just how representative they really are of the population as a whole.
In the West, the main reason to hate Gaddafi in recent years has been the Lockerbie bombing. For two decades, the allegation that the Libyan leader was responsible for the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, has been kept in the public eye by mainstream media.
Last February, leaders of the emerging rebellion in Libya gave interviews with Western media claiming to have documentary proof that Gaddafi ordered the terrorist attack that killed 270 people. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, former Libyan justice minister who heads the “National Transitional Council” in Benghazi told The Daily Telegraph that: “The orders were given by Gaddafi himself”.
Few in the West are likely to object that if the NTC leaders really possess such proof , they have been complicit in the crime for decades. Nor will Western media raise the question as to why the wily Gaddafi would leave “documentary proof” of orders to commit a terrorist act lying around for 23 years.
These claims serve to bond the NTC leaders with the Western powers, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, and to suggest a community of legality between them against “the criminal Gaddafi”. They help build the fiction of “legitimate, representative leaders of the Libyan people” whose views of human rights, democracy and the misdeeds of the evil dictator Gaddafi coincide with Western attitudes, as expressed by Western politicians and media.
My visit to Libya in January 2007, to attend an international conference on the International Criminal Court, gave me the opportunity to hold private conversations with a number of well-educated Libyans who clearly knew a lot more about the West than the West knew about them. I was particularly interested in getting the take of unofficial Libyan citizens on two issues that at the time dominated Western perception of Libya: Lockerbie and the affair of the Bulgarian nurses. I should mention that I never got near Gaddafi, and the conference was sponsored by academics who held diverse opinions on important issues, often unlike those of the Leader, which didn’t seem to bother anyone. But on the issue of Lockerbie, I discovered two general widespread points of agreement.
On the one hand, nobody believed that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. It was taken for granted that Libya had been unfairly accused for political reasons.
On the other hand, it was clear that the sanctions imposed by the West to punish Libya for its alleged guilt had caused hardship and discontent. The power of the West both to impose sanctions and to project its images amounts to serious interference in the domestic politics of targeted countries, since very many people, especially the young, want to live in a “normal” country and may resent leaders who cause them to be treated as pariahs by the West. Therefore, it was understood that Gaddafi had finally given in to Western pressure to accept responsibility – but not guilt – for Lockerbie merely in order to get the unpopular sanctions lifted. The fact that he agreed to turn over two Libyan citizens to a Western court to be tried for the crime and to pay over two billion dollars of compensation to the victims was explicitly not an admission of guilt, but rather a response to blackmail by Great Powers in order to normalize relations and improve daily life.
This did not surprise me, since over the years I had read a lot about the Lockerbie case. Indeed, a great deal has been written exposing the weakness of the prosecution’s case, based on a totally implausible scenario (a bomb to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was allegedly sent via airports in Malta, Frankfurt and London), technical “evidence” that had been tampered with by CIA agents, and a witness who was richly rewarded for testimony which did not fit the facts. All this has been told many times, for instance Andrew Cockburn in the CounterPunch newsletter, or the London Review of Books, “The Framing of al-Megrahi” by British lawyer Gareth Peirce. But the fact that the case has been repeatedly exposed by careful analysis as a probable frame-up has not made the slightest impression on mainstream media and politicians who continue to blast Gaddafi as the monster who ordered the Lockerbie massacre.
One may add that at the time of the event in 1988, it was widely assumed that Iran had ordered the attack in retaliation for U.S. downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf. When the United States, switching from its anti-Iran alliance with Iraq to war against Saddam Hussein, decided to accuse Libya instead, no motive was ever produced. But when a “dictator” has been stigmatized as a monster, no motive is needed. He just did it because that is the sort of thing evil dictators are supposed to do.
The two accused Libyan airline employees working in Malta had been put on trial in 2000 by three Scottish judges without a jury in a specially built court in the Netherlands. One of the Libyans was acquitted and the other, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The United Nations observer at this peculiar trial, Hans Köchler, called the guilty verdict “incomprehensible”, “arbitrary, even irrational” and noted “an air of international power politics” surrounding the proceedings.
On November 12, 2006, the Glasgow Sunday Herald quoted top State Department legal advisor Michael Scharf, who was the counsel to the US counter-terrorism bureau when the two Libyans were indicted for the bombing, as calling the case “so full of holes it was like Swiss cheese” and said it should never have gone to trial. He claimed the CIA and FBI had assured State Department officials there was an “iron-clad” case against the two Libyans, but that in reality the intelligence agencies knew well in advance of the trial that their star witness was “a liar”. But Great Powers can’t back down. Their sacred “credibility” is at stake. In short, they must keep lying to preserve the illusion of infallibility.
At the time I was in Tripoli, the defense team of the convicted Libyan was trying to appeal the conviction to a higher court. I was able to call on one of the lawyers on Megrahi’s defense team. I spent a long time in her office, trying to overcome her reluctance to speak about the case. Finally, she agreed to talk to me when I promised to keep our conversation to myself, so as not to risk harming the appeal. By now, the circumstances have changed drastically.
Here, briefly, is what she told me.
The Scottish judges were under enormous pressure to convict the two Libyans. After all, for years their guilt had been trumpeted by the United States demanding that they be “brought to justice”. A special court had been set up with the obvious purpose of convicting them. Yet the evidence which would merit conviction in a proper Scottish court was simply not there. The best the judges dared to do was to acquit one of the defendants and pass along the responsibility for acquitting the other to a higher court. But to the dismay of the Libyan defense team, the designated court of appeals evaded the dangerous issue by disqualifying itself. So now an appeal was being prepared for another high court, complete with new evidence further discrediting the prosecution case.
And in fact, five months later, on June 28, 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which had been investigating the case since 2003, recommended that Abdel Basset al-Megrahi be granted a second appeal against his conviction. The Commission said it had uncovered six separate grounds for considering that the conviction may have been an injustice. The announcement caused a sensation in the small circles following the affair. It seemed that Scottish justice was courageous enough to assert itself and allow hearings that would expose the CIA frame-up.
That sort of thing may happen in movies, but the real world is something else.
What happened after that helped set the stage for the NATO attack on Libya this year.
Time passed. It was two years later, in April 2009, that the appeal finally was due to get underway. But meanwhile, behind the scenes, secret bargaining was going on, amid leaks and rumors.
On August 21, 2009, on grounds that he was suffering from terminal cancer, Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was released from prison in Scotland by the Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill and allowed to “go home to die”.
Now, it so happens that in 2007, Tony Blair went to Libya to negotiate a British-Libyan agreement with Gaddafi covering law, extradition and prisoner transfer. Under this Prisoner Transfer Agreement, Libyan authorities asked for Megrahi to be sent home due to his illness.
The catch was that the Prisoner Transfer Agreement could be applied only when no legal proceedings were outstanding. So in order to benefit from it, Megrahi had to drop his appeal.
The matter is confused by the fact that he was formally released on “compassionate” grounds. One way or another, the deal was clear: al-Megrahi could go home, but the appeal was dead. Hans Kochler, UN-appointed special observer to the Lockerbie trial, thought Megrahi may have been subjected to “morally outrageous” blackmail to abandon his appeal against his will.
The sordid aspect of this bargain is that it deprived Megrahi of the right to clear his name, while leaving the CIA frame-up officially unexposed. There was nothing to counter the chorus of protestations from Hillary Clinton on down denouncing Scotland for having “freed the Lockerbie bomber”. Two years later, news that Megrahi has failed to die has elicited further indignation from Western media, who see this as proof that the UK had “sold the Lockerbie bomber for Libyan oil”. Naturally, the impression must be conveyed that the sly Libyan dictator tricked the naïve but greedy Brits into selling out their principles for petroleum.
But it is just as likely that it was the naïve Libyan dictator who was tricked by the unscrupulous British into thinking he had made a “gentleman’s agreement”. Rather than pursue an appeal which risked causing acute embarrassment to Western authorities, Megrahi could be released and the matter forgotten. The popular rejoicing at Megrahi’s return home was muted in Libya, but Western media pretended to be scandalized that a convicted mass murderer received a hero’s welcome. In reality, he was welcomed home discreetly as an innocent man who had been unjustly convicted, not as a mass murderer. And whenever he has been able to make himself heard, he has reiterated his desire to clear his name.

The other subject I asked about while I was in Tripoli in 2007 was the plight of the Bulgarian nurses. In 2004, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor working in a Benghazi hospital were sentenced to death for allegedly having infected children with the HIV virus. Everyone in the West, myself included, assumed this was an outrageous injustice. When I raised the issue with highly Westernized, liberal Libyan intellectuals, I fully expected to hear strong criticism of the dictator for persecuting defenseless health workers. I was quite surprised when the reaction was somewhat different.
“Of course they are innocent”, I said.
The gentleman with whom I was talking, whom I could loosely describe as anti-Gaddafi, shook his head. “That’s not so clear”, he replied. And so I began to learn what was explained a few months later by Harriet Washington in a New York Times column, namely that:
“The evidence against the Bulgarian medical team, like H.I.V.-contaminated vials discovered in their apartments, has seemed to Westerners preposterous. But to dismiss the Libyan accusations of medical malfeasance out of hand means losing an opportunity to understand why a dangerous suspicion of medicine is so widespread in Africa.
“Africa has harbored a number of high-profile Western medical miscreants who have intentionally administered deadly agents under the guise of providing health care or conducting research.”
My conversations in Libya did not convince me that the Bulgarian health workers were guilty, but they did give me a new insight into the Libyan viewpoint. On the African continent, it was easy for even highly rational people to believe that foreign health workers might have been paid to infect children, either for experimental purposes or to “destabilize” the public health system. Secondly, it became clear that this was not a case of “the dictator Gaddafi” persecuting innocents. The arrest, alleged torture and conviction of the Bulgarian nurses were carried out by authorities in Benghazi. Indeed, last March 11, the day after France recognized the rebel National Transitional Council as the “sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people”, Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov complained to a European summit in Brussels that key members of that council in Benghazi “are the people who tortured the Bulgarian medics for eight years and that this cost us nearly $60 million” in reparations to the infected children and their families.
In January 2007, I was also assured by people in Tripoli that the death sentence against the nurses would never be carried out. This was true. In August of that same year, the medical workers were freed by the Gaddafi family and allowed to go home to Bulgaria after a much publicized trip to Libya by President Sarkozy’s wife at the time, Cecilia. This liberation was presented as a final reconciliation between Gaddafi’s Libya and Europe.
I abstained from writing about this for years, because I feel I do not know enough about Libya. But now I see others, who know even less, loudly advocating NATO support to rebels in a civil war whose real motives and consequences are obscure.
My first conclusion is to point out that just because a country is not a Western-style democracy does not mean that everything that happens there is “dictated” by a “dictator”. The term “dictator” serves to comfort the laziness of media and politicians who do not care to bother to investigate the complexities of an unfamiliar society.
My second and final conclusion is that we in the West have neither the right nor the ability to “fix” those unfamiliar societies such as Libya which we dismiss as “dictatorships”. As the financial crisis threatens to bring living standards in much of the West below what they were in Gaddafi’s Libya before NATO intervened there, our Western “democracy” is in danger of being gradually reduced to a mere ideological excuse to attack, ravage and pillage other people’s countries.”

The Rajavi Cult !

2011-08-19T15:57:00.002+02:00

Elizabeth Rubin wrote :
A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about?
I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran.
Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I visited them shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Mr. Dean’s speech stunned me. But then came Rudolph W. Giuliani saying virtually the same thing. At a conference in Paris last December, an emotional Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Rajavi, “These are the most important yearnings of the human soul that you support, and for your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just simply a disgrace.” I thought I was watching The Onion News Network. Did Mr. Giuliani know whom he was talking about?
Evidently not. In fact, an unlikely chorus of the group’s backers — some of whom have received speaking fees, others of whom are inspired by their conviction that the Iranian government must fall at any cost — have gathered around Mujahedeen Khalq at conferences in capitals across the globe.
This group of luminaries includes two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, Gens. Hugh H. Shelton and Peter Pace; Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander; Gen. James L. Jones, who was President Obama’s national security adviser; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the former intelligence officials Dennis C. Blair and Michael V. Hayden; the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; the former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

Indeed, the Rajavis and Mujahedeen Khalq are spending millions in an attempt to persuade the Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to take them off the national list of terrorist groups, where the group was listed in 1997. Delisting the group would enable it to lobby Congress for support in the same way that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 allowed the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi to do.
Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us.
When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks, busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. One said she had been suicidal in Iran until she found Ms. Rajavi on the Internet.

At Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, 3,400 members of the militant group reside in total isolation on a 14-square-mile tract of harsh desert land. Access to the Internet, phones and information about the outside world is prohibited. Posters of Ms. Rajavi and her smiling green eyes abound. Meanwhile, she lives in luxury in France; her husband has remained in hiding since the United States occupied Iraq in 2003.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the group served as Mr. Hussein’s own private militia opposing the theocratic government in Tehran. For two decades, he gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases along the border with Iran. In return, the Rajavis pledged their fealty.
In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds.
Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Many followers escaped in disgust.
So the Rajavis then began preying on Iranian refugees and asylum seekers in Europe to fill their ranks. The Rajavis promise them salaries, marriage, family, freedom and a great cause — fighting the Iranian government. Then the unwitting youths arrive in Iraq.
What is most disturbing is how the group treats its members. After the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rajavi orchestrated an ill-planned offensive, deploying thousands of young men and women into Iran on a mass martyrdom operation. Instead of capturing Iran, as they believed they would, thousands of them were slaughtered, including parents, husbands and wives of those I met in Iraq in 2003.
After my visit, I met and spoke to men and women who had escaped from the group’s clutches. Many had to be deprogrammed. They recounted how people were locked up if they disagreed with the leadership or tried to escape; some were even killed.
Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden. From the time they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and thoughts.
If a man was turned on by the scent of a woman or a whiff of perfume, he had to confess. Members had to attend weekly ideological cleansings in which they publicly confessed their sexual desires. Members were even forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy to ensure that all their energy and love would be directed toward Maryam and Massoud.

Mr. Hamilton and Generals Jones and Clark have been paid speakers’ fees by front groups for Mujahedeen Khalq and have spoken in support of the group in public conferences. They claimed ignorance of how the group treated its members.
“I don’t know a lot about the group,” Mr. Hamilton told me over the phone last week. But in 1994, when he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Hamilton received a report describing the group as a violent cult with a distinct ideology synthesizing Marxism and messianic Shiism.
At a February conference in Paris, Mr. Dean praised the group’s extraordinary “bill of rights.” And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi: “It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals.” When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the group a totalitarian cult, he replied, “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this.” He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things that I don’t know about,” he said. “Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t know what questions to ask.”
IN fact, a 2004 F.B.I. report on the group detailed a joint investigation by the American and German police, which revealed that the group’s cell in Cologne, Germany, had used money from a complex fraud scheme to buy military equipment. The group used children with multiple identities to claim multiple benefit checks from the German government. Evidence also showed that the group had obtained money in Los Angeles to purchase GPS units to increase the accuracy of planned mortar attacks on Tehran.
It is possible that such plots do not bother General Jones and other supporters of the group. But Iraq will no longer tolerate its presence. Its government wants the Mujahedeen Khalq out of the country by the end of the year. In April, Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf. General Jones and other supporters of the group were outraged.
They are right that we should have compassion for those trapped inside the camp. A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of the group’s members there might have been held against their will. If the group’s American cheerleaders cared for those at the camp half as much as they did for the Rajavis, they would be insisting on private Red Cross visits with each man and woman at Camp Ashraf.
American officials who support the group like to quote the saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By this logic, the group’s opposition to the Tehran theocracy justifies American backing. But there is another saying to consider: “The means are the ends.”
By using the Mujahedeen Khalq to provoke Tehran, we will end up damaging our integrity and reputation, and weaken the legitimate democracy movement within Iran.
As a senior State Department official told me, “They are the best financed and organized, but they are so despised inside Iran that they have no traction.” Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran.

“They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Mujahedeen Khalq’s status on the terrorist list is under review. “They are so unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform.”
If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy movement.
Recent history has shown that the United States often ends up misguidedly supporting not only the wrong exile groups in the Middle East, but the least relevant ones. We cannot afford to be so naïve or misguided again.

Targeting Iran again !

2011-08-13T11:15:00.004+02:00

In a heated exchange with Ron Paul at the Republican debate in Iowa, Rick Santorum defended his sponsorship of sanctions against Iran as well as general U.S. belligerence toward that country.
This devoutly anti-freedom politician made a number of claims against Iran that are very misleading or just flat out wrong. Ron had only 30 seconds to respond, and did a great job, but there is more to say.
First, Santorum says Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. Ron points out that the bad blood between Americans and Iranians began in 1953, when a CIA coup installed the Shah. Indeed, we should remember that before 1953, the Iranians tended to look very warmly upon the Americans, who, unlike the British, had left the Iranians alone. Their democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, partly for his popularity due to his resistance to British corporate imperialism, was even Time Magazine‘s Man of the Year in 1951.

Not only did the U.S. install the Shah two years later; the CIA taught his secret police force, Savak, how to torture. Savak went on to imprison and torture tens of thousands of political prisoners, adopting such practices of nearly unfathomable brutality as using broken glass and boiling water on subjects’ rectums, mutilating women’s breasts, and cooking victims alive.
After years of being ruled by this U.S.-backed regime, the Iranians overthrew the Shah and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept the nation. But, despite what the propagandists say, Iranians still did not hate Americans for our freedom — only for our government’s foreign policy. All the attempts to get Iranians angry at Americans for our culture or modernity failed, Michael Scheuer, former CIA counterterrorism expert, points out.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration illegally, in direct defiance of Congress, sold weapons to the same Iranian extremists that we are now supposed to think have always been America’s #1 enemy. Meanwhile, the same U.S. administration supported Saddam Hussein’s aggressive invasion of Iran. Iran has never conducted an outright invasion of another nation in over 200 years. It is a much more peaceful nation internationally than the United States. Its one major war in recent years was defensive, against an America-backed invasion by a regime whose atrocities in that very war were later used as partial justification for America’s aggressive invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And that war, the one with Iraq that has gone on for over eight years, greatly empowered the theocratic Iranian state as has nothing else in recent memory. The Iranians were given a huge boost in influence over the new Shiite government in Baghdad, put in place by this supposed American war for democracy. Brutal shariah law resembling that of Iran became imposed. Then, despite the freedom dominoes that were supposed to fall thanks to the Iraq war, Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005. Nothing has advanced the interests of the Iranian extremists more than the United States of America. Even so, Ahmadinejad has since been demonized, his bizarre rants taken out of context, and implied to have far more power over Iranian military policy than he actually does.
Second, Santorum claims that Iran has killed more Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan than have the people of those countries. This accusation of significant Iranian guilt behind the insurgent resistance to the U.S. presence has been a constant theme of U.S. propaganda throughout the occupation of Iraq, but has never been demonstrated convincingly. It is even more difficult to believe now. As Jason Ditz explains, the allegations “don’t appear to make a lot of sense at this point, with the Iraqi coalition government firmly in the control of Shi’ite religious factions and the nation on good terms with Iran. There seems little to gain from destablizing the situation.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran, likely including the support of some unsavory terrorists and suicide bombers intent on destabilizing the nation.
Third, Santorum argues that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. This is simply laughable. Iran has no nuclear weapons, as far as anyone can tell, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the U.S. intelligence community, Iran hasn’t been seeking such weapons for at least eight years.
Ron Paul is correct that American belligerence toward Iran is a major concern as it could easily be a precursor to war. He is also correct, and bold to say it, when he argues that these conservatives supporting sanctions against countries like Iran (or Cuba) are fake free-traders. In fact, the very worst trade restrictions are those waged in a militarist manner or with coercive diplomacy as the goal. U.S. sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, an atrocity that contributed to the hatred that led to 9/11. Blockades greatly exacerbated civilian deaths in World War I and helped bring about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If goods don’t cross borders, warned Bastiat, soldiers will. Those playing with sanctions are playing with fire.
The mainstream Republicans’ belligerence toward Iran should frighten anyone who is hoping for some electoral reprieve from the Obama administration but remembers the horrors of the Bush years, and what was promised by prospective future Republican presidents. John McCain infamously sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran,” in the rhythm of the classic Beach Boys tune, forever marking himself as someone who simply couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear launch codes. If there was one reason for any reasonable American — including conservatives — to prefer Obama in 2008, despite his promises for domestic socialism and his own weaknesses on foreign policy, it was the neocons’ obsessive hatred toward Iran that persisted and grew more feverish by the day during the Bush years. Many of them sought to destroy that country, and they seem to still want to do so. Obama has been, as Ron Paul indicates, far too belligerent, such as in his saber rattling at Iran after the non-event concerning the peaceful nuclear facility at Qom, which Iran declared according to its responsibilities under international law, despite the president’s claims that the nation was caught red-handed doing something illicit. (by Anthony Gregory, August 13, 2011)

A clip of it..

The legend of Lillith !

2011-08-08T21:09:00.004+02:00

The occasional readings I have of different religons has never ceased to surprise me. The latest was that of a Jewish text about Adam & Eve and the belief that Adam to have had a first wife “lillith” . Lillith supposedly left Adam and the Garden for he seemed too oppresive and disrespectful to her and their equality. There are many legends regarding her , I try and bring them here to your attention. Before we get to the actual topic ,I would like to emphasize on the theory that the story of “Lillith” not to be of Jewish origins but a classic take over or at least influence through the liberation of Jews by the Persians in Babylon from well established and known Persian mythology sources. Nevertheless ,the best text I found, which coveres and simplifies it all is as follows:

"You could have heard Lilith is a model for Oppressed Womanhood. You could have heard she's a succubus who gives men wet dreams. You could have heard that she's a demoness who murders babies. You could have heard that she's a goddess, the wife of Death. On the one hand there are all these (and likely other) interpretations. On the other hand there are the legends themselves, which are also quite varied, from Jewish folklore. Let's start with a paraphrase of the most familiar legend, which dates to medieval times, from the controversial work known as the Alphabet of Ben Sirah, including a few of our own interjections:
When God created Adam, he was lonely, so God created Lilith from the same dust from which Adam was molded. But they quarrelled; Adam [the proverbial domineering male] wished to rule over Lilith. But Lilith [a militant feminist] was also proud and willful, claiming equality with Adam because she was created from the same dust. She left Adam and fled the Garden. God sent three angels in pursuit of Lilith. They caught her and ordered her to return to Adam. She refused, and said that she would henceforth weaken and kill little children, infants and babes. The angels overpowered her, and she promised that if the mother hung an amulet over the baby bearing the names of the three angels, she would stay away from that home. So they let her go, and God created Eve to be Adam's mate [created from Adam's rib, so that she couldn't claim equality]. And ever since, Lilith flies around the world, howling her hatred of mankind through the night, and vowing vengeance because of the shabby treatment she had received from Adam. She is also called "The Howling One."
You can see how this legend could lead to various interpretations, depending on whether you think she is noble (in rebelling against male domination) or evil (in vowing vengeance against innocent babies.) But where does this legend come from? The author of Ben Sirah basically wove together three separate threads from centuries earlier works, because Lilith is a very ancient legend. Let's start with the Bible as primary source material. Genesis of course mentions Adam and Eve, but -- please note -- doesn't mention Lilith. The idea of Lilith as a "prior first woman" before Eve arises much later. The only reference to Lilith in the Bible (Old or New Testaments) is Isaiah 34:14, probably written around 540 BC; it's a description of desolation, jackals and ravens among nettles and briers, etc.: "Goat demons shall greet each other; there too the lilith will repose." Most of the other creatures referenced in this poetry cannot be positively identified. The KJV, following the Vulgate, translates "the lilith" as "the night demon," confusing the lili- with the Hebrew word for night. But presumably Isaiah meant some sort of demon.

The notion of a lilith as a demon is probably Assyrian (say around 700 BC), incorporated into Isaiah by way of the ancient Israelite contacts with the mythologies of Babylonia and Chaldea. The Assyrians had three female demons, Lilit, Lilu,and Ardat Lilit. There's little doubt that the Hebrew lilith-demon mentioned in Isaiah was a folkloric adaptation of the Assyrian demons. Several hundred years after Isaiah, we find Talmudic writings that describe Lilith (now as a named demon, rather than a broad category) as an irresistibly seductive she-demon with long hair (presumably worn loose, a sure sign of wantonness) and wings. Terey wants us to be sure to say that she's a succubus. She seduces unwary men, then savagely kills the children she bears for them. From this, she becomes the demon responsible for the death of babies. In ancient times, one needed to protect against such demons; today, we blame other factors for the death of infants. To guard against Lilith, superstitious Jews would hang four amulets, one on the wall of each room of a newborn babe, with the inscription "Lilith - abi!" ["Lilith - begone!"] which some think is the origin, much later, of the English word "lullaby."
OK, that's legend one: a she-demon who kills babies.
Legend two: early rabbinic writings about Adam and Eve. There are rabbinic midrashim, stories filling in the gaps in the text, that tell of Adam and Eve after they leave the garden. Adam is angry with Eve for causing so much trouble, so he leaves her, and is beset by demons (called "lilith"; the name is still a generic category of demon). A particular lilith called Penzai seduces Adam and becomes pregnant. Got it? So that legend associates a lilith with Adam.
Legend three: an early midrash that puzzles about why Eve is created from a rib of Adam, why not created equally with him? The midrash suggests the creation of a prior "first woman" (unnamed) who doesn't work out as a fitting companion for Adam. OK, so around a thousand years later (give or take a few centuries), theAlphabet of Ben Sira creates the story we started with, tying together all three legends, merging (1) Lilith the child-slaying night-demon story with (2) Penzai the lilith who seduces Adam with (3) the "prior first woman" story. This mingling of legends provided a good Jewish context for the ancient custom of making the Lilith amulets (thus exonerating the custom from the taint of superstition or witchcraft.) That's why the legend of Lilith as Adam's first wife doesn't emerge until medieval times, although the strands of the story are much earlier.

The Zohar, the great book of Jewish mysticism from the 12th Century, adds yet another dimension. The Zohar generally doesn't mention Lilith by name, but refers to her as the wife of Samael, the Angel of Death ... and sometimes as the wife of Satan. She sleeps with men, causing wet dreams, and she collects semen from the marriage bed. (Flowing semen is a symbol of life, the white fluid, contrasted with flowing blood as a symbol of death, the red fluid, so the demoness who kills children collecting semen is symbolically very neat.)
So that's the legend(s) and their origin(s). A little confusing, but demonology is not an exact science. Now, a brief footnote in Modern Times. You can imagine that modern feminists would latch on to the rabbinic story of punishment for resisting male domination, and use Lilith as a symbol. It's a two-edged symbol, of course, since Lilith as a demon who destroys newborns pre-dates the medieval explanation of Lilith as a rebellious wife. However, the modern use of Lilith as a symbol of oppressed womanhood is quite strong.”

Still demonizing Iran !

2011-08-05T10:01:00.004+02:00

The Diplomat wrote “It’s now widely accepted – and lamented – that US President Barack Obama failed dismally in attempting to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Defeated by Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, and by Israel’s friends in the United States – lobbyists, lawmakers and neo-conservatives – the president simply threw in the towel.
What is less well understood is that Obama was also defeated in another major area of foreign policy – relations with Iran. When he came to office he vowed to ‘engage’ with the Islamic Republic, but this admirable objective was soon supplanted by a policy of threats, sanctions and intimidation aimed at isolating Iran, subverting its economy and overthrowing its regime. Israel and its friends led the campaign against Iran, demonizing it as a threat to all mankind, and forcing the United States to follow suit. Israel has repeatedly, and very publicly, threatened to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, and has done its best to drag the United States into war against it, in much the same way as pro-Israeli neo-conservatives at the Pentagon were alleged to have manipulated intelligence to push the United States into war against Iraq in 2003, with catastrophic consequences.
Why did they do it? Because they feared that, having survived the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq might just possibly pose a threat to Israel. It had to be destroyed. Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, was foolish enough to tag along. The war totally discredited him.
The neo-cons’ strategic fantasy wasn’t just to use American power to smash Iraq. Once Saddam had been dealt with, they are said to have wanted to use the US military again and again to ‘reform’ Syria, Hizbollah, Iran, the Palestinians and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Having brushed the Iraqi fiasco under the carpet, Israel and its friends are now doing it again. In recent weeks there has been a flurry of reports that Israel was planning to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities this September – a bluff clearly intended to pressure the United States into taking ever tougher measures against Iran so as to make it unnecessary for Israel to attack.

In addition to such a transparent propaganda ploy, Israel is believed by many over the past two years to have been behind the murder of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists – two were killed and one was seriously injured last year, and a fourth was killed last month.
Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear programme has been attacked through the introduction of the Stuxnet virus at its nuclear facilities. Not surprisingly, Tehran now views the United States and its Israeli ally as one and the same enemy.
Assassinations and other acts of state terrorism are short-term expedients that usually end up being paid for dearly. Countries have long memories. Hate isn’t easily expunged. The United States, and to a lesser extent Britain, are still paying for their clandestine overthrow in 1953 of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister, whose ‘crime’ was to seek to protect Iran’s oil from imperialist predators.
Why has Netanyahu chosen to portray Iran’s nuclear programme as the gravest threat to the survival of the Jewish people since Hitler? He must know that this is pure fantasy. Ehud Barak, his defence minister, has himself admitted that Iran poses no ‘existential threat’ to Israel. With its own vast nuclear arsenal, Israel has ample means to deter any attack.
But a nuclear Iran – if it ever came to that – would indeed pose a different sort of challenge to Israel: it would not threaten its existence, but it would curtail its freedom to strike its neighbours at will. Israel has always sought to prevent any of its neighbours acquiring a deterrent capability. It wants to be the uncontested military power from Tehran to Casablanca. Hence the hysteria it has sought to generate over Iran’s nuclear programme and over Hizbollah’s rockets.
In recent weeks, the troubles in Syria have encouraged Israel and its friends to seek to disrupt, and if possible destroy, the Tehran-Damascus-Hizbollah axis that has challenged the regional hegemony of Israel and the United States. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has been particularly active in rousing opinion against all three members of the axis. To quote a single example among many, in an overheated article in Foreign Affairs last month, Matthew Levitt described Hizbollah as one of the largest and most sophisticated criminal operations in the world.
The ‘crime’ of this Lebanese resistance movement was to have forced Israel out of South Lebanon after an 18-year occupation (1982-2000) and to have built up a minimal capability to deter future Israeli aggressions, such as its invasion in 2006, which is estimated to have killed 1,600 Lebanese.

The United States has already paid dearly – in men, treasure, and reputation – for its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It remains trapped in the AfPak theatre of war. It must surely know that there can be no settlement in Afghanistan without Iran’s support. Simply glancing at a map should be enough to confirm this.
But the relentless demonising of Iran goes on. Most recently, David S. Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism at the US Treasury, made the excitable accusation that ‘Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today.’ Without advancing a scrap of evidence, Cohen alleged that Tehran had a ‘secret deal’ with al-Qaeda to use Iranian territory to transport money and men to the war in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This approach is eerily like the one the neo-cons took against Saddam Hussein to justify the 2003 invasion.
Instead of such propaganda, the United States would be better advised to listen to Turkey and Brazil. Having approached Iran with respect and understanding, these two powers concluded a deal in May last year whereby most of Iran’s low-enriched uranium would have been swapped for fuel for Tehran’s research reactor. Had the United States conceded Iran’s right to develop a peaceful nuclear programme, as allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the deal could have provided the basis for a global settlement.

Obama rashly dismissed this highly promising approach. Instead, yielding to his ill-intentioned advisers, he pressed for a new round of Security Council sanctions against Iran. But by making an enemy of Iran, he has simply increased the bill the United States will eventually have to pay – in Afghanistan, and no doubt in Iraq and elsewhere as well.”

Two years on !

2011-08-04T17:51:00.005+02:00

A thorough look at the death of Neda Agha Soltan. Watch and make your own thoughts.
Unfortunately the last 3 parts have no English subtitle, should I come across them I will replace it.

Murdoch’s News Corp.

2011-07-23T15:50:00.002+02:00

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split to Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. The transparency watchdog said Tuesday that Democrats received 51 percent of News Corp.'s contributions, while Republicans received 49 percent. News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox News, The Sun and The Sunday Times among others. The news company is currently under scrutiny in both the U.S.and in the UK over allegations its now-closed subsidiary News of the World hacked into voice mail accounts and bribed public officials.

"Obama being listed as the company's top recipient might surprise some people because of its highly publicized involvement with his political rivals, like Sarah Palin who was the vice presidential candidate in 2008 and reportedly still under contract with Murdoch-owned Fox News as a paid commentator," wrote Sunlight's Ryan Sibley. Sibley said News Corp. has spent $8.2 million since 1997 lobbying on issues such as net neutrality and privacy and claims that the top recipients from the firm's political action committee (PAC), News America Holdings, in the 2009-10 election cycle were Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). Moreover, according to the reports from the Sunlight Foundation, the top recipients of contributions from the company, its employees, and their families since 1989 are all Democrats.

In a Tuesday blog post, the organization argued that the political influence of the company and its CEO, Rupert Murdoch, extends around the world, affecting the U.S. as Murdoch is said to have close ties with Democrats and Republican alike. "It's been reported that Murdoch has close, and sometimes inappropriate, relationships with conservative politicians in the [United Kingdom]," wrote Sunlight reporter Ryan Sibley. "It's also commonly believed that he has close ties to what we consider conservative politicians here in the U.S. as well, but campaign-finance records suggest he has ties to both sides of the aisle." Obama raked in $368,669 from News Corporation-affiliated sources, according to the foundation, while the reports also claim that the top three recipients are former Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, at $298,525; and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at $157,901. Firmly denying the foundation's allegations, Obama for America, the president's re-election campaign organization, pointed out it does not accept PAC donations and a campaign spokesman was quick to dismiss the suggestion that Obama has close ties to News Corporation. "Access to a remote control would disprove this absurd suggestion," said spokesman Ben LaBolt. "We don't accept money from PACs and haven't accepted a dime from News Corp's PAC. We had 3.95 million donors to the campaign in 2008." (thanks to Anissa Haddidi)

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Rogue state USA !

2011-07-21T11:15:00.002+02:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was at it again last week. She was in Turkey attending a NATO gathering dealing with what to do about the succession in Libya, based on the perhaps erroneous assumption that Muammar Gadhafi is on his way out. Clinton and NATO decided, based on their own admittedly partial view of the situation, that the Gadhafi regime is no longer legitimate and that the rebels who are trying to topple him are now to be regarded as the legal government. The “international recognition” will enable them to use the roughly $30 billion in frozen Libyan government assets, mostly located in American and European banks. Hopefully, things will go better than they did in Iraq back in 2003. Washington sent in a proconsul supported by a host of neocon Myrmidons to make sure things would run smoothly. More than $20 billion of Iraqi state “reconstruction” funds were unfrozen and then went missing after liberation took place. The Iraqi people are still waiting for the electricity to come back on.
Clinton also took some heavy-handed swipes at Syria, making clear that both she and her boss want to see regime change. Three hundred fifty representatives of Syrian dissident groups were perhaps not coincidentally present in Istanbul for a “National Salvation Conference,” so Clinton took the opportunity to denounce President Bashar al-Assad’s government as having “lost legitimacy.” The White House backed up Clinton’s possibly impromptu comment, and over at Foggy Bottom, Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s neoconnish press spokeswoman, made the case more explicitly, denouncing “a Syrian government that continues to beat, imprison, torture, slaughter its own people.”
If Syria sounds like any number of regimes that the United States has quite comfortable relationships with, it should. While it would seem that international conferencing and seeking to overthrow two regimes would make for a busy weekend for even the most peripatetic secretary of state, Hillary also decided to take on her host, Turkey. She lauded Muslim Turkey as a model for the future development of Arab Spring states but then whacked its government for imprisoning journalists. Whoever was briefing her from her staff or from the Embassy evidently neglected to describe how Turkey has a wide open and fairly raucous press that often is very critical of the government. Most of the 60 detained journalists are reported to have close and continuing ties with separatist groups, including the terrorist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Others are believed to be linked to right-wing extremists who have been advocating a military coup to overthrow the civilian government. Turkish sources make clear that there is little doubt that the authorities have quite likely overreacted and used sometimes flimsy evidence to concoct their cases against at least some of the journalists, but the political engagement of many of those arrested might suggest that there is more to the story than meets the eye.
The U.S. media fans the flames and reciprocates by frequently reporting on Washington’s disenchantment with Turkey and the direction it is moving in, but they are really only expressing their own biases, which are generally measured through their consideration of what Israel appears to want. Recently, two American senators have indicated that they will work to derail any planned NATO missile defense deployment in Turkey unless Ankara agrees to share all information with Israel. Perhaps someone should point out to Sens. Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk that Israel is not a member of NATO and is not in any formal alliance, with the United States or anyone else. Which means that the United States would be compelling NATO to participate in the defense of Israel without any apparent reciprocity on the part of Tel Aviv.
In the middle of all the finger pointing, the United States seems to have lost sight of its own national interest. It is true that Turkey did not support the invasion of Iraq, but it was the right decision not to do so. If a few more countries had also said “no,” perhaps the United States would not have killed a couple of hundred thousand people and wasted more than $1 trillion dollars while accomplishing absolutely nothing.

It is true that Turkey has rightly condemned Israeli policies and its occupation of the Palestinian territories, but most of the world would consider that a perfectly legitimate viewpoint. Turkey is also derided for becoming more religious even though most of its people have always been devout, and the open expression of belief is also part of its becoming more democratic. In addition, the mainstream media frequently claims that Ankara is soft on Iran sanctions and aligning culturally and politically with its eastern neighbors. Critics forget that Turkey’s attempts to become part of the European Union have been consistently rejected while the country itself is geographically mostly in Asia and sharing borders and trade relationships with quite a lot of the rest of it, including Iran.
To my mind, Turkey is far too nice to Hillary and to Washington. Rather than be lectured, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan might suggest that Clinton go away and find another bone to chew. If the Middle East is in a catastrophic state, it is precisely because of Washington’s meddling and its perennial tilt toward Israel. Erdogan might note that Turkey’s economy is booming because it takes pains to remain on good terms with everyone, and he might reasonably ask why Washington cannot recognize its own failure to put its house in order. How many congressmen are suggesting that the costs of empire be cut to help pass a federal government budget? Only a handful, while to virtually everyone else in the world watching the spectacle of American impotence on display, the mailed fist and the angry frown of Hillary Clinton are what the United States represents.
What is going on in Syria is another poster child for what is wrong. I have no particular insight into what is occurring in Syria except for my belief that the United States government quite likely knows little about what is taking place and is probably wildly wrong about what the dissidents represent and what they would be likely to do if they were to seize power. There might be a few Patrick Henrys among them ready to go all out for the cause, but I doubt there is a Thomas Jefferson who can pick up the pieces and put Humpty Dumpty back together. Would a destabilized Syria be a precondition for an Israeli attack supported by Washington? You heard it here first.

In the case of Syria, the United States has made plain right from the get-go that it is supporting dissidents through training and provision of technology and infrastructure to enable them to communicate and organize. On July 7, U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford traveled with full ambassadorial entourage to the city of Hama, believed to be a hotbed of resistance to the government. He did so to express his support for the rebels. When he returned to Damascus, an angry crowd, no doubt egged on by the regime, attacked and entered the U.S. Embassy and was eventually driven out of the building by the Marine guards. At the end of it all, it was difficult to discern what the ambassador’s trip was intended to do apart from increase tension. It did produce a tit-for-tat that benefited neither Washington nor Damascus, nor, insofar as can be determined, the rebels or reformers, depending on how one regards them.
The examples of Libya, Syria, and Turkey reveal that the United States persists in thinking that it can lead the world by intimidation rather than by example. One hesitates to construct an analogy, but if the ambassador of an unfriendly country, Venezuela perhaps, were to publicly announce that his country would support separatists in the United States with training and communications equipment and, furthermore, that he would travel to attend an anti-government rally in Texas or Alaska, it would certainly cause considerable heartburn, and I can well imagine President Barack Obama taking aggressive steps to stop the activity. The United States is ever the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, acting out in ways that it denies to others. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are no strangers to the word “hypocrisy” in their dealings all around the world. Yes, it is certainly true that people are protesting and dying in Syria, but it is not our quarrel. It is something that the Syrians themselves will have to sort out.
But perhaps there is a more fundamental question. Who is Hillary Clinton to pronounce on the legitimacy of any foreign government? Victoria Nuland’s condemnation of Syria cites “beating, imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering,” but doesn’t Washington do all of that and more? Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA secret prisons, and Predator drone strikes surely tell the tale. No other government claims that it has the right to kill its own citizens anywhere in the world based on secret evidence. Isn’t it time for Washington to recognize that it has become a rogue state and for Hillary to come home, sit down, and stop talking? (Thanks to P.Giraldi.)

Mir Mahna

2011-07-15T10:40:00.008+02:00

In the mid 1700's an Iranian Amir took on the military might of Dutch colonials occupying Iran's Kharg Island, capturing their fort and liberating the southern Iranian cities from colonial rule. This Amir, called Mir Mahna, is an Iranian national hero.
And now he's a video game hero as well.
Shipping this week to local stores courtesy of Iranian developer ESPRIS Studio in collaboration with the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games, Mir Mahna is the first Iran-produced computer game honoring the life of a contemporary Iranian hero. It's Iran's equivalent of Medal of Honor, and perhaps it's also a way to spread the rich historical legacy and culture of Iran to gamers around the globe.
The story of Mir Mahna is perfect for a video game treatment.
In the mid-1700's the Persian Gulf was a brewing storm. Tension between the colonial forces of The Netherlands and Britain were steadily rising as both competed for influence in the region. It was during the height of this tension that the Dutch established a trading post and fort on Kharg Island, a strategically sound location positioned some 16 miles off the coast of Iran.
The true importance of Kharg to Iran wouldn't be evident until some two hundred years later. Soon after World War I, great quantities of oil were discovered in the Persian Gulf, and Kharg became not only the world's largest offshore crude oil installation, but the principal sea terminal for Iranian oil as well. Iran's been slowly rebuilding the facilities after they were damaged in the 80's Iran-Iraq War. The island remains a location of paramount importance to the country to this day.
But Mir Mahna didn't fight for the oil hidden beneath the waves surrounding Kharg Island. He waged his battles so that the island that belonged to his people would belong to them once again. The Dutch Empire established its presence on Kharg in 1753. In 1766 Mir Mahna and his forces took the fort and ejected the colonials, freeing the region from foreign rule.
And so Mir Mahna is considered one of Iran's great national heroes. His life and battles have been famously chronicled in the "On the Red Marine Roads" books by Iranian writer Nader Ebrahimi. It is Ebrahimi's fictionalized version of the Amir's life that serves as the foundation for the Mir Mahna game.

It took a team of twenty more than two years to complete Mir Mahna, marrying traditional Iranian music with modern game development techniques, including motion capture. The end result is a first-person shooter that casts players in the role of members of Mir Mahna's army, taking on the Dutch with muskets, throwing knives, and cannons. It's no Battlefield 1766, but it certainly looks capable of readily engaging fans of the genre.

But the impact of Mir Mahna extends well beyond simple entertainment. During a ceremony honoring the game's creators earlier this year, Iran's Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini stressed the importance of computer games to the country's culture. "The inspiration of the computer game from national figures is a very auspicious event. It is necessary for us to introduce our heroes and luminaries to new generations."

In fact, Mir Mahna's creators believe the game could reach beyond the borders of Iran, introducing the culture of the country to the world at large. In an age where much of the world perceives the Middle East as a place to which troops are deployed and from which oil comes, any product with the power to provide a deeper understanding of Iran to other cultures is a welcome one.

And what better teaching platform than a video game? The interactive and immersive nature of games give them the power to break down cultural barriers far more readily that books or television. Experiencing an important moment in the history of Iran from the perspective of a warrior that was directly involved in the conflict can form a much stronger connection to the events than simply watching or reading someone else's story.

Perhaps Mir Mahna is the game that will cross these boundaries and make that connection, delivering a deeper understanding and appreciation of Iran to the world at large, and more than two hundred years after his defeat of the Dutch the Amir of Kharg can become a national hero all over again.(Thanks to M. Fahey)

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Lawfare !

2011-07-07T11:04:00.002+02:00

Even governments can learn from their mistakes. The United States went into Iraq and Afghanistan with Army and Marine divisions and the result has been disastrous, with hundreds of thousands dead and Washington on the verge of bankruptcy. Nor has the result been satisfactory, with Iraq firmly in the Iranian orbit and Afghanistan so corrupt and ungovernable that the daily newspapers are having trouble keeping up with the latest scandal. The Israelis too had their moment of comeuppance when they decided to smash the first Gaza Flotilla a year ago, killing nine Turks, one of whom was also a US citizen, and worsening their already dismal public relations problem. It was hardly worth the effort to stop ship loads of building material and relief supplies and it demonstrated to one and all that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was both ruthless and heedless of the consequences of its actions.

Using soldiers to remove regimes and commandos to stop civilian vessels ultimately looks bad and is bad. It is a use of what might be designated hard power that is all too convenient for heads of state of nations that for one reason or another consider themselves to be operating outside the rules that govern other states. Can one imagine the response if Russia had invaded Iraq and Iran had intercepted an Israeli merchant vessel and killed nine passengers? No, only America and Israel believe that they operate on another plane. But even in Washington and Tel Aviv there is some sensitivity to world opinion. This will likely mean that in the next few years we will see a mixture of hard and soft power being used by the Obamas and Netanyahus to bring about satisfactory results without instantly resorting to maximum force.

The recent incident involving the second Gaza Flotilla demonstrates exactly how it works. The ships were completely and scrupulously legal, were carrying humanitarian supplies that had been inspected, and all passengers and crews had signed pledges of non-violence. At least one ship was sabotaged, but the others were willing and able to make the short trip down to the international waters off of Gaza. That is when the Greek government intervened, using armed commandos to intercept the American vessel. The captain was arrested and eight passengers protesting afterward in front of the American Embassy were also detained. As anticipated, the United States Embassy did nothing to assist the US citizens in distress. The other vessels were refused permission to depart even though the boats were seaworthy and no one on board had committed any crime. There is no reason to doubt that the action was taken under pressure from Israel and the United States, which had together carefully orchestrated a response. And Athens proved to be a soft target. With Greece tottering on the brink of default, it was more than ever necessary to have the good graces of Washington to make sure that IMF loans arrive on time. Israel even thanked Greece for its favor in stopping the aid ships.

And then there is the upcoming vote for Palestinian statehood, where the same arm twisting is going on. The US Senate has already approved a bill that will cut off aid to the Palestinians if they seek statehood and the White House has let it be known that countries that support the Palestinians will not be viewed in favorable terms by Washington when it comes time to renew trade agreements. Netanyahu also promoted his negative assessment of the Palestinians during a recently completed charm offensive in Europe, a tour that was tactically supported by every United States Ambassador along the way, even though the US is not in any way threatened by the creation of a Palestinian state. Throughout , Israel and the United States have made every effort to distort and defame both the Gaza Flotilla and the drive for Palestinian independence. The pressure exerted on the European governments to stop the flotilla and vote against Palestinian statehood has been both enormous and largely invisible. And it has been an effort fully coordinated between the United States and Israel.

And a lot of the to-ing and fro-ing is being supported by new legal tactics that were dubbed Lawfare by Air Force Deputy Judge Advocate General Major General Charles Dunlap following 9/11, even though the tactic of using law to subvert a constitutional government had been around for quite a while, having been developed by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in the 1930s. In its American version. Lawfare initially was framed around taking the offensive against groups that were impeding executive prerogatives by arguing for due process for Guantanamo detainees, in favor of protections provided by the Bill of Rights, and supportive of US observance of the Geneva Conventions. This offensive took the form of accusing these groups of waging their own version of Lawfare even though they were trying to protect the Constitution and the Rule of Law, not subvert them. Lawfare was seen as a legal mechanism for attacking the Bush Administration critics, who were mostly progressives who were admittedly themselves using existing international law to target senior government officials including Donald Rumsfeld and Ariel Sharon, men who were widely regarded as war criminals. Following the successful arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in Britain in 1998, lawsuits charging crimes against humanity were filed against generals and statesmen transiting Europe or in other jurisdictions that accepted the international applicability of war crimes.

Lawfare was a response to these challenges and is the term most appropriate to describe the legal tactics being employed currently by the United States and Israel. Lawfare, which is essentially a state of continuous war without bloodshed, challenges the rule of law and constitutionalism. It has two aspects. It can be used to expand government prerogatives, to make what has been illegal legal and also to indemnify those government employees who have carried out actions that once would have been considered violations of law. That is essentially what John Yoo and Jay Bybee did in the George W. Bush White House when they issued legal judgments authorizing torture as an executive privilege. It is also what the Barack Obama Administration has been doing in obtaining legal advice endorsing immunity for torturers, in expanding the FBI use of National Security Letters, and in saying that the war against Libya is legal. The other side of Lawfare, as the name indicates, is using the law itself as a weapon of war. The Israelis and American supporters of Israel have caught on to the potential of the legal weapon and are using lawsuits to tie up opponents. In a recent outing, to stop last month’s Gaza Flotilla, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York City claiming that the sponsoring organization the Free Gaza Movement was raising money and preparing ships to be used in “hostilities” against American “ally” Israel. The suit was initiated immediately after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department made clear that they would do absolutely nothing to protect anyone wishing to sail to Gaza.

The lawsuit was filed with the assistance of the Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center, which has been established as a Non-Government Organization intended to use the law against groups that are critical of Israel. The objective is to harass such groups with litigation so they become ineffective or, even better, bankrupted by legal costs. Shurat HaDin was also behind a simultaneous lawsuit filed in Greece claiming, incorrectly, that the flotilla ships had not complied with Greek safety and other regulations for seaworthiness and that they therefore were departing illegally. Both the claims in New York and Athens were palpably of doubtful validity but once the legal process started grinding, all that was needed was a friendly judge in either location to place the sailing in limbo. On its website, Shurat HaDin claims that it is “fighting for the rights of hundreds of terrorist victims.” In its relentless assault on the Gaza Flotilla intimidation was the name of the game. It boasted “We are continuing our legal battle against the Islamic terrorists and extremist NGOs organizing the naval flotilla to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip. Last week we targeted the international insurance companies that provide maritime insurance to the extremists’ ships demanding that they terminate their services. Several of the companies, including Lloyd’s of London, wrote us back saying they would not insure the flotilla boats. Today, Shurat HaDin sent warning letters to the UK and US based global satellite company INMARSAT, stating that it may be liable for massive damages and criminal prosecution if it provides communication services to ships used by suspected terror organizations in the Gaza flotilla planned for late June. The legal warning, sent to both INMARSAT and its senior corporate officers in the US and UK, asserts that under US law, INMARSAT and its officers will be open to charges of aiding and abetting terrorism if it provides satellite services to the Gaza-bound ships.”

Existing legislation in the US making it illegal to provide “material support” to any group designated as terrorist is itself Lawfare, using deliberately vague language to justify nearly anything if a terrorist group is in any way involved or can plausibly be implicated. The broad language makes it easy to initiate this type of litigation, so it is reasonable to assume that more of this will be coming from the well-funded Shurat HaDin, much of it probably playing out in American courts. Any group deemed to be hostile to Israel will be attacked and litigated against. Many of the charges will be frivolous but those who are sued will have to waste time and resources defending themselves, which is precisely what is intended. When the pro-Israel agenda is combined with a general tendency by Republican and Democrat alike in Washington to legalize unconstitutional behavior, it becomes clear that Lawfare is here to stay. Unlike invading a country and having to explain why, it incrementally accomplishes the same objective of neutralizing enemies with little fanfare or warning. Canadian legislators are already considering making any criticism of Israel a hate crime, and once the idea takes hold here in the United States something similar is sure to follow, creating yet another basis for litigation. And let’s not forget the possibility that the US government will someday make it illegal to criticize any and all wars it is fighting — the precedent for doing just that already exists in the Espionage Act of 1917, which is still on the statute books. Torture, targeted assassination, and wars of choice are already judged to be “legal” by those in charge in Washington. It just requires a bit more fine tuning using Lawfare to produce the kind of country where political dissent rapidly becomes an endangered species. (Thanks to P. Giraldi)

Iran Air Flight 655

2011-07-02T18:54:00.006+02:00

On July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 (IR655) was shot down by USS Vincennes on the Bandar Abbas-Dubai rout, which resulted in the loss of life of 290 innocent civilian from six nations including 66 children. There were 38 non-Iranians aboard.
On the morning of that disastrous day, 3rd of July, the captain and crew of Flight 655 were at Bandar Abbas airfield in southern Iran, preparing for the second leg of their routine 150-mile flight over the Persian Gulf to Dubai. Flight 655 was a commercial flight operated by Iran Air that flew on a Tehran-Bandar Abbas-Dubai route. The plane, an Airbus A300B2, registered EP-IBU, left Bandar Abbas at 10:17am that day, 27 minutes after its scheduled departure time of 09:50am. It would have been a 28-minute flight. At that same time, the U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser,USS Vincennes, fitted with the AEGIS combat system, was nearby in the Strait of Hormuz, which the commercial airliner, flown by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, would pass over. USS Vincennes was stationed in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war, U.S. presence was intended to escort and defend Kuwaiti oil tankers registered under the U.S. flag; and limit Iranian marine activities as well as the tightening of US imposed embargo against Iran. In command of Vincennes was Commander William C. Rogers III. At the time of the incident, Vincennes, in support of Operation Earnest Will, was within Iranian territorial waters, following combat with and pursuit of Iranian gunboats. The USS Sides and the USS Elmer Montgomerywere nearby.

Like most modern aircraft, the Iranian airliner was equipped with an aircraft identification transponder, a modern form of the old "identification, friend or foe" (IFF) system of World War II. When interrogated by a radar signal from a potential adversary, the transponder "squawks" (gives off a specific response signal) in a prespecified, fixed mode. After taking off from runway 21, Flight 655 was directed by the Bandar Abbas tower to turn on its transponder and proceed over the Persian Gulf. The flight was assigned routinely to commercial air corridor Amber 59, a twenty-mile-wide lane on a direct line to Dubai airport. Owing to the short distance, the flight pattern would be a simple trajectory--climbing out to an altitude of 14,000 feet, cruising for a short time, and then descending gradually into Dubai. Because of the delay in takeoff, it appeared on the Vincennes's radar at 10:17, and at 10:19, the Vincennes began to issue warnings on the Military Air Distress frequency. According to U.S. government accounts, Vincennes mistakenly identified the Iranian airplane as an attacking military fighter. The officers identified the flight profile being flown by the A300B2 as being similar to that of an Iranian Air Force F-14A Tomcat during an attack run. According to the same reports Vincennes tried more than once to contact Flight 655, but there was no acknowledgement. The official ICAO report stated that these attempts to contact Iran Air 655 were sent on the wrong frequency and addressed to a non-existent "Iranian F-14".

The Iranian F-14s at Bandar Abbas have been set to squawk in "Mode II," a mode that would identify to the U.S. ships that the aircraft in question were military, and Iranian. Being a commercial flight, Iran Air 655 was instructed to squawk in Mode III, a signal that identifies civilian traffic. A unique transmission code number, 6760 in this case, was assigned to distinguish this particular flight from others.
During the next three minutes, the Vincennes issued a number of warnings on both military and civil distress frequencies, it (mistakenly) identified the Airbus 320 as a possible Iranian F-14, it (mistakenly) reported hearing IFF squawks in Mode II, and it (mistakenly) reported the aircraft as descending toward the ship when it was in fact still climbing according to its usual flight plan. At 10:24 am, Captain Rogers, (above photo)the Commanding Officer of Vincennes ordered to fire two SM-2ER antiaircraft missiles at the assumed F-14 fighter jet. A few seconds later, with the Airbus still on its assigned climb out, and slightly to one side of, but well within air corridor Amber 59, it was intercepted by one or both of the missiles at a range of eight nautical miles and an altitude of 13,500 feet. Flight 655, with some 290 people, tumbled in flames into the Persian Gulf. The whole flight had taken less than seven minutes. There were no survivors. By noon that day, Iranian helicopters and boats began to search the area and recover the bodies. It was not until later in the day that the officers and men of the Vincennes would learn that what they had shot down was not an Iranian F-14, but a commercial, civil flight. Since the "black box" flight recorder on board the Iranian Airbus has been irrecoverably lost in the waters of the Persian Gulf, we shall never know exactly what her flight profile was, whether the crew ignored the American challenges or simply did not hear them. However, the Vincennes had a black box of its own. The SPY-1A, Command and Decision, and Weapons Control System computers were all equipped with magnetic tape equipment that tracked and recorded all of the signals received and processed by these key pieces of electronic equipment. Because of this, investigators have been able to verify the timing and nature of all actions.

The situation aboard the Vincennes that day was one of confusion and disorder. The story told by the data tapes is straightforward. Iran Air Flight 655 took off from Bandar Abbas at 10:17 a.m. on the morning of July 3, on a heading of 210 (runway 21). Squawking Mode III, Code 6760 continuously, it kept on a more or less constant heading of 210, climbing steadily to its cruising altitude while gradually gaining speed. Data and testimony from the USS Sides corroborate the flight path and the Mode III IFF squawk. Indeed, the Sides was to identify the unknown aircraft as non-hostile and turn its attention elsewhere only seconds before the Vincennes launched its missiles. The story told by those inside the CIC aboard the Vincennes is quite different. From the first alerted contact, various personnel began to report a "Mode II" squawk on a code associated with Iranian F-14s. Although none of the data recorders reported any IFF response other than Mode III, Code 6760, those aboard the Vincennes continued to consistently misreport the signal. As the range closed, the Vincennes began to broadcast increasingly urgent warning messages to the unknown aircraft; at first, these were general challenges on both military and international civil distress nets. But as the notion that the aircraft was indeed an F-14 became fixed in the minds of the key operators, the challenges were made more specific and were addressed only to an unidentified "Iranian F-14." A quick thumb-through of a listing of commercial flights missed the clear listing for Flight 655, although it was on course and nearly on time.

A warning of possible "COMAIR" (commercial aircraft) issued a minute or two later was acknowledged by the CO, but essentially ignored. Commander Lustig, the Anti-Air Warfare Commander (AAWC) new to his post (and generally regarded as inexperienced and a weak leader), de facto leadership fell upon the more junior Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC), who by that time was almost literally shouting about the immediacy and seriousness of the threat. Captain Rogers did allow the unknown aircraft to close to well within its possible missile firing range before asking for and receiving permission to intercept, and he did so only after repeating the challenge several more times. Only then, convinced that the threat to his ship was too serious to ignore, and under pressure to act quickly to avoid the earlier fate of the USS Stark, did he authorize the firing. Was Captain Rogers justified in his perception of a real threat to his ship (which was the US Navy's claim)? .....Was the whole incident a regrettable, but unavoidable, accident of war (which is precisely what the resulting U.S. attitude was, in the Pentagon, in Congress, and in the press)? ....The question to be asked is: Was an error made on the U.S. side at all? The U.S. Navy finally claimed that Captain Rogers of the Vincennes acted correctly in appraising the threat. Others in the United States asserted that such blame as there was attached solely to Iran. The large-scale technical military system operating in the Persian Gulf on that day, of which the Vincennes was the central feature, was not waging total war, but rather a highly selective engagement in an arena known to be filled with civil traffic on air and sea. This very sophisticated piece of equipment had been placed in a situation for which it had never been designed precisely because it was thought to be most capable of making the kinds of quick and accurate judgments that would be necessary. But it failed. Throughout its final flight IR655 was in radio contact with various air traffic control services using standard civil aviation frequencies, and had spoken in English to Bandar Abbas Approach Control seconds before Vincennes launched its missiles.Vincennes at that time had no equipment suitable for monitoring civil aviation frequencies, other than the International Air Distress frequency, despite being a sophisticated anti-aircraft warship. Subsequently U.S. Navy warships in the area were equipped with dialable VHF radios, and access to flight plan information was sought, to better track commercial airliners.

The Investigation
The Navy investigation board was convened by Rear Admiral William M. Fogarty at Bahrain beginning on July 6, while the events were still fresh in the minds of the participants. Formal hearings began a week later, and the entire procedure was completed and the report delivered to the Navy on July 28. Even in the cleansed form provided to the public, the report is rich in personal and technical detail. Perhaps the most striking feature is the degree to which the recollections of the participants as to the nature and assessment of the presumptive threat differ, and the variance between what was reported by the SPY-1A computers and what its human interpreters were reporting. The record shows that the decision to fire was taken more or less calmly and deliberately on the basis of personal advice passed from junior officers to the senior AAWC, and from the AAWC to the CO--in the face of a stream of contrary evidence from the electronics aboard.

Medals awarded
While issuing notes of regret over the loss of human life, the U.S. government has, to date, neither admitted any wrongdoing or responsibility in this tragedy, nor apologized, but continues to blame Iranian hostile actions for the incident. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat-action ribbons. Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement", his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire" having enabled him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure." According to a 23 April 1990 article printed in The Washington Post, the Legion of Merit was presented to Captain Rogers and Lieutenant Commander Lustig for their performance in the Persian Gulf on 3 July 1988. The citations did not mention the downing of the Iran Air flight at all. The incident continued to overshadow U.S.-Iran relations for many years. Following the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 six months later, the British and American governments initially blamed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian militant group backed by Syria, with assumptions of assistance from Iran in retaliation for Iran Air Flight 655. The blame was later shifted to Libya.
Vice President George H. W. Bush (later President of United States of America) declared a month later,
"I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are."
Newsweek, August 15, 1988
With Thanks to Sh. Ghassemi.

Diamonds II

2011-06-21T10:33:00.008+02:00

Here an article by Lisa Daftari which more or less explains what the whole story is about.

"The Iranian Government is alleging that the United States cozied up to a former Iranian intelligence agent who was sent on a clandestine mission to infiltrate American government agencies. Last week, Iranian State television broadcasted a half hour-long program relating the accounts of Mohammad Madhi, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards and clerical leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s right-hand man, explaining how he was sent out on a secret mission by the Iranian government. In the film, Madhi explains in great detail his purported dealings with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute based in Washington D.C., with all collaborations leading up to an alleged State Department proposal asking Madhi to lead an opposition group in toppling the Iranian System and replacing it with a US friendly governing body created by the United States.

With in-depth knowledge about the system and its operations, Madhi explains how he became Washington’s winning ticket on Iran policy while secretly infiltrating and outing the long-established opposition networks abroad, mentioning many of the Iranian-American opposition leaders by name and association in the film. Madhi left Iran in 2008 and lived in Bangkok, working as a diamond distributor. He passed himself off as a disenchanted defector who would be interested in joining the opposition abroad. That is how he attracted policy makers who approached him, he further explains how he sets up these alleged, sensitive meetings with policy makers and politicians.As a defector, 46-year-old Madhi was quite popular in the expatriate community. His position and knowledge of internal affairs made him a curious target, particularly as he regularly sought publicity over his “rebellion” against the regime. In his frequent interviews he advocated regime change and spoke out against the clerics.

“The government has already collapsed,” he said earlier this year in an interview with the English-language Thai newspaper Bangkok Post, which ran again in the Los Angeles Times. “There’s going to be big changes very soon. Believe me, it will happen soon.” His selling point was charming. He said that he had “once headed a committee tasked with keeping the regime in place and that now, as an opponent, he could count on about 20,000 backers in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, army, intelligence services and the religious hierarchy.”

It was his knowledge of the Revolutionary Guards and insider’s perspective that attracted the U.S. policy makers to Madhi in Bangkok, according to his own relations aired in the film called “A Deceptive Diamond.” It was a courtship that both sides found mutually attractive, at least, so it appeared. According to Madhi, the U.S. had long been searching for a source from within the Iranian government who was both a socially and religiously viable candidate to lead the people of Iran. As a successful businessman who had worked as an importer/exporter for years and one who had reached a high rung climbing the Islamic regime’s ladder, he was the perfect defector for the job. The film shows Madhi in a conference in Paris, gathering the Iranian opposition living abroad, clearly broadcasting the names and alleged affiliations of the panelists, all central and recognized opposition leaders.

Madhi said in the film that the conference was meant to introduce the rest of the opposition leaders with the group that the U.S. had constructed, called “Circle of Friends,” in which he was allegedly appointed leader.

Before leaving Iran, Madhi held a position with the Majlis Khobregan (Assembly of Experts on Leadership) for 12 years and was a member in the intelligence division of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Yet in the meantime, Madhi dubiously played the part of the traitor turned hero, openly proud of his newfound calling to save the Iranian people. In a Feb. 3 Reuters article, Madhi wrote: “I realized then that the regime would not evolve.” “(I joined the Green Wave) because no other organization has the capacity to link the internal opposition with the overseas elements.” he said, communicating through an interpreter. Perhaps he fell prey to the State Department at the dismay of the Islamic regime back home, who claim to have Madhi in their custody. Despite the broadcasted statements about Madhi’s assigned task to deceive policy makers and opposition members, Kayhan and IRNA, both regime media outlets, maintain that Madhi was “a deceived element,” who is now under arrest for his betrayal of the government and country. They claim that the broadcast was in actuality a “confession,” something the Iranian Government has notoriously done.

D.C. policy makers and opposition members mentioned in the film and those who surround the story have denied any connection to Madhi. Meetings with Clinton and Biden cannot be confirmed, but Madhi’s meeting with outstanding opposition leaders in Paris has been documented. Could it be that Madhi escaped Iran, hoping to make a pretty penny offering information and his expertise to American intelligence officials, but when that plan botched, he decided to make nice with the system back home, to allow him to go back to Iran and to mend ties with the Government once again?

The bottom line is that even if all of the details in Madhi’s account are fabricated, he, as a tool of the Iranian Government, successfully cracked the opposition abroad. Now every opposition leader will look to his or her right and left and wonder who can be trusted. Madhi lured everyone in with his expertise and defector status, and ended up an agent of the Intelligence community of Iran. The most significant outcome is that this will not only eliminate many key players who were mentioned or who fear being outted in the future, for several reasons, but more importantly, where anti-Iranian movements are concerned, it will delegitimize so much of what the so called "opposition abroad" has worked hard to build, particularly since the 2009 election."

The Rasad

2011-06-16T13:38:00.003+02:00

A locally produced satellite, called Rasad, or observation, was launched successfully by a Safir missile on Wednesday in Iran. The Rasad satellite, developed by Iran's aerospace agency, weighs 15.3kg and has been designed to orbit the Earth 15 times a day at a height of 160 miles.

We shall all probably witness a massive and coordinated media attack and criticism on Iran on different issues starting from Iran being a threat to everything that has ever existed to being at fault over the 9/11… only to echo out any eventual credit regional populations might want to furnish Iran with. Whatever the case, it is fulfilled and it seems they are moving forward with their undertakings however rocky the path.

Here the launch as broadcasted in Iranian International TV;

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Diamonds !

2011-06-11T19:15:00.004+02:00

This is a documentary broadcasted recently in Iran, in which the claim is about a massive long term infiltration of pro western Iranian opposition forces by Iranian intelligence services,(political and militant)actively cooperating with different foreign services. The material is very fresh, that is why still not translated and even no subtitles. They claim to have met H.Clinton, identified the money sources and the canals, their weaknesses, strength and methods, routs and the anti Iranian establishments throughout Iran's neighboring countries. The whole documentary is in Persian and should I come across the English version or at least subtitled version then I shall replace these clips.

However, for the time being only Persian speakers can watch and the non Persian speakers must trust their Persian speaking friends for an honest interpretation.

Watch,make your own judgments and don't shoot the messenger !

The Iran Complex !

2011-06-09T20:33:00.004+02:00

P.Giraldi wrote : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent and successful excoriation of the Palestinians before a receptive American audience made it easy to miss the subplot, which was the alleged threat posed by Iran. Netanyahu took every opportunity to attack the Iranians, tying them into each hostile group in the Middle East and taking them to task for their presumed efforts to become the regional hegemon rather than his beloved Israel. So it comes as no surprise that an Israeli Deputy Prime Minister has now called for war against Iran. Speaking at the end of May in an “Opines” that there is considerable danger that Iran will be surprise attacked between the June departure of Robert Gates from the office of Secretary of Defense and the retirement of Admiral Mike Mullen from the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September. The timing of the attack is intended to take advantage of the confusion inevitable when there is a change of command in Washington. A regional war would also preempt any Palestinian attempts to declare statehood at the UN in September. And there are many in Washington who would welcome such an enterprise. Sources article by Seymour Hersh that appeared last week in the New Yorker reveals some details of the still classified 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. To put it succinctly, there is no actual evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. None. Hersh’s article elicited a response from a number of anonymous White House sources who disputed the article’s conclusions, suggesting very clearly that the Obama Administration embraces the Iranian threat narrative, if only to be able to cite Tehran as the reason for the repeated American failures in the region. Hersh also reported that the NIE had been delayed for four months because the White House had wanted a harsher judgment on Iran’s likely intentions. The intelligence community, having been burned once over Iraq, refused to comply.
Israel and Washington have also continuously redefined the red line regarding the precise nature of the Iranian threat. It started reasonably enough with the acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but then became breakout capability meaning that the technology had been developed to such a point that a weapon could be acquired in short order, and now it is any ability to master the uranium enrichment process. It is a series of definitions that constantly move backwards, so Iran can hardly win except by abandoning its perfectly legal and inspected program to provide nuclear energy to generate electricity. Even if Iran were to do so, it would undoubtedly be accused of having a “secret” program.

So it might not be completely illogical to conclude that Iran is not the likely instigator of a regional war in the Middle East — it is much more likely to be Israel, with its extreme right-wing government, an established nuclear arsenal, and a US taxpayer-provided defensive missile system in place to protect it against counter-attack. And lest there be any doubt about what the United States would do, there are two bills in Congress that might provide some enlightenment. They are H.Res. 1905 . The former, which is co-sponsored by Tea Party darling Michelle Bachmann and 43 other Republicans, affirms the US commitment to continue arming Israel against its enemies, notes rather oddly along the way that “whereas archeological evidence exists confirming Israel’s existence as a nation over 3,000 years ago in the area in which it currently exists, despite assertions of its opponents,” and concludes by expressing “support for Israel’s right to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by Iran, defend Israeli sovereignty, and protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within a reasonable time.”

H. Res 1905 “The Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011” toughens sanctions against Iran, including establishment of a refined petroleum products embargo, which would have a devastating effect on the Iranian economy. Many would consider it to be an act of war. It is sponsored by the irrepressible Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, and has 95 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle and including both liberals and conservatives.
The bills in Congress, which do absolutely nothing for the United States and its citizens and instead ratchet up tension in the region while also providing a carte blanche for Israel to start another war, should provide convincing evidence to anyone who cares that Benjamin Netanyahu pretty much calls the shots insofar as America’s legislature is concerned. If the reports from Haaretz are true and we are quite possibly looking at war later this summer, that would mean that the control extends to the White House.
Obama, keen to get reelected, would not want to cross the Israel Lobby even if it means sinking farther into the international quagmire that has characterized American foreign policy over the past ten years. Someone should tell him that when you fall in a hole the way out is not to dig deeper.
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The Secret Wars against Iran !

2011-06-06T12:53:00.004+02:00

Egypt is ruled by a counter-revolutionary military junta. Despite the increasing assertiveness of the Egyptian people, the old regime is still in place. Yet, its foundations are becoming shakier as the Egyptian people become more radical in their demands. Like in the Mubarak era, the military regime in Cairo is also allowing sectarianism to spread in Egypt in an effort to create divisions within Egyptian society. In early-2011 when Egyptians stormed government buildings they discovered secret papers that showed that the regime was behind the attacks on Egypt’s Christian community. Recently, so-called Salafist extremists have attacked Egyptian minorities including Christians but also Shiite Muslims. Egyptian activists and leaders in the Coptic and Shia community are pointing their fingers at the military junta in Cairo, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The Egyptian military junta, Tel Aviv, and the Al-Sauds are all part of an ominous alliance. This grouping is the backbone of the U.S. imperial structure in the Arab World. They are dependent on Washington. They prevail inasmuch as the U.S. remains dominant in Southwest Asia and North Africa. The Al-Sauds are now working with Washington in Egypt to establish a supposedly Islamic government. This is being done through political parties that the Al-Sauds have funded and helped organize. The new so-called Salafist movements are primary examples of this. It also appears that the Muslim Brotherhood or at least branches of it have been co-opted.
The ties of the Al-Sauds to Tel Aviv have in recent years become increasingly visible and pervasive. This secret Israeli-Saudi alliance exists within the context of a broader Khaliji-Israeli alliance. The alliance with Israel is formed through strategic cooperation between the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and the Arab sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf. Together Israel and the Khaliji ruling families form a frontline for Washington and NATO against Iran and its regional allies. The alliance also acts on behalf of Washington to destabilize the region. The roots of chaos in Southwest Asia and North Africa are this Khaliji-Israeli alliance. In line with the U.S. and the E.U., it is the alliance formed by Israel and the Khaliji rulers that has worked to create ethnic divisions between Arabs and Iranians, religious divisions between Muslims and Christians, and confessional divisions between Sunnis and Shiites. It is the “politics of division” or “fitna” that has also served to keep the Khaliji ruling families in power and Israel in its place. Israel and the Khaliji ruling families would not survive without the regional fitna. The Al-Sauds and Tel Aviv are the authors of the Hama-Fatah split and the estrangement of Gaza from the West Bank. They have worked together in the 2006 war against Lebanon with a view to crushing Hezbollah and its political allies. Saudi Arabia and Israel have also cooperated in spreading sectarianism and sectarian violence in Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and now Egypt. Israel and the Khaliji monarchies serve Washington in its objective to ultimately neutralize Iran and its allies, as well as any form of resistance against the U.S. in Southwest Asia and North Africa. This is why the Pentagon has been heavily arming Tel Aviv and the Khaliji sheikhdoms. Washington has also been setting up missile shields aimed at Iran and Syria in Israel and the Arab sheikhdoms.
The alliance between the Khaliji sheikhdoms and Israel has been instrumental in creating a wave of Iranophobia in the Arab World. The ultimate objective of Iranophobia is to transform Iran in the eyes of Arab public opinion, into an enemy of the Arab people, thereby distracting attention from the real enemies of the Arab World, namely the neo-colonial powers which occupy and control Arab lands. Iranophobia is a PsyOp, an instrument of propaganda. The strategic objective is to isolate Iran and reconfigure the geo-political landscape of Southwest Asia and North Africa. Moreover, Iranophobia has been used by the Khaliji ruling families, from the U.A.E. to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, as a pretext for the repression of their own people, who are demanding basic freedoms and democratic rights in the sheikhdoms. The March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, which is a collection of Khaliji-U.S. clients and Israeli allies, has also used Iranophobia and the “politics of division” to try to attack Hezbollah and its political allies in Lebanon The objective is to weaken and undermine Lebanese-Iranian and Lebanese-Syrian ties. The March 14 Alliance, specifically the Hariri-controlled Future Movement, has imported into Lebanon the so-called Salafist fighters of Fatah Al-Islam with the objective of getting them to attack Hezbollah. The Future Movement has also had a role in the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. project to destabilize Syria and remove it from the Resistance Bloc. Many Thanks to M.D. Nazemroaaya.

Mercenaries in the Persian Gulf !

2011-05-28T11:09:00.003+02:00

As the Arab Spring turns tentatively to summer, pressure continues to build in those countries across North Africa and the Middle East which have already been rocked by revolution, those currently embroiled in uprisings and those which are bracing themselves for potential upheaval.
At such an uncertain time in an area of such heightened instability, the creation and deployment of a large mercenary force in the Persian Gulf is akin to dropping a burning match into a puddle of petroleum. But that is exactly what Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi has done by hiring the man behind Blackwater to create a private army for him.
According to a report in the New York Times, Erik Prince, the controversial former Navy SEAL who founded, then sold, the notorious private security company which now operates under the name Xe Services, has been paid $529 million (372 million euros) by the Crown Prince to form a paramilitary force of foreign mercenaries, including former members of the US Special Forces, British SAS and the French Foreign Legion.
The mercenaries, some attracted to the United Arab Emirates from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan by salaries of more than $200,000 a year, will train an army largely made up of Colombians and South Africans to assist the UAE government with intelligence gathering, security, counterterrorism and suppression of any revolts.
Estimates put the number of mercenaries recruited at between 580 and 800 but Prince's new venture, known as Reflex Responses or R2, is expected to expand into the thousands as demand for private military assistance from other governments under threat in the region increases.

It is alleged that Prince, who is keeping a low profile and who allegedly uses the codename 'Kingfish' to avoid his name being linked to documentation, is planning to expand Zayed Military City, R2's secretive compound in the desert roughly 32km (20 miles) outside Abu Dhabi, in anticipation of deals with other Gulf regimes.
While Prince is said to be the key decision maker and the man who ordered the bolstering of the Colombian contingent with the better trained and disciplined South African mercenaries, it is believed that the UAE military intelligence branch is overseeing the entire project while the UAE government is named as the supplier of hardware for the troops.
The New York Times reports that Sheik Mohamed has allegedly given R2 orders to avoid recruiting Muslims, saying that they couldn't be trusted "to kill fellow Muslims" - suggesting the mercenaries may be used in interventions similar to those in Bahrain in March involving troops from the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to violently suppress the uprising there.
"Domestically, the force would allow the ruler of the UAE to put down revolts and deal with upheavals more effectively than other Arab dictators," Dustin Dehez, an expert on the use of mercenaries and former director for North-Eastern African Studies at the Düsseldorf Institute for Foreign and Security Policy, told Deutsche Welle.
"The Tunisian and Egyptian armies disobeyed the orders they were given by their civilian leaderships which were then basically toppled in a de facto coup d'état," he added. "The reasoning behind R2 could be that a foreign force would be immune to that sort of disobedience. On the other hand, this is by no means guaranteed. It might well be that many contractors, coming from Western militaries, might also refuse to fight unarmed civilians."
The UAE's Sheik Mohamed is just one of the many Sunni leaders in the region who are deeply apprehensive about the popular unrest of the Arab Spring as well as the perceived threat from Shia Iran. The Crown Prince is known to be a trusted Pentagon associate and a supporter of military intervention against the Islamic Republic.
A WikiLeaks report last year revealed that he allegedly told the Americans in 2006 that he was "unwilling to wait much longer" in regard to taking military action against Iran.
There are fears that, as well as being employed to put down domestic uprisings, the force could be used beyond state borders in any conflagration should the wave of unrest exacerbate regional tensions, especially with Iran.

"No Arab nation is capable of dealing with a potential threat from Iran," Dehez said. "In a direct confrontation with small units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who are specialized in asymmetric warfare, R2 could well be an effective force."
The UAE also have a long-standing territorial conflict with Iran over the islands of Abu Musa, Greater and Lesser Tunb which Iran has occupied and on which it is currently increasing its military presence. "The mercenary force would give the Arab states more options in dealing with Iran in various military scenarios such as these," Dehez added.
The idea that R2 could be used as a proxy army by Gulf States in a confrontation with Iran has prompted a number of questions to arise over the potential role of the United States government in its creation. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was challenged in a letter by a group of congressmen in Washington earlier this month to reveal any continuing connections between the US government and Erik Prince. To date there has been no official response.
Prince's Blackwater was the largest private military company on contract to the Pentagon during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite its role in the deaths of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007 and on-going legal investigation into its growing list of misconduct, there is concern on Capitol Hill that the US government has retained its links to Prince.
"It is very likely that the US government will be aware of the mission," Dehez said. "That doesn't necessarily indicate that they approve of it or endorse it. However, balancing Iran is largely a US interest, so some tacit approval might be considered reasonable. But more than that seems rather unlikely."
There are also concerns over the legality of R2's operations. US federal laws prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.
Under US law, Prince's company is exporting a defense product and therefore falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations controlled by the US State Department. A statement from the State Department, republished by the New York Times, neither confirmed or denied that R2 had such a license to operate.
"It is illegal to have Americans train and equip mercenary groups unless the State Department has specifically set a policy and agreement with the host country," Patricia DeGennaro, an adjunct professor at New York University's Department of Politics and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, told Deutsche Welle.
"The whole initiative could backfire on the US because it is not clear that the forces will be used solely for protection of the state."
DeGennaro described the creation of R2 as a "frightening" development in asymmetrical warfare, warning that armies operating with financial rather than national security interests posed a greater risk to stability due to their fluid allegiances.
"There is a reason that a military is organized through a state," she said. "It is supposed to be an entity that manages violence and protects or maintains the security of the state."
"Having organized mercenary groups sets all types of independent standards and in essence allows the creation of more groups who are out for themselves; opening doors to coups, corruption, and better planned terrorism," she added.
"It is really organizing and equipping gangs to reach a whole new level of intimidation and control of weaker individuals and states that can't protect themselves." / With many thanks to Nick Amies.

New realities !

2011-05-22T16:05:00.002+02:00

Given that President Obama daily authorizes the firing of hellfire missiles and the dropping of cluster bombs in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it was awful odd seeing him wax eloquent this week about the "moral force of non-violence" in places like Egypt and Tunisia. But there he was, the commander-in-chief of the largest empire in history, praising the power of peaceful protest in countries with repressive leaders backed by his own administration. Were we unfamiliar with his actual policies – more than doubling the troops in Afghanistan, dramatically escalating a deadly drone war in Pakistan and unilaterally bombing for peace of Libyia – it might have been inspiring to hear a major head of state reject violence as a means to political ends. Instead, we almost choked on the hypocrisy.

Cast beforehand as a major address on the Middle East, what President Obama offered with his speech on Thursday was nothing more than a reprisal of his 2009 address in Cairo: a lot of rhetoric about U.S. support for peace and freedom in the region contradicted by the actual – and bipartisan – U.S. policy over the past half-century of supporting ruthless authoritarian regimes. Yet even for all his talk of human rights and how he "will not tolerate aggression across borders" – yes, a U.S. president said this – Obama didn’t even feign concern about Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime invading neighboring Bahrain to put down a pro-democracy movement there. In fact, the words "Saudi Arabia" were never uttered. It was that kind of speech: scathing condemnations of human rights abuses by the U.S.’s Official Enemies in places like Iran and Syria and muted criticism – if any – of the gross violations of human decency carried out by its dictatorial friends in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen.
Obama predictably glossed over the reality of U.S. policy and, in an audacious attempt to rewrite history, portrayed his administration as being supportive of the fall of tyrannical governments across the Middle East and North Africa, ludicrously suggesting he had supported regime change in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt – a claim betrayed by the $1.3 billion a year in military aid his administration provided to Mubarak’s regime right up until the moment he resigned. The president’s revisionism might fool a few cable news personalities – what wouldn’t – but it won’t fool Egyptians, less than one in five of whom even want the closer relationship with the U.S. that Obama offered in his speech, at least one that involves more military aid and economic "reforms" imposed by the International Monetary Fund. And Obama’s remarks shouldn’t fool their primary audience: American voters.

Contrary to the rhetoric of Obama’s speech, if the U.S. has sided with Middle Eastern publics against their brutal dictators it has not been because of their dictators’ brutality, which in the case of Mubarak was seen as a plus in the age of the war on terror. Nor has that support for the oppressed come in the form of – hold your laughter – non-violence. Rhetoric of change aside, how best to use the liberating power of bullets and bombs continues to be the guiding principle of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
And Obama certainly isn’t apologizing for that. In his speech called the war in Iraq, which conservatively speaking has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, "costly and difficult" – and, grotesquely, "well intended" – but that was as much an acknowledgement as he was willing to make of the deadly failure of U.S. policy toward the region in recent decades. Indeed, Obama argued it was not a failure of policy but merely a failure of rhetoric, a "failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people" that had prompted the "suspicion" the U.S. pursues its own interests at the expense of those living in the countries it invades or whose dictators it supports. But the truth of these suspicions was evident when Obama explained why the U.S.’s supposed national interests were at stake in the Middle East, claiming that "our own future is bound to this region by the forces of economics and security." Notice which came first (and just so you know: both have to do with oil).
The president also didn’t deviate from his policy of "unshakable" support for Israeli militarism, typified by his administration’s efforts to safeguard the Jewish state from accountability for its war crimes in Gaza – crimes that left some 1400 Palestinians dead – and his determination to hand an already wealthy nation more than 3 Billion $ a year in military aid, even as it flaunts the "peace process" and colonizes ever more Palestinian land. Though typical of his first two years in office, Obama’s duplicity was more evident – and his rhetoric more sloppy – than usual. Mere seconds after proclaiming that "every state has the right to self-defense," Obama called for the creation of a "sovereign, non-militarized state" for Palestinians, meaning one incapable of defending itself. And while he spoke of Israeli parents fearing their children "could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes," he did not deign to mention the much more frequent and deadly Israeli violence perpetrated against Palestinians, saying only that the latter suffered "the humiliation of occupation," as if Palestinian parents feel embarrassment, not pain, at the loss of child killed by an Israeli strike.

Obama’s remarks on the killing of Osama bin Laden were likewise delivered with a complete lack of self-awareness. Describing the latter as a "mass murderer," Obama – who since taking office has the blood of hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani civilians on his hands – said bin Laden’s philosophy of using bloodshed to achieve desired political changes had been discredited "through the moral force of non-violence" that has swept the region. Peaceful protests, Obama proclaimed, had "achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades" – and more than decades of U.S. wars and occupations, he might have added. Talking up the virtues of peaceful protest is great and all, but the pretty words lack their power coming from the commander-in-chief of the most lethal and widely deployed military force in world history. Mr. Obama, if you want talk about the evils of violence, great – but follow your own advice. With thanks to C.Davis and M. Benjamin.

Yellow Journalism !

2011-05-15T21:03:00.004+02:00

Sharmine Narwani, a senior associate at Oxford writes; A public spat between Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the country's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the international headlines last week. Politics is rarely ever a harmonious business in any country, so why the brouhaha over this particular stand-off?
To be sure, the disagreement itself was an unusual occurrence. Khamenei's very public reinstatement of Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi - citing the "greater good of the nation", no less - shortly after Ahmadinejad removed him, could only be viewed as a tough dressing down. And then Ahmadinejad unexpectedly raised the stakes further by boycotting cabinet meetings for eleven days.
The whole point of a Supreme Leader as conceived by the Islamic Revolution's founders,and the constitution is that he is the ultimate arbiter over both state and religious affairs.
Ahmadinejad's defiant snit was a direct challenge to the authority of the Supreme Leader. It served to catapult the affair into the political stratosphere, and he was eventually forced to back down.
But there's more to this. Tehran sits at the epicenter of a geopolitical struggle between two battling regional world views. One "bloc" is comfortable with the existing US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and consists of many of the autocratic leaders now being swept away in the Arab Spring. The other is the Iran-led "Resistance Bloc" that seeks to end this foreign hegemony and embrace regional and national self-determination.
As such, every twitch out of Iran is being pounced on by the pro-US bloc, now openly gunning for the Islamic Republic to experience its own domestic revolt, and doing everything it can to facilitate it.
The anti-Iran brigade also extends its aversions to Tehran's closest allies in Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas - while keeping a tight lid on other regional players prone to take independent stances such as Iraq, Qatar, Oman, and now even Egypt and Lebanon.
A key reason for the escalation of activities against the Islamic Republic is the emergence of the Arab Spring in Persian Gulf nations such as Bahrain and Yemen, where a wave of reform could 1) threaten the dominance of Iran's biggest regional foe, and close US ally, Saudi Arabia, and 2) fundamentally shift the regional balance of power toward the "resistance" bloc.
The wholly domestic dispute between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad thus serves as an opportunity to highlight and exacerbate divisions within Iran's body politic - hence the intense media scrutiny.
What these regional players fail to recognize is that during thirty-two years, Iran has demonstrated that national security interests trump domestic politics every single time.
Iran has endured four rounds of economic sanctions by the UN Security Council and continues to feel under siege by the West and Israel. Recent developments in the regional neighborhood, where Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen have pulled out the "Iran bogeyman" card to justify violent actions against their own populations make Iran nervous and ultra-cautious. Any high profile is currently undesirable - and the Iranian government will do its utmost to close ranks, put rumours of strife to rest, and promote an image of domestic stability and unity. Anything else would be detrimental to the country's national security imperatives - which rule the day and are a unifying subject across both domestic camps.
From a domestic political standpoint, the internal divisions remain firmer than ever. In the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian presidential election barely two years ago, Khamenei was viewed as a staunch Ahmadinejad ally.
But Iran's first non-clerical president has ambitions that are perceived to threaten the rule of the clergy and elevate his allies to positions of power.
Conservative politicians faithful to the ideals of the Revolution have kept up a drumbeat of criticism that has served to keep the lid on Ahmadinejad's machinations. The president has fired ministers outside his sphere of influence before - most recently Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki - but this recent dismissal was viewed as too politically motivated to escape notice.
Many believe Ahmadinejad badly miscalculated this time around - the net result being that the domestic balance of power has now decidedly shifted to the Conservative camp. And the president is not out of the woods yet. His challenge to Khamenei's authority is being exploited by foes to target Ahmadinejad's controversial Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, who is seen as promoting "Iranian" nationalism, undermining the clergy and actively promoting liberal ideas regarding the hijab, music, satellite TV availability, youth, etc.
Mashai, who Ahmadinejad has defended vigorously in the past and is allegedly being groomed to succeed his boss, may have to be the sacrificial lamb if Ahmadinejad wants to regain some authority and not end his term as a lame-duck president. Something has to give, because conservatives are still beating those drums and several dozen people close to the president and his chief of staff have now been arrested. Though Ahmadinejad has clearly lost this round, his presidency could altogether still be at stake unless he makes further concessions.
On the other hand - calls for impeachment notwithstanding - it is unlikely that the conservative establishment or Khamenei would actively seek to remove the president from office, because this would suggest a serious lack of confidence at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic, and resuscitate the international ruckus over his election two years ago.
This may be a defining moment in Iranian domestic politics, or just another political row, not unlike in other nations where political stakes are high. Keep in mind that Iran's complex political system is as dynamic, diverse and decentralised as can be found anywhere in the Middle East, and rows - public and private - are par for the course.
In the final analysis, the Iranian establishment is unlikely to allow this to spin out of control. They received more international attention than they can stand and they will close ranks and speak with one voice in the coming weeks and months. Certainly, national security priorities - where both camps share similar principles - can serve to dissipate even the most threatening divisions.
With external political pressures mounting against Iran - both regionally and beyond - we can expect the tensions between the camps to result in further crackdowns and political maneuvering. Just never so much as to allow external players to participate and exploit vulnerabilities.
So although the heated domestic debate continues, this "feud" is, from a geopolitical standpoint, much ado about nothing - at least until the regional landscape fundamentally shifts in favor of Iran's world view. Then all bets are off.

Bahrain's apartheid

2011-05-10T22:14:00.004+02:00

Harrowing testimony of torture, intimidation and humiliation from a doctor arrested in the crackdown on medical staff in Bahrain has revealed the lengths to which the regime's security forces are prepared to go to quash pro-democracy protests. Interviews obtained by newspapers and reporters from inside Bahrain tell of ransacked hospitals and of terrified medical staff beaten, interrogated and forced into signing false confessions. Many have been detained, their fate unknown.

Inspired by the pro-democracy protests which swept Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, Bahrainis took to the streets in their thousands in February, demanding greater political rights and more equality for the overwhelming 4/5 ratio of Shia Muslim majority, ruled over for decades of a British and US supported Sunni monarchy. Saudi Arabia invaded this more or less mini aphartheid and helped the state launch a fierce counter-offensive in mid-March, swiftly and brutally crushing the uprising by killing, arresting, raping destroying everything and everyone in their way, enjoying the privelege of the USA and Britain looking the other way. .
The campaign of intimidation against the doctors and nurses who bore witness to the bloody crackdown began two months ago at Salmaniya Medical Complex, the main hospital in the capital Manama. It has since been extended to at least nine health centers which have been systematically attacked by the the so called imported security forces over the past month, an activist cataloging the abuses says. Each incident follows the same pattern: cars with people in police uniforms in jeeps surround the center, before armed men and women in masks close the gates and line all those caught inside up against the wall.

Their previously non existent and suddenly imported Police dogs are also used to spread fear among the staff. The accounts, correspond with others emerging from Bahrain and from reports by international monitoring groups. The latest crackdown followed protests by doctors at the refusal by the regime to allow ambulances from Salmaniya Hospital to attend to those injured in the protests. Details of the assaults, collected by the families of those detained and passed to reporters, show that at least 40 medical staff were arrested in nine health centers between 10 April and 27 April. Dr Ahmed Jamal, president of the Bahrain Medical Society, was arrested at his clinic on 2 May.
Among 11 female doctors and nurses arrested, eight were released on 4 May but three remain detained, including Rula Jasim al-Saffar, 49, president of the Bahrain Nursing Society who has been held in custody for five weeks. One consultant and family physician described in an email how she had been beaten, abused and humiliated and left with a black eye and bruises on her back during a seven-hour detention at the Central Province Police center. Fearing for the safety of her children, she asked to remain anonymous.

She was sworn at, called a "dirty Shia" and a "whore", beaten with a thick hose and forced to sing the national anthem, she said. At one point she was blindfolded and made to run down a corridor until she banged into a wall. Her assailants alleged she had protested against the regime, and hit her when she denied it. She was released after signing a document admitting she had protested against the Health Minister.
The doctor believes she was targeted because she is the wife of a prominent surgeon who has been held in custody since being arrested in mid-operation more than a month ago "While I thank God I have been reunited with my children, I am even more fearful for the well-being of my husband, knowing the torture that I endured," she wrote.
She said that another female doctor detained with her had been unable to sing the national anthem when ordered to do so because her throat was too dry. "The interrogators gave her a tiny sip of water and told her to stick out her tongue. She was blindfolded and when she put her tongue out, one of the officers suddenly stabbed it with a pen. Then they told her to sit on a chair because she felt dizzy.
"When she went to sit, they pulled the chair away and she fell to the ground. Then they threw the chair at her and it landed on top of head. They told her not to remove the chair from her head." Relatives of those detained said some were forced to confess to acts they had not committed, with those confessions filmed by the security forces for subsequent broadcast. The daughter of one doctor said: "They were made to confess that they gave treatment only to Shia protesters and not to Sunnis, stole blood from the hospital to splatter on protesters to make the situation seem more dramatic, and that they encouraged others to protest against the regime."
Rights activists say medical officials have been targeted because they bore witness to the terrible injuries sustained by the protesters they treated, and could therefore give evidence against the government. Forty-seven doctors and nurses were charged last week with "promoting efforts to bring down the government" and "harming the public by spreading false news". Their trials are expected to begin shortly. Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association, said the attacks on medical staff in Bahrain were unprecedented.

"I don't think we have seen it on this scale before. It is very worrying because doctors and health workers have an ethical duty to treat people regardless of what they have been doing and the state has an obligation to protect them. All the doctors have been doing is saying these people need care and they have got to give care. They are not saying the protesters are right," she said. Lord Eric Avebury, a Liberal Democrat peer and expert on Bahrain, condemned the British Government's response to the crisis, and called for sanctions against the Sunni government and the ruling family of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. "The Foreign Secretary has made some pretty anodyne statements that are not commensurate with the scale of the problem. The whole medical and nursing profession, journalists and all Shia professionals including MPs have been targeted," he said.

"I would like to see a ban on entry to the UK of some of the leading perpetrators of the Khalifa family and the sequestration of their assets. "These are crimes against humanity which I hope will be subject to criminal proceedings and their assets used to compensate the victims, subject to court proceedings." This article was printed in The Independent.

The alternative story of Bin Laden’s end!

2011-05-04T11:19:00.007+02:00

When you read the different reports of the heroic and Bollywood, sorry Hollywood like killing of “bin Laden”, then one cannot help oneself but roll the eyes and scuff “yet again”. This time however, the whole episode seems to be containing the necessary elements implying certain seriousness in finally wanting to close the chapter on Bin Laden. Until now, his uncertain fate helped get very controversial laws passed in almost all elected houses. Any resistances towards sometimes draconian security amendments were considered risky and those pursuing a resistance were stamped as Bin Laden lovers and anti-Americans. A known phenomenon regarding any criticism of Israel is followed by a systematic media frenzy of calling the poor daredevil an anti-Semite. However their unbelievably clumsy handling of this affair can only be considered “militarily induced dyslexia”.

As Long as we all remember, any Rebel…Outlaw or Terrorist that has ever been hunted down, arrested or killed, have without exception been demonstratively shown to be approved by the free and not so free press. Revolutionaries such as Zapata and Che Guevara, villains like Dillinger and other gangsters or even Dictators and their extended families like Chauchesku and Saddam Hussein…. in the latter’s case even the bodies of his children and son in law were presented to eliminate any doubts whatsoever. Yet when it came to Bin Laden! The rule seems to have suddenly changed. However the whole obscurity and lack of real information on him did keep societies and civil governments on their toes and enabled them to get rid or at least freeze some of the constitutional rights of their respective societies. The anti-terror laws passed included unadulterated surveillance of their subjects in every possible aspect, the likes of collecting and saving data starting from flight, right down to all Bank transactions across the financial world. Other words, one could not conduct a simple tanking without big brother not knowing. All the stories of Special Forces and Seals and super-secret elite forces, where a President watches a video and photographed to impress the mob are secondary to divert the attention from a vital question…Of why only a few hours after his killing, he was thrown into the sea.

The only explanation one can possibly have is the fact that it was all a masquerade to officially and publically close a book that should have been closed years ago. One can well imagine the following as the real chain of events;

Bin Laden either died or was eliminated a few years aback, his body buried somewhere (whereabouts unknown), the biggest secret and quest was the 100% assurance of his demise, so this so called operation was actually a hunt for the remains. All the tracking, hunting and intelligence work was to find the grave and dig out the remains. This solvable task was finally fulfilled by finding his wife and family which inevitably led to his grave. The recently announced operation "Geronimo" was the typical smokescreen needed to announce the closure.Those killed were probably all small fishes who could have actually been taken out with a drone. The OBL remains were positively tested months ago and probably thrown into the sea for understandable reasons. A headless body of a poor nobody was thrown into the Arabian Sea by Sailors giving the Sailors something to remember, in a few years they would swear it was him and sell the book rights and get rich. What is now left is the audacity with which this whole masquerade was presented! Any raised question regarding the details will be answered with a deficiency in reporting or admitting a wrong doing...particular aspects of the story will be corrected, like the "was he actually armed or not"… admitting blame to confirm us as clever, thus confuse us and the third party in doubting and questioning the truthfulness of the actual event.

As long as there are discussions over details of a story, then noone questions the authenticity.. …Don’t take my word for it.. ..Make your own thoughts.

Rick Steves

2011-04-23T11:43:00.003+02:00

Richard Steve is an American author, historian, and TV personality focusing on European travel. He is the
host of the public television series Rick Steves' Europe, has a Radio travel show called "Travel with Rick Steves", and has authored various location-specific travel guides. In 2009 he published a much anticipated report on Iran called “Iran: Yesterday and Today”. A man of his experience simply refused to allow politicians to hype up an already tense and complicated relationship that existed between Iran and the USA and have the two countries pushed into a spiral of military conflict.

Underneath, are the report and his lecture on Iran, which I found well done.

Who is Norman Finkelstein !

2011-04-15T10:50:00.002+02:00

"Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians."

Norman Finkelstein

"Norman is a very careful scholar. And he feels very passionately about the Holocaust. His parents are both survivors of extermination camps and he was deeply involved in their lives and the tragedies and so on. [He] knows everything about the Holocaust. And when he sees somebody using it, exploiting it, demeaning the memory of the victims for personal gain, he doesn't like it. I can understand that."

Noam Chomsky, friend and professor of linguistics, MIT

Another Perspective !

2011-04-09T11:29:00.002+02:00

One could not agree more with John Pilger when he said, The Euro-American attack on Libya has nothing to do with protecting anyone; only the terminally naive believe such nonsense. It is the West’s response to popular uprisings in strategic, resource-rich regions of the world and the beginning of a war of attrition against the new imperial rival, China.

President Barack Obama’s historical distinction is now guaranteed. He is America’s first black president to invade Africa. His assault on Libya is run by the US Africa Command, which was set up in 2007 to secure the continent’s lucrative natural resources from Africa’s impoverished people and the rapidly spreading commercial influence of China. Libya, along with Angola and Nigeria, is China’s principal source of oil. As American, British, and French planes currently incinerate both "bad" and "good" Libyans, the evacuation of 30,000 Chinese workers is under way, perhaps permanently. Statements by western officials and media that a "deranged and criminal Colonel Gadhafi" is planning "genocide" against his own people still await evidence. This is reminiscent of fraudulent claims that required "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo, the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and the establishment of the biggest US military base in Europe. The detail is also familiar. The Libyan "pro-democracy rebels" are reportedly commanded by Colonel Khalifa Haftar who, according to a study by the US Jamestown Foundation, set up the Libyan National Army in 1988 "with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency." For the past 20 years, Colonel Haftar has been living not far from Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, which also provides him with a training camp. The Afghan mujahideen, which produced al-Qaeda, and the Iraqi National Congress, which scripted the Bush/Blair lies about Iraq, were sponsored in the same time-honored way, in leafy Langley.

Libya’s other "rebel" leaders include Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gadhafi’s justice minister until February, and General Abdel-Fattah Younes, who ran Gadhafi’s interior ministry: both with formidable reputations for savagely putting down dissent. There is a civil and tribal war in Libya, which includes popular outrage against Gadhafi’s human rights record. However, it is Libya’s independence, not the nature of its regime, that is intolerable to the west in a region of vassals; and this hostility has barely changed in the 42 years since Gadhafi overthrew the feudal king Idris, one the more odious tyrants backed by the west. With his Bedouin hyperbole and bizarre ways, Gadhafi has long made an ideal "mad dog," now requiring heroic US, French, and British pilots to bomb urban areas in Tripoli, including a maternity hospital and a cardiac center. The last US bombing in 1986 managed to kill his adopted daughter. What the US, British, and French hope to achieve is the opposite of a people’s liberation. In undermining the efforts of Libya’s genuine democrats and nationalists to free their country from both a dictator and those corrupted by foreign demands, the sound and fury from Washington, London, and Paris has succeeded in dimming the memory of January’s days of hope in Tunis and Cairo and distracted many, who had taken heart, from the task of ensuring that their gains are not stolen quietly. On 23 March, the US-backed Egyptian military issued a decree barring all strikes and protests. This was barely reported in the west. With Gadhafi now the accredited demon, Israel, the real canker, can continue its wholesale land theft and expulsions. Facebook has come under Zionist pressure to remove a page calling for a full scale Palestinian uprising – a "Third Intifada" — on 15 May.

None of this should surprise. History suggests nothing less than the kind of machination revealed by two senior diplomats at the United Nations, who spoke to the Asia Times. Demanding to know why the UN never ordered a fact-finding mission to Libya instead of an attack, they were told that a deal had been done between the White House and Saudi Arabia. A US "coalition" would "take out" the recalcitrant Gadhafi if the Saudis put down the popular uprising in Bahrain. The latter has been accomplished, and the bloodied King of Bahrain will be a guest at the Royal Wedding in London. The embodiment of this reaction is David Cameron, whose only real job has been as PR man to the television industry’s asset stripper, Michael Green. Cameron was in the Gulf selling arms to the British-invented tyrannies when people rose up against Yemen’s Abdullah Saleh; on 18 March, Saleh’s regime murdered 52 demonstrators. Cameron said nothing of value. Yemen is "one of ours," as the British Foreign Office likes to say. In February, Cameron revealed himself in an attack on what he called "state multiculturalism" – the code for Muslims. He said, "We need a lot less of the past tolerance of recent years." He was applauded by Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s fascist National Front. "It is exactly this kind of statement that has barred us from public life for 30 years," she told the Financial Times. "I can only congratulate him." At its most rapacious, the British empire produced David Camerons in job lots. Unlike many of the Victorian "civilizers," today’s sedentary Westminster warriors – throw in William Hague, Liam Fox, and the treacherous Nick Clegg — have never been touched by the suffering and bloodshed which, at remove in culture and distance, are the consequences of their utterances and actions. With their faintly trivial, always contemptuous air, they are cowards abroad, as they are at home. War and racism and the destruction of Britain’s hard-won social democracy are their gift. Remember that when you next take to the streets in your hundreds of thousands, as you must.

Libyan war & lies

2011-04-02T15:26:00.005+02:00

Lee Wrights got it mostly right when he wrote.. “In politics, there are lies, damn lies and presidential statements. Nine days after taking the United States into another immoral, unnecessary, and unconstitutional war based on lies and distortions, President Obama continued to compound and expand the deceit. Everything about this action has been a lie, from the claims used to justify the action, to the bogus U.N. resolution crafted to give it an air of legality, to the implementation of the phony "no-fly zone." It should now be clear to anyone that the United States has intervened in a Libyan civil war on the side of the rebels. Just a day after President Obama said this action was not about removing Muammar Gadhafi from power by force, Secretary of State Clinton said the United States and our allies were considering arming the rebels, an action which would be a violation of the U.N. resolution that supposedly authorized this attack. Obama claimed, without presenting any evidence, that we had to act in order to prevent the "slaughter of civilians" and incredibly declared that to do otherwise would be a "betrayal of who we are." Launching a massive attack on a sovereign nation which has not attacked or threatened us is the real and the greatest betrayal of who we are. It is a despicable act of aggression and an outright act of war.

Once again, the United States military is engaging in a policy to "destroy the village in order to save it." What is unclear is exactly who are we saving it from. Obama said he "refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action." But, he’s apparently perfectly content to be responsible for images of the mangled bodies of innocents killed by the "collateral damage" of American bombs, missiles and aircraft, and the body-bags filled with brave American soldiers. The president has forgotten, or maybe he doesn’t believe, that his first and most important legal and moral duty as commander-in-chief is to protect the lives of Americans. From the beginning of this manufactured crisis, President Obama simply has not been honest with the American people. He doesn’t even have the honesty to call this a war. His political sycophants have come up with the euphemism "kinetic military action" to disguise and obfuscate the true nature of this aggression. Obama has behaved and spoken in a way eerily and painfully reminiscent of his three predecessors, who entangled the United States in the quagmires of internal conflicts in other nations.
Like his predecessors, President Obama has used cleverly crafted, high-sounding and morally tinged words and phrases to justify actions that clearly demonstrate a disregard for the rule of law and U.S. Constitution. But actions speak louder than words. Sadly, his actions show a callous disregard for the lives of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. On the one hand, the president did not find the time to consult with Congress before ordering the attack on Libya, yet he found time to consult with NATO and the Arab League. While ignoring the clear mandate to seek a declaration of war from Congress, Obama cited the U.N. Charter to justify his action. Apparently the President thinks that is a higher law than the Constitution he has sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. From the beginning, the "no-fly" zone was shown to be a farce. American missiles and aircraft attacked not just air defense systems, but infrastructure, convoys, tanks, Libyan government forces — and Gadhafi’s residences. Filling the Libyan sky with U.S. bombs, the president insisted that while Gadhafi "must go," he was not a target. That is insane! If this is indeed a just war, then all the leaders of the enemy nation should be targets. The fact that President Obama has been so circumspect about this issue just makes it all the more clear that this is not a just war.

The U.S. employed AC-130 gunships and A-10 tank buster aircraft which are specially designed for close air support and battlefield interdiction in support of ground forces. Another insanity here, if indeed this is a just war, is that to use such massive firepower without having someone on the ground to direct it is militarily unsound and morally reprehensible because it inevitably results in the death of non-combatants. The talk about sending arms to the rebels in Libya is perhaps the most bizarre and disturbing development. Even before the bombing of Libya began there was very little information reported about exactly who the rebels are. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, explained in a recent article that there is plausible reason to believe the rebels are current or former Islamist mujahedin, eager to engage in jihad. During his despotic reign, Gadhafi fought to suppress Libyan Islamists, who mostly live in the eastern provinces of the nation that are now in rebellion. Some of these same folks fought Americans in Iraq! Whether or not the Libyan rebellion is dominated by al-Qaeda, Islamists, or any other terrorist or anti-American group is not the point. The point is that the United States does not know. Once again our ignorance of local conditions in a foreign nation, particularly the Middle East, hasn’t deterred American politicians from making stupid decisions about policy. And so – once again — American diplomatic ignorance and hubris will make enemies, sow chaos and discord, and result in the death of innocent people".

Patriot Act Revisited

2011-04-01T10:33:00.003+02:00

The US wars across the world will someday come to an end, when the US runs out of money or soldiers or both. But less well understood is the collateral damage in the US where the consequences of the so called global war on terror will linger on in the form of a shattered constitution. The US Patriot Act is generally promoted as the principal legislative tool being used to fight international terrorism. It is, in reality, a devastating and poorly conceived bit of legislation originally approved just after 9/11. It will soon be up for an extension in the US Senate. President Obama, who criticized it while he was a candidate but apparently has had a change of heart since that time, favors its renewal. Most members of Congress, few of whom have ever read the entire act, want it renewed. The mainstream media likes it because who can resist patriotism?
That is the bad news. But there is also some good news. Libertarians, traditional conservatives, progressives, and even some tea partiers are for the first time uniting to stop the extension. Senator Rand Paul led the charge in the Senate back in February, resulting in a temporary 90 day continuation of key provisions of the act that will expire in May. Before that happens, the Patriot Act will again be up for Senatorial approval but this time there will be an open debate in front of the full Senate and under the scrutiny of the media. It will be the first time that has happened since 2001. There will also be a roll call vote with each Senator having to come down for or against. It is an opportunity not to be missed to roll back the tide of government intrusion in the life of every US citizen.
Americans should know what the Patriot Act has done to each and every one of them. Broadly speaking, the Patriot Act was designed to make it easier for law enforcement to investigate US citizens and permanent residents by easing legal restraints on records and activities that were hitherto considered private or required a judge’s order to access. The Act has enjoyed bipartisan support since 2001.
Title 2 of the Patriot Act, entitled “Enhanced Surveillance Procedures,” contains many of its most controversial aspects of the new law. Previously, obtaining information on foreigners residing in the United States was carefully regulated by the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA) court and the information generally had to be sought as part of an actual criminal investigation. Under the new law, it became possible to investigate any foreign suspect as part of a law enforcement effort to obtain foreign intelligence information even if there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. The difference is critical as the former procedure required actual evidence of a crime while the new procedure permitted investigation of just about anyone who could plausibly be linked to a foreign suspect to obtain information, allowing law enforcement to conduct wide ranging fishing expeditions. The new rules also lifted the requirement that law enforcement demonstrate that the target of a FISA approved investigation was a foreign national and a possible agent of a foreign government. Anyone linked to the inquiry, including a US citizen, could become a person of interest.
Title 2 also permitted any district court in the United States to issue surveillance orders and search warrants in connection with proposed terrorist investigations and the Act specifically included electronic communications and voicemail records as subject to the warrants. Using the warrants, the FBI is able to access from the internet service provider all records on a user, to include name, address, and telephone billing records, session details, and payment information to include bank and credit card records.

Title 4 and Title 8 of the Patriot Act deal with defining terrorism. The definition was broadened to include many criminal acts hitherto regarded as non-terrorism, to include mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, intimidation, coercion, and racketeering. It also includes activities “dangerous to human life.” The definition of terrorist support activity was also made extremely broad and elastic, meaning that even a letter to the editor defending a terrorist group or the inadvertent contribution to a charity that was somehow linked to a group that the State Department had defined as terrorist could lead to criminal prosecution. Under the new law, any alien, including legal residents, who is arrested on terrorist related charges can be detained indefinitely under orders from the Attorney General. The evidence used to determine that the accused had possible links to terrorist organizations can be withheld at the discretion of the Justice Department and cannot be challenged, which means that it can be based on suspicion or uncorroborated information. There is no guarantee of any kind of due process for those who are arrested.
Probably most disturbing to libertarians are the National Security Letters (NSL) authorized in Title 5 of the Act. The NSL has been described as an administrative subpoena that can be used by a number of government agencies that have investigative authority. This means in practice that they are mostly used by the FBI. The NSL is used to obtain documents and information relating to any individual or to organizations, to include employment, health, financial, and credit records. There is no requirement for probable cause and there is no judicial oversight of the process. The recipient of the NSL cannot reveal that he has received the letter to anyone and can be prosecuted if he violates that restriction. At FBI, the letters can be issued by any Special Agent in Charge of any field office, which means that the authority to approve a NSL is essentially local, is not reviewed at a higher level, and does not have to be linked to any actual terrorism case. Between 2003 and 2006, the FBI issued 200,000 National Security Letters. As of 2005, the NSLs had been used to obtain more than one million personal records, including medical histories and credit reports. A Justice Department investigation determined that most had nothing to do with terrorism.
It is undeniable that the Patriot Act infringes on constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, the right to habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property, but defenders of the Acts claim that the infringements are moderate, incremental, and necessary. Defenders of the Constitution would claim that any infringement is illegal and therefore unacceptable. There are also inconsistencies in terms of how the act operates. It is legal under the act to intercept and read an email communication or listen to a phone conversation but illegal to open a letter moving through the United States Postal Service. The part of the act criminalizing giving “expert advice and assistance” to a terrorist group is so broad that it would mean that someone advising the group to surrender to authorities could be arrested. A doctor offering advice on child rearing at an orphanage in Hamas governed Gaza might likewise be prosecuted upon returning to the United States. With the Patriot Act, any objection to Washington’s foreign policy can be construed as an act of terrorism. We have empowered the police to read our private communications, place wiretaps into our homes and places of work, look into our finances and medical histories, and even search our houses without a warrant. Citizens no longer have the right to associate freely and our property can be seized by the government while we are being investigated. The Patriot Act opens the door to fishing expeditions by the government that violate the rights of every American citizen. It is a law that is worthy only of a police state and everyone in the USA who cares about the constitution should unite to demand its repeal. Now …./ excerpts from P.Giraldi

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss

2011-03-18T21:53:00.002+01:00

The outspoken Rabbi, is known as an authentic Jew,to simplify his status and philosophy, read his statement below;

"It has come to our attention that on Sunday, March 20, at 12:00 p.m., in front of the Iranian UN Mission at 633 Third Avenue, corner of 40th Street in Manhattan, certain rabble-rousers plan to hold a Megillah reading with the purpose of insulting the Iranian president and heating up tensions. Authentic Jews will be there to register their protest against these troublemakers, as well as express their pain and sorrow at this insulting and provocative behavior, which is a part of an approach that can have catastrophic consequences.
"The portrayal of the Iranian president as an anti-Semite and hater of the Jewish people is patently false. In Iran, Jews and Judaism are treated with the honor and respect. The Zionists, ever since the founding of their movement, have adopted a policy of terrorizing and vilifying anyone who does not go along with their political line. But this policy has always brought, and continues to bring, severe consequences for the Jewish people - bloodshed and misfortunes, may the Almighty spare us.
"In general, it must be known that the idea of Zionism - that the Jewish people must arise from exile and found its own independent state - is forbidden by the Torah, no matter how it is done. The Almighty sent us into exile, and forbade us to free ourselves from that exile, promising us through His prophets that He Himself would take us out of exile in a supernatural manner, without any human movement. The Jewish people believes in the Almighty's redemption and waits patiently for it.
"Therefore the idea of Zionism and its state, and especially the policy of oppressing, terrorizing and insulting, is foreign and forbidden to the Jewish people. The Zionists' use of the name "Israel" for their state is a farce; it is not a Jewish state, only a Zionist state.
"The Almighty commands every Jew to be a loyal citizen of his country of residence, not mixing into political matters between countries. A Jew must live with honor and respect for all people. We especially thank and respect anyone who recognizes the above truths.
"May the Almighty bring peace to the entire world, and may the time come when all humanity serves only Him."

What can I say, I like him and his Judaism...that my friends is a man of peace.

KEIJI.....

2011-03-15T10:41:00.017+01:00

The BBC Persian Service V (By Dr. M. Torfeh)

2011-03-10T18:42:00.003+01:00

Later on, Ambassador Radji, also voices his direct complaint. On
Wednesday November 29, 1978, he writes in his diary:
“I send off a letter of protest to the BBC in which I say that, being
able now to monitor the Persian Service’s transmission, the
Embassy is “frankly astonished at the undisguised bias that is an
ever-present feature of its broadcasts and the compromising light in
which they place the Government effort to restore stability.”69
Radji then gives insight into other Iranians of influence who were getting
together to put pressure on the BBC’s Persian Service. The next day,
Thursday November 30 he writes:
“Seyyed Hussein Nasr, the new head of the Empress’s Private
Bureau comes to see me at the office. Although he doesn’t quite
say so, I gather he is in London to make use of his university
contacts to enlist pressure from academic circles against the BBC.”
70
Another anti-BBC campaigner is the Iranian millionaire, David Allainace.
Radji writes in his memoirs of November 6 1978 that:
“David Alliance, a successful Iranian businessman, now resident in
Manchester, comes to tell me that, through his influential contacts
in the business community in London, he is bringing pressure on to
the BBC to tone down their Persian broadcasts.” 71
The BBC correspondent in Iran is also put under pressure. On December
1, 1978 Radji write that the Foreign Minister writes to inform him that:
“The BBC representative has been summoned to the Ministry
tomorrow to explain his misrepresentation of facts in reporting the
money transfers. For your information his expulsion seems
probable.”72
So, it is clear that official pressure was being put on the BBC Persian
Service to tone down its reporting on the events that led to the revolution.
However, despite the regular meetings with the Iranian Ambassador and
despite their attempts to keep relations with Iranian officials amicable, in
69 (Ibid, p 269)
70 (Ibid, p270)
71 (Ibid, p252)
72 (Ibid, p271)
Radji’s account of events and meetings there does not seem to be any
attempts by the BBC at appeasing the Shah or Iranian officials. BBC
standards of journalism are always referred to as being the guide for all
broadcasts. Even top British officials such as the Foreign Minister, David
Owen, deny they can have any influence over the BBC out put as we saw
above. Ambassador Radji, who had always tried to keep good relations
with the BBC as can be read from his memoirs, shows in his recollection
of 28 April 1978 -- when he met Gerald Mansell of the BBC and his
colleagues -- why Iranian officialdom was expecting more from the BBC
than others:
“I say that what comes out of the BBC, or for that matter other
foreign Persian language broadcasts such as those of Radio
Moscow, Radio South Yemen, or Radio Iran courier… is nothing
to decide the destiny of Iran. There is however, one distinguishing
factor about the BBC. While other Persian language transmissions
are honest in their desire to see the overthrow of the regime in Iran,
the BBC, which is quick to boast its independence and impartiality,
remains the broadcasting agency of a country that is a military ally
of Iran. It is an agency which is directly financed by the British
Government, with the length of each foreign language broadcast
determined in consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office.” 73
According to the same entry BBC’s objective reporting is stressed:
“Mansell reiterates the BBC’s impartiality and says there has never
been an occasion when only the views of the regime‘s opponents
were given. Statistics are produced to prove the claim to
impartiality. Of course they admit mistakes may have been
committed, but the BBC cannot engage in a sort of “positive
reporting” favored by the Eastern block countries.” 74
Indeed Radji himself on several occasions had tried to convince the Shah
and the Prime Minister, Amir Abass Hoveyda that the BBC reporting was
indeed impartial. A few days after Shah’s visit to Washington, Radji
write on November 25 1977:
73 (Ibid, p173)
74 (Ibid p 174)
“I send a long and carefully documented cable in reply to an
enquiry by Hoveyda, in which I say that, after a thorough
examination of the BBC’s coverage of HIM’s visit to Washington,
I do not share the opinion that the BBC showed bias or hostility.” 75
Towards the end of the era of Shah’s rule, anger with the BBC rises
almost on a daily basis. BBC’s crucial role in reporting detailed events of
the revolution -- as registered in Ambassador Radji’s book -- show
clearly that the Shah is much angered by BBC’s reporting that there were
two million demonstrators and he particularly dislikes the main BBC
reporter, Andrew Whitley, and wishes to serve an expulsion order on him.
Radji says he advised against it. Towards the end, for instance on
December 19 1978, just two months before the revolution, Radji’s
account is revealing about the extent of pressure put on the BBC by the
Iranian Foreign Minister, Amir Khosrow Afshar:
“At 11:30 Sir Michael Swann, Chairman of the BBC comes to
[Amir Khosrow] Afshar’s suite at Coleridge’s, and the next one
and a half hours are devoted to singling out for Sir Michael’s
consideration instances, some genuine, others less so, of BBC bias
and particularly against the Iranian regime. Sir Michael, a soft
spoken, pipe-smoking person of academic appearance, is
understandably defensive.” 76
Only one day earlier, Afshar, in a meeting with British diplomats, had
described the BBC “as bad as Radio Moscow.” (p288) Other supporters
of the Shah also see a major role for the BBC in bringing the Shah’s
government to heal. The German historian William Engdahl describes
the role of the BBC in the 1979 revolution as “very similar” to the
previous times when it led to the downfall of Reza Shah and then
Mossadeq’s government. With this background Engdahl write:
“The British Broadcasting Corporation's Persian-language
broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC 'correspondents'
sent into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria against the
Shah. The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda
platform inside Iran during this time. The British governmentowned
broadcasting organization refused to give the Shah's
government an equal chance to reply. Repeated personal appeals
from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result. Anglo-American
75 (Ibid p125)
76 (p289)
intelligence was committed to toppling the Shah. The Shah fled in
January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been flown into
Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his repressive theocratic
state to replace the Shah's government.”77
However, during the years that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the
relationship between the BBC Persian Service and millions of prorevolutionary
Iranians changed drastically. BBC Persian Service was
now highly trusted and liked by the ordinary people. Gone were the days
when the BBC Persian broadcasts were just for intellectuals. Now the
BBC had gained mass appeal. The image of the BBC changed in the
collective perception of the population. It was no longer the voice of
“British Imperialism” but a trusted friend. At home and abroad millions
of Iranians were listening to the BBC to find out the latest development.
It broadcast details of demonstrations, meetings and opposition
statements. It was the first media from which that famous demonstration
slogan “death to the Shah” was reported.
BBC World Service has argued openly, especially since the 1990 when it
was led by John Tusa that “cultural diplomacy” was an inherently
worthwhile activity for the British public service broadcaster to pursue.
He insisted also that cultural diplomacy provided by the World Service
was exceptionally good value for money. In Conversation with the
World, John Tusa, then the Director General of the BBC WS pointed out
that:
“We have 120 million regular listeners to our broadcasts. There
are many millions more who listen to local relays of our
broadcasts. At an all-up cost of £120 million in 1988, we deliver
our message at a cost of two pence per listener per week every
year.” 78
For John Tusa, one of its most determined defenders, the BBC WS has
never been “propaganda”, but journalism equally relevant to populations
all over the world, regardless of information environment in their
respective societies. 79And, the BBC WS does not hide the fact that it has
to take into consideration Government’s international priorities. It says in
its own web site:
77 (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, pages 171-174,
Published by Pluto Press Ltd. 1992 and 2004)
78 (Cited in: Brian Mc Nair, “News and Journalism in the UK”, pp148-9, Routledge 2003)
79 (Ibid, p150)
“The Foreign Office funds the BBC World Service. While the
World Service has complete editorial and managerial
independence, we are able to gain an understanding of the
international priorities of the UK Government as one component
(though not the sole determinant) of setting our strategy. Therefore,
we engage in regular sharing of information with the FCO.”80
There is also a more general benefit as defined in the BBC web site:
“At the same time, the BBC is a powerful global showcase for
British culture, talent and creativity, through BBC Worldwide,
which markets BBC brands, programs and TV channels across the
world. It exposes millions of people to the highest quality British
entertainment, informational, and educational output. In so doing,
it generates both esteem for the UK’s creativity, as illustrated by
the dozens of awards and other accolades it receives, and
significant financial returns.”
80 (The Foreign and Commonwealth Office/BBC World Service Broadcasting Agreement, June 17th
2002)

Nevertheless,the BBC is an extended arm of the British foreign office and more than willing and committed to carry out more than the occasional manipulation /disinformation / misinformation or whatever necessary to promote British interests. Mixing up truth and disinformation is an old trick that usually works in creating false realities and perceptions to ready and justify a public or political move. In case of Iran... Iranians always should distrust the BBC, and they should always keep in mind, that the BBC as the tool of the MI6, has been, is and shall always be after promoting short and long term British interests by manipulating or seducing a few hundred naive and in diaspora living Iranians,or even a few hundred thousand upper middle class Iranians in Iran by hoping to echo their reactions as an authentic Iranian general perception. Listen and watch them if you have to but always be aware who they are and what they represent.

The BBC Persian Service IV (By Dr. M. Torfeh)

2011-03-09T18:44:00.003+01:00

From the mid-60 to mid-70 the Shah was increasingly regarded as an
unrivalled ambitious dictator, a devoted ally of the US and benefiting
excellent relations with the international community. Iran was portrayed
in the western press as enjoying full prosperity and economic growth. His
ambitions took him so far as to begin to plan the well-known costly
celebrations of 2500 anniversary of monarchy in Iran. The Iranian
Ambassador to the UK, Parviz Radji, writes in the introduction to his
book “In the Service of the Peacock Throne”:
“Indeed the Shah saw the 1973 boom in oil prices – for which he
was the prime mover – as the moment to realize his grand vision of
Iran, as a grand force to be reckoned with economically as well as
militarily. Massive expenditure was taken beyond the human or
infrastructural capacity of the country. These were the seeds of the
gigantic economic dislocation that was to become increasingly
apparent after 1976.”48
Movements against the Shah were growing both inside Iran and in the
West. These included from the most extreme left and underground
movements to the religious clergy and the National Front. The
International Confederation of Iranian Students had become organized
across Europe, especially in France, Germany and in the UK. Shah’s trips
to Europe were often an opportunity for the Students Confederation to
illustrate its growing power. As such the Shah often faced student
demonstrations and personal attacks when he traveled abroad.
Lutfali Khonji, a veteran Persian Service broadcaster who joined the BBC
in 1968, says all details of these demonstrations were given in BBC
broadcasts and there were no restrictions on reporting anti-Shah slogans
in broadcasts despite the amicable relations between the UK and the
Shah. He says he never had any personal experience of being told what to
say or which line to take although he was one of the main news editors,
then known as “program assistant.” But he adds that the program assistant
was not writing the original reports, news or analysis.
“News items were -- and still are -- prepared in the Central
Newsroom of the BBC and the analysis was written by British
reporters. The program assistant only had the task of translating
and broadcasting from English to Persian. Amongst the talkswriters
were Evan Charlton and Squire Barraclough. If there was
48 Parviz Radji, In the Service of the Peacock Throne, Hamish Hamilton Publishers 1983, p 8
any pressure to be born, it may have been on Newsroom editors or
the so-called “talks writers.” In my experience, the BBC would
never impose any line on any of its staff.”49
However, individual managers, reporters or analysts could be persuaded
to toe a particular line, Mr. Khonji believes. Persuasion rather than force
on individuals rather than on the system as a whole is the only possibility
of influencing the news and analysis in the BBC according to Lutfali
Khonji.
He says that it would be accurate to say that at times of crisis the program
durations would always be increased by 15 minutes and with that the
budget of the Service would go up. In response to a question about the
relative lack of importance of the BBC during the 60’s and early 70’s –
when the Shah was most powerful – Khonji says:
“That’s because there was nothing important to report in Iran
during the 60’s. Whatever there was to report, was reported -- such
as the huge demonstrations against the Shah in Germany in late
60’s or the case of someone standing up in the UN General
Assembly in mid 70’s calling the Shah “a murderer.” There was
little opposition and thus little newsworthy to report during the
years after the US led coup of 1953 through to early 70’s.”50
The only unusual incident, according to Mr. Khonji was:
“The Persian broadcasts would always play the Iranian national
anthem when it was the Shah’s birthday. This is very unusual for
the BBC WS and begs the question why and whether this was to
appease the Shah?”51.
Another veteran broadcaster, Majid Massoudi, says during this period the
Shah used to listen to broadcasts and was putting pressure on the BBC.
“Iranian intelligence ministry and other related organizations
always listened to our program with diligence. Whenever we said
something tiny that they considered anti Iranian they used to
complain. We were always under pressure of such criticism.”52
49 Interview with M. Torfeh
50 Ibid
51 Ibid
52 (BBC Persian Service Archive, 65th anniversary of the Persian Service, Shahryar Radpoor.)
Massoudi says inside the Service too, there were discussions about how
to refer to the Shah. Some preferred Shahanshah [King of kings], others
Alihazrat [His Highness] and others who preferred the Shah.
“There were always discussions on using official titles such as
Alihazartat, or Shahanshah, or just saying Iran’s Shah. But this
annoyed the Shah to a great extent.”53
Khonji confirms the constant pressure put on the BBC by the Shah:
“In Germany in 1968 for 3-4 days there was a lot of anti Shah
demonstrations culminating in a huge demonstration in Berlin. We
reported all these and the Shah did not like this at all.”54
Massoudi says we reported both sides of the story. In 1967 when the
BBC Persian service was allowed by the Shah for the first time to send an
Iranian reporter, Fazlullah Nikaiin, to report on the celebrations for his
coronation, much of his broadcast was an appraisal of the Shah then
referred to as Shahanshah:
“I daresay Iranians have never taken part in such a united mass
celebrations. Other than the pageantry, these celebrations are for
showing gratitude to the crowned leader of Iran, Shahahnshah, in
one of the most stable, most important, and most decisive moments
of Iran’s history.” 55
But when a BBC English reporter, John Birdman, went to Iran and
portrayed in his report poverty in Iran close to the pageantry, Shah
ordered his deportation.
On the other hand the Queen, who had invited the Shah of Iran prior to
the celebration of 2500 anniversary of monarchy, she praised him for his
role:
“The traditions and culture of your historic land have long been the
object of our admiration. Its traditions are exemplified in the
coming celebrations of 2500 years of monarchy in Iran.”56
53 (Ibid)
54 (Ibid)
55 (Ibid)
56 (Ibid)
3. The Persian Service and the Islamic Revolution of 1979
The BBC Persian Service rose to unprecedented prominence in the years
leading to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Recalling the lead up to the
Revolution of 1979, Khonji says:
“At this stage there was a lot to report since opposition was
gathering momentum and they were contacting us in the BBC with
news. It was not just the Islamic activists but also the National
Front and left activists of a variety of colors. They would call us
daily giving us details of demonstrations, gatherings and their
political statements. So we had a lot to report.”57
By this time several new staff was recruited including Baqer Moin who
later in 1992 became the first Iranian head of the Service. Shadab Vajdi,
Sharan Tabari, Solmaz Dabiri, Fereydoon Jahed and Shahryar Radpoor
were amongst other main program assistants.
One of the common assertions amongst Iranians who were anti-Islamic
Revolution is that the BBC would tend to be ahead of the news in Iran. It
is asserted that the BBC would announce demonstrations before they
were announced in Iran. I asked Mr. Khonji why the listeners had such
impressions.
Khonji said
“Those working in the BBC had their own set of contacts. I was
the main link for the National Front and as such my friends would
pass on the relevant news on developments. Improved
communications techniques meant that the BBC could be heard far
better in Europe and through the BBC broadcasts and the Iranian
Diaspora were increasingly involved in the struggle for democracy
in Iran. Another element that increased news coverage was that the
BBC dispatched several reporters to Iran and thus could report
from various corners of the country on developments. That meant
the volume of incoming news was suddenly drastically increased.
New methods of broadcasting such as interviews were allowed.
Despite this there were only a few major interviews and the senior
British managers did not feel too happy about these since they
could not follow the contents. In the one year leading to the
revolution, there was only one interview with Khomeini, three or
57 Interview with M. Torfeh
four with Shapur Bakhtiar and two with Abdulkarim Sanjabi, who
led the National Front activists.”58
Khonji recalls a personal story when with great difficulty he managed to
get an appointment for interviewing the leader of the revolution,
Ayatollah Khomeini.
“At the time interviewing was done with great technical difficulty.
We had to book studios and lines. I also had to speak to several
contacts before convincing them of the justifications for the
interview. Nevertheless, soon after arriving in the studio, Mark
Dodd, the head of BBC WS arrived in the studio. I don’t even
know who had informed him that I was doing this interview. He
barred me from interviewing and said we should not “artificially
blowing the events out of proportion”59
Mr. Khonji uses this as an example to reject the common belief that the
BBC was supporting the Islamic revolution in Iran. However, there is the
possibility that Mark Dodd’s assertion was made under pressure from the
Iranian Embassy in London, which by then was growing increasingly
furious with the BBC broadcasts as we will see below. He recalls that
after about three weeks, Mark Dodd did allow the interview with
Khomeini but the interviewer was a colleague who was against the
Islamic revolution.
The contact that made the interview with Khomeini possible, Abulhassan
Banisadr, says that the distrust of the BBC from the old days of the crisis
still persisted. He says Khomeini was not at all convinced that he should
give the interview to the BBC:
“I suggested to Khomeini to give an interview to BBC assuring
him that they will broadcast exactly what he says. Khomeini
rejected saying “BBC belongs to the British and it will not benefit
us to give them an interview”. I convinced him when I said all the
other media you give interviews to, are also all foreign so what is
the difference. Khomeini then accepted.”60
58 Ibid
59 ibid
60 (BBC Persian Service Archives, program for the 65th anniversary of the Service, produced by
Shahryar Radpoor)
Asked about the opinion of staff at the time prior to the revolution,
Khonji says it was a true reflection of the Iranian society at home and
abroad. He claims about 80% of the staff were supporting the revolution
and only 20% were against it. He explains that the reason for the
popularity of BBC could have been the following:
1. Communication between the BBC staff and opposition was crucial.
2. Radio Iran was on strike and the BBC became the only source of
information.
3. Opposition became far more active than any other time in the
history of Iran.
4. Means of communications were far better.
5. BBC itself was by this time far more open to change and open
broadcasting with more confidence and a far more assertive
position vis-à-vis the UK Government.
6. The force of the movement was creating change inside the Persian
Service.61
Despite these, Khonji rejects the assertion strongly that the British
Government was pro the revolution or used the BBC for furthering that
aim. He says there was never any push or force on any member of the
staff. Other BBC staff such as Solmaz Dabiri and Shahran Tabari
acknowledges the same.
However, all Iranian supporters of the Shah regard the BBC’s role most
skeptically. In a revealing account of Shah’s perception of events in “The
Shah’s Story” published in 1980 by Michael Joseph Ltd., he accuses the
mass media of playing an important role in the unfolding of events in Iran
during the last three years that led to the revolution. He says,
“The composition of journalists in search of ever more sensational
news has led to the most regrettable excesses.”62
He singles out the rise in price of petrol as being the main cause of
international anger with his policies:
“I can imagine the anger of the Western motorist whose petrol cost
more or for whom there was a shortage. He was told it’s the Shah’s
fault and he believed it.” 63
61 Interview with M.Torfeh
62 “The Shah’s Story” published in 1980 by Michael Joseph Ltd, p161.
63 Ibid.
He even blames Libyan finances for having instigated the student’s
movement. He says:
“A very active subversive campaign was aimed at our students at
home and abroad… I am told that this subversion was subsidized
by Libyan funds amounting to 250 million dollars.” 64
The Shah goes on to blame the BBC in the same tone:
“No less surprising was the BBC’s attitude. From the beginning of
1978 their Persian language broadcasts consisted of virulent attacks
against my regime. It was as though some mysterious conductor
had given the go ahead to these attacks. I am not mentioning the
attitude of certain special envoys that caused certain deplorable
incidents to be magnified out of all proportion. I am tempted to
say that, for some newspapers a dead body is a godsend, and I
think that some newsagents must have made a fortune out of the
events in Iran.” 65
The US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, records in his book
Mission to Iran, how the Shah regularly used to complain about the BBC.
He says that in August 1978, just a few months before the revolution and
during the time of martial law, the Shah became especially suspicious and
related BBC broadcasts to the question of oil negotiations between the
UK and Iran and claimed they resembled “ancient British subversions” in
Iran: Sullivan, William H., “Mission to Iran, WW Norton &company,
USA, 1981,
“He [the Shah] pointed out the negotiations with the oil consortium
were currently underway and that this gave the British antagonists
all the excuses they needed to attempt the resumption of their
ancient subversions in Iran. In listening to the BBC broadcasts that
were critical of his Government, he was, he said, confirmed in this
analysis.” 66
The Iranian Ambassador to the UK, Parviz Radji, catalogues in his book
“In the Service of the Peacock Throne” (Hamish Hamilton Publishers
1983) in his memoirs covering June 1976 to end of January 1979, the
number of times meetings took place between him and the Managing
Director of BBC External Services as well as Ian Trethowan, the Director
64 Ibid (P162)
65 (Ibid p163)
66 William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran, WW Norton & Co, USA, 1981, pp156-7.
General of BBC and Mark Dodd, Head of BBC’s Eastern Service. It is
clear from these accounts that the Shah is cabling frequently his anger at
BBC Persian Service’s reporting. Radji claims that, as the Ambassador he
would often try to tone down the anger in Teheran and persuade the Shah
that it would not be appropriate to make direct complaints to the BBC,
explaining this would make matters worse and give more credit to the
BBC. His recollection of a meeting on October 4, 1977 reveals the form
of discussions that took place between top BBC officials and the
embassy:
“Ian Trethowan, the new Director-General of the BBC comes to
lunch bringing with him Gerald Mansell, Robert Gregson and
Mark Dodd…Mansell says if a story gets taken up nationally he
doesn’t see how the BBC can stay out of it. Dodd says BBC
needn’t stay out of it, but that if they should decide to give the
matter coverage, the views of the embassy should also be
expressed. I say that’s all I ask for. I then say that on my arrival in
London, I had found three main problem areas: the BBC, amnesty
International and the press.” 67
Radji illustrates in the account of his meetings that the anger is persistent
and as we get closer to the revolution, the matter gets out of hand.
According to his account, various members of the Iranian Government
who want to express complaints to the BBC are told that the BBC acts
independently. They are even frequently taken around to BBC to see
how BBC’s newsroom operates and how the Persian broadcasters are
translating the news. The go-betweens were trying to illustrate to Iranian
officials that there can be no Government pressure on the BBC. The
account of 19 April 1978 reads as follows:
“The [Foreign Ministers] session breaks up and David Owen walks
up to me followed by Khalatbari, who raises the vexed subject of
the BBC. He confesses to be puzzled as to why “the BBC is more
anxious to broadcast the views of the opponents of your friends
than the views of your friends.” The Foreign Secretary laughingly
says, “I agree with everything you say, but there isn’t anything I
can do about it,” again insisting on the BBC’s independence from
the Foreign Office.” 68
67 Parviz Radji, In the Service of the Peacock Throne, Hamish Hamilton Publishers
1983, p111)
68 (Ibid, p167)