The most glaring and obvious question is: why?

Since President Felipe Calderón declared “war” against some of the region’s murderous drug cartels in 2006, some 50,000 Mexicans have been butchered. Activists, journalists, honest law enforcement officials but also ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire, the vast majority of victims, have been the targets of mafia-controlled death squads, corrupt police and the military.

Underscoring the savage nature of another “just war” funded by U.S. taxpayers, last week The Dallas Morning News reported that “23 people were found dead Friday–nine hanging from a bridge and 14 decapitated–across the Texas border in the city of Nuevo Laredo.”

The arcane and highly-ritualized character of the violence, often accompanied by sardonic touches meant to instill fear amongst people already ground underfoot by crushing poverty and official corruption that would make the Borgias blush, convey an unmistakable message: “We rule here!”

“The latest massacres are part of a continuing battle between the paramilitary group known as the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel,” the Morning News averred. “The violence appears to be part of a strategy by the Sinaloa cartel to disrupt one of the most lucrative routes for drug smugglers by bringing increased attention from the federal government.”

According to investigators the “two warring cartels are fighting for control of the corridor that leads into Interstate 35, known as one of the most lucrative routes for smugglers.”

But as Laura Carlsen, the director of the Americas Program pointed out last month in CounterPunch, “In a series of ‘Joint Operations’ between Federal Police and Armed Forces, the Mexican government has deployed more than 45,000 troops into various regions of the country in an unprecedented domestic low-intensity conflict.”

The militarization of Mexican society, as in the “Colossus to the North,” has also seen the expansion of a bloated Surveillance State. Carlsen averred that when the Army and Federal Police are “deployed to communities where civilians are defined as suspected enemies, soldiers and officers have responded too often with arbitrary arrests, personal agendas and corruption, extrajudicial executions, the use of torture, and excessive use of force.”

But expanding the surveillance capabilities of secret state agencies as the State Department proposes in its multimillion dollar gift to the Israeli-founded firm, Verint Systems, far from inhibiting violence by drug gangs and the security apparatus, on the contrary, will only rationalize repression as new “targets” are identified and electronic communications are data-mined for “actionable intelligence.”

Indeed, The New York Times reported last summer that “after months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern Mexican military base.”

Although anonymous “American officials” cited by the Times “declined to provide details about the work being done” by a team of spooks drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and “retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command,” they said that “the compound had been modeled after ‘fusion intelligence centers’ that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups.”

Such developments are hardly encouraging considering the role played by “fusion centers” here in the heimat. As the ACLU has amply documented, “Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints, and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

In Mexico, the results will be immeasurably worse; with corruption endemic on both sides of the border, who’s to say authorities won’t sell personal data gleaned from these digital sweeps to the highest bidder?

Only this time, the data scrapped from internet search queries, emails, smartphone chatter or text messages grabbed by bent officials won’t result in annoying targeted ads on your browser but in piles of corpses.

Guns In, Drugs Out: Iran/Contra Redux

While Obama administration officials hypocritically washed their hands of responsibility for failing to clamp-down on what journalist Daniel Hopsicker christened The New American Drug Lords, an old boys club of dodgy bankers, shady investment consultants, defense contractors and other glad handers, the violence following drug flows north like a swarm of locusts is fueled in no small part by arms which federal intelligence and law enforcement allowed to “walk” across the border.

Indeed, as Hopsicker pointed out in MadCow Morning News: “Ten years ago Miami Private Detective Gary McDaniel, a 30-year veteran investigator for both Government prosecutors and attorneys for major drug traffickers, educated me on the basics of the drug trade.”

Every successful drug trafficking organization (DTO) needs four things to be successful,’ he said. He ticked each one off on his fingers: ‘Production, distribution, transportation, and–most important of all–protection’.

To McDaniel’s list we can add a fifth element: intelligence gleaned from the latest advances in communications’ technologies.

If all this sounds familiar, it should.

During the 1980s, as the Reagan administration waged its anticommunist crusade across Central and South America, the CIA forged their now-infamous “Dark Alliance” with far-right terrorists (our “boys,” the Nicaraguan Contras), Argentine, Bolivian and Chilean death-squad generals and the up-and-coming cocaine cartels who had more on their minds than ideological purity.

By the end of that blood-soaked decade, with much encouragement from Washington, including a get-out-of-jail-free card for their dope dealing assets in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department, the region was on its way towards becoming a multibillion dollar growth engine for the well-connected.

Does history repeat? You bet it does!

As Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported:

A top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug organization and his army of assassins in Juarez, Mexico–responsible for a surge in violence in that city that has led to thousands of deaths in recent years–may well have been supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons through an ill-fated US law-enforcement operation known as Fast and Furious.

But which agency has the wherewithal to guarantee that weapon flows from the United States fall into the right hands? More than a few analysts believe that Fast and Furious was an “intelligence” gambit overseen by the CIA.

Indeed, Narco News reported:

When it comes to prime intelligence targets, they don’t come much better than the leaders of Mexican drug organizations, who have their tentacles planted deep inside Latin American governments due to the corrupt reach of the drug trade. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that part of the reason that ATF’s Fast and Furious makes no sense in terms of a law enforcement operation is because it wasn’t one at all. (emphasis added)

“In fact,” Conroy wrote, “it may well have been co-opted and trumped by a covert U.S. intelligence agency operation, such as one run by CIA, that is shielded even from most members of Congress–possibly even the White House, if it was launched under a prior administration and parts of it have since run off the tracks on their own.”

Conroy revealed that enforcer, Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, who was arrested in February by Mexican authorities, “is now the subject of a 14-count US indictment unsealed in late April in San Antonio, Texas, that also charges the alleged leaders of the Sinaloa organization (Joaquin Guzman Loera, or El Chapo; and Ismael Zambada Garcia, or El Mayo) and 21 other individuals with engaging in drug and firearms trafficking, money laundering and murder in ‘furtherance of a criminal enterprise’.”

According to officials, Marrufo was allegedly responsible for the murders of some 18 patients at a Juárez drug treatment center in 2009. However, the significance of the gangster’s arrest may be overshadowed by the additional disclosure that his close associates, Eduardo and Jesus A. Miramontes Varela “worked for the Sinaloa Cartel when they became informants for the FBI in 2009.”

“Under Fast and Furious,” Conroy wrote, “the nation’s federal gun-law enforcer, ATF, in conjunction with a task force composed of several other federal agencies, including the FBI, allowed nearly 2,000 weapons to be smuggled into Mexico.”

Amongst the firearms allowed to “walk,” according to multiple published reports, were AK-47 assault rifles, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers and FN Five-seven automatic pistols. Most of the arms purchased with ATF and Justice Department approval went to the Sinaloa or other drug cartels and have since turned up at some 170 crime scenes in Mexico.

While field level investigators objected to the operation and voiced their opposition to higher-ups in ATF, they were smacked-down by senior supervisors David Voth.

Responding to strong objections from his own agents, Voth wrote a threatening email to disgruntled officers in March 2010:

I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior. I don’t know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have an exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don’t think this is fun you are in the wrong line of work–period!

Fun? Try telling that to the families of U.S. Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata or the families of hundreds of unnamed Mexican victims who turned up dead, murdered with weapons supplied by the U.S. government.

Conroy also informed us that “deadly weapons were allowed to ‘walk’ across the border, where they were put into the clutches of criminal organizations, such as those overseen by alleged Sinaloa enforcer Marrufo, so that US law enforcers could supposedly later trace the trail of those guns to the so-called kingpins of Mexico’s criminal organizations.”

There was just one small catch. “A Feb. 1, 2012, memo drafted by staff for [U.S. Senator Charles] Grassley and [U.S. Rep. Darryl] Issa, thickens the plot, indicating that there were, in fact, two FBI informants involved with purchasing weapons from [Manuel Celis] Acosta, [presumably the "main target" of Fast and Furious] and ATF had no clue that these so-called ‘big fish,’ the high-level targets of Fast and Furious, were, in fact, working for a sister agency.”

According to that Congressional memo:

During the course of this separate investigation, the FBI designated these two cartel associates as national security assets. [essentially foreign-intelligence agents, or informants]. In exchange for one individual’s guilty plea to a minor count of ‘Alien in Possession of a Firearm,’ both became FBI informants and are now considered to be unindictable. This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious–to target these two individuals and bring them to justice–was a failure. ATF’s discovery that the primary targets of their investigation were not indictable was ‘a major disappointment’.

Brilliant, right? If one were to fall for “conspiracy theories,” one would almost believe that U.S. secret state agencies, like their Mexican counterparts, were favoring one narcotrafficking gang (the Sinaloa cartel) over their rivals, the equally violent and sinister group Los Zetas or the Juárez cartel founded by self-described “Lord of the Heavens,” Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In fact, it wasn’t only the ATF-DEA-FBI that allowed guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of state-connected killers. To the list of the clueless, add the Pentagon.

In an earlier report, Conroy disclosed, citing State Department cables published by the secrecy-shredding web site WikiLeaks, that grenades used to attack the Televisa TV station and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in 2008-2009 “involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico.” A second cable confirms that “U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.”

Narco News also reported that the State Department cables confirm “that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.”

Indeed, “bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Mérida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.”

But what if that is precisely the goal of U.S. policy planners and their masters, corrupt American financial institutions like Wachovia Bank or the defense contractors who reap billions from the slaughter?

In that case then, the so-called “War on Drugs” is really a war over who controls the drug flow and the fabulous profits derived from the illicit trade.

Back to the Future

While Colombia continues to be the principle source of processed cocaine entering Europe and the United States, despite some $7.5 billion dispensed to that country’s repressive military and police apparatus under Plan Colombia, wholesale distribution of narcotics entering the U.S. are now controlled by Mexican DTOs.

It is a demonstrable fact that Plan Colombia failed to stop the tsunami of narcotics entering the U.S. and that “success” or “failure” in that enterprise was besides the point. As multiple analysts and investigative journalists across the decades have documented, U.S. intelligence agencies, principally the CIA, have cultivated ties and operational links to DTOs and their ruling class enablers, favoring cartels that advanced U.S. geopolitical goals whilst targeting those perceived as liabilities.

As researchers Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle pointed out in Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia: “Among the compradores, short-term arrangements were made on coca production that paved the road for longer-term agreements of all kinds, one of which supported the emergence of the narco-bourgeoisie, whose business operations had remained relatively independent.”

Villar and Cottle averred:

Emerging narco-capitalism permeated Colombia’s financial system, creating financial connections throughout the Colombian economy. The active participation of banks in the cocaine industry greatly strengthened financial connections among the narco-bourgeoisie. The Cali cartel metamorphosed into numerous legitimate business enterprises such as pharmaceutical companies and real estate firms to operate the cocaine trade, whereas the Medellín cartel focused on money-laundering.

This production and distribution system was highly unstable however, and “created fierce competition among traffickers with connections to the Colombian ruling class,” Villar and Cottle wrote. “The Medellín cartel waged a desperate battle against enterprises that refused to enter into an alliance with them. All manner of underhanded methods, from blackmail to murder, were employed in this battle. The violent liquidation of rival enterprises, many who collaborated with the CIA, provoked retaliation from the United States which declared a war on drugs that targeted Pablo Escobar.”

As with Plan Colombia, under terms of the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has authorized some $1.6 billion for Mexico and Central American states blown away by the narcotics hurricane. However, much of the funds doled out to Mexican military and police organizations never leave the United States. Instead, as with other “foreign aid” boondoggles these funds flow directly into the coffers of giant U.S. defense firms and will be used to purchase aircraft, surveillance equipment and other hardware produced by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex.

As in Colombia during the 1990s, a similar consolidation process, accompanied by spectacular levels of violence, is currently wracking Mexican society as drug gangs vie for control over the lucrative distribution market and are said to control 90% of the trafficking routes entering the U.S.

According to some estimates, approximately $49.4 billion annually pour into the accounts of major DTOs, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported back in 2007. However, most studies of global drug trafficking fail to analyze the benefits accrued by major U.S. financial institutions — banks, the stock market, hedge funds, etc. — who have been the direct beneficiaries of the $352 billion in annual drug profits “absorbed into the economic system,” as The Observer reported in 2009.

“In a nutshell,” Villar and Cottle wrote, “the war of drugs and terror is part of a counterrevolutionary strategy designed to maintain rather than eliminate the economic conditions that allow the drug trade to thrive.” That pattern is being replicated today in Mexico. “From Reagan to Obama, U.S. covert intervention has, paradoxically, only accentuated the social violence and systematized the production and distribution of cocaine.”

Corporate grifters, profiting on everything from weapons’ sales to surveillance kit have names. In the context of the Mérida Initiative, one firm stands out, the Israeli-founded spy shop Verint Systems Inc.

Drugs, Terror, War… Whatever

Like the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs” is predicated on the fallacy that “persistent situational awareness” obtained through the driftnet surveillance of electronic communications will give secret state agencies a leg-up on their adversaries.

Better think again! As Villar and Cottle pointed out, “the 1994 discovery of a computer owned by members of the Cali cartel offered clues on the complexities of the system and illustrated the technological sophistication of Colombia’s narco-economy.”

Indeed, the $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe “networked with half a dozen terminals and monitors and six technicians overseeing its operations,” and its “custom-written data-mining software cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange’s traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials.”

That network was “set up by a retired Colombian army intelligence officer,” a fact which the Colombian government denied despite strong evidence to the contrary. And when Colombian officials “established a toll-free hotline for information about the Cali cartel leaders,” Villar and Cottle reported that a “former high-level DEA official said: ‘All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed.”

By today’s standards, that IBM mainframe is a throwback to the stone age. With advanced communications and encryption technologies readily available to anyone, and with any number of dodgy spy firms specializing in everything from the mass harvesting of information from social networks to the installation of malware on personal computers and GPS smartphone tracking as the WikiLeaks Spyfiles revealed, only a fool — or a State Department bureaucrat — would believe that a weaponized spy kit won’t fall into the hands of billion dollar organized crime groups. Yet that’s exactly what Washington plans to do.

In the NextGov report cited above, we were informed that the State Department’s “Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in a contract notice published late Friday, said it will fund what it called the Mexico Technical Surveillance System for use by that country’s Public Security Secretariat to ‘continue to help deter, prevent and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism’.”

The contract proposal specifies that “all awards will be based on the following criteria in order of importance for 1) Technical Approach/Understanding/Personnel, 2) Corporate Experience, 3) Past Performance and 4) Price. Technical merit (captured in the three (3) technical evaluation factors enumerated above, taken together) is significantly more important than cost/price.”

But as NextGov reported while the procurement, at least on paper, is “competitive,” the State Department “came close to ruling out any other bidder except Verint with the caveat that ‘the new equipment must function seamlessly with the existing in a single system or be entirely replaced’.”

That pretty much “levels the playing field” for the Israeli firm and the suite of surveillance tools it offers, the Reliant Monitoring System, which “intercepts virtually any wired, wireless or broadband communication network and service.” Indeed, the State Department plans to “triple the capacity of the current Verint system from 30 workstations to 107,” according to NextGov. Given the spooky nature of the company, no doubt El Chapo is drooling over the prospect.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory and in a series of recent articles in Wired Magazine, “Verint was founded in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations.”

As Antifascist Calling disclosed back in 2008 (see: “Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying”): “When Comverse Infosys [now Verint] founder and CEO Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended ‘vacation’–$57 million to be precise.”

Alexander, a veteran of Israel’s ultra-secretive Unit 8200, the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, fled to Namibia because he faced a 32-count indictment by the Justice Department over allegations that he masterminded a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options which allowed the enterprising corporate grifter to embezzle some $138 million from company shareholders.

As I wrote back then:

Despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.

But as we know, software and the spy trojans embedded in their code are “neutral.” What can be used by law enforcement agencies such as Mexico’s Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) and the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI) can also be handed over by corrupt officials to their presumed targets, the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, Knights Templar, Tijuana or Los Zetas narcotrafficking cartels, all of whom have ties to Mexico’s narco-bourgeoisie, police and the military.

It wouldn’t be the first time that “retired” Israeli military officers or “ex” Mossad men were exposed as trainers for some of the drug world’s most notorious killers.

Nearly a decade ago, investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood revealed in Narco News that drug gangster and far-right political actor Carlos Castaño, the future founder of the blood-soaked Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, “was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called ’562.’ Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.”

Bigwood reported that Castaño’s IDF trainers emphasized instruction in “urban strategies,” which included the use of fragmentation grenades, RPG-7s as well as “complementary courses” on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Narco News informed us that “not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there–soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.”

A future that encompassed the wholesale massacre of Colombian peasants, union organizers and left-wing activists as the AUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA-anointed Cali cartel, founded by Iran/Contra drug kingpins, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, engaged in a brutal war to the death with Pablo Escobars’ Medellín cartel in the 1990s.

According to declassified CIA, DEA and State Department documents published by the National Security Archive in 2008, “U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.”

Documents published by the Archive “include two heavily-censored CIA memos describing briefings provided by members of a ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ of CIA investigators to members of U.S. congressional intelligence committees and the National Security Council. The Panel–which included personnel from the CIA’s directorate for clandestine intelligence operations–had been investigating the possibility that intelligence shared with the Medellín Task Force in 1993 ended up in the hands of Colombian paramilitaries and narcotraffickers from the Pepes. That investigation concluded on December 3, 1993, the day Escobar was killed.”

“The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today’s ‘para-political’ scandal,” said Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project. “The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.”

While both the Cali and Medellín cartels have faded into history, cocaine processed on an industrial scale continues to flood out of Colombia and other “legs” of the Crystal Triangle. Control over that distribution network, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, much of which finds its way into U.S. banks, is the source of the bloodshed currently tearing Mexico and Central America to pieces.

Is history repeating itself when it comes to favoring one drug gang over another? The answer is yes. According to a 2010 National Public Radio report, “an NPR News investigation has found strong evidence of collusion between elements of the Mexican army and the Sinaloa cartel in the violent border city of Juarez.”

“Dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement agents, organized crime experts, elected representatives, and victims of violence suggest that the Sinaloans depend on bribes to top government officials to help their leader, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, elude capture, expand his empire and keep his operatives out of jail.”

Sound far-fetched? As Bill Conroy reported last year in Narco News, court pleadings in the case of accused Sinaloa capo Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla “demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.”

“According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the informant [Humberto] Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.”

“The alleged deal,” Conroy averred, “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder why, if Zambada Neibla’s allegations are so much hot-air, would U.S. prosecutors invoke “national security” under provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) “in his trial in an attempt to assure certain sensitive and/or embarrassing evidence is not made available to Zambada Niebla’s attorneys”?

As Narco News disclosed, “Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.”

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a “drug war” that favors one group of cut-throats over another to obtain leverage over corrupt politicians, along with an endless source of funds for intelligence-connected black operations, the Verint deal seems like a slam-dunk.

After all, with powerful communications’ intercept technologies in the hands of the Mexican secret state, “national security,” on both sides of the border, is little more than code for business as usual.

If the legislation passes muster in the Senate and is signed by President Obama (who has threatened a veto, but don’t hold your breath), it would allow private firms–internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms and wireless providers–to hand over personal information about users to law enforcement and security agencies.

This unprecedented power-grab by a cabal of giant corporations and the federal government would take place under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the latest front in the secret state’s assault on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights.

While the bill’s sponsors and supporters claim that any “information-sharing” of personal data would be “voluntary,” it would occur without benefit of a warrant or a court order and automatically “exempts such information from public disclosure.”

Denouncing the bill, the ACLU’s Michelle Richardson said that CISPA’s “biggest and most fundamental flaw” is that it empowers “the military, including agencies like the NSA, to collect the internet records of Americans’ everyday internet use.”

CISPA is the latest in a series of repressive measures that have incrementally rolled-back the Bill of Rights since 1995′s Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist provocations. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations fundamental constitutional protections, specifically those guaranteed by the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, have been gutted.

Beginning with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which severely limited the rights of prisoners to obtain habeas corpus relief from federal courts, 2001′s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which handed the Executive Branch carte blanche to wage endless, undeclared wars, and now the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), which empowers the President to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison anyone, anywhere in the world declared a “terrorist,” including American citizens detained on U.S. soil, without charge or trial, the architecture of a police state is firmly in place.

“In the past decade,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Trevor Timm averred, “the amorphous phrase ‘national security’ has invaded many arenas of government action, and has been used to justify much activity that did not involve legitimate terrorist threats. The most obvious (and odious) example is the unfortunately named USA-PATRIOT Act, a law that was sold to the American public as essential to combating terrorism, but which has overwhelmingly been applied to ordinary American citizens never even suspected of terrorism.”

Citing the example of the FBI, Timm pointed out that under the rubric of “stopping terrorism” the Bureau “issued more than 192,000 National Security Letters to get Americans’ business, phone or Internet records without a warrant. These invasive letters–which come with a gag order on the recipient so they can’t even admit they received one–have been used to gather information about untold number of ordinary citizens, including journalists.”

Indeed, “‘Information sharing’–CISPA’s mantra–has also created privacy nightmares for everyday Americans in the name of national security. The federal government routinely shares its massive national security databases with local law enforcement agencies with predictable results.”

Amongst CISPA’s controversial provisions, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Obergruppenführer of America’s 16-agency Intelligence Community, “shall issue guidelines providing that the head of an element of the intelligence community may, as the head of such element considers necessary to carry out this subsection: (A) grant a security clearance on a temporary or permanent basis to an employee or officer of a certified entity; (B) grant a security clearance on a temporary or permanent basis to a certified entity and approval to use appropriate facilities; and (C) expedite the security clearance process for a person or entity as the head of such element considers necessary, consistent with the need to protect the national security of the United States.”

Under “Definitions,” (1) a “certified entity” is described as a “protected entity, self-protected entity, or cybersecurity provider that–(A) possesses or is eligible to obtain a security clearance, as determined by the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) is able to demonstrate to the Director of National Intelligence that such provider or such entity can appropriately protect classified cyber threat intelligence.”

“(2) The term ‘cyber threat information’ means information directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from–(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or (B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information. (3) Cyber threat intelligence.–The term ‘cyber threat intelligence’ means information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from–(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or (B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.”

According to this reading, a “certified entity” is any one of the thousands of über-secretive “cybersecurity firms” with their stable of “cleared” employees who hold top secret and above security clearances who rely upon and do the bidding of their masters–corporate shareholders and the federal government.

The bill’s draconian language would in essence transform investigative journalism and whistleblowing into a crime since “the theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information” is precisely the meat and potatoes used by journalists and outraged citizens to uncover corporate and government lawbreaking.

Indeed under CISPA, the employees of firms such as the ultra-spooky Endgame Systems, SAIC, Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics, the designers of “boutique cyber weapons” for the government as BusinessWeek disclosed last summer, would ply their dirty trade in destructive algorithmic weapons with more than a wink-and-a-nod: they would be empowered to do so and earn big bucks (courtesy of U.S. taxpayers) in the process!

To get a sense of some of the surveillance “products” which have transformed private data into weaponized kit for the secret state, readers are well-advised to peruse The Spyfiles published last December by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks.

“In the last ten years,” WikiLeaks informed us, “systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.”

To cite but one example culled from The Spyfiles, NICE Systems, founded by “retired” members of Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, Unit 8200, has become a key player in the global Surveillance-Industrial Complex.

With decades of experience surveilling, tracking and repressing Palestinian and left-wing activists at home and abroad, the NiceTrack Mass Detection Center is a perfect tool that provides “nationwide interception, monitoring and analysis” to enterprising securocrats who need a leg-up on home-grown “subversive elements.”

Accordingly, the Mass Detection Center “helps intelligence organizations and national security agencies fight terrorism and reduce national threat levels. It supports both mass and target monitoring workflows and helps operators and analysts find new suspects, generate new leads and monitor existing targets.” Indeed, the software suite “stores and analyzes all types of telephony and Internet content.” We’re informed that “collecting and storing nationwide data enables broadening the scope of target information and performing on-going and post-event investigations.”

NiceTrack Target 360° according to brochures published by WikiLeaks “is the leading communication intercept system for tracking, monitoring, and investigating targets’ activities, securing 1.5 billion people worldwide.” Indeed, “the system is designed to provide Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), intelligence organizations and SIGINT agencies with hermetic 360° target monitoring by collecting, processing, retaining and analyzing any type of communication activity.”

Amongst the product’s “Key Benefits” we learn that Target 360° can “help” law enforcement “reduce crime, prevent terrorism” and “identify other security threats” by providing “persistent situation awareness” of a “target” through “advanced IP monitoring,” “open source intelligence” and “lawful hacking.”

Additionally, Target 360° can “manage and efficiently structure millions of internet activities and unstructured data into a simple and meaningful intelligence picture.” Target 360° “is designed to handle all types of Web 2.0 internet applications, including Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, forums, chats, and e-mails, and is scalable to support new services” and can “be integrated with legacy systems for telephony and mobile interception and provide a comprehensive solution for all types of communication interception.”

As numerous critics and journalists have pointed out, the privatization of the government’s intelligence and security functions, theoretically transparent under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), would, under CISPA, fall under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) where “disclosure” is little more than a euphemism for “down the memory hole.”

In all likelihood, privatized spooks would be exempt from revealing the state’s blanket surveillance of its citizens under any number of provisions built into the Freedom of Information Act.

For example under section (b)(1), the secret state can prevent “disclosure [of] national security information concerning the national defense or foreign policy, provided that it has been properly classified in accordance with the substantive and procedural requirements of an executive order.”

Can you say “state secrets privilege,” Sibel Edmonds or Thomas Drake?

Since, an “an employee or officer of a certified entity,” i.e., a private contractor, telecom or ISP will be empowered by Congress to share user information with NSA and other departments of the federal government, such information “shall be considered proprietary information and shall not be disclosed to an entity outside of the Federal Government except as authorized by the entity sharing such information.”

Under CISPA it will be virtually impossible for the average citizen to learn whether they have been spied upon since Section (b)(4) of FOIA specifically protects “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential. This exemption is intended to protect the interest of both the government and submitter of information.”

And once an “employee or officer of a certified entity” has been “read into” a CIA, FBI, DHS or NSA black program, they are automatically exempt from disclosing such information to a lawful court since CISPA “prohibits a civil or criminal cause of action against a protected entity, a self-protected entity (an entity that provides goods or services for cybersecurity purposes to itself), or a cybersecurity provider acting in good faith under the above circumstances.”

With CISPA, official lawbreaking is automatically precluded from review by a lawful court and the average citizen, who may have lost their job because of malicious or flawed data collected by a “certified entity” will be stripped of their ability to obtain compensation from deputized cyber snoops “acting in good faith.”

Most controversially perhaps, the statute reads: “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” companies can share information “with any other entity, including the federal government.”

As CNET News analyst Declan McCullagh pointed out, “By including the word ‘notwithstanding,’ House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) intended to make CISPA trump all existing federal and state civil and criminal laws.”

Indeed, by inserting the word “notwithstanding” into the legislation, it “would trump wiretap laws, Web companies’ privacy policies, gun laws, educational record laws, census data, medical records, and other statutes that protect information,” McCullagh wrote.

As noted above, “CISPA’s authorization for information sharing extends far beyond Web companies and social networks. It would also apply to Internet service providers, including ones that already have an intimate relationship with Washington officialdom,” CNET reported.

“Large companies including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer records to the NSA; only Qwest refused to participate,” McCullagh reminded us. “Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.”

What’s to prevent firms such as Google, Facebook or Twitter from turning over our private data to the government, after all, they have their customers’ best interests at heart as part of their business model, right? Better think again!

The New York Times reported Sunday that that “Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.”

That report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission “draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.”

“As early as 2007,” the Times disclosed, “Street View engineers had ‘wide access’ to the plan to collect payload data. Five engineers tested the Street View code, a sixth reviewed it line by line, and a seventh also worked on it, the report says.”

“Google’s rogue engineer scenario collapses in light of the fact that others were aware of the project and did not object,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the Times. “This is what happens in the absence of enforcement and the absence of regulation.”

Such practices will be infinitely worse under CISPA. Google’s harvesting of their customers’ private data or Facebook’s routine cooperation with law enforcement “requests” for users’ information could in fact be turned over whenever an intelligence agency declares that doing so is in the interest of national- or cybersecurity and we would have no way of ever learning about it since harvested emails, web searches and stored profiles could be deemed “proprietary information.”

With a ginned-up panic over “cybersecurity” taking its place alongside imperialism’s other “wars” on “terror,” “drugs” and “crime,” the secret state’s “unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, in which the entire political establishment and both Democrats and Republicans are participating,” as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “must be understood as preemptive preparations by the political establishment to meet the coming social upheavals with police state measures.”

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be “mined” for “actionable intelligence,” covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine, “the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes–so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)”

“It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015,” Bamford reported, “reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) … Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.”

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime’s warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama), “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and told Bamford, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, “Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.”

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration’s invasion of “travel by other means,” as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian, through the agency’s usurpation of “jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit,” and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn’t) that there is no way of escaping the secret state’s callous trampling of our rights.

Commenting, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition.”

“The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation’s most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism.”

“Accepting that bargain,” Greenwald noted, “enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom–’he who does not move does not notice his chains,’ observed Rosa Luxemburg–but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.”

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only “choice” is to shut up, keep your head down — or else.

‘Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships’

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA’s ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency’s associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the “excess of democracy” decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against the democratic “excesses” of the 1960s, the “massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society,” were “terrifying.”

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the “austerity” boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as “investment opportunities,” our corporatist masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch in the wake of last summer’s London “riots,” a mass response to police murder (coming soon to an “urban exclusion zone” near you!): “Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: ‘the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…’”

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” and George Orwell’s ubiquitous “Big Brother,” the National Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and marginalize “dangerous” individuals and ideologies thereby “inoculating” the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar’s COINTELPRO operations, “subversive elements.”

It matters little whether today’s “usual suspects” are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or another: “threats” will be “neutralized” or more pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: “Terminated with extreme prejudice.”

Operating alongside tried and methods — police repression and violence — contemporary crackdowns are guided by “robust situational awareness” gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: “An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

“When we produced our first Electronic Police State report,” the privacy professionals wrote, “the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, “This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed.” The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution’s fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of “wars” against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping “anti-social” activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, “the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content.”

Mark that well.

Rejecting the orthodoxies and received wisdom of his day, Debord argued that “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

It is again worth noting that the much-vaunted “global village” which sprung to life with the widespread deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon’s quest for a wartime digital communications system.

But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater, what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of proprietary apps which, like Bentham’s “panopticon,” have become prisons of our own choosing?

Ponder Debord’s rigorous theorems in this light; substitute “cell phone” or “GPS” for “automobile,” and “internet” for “television” and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst to the militarist inventors of the “digital highway” they had stumbled upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.

As Debord averred: “If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the ‘mass media’ that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.”

“Internal dynamics” geared only towards its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars on “terror,” “drugs,” “crime,” take your pick. Prison-Industrial Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step right this way! There’s an app for that and much, much more!

Indeed, “if the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this ‘communication’ is essentially unilateral,” that is, “the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.”

Keep in mind that Debord’s seminal text was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Once a disquieting and uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg cube where “resistance” is always “futile.”

The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?

Once viewed as the proverbial “tip” of the imperial spear that advanced elitist dreams of “full-spectrum dominance,” the “plausibly deniable” puppeteering which formerly characterized such projects now take place in full-daylight with nary a peep from bought-off guardians of our ersatz democratic order, or a public narcotized by tawdry spectacles: Kony 2012 or American Idol, take your pick!

Mixing intellectual and moral squalor in equal measure with the latest high-tech gizmos on offer from Silicon Valley or Chengdu, the general societal drift towards data totalitarianism, once a hallmark of police states everywhere, is the backdrop where “too big to fail” is code for “too important to jail”!

With the current global economic crisis, brought on in no small part by private and public actors resorting to various frauds and market manipulations which reward privileged insiders, we have reached a social endpoint that analyst Michel Chossudovsky has accurately described as the “criminalization of the state,” that is, the historical juncture where “war criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide ‘who are the criminals’, when in fact they are the criminals.”

It should hardly surprise us then that American “hero,” Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 innocent Afghan civilians, including 9 children and then burning their bodies, joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks not out of a sense of patriotic “duty,” but because he was a thief and swindler who went on the lam to avoid accounting for his crimes.

Indeed, ABC News reported that Bales “enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio couple of their life savings in a stock fraud.”

Meanwhile Bales’ attorney John Henry Browne told CBS News that his client has “no memory” of the massacre and that it was “too early” to determine “what factors” may have led to the “incident.”

Some hero.

Keeping Us ‘Safe’

However, there are powerful institutional forces at work today which have extremely long–and exceedingly deep–memories, able to catalog and store everything we do electronically, “criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” or, more in keeping with the preferences of our Hope and Change™ administration, a one-way ticket to indefinite military detention for dissident Americans in the event of a “national security emergency” as a recent White House Executive Order threatened.

“In an Electronic Police State,” Cryptohippie averred, “every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database.”

In stark contrast to feckless promises to undo the egregious constitutional violations of the Bush regime, The New York Times reported that the “Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats.”

On March 22, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed-off on new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) that “will lengthen to five years–from 180 days–the center’s ability to retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism,” investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote.

“The guidelines,” the Times disclosed, “are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and ‘data-mining them’–using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat–than it currently does.”

We’re told that the relaxation of existing guidelines “grew out of reviews launched after the failure to connect the dots about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber, before his Dec. 25, 2009, attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner.”

“‘There is a genuine operational need to try to get us into a position where we can make the maximum use of the information the government already has to protect people,’ said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the National Counterterrorism Center,” the Times reported.

However, as Antifascist Calling disclosed in previous reports on the Abdulmutallab affair (see here, here, here and here) former NCTC Director Michael E. Leiter made a startling admission during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee shortly after the incident.

During those hearings intelligence officials acknowledged that the secret state knowingly allows “watch-listed” individuals, including terrorists, to enter the country in order “to track their movements and activities.”

Leiter told congressional grifters: “I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

As I wrote at the time: “An alternative explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now, Christmas Day’s aborted airline bombing, offers clear evidence that a ruthless ‘choice’ which facilitates the murder of American citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism’s geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.”

Commenting on the ramp-up of new surveillance powers grabbed by the Obama administration, Michael German, a former FBI investigator now with the ACLU’s legislative office warned that “the ‘temporary’ retention of nonterrorism-related citizen and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny.”

Anonymous administration officials who spoke to The Washington Post tried to assure us that “a number different agencies looked at these [guidelines] to try to make sure that everyone was comfortable that we had the correct balance here between the information sharing that was needed to protect the country and protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties.”

However, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out “oversight” of the secret state’s surveillance activities are being handled by the ODNI’s Civil Liberties Protection Officer, Alexander Joel, a Bush appointee who was so “concerned” about protecting our privacy that he found no civil liberties violations when he reviewed NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping programs.

Joel, a former attorney with the CIA’s Office of General Counsel, told The Wall Street Journal that public fears about NSA’s driftnet spying activities were “overblown.”

“Although you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on, those potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see what was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else,” Joel said.

Despite Joel’s soothing bromides spoon-fed to compliant media, Michael German warned that “such unfettered collection risks reviving the Bush administration’s Total Information Awareness program, which Congress killed in 2003.”

Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that TIA aimed “to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.”

EPIC learned that “The project called for the development of ‘revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories,’ which would contain information from multiple sources to create a ‘virtual, centralized, grand database.’ This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data.”

Although Congress allegedly “killed” TIA in 2003 when it closed the Pentagon office, we now know from multiple investigations by journalists and from the government’s own internal reports, Total Information Awareness never went away but rather, was hidden behind impenetrable layers of above top secret Special Access Programs and code-name protected projects, most of which are controlled by the National Security Agency.

‘A Turnkey Totalitarian State’

The secret state’s “virtual, centralized, grand database” will shortly come on line.

As investigative journalist James Bamford recently reported in Wired Magazine, “new pioneers” are taking up residence in the small Utah town of Bluffdale, home to the largest sect of renegade Mormon polygamists: the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center.

“A project of immense secrecy,” Bamford wrote, “it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013.”

Wired disclosed that all manner of communications will flow into Bluffdale’s “near-bottomless databases” including “the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails–parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter’.”

Additionally, one top NSA official involved with the program told Bamford that the agency “made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: ‘Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target’.”

“For the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration–the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens,” Bamford averred. “It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

Since the dawn of the Cold War, the National Security Agency operated outside its charter, illegally spying on the communications of dissident Americans. In a companion piece for Wired, Bamford detailed how NSA denied that it was eavesdropping on Americans.

“For example,” Bamford wrote, “NSA can intercept millions of domestic communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still be able to say it has not ‘intercepted’ any domestic communications. This is because of its definition of the word. ‘Intercept,’ in NSA’s lexicon, only takes place when the communications are ‘processed’ ‘into an intelligible form intended for human inspection,’ not as they pass through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses.”

NSA mendacity aside, “for decades,” Bamford informed us, “the agency secretly hid from Congress the fact that it was copying, without a warrant, virtually every telegram traveling through the United States, a program known as Project Shamrock. Then it hid from Congress the fact that it was illegally targeting the phone calls of anti-war protesters during the Vietnam War, known as Project Minaret.”

But as we learned when The New York Times disclosed some aspects of the Bush regime’s Stellar Wind program, the NSA was caught red-handed illegally spying on tens of thousands of Americans without benefit of a warrant and did so with the full cooperation of America’s giant telecom firms and internet service providers who were then immunized by Congress under provisions of 2008′s despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

Even as Congress granted retroactive immunity to telecoms and ISPs, and politicians, including President Obama, scrambled to downplay serious violations to individual political and privacy rights, the enormous reach of these programs are still misunderstood by the public.

William Binney, a former NSA official who was a senior “crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network,” went on the record with Wired and denounced NSA’s giant domestic eavesdropping machine.

Binney explained “that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations–the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law.”

“Instead,” Binney told Wired, the agency “chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country–large, windowless buildings known as switches–thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. ‘I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,’ Binney says. ‘That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast’.”

Readers will recall that back in 2006, former AT&T technician Marc Klein blew the lid off the technical details of Stellar Wind, disclosing internal AT&T documents on how the firm gave NSA free-reign to install ultra-secret Narus machines. Those devices split communications as they flowed into AT&T’s “secret rooms” and diverted all internet traffic into NSA’s bottomless maw.

Klein, the author of Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine said that the program “was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg” which is not only targeted at suspected “terrorists” but rather is “an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples’ communications every second automatically.”

Narus, an Israeli firm founded by retired members of the IDF’s secretive Unit 8200, now owned by The Boeing Corporation, and Verint, now Comverse Infosys, another Israeli firm, were close partners alongside NSA in these illegal projects; one more facet of the U.S. and Israel’s “special relationship.”

The former official turned whistleblower told Wired that “Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email.”

“At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day,” Bamford wrote, “which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney–who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago–the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct ‘deep packet inspection,’ examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.”

“Once a name is entered into the Narus database,” Binney said, “all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders.”

“‘Anybody you want, route to a recorder,’ Binney says. ‘If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.’ He adds, ‘The Narus device allows you to take it all.’ And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.”

Chillingly, Binney “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and told Bamford: “‘We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state’.”

Main Core

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration issued Executive Order 9066 which granted the military carte blanche to circumvent the constitutional rights of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and led to their mass incarceration in remote, far-flung camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

Will history repeat, this time under the rubric of America’s endless “War on Terror”?

In 2008, investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum reported in the now-defunct Radar Magazine and Tim Shorrock, writing in Salon, provided details on a frightening “Continuity of Government” database known as Main Core.

According to Ketchum, a senior government official told him that “there exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

That official and other sources told Radar that “the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

For his part, Shorrock revealed that several government officials with above top secret security clearances told him that “Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies.”

“One former intelligence official,” Shorrock reported, “described Main Core as ‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains ‘copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community’.”

It now appears that Main Core, or some other code-word protected iteration of the secret state’s administrative detention database will in all likelihood soon reside at Bluffdale.

While conservative and liberal supporters of the Bush and Obama administrations have derided these reports as the lunatic ravings of “conspiracy theorists,” analysts such as Peter Dale Scott have made clear that a decade after the 9/11 attacks, “some aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also the probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame–a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone.”

“At the same time,” Scott wrote, “we have seen the implementation of the plans outlined by [Miami Herald journalist Alfonso] Chardy in 1987: the warrantless detentions that Oliver North had planned for in Rex 1984, the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart, and the militarization of the domestic United States under a new military command, NORTHCOM. Through NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with local enforcement to control America, in the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local enforcement to control Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Indeed, as the Associated Press recently disclosed in their multipart investigation into illegal spying by the New York Police Department (NYPD), undercover officers “attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the U.S., according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.”

A 2008 intelligence report obtained by AP revealed “how, in the name of fighting terrorism, law enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that legally oppose government policies.”

“The FBI for instance,” investigative journalists Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo averred, “has collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Republican Rep. Ron Paul might indicate support for violent militias–an assertion for which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups.”

“The April 2008 memo offers an unusually candid view of how political monitoring fit into the NYPD’s larger, post-9/11 intelligence mission. As the AP has reported previously, [David] Cohen’s unit has transformed the NYPD into one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies in the United States, one that infiltrated Muslim student groups, monitored their websites and used informants as listening posts inside mosques.”

Nor should we forget how the Pentagon’s own domestic intelligence unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA, routinely monitored antiwar activists and other dissidents.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, multiple news reports beginning in late 2005 revealed that CIFA with 400 full-time DoD workers and 900 “outsourced” contractor employees and a classified budget, had been authorized to track “potential terrorist threats” against DoD through reports known as Threat and Local Observation Notices (TALON).

Although that office was shuttered in 2008, its domestic security functions were transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and the TALON database along with future “threat reports” would now be funneled to an FBI database known as “Guardian.”

However, as SourceWatch noted, “in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements,” even though CIFA was closed down, DoD “will maintain a record copy of the collected data.” In other words TALON reports, including data illegally collected on antiwar activists, will continue to exist somewhere deep in the bowels of the Defense Department, more likely than not in a Bluffdale database administered by NSA.

When President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on December 31, he did more than simply facilitate multibillion dollar Pentagon boondoggles for the current fiscal year; he set the stage for what journalist Christopher Ketchum called “The Last Roundup,” and what James Bamford’s source denounced as our approaching “turnkey totalitarian state.”

We need not speculate as to when an American police state will be fully functional, it already is.

As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set their sights on the “prize,” Iran’s vast petrochemical wealth, multiple themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.

Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran’s alleged links to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion calls for “regime change.” It would serve us well however, to explore the recent history of the secret state’s reliance upon the illicit trade and how such dalliances advance America’s wider geopolitical goals.

Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars

In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and “Castro-Communism” who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As money and weapons flowed to “our boys,” the Contras, they repaid the favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that “go-go” decade.

Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: “The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America’s first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s.”

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Argentina’s death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.

Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime syndicates. Both men were billionaires who’s wealth derived from control over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945 for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly stated: “I am the world’s richest fascist.” Both Kodama and Sasakawa operated alongside old “China hands” such as Paul Helliwell, who created CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.

Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind the throne of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup, facts you’re not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.

As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant magazine, “In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia.” In his most recent book, Scott noted:

The members of Helliwell’s small OSS detachment in Kunming (Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug triarchies and the WACL’s history. In addition to Helliwell’s support for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt’s contribution in Mexico, APACL’s formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also involved with WACL death squad patrons … and was eventually indicted himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)

Shortly after WACL’s formation, the organization was joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko, then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state allied with the Third Reich. In the “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Stetsko declared that Ukraine “will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the Vatican’s infamous “ratlines” and took up the anticommunist cudgel for the United States while working alongside European and Latin American fascists connected to global drug networks.

As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by Argentine “dirty war” specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links to both the CIA and NATO’s Gladio network, put his unique “skills” to use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte–’The Fiancés of Death’–as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez, described as the ‘King of Coca,’ overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)

Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry reported that “many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan contras.” By “1981,” Gurvich and Parry wrote, “President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building up the contra army.”

Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the CIA’s underworld “friends” made up to $60 million per month; chump change by today’s standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by 1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.

In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents, when Escobar was run to ground “key evidence” linked “the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive … to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.” According to the Archive, “The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.” They had; a pattern that persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. “war” against Mexico’s powerful Cartels.

As we now know, this great drug war “victory” in practice favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent “claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs.”

“Kent’s memorandum,” journalist Bill Conroy disclosed, “contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

“The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a few ‘bad apples’ who need to be reported to their superiors, these allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up orchestrated by ‘watchdog’ agencies within the Justice Department,” Conroy wrote.

This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.

Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.

When the “Great Triangulator” Bill Clinton took the helm in 1993, it was Slobodan Milošević who reprised the role of the century as Europe’s “new Hitler.” With the Cold War over, the Soviet “menace” a fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic “reforms” all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical anachronism had to go, and so it did.

Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal. Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in “protected” drug operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.

Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began working their magic in the Balkans.

Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany’s close allies, the secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of Western “humanitarian interventionists,” an Islamist fraudster who had expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help “liberate” Bosnia. As with NATO’s current “regime change” ops in Libya and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed into Al Qaeda, the “database,” poured into the region.

While Osama Bin Laden’s minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia, merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing Saudi-financed Wahhabist “charities,” later in the decade they gained entrée into Kosovo where they joined NATO’s newest “best friends forever,” the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and prostitution rackets across Europe.

In 1999, The Montreal Gazette published an exposé reporting that “Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S. authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the drug.”

Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was “no question” that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA’s drug ties.

“They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could,” Levine said. “As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that “While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was ‘preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs’.”

“In order to thrive,” Chossudovsky averred, “the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans ‘cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties’ including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment.”

Following NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign, a template for today’s State Department-fomented “humanitarian interventions,” the former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi’s “boys” had pushed aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.

It was a victory all around.

We should keep Chossudovsky’s point in mind today, as “undercover political lobbies” such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) “cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,” showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars in “speaking fees” from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.

The New ‘Heroin Connection’

If the prospect of a “nuclear-armed” Iran isn’t enough to send red-blooded, God fearin’ Americans into a tizzy, then consider this zinger from RFE/RL: “U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic.”

That’s right, the CIA’s former propaganda mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration “has named a general in Iran’s elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking heroin from Afghanistan.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “General General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force office in Zahedan,” has been designated a “narcotics kingpin.”

We’re told that Baghbani has been accused “of aiding Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well helping send weapons to the Taliban.”

Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO’s Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?

According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:

Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is ‘probably the world’s largest producer of opium for export’ and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.’ U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai’s warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the source of what amount to protected drug rackets–the CIA and NATO–RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive war.

But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that “Russia’s top officials have described the situation as ‘narco-aggression’ against Russia and a new ‘opium war’.”

“The Russian press,” Blagov wrote, “has been even less diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped abroad on US planes.”

Commenting on the “creative destruction” wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail that the West’s “economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.”

According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”

“How can this have happened, and on this scale?” Murray wonders. “The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government–the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

But let’s not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom’s “new Hitlers”!

Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters reported, while Iran “is a main transit route for bringing heroin and opium to Western markets from Asia … the United Nations’ top anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics.”

“Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories (from Iran),” said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).”

“This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate seizures,” he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium, morphine and heroin. “Last year it was 300 tons.”

If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters disclosed, “Iran’s campaign was showing results with the country seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to 5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;” a telling statistic not likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.

Indeed, UNODOC reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan have entered into an agreement “designed to strengthen drug control among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations targeting the major transnational networks.”

“All three parties,” UNODOC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov averred, have launched a “Triangular Initiative” that has already boosted “their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities.” Tellingly, a “joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations.” (emphasis added)

According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell “has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers.”

This is certainly not the message that war planners in Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the Obama administration has the media’s ear and can exert influence over own America’s benighted “War on Drugs”?

When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker’s eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia, pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns “walk” across the border, right into the hands of the CIA’s favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.

In fact, Narco News revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had “entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.”

Conroy disclosed that “US prosecutors do confirm in court filings that another high-level Sinaloa ‘Cartel’ member, Mexican attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10 years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa organization.”

“Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, “acted as the intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings allege.” Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico’s largest drug gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across the Americas, the “US government, in court pleadings filed in September, lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.”

What might threaten America’s “national security,” pray tell?

As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed last summer, when “embattled” acting ATF director Kenneth Melson testified before Congress he refused “to go down for a program [Fast and Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating.”

Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Melson told congressional grifters that “the evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”

As Hopsicker pointed out, those “shadowy other government agencies” is “the very definition of the CIA.”

Hopsicker asked: “If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?”

“Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF’s Operation Gunwalker?”

As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, “a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)” Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped “terrorist” suspects on CIA “ghost flights.”

But that’s all the past, we should “look forward, not backward.” Why bother with “ancient history” when there’s a new war to gin-up?

According to the Treasury Department press release, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official.”

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen.

If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and given Cohen’s role as Obama’s point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the charges reek to high-heaven. “General Baghbani,” we’re told, “allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into Iran.”

Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal, charge that “Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its operatives into Afghanistan.”

We’re told that “several [unnamed] Taliban commanders based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda operatives en route to Afghanistan.”

LWJ’s “proof”? Why none other than a 2010 statement from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that “Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons”! Case closed, right?

But as with last year’s discredited Iranian “Qods Force” plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri, has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.

Mehr News Agency reported that “Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government’s involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).”

According to Mehr, “Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based.”

Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that “the person in question has been travelling to different countries under the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number was K10295631.”

As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of Mexico’s violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.

As journalist Gareth Porter noted in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, “the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to ‘attack’ the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped ‘in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,’ according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.”

Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure, cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of America’s shadow war.

With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug scourge.

And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in 2009, “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.

Last Saturday The Daily Telegraph, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that “military planners have asked for emergency funding from Congress to address a perceived shortfall in defence capabilities that could undermine the ability of US forces to respond to an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Plans are underway “to modify weapons systems on ships that are at present vulnerable to Iranian fast-attack boats, many of which carry anti-ship missiles,” the Telegraph averred.

Feeling the heat from pro-Israeli lobby shops and congressional grifters, President Obama told The Atlantic on Friday:

When I say we’re not taking any option off the table, we mean it. I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff. I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.

In other words, despite repeated assertions by Iran that its nuclear program is strictly for civilian, not military, purposes facts borne out by multiple on-the-ground inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and assessments by American spy agencies, the bar for Iranian “compliance” is continually set higher, moved from an “active program” to a mere “capability,” it is now clear that war is the first, last, indeed only “option.”

With this mind, Times’ journalists James Risen and Mark Mazzetti informed us that lying “at the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran.”

While there is “no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power,” the Times disclosed that secret state agencies also “believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead–a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb.”

In his January 31 Senate testimony, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “stated explicitly that American officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but said there was no evidence that it had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon.”

Clapper’s assessment is shared by other top Obama administration officials including CIA Director David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey.

According to the Times:

Intelligence officials and outside analysts believe there is another possible explanation for Iran’s enrichment activity, besides a headlong race to build a bomb as quickly as possible. They say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call ‘strategic ambiguity’.

Given the belligerent rhetoric and hostile military maneuvers by the United States, Israel and NATO, why wouldn’t the Iranians aim for “strategic ambiguity” in their dealings with the West?

Ringed by U.S. military bases, targets of a CIA/Mossad “active program” to assassinate scientists, bomb military installations, wage cyberwar against nuclear facilities and impose crippling sanctions intended to crater their economy, it’s surprising the Iranians haven’t sought the illusory “security” afforded by possessing nuclear weapons!

Disappeared History

While disinformation specialists such as The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick shamefully assert that “Iran already has enough enriched uranium to build four nuclear weapons,” he trumpets this specious charge–and gets away with it–by hiding behind the skirts of anonymous “U.S. officials and nuclear experts.”

In fact, Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated the obvious not only for Iranians but for the entire planet:

We believe that using nuclear weapons is haram and prohibited, and that it is everybody’s duty to make efforts to protect humanity against this great disaster.

Khamenei, the head of Tehran’s repressive mullahocracy, whose hand was strengthened in recent parliamentary elections, also reiterated that “besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity.”

“The Iranian nation which is itself a victim of chemical weapons feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats,” Khamenei declared.

The Grand Ayatollah pointedly alluded to chemical attacks on Iran during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.

Though studiously ignored by corporate media in today’s rush to war, we would do well to recall that Iraq had been given a green light to invade the Islamic Republic by the Carter administration.

During that period, Western-supplied technology and logistical support, including geospatial intelligence provided by America’s fleet of spy satellites, along with billions of dollars in arms provided by Britain, France, Germany and the United States were lavished on Iraq when Saddam was America’s “best friend forever.” American and European firms literally handed over the know-how that allowed Iraq to kill and maim Iranian civilians and soldiers during that disastrous war. By the conflict’s end, Iran had suffered an estimated one million casualties, killed or wounded, and the near-destruction of their economy.

Investigative journalist Alan Friedman, the author of Spider’s Web: The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq, documented how early in the conflict, the U.S. began providing tactical battlefield advice to the Iraqi Army.

“At times,” Friedman wrote, “thanks to the White House’s secret backing for the intelligence-sharing, U.S. intelligence officers were actually sent to Baghdad to help interpret the satellite information. As the White House took an increasingly active role in secretly helping Saddam direct his armed forces, the United States even built an expensive high-tech annex in Baghdad to provide a direct down-link receiver for the satellite intelligence and better processing of the information.”

According to Friedman’s definitive account: “The American military commitment that had begun with intelligence-sharing expanded rapidly and surreptitiously throughout the Iran–Iraq War. A former White House official explained that ‘by 1987, our people were actually providing tactical military advice to the Iraqis in the battlefield, and sometimes they would find themselves over the Iranian border, alongside Iraqi troops’.

But such support was not limited to providing advice and battlefield intelligence to Saddam’s generals; it also extended to Iraqi procurement of banned chemical and biological weapons, actual “weapons of mass destruction,” backed by billions of dollars in loan guarantees extended to Iraq by the U.S. Commerce Department.

Indeed, as Scotland’s Sunday Herald reported more than a decade ago, months before America and Britain’s rush to war with Iraq, an investigation all but suppressed by American media, “The US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.”

Investigative journalists Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot reported at the time that:

The US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs–which oversees American exports policy–reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

Weapons that were used to deadly effect against Iran with the full knowledge, and complicity, of Western governments.

As Fars News Agency reported last June, Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani “condemned the use of chemical weapons against innocent people throughout the world, and lamented that the Iranians who came under Iraq’s chemical attacks during the imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) are still suffering from the impacts of these invasions.”

“On June 28, 1987,” Fars reported, “Iraqi aircraft dropped what Iranian authorities believed to be mustard gas bombs on Sardasht, in two separate bombing runs on four residential areas.”

“Sardasht was the first town in the world to be gassed. Out of a population of 20,000, 25% are still suffering severe illnesses from the attacks.”

As the National Security Archive revealed in declassified documents published in 2003:

By the summer of 1983 Iran had been reporting Iraqi use of using chemical weapons for some time. The Geneva protocol requires that the international community respond to chemical warfare, but a diplomatically isolated Iran received only a muted response to its complaints. It intensified its accusations in October 1983, however, and in November asked for a United Nations Security Council investigation.

What was the Reagan administration’s response?

A State Department account indicates that the administration had decided to limit its ‘efforts against the Iraqi CW program to close monitoring because of our strict neutrality in the Gulf war, the sensitivity of sources, and the low probability of achieving desired results’.

Those “desired results”? The destruction of Iran by Saddam’s military, propped-up by the repressive Gulf monarchies that now constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) whom Asia Times Online analyst Pepe Escobar has characterized as the “Gulf Counter-Revolution Club” and “NATOGCC.”

Indeed, as the Archive revealed:

The department noted in late November 1983 that ‘with the essential assistance of foreign firms, Iraq ha[d] become able to deploy and use CW and probably has built up large reserves of CW for further use. Given its desperation to end the war, Iraq may again use lethal or incapacitating CW, particularly if Iran threatens to break through Iraqi lines in a large-scale attack’.

Meanwhile, by 1984 “Ronald Reagan issued another presidential directive (NSDD 139), emphasizing the U.S. objective of ensuring access to military facilities in the Gulf region, and instructing the director of central intelligence and the secretary of defense to upgrade U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities.”

According to documents published by the Archive, “It codified U.S. determination to develop plans ‘to avert an Iraqi collapse.’ Reagan’s directive said that U.S. policy required ‘unambiguous’ condemnation of chemical warfare (without naming Iraq), while including the caveat that the U.S. should ‘place equal stress on the urgent need to dissuade Iran from continuing the ruthless and inhumane tactics which have characterized recent offensives.’ The directive does not suggest that ‘condemning’ chemical warfare required any hesitation about or modification of U.S. support for Iraq.”

As we now know, U.S. support continued and American and British firms supplied Iraq with chemical precursors used in the manufacture of chemical weapons subsequently deployed against the Iranian city of Sardasht, whose inhabitants “are still suffering severe illnesses from the attacks,” as Fars noted.

Bottom line for the Reagan administration’s State Department? “Gas the hajis and let God sort ‘em out!”

Another ‘Just War’ on the Horizon

As with the Bush administration’s ginned-up “evidence” used to slaughter some million Iraqis when the U.S. launched its “preemptive and premeditated” invasion of Iraq in 2003, as the National Security Archive disclosed, U.S. perception management over the use of banned weapons reflected “the realpolitik that determined this country’s policies during the years when Iraq was actually employing chemical weapons. Actual rather than rhetorical opposition to such use was evidently not perceived to serve U.S. interests.”

Indeed, the “U.S. was concerned with its ability to project military force in the Middle East, and to keep the oil flowing.”

Fast forward to 2012 and the manufactured hysteria over an “aggressive” Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear deterrence.

Is there a disconnect here? What “red line” have the Iranians allegedly “crossed” that would necessitate extorting billions of dollars from our disreputable Congress for war while Americans go hungry and lose their homes, congressional thieves in thrall to pro-Israel lobby groups and the Military-Industrial cabal of war profiteers who pull their collective strings? Are we to flatten yet another nation that hasn’t attacked us solely on the basis of ill-defined “ultimate ambitions”?

Increasingly, it looks like the answer is yes.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that an unnamed “U.S. intelligence official” familiar with discussions amongst top administration officials and their Israeli counterparts averred that Israel “won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”

Why not? Well, we’re supposed to believe a ludicrous fairy tale spun by Benjamin Netanyahu’s unhinged government that keeping “the Americans in the dark” would actually “decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel’s potential attack.”

Washington “peacemakers” eager to “avoid” war with the Islamic Republic, including senior “U.S. intelligence and special operations officials,” AP reported, “have tried to keep a dialogue going with Israel” by “sharing options such as allowing Israel to use U.S. bases in the region from which to launch such a strike, as a way to make sure the Israelis give the Americans a heads-up, according to the U.S. official, and a former U.S. official with knowledge of the communications.”

With this in mind, Haaretz reported that “Netanyahu is expected to publicly harden his line against Iran during a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on March 5, according to a senior Israeli official.”

Correspondent Barak Ravid disclosed that Israel is demanding that Obama “make further-reaching declarations than the vague assertion that ‘all options are on the table’.” In fact, Netanyahu “wants Obama to state unequivocally that the United States is preparing for a military operation in the event that Iran crosses certain ‘red lines’.”

Apparently, administration officials and Pentagon war planners got the message. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that “the U.S. could join Israel in attacking Iran if the Islamic republic doesn’t dispel concerns that its nuclear-research program is aimed at producing weapons.”

“Four days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to arrive in Washington,” Bloomberg averred, “Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz told reporters the Joint Chiefs of Staff have prepared military options to strike Iranian nuclear sites in the event of a conflict.”

“What we can do, you wouldn’t want to be in the area,” Schwartz told reporters in Washington.

In keeping with Obama’s statement that his administration is marching in “lockstep” with Israel, “Pentagon officials said military options being prepared start with providing aerial refueling for Israeli planes and include attacking the pillars of the clerical regime, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite Qods Force, regular Iranian military bases and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”

The Guardian disclosed on Friday that “Israel is to test an advanced anti-ballistic missile system in the coming weeks, inevitably fuelling speculation about preparations for a possible military confrontation with Iran.”

“The unusual advance notification of the test,” The Guardian noted, “follows an unannounced test in November of a long-range ballistic missile that intensified speculation that Israel was preparing for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Just yesterday, TASS disclosed that “the carrier group of the USS Carl Vinson has re-entered the Gulf. Another US carrier group, of the USS Abraham Lincoln, continues to patrol the Arabian Sea just south of the Strait of Hormuz. It is backed by three attack submarines, one of which is carrying 154 Tomahawk missiles.”

In other words, preparations for a joint U.S.-Israeli-NATO attack will target Iran’s entire defense infrastructure, and in all likelihood its civilian infrastructure as well, in preparation of Washington’s long-standing goal of “regime change.”

Driving home the point that the United States is preparing to launch a new war of aggression in the Middle East, The Washington Post reported last week that contingency plans have already been drawn up for attacking the Fordow nuclear facility.

“Built into a mountain bunkers designed to withstand an aerial attack,” Pentagon stenographer Joby Warrick informed us, “U.S. military planners … are increasingly confident about their ability to deliver a serious blow against Fordow should the president ever order an attack.”

“In arguing their case, U.S. officials acknowledged some uncertainty over whether even the Pentagon’s newest bunker-buster weapon–called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator–could pierce in a single blow the subterranean chambers where Iran is making enriched uranium,” Warrick wrote.

However, “a sustained U.S. attack over multiple days would probably render the plant unusable by collapsing tunnels and irreparably damaging both its highly sensitive centrifuge equipment and the miles of pipes, tubes and wires required to operate it.”

“If you can target the one piece of critical equipment instead of the whole thing, isn’t that just as good?” an anonymous official told the Post. “Even by reducing the entrances to rubble, you’ve effectively entombed the site.”

It isn’t just centrifuges, however, that American and Israeli war criminals plan to “entomb.”

Close aides to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Tel Aviv’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper Wednesday that “Iran’s citizens should be starved in order to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.”

“Suffocating sanctions could lead to a grave economic situation in Iran and to a shortage of food,” YNET’s anonymous source said. “This would force the regime to consider whether the nuclear adventure is worthwhile, while the Persian people have nothing to eat and may rise up as was the case in Syria, Tunisia and other Arab states.”

“The Western world led by the United States must implement stifling sanctions at this time already, rather than wait or hesitate,” YNET disclosed. “In order to suffocate Iran economically and diplomatically and lead the regime there to a hopeless situation, this must be done now, without delay.”

As left-wing analyst Richard Silverstein pointed out on the Tikun Olam web site: “Keep in mind, this particular gem of an Israeli isn’t advocating merely putting Iran ‘on a diet’ as Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s advisor, did toward Gaza. He’s advocating death, malnutrition, pestilence: the whole nine yards of incremental genocide.”

“It’s especially telling that this genius came up with such a policy proposal on the eve of Bibi’s trip to Washington to meet with Pres. Obama, who will certainly warm to such an idea,” Silverstein noted. “I guess the Israelis must see this as an ice-breaker to bring the two leaders, who have a history of icy relations, closer.”

Mass starvation? Genocide? No problem!

And why not? After all, as Karl Rove told journalist Ron Suskind back in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

But as Iran specialist Gary Sick recently observed in Le Monde Diplomatique, “When sanctions began Iran had only a rudimentary nuclear programme, without a single centrifuge. Today, after 16 years of ever-stronger sanctions, the IAEA reports that Iran has a substantial nuclear programme with some 8,000 operational centrifuges installed in two major sites, and a stockpile of about five tons of low-enriched uranium. This is the definition of a failed policy.”

“The US and its allies have responded by increasing the sanctions to a point where Iran would no longer be able to sell its petroleum products, depriving it of more than 50% of its revenues. This amounts to a military blockade of Iranian oil ports, an act of war,” Sick wrote.

“So sanctions, supposed to be the alternative to war, are gradually morphing into economic warfare. The point at which economic pressure becomes undeclared war will be reached by mid-2012 when near-total boycotts of Iranian banks and Iranian oil by the US and the EU will formally take effect. No one can be sure how Iran will respond, but it is difficult to believe it will meekly surrender or simply do nothing.”

And when Obama and Netanyahu meet tomorrow in Washington, “neither heads of state will have to worry too much about plotting their war on Iran. Pentagon officials are saying that those wheels are already in motion,” Russia Today noted.

“With Obama preparing to go before the AIPAC conference this weekend, there are already talks that the United States’ commander-in-chief is considering giving in to Israeli pressure to align against Iran with force, fearing what repercussions could come on Election Day should he walk,” RT observed.

Although “Obama has been hesitant to throw his weight behind any actual endorsements of war so far–and much to the chagrin of Israel–but this week’s meeting between Barak and Panetta suggest that Obama may soon crack.”

Should the United States engage Iran militarily however, it just might be more than Obama that would “soon crack.”

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya warned, citing the results of a 2002 Pentagon war game: “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

While we do not know where belligerent moves by the West will lead, it is also clear that despite these threats Iran will “not go gentle into that good night.”

Indeed, as investigative journalist Robert Parry pointed out on the Consortium News web site, arch neocon Senator Joseph Lieberman “is leading a group of nearly one-third of the U.S. Senate urging that the red line on war with Iran be shifted from building a nuclear weapon to the vague notion of Iran having the ‘capability’ to build one.”

“In other words,” Parry warned, “the next preemptive war could be launched not against Iran for actually building a bomb or even trying to build a bomb but rather for simply having the skills that theoretically could be used sometime in the future to build a bomb. The ‘red line’ has been moved from some possible future development to arguably what already exists.”

Last week Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili wrote European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, reiterating that the Islamic Republic’s willingness to return to the negotiating table “is tied to the P5+1′s constructive approach to Iran’s initiatives,” Press TV reported.

In that letter, Iran voiced their “readiness for dialogue on a spectrum of various issues which can provide ground for constructive and forward-looking cooperation,” and that talks should be approached “on step-by-step principles and reciprocity.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, flanked by Ashton at a Friday press conference that was pure Kabuki theater said “We think this is an important step, and we welcome the letter,” The Washington Post reported.

“I’m cautious and I’m optimistic at the same time for this,” Ashton told reporters after a gabfest with Clinton at the State Department.

“It also demonstrates the importance of the twin-track approach,” Ashton told The New York Times, “referring to the international effort to intensify sanctions while leaving the door open for a diplomatic resolution of concerns about the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons.”

In essence what Ashton is saying is: We have a gun pointed at your head and can pull the trigger at any time; better to capitulate now and give up your right to enrich uranium for your civilian program rather than run the risk of war.

Undeterred by implicit Western threats, Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi “has reiterated Tehran’s determination to continue with its peaceful nuclear program, insisting on the nation’s willingness to even deal with ‘the worst-case scenario’,” Press TV reported Sunday.

Speaking at a news conference Salehi asserted:

Since we believe that we are right, we do not have the slightest doubt in the pursuit of our nuclear program. Therefore, we plan to move ahead with vigor and confidence and we do not take much heed of [the West's] propaganda warfare. Even in the worse-case scenario, we remain prepared.

Lambasting the West’s contradictory posture, hailing Iran’s willingness to renew talks with the P5+1 nations on the one hand, while raising “baseless allegations” over Iran’s civilian nuclear program on the other, Salehi observed that “they [the West] have an arrogant nature, they have not learned to engage in political interactions with prudent and humane manners.”

The Foreign Minister however “expressed optimism” that “Western countries, as a whole will amend their policies towards Iran.”

On Monday a team of IAEA inspectors arrived in Tehran, BBC News reported. Chief inspector Herman Nackaerts said their “highest priority” was to clarify the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program.

Although the Agency had described their last visit in January as “positive,” saying that Iran was “committed to resolving all outstanding issues,” as in the case of Iraq a decade ago, an unnamed U.S. official told The New York Times that the meeting was “a disaster” that demonstrated Iranian “foot-dragging.”

The IAEA’s board of governors “is scheduled to convene on March 5 in Vienna, the same day on which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to give a speech in Washington at a meeting of the annual policy conference of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” Haaretz disclosed.

Talk about coincidences!

‘SWIFT-Boating’ Iran

In her remarks last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that any resumption of talks “will have to be a sustained effort that can produce results.” Translation: “Iran will give in to all our demands–or else.”

The “or else” wasn’t long in coming.

In fact on Friday, the same day that Ashton and Clinton expressed “cautious optimism” over a resumption of P5+1 talks, the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT network, “bowed to international pressure,” Reuters reported, “and said it was ready to block Iranian banks from using its network to transfer money.”

So much for “confidence building” measures ahead of negotiations!

Washington’s latest move to strangle the Iranian economy, follow efforts by the U.S. and EU to enact crippling sanctions that would punish countries and financial institutions if they do not cut-off purchases of Iranian oil.

However, the Associated Press reported last week, “American attempts to get major Asian importers of Iranian oil to rein in their purchases are faltering as allies South Korea and Japan give U.S. officials a polite brushoff.”

“Emerging giants India and China may even increase their purchases,” AP disclosed.

Indeed, as a close ally of Tehran “China has also dug its heels in–in fact, far deeper than either South Korea or Japan. Beijing turned a blind eye to efforts by American Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to get it to cut back on Iranian imports during a January visit.”

“Earlier this month,” AP reported, “the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily described Western efforts to pressure Iran with an oil embargo as ‘casting a shadow over the global economy’.”

In this light, the move to cut-off Iranian banks from the SWIFT network will have far-reaching ramifications and will surely intensify Washington’s geopolitical machinations targeting their Asian capitalist rivals.

In an email published by Reuters, the private company declared that “SWIFT stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted.”

The Iranian response quickly followed the announcement. Last week, Iran said it would “immediately” order a preemptive embargo of crude oil exports to six recession-hit European nations–Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, France and the Netherlands.

“It took virtually no time for Iran’s Oil Ministry and then the Foreign Ministry to deny it,” Asia Times Online analyst Pepe Escobar wrote.

“But only the deaf, dumb and blind wouldn’t understand the message; blowback for the ridiculously counter-productive European sanctions/oil embargo package will only plunge vast swathes of Europe further into deep economic pain,” Escobar observed.

Making good on a pledge approved by Parliament earlier this month, the Iranian Oil Ministry announced it has cut oil exports “to British and French firms in line with the decision to end crude exports to six European states,” Press TV disclosed Sunday.

Oil Ministry spokesperson Alireza Nikzad-Rahbar said that Iran would have no problem exporting and selling crude oil to its customers.

“We have our own oil customers and replacements for these [British and French] companies have already been chosen and we will sell the crude oil to new customers instead of the British and French companies,” Nikzad-Rahbar averred.

On Monday, Iran’s Deputy Oil Minister Ahmad Qalebani “hinted at the possibility of a halt in oil exports to Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Italy and Portugal,” Press TV disclosed.

“Undoubtedly if the hostile actions of certain European countries continue, oil exports to these countries will be stopped,” Qalebani said.

Call it round two of a new tit-for-tat oil war where almost everyone loses.

As financial jackals and capitalist hyenas lusting after publicly-owned assets in cash-strapped EU states such as Greece, Italy and Spain move in for the kill, Washington’s one-two punch against Iran and recession-hammered EU workers will have have the salutary effect of hastening “reform,” i.e., the immiseration of millions of proletarians “transitioning” to their new role as low-paid wage slaves in a global order lorded over by Wall Street and the City of London.

In a Press TV interview, two Italian lawmakers voiced “their serious concern about Tehran halting oil exports to some European states.”

Democratic Party Senator Francesco Ferrante told the Iranian news outlet that “Rome is currently importing a great deal of its needed oil from Iran.”

“As a result, Italy will suffer more than other countries from the decision of cutting oil supplies to European states taken by the Iranian government,” he added.

Ferrante said that “Italians’ everyday lives will be affected as fuel prices are likely to go up [as a result of Iran oil cut]. The [oil] cut will also have negative consequences on Italian companies.”

Another senator, Stefano Saglia from Italy’s People of Liberty Party, told Press TV: “Without a doubt, Italy is the European country that will be damaged the most from this situation as Iran and Italy have always been close business partners.”

And with a massive strike wave earlier this month against harsh austerity measures imposed on Italy’s combative working class by the unelected government of Prime Minister Mario Monti, the European Chairman of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and a leading member of the shadowy Bilderberg Group, an Iranian oil boycott could send the Italian economy over the cliff.

As a result of escalating tensions, Forbes reported on Friday that the price of crude oil “has gone on a nice rally in February and a perfect storm has brewed that promises to take it higher.”

“Markets have underestimated how tight global oil markets truly are,” Forbes disclosed. So much for U.S. fantasies that Saudi Arabia or the Gulf monarchies will make up any shortfalls that arise from removing Iranian oil from international markets.

“Supply-side issues, particularly the problems around Iran, and demand-side issues, especially very strong Asian and Chinese demand, will help take prices higher. A weak U.S. dollar adds a final drop that could take U.S. prices to $118 a barrel by the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Barclays.”

“West Texas Intermediate contracts for March delivery, currently trading at $103.52 a barrel, have gained on eight of the last ten trading days while Brent, the international benchmark, recorded six positive sessions over the same time frame and was at $119.62 as of 4:20PM in New York on Friday,” Forbes reported.

Following Monday’s report that Iran may be poised to halt oil shipments to additional EU states, “crude for March delivery rose as much as $2.20 to $105.44 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest intraday price since May 5,” Bloomberg News reported.

“The more actively traded April contract gained $1.64 to $105.45. Prices increased 4.6 percent last week and are up 6.1 percent so far this year.” Additionally, “Brent oil for April settlement on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange climbed as much as $1.57, or 1.3 percent, to $121.15 a barrel.

According to Christopher Bellew, “a senior broker at Jefferies Bache Ltd. in London, who correctly predicted last week that the price of Brent crude would advance to $120 a barrel,” increasing tensions in the Persian Gulf “continues to support prices,” Bloomberg noted.

Commenting on the deteriorating situation, NusConsulting Group analyst Richard Soultanian told Forbes that “Market prices currently reflect a significant risk premia for the potential of a supply disruption from a geopolitical event,” i.e., a “preemptive” attack on Iran. “However, the amount of risk premia currently included does not fully account for an actual event/supply disruption.”

In plain English, should a U.S./Israeli/NATO attack force Iran’s hand into closing the strategic energy chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, as a defensive response to Western aggression, global energy prices will skyrocket and quickly wreck havoc on recession-plagued capitalist economies.

According to Barclay analysts:

Our view remains that policy and circumstances are now both running fast enough for policy accidents and unintended consequences to play a role. In other words, in our view, the probability of the situation becoming ‘hot’ in some way that affects the oil market is now significant and perhaps rising, in a way which makes the maintenance of too entrenched a short position in the market increasingly difficult.

Will the SWIFT cut-off work? “Hardly,” according to Asia Times. “It will certainly represent more devastation unleashed over ‘the Iranian people’–the vague entity of choice against which the US has ‘no quarrel.’ More than 40 Iranian banks use SWIFT to process financial transactions, and Iranians use it like everybody else in a globalized economy.”

However, Pepe Escobar writes:

It will drag SWIFT’s carefully maintained reputation for trust and neutrality through the mud; imagine other member countries’ reaction to the fact they can also be totally marginalized according to the US’s whims.

The “message” was delivered to the Europeans “Mafia-style” Escobar averred, “in person” by David Cohen, U.S. Treasury Department Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

On Friday Cohen told The Washington Post that cutting-off Iranian access to SWIFT “would build on earlier U.S. efforts to exclude Iranian banks from international commerce.”

“It’s another good turn of the screw,” Cohen said.

Really?

“If the Washington/Tel Aviv-promoted hysteria is already at fever pitch,” Asia Times warned, “wait for March 20, when the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in other currencies apart from the US dollar, heralding the arrival of a new oil marker to be denominated in euro, yen, yuan, rupee or a basket of currencies.”

“That may be the straw to break the American camel’s back.”

Sometime in March, the USS Enterprise, along with a large contingent of U.S. Marines will join two other aircraft carrier battle groups and NATO warships and enter waters off Iran’s coast.

Earlier this month, the Enterprise and NATO military units, including forces from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand concluded maneuvers, including large-scale amphibious landings against an unnamed “hostile power.”

The menacing tone of U.S. rhetoric was matched by the deployment of American firepower. The Associated Press reported last week that U.S. Fifth Fleet Commander, Vice Admiral Mark Fox said that the Navy has “built a wide range of potential options to give the president” and is “ready today” to confront any hostile action by Tehran.

“We’ve developed very precise and lethal weapons that are very effective, and we’re prepared,” AP reported. “We’re just ready for any contingency.”

As the World Socialist Web Site recently pointed out, what Fox and other Pentagon big wigs have “outlined is the classic scenario for a US provocation that could provide the pretext for war–the appearance of ‘Iranian’ mines, an inflammatory media campaign and a US attack on Iranian naval assets that rapidly escalates into all-out conflict.”

“The US has a history of manufacturing naval episodes to serve as a casus belli,” Peter Symonds warned. “The notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, in which Vietnamese PT boats allegedly attacked a US destroyer, was exploited to obtain congressional approval for a massive US military intervention in Indochina.”

Today, with the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration marching in “lockstep” with Israel as it plans to launch a “preemptive” war of aggression against Iran, and as the administration allies itself, once again, with the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as Al Qaeda, in its “regime change” program targeting Iran’s ally, Syria, a major global conflict is a provocation away.

Last Sunday during an interview with NBC News, the president made it clear that “all options” regarding plans for a joint U.S.-Israeli attack “are on the table.” Far from distancing his government from the strident rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv, Obama added that the administration is working “in lockstep” with Israel to “prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

Never mind that unlike Israel, which is estimated to possess upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Iran is perfectly within its rights under international law to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Indeed in December 2003, the Islamic Republic signed an additional protocol authorizing IAEA inspectors to make intrusive, snap inspections of their nuclear facilities and have expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the Western-manufactured “standoff.”

In our Orwellian Empire, however, “diplomacy” is a convenient cover — and political talking point — for war and regime change. “Again,” Obama told NBC News, “our goal is to resolve this diplomatically. That would be preferable. We’re not going to take options off the table, though.”

The president followed-up his threats on Monday when he signed an executive order freezing “all Iranian government and financial institutions’ assets that are under U.S. jurisdiction,” Bloomberg News reported.

According to the White House, Obama took the additional step towards cratering Iran’s economy and cited “‘deceptive practices’ of the Iranian central bank in hiding transactions of sanctioned parties and its failure to prevent money laundering, concluding that Iran activities pose an ‘unacceptable risk’ to the international financial system.”

If only Obama’s “neocon-lite” regime had taken similar measures to rein-in the fraudulent and patently “deceptive practices” of the big Western capitalist financial firms that continue to pose an “unacceptable risk” to the economic and social well-being of the global proletariat!

Nigel Kushner, the CEO of the London-based Whale Rock Legal told Bloomberg that “the practical impact is less important than the message it sends to Iran.” The analyst went on to say that the new executive order is “a declaration of economic warfare, to the extent that it’s not already been declared,” Bloomberg averred.

Accordingly, the asset freeze blocks “all property and interests in property belonging to the Iranian government, its central bank, and all Iranian financial institutions, even those that haven’t been designated for sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department,” and is one more sign that “hope and change” fraudsters in Washington have taken these steps as deliberate provocations.

This is spelled out quite clearly by neocon Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the oxymoronic Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has rightly been described as the successor organization of the infamous Project for the New American Century.

Last summer, an exposé of the organization by Eli Clifton at Think Progress revealed that FDD’s über-rich donors include individuals who, like Obama, march “in lockstep” with Israel’s Likud party.

According to Clifton’s research, FDD sugar daddies include: U.S. Healthcare CEO Leonard Abramson, the head of the Abramson Family Foundation ($822,000); Edgar M. and Charles Bronfman, heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune (($1,050,000); Home Depot cofounder Bernard Marcus ($600,000); mortgage backed securities “pioneer,” Lewis Rainieri ($350,000); “hedge fund mogul” Michael Steinhardt ($850,000) and Ameriquest owner and former Bush administration ambassador to the Netherlands, Roland Arnall ($1,802,000).

“Most of the major donors,” Clifton wrote, are active philanthropists to ‘pro-Israel’ causes both in the U.S. and internationally,” who “helped promote the ‘Bush doctrine’ which led to the invasion of Iraq” and are doing so today with the ginned-up crisis over Iran.

Dubowitz told Bloomberg that Obama’s new executive order was “the logical next step in the ‘administration’s economic war on the Iranian regime’.” He gloated that “freezing assets of Iran’s central bank and its government institutions, including the National Iranian Oil Company, makes them ‘subject to much tougher enforcement by the U.S. government and the global financial sector’.”

In response, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ramin Mehmanparast told Tehran Times Tuesday, that “the issue of sanctions pursued by Western countries and U.S. officials is not a new issue. The issue… is regarded as a hostile measure and indicates that officials of Western countries, particularly the Americans, have not yet come to know our great nation.”

“If illogical pressure and inhumane methods are used to hinder the progress of the country and to prevent it from achieving its rights,” Mehmanparast said “they (countries that impose sanctions) will definitely not receive a pleasant response from our nation.”

Military Build-Up Accelerates

War is not pursued by economic means alone, however.

On the military front, Navy Times reported last week that the “essence” of a massive war game carried out along the U.S. east coast, “Bold Alligator 2012″ was “planning, staging and getting them here–and not a few platoons, not a Marine Expeditionary Unit but an entire Marine Expeditionary Brigade that could number upwards of 14,500 Marines and sailors.”

According to the right-wing Israeli publication Debkafile, the “Bold Alligator” drill “is the largest amphibian exercise seen in the West for a decade, staged to simulate a potential Iranian invasion of an allied Persian Gulf country and a marine landing on the Iranian coast.”

As part of the exercise, three Marine Corps gunship carriers that practiced an amphibious landing and attacked a “hostile” mechanized enemy division which had “invaded its neighbor.”

Practicing alongside their U.S. counterparts, “French, British, Italian, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand military elements are integrated in the drill.”

Debkafile reported that “Bold Alligator” is “led by the USS Enterprise nuclear carrier with strike force alongside three amphibian helicopter carriers, the USS Wasp, the USS Boxer and the USS Kearsage.”

“On their decks,” the Israeli publication averred, “are 6,000 Marines, 25 fighter bombers and 65 strike and transport helicopters, mainly MV-22B Ospreys with their crews. Altogether 100 combat aircraft are involved.”

Coinciding with naval exercises currently underway in the Persian Gulf, when the “Bold Alligator” war games end, “the participants are to be shipped out to Persian Gulf positions opposite Iran. Altogether three American aircraft carrier strike groups, the French Charles de Gaulle carrier and four or five US Marines amphibian vessels will be posted there,” Debkafile’s military sources report.

As war drums beat louder, researcher Rick Rozoff at Stop NATO revealed that during a January 30 meeting, President Obama “met with his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili in the Oval Office at the White House for an unprecedented private meeting between the heads of state, a tête-à-tête initiated by Washington.”

Rozoff reports that:

Obama had summoned the ambitious and erratic Georgian leader to Washington to propose a quid pro quo: The use of Georgian territory for American attacks on Iran in exchange for the U.S. exercising its not inconsiderable influence in Georgia–with a population of only 4.7 million the third largest recipient of American foreign aid–to assist in securing Saakashvili’s reelection in next year’s presidential poll.

The move was denounced by former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, “who was overthrown by Saakashvili’s self-styled Rose Revolution in 2003,” a U.S.-financed “civil society coup” that installed an American-educated puppet in power in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze warned, “I don’t rule out that to retain the [presidential] chair Saakashvili may join a military campaign against Iran, which would become a catastrophe for our country.”

“Georgian analysts and opposition party leaders seconded Shevardnadze’s suspicions, specifying that the Saakashvili regime would provide air bases and hospitals, of which a veritable proliferation have appeared in recent months, for such a war effort.”

“A Georgian opposition analyst estimated that 30 new 20-bed hospitals and medical clinics were opened last December and that new air and naval sites are being built and modernized, military air fields in Vaziani, Marneuli and Batumi most ominously,” Rozoff wrote.

Similarly, The Jerusalem Post, citing a piece that appeared Saturday in The Times, reported that Azerbaijan, which shares a long border with Iran, “is teeming with Mossad agents working to collect intelligence on the happenings within the Islamic Republic.”

“This is ground zero for our intelligence work,” an anonymous Mossad intelligence operative told The Times. “Our presence here is quiet, but substantial. We have increased our presence in the past year, and it gets us very close to Iran. This is a wonderfully porous country.”

One might say, a “wonderfully porous country” for staging terror attacks, as NBC News revealed last week.

According to Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, “deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.”

That group the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, enjoys considerable support amongst Washington’s power elite as The Christian Science Monitor disclosed last summer.

Indeed, “a high-powered array of former top American officials,” from Rudy Giuliani to Howard Dean, “have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak in support of the MEK.”

While Obama administration officials have tried to distance the U.S. secret state from the Mossad’s assassination program, as Richard Silverstein noted on the left-wing Tikun Olam web site:

One aspect of this report, however, is misleading. The U.S. officials who confirm Mossad involvement in these plots carefully note that the U.S. is not participating. That, unfortunately is not quite true. The Bush administration allocated $400-million for this black ops war against Iran. A good portion of this is suspected of funding Israel’s efforts. So it is highly likely that we are the paymasters for this effort and our denials ring hollow.

But the Iranian terror cult’s connections to the CIA don’t stop there. In fact, “law enforcement officials have told NBC News that in 1994, the MEK made a pact with terrorist Ramzi Yousef a year after he masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City,” Engel and Windrem wrote.

According to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Yousef built an 11-pound bomb that MEK agents placed inside one of Shia Islam’s greatest shrines in Mashad, Iran, on June 20, 1994. At least 26 people, mostly women and children, were killed and 200 wounded in the attack.

Yousef, the nephew of reputed “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammad, was the top bombmaker for Osama Bin Laden’s Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as Al Qaeda, who had a long history of close collaboration with the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency before “going off the reservation” in the early 1990s.

These connections, and links, to Western destabilization operations are hardly historical relics of Washington’s anticommunist jihad against the former Soviet Union, as Peter Dale Scott pointed out in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus last summer.

Scott noted that:

Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America.

And today, with foreign fighters flooding into Syria, including Libyan jihadist elements armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, it should hardly come as a shock that Al Qaeda’s “emir,” Ayman al-Zawahri, in a reprise of Islamist-backed efforts in alliance with the CIA in Afghanistan during the 1980s “urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to come to the aid of Syrian rebels confronting Assad’s forces,” Reuters reported Sunday.

Western operations against Syria are viewed as a prelude to an all-out attack on Iran as Michel Chossudovsky and other analysts describe in a new series published by Global Research.

Indeed, U.S. war planners have presented regional military commanders with a target list that include “beyond Iran’s nuclear facilities, communications systems; air defense and missile sites; Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities; munitions storage facilities, including those for sea mines (remember the Strait of Hormuz); airfields and aircraft facilities; and ship and port facilities, including midget submarines, missile boats and minelayers,” The Washington Post disclosed.

“Aircraft employed,” the Post averred, “would include B-2 stealth and B-52 bombers, fighter-bombers and helicopters, along with ship-launched cruise missiles.”

In other words, Washington is contemplating a massive air and sea bombardment followed by a land invasion, as the “Bold Alligator 2012″ drill suggests, with the express purpose of forcing “regime change” in Tehran.

As analyst Peter Symonds pointed out in the World Socialist Web Site, “While the US and its allies insist that Iran must satisfy ‘international concerns’ about its nuclear programs, the demands for ‘clarification’ are endless.”

“IAEA inspectors visited Iran on January 29-31 and are due to return for further discussions later this month,” Symonds wrote. “No report has been released, but the US and international media nevertheless accused Tehran of ‘obfuscation’ and ‘time wasting’.”

Ominously, Haaretz reported that a new dossier “to be issued next month by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program is expected to be harsher than the last one, which the IAEA released in November.”

According to Haaretz, “the agency’s board of governors is scheduled to convene on March 5 in Vienna, the same day on which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to give a speech in Washington at a meeting of the annual policy conference of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.”

Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet with Obama where talks on the “international response” to the “threat from Tehran” will take center stage. Isn’t that a coincidence!

“The reality,” the World Socialist Web Site noted, “is that nothing short of complete capitulation to all Washington’s demands–not only on the nuclear issue, but its relations with the Syrian government and groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as its alleged ‘interference’ in Iraq and Afghanistan–would end the US build-up to war.”

“In short,” Symonds observed, “Washington is pressing for a regime in Tehran that bows to American economic and strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia on every significant issue.”

“For all the talk about ‘diplomacy’ and ‘sanctions,’ the World Socialist Web Site warned, “the US is recklessly setting course for a war with Iran that threatens to engulf the Middle East and spread internationally.”

The clock is ticking…

In meeting rooms in London, Tel Aviv and Washington the dice have been thrown: snake eyes.

Flashback, 1963: When John F. Kennedy decided not to escalate the soon-to-be disastrous Vietnam war and issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), he signed his death warrant.

Scarcely six weeks after vowing to pull all American forces out of South Vietnam by 1965, Kennedy was dead, the target of an “executive action” orchestrated by the CIA, a coup d’état on behalf of America’s corporatist masters–the military-industrial cabal of hardline cold warriors who stood to lose billions if Kennedy lived.

That sweet little deal to “win” the war in Southeast Asia cost some two million Vietnamese lives, 58,000 dead Americans and precipitated an economic crisis which dealt a death blow to post-World War II prosperity and launched the United States on its inexorable glide path towards becoming a failed state.

Flash forward to 2012: We have Barack Obama in the White House; a fraudster who promised “hope and change” and instead led his wilfully blind constituents into embracing the third term of a George W. Bush administration.

Comparing Obama with Kennedy one can only conclude: They don’t make bourgeois politicians like they use to!

Following on from a decades-long drive to transform the Gulf into an “American lake” (under provisions of the so-called “Carter Doctrine,” another “peace loving” Democrat), the coming war with Iran is a transparent scheme to ensure U.S. hegemony over the vast petroleum resources of Central Asia and the Middle East–to the detriment of their geopolitical rivals.

U.S. and NATO naval forces on high alert threaten the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf, the life’s blood of the global capitalist economy.

A war will lead to an oil price spike as Iranian, but perhaps also Saudi and GCC oil is removed in one fell swoop from the market, thereby setting-off a chain reaction that will exacerbate the West’s economic decline–to the benefit of financial jackals waiting in the wings who will gobble up what remains of America and Europe’s publicly-owned assets at fire sale prices in a desperate move to stave off the crisis.

Currently, Iran is ringed with military bases. American, British and Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles keep silent watch. Aircraft carrier battle groups carry out provocative maneuvers. U.S. and Israeli drones routinely overfly Iranian territory. Scientists are murdered in orchestrated terror attacks. Defense installations are bombed.

Economic sanctions, universally recognized as a prelude to war, strangle the Iranian people and their economy, all in the quixotic hope of inducing (coercing) “regime change” in Tehran.

The U.S. media, reprising their role during the run-up to 2003′s invasion and occupation of Iraq, are chock-a-block with scare stories that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are preparing to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

Indeed, the Shiite regime “may have” given “new freedoms” to Sunni Salafist extremists, including members of the “management council” of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets also known as “Al Qaeda” detained in Iran and “may have provided some material aid to the terrorist group,” if an account published last week by The Wall Street Journal can be believed, which of course it can’t.

Meanwhile, the CIA and Mossad recruit, train and then unleash Salafist terrorists such as Jundallah or Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen, the cultic Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) for terror ops, just as they did in Libya when former Al Qaeda “emir,” the MI6 asset Abdelhakim Belhaj was appointed chief of Tripoli’s Revolutionary Military Council.

And what “evidence” did U.S. officials offer for these dastardly Iranian plots to murder us all in our beds? Why the now-discredited FBI fable which had a failed Texas used-car dealer, Manssor Arbabsiar, and a still-unnamed DEA snitch posing as, or actually a member of, the notorious Zetas narcotrafficking cartel, plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant, that’s what!

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta, who replaced Robert Gates, also a former CIA chief, now helms the Defense Department.

Corporate media in Europe and America report that Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, have tried to “cool” the Israeli’s ardor for a preemptive strike and deny that the U.S. is preparing for war.

This too, is a carefully contrived disinformation campaign.

In a syndicated column for The Washington Post, war hawk David Ignatius wrote Thursday that “Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June–before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”

According to Ignatius, “the administration appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would trigger a strong U.S. response,” and that Washington’s alleged disapproval of an Israeli first strike “might open a breach like the one in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower condemned an Israeli-European attack on the Suez Canal.”

Ignatius’ unnamed “senior administration official,” since identified as Panetta, “caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

In other words, should America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” launch a sneak-attack on Iran, hitting their civilian nuclear and defense installations, thereby inflicting “collateral damage,” i.e., the wanton slaughter of innocent Iranian citizens, if Tehran has the temerity to defend itself and strike back, the full military might of the imperialist godfather will be brought to bear.

Inter Press Service reported Wednesday that JCS Chairman Dempsey, “told Israeli leaders January 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.”

According to journalist Gareth Porter, “Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.”

Claiming that “Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon,” Porter alleges that “the message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally.”

Holding on to the thinnest of reeds, Porter writes that Panetta “had given a clear hint” of the U.S. position “in an interview on ‘Face the Nation’ Jan. 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.”

When asked by CBS host Bob Schieffer, who pressed the issue of a unilateral Israeli attack, Panetta said, “If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that’s what we’d be concerned about.”

What are we to make of these claims?

If their purpose was to force Israel to rethink their attack plans, it clearly isn’t working. If however, Panetta’s remarks were meant to disarm domestic opponents of U.S. war plans, then mission accomplished!

“Speaking at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s annual conference,” The Christian Science Monitor reported that “Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak compared the current standoff with Iran to the ‘fateful’ period before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt.”

“The temperature is rising in Israel,” Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar told the Monitor. “He says that if the defense minister sees the current period as similar to the run-up to the [1967] Six-Day War, ‘that gives credibility to those who think Israel is going to launch an attack’.”

In a follow-up piece published Saturday by IPS, Porter now suggests that Panetta’s leak to Ignatius “had a different objective,” namely that the “White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months.”

Indeed, the “Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama’s effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack.”

Moreover, Panetta’s leak to The Washington Post “seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel’s defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran.”

Although there is trepidation amongst military planners in Tel Aviv and Washington should Israeli officials opt for a preemptive attack on Iran–and a retaliatory counterstrike by the Islamic Republic would have devastating effects on both Israel’s civilian population and U.S./NATO military forces in the Persian Gulf and beyond–should such disastrous orders be given, it is a certainty that Washington would follow suit.

This, in fact, is what the Israeli leadership is banking on and, contrary to sanctioned leaks to media conduits like Ignatius, is fully in keeping with Washington’s strategy of employing Israel as a cats’ paw to “drag” the United States into a war with Iran.

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, “any differences between the US and Israel are purely tactical.”

“Washington could, of course, use its considerable influence to veto an attack by Israel, which is heavily dependent on the US, diplomatically, economically and militarily,” leftist critic Peter Symonds writes.

Ignatius’ column however, “makes no mention of this possibility. In effect, the Obama administration appears to be giving Israel a tacit green light for an illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, and threatening its own military action if Iran retaliates.”

Indeed, the right-wing Israeli publication Debkafile reported Saturday that while Panetta “has been outspoken about a possible Israeli offensive against Iran taking place as of April … no US source is leveling on the far more extensive American, Saudi, British, French and Gulf states’ preparations going forward for an offensive against the Islamic Republic.”

Accordingly, Debkafile’s “military sources” (read high-placed intelligence and military officials favoring an attack) “report a steady flow of many thousands of US troops for some weeks to two strategic islands within reach of Iran, Oman’s Masirah just south of the Strait of Hormuz and Socotra, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.”

Debkafile also noted that “the Saudis this week wound up their own intensive preparations for war. Large forces are now deployed around Saudi oil fields, pipelines and export facilities in the eastern provinces opposite the Persian Gulf, backed by anti-missile Patriot PAC-3 batteries. American, British and French fighter-bombers have been landing at Saudi air bases to safeguard the capital, Riyadh.”

And with the Pentagon speeding-up arms sales to repressive Gulf monarchies and Saudi royals (with tens of billions in profits flowing into the coffers of American and European death merchants), the stage is now set for a bloody military confrontation.

On the so-called diplomatic front, as “useful idiots” and “accessories before the fact” in the drive towards war, the shameful part played by the International Atomic Energy Agency must be underscored.

Despite, or more likely because Iran’s top leadership have expressed their willingness to reopen stalled talks over their civilian nuclear program and have taken steps to do so, the United States and NATO are stepping-up their propaganda offensive, with the IAEA playing a leading role.

Indeed, The New York Times reported Sunday that “American and European officials said Friday that a mission by international nuclear inspectors to Tehran this week had failed to address their key concerns, indicating that Iran’s leaders believe they can resist pressure to open up the nation’s nuclear program.”

Times’ stenographers Robert F. Worth and David E. Sanger averred that an unnamed “senior American official described the session between the agency and Iranian nuclear officials as ‘foot-dragging at best and a disaster at worst’.”

Why is the onus solely placed on Iranian negotiators?

Because “members of the I.A.E.A. delegation were told that they could not have access to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an academic who is widely believed to be in charge of important elements of the suspected weaponization program, and that they could not visit a military site where the agency’s report suggested key experiments on weapons technology might have been carried out.”

What Worth and Sanger fail to mention in their report is that Iranian officials asserted that before Roshan’s murder he “had talked to IAEA inspectors, a fact which ‘indicates that these UN agencies may have played a role in leaking information on Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientists’,” Russia Today reported at the time.

Protesting the killing before the UN Security Council last month, Iranian deputy UN ambassador Eshagh Al Habib said there was “‘high suspicion’ that, in order to prepare the murder, terrorist circles used intelligence obtained from UN bodies.”

According to the deputy ambassador’s charge, “this included interviews with Iranian nuclear scientists carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the sanction list of the Security Council,” RT disclosed.

Sound far-fetched, the product of Iranian “conspiracy theories”? Better think again!

As former UNSCOM Iraq weapons’ inspector Scott Ritter revealed in his 2005 book, Iraq Confidential:

The issue of uncovering incriminating documentation suddenly took on a higher priority, and the CIA, supported by activist elements within the Department of State, pushed for more direct involvement in the operations of UNSCOM and the IAEA. For the first time, the darkest warriors in the CIA’s covert army, the Operations Planning Cell (OPC), were getting actively involved in preparing intelligence for UNSCOM’s use.

According to Ritter:

The secret warriors of the CIA were accustomed to plying their trade in the shadows, far away from prying eyes. UNSCOM inspections, however, were carried out in full view of the Iraqi government, representing the antithesis of covert action. The existence of the OPC, as with any CIA affiliation with UNSCOM, was a carefully guarded secret. Officially, therefore, all OPC personnel were presented to UNSCOM as State Department ‘experts’.

In light of past practices by the CIA, or for that matter the IAEA itself, Iranian fears that their scientists are being set-up for liquidation are fully justified.

Indeed, the “cautious” U.S. Secretary of Defense, former CIA chief Leon Panetta, speaking at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday, echoed Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s claim that Israel would need to “consider taking action” should nuclear inspections and sanctions fail.

“My view is that right now the most important thing is to keep the international community unified in keeping that pressure on, to try to convince Iran that they shouldn’t develop a nuclear weapon, that they should join the international family of nations and that they should operate by the rules that we all operate by,” Panetta asserted. “But I have to tell you, if they don’t, we have all options on the table, and we’ll be prepared to respond if we have to.”

One of those “options,” passed by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Friday were demands made to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

“The new Senate package,” Reuters reported, “seeks to target foreign banks that handle transactions for Iran’s national oil and tanker companies, and for the first time, extends the reach of Iran-related sanctions to foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies.”

The new legislation would target SWIFT with wide-ranging penalties if they failed to exclude sanctioned Iranian banks from the international system.

The bill now goes to the full Senate “where the likelihood of passage is considered strong,” The New York Times reported.

With the Orwellian title, the “Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act” Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-SD) said that “Iran can end its suppression of its own people, come clean on its nuclear program, suspend enrichment and stop supporting terrorist activities around the globe. Or it can continue to face sustained, intensifying multilateral economic and diplomatic pressure deepening its international isolation.”

Now if only Senator Johnson offered similar demands on America’s Israeli allies who possess upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, refuse to join the international nonproliferation regime and carry out worldwide terrorist attacks with impunity, perhaps then diplomacy would operate on a level playing field!

SWIFT officials were quick to cave to U.S. pressure. “SWIFT fully understands and appreciates the gravity of the situation,” Reuters disclosed.

In its statement, “SWIFT said it is working with officials and central banks to find ‘the right multilateral legal framework’ to ‘expedite’ a response to the issues.”

“This is a complex situation, and SWIFT needs to ensure that it takes into consideration the implications to the functioning of the broader global financial payments system, as well as the continued flow of humanitarian payments to the Iranian people,” the organization said.

Needless to say, a boycott of Iranian financial institutions by SWIFT would be catastrophic to Iran’s economy, a provocation fully intended as a step towards war.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “if Israel does attack Iran, it will not simply be ‘a surgical strike’ that destroys Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Any Iranian retaliation will be used by the US as a pretext for a massive air war aimed at destroying the country’s military and infrastructure. As a result, any conflict carries a real danger of becoming a regional war that could embroil the major powers.”

Despite the evident madness of countenancing an Iran attack, political calculations by capitalist elites during a critical election year in the United States, with “conservative” and “liberal” factions angling for advantage by currying favor with the powerful Zionist and U.S. defense lobbies, Israel’s unambiguous message to the White House is: “We’ll give you the war, you give us the cannon fodder.”

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared amid thunderous applause and a standing ovation from Congress, “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Similar to sanctions legislation signed into law by Obama on December 31, the EU-approved measures ban imports on future and existing contracts beginning July 1 of crude oil, petrochemical products; as well, the measures forbid the export of equipment and technology to Iran’s energy sector.

The EU sanctions also hit Iran’s Central Bank, freezing its assets. Also on Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat; a sign that the administration intends to further isolate Iran from the global financial system.

The New York Times claimed that the EU’s “phased” ban on oil purchases “was needed to help force a shift in policy and avert the risk of military strikes against Tehran.”

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters that in order to “avoid any military solution, which could have irreparable consequences, we have decided to go further down the path of sanctions.”

“It is a good decision that sends a strong message and which I hope will persuade Iran that it must change its position,” Juppé said, “change its line and accept the dialogue that we propose.”

Writing in Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar rejected the foolish notion that the West is interested in defusing the crisis.

“The EU defends its strategy–or economic war–as the only way to avert ‘chaos in the Middle East.’ Yet the economic war may end up sparking the full-blown war it is theoretically trying to avert; talk about an array of unintended consequences waiting in the wings.

“The EU insists on spinning its so-called ‘dual track’ approach towards Iran,” Escobar averred. “Stripped of spin, dual track essentially translates in practice as ‘shut up, bow to our sanctions, stop enriching uranium and sit on the table to negotiate on our terms’”

“Senior EU officials,” The Guardian disclosed, “concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west.”

Reflecting the growing danger to the world economy by this stunt, “oil prices rose on Monday after the European Union agreed to ban imports of Iranian crude,” Reuters reported.

“Brent March crude rose 72 cents to settle at $110.58 a barrel, having reached $111.36 intraday but unable to threaten front-month Brent’s 200-day moving average of $112.19.” One analyst warned, “heaven knows what will happen between now and the first of July” when the EU’s date for full implementation of the embargo takes effect.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned “that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 percent if Iran halts oil exports as a result of U.S. and European Union sanctions,” Reuters disclosed.

Accordingly, if the Islamic Republic stops exporting oil to the EU and other countries that join the “attack Iran” coalition of the feckless, “it would likely trigger an ‘initial’ oil price jump of 20 to 30 percent, or about $20 to $30 a barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.”

“In addition the oil embargo, the EU also decided to freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank, arguing that the aim was to choke off funding for the nuclear programme,” according to The Guardian. The EU’s move against Iran’s Central Bank follow policies put in place by the United States.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” an unnamed “senior diplomat” The Guardian. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

The Guardian also informed us that “David Cameron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a joint statement calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.”

“Our message is clear,” the statement read. “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people”–a diplomatic cliché that generally means: do what we say or else–”but the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. We will not accept Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

In a day filled with joint statements by imperial shills, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Henry Kissinger’s wunderkind in Obama’s cabinet) and Secretary of State Hillary (bomb the Libyans back to the Stone Age) Clinton said that “the measures agreed to today by the EU Foreign Affairs Council are another strong step in the international effort to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran. This new, concerted pressure will sharpen the choice for Iran’s leaders and increase their cost of defiance of basic international obligations.”

Commenting on the slow-motion apocalypse in progress, Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent: “Bring on the sanctions. Send in the Clowns.”

More Israeli Threats

How did America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” react?

According to Debkafile, a right-wing publication privy to leaks from Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that a “new round of sanctions will not stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon … stressing that Israel’s hand was always near the trigger.”

Barak’s comments were “aimed at cooling the optimistic notes emanating from Washington, Europe and some Israeli circles Monday after the European Union foreign ministers approved an oil embargo against Iran from July 1 and froze its central bank’s assets.”

The Defense Minister said “that because Iran had not stopped developing a nuclear weapon Israel had not removed any options from the table. We say this ‘very seriously,’ he stressed.”

Barak’s noxious statements were amplified in a lengthy piece published this week in The New York Times.

Titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?,” Ronen Bergman, a political analyst with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper who, like Debkafile, has cozy ties to Israeli defense mavens, wrote: “After speaking to many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Speaking at the Davos economic summit on Friday, Barak warned “that a situation could be rapidly reached when even ‘surgical’ military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. ‘We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons’,” The Independent reported.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear,” Barak said. “It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them.”

Barak’s message to Washington and the “international community”: “We’re ready to attack, now!”

‘Europe Will Burn in the Fire of Iran’s Oil Wells’

The new sanctions, coupled with escalating threats from Israel and the West are hardly “bridge builders” aimed at resuscitating stalled talks, but in fact are economic acts of war designed to force Iran into a corner.

Rejecting demands to “dialogue” with guns pointed at their heads, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Kowsari, the deputy leader of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee told Press TV that “in the event of US ‘military adventurism’ in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will respond in the shortest possible time by making the entire world unsafe for Americans.”

Kowsari reiterated Iran’s long-standing promise to “definitely” close the strategic Strait of Hormuz “if there is a disruption in the sales of the country’s crude, stressing that the “US and its allies will not be able to reopen the strategic waterway.”

Hardly fazed by Western threats, and apparently ready to take “preemptive” measures of their own, Seyyed Emad Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s parliamentary Energy Commission said on Friday that “Iran has the world’s third biggest oil reserves and cannot be eliminated from global energy equations,” Press TV reported.

Hosseini said that parliament “is considering a plan to completely stop oil exports to EU members which will initially paralyze the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece.”

“Iran is powerful [as a country] and oil sanctions imposed by European countries will only harm the European Union.” Hosseini added, “Europe will definitely lose its oil war with Iran because European countries are grappling with numerous domestic challenges and disruption of Iran oil flow will lead to the escalation of domestic pressure and crisis in EU member states.”

On Saturday, Fars News Agency reported that “members of the Iranian parliament finalized a draft bill on cutting the country’s oil exports to the European states in retaliation for the EU’s oil ban against Tehran.”

Nasser Soudani, the vice chairman of the parliamentary Energy Commission told Fars that “the bill has 4 articles, including one which states that the Islamic Republic of Iran will cut all oil exports to the European states until they end their oil sanctions against the country.”

Soudani told Fars earlier this week when the oil cut-off bill was introduced, “Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.” Take that, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy!

Driving home the point, Bloomberg News reported Friday that “Fitch Ratings cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and three other euro-area countries, saying they lack financing flexibility in the face of the regional debt crisis.”

In addition to Italy and Spain, the ratings agency also downgraded the credit worthiness of Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus. And with Greece currently negotiating with creditors on how to avoid a default, soaring oil prices would severely impact the ability of EU countries to climb out of the economic ditch and is a further sign that the 2008 capitalist economic crisis is accelerating.

Commenting, Asia Times Online political analyst Pepe Escobar again warned: “According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1–and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this preemptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude.”

“Not surprisingly,” Escobar averred, “the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves.”

“Greece,” Asia Times pointed out, “already facing the abyss–has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default–and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain–and beyond).”

Not that any of this matters to the Americans who are exacerbating the manufactured “Iran crisis,” partially as a hammer to beat down their EU competitors–under the tattered flag of Western “unity”–while gambling that war and their delusional hope for “regime change” in Iran will bring them one step closer to energy hegemony in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Eyes Wide Shut

Which brings us back to Iran’s “red line.”

“Tehran has repeatedly said that it would close Hormuz only if–and we should repeat–only if Iran is blocked from exporting its oil,” Asia Times warned.

“This would represent a deathblow to the Iranian economy–totally dependent on oil exports–not to mention the regime controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regime change is the real agenda of Washington and its European poodles– but that cannot be spelled out to global public opinion,” Pepe Escobar noted.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Press TV that “in the absence of Iranian supply, oil prices will go up and they (the Western states) know it. However, Iran will never allow itself to be in a situation in which it cannot sell oil but other regional states can.”

And how did the global godfather react to Tehran’s warning? Why with more bellicose rhetoric of course! The United States and their “partners” have pledged to “do what needs to done” to keep the strategic waterway open, U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder warned.

The ambassador added: “These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.”

The Defense Department announced last week that it will maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers despite budget constraints, as a threat to Iran but also to geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

Russia Today reported that “with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.”

Ramping things up even further, Interfax reported Thursday that the U.S. “plans to deploy a third convoy of warships led by USS Enterprise to the Gulf in March.”

“The country’s second aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group entered the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz last Sunday, accompanied by UK and French warships.”

Last Saturday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Enterprise, that “the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran,” the Associated Press reported.

While Iran reiterated its threat to close the narrow Strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, Tehran has done so as a defensive response to an aggressive military build-up along their borders, the assassination of scientists, terrorist bombings of defense facilities, surveillance overflights by U.S. and Israeli drones and economic sanctions by the West that could crater their economy.

“That’s what this carrier is all about,” Panetta blustered. “That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

Yet despite Israeli threats to “go it alone,” they do not possess the assets capable of mounting a decisive military offensive against the Islamic Republic.

On Thursday, Time Magazine reported that an unnamed “senior security official” told Netanyahu’s cabinet last fall that the prospects for “success” were “not altogether encouraging.”

“‘I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,’ the official quoted a senior commander as saying. ‘If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way’.”

Short of launching a preemptive nuclear first strike on Iran, the Israelis will heel when the master whistles. Only the United States has the requisite military assets capable of inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, but they are well-aware of the risks an Iranian counterstrike would pose.

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya cautioned: “U.S. naval strength, which includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled and unmatched by any other naval power. Primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are nonetheless vulnerable.”

Noting the findings of a Pentagon war game, Millennium Challenge 2002, Nazemroaya wrote that “even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.”

During that $250 million war game, the “scenario hypothetically pitted the Blue Team (representing US warships) against a Red Team that launched a coordinated assault using swarming boats and missiles–the kind of tactics Iran might employ,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Red Team commander, Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, told The New York Times back in 2008 that “the sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack.”

“The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes,” Van Riper told the Times. “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” the general cautioned.

“Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare recognizes that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has little chance of winning any face-to-face military contest with powerful enemies like the United States,” the Monitor noted.

“Instead,” journalist Scott Peterson averred, “Iran aims to ‘exploit enemy vulnerabilities through the used of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft, to mount surprise attacks at unexpected times and places’ which will ‘ultimately destroy technologically superior enemy forces,’ writes Iranian military expert Fariborz Haghshenass in a 2008 study based on published doctrines of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Part of Iran’s strategy includes decentralized decision-making.”

A “former European diplomat” told the Monitor that “the entire [IRGC] structure–if you look at how air defense is organized, the land forces, the combination of the Basij [militia] and the [IRGC]–this is all geared toward what they call the Mosaic Strategy, where you have individual military units who have a great deal of independence to decide what they can do without referring back to the center.”

“When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles,” the Times grimly observed, “it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.”

Nazemroaya warned, “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

Undeterred by warnings from their own military experts, Washington and Tel Aviv are heading towards the edge of the cliff and seem eager to jump.

On Friday, Russia Today disclosed that the mysteriously “delayed” Austere Challenge 12 joint missile defense exercise with Israel “originally slated for this spring, will be scheduled for October 2012.”

Amid conflicting reports that first had the Obama administration, and then the Israelis, postponing the exercise, allegedly because “a series of events,” according to Inter Press Service, “impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.” On the other hand however, Debkafile averred that Netanyahu called it off “as a mark of Israel’s disapproval for the administration’s apparent hesitancy.”

Well, it’s on again.

As Russia Today reported, the drill will “signal a surge of American troops to Israel by the thousands” and Iranian authorities “fear that the exercise will try out more than just the missile capabilities of the allies. Also being put to the test is Iran’s patience.”

“Now after a brief delay,” RT averred, “America will send thousands of troops and its anti-missile defense systems to Israel, albeit a few months later than planned.”

“With the exercise back in the books, it could mean that an eventual war between the US and Iran is still in the works–and now the world has a timeline to see it through.”

Indications are that Washington’s timeline is shrinking as the Pentagon accelerates plans to rush new weapons into the deployment phase.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that “Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.”

“The 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.”

However, “initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.”

“The push boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” the Journal disclosed.

Having already spent some $300 million for 20 bombs, designed by military-industrial-complex heavyweight Boeing, the Pentagon sought an additional $82 million this month in a secret request to Congress.

Warning of the “grave consequences” of a U.S.-led attack on Iran, last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described “the scenario Russia and the global community could face if things in the Middle East, especially in Iran, get out of hand,” Russia Today informed us.

“As for the chances that this disaster (a military attack against Iran) could occur, this question would be better addressed to those who keep mentioning this as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said in a comment apparently intended for Israel and the United States. “The consequences will be really grave, and we are seriously concerned about this.”

Pointedly, the Foreign Minister said “this will not be an easy walk, and it’s impossible to calculate all of the possible consequences.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that “Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.”

Braggadocio aside, unlike the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise, American forces will not have the luxury of a “do-over” if events really do spin out of control.

A miscalculation, or deliberate provocation by the West designed to maneuver the Iranians into “firing the first shot,” could have disastrous consequences far beyond the confines of the Persian Gulf.

That provocation wasn’t long in coming.

Despite an agreement reached by Iran with the P 5+1 group of nations (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany), to restart talks in Turkey over the nuclear issue, the CIA-Mossad-MEK terror campaign took a dark turn this week; a sign that the imperialist powers, spearheaded by the United States, aim to scupper negotiations even before they start.

On Tuesday, an Iranian university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was murdered after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car.

Analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site Wednesday that “my own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of the Mossad and MEK, as have been a number of previous operations I’ve reported here.”

Silverstein averred that “the method recalls another series of assassinations that occurred of Fereidoun Abbassi Davani (who was seriously wounded) and his colleague Majid Shahriari (who was killed). Today’s killing occurred two years to the day after the assassination of another scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi.”

According to Fars News Agency, the blasts which killed Roshan “also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.”

The scientist”s driver, Reza Qashqavi, who was severely injured in the blast, “died of his wounds in Resalat Hospital a few hours later,” Fars reported.

What makes Roshan’s murder especially troubling is that according to political analyst Seyyed Mohamed Marandi, the “IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] officials had met him [Ahmadi Roshan] earlier.”

Marandi charged that all of the Iranian scientists who had been targeted and then subsequently murdered in terrorist attacks “have had their names given by the IAEA to third parties,” Press TV reported.

“It is obvious that Western intelligence agencies are carrying out these attacks, or if the Israelis are carrying them out, it is with the knowledge of the Europeans and Americans. Because these agencies are very closely aligned to one another, they cooperate extensively, they exchange information,” Marandi said.

While no one has claimed authorship of the terrorist outrage, the Associated Press reported that IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz testified in closed session to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that America’s proxy, Israel, was engaged in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through a series of “unnatural acts.”

“2012 is expected to be a critical year for Iran,” Gantz told the committee, citing “the confluence of efforts to advance the nuclear program, internal leadership changes, continued international pressure and things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Roshan was the fourth scientist killed in a series of assassinations since January 2010 and follows a series of attacks on defense and nuclear facilities.

In early November, a massive bomb blast at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program.

Later that month, a huge explosion was reported at Iran’s uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. Though Iranian officials denied an attack took place, The Times reported that “satellite imagery … clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction.”

U.S. officials, as is their wont, responded in typical fashion–they blamed the victims.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said she had “no information one way or the other” about the scientist’s murder, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced Iran for their “provocative rhetoric” and issued a categorical denial that the U.S. was organizing terrorism inside the Islamic Republic.

However, in an interview with the Hebrew-language Ma’ariv daily, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said that “Washington is preparing to undertake any measure to thwart Iran’s nuclear program,” Xinhua reported.

“We’ve said and I say again that all options are open … President (Barack) Obama clearly and consistently says that he will do everything and resort to all necessary means to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and he means every word,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro’s statement, if not quite an open admission, is a sign of Washington’s boundless hypocrisy as it supposedly wages a so-called “War on Terror” while organizing terrorist attacks on governments it has targeted for regime change.

Iran, and China, Strike a Defiant Note

With a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran’s ability to sell its oil on international markets signed into law by President Obama last week, and with the European Union threatening to do the same, it was unlikely that the Iranian government, or their principle trading partner, would sit idly by and allow the West to damage their respective economies.

Although The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “a senior U.S. intelligence official” said that “the goal of U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse,” the quote was quickly yanked from their web site.

The Post claimed the earlier account was “incorrectly reported” and that “an updated version clarifies the official’s remarks,” a fallacious climb-down that revealed far more than Washington intended to say the least!

The European Union announced that a meeting of foreign ministers would be held January 23, a week earlier than originally planned, to finalize an agreement on a comprehensive oil embargo.

While the EU and some Asian oil-buying nations are caving-in to Washington’s demands, America’s geopolitical rival and largest creditor, China, has rejected calls to put the squeeze on Tehran.

With U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in Beijing this week, the Washington Post reported that the former Kissinger Associates henchman in Obama’s cabinet “is expected to press China’s leaders to reduce the country’s oil imports from Iran.”

He is unlikely to find a receptive ear, however.

China’s vice foreign minister responsible for U.S. relations, Cui Tiankai, said on Monday that “the normal trade relations and energy cooperation between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue. We should not mix issues of different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected.”

Having blasted the new sanctions regime imposed last week, China, the third largest buyer of Iranian crude, said new restrictions would not affect business in the least.

The Associated Press reported that “about 11 percent of China’s oil imports in 2011 came from Iran, or about 560,000 barrels per day, a flow that increased in the latter half of the year, according to oil industry analysts Argus Media.”

“The daily average for November was 617,000 barrels,” AP reported, “close to a third of Iran’s total oil exports of 2.2 million barrels a day, Argus said,” a sign that China is hardly intimidated by U.S. threats.

Rejecting U.S. and European claims that normal business relations with the Islamic Republic provided financial support for its nuclear program, Cui declared that “argument does not hold water.”

“According to this logic,” the vice minister said, “if the Iranians have enough money to feed their population, then they have the ability to develop nuclear programs,” Cui told reporters. “If that is the case, should we also deny Iran the opportunity to feed its population?”

Cui’s pointed remark was an obvious jab at the U.S. sanctions regime which targeted Iraq for more than a decade prior to the 2003 invasion. Sanctions, which former UN official Dennis Halliday called “genocide” back in 1999, were estimated to have caused the death of upwards of 1.7. million people, including some 500,000 children, a “price” which former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it.”

Undeterred by American threats, Press TV disclosed Sunday that “a senior Iranian lawmaker says the aim of the upcoming naval drills by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) is to prepare for the potential closure of the strategic Hormuz Strait.”

Iranian naval officials announced January 5 that they “would be holding a major military maneuver in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in February.”

“IRGC’s Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said the drills, the seventh in a series of military exercises dubbed the Great Prophet, will be different compared to previous naval maneuvers held by the IRGC,” Press TV reported.

Pointedly, the deputy head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Esmail Kowsari, said that “the military maneuver has been designed to prepare the armed forces for receiving the order to shut down the strait within the shortest time possible.”

The semiofficial Iranian news outlet also reported Sunday that the “Commander of Iran’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan announces plans to hold a massive military maneuver in the near future.”

“In line with the global developments and their own interests,” Pourdastan told Press TV, “Western countries are, today, using soft war [tactics] as the core of their strategy and it is [only] natural for us to have a defense [tactic] when the enemy starts a war.”

On Monday, Fars News Agency reported that IRGC Commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, reiterated his earlier warning that “any enemy move, even the slightest aggressions, against the Islamic Republic would be reciprocated with a destructive response and will endanger the interests of the aggressor all around the world.”

Mounting U.S.-NATO Threats

Iran’s announcement that they will hold new naval exercises, followed a report by The Daily Telegraph that the UK will deploy “the HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer,” and this “will send a significant message to the Iranians because of the firepower and world-beating technology carried by the warship.”

In November, The Guardian disclosed that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.”

In a controlled leak, Ministry of Defence officials told The Guardian that “military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.”

During the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Diego Garcia was used by the the U.S. Air Force as a launch pad for B-2 stealth bombers during the initial phase of Washington’s “shock and awe” campaign over Baghdad.

It now appears those contingency plans have moved off the drawing board with the deployment of the HMS Daring towards the Persian Gulf.

The Telegraph disclosed that the ship “has been fitted with new technology that will give it the ability to shoot down any missile in Iran’s armoury. The £1 billion destroyer, which will leave Portsmouth next Wednesday, also carries the world’s most sophisticated naval radar, capable of tracking multiple incoming threats from missiles to fighter jets.”

Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned Iran that “any blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’.”

According to the Telegraph, naval sources have said that “more British ships could be sent to the Gulf if required. The second Type 45, HMS Dauntless, will also be available to sail at short notice.”

As Global Research reported in December, the United States has significantly increased military aid to Israel in preparation for an all-out war with Iran and that “the Pentagon dispatched some 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist Israel in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system as part of a new and integrated air defense system.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Michel Chossudovsky wrote, “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.”

In a new development, Russia Today reported last week that “thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.”

“Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an undisclosed time during the next few weeks,” RT disclosed, “the Israeli military will together with America host the largest-ever joint missile drill by the two countries.”

An anonymous Israeli official told the Associated Press “the drill would test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets. Israel has deployed the ‘Arrow’ system, jointly developed and funded with the U.S., designed to intercept Iranian missiles in the stratosphere, far from Israel.”

While U.S. and Israeli officials have called the drills “routine,” RT reported that “following the installation of American troops near Iran’s neighboring Strait of Hormuz and the reinforcing of nearby nations with US weapons, Tehran authorities are considering this not a test but the start of something much bigger.”

Iranian fears are fully justified.

With the United States and NATO ringing Iran with military bases and with the U.S. beefing-up arm sales to its regional allies, including recently announced plans to sell some $30 billion of advanced F-15SA war planes to Saudi Arabia and “bunker buster” bombs to the UAE, the stage is set for a confrontation.

In this context, the murder of an Iranian scientist just as a new round of talks were announced, is a clear sign that Washington is hell-bent on imposing its control over the Persian Gulf–through aggressive war–as part of long-standing plans to ensure imperial hegemony over the energy-rich regions of of Central Asia and the Middle East.

Following a sustained covert terror campaign by the U.S. and Israel, Rahimi declared: “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”

On Saturday, President Obama took that step and signed crippling sanctions legislation as part of the Pentagon’s massive $662 billion 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

It should be noted that the NDAA, which threatens war on Iran, also calls for the indefinite detention of so-called “terrorist” suspects by the military, including American citizens, who can now be held without charge or trial.

Dubbed the “nuclear option” by critics and supporters alike, the legislation passed with overwhelming support from “conservative” Republicans and “liberal” Democrats in Congress and targets foreign corporations that do business with Iran’s Central Bank.

Under the guise of “punishing Iran” for an unproven nuclear weapons program the bill is designed to “collapse the Iranian economy” according to its chief sponsor, Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk.

As pointed out by numerous analysts and proliferation experts, Iran’s research related to nuclear weapons ended more than a decade ago. Even the highly-politicized report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in November under pressure from Washington, was forced to concede that Iran has not diverted material into a covert weapons program.

Two days after becoming law, Iran’s currency hit a record low against the U.S. dollar.

According to the Associated Press the riyal “hovered around 16,800 riyals to the dollar, marking a roughly 10 percent slide compared to Thursday’s rate of 15,200 riyals to the dollar. The riyal was trading at around 10,500 riyals to the U.S. dollar in late December 2010.”

“The sanctions target both private and government-controlled banks–including central banks–and would take hold after a two- to six-month warning period, depending on the transactions,” Reuters reported.

“Foreign central banks which deal with the Iranian central bank on oil transactions could also face restrictions,” AFP disclosed, “sparking fears of damage to US ties with key nations such as Russia and China which trade with Iran.”

The new law would make it virtually impossible for Iran to collect payments for energy exports severely damaging its already-fragile economy while setting the stage for a military confrontation.

In the event hostilities break out, energy analysts have warned that the price of oil could spiral to $250 barrel and would have a devastating effect on the crisis-ridden global economy.

Reflecting the skittishness of global energy markets, “crude futures headed for a third yearly advance on speculation escalating tension in the Middle East may disrupt supplies,” Bloomberg News reported, and “surged to $101.77 a barrel on Dec. 27, the highest intraday price since Dec. 7.”

Hair-Trigger Alert

American threats have been taken seriously by the Tehran government.

Iran is currently conducting a 10-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf and officials have said they would react forcefully should the United States threaten their ability to conduct operations in defense of their territorial sovereignty.

Last week, Iran’s Naval Commander, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, reiterated that the country’s naval forces “can readily block the strategic Strait of Hormuz if need be,” Press TV reported.

“Closing the Strait of Hormuz is very easy for Iranian naval forces,” Sayyari said. “Iran has comprehensive control over the strategic water way.”

In response, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson George Little said “that any interference by Iran in the strait would ‘not be tolerated,’ stressing that the region was ‘an economic lifeline for countries in the gulf’,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Iranian officials fired back. Hossein Salami, a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said that “Americans are not in a position whether to allow Iran to close off the Strait of Hormuz.”

“Any threat will be responded by threat,” Reuters reported. “We will not relinquish our strategic moves if Iran’s vital interests are undermined by any means.”

Iran claimed Sunday that its naval forces had successfully test-fired a new medium-range surface-to-air missile during the exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.

Rear Admiral Mahmoud Mousavi, the spokesperson for the exercises, claimed that the missile was “designed and manufactured by Iranian experts, [and] is equipped with state-of-the-art technology and an intelligent system that enables it to target radio emission sources and thwart jammers,” according to Press TV.

“On Friday,” Xinhua disclosed, “Mousavi said that the country’s naval units will fire different long- and short-range land-to-sea, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles during the power phase of the exercises in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, starting Saturday.”

“He added that Iran’s submarines will also hit the pre-determined targets,” Xinhua reported, “using domestically-manufactured torpedoes, during the exercises.”

On Monday, the last day of the maneuvers, Deutsche Welle reported that the Iranian navy “test-fired a cruise missile with stealth technology in a move sure to ratchet up tensions with the West.”

While claims that new Iranian missiles are stealth-equipped cannot be independently verified, it should be noted that prior to the intact capture of an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone flown by the CIA in early December, Western security experts had downplayed Iran’s technological capacity to employ sophisticated electronic warfare tactics.

According to reports, “Iran on Monday successfully tested a ‘Ghader’ surface-to-surface cruise missile on the last day of war games near the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

“The ‘Ghader,’ which means ‘capable’ in Farsi, is an upgraded version of an existing missile that had a range of 200 kilometers (125 miles) and could travel at low altitudes.”

Deutsche Welle observed that the “war games and the missile firing are seen by political analysts as a practice run for closing the Strait of Hormuz if the West were to block Iran’s oil sales.”

Reiterating that message, a senior Iranian lawmaker, Kazem Jalali, told Press TV Monday that “if faced with a threat Iran will definitely use the defensive potential of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.”

“Iran has warned,” Press TV noted, “that in case Western threats of imposing an oil embargo on the Islamic Republic materialize, it reserves the right to respond by choking the oil flow through Hormuz, arguing that the free flow of oil must be for all or for none.”

Robert Naiman, the policy director at the Just Foreign Policy think-tank, told Russia Today that “Tehran had to call navy maneuvers at this time as otherwise it would have been perceived as a country unable to defend itself. The embargo on Iran’s oil exports proposed by the US necessitates an active response.”

“It is understood in the international political discourse that an embargo is an act of war. If it really is the policy pursued by the US and Western Europe to try to cut off Iran’s oil exports, then that is an act of war. It would not make sense for Iran to roll over,” Naiman told RT.

As analyst Peter Symonds pointed out on the World Socialist Web Site, “Having waged wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and backed the NATO bombing of Libya, the US is now deliberately and recklessly raising tensions in the Persian Gulf by threatening severe penalties against any foreign company doing business with Iran’s central bank, thereby effectively blocking Iranian oil exports.”

“The media is silent on Washington’s rank hypocrisy in demanding an end to Iran’s nuclear programs,” the socialist critic noted, “while fully backing the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East–its ally Israel, which is notorious for its wars of aggression.”

“The glaring double standard,” Symonds observed, “only underscores the fact that Obama’s belligerence towards Iran is no more about the ‘nuclear threat’ than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were about ‘terrorism’ and WMDs.”

U.S. Arms Sales

In the face of escalating Western threats, Tehran Times reported Friday that Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that “Iran is ready to resume negotiations with the 5+1 group (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany).”

According to the paper, Salehi’s remarks came during a meeting with China’s Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun on Thursday.

“The Chinese vice foreign minister,” Tehran Times averred, “emphasized that the dispute over Iran’s nuclear issue should be resolved through negotiations, adding that Beijing is opposed to the adoption of new sanctions on Tehran.”

Bloomberg News reported Monday that “the country’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, plans to send a letter to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, which may be followed by a new round of talks, Mehr reported on Dec. 31, citing Iran’s ambassador to Germany, Alireza Sheikh Attar.”

“The EU,” Bloomberg reported, “continues to pursue a ‘twin-track approach’ and is ‘open for meaningful discussions on confidence-building measures, without preconditions from the Iranian side’,” EU spokesperson Michael Mann said last week.

Despite Iran’s willingness to renew direct talks, the Obama administration announced a $30 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and agreed to sell 84 advanced F-15SA fighter jets to the repressive House of Saud.

“Though the White House said the deal had not been accelerated to respond to threats by Iranian officials in recent days to shut off the Strait of Hormuz,” The New York Times reported that “its timing is laden with significance, as tensions with Iran have deepened and the United States has withdrawn its last soldiers from Iraq.”

Andrew J. Shapiro, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs told the Times that “this sale will send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the gulf and the broader Middle East.”

However, when the global godfather speaks of “stability,” what the U.S. means is the maintenance of a system of exploitation and resource extraction controlled by American multinationals, backed by the threat of covert and overt aggression by Washington.

Accelerating the encirclement of Iran by U.S. allies, Reuters reported that the “United States has signed a $3.5 billion sale of an advanced antimissile interception system to the United Arab Emirates, part of an accelerating military buildup of its friends and allies near Iran.”

Pentagon press secretary George Little said that the deal “is an important step in improving the region’s security through a regional missile defense architecture.”

The sale of the Theater High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), manufactured by mega merchant of death Lockheed Martin, is described as “the only system designed to destroy short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside the Earth’s atmosphere.”

“The United States,” Reuters disclosed, “under the government-to-government deal, will deliver two THAAD batteries, 96 missiles, two Raytheon Co AN/TPY-2 radars plus 30 years of spare parts, support and training with contractor logistics support to the UAE,” the Pentagon spokesperson said.

In another pending arms sale, Reuters reported that the Obama regime “formally proposed in November to sell 600 ‘bunker buster’ bombs and other munitions to UAE in an estimated $304 million package to counter what the Pentagon called current and future regional threats.”

Sale of these munitions are widely believed to be essential should the U.S., Israel, NATO and their regional Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, decide to attack Iran, and would be deployed for targeting “hardened” command-and-control sites in the Islamic Republic.

As analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya pointed out on Global Research, Washington’s long-standing plans for “regime change” in the Middle East and North Africa are part of an ongoing cold war between Tehran and Washington and that the “destabilization campaign being waged against Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are also a critical front in this cold war.”

“The Obama Administration has used 2011 to unleash Washington’s so-called ‘Coalition of the Moderate’ against the Resistance Bloc,” Nazemroaya wrote, “which pins together all the countries and forces united by their opposition to U.S. and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region.”

“The two camps that are becoming more and more visible in the MENA region are falling along the lines of what Washington, Tel Aviv, and NATO planned on forming after the 2006 Israeli defeat in Lebanon as a means of tackling Iran and its allies,” Nazemroaya observed.

“In 2007, the United States of America, represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, held a meeting in Cairo under the ‘GCC + 2′ formula with the Gulf Cooperation Council–Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Oman, and Qatar–plus Egypt and Jordan to form a strategic and all encompassing front against Iran, Syria, and their regional allies.

“This ‘Coalition of the Moderate’ formed by Washington was a direct extension of NATO that also included Israel and Turkey as important and central participants,” Nazemroaya wrote.

In this context, stepped-up sales of advanced weapons systems to so-called “moderate” regimes are, contrary to American propaganda, not the result of a supposed “threat” from Iran but precisely are intended to hasten “regime change,” either through National Endowment for Democracy (NED) sponsored “color revolutions” or overt military aggression.

Last week, Antifascist Calling disclosed, citing reports from the Israeli, Russian and Turkish press, that the U.S. has doubled the “special aid” it gives to Israel for long-range anti-ballistic air defense systems and associated radars.

The $235.7 million deal approved by Congress, Israel National News noted was “for the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic long-range air defense system, for the program to improve the basic capabilities of the Arrow systems, and for the David’s Sling mid-range anti-missile system.”

And as The Jerusalem Post reported, the arms sale comes on the heels of Israeli plans “to hold the largest-ever missile defense exercise in its history this spring amid Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.”

Defense correspondent Yaakov Katz disclosed that “Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post noted that “the drill, which is unprecedented in its size, will include the establishment of US command posts in Israel and IDF command posts at EUCOM headquarters in Germany–with the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.”

“The US,” Katz reported, “will also bring its THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) and shipbased Aegis ballistic missile defense systems to Israel to simulate the interception of missile salvos against Israel,” and that the “American system will work in conjunction with Israel’s missile defense systems–the Arrow, Patriot and Iron Dome.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky observed that “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.”

Advanced ballistic missile early warning radar systems have also been installed in Turkey and, as with the Israeli deployment, the U.S. is clearly in the driver’s seat.

In late December, Hürriyet Daily News reported that “NATO’s Malatya-based ballistic missile early warning radar system … will become operational next week, before the end of this year,” a “senior Turkish official” said.

“The agreement signed between Ankara and Washington calls for the deployment of a U.S. AN/TPY-2 (X-band) early warning radar system at a military installation at Kürecik in Malatya as part of NATO’s missile defense project,” Hürriyet reported.

Similar to the Israeli agreement, Hürriyet disclosed that “a Turkish senior commander is to be posted at NATO’s headquarters in Germany, where the intelligence gathered through the radar system will be processed.”

Global Energy Hegemony

The precipitating factor propelling Washington’s machinations against Tehran is the severe economic decline of the United States vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, above all China and Russia.

American aggression in the context of the current global economic crisis, has nothing whatsoever to do with moves to stop nuclear proliferation, let alone advance the cause of “freedom and democracy” in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter.

Rather, belligerent threats and U.S. state-sponsored terrorism against the Islamic Republic are part and parcel of Washington’s long-standing strategic goal of hegemonic control over the energy-rich regions of Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Dialing-up tensions, the United States is gambling that a war with Iran, particularly during a critical election year with all major candidates from both capitalist parties (Ron Paul being a notable exception) outbidding one another in terms of their bellicose rhetoric, hope to divert attention from ongoing attacks on the standard of living and democratic rights of the working class by kleptocratic American elites.

Imperial military adventurism for control over the world’s energy supplies, however, raises the specter of an unintended conflict with rivals China and Russia, who also face renewed threats from Washington, a confrontation that could have unintended and potentially catastrophic consequences.

Before the first bomb falls disinformation specialists prepare the ground.

Leading media outlets, foreign policy journals and a plethora of think tanks funded by elite foundations, energy and weapons’ conglomerates, “right,” “left” or “center” take your pick, churn out war propaganda disguised as “analysis.”

From the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP), rhetorical skirmishes aside, the line is remarkably similar.

Indeed, for “conservative” and “liberal” elite bloviators alike, Iran poses an “existential threat” to Israel and America’s regional “allies,” a disparate crew of land-grabbing colonizers, murderous princes and profligate potentates.

Only U.S. intervention, in the form of an overt military attack now or crippling economic sanctions followed by military action later, can save the day and bring “democracy” to the benighted Iranian people.

If we’re to believe neocon acolyte Thomas Donnelly, “The rapid ticking of the Iran nuclear clock also marks an increasingly dark hour for the United States and its closest allies and partners, because it coincides with a third clock … the timetable of retreat set in motion by Barack Obama.”

Meanwhile, liberal interventionists Rudy deLeon and Brian Katulis over at CAP tell us that “President Barack Obama and his administration are ratcheting up the pressure on the Iranian regime, building an international coalition that is increasingly isolating and weakening Iran–making it pay a price for not living up to its international responsibilities.”

While AEI and their fellow-travelers claim that “in the after-midnight hour when the Obama retreat is complete, the United States would find itself with few options at the chiming of the nuclear clock,” CAP’s liberal hawks loudly proclaim that the “Obama administration has adopted a tough approach to Iran, centered on three main components: Unprecedented defense cooperation with regional allies that enhances their security and independence; An international coalition that holds Iran accountable for its actions; Smart, targeted economic sanctions.”

In other words, while elite Washington factions may disagree over tactical issues, they are in full agreement on the wider strategic goals: undisputed American hegemony over energy corridors in Central Asia and the Middle East.

From the darkest days of the Cold War to the present moment, American policy is designed with one goal in mind: smash the competition, firstly China and Russia, but also the crisis-ridden European Union, whose main task is to keep quiet and fall in line.

Red Lines

Last week in an interview with the CBS Evening News, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that “despite the efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less.”

“So are you saying that Iran can have a nuclear weapon in 2012?,” reporter Scott Pelley asked. Panetta replied, “It would probably be about a year before they can do it. Perhaps a little less. But one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.”

Never mind that the U.S.-controlled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not discovered a so-called “secret facility,” or that two National Intelligence Estimates produced by all 16 U.S. secret state agencies, the latest one this year, reported there is not a shred of credible evidence supporting claims that Iran has diverted uranium towards the development of a bomb.

No matter; as we learned in the aftermath of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” and therefore, the march to war with Iran will continue, indeed accelerate in the near term.

“If the Israelis decide to launch a military strike to prevent that weapon from being built,” Pelley asked, “what sort of complications does that raise for you?”

Panetta replied, “Well, we share the same common concern. The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us and that’s a red line, obviously, for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it.”

When Pelley asked what “it?” is, Panetta said: “If they proceed and we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.”

Pelley: “Including military steps?”

Panetta: “There are no options off the table.”

Ticking Clocks

While the media have gone to great lengths to portray the Israelis as proverbial loose cannons who just might launch an Iran attack without first consulting their American partners, this is a smokescreen providing political cover for the Obama administration during an election year.

As analyst Michel Chossudovsky pointed out on Global Research, “In late December 2008, coinciding with the onslaught of Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ directed against Gaza, the Pentagon dispatched some 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist Israel in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system as part of a new and integrated air defense system.”

Chossudovsky observed this development indicates that there has been “a fundamental turning point in the structure of Israel’s Air Defense system and its relationship to the US global missile detection system.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Chossudovsky wrote, “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.” (emphasis added)

Since the Obama regime came to power, Chossudovsky noted there has “been a significant hike in US military aid to Israel,” and “in fact much of this so-called military aid constitutes a veiled increase in the U.S. Defense budget.”

This has been borne out by several reports in the Israeli press.

Last week, Israel National News disclosed that the “United States will double the special aid it gives Israel for the development and implementation of anti-missile systems, the Globes financial newspaper reported on Thursday.”

Indeed, “the House and Senate’s Committees on Appropriations approved the aid following a request by the U.S. Administration to approve aid totaling $106.1 million for the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic long-range air defense system, for the program to improve the basic capabilities of the Arrow systems, and for the David’s Sling mid-range anti-missile system.”

Significantly, both “Appropriations Committees went far beyond the request, the report noted, and raised the amount of aid from $129 million to $235.7 million in 2012,” Israel National News reported.

These developments were underlined in a report last week by the right-wing Jerusalem Post.

According to the Post’s defense correspondent Yaakov Katz, “Israel is moving forward with plans to hold the largest-ever missile defense exercise in its history this spring amid Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.”

“Last week,” Katz wrote, “Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post disclosed that “the drill, which is unprecedented in its size, will include the establishment of US command posts in Israel and IDF command posts at EUCOM headquarters in Germany–with the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.”

“The US,” Katz noted, “will also bring its THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) and shipbased Aegis ballistic missile defense systems to Israel to simulate the interception of missile salvos against Israel,” and that the “American system will work in conjunction with Israel’s missile defense systems–the Arrow, Patriot and Iron Dome.”

Similar deployments are also underway in Turkey, the staging area for terrorist attacks targeting the Syrian government for “regime change” à la Libya.

As analyst Sibel Edmonds pointed out for Boiling Frogs Post, a “joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria.”

Edmonds noted that “weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US participation since last May.”

According to Edmonds’ Turkish and Pentagon sources, “the HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors.”

It now appears that U.S.-NATO war plans against Iran will also rely heavily on Turkish participation.

The PanArmenian News Agency reported Saturday (h/t Stop NATO) “NATO’s Malatya-based ballistic missile early warning radar system will begin functioning next week, a senior Turkish official said Dec 23, reiterating that the device ‘is defensive and not directed at any particular country, especially Iran’.”

However, with U.S.-NATO plans already underway to install so-called Ballistic Missile Defense systems in Eastern Europe which threaten Russia with a nuclear first-strike, the deployment of these systems in Turkey can only be viewed as a shot across the bow by both Iran and Russia.

After all, as The New York Times reported earlier this month, “the American commitment to work with NATO allies and deploy the missile shield is founded on a belief that Iran is accelerating its program to field missiles capable of reaching across NATO territory in Europe.”

The American ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daadler, told the Times, “our estimate of the threat has gone up, not down. It is accelerating–this is the Iranian ballistic missile threat–and becoming more severe than even we thought two years ago.”

Dismissing Russian concerns that “the alliance’s system of radars and interceptors could blunt Moscow’s own arsenal of missiles, and thus undermine Russia’s strategic deterrent,” Daadler proclaimed: “Whether Russia likes it or not, we are about defending NATO-European territory against a growing ballistic missile threat.”

Despite claims by Turkey that the radar deployment is strictly “defensive” and not aimed at Iran, the PanArmenian News Agency informed us that “the agreement signed between Ankara and Washington calls for the deployment of a U.S. AN/TPY-2 (X-band) early warning radar system at a military installation at Kürecik in Malatya as part of NATO’s missile defense project.”

Remarkably similar to the accord signed with Tel Aviv, the Turkish agreement calls for the deployment of “around 50 U.S. soldiers” at the installations, “accompanied by a number of Turkish troops.”

“In addition,” the news agency disclosed, “a Turkish senior commander is to be posted at NATO’s headquarters in Germany, where the intelligence gathered through the radar system will be processed, Hurriyet Daily News reported.”

These reports indicate that the United States, with Israel and NATO as junior partners, are coordinating strategic deployments which the Iranians will undoubtedly view as preparations for a large scale attack.

Coming on the heels of a report earlier this month by Haaretz that the “Israel Defense Forces is forming a command to supervise ‘depth’ operations, actions undertaken by the military far from Israel’s borders,” military action by the U.S., Israeli and NATO forces are perhaps only a provocation away.

The New York Times reported last week that “Iran put neighbors on notice Thursday that it was about to conduct vast naval exercises in the Arabian Sea, including war games near the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for international oil traffic.”

“The exercises,” the Times reported, “to start Saturday and last 10 days, are Iran’s first since May 2010 and were described by the official news media as the largest the country ever planned.”

“The scale of the maneuvers, the Times disclosed, “appeared intended to demonstrate Iran’s military capabilities as it faces increased isolation over its suspect nuclear energy program.”

These exercises “are bound to put Iranian warships close to vessels of the United States Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, which patrols some of the same waters, including the Strait of Hormuz.”

War threats are being taken seriously far beyond the Persian Gulf.

Earlier this month Russia Today disclosed that the “geopolitical situation unfolding around Syria and Iran is prompting Russia to make its military structures in the South Caucasus, on the Caspian, Mediterranean and Black Sea regions more efficient.”

RT’s correspondent Sergey Konovalov wrote that “Defense Ministry sources are saying that the Kremlin has been informed about an upcoming US-supported Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The strike will be sudden and take place on ‘day X’ in the near future. One could assume Iran’s reaction will not be delayed. A full-scale war is possible, and its consequences could be unpredictable.”

“Recently,” RT reported, “the Northern Fleet’s aircraft carrier group with the heavy aircraft carrier ‘Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Kuznetsov’, headed towards the Mediterranean with plans to ultimately enter the Syrian port of Tartus.”

Russian Defense Ministry sources would neither confirm nor deny “that the surface warships are being accompanied by the Northern Fleet’s nuclear submarines.”

“The tasks that will be carried out by the army and the navy in the event of a war against Iran are, of course, not being disclosed,” Konovalov wrote.

That an attack on Iran might set-off a global conflict with far-reaching, and deadly, consequences was underscored by Russia Today.

Analyst Col. Vladimir Popov said that “if in the midst [of an attack on Iran] Azerbaijan supported by Turkey, attacks Armenia, then, of course, all of the adversary’s attacks against Armenia will be repelled by Russia in conjunction with Armenian anti-missile defense forces.”

“The analyst does not exclude the possibility of Russia’s military involvement in the Iranian conflict.”

“‘In the worst-case scenario’,” Popov told RT, “‘if Tehran is facing complete military defeat after a land invasion of the US and NATO troops, Russia will provide its military support–at least on a military-technical level.”

As the United States, Israel and NATO prepare the ground for war against Iran, and with operations already underway by the U.S. and NATO to effect “regime change” in Syria, Iran’s close regional ally, the pieces of a slow-motion global catastrophe are falling into place.

“We have asked for it back,” Obama said. “We’ll see how the Iranians respond.”

A huge embarrassment to the CIA and the Pentagon, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters during a State Department briefing: “We submitted a formal request for the return of our lost equipment as we would in any situation to any government around the world.”

Cheekily, Clinton said although the U.S. government has little prospect of getting their $6 million toy back because of “recent Iranian behavior,” she then threatened the Islamic Republic saying, “the path that Iran seems to be going down is a dangerous one for themselves and the region.”

In Washington’s bizarro world where war is peace the United States, which has Iran surrounded with a string of military bases and where nuclear-armed aircraft carrier battle groups and submarines ply the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, the aggressor is magically transformed into the aggrieved party.

The Secretary said, “given Iran’s behavior to date we do not expect them to comply but we are dealing with all of these provocations and concerning actions taken by Iran in close concert with our closest allies and partners.” (emphasis added)

Talk about chutzpah!

Firing back, the head of Iran’s Judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani told PressTV that “the US has violated our country’s territory and has waged an intelligence war, and now expects us to return the aircraft.”

Noting the absurdity of U.S. demands Larijani said, “Iran has the right to deal with this blatant crime in any way [it deems necessary] and the US should forget about getting the spy aircraft back.”

By all accounts, the “intelligence war” is heating heating up. On Thursday, Haaretz reported that the “Israel Defense Forces is forming a command to supervise ‘depth’ operations, actions undertaken by the military far from Israel’s borders.”

In a follow-up piece published Sunday, Haaretz informed us that the new corps, “has already earned the somewhat overstated sobriquet ‘the Iran Command’.”

The newspaper’s chief military correspondent, Amos Harel, wrote that the new unit “could, in the future, assist in mobilizing special forces in the Iranian context.”

“More important,” Harel averred, “it will have the job of planning and leading operations in areas far beyond the borders, operations that are connected to the covert war against terror organizations (and, indirectly, against Iran).”

Whether the IDF’s newly-launched “Iran Command,” will prove any more effective than the CIA or Mossad, which suffered major set-backs when their intelligence nets were rolled-up in Iran and Lebanon as Asia Times Online recently reported, is an open question.

War “by other means” however, will continue.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed by a vote of 283-136 the Iran Threat Reductions Act (H.R. 1905), a draconian piece of legislative detritus which hopes to crater Iran’s Central Bank.

The following day, the U.S. Senate followed suit, approving the legislation by an 86-13 vote. President Obama has said he would sign the bill, cobbled-together by war hawks as part of the massive $670 billion 2012 Defense Authorization Act.

Spinning the Story

U.S. military and CIA operations today involve far more than simply “putting steel on the target.” Increasingly, covert actions and clandestine operations rely on what the Pentagon has described as “information operations.”

With few exceptions, corporate media in Europe and the U.S. have played accessory roles in ginning-up the so-called “Iranian threat,” a decades’ long program to secure hegemony over the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East.

When initial reports surfaced that the drone had gone missing deep inside Iran, “CIA press officials declined to comment on the downed drone and reporters were directed toward a statement from the military,” The Washington Post reported.

Indeed, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-led alliance currently occupying Afghanistan, dismissed Iran’s claims that the drone was operating over their territory. “The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week,” the ISAF statement read.

Deep inside the media echo chamber, CNN informed us earlier this month that the drone had been “tasked to fly over western Afghanistan and look for insurgent activity, with no directive to either fly into Iran or spy on Iran from Afghan airspace.”

“A U.S. satellite quickly pinpointed the downed drone, which apparently sustained significant damage,” the “senior official” told the network.

CNN quoted the unnamed “senior official” as saying, “the Iranians have a pile of rubble and are trying to figure what they have and what to do with it.” According to this reading, “the drone crashed solely because its guidance system failed, the official said.”

While first claiming that the CIA drone had strayed off-course, CNN reported after the Sentinel was publicly displayed, that unnamed “U.S. military officials” re-calibrated their tale and now said that the drone “was on a surveillance mission of suspected nuclear sites” in Iran.

Anonymous officials told CNN that “the CIA had not informed the Defense Department of the drone’s mission when reports first emerged that it had crashed,” and that the U.S. military “‘did not have a good understanding of what was going on because it was a CIA mission’.”

As with their earlier reporting, CNN’s latest explanation was a fabrication.

The Los Angeles Times reported two days after the incident, “though the drone flight was a CIA operation, U.S. military personnel were involved in flying the aircraft, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy involved.”

In fact, as The Washington Post disclosed in September, the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are thick as thieves.

“Their commingling at remote bases is so complete, the Post informed us, “that U.S. officials ranging from congressional staffers to high-ranking CIA officers said they often find it difficult to distinguish agency from military personnel.”

“‘You couldn’t tell the difference between CIA officers, Special Forces guys and contractors’,” an unnamed “senior U.S. official” told the Post. “‘They’re all three blended together. All under the command of the CIA.”

“Their activities occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations.” One can presume that these “blended” units have been tasked by Washington with the “Iranian brief.”

“Sometimes their missions are considered military ‘preparation of the battlefield’,” the Post reported, “and others fall under covert findings obtained by the CIA. As a result, congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view,” which of course is precisely what the Agency and Pentagon fully intend.

In light of recent statements by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to The New York Times, that “surveillance flights over Iran would continue despite the loss of the drone,” reporting by U.S. media stenographers, are blatant misrepresentations of the basic facts surrounding the entire affair. (emphasis added)

Now sensing the jig was up and that a face-saving meme had to be injected into the news cycle, a “former intelligence official” continued to discount Iranian assertions that their armed forces had brought the drone down.

“It simply fell into their laps,” he told CNN.

However, much to the consternation of American officials, Iranian spin doctors were running their own info op, one which cast U.S. claims in a most unflattering light.

The Associated Press reported that “Iran deliberately delayed its announcement that it had captured an American surveillance drone to test U.S. reaction, the country’s foreign minister said Saturday.”

“Ali Akbar Salehi said Tehran finally went public with its possession of the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone to disprove contradictory statements from U.S. officials,” AP reported.

“When our armed forces nicely brought down the stealth American surveillance drone, we didn’t announce it for several days to see what the other party (U.S.) says and to test their reaction,” Salehi told the official IRNA news agency. “Days after Americans made contradictory statements, our friends at the armed forces put this drone on display.”

Unlike American and Israeli assertions that Iran is taking steps to “go nuclear,” Iranian officials at least had hard evidence on their side that the United States was violating their territorial integrity–the captured U.S. drone.

Electronic Countermeasures

Although Western “defense experts” have ridiculed claims that Iran’s electronic warfare specialists have captured the Sentinel rather than recovering the downed craft from a crash site, a report by The Christian Science Monitor shed new light on Iran’s apparent capabilities.

Investigative journalists Scott Peterson and Payam Faramarzi disclosed that an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone, said that the military “exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.”

According to the Monitor, “Iran guided the CIA’s ‘lost’ stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military.”

Earlier reports suggested that Iran, which had recently been supplied with the Russian-built Kvant 1L222 Avtobaza Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) systems, may have been a factor in the drone’s capture.

The Israeli defense industry publication, Defense Update, informed us that the Avtobaza is “capable of intercepting weapon datalink communications operating on similar wavebands. The new gear may have helped the Iranians employ active deception/jamming to intercept and ‘hijack’ the Sentinel’s control link.”

The Monitor investigation however, suggests that the Iranians had accomplished this feat on their own.

Regardless of the means employed, statements by U.S. officials that all the Iranians had was “a pile of rubble” were blatant falsehoods.

According to the Monitor, Iran’s military experts were able to do so by cutting off “communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.”

Armed with knowledge “gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, Peterson and Faramarzi disclosed that “the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.”

It would seem then, if this account is accurate, that Iranian defense experts had already “figure[d] out what they have and what to do with it” from earlier captures.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer said. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

Once military engineers had “spoofed” the American drone, “which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data,” they were able to make “the drone ‘land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications’ from the US control center.”

Peterson and Faramarzi reported that the techniques employed “were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years,” as well as by taking advantage “of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.”

Former U.S. Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore told the Monitor that “‘modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible’ to manipulation,” saying it is “certainly possible” to “‘recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course’.”

As Antifascist Calling reported in 2009, Iraqi insurgents battling the U.S. occupation had deployed $26 off-the-shelf spy kit which enabled them to intercept live video feeds from Predator drones.

What the Iranians claim to have done, according to defense experts, are orders of magnitude greater than simply capturing a video feed. Indeed, if this report is credible, it would have wide-reaching implications for other U.S., Israeli and NATO aircraft and missiles which similarly rely on GPS to guide them towards their targets.

Why is this the case? As WikiLeaks revealed in a 2009 report on the earlier Iraqi revelations that “it is theoretically possible to read off this [drone] mission control data both in the intercepted video feed and saved video data on harddisks.”

In plain English, this means that the “control and command link to communicate from a control station to the drone” and the “data link that sends mission control data and video feeds back to the ground control station,” for both “line-of-sight communication paths and beyond line-of-sight communication paths” are hackable by whomever might be listening.

Leaked Pentagon Document

On December 13, the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence, published a leaked U.S. Air Force document, USAF Operating Next-Generation Remotely Piloted Aircraft for Irregular Warfare, SAB-TR-10-03, dated April 2011.

Classified “For Official Use Only,” the 110-page report issued by the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), revealed that drones or “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) are subject to a number of vulnerabilities.

Air Force analysts averred that “in spite of current low RPA losses, inexpensive physical threats (e.g., MANPADS, low-end SAMs, air-to-air missiles) and electronic threats (e.g., acoustic detectors, low cost acquisition radars, jammers) threaten future operations.”

Relevantly, “sensor/data downlinks for some RPAs have not been encrypted or obfuscated.”

However, the RQ-170 Sentinel, which can operate at 50,000 feet would not have been vulnerable to “MANPADS” or “low-end SAMs,” and was certainly not brought down by an Iranian air-to-air missile; therefore, a valid explanation of its capture would be the one offered by Iran: electronic countermeasures developed by the Islamic Republic.

Amongst the more salient findings of the Air Force report are the following:

Section 2.4.3 Threat to Communication Links

1. Jamming of commercial satellite communications (SATCOM) links is a widely available technology. It can provide an effective tool for adversaries against data links or as a way for command and control (C2) denial.
2. Operational needs may require the use of unencrypted data links to provide broadcast services to ground troops without security clearances. Eavesdropping on these links is a known exploit that is available to adversaries for extremely low cost.
3. Spoofing or hijacking links can lead to damaging missions, or even to platform loss.

Section 2.4.4 Threat to Position, Navigation, and Guidance

1. Small, simple GPS noise jammers can be easily constructed and employed by an unsophisticated adversary and would be effective over a limited RPA operating area.
2. GPS repeaters are also available for corrupting navigation capabilities of RPAs.
3. Cyber threats represent a major challenge for future RPA operations. Cyber attacks can affect both on-board and ground systems, and exploits may range from asymmetric CNO [computer network operation] attacks to highly sophisticated electronic systems and software attacks.

Jeffrey Carr, a U.S. cybersecurity expert who maintains the Digital Dao web site wrote that the timing of document’s release to Public Intelligence was “very interesting.”

“Clearly,” Carr wrote, “someone with FOUO access wanted this information to be made public to inform the controversy surrounding the incident.”

Commenting on the Air Force report, Carr averred that “the capture of the RQ-170 by Iranian forces needs to be evaluated fairly and not dismissed as some kind of Iranian scam for reasons that have more to do with embarrassment than a rational assessment of the facts.”

“Theft of this technology via cyber attacks against the companies doing R&D and manufacture of the aircraft is ongoing,” Carr noted.

“Whether or not the Iranians got lucky or have acquired the ability to attack the C2 of the drone in question, there’s obviously some serious errors in judgment being made at very high levels and secrecy about it is only serving the ones guilty of making those bad decisions.”

While Carr’s observations are true as far as it goes, the “serious errors in judgement” begin with chest-thumping U.S. and Israeli politicians who believe they have a monopoly when it comes to dictating policies or invading other countries, killing people on an industrial scale, stealing their resources and reducing their cities to smoking ruins as was done in both Gaza and Fallujah.

To make matters worse for technophilic Western militaries hell-bent on attacking Iran, Tehran Times reported Thursday that “Iran plans to put foreign spy drones it has in its possession on display in the near future.”

According to unnamed sources quoted by the newspaper, which reflects the views of the Iranian government, “the foreign unmanned aircraft that Iran has are four Israeli and three U.S. drones.”

Back in September, The Christian Science Monitor disclosed, “Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile–a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.”

According to Peterson and Faramarzi, Gholizadeh told the news agency that “we have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” … such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

While it is not possible to verify these claims, indeed they may be nothing more than propaganda offerings from Iranian spinmeisters, if their assertions are accurate, a technological leap such as this would pose a serious threat to any attacking force.

As I wrote back in 2009, since cheap and readily-obtainable software packages were now part of the spy-kit of Iraqi insurgent forces, I wondered whether it was “only a matter of time before militant groups figure out how to hijack a drone and crash it, or even launch a Hellfire missile or two at a U.S. ground station?”

We were told by military experts this was not possible; however, who would have dreamed that the Achilles’ heel of Pentagon robo-warriors, blinded by their own arrogance and racist presumptions about the “Arab” or “Persian mind” was something as simple as their own imperial hubris.

Amongst Washington elites and the courtier press, it appears that more than a pipe or two has been passed around of late as the political and psychological ground is prepared for a military attack on Iran.

Do ‘All Options’ Mean Nukes?

During a White House press briefing Thursday, President Barack Obama said that “No options off the table means I am considering all options.”

Many of those “options” are already in play. Ranging from a covert program of assassination and industrial sabotage to planting computer malware as “beacons” for future attacks on civilian and defense infrastructure, the United States, NATO and Israel are already engaged in a campaign of violent destabilization inside the Islamic Republic.

As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi pointed out on Antiwar.com, “the White House has issued several findings to the intelligence community authorizing stepped-up covert action against both Damascus and Tehran.”

“A ‘finding,’” Giraldi noted, “is top-level approval for secret operations considered to be particularly politically sensitive. Taken together, the recent findings, combined with the evidence of major intelligence operations being run in Lebanon, amount to a secret war against Iran and its allies in the Mideast.”

In 2007, President Bush “authorized attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists and other facilities in Tehran and elsewhere as well as coordination with the Israelis to develop computer viruses to disrupt the Iranian computer network, a program that led to the production of the Stuxnet worm.”

“While the media credits ‘the Israelis’ in the assassination of Iranian scientists,” Giraldi noted “the reality is that no Israeli (or American) intelligence officer could possibly operate effectively inside Iran to carry out a killing.”

“The assassinations, which are acts of war, have actually been carried out by followers of the dissident Iranian Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the separatist Baluch Jundallah, and the Kurdish PJAK, all acting under direction from American and Israeli intelligence officers,” Giraldi grimly observed.

More ominously however, five years ago The New Yorker revealed that “One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites,” such as the one at Nantaz.

At the time, a “senior intelligence official” familiar with the plans told Seymour Hersh: “‘Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout–we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out’–remove the nuclear option–’they’re shouted down’.”

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky warned in Towards a World War III Scenario: “Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT, ‘Theater Iran Near Term’, simulations of an attack on Iran were initiated in May 2003 ‘when modelers and intelligence specialists pulled together the data needed for theater-level (meaning large-scale) scenario analysis for Iran’.”

“In 2004,” Chossudovsky wrote, “drawing upon the initial war scenarios under TIRANNT, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a ‘contingency plan’ of a large-scale military operation directed against Iran ‘to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States’ on the presumption that the government in Tehran would be behind the terrorist plot. The plan included the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.”

Writing on Iran war plans back in 2005, Philip Giraldi disclosed in The American Conservative magazine, “The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option.”

“As in the case of Iraq,” Giraldi wrote, “the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”

While Israel is portrayed as an irrational actor which the United States is powerless to control, this manufactured reality is a smokescreen meant to conceal America’s hidden hand.

According to Chossudovsky, “What we are dealing with is a joint US-NATO-Israel military operation to bomb Iran, which has been in the active planning stage since 2004. Officials in the Defense Department, under Bush and Obama, have been working assiduously with their Israeli military and intelligence counterparts, carefully identifying targets inside Iran.”

“In practical military terms,” Chossudovsky averred, “any action by Israel would have to be planned and coordinated at the highest levels of the US-led coalition.”

With these disturbing facts in hand, and the chilling implications of policies which have been concealed from the American people, one can reasonably inquire: Is this what President Obama means when he says “no options off the table means I am considering all options”?

Given the heated rhetoric employed by the president and his national security team, moves towards economic- and other forms of warfare by Congress, as well as even-more bellicose threats by Republican presidential contenders angling for the Oval Office, the use of a nuclear weapon in any attack upon Iran cannot be ruled out.

‘Sentinel Down’

Much to their consternation, Iran may not be the pushover claimed by the war hawks and their media acolytes.

After decades of regaling the public with lurid tales of U.S. technological prowess, replete with grandiose plans for “full-spectrum dominance,” the Aerospace Division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released video Thursday of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone brought down last Sunday some 140 miles from the Afghan border, well into Iranian territory.

The incident has become a huge embarrassment to the Pentagon and chest-thumping American politicians who have oversold their oft-repeated claim that the United States is the world’s “sole superpower.”

According to PressTV, a Tehran-based English language media outlet which reflects the views of the Iranian government, Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh said: “After the aircraft’s entry into the country’s eastern [air]space, it fell in the electronic ambush of the Iranian Armed Forces and was brought to the ground with minimum damage [caused to it].”

Also on Thursday, DebkaFile, a Jerusalem-based military intelligence web site with close ties to ultra-rightists in Israel and the United States, reported that the RQ-170 captured December 4 in “almost perfect condition confirmed Tehran’s claim that the UAV was downed by a cyber attack, meaning it was not shot down but brought in undamaged by an electronic warfare ambush.”

How did the Iranians bring the Sentinel down? While speculation is rife amongst aviation experts, a plausible theory has emerged.

According to the Israeli defense industry publication, Defense Update, “Russia has transferred a number of Kvant 1L222 Avtobaza Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) systems to Iran in October.” Each “system includes an passive ELINT signals interception system and a jamming module capable of disrupting airborne radars including fire control radars, terrain following radars and ground mapping radars as well as weapon (missile) data links.”

The Russian-supplied system, Defense Update analysts report, is also “capable of intercepting weapon datalink communications operating on similar wavebands. The new gear may have helped the Iranians employ active deception/jamming to intercept and ‘hijack’ the Sentinel’s control link.”

On Saturday, the AviationIntel web site, citing photographic documentation released by Iran that the “evidence is unbelievably conclusive” that Iranian cyberwarriors captured the U.S. spy craft.

In other words, AviationIntel analysts averred, “there is no reason why [that] system [Avtobaza] could not have detected the Sentinel’s electronic trail and either jammed it and/or have alerted fighter aircraft and SAM [surface-to-air missile] installations as to its whereabouts.”

While the RQ-170 “could have operated with limited electronic connectivity, making it less visible,” AviationIntel reported that a “more likely scenario” would be that the Sentinel actively transmitted “live video, detailed radar maps, or electronic intelligence, in real-time,” making detection all-the-more easier when “pinged” by the Russian-designed system.

However you care to spin this story, the Iranian military are no slouches; an attack on the Islamic Republic would hardly be the proverbial “cake-walk” touted by the neocons and other armchair warriors.

In a further sign that the Tehran government take ongoing terror attacks by London, Tel Aviv and Washington very seriously, The Daily Telegraph reported that IRGC commander, General Mohammed Ali Jaafari, “raised the operational readiness status of the country’s forces, initiating preparations for potential external strikes and covert attacks.”

The Telegraph disclosed, citing unnamed “Western intelligence officials,” that Iran’s armed forces “had initiated plans to disperse long-range missiles, high explosives, artillery and guards units to key defensive positions.”

“The Iranian leadership fears the country is being subjected to a carefully co-ordinated attack by Western intelligence and security agencies to destroy key elements of its nuclear infrastructure,” The Telegraph reported.

In response to bellicose threats emanating from Western capitals, a new round of crippling sanctions meant to crater the economy and attacks by intelligence agencies and terrorist assets operating inside Iran, orders were issued “to redistribute Iran’s arsenal of long-range Shahab missiles to secret sites around the country where they would be safe from enemy attack and could be used to launch retaliatory attacks.”

On Friday, The Christian Science Monitor reported that conservative lawmaker Mohammad Kossari warned that “‘Iran will target all US military bases around the world,’ in case of further violations … [and that] Iran’s response would be ‘terrifying’.”

Investigative journalist Scott Peterson, who has done yeoman’s work exposing the propaganda blitz by current and former U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers to delist the bizarre Iranian political cult, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, disclosed that “the drone flights have apparently not yielded new evidence that would change conclusions by the United States and the United Nations that Iran stopped systematic nuclear weapons-related work in 2003.”

This of course, confirm Iranian assertions that efforts by Western imperialists over Iran’s alleged “nuclear weapons programs” is a pretext for “regime change.”

Defense journalist Robert Densmore, a former Navy electronic countermeasures officer told Peterson that the capture of the RQ-170 drone is “very significant.”

“Strategically,” Densmore told the Monitor, “the US will suffer from the loss of this because … it has radar, a fuselage, and coating that makes it low-observable, and the electronics inside are also very high-tech.”

But perhaps the biggest loss to the Pentagon is not the drone’s bat-wing design nor coatings which render the craft less visible to detection by radar–long known to America’s capitalist rivals China and Russis–but the “cutting-edge cameras and sensors that can ‘listen in’ on cellphone conversations as it soars miles above the ground or ‘smell’ the air and sniff out chemical plumes emanating from a potential underground nuclear laboratory,” as the Los Angeles Times disclosed.

Built by defense giant Lockheed Martin at a cost to taxpayers of some $6 million dollars per unit, the secret state’s drone program, greatly expanded by the Obama regime, may be a boon to Washington’s opaque Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex but it is also something of an Achilles’ heel.

“Ever since it was developed at Lockheed Martin Corp.’s famed Skunk Works facility in Palmdale,” the Los Angeles Times averred, “the Sentinel drone has been cloaked in tight secrecy by the U.S. government. But now the drone that the Iranian military claims to have brought down for invading its airspace might be made far more public than the Pentagon or Lockheed ever intended.”

On this count, along with many other assumptions underpinning the doctrinal constructs of Washington’s technophilic military, they have no one to blame but themselves.

As Antifascist Calling reported back in 2009, Iraqi insurgents deployed $26 off-the-shelf spy kit that enabled them to intercept live video feeds from Predator drones.

According to The Wall Street Journal the Pentagon’s “potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control.” Although this flaw was known to the Pentagon since the 1990s during imperialism’s campaign to dismember socialist Yugoslavia, nothing was done since it might prove too costly to the drone’s prime contractor, General Atomics Inc.

The Journal noted “the stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.”

In fact, as the Journal disclosed in a subsequent report, the video feed wasn’t encrypted “because military officials have long assumed no one would make the effort to try to intercept it.”

Talk about imperial hubris!

“‘It’s bad–they’ll have everything,’ in terms of the secret technology in the aircraft,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times. “‘And the Chinese or the Russians will have it too’.”

The Associated Press reported that “Iran will not return a U.S. surveillance drone captured by its armed forces, a senior commander of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard said Sunday.”

“Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy head of the Guard, said in remarks broadcast on state television that the violation of Iran’s airspace by the U.S. drone was a ‘hostile act’ and warned of a ‘bigger’ response. He did not elaborate on what Tehran might do.”

“‘No one returns the symbol of aggression to the party that sought secret and vital intelligence related to the national security of a country’,” Salami said.

On the diplomatic front, the drone’s capture was a tactical boost for Tehran.

On Thursday, Iran’s UN Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee complained in a letter to the UN Security Council that the “blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States Government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations.” Khazaee demanded “condemnation of such aggressive acts.” Needless to say, none will be forthcoming.

A One-Two Punch: Iran and China

As Washington seeks to impose a stranglehold over vital petrochemical resources in Central Asian and Middle Eastern energy corridors, efforts to overthrow the Tehran government, as with U.S. machinations against Libya and now Syria, are daggers aimed directly at Washington’s largest creditor and geopolitical rival, China.

Writing in Asia Times Online, analyst Kaveh L. Afrasiabi warned that the “United States government is on the verge of taking its problems with the Islamic Republic of Iran to a whole new and ominous level that portends clashing interests with China and a number of other countries, including in Europe, which receives some half a million barrels of oil from Iran on a daily basis.”

As previously reported, the 2012 Defense Authorization Act, wending its way through Congress will impose new crippling economic sanctions on Iran, and threaten any corporation or financial institution that does business with Iran’s Central Bank with stiff punitive measures.

“Unwilling to compromise, hawkish lawmakers sponsoring the bill and their impressive army of pro-Israel lobbyists have mounted a counter-attack,” Afrasiabi averred, “arguing that the bill is sound and does not require any ‘watering down’ that would weaken its impact on Iran–the hope being that this will bring Tehran to its knees over the nuclear issue.”

Last week, pro-Israel lobby groups, including the the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, “began a loud campaign in favor of the latest US sanctions bill, pressuring Obama to go along and reminding him of his ‘waiver authority’” under terms of the draconian legislation.

“This argument traps the White House into difficult choices, for example, exempting China, which receives 13% of its imported oil from Iran, would ignite a bush fire of political criticism, and not doing so on the other hand would inevitably harm US-China relations,” Afrasiabi wrote.

Indeed, the current legislation is a double-edged sword aimed at both Iran and China because “the bill in effect asks Beijing to forego its energy ties with Iran and look elsewhere, clearly not something the Chinese are prepared to do in today’s age of energy insecurity.”

“That insecurity,” Asia Times reports, “would be exacerbated as a result of an oil embargo on Iran, which relies on its oil exports for some 80% of its foreign income. Oil prices would jack up, perhaps to about US$250 a barrel as warned by Tehran,” and would have a deleterious effect on countries “such as Spain and Greece, which receive 14% of their oil from Iran, some on Iran credit,” directly impacting their already troubled economies.

Reframing Western Propaganda

Underscoring Western unity regarding the terrorist campaign targeting Iran, the director of “Germany’s Institute for Security and International Affairs (SWP), Volker Perthes, and their Iran expert Walter Posch” argued in a secret 2010 diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks that “a policy of covert sabotage (unexplained explosions, accidents, computer hacking etc) would be more effective than a military strike whose effects in the region could be devastating.”

As German Foreign Policy reported last month, the “German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) recently recalled the cause for the renewed escalation of tensions. ‘Since the demise of British colonial rule and the announcement of the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine,’ according to the think tank’s recent analysis, the USA has been pursuing the objective of thwarting the rise of any Middle East country to become a regional predominating power–’if necessary by military means’.”

“‘The growth of power and influence of a regional player’ would ‘automatically be equated with loss of US power and influence in that region.’ Washington has always sought, through ‘alliances and inter-alliance policies, to create a regional balance of power’ that guarantees western hegemony in this resource-rich region.”

“Therefore,” GFP’s analyst concludes, “the conflict between the West and Iran–regardless of ideological wrappings–is simply a hegemonic conflict.”

This has been borne out by recent statements by neoconservatives in the United States. Shifting gears, neocons in leading U.S. think tanks are busily manufacturing new reasons why the United States, Israel, or both, need to attack Iran–now.

As journalist MJ Rosenberg pointed out for Media Matters, “suddenly the struggle to stop Iran is not about saving Israel from nuclear annihilation.”

Rosenberg reported that “after a decade of scare-mongering about the second coming of Nazi Germany, the Iran hawks are admitting that they have other reasons for wanting to take out Iran, and saving Israeli lives may not be one of them.”

“Suddenly,” Rosenberg wrote, “the neoconservatives have discovered the concept of truth-telling, although, no doubt, the shift will be ephemeral.”

In late November Danielle Pletka, the head of the American Enterprise Institute’s “foreign policy shop” explained: “The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, ‘See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.’ … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.”

Never mind the inconvenient fact that Iran has repeatedly stated their nuclear program is exclusively for civilian purposes, a point clearly established by two National Intelligence Estimates by American secret state agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Indeed, no evidence exists that Iran has diverted enriched uranium towards a secret military program to develop a weapon, despite howls of protest to the contrary by powerful pro-Israel lobby groups and their pets in Congress.

“Earlier this week,” Rosenberg reported, “one of Pletka’s colleagues at AEI said pretty much the same thing. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Thomas Donnelly explained that we’ve got the Iran problem all wrong and that we need to ‘understand the nature of the conflict.’”

Donnelly continued: “‘We’re fixated on the Iranian nuclear program while the Tehran regime has its eyes on the real prize: the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East’.”

In other words, warmongers on both sides of the rather narrow Washington “divide” view Iran not as a so-called “existential threat” to America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East,” Israel, which possesses upwards of 200 nukes, but as a direct competitor for hegemony over the control of the vast petrochemical resources of Central Asia and the Middle East.

As Seumas Milne wrote last week in The Guardian, “a US or Israeli attack on Iran would turn that regional maelstrom into a global firestorm.”

“Iran would certainly retaliate directly and through allies against Israel, the US and US Gulf client states, and block the 20% of global oil supplies shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Quite apart from death and destruction, the global economic impact would be incalculable.”

As Reuters reported, “the chance of a military strike on Iran has roughly tripled in the past year, the senior geopolitical risk analyst at Barclays Capital said on Thursday.”

“New York-based analyst Helina Croft, writing in a note titled ‘Blowback: Assessing the fallout from the Iranian sanctions’, said even increased sanctions without an all-out military strike was increasing the risk of a spike in oil prices.”

“We still contend that the risk of either an Israeli or US strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities remains low, but it has risen, in our view, from 5-10 percent last year to 25-30% now,” Croft said.

Despite, or possibly because the severe economic fallout an attack on Iran would threaten their global competitors, the crisis-ridden U.S. Empire just might view the risks as “manageable.”

But as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “what is being attempted is no less than redrawing the political map of the entire Middle East. It threatens not only region-wide conflict, but to involve those major powers Washington is trying to exclude from this area of vital geostrategic concern: Russia and China.”

This dangerous and deadly game is fraught with peril. As Michel Chossudovsky warned on Global Research: “If such a war were to be launched, the entire Middle East-Central Asia region would flare up. Humanity would be precipitated into a World War III Scenario.”

Such a scenario, as readers undoubtedly surmise, would be anything but “manageable.”

In this light, it is hardly an accident that the same 2012 Defense Authorization Act which threatens to collapse Iran’s economy also targets dissident Americans with loss of their constitutional rights and indefinite detention under a creeping martial law regime.

One crime begets another.

The Isfahan complex transforms mined uranium into uranium fluoride gas which is then “spun” by centrifuges that enrich it into usable products for medical research and for Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program.

While Iranian officials sought to distance themselves from initial reporting by the semi-official Fars news agency that a “loud explosion” was heard across the city, but that “the sound of the explosion was from [a] military exercise,” has been contradicted by several sources.

Indeed, some Iranian officials have denied that an explosion even took place.

On Tuesday however, The Times reported that “satellite imagery … confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.”

“The images,” Times reporter Sheera Frenkel averred, “clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was ‘no doubt’ that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was ‘no accident’.”

Despite clear evidence that Israel and the United States have stepped-up their shadow war against the Islamic Republic, Defense Minister Ehud Barak “played down speculation on Saturday that Israel and U.S.-led allies were waging clandestine war on Iran, saying sanctions and the threat of military strikes were still the way to curb its nuclear program,” Reuters reported.

Proverbial “facts on the ground” however, tell a different tale.

The latest attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear program followed a blast two weeks ago at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran.

That blast killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program.

Satellite imagery shows much of the base in ruins. The attack was described by Time Magazine as the work “of Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad.”

In a backhanded confirmation that Monday’s blast was the handiwork of Mossad and their terrorist proxies, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Frenkel wrote that “Dan Meridor, the Israeli Intelligence Minister, said: ‘There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat’.”

Frenkel reported that “Major-General Giora Eiland, Israel’s former director of national security told Israel’s army radio that the Isfahan blast was no accident. ‘There aren’t many coincidences, and when there are so many events there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it’s the hand of God’,” Eiland said.

The Isfahan blast, as with other recent attacks, were allegedly in response to allegations made last month in a report filed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

However, while the “Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities,” the ginned-up report relied on information provided by “Member states,” presumably Israel and United States in the form of forged computer laptop documents and other “intelligence sources.”

The Agency claims they were “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Black operations targeting the Islamic Republic aren’t solely the province of America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East,” Israel. As Seymour Hersh reported last spring in The New Yorker: “In the past six years, soldiers from the Joint Special Operations Force, working with Iranian intelligence assets, put in place cutting-edge surveillance techniques, according to two former intelligence officers.”

In 2007, ABC News disclosed that “the CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government.”

Unnamed sources told ABC News that President Bush signed a presidential finding “that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.”

Congress has appropriated some $300 million for the CIA and the Pentagon’s covert war.

In the intervening years, those programs have turned lethal. Widely applauded by “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike, these programs have continued, indeed expanded under Barack Obama’s “progressive” Democratic administration.

Despite the fact that there “is also constant satellite coverage of major suspect areas in Iran,” The New Yorker reported “that nothing significantly new had been learned to suggest that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon.”

‘Shadow War’ Heating Up

Iran’s intelligence services haven’t been sitting idly by watching American, British, and Israeli terror operations.

On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported that the Iranian armed forces “brought down an unmanned US spy plane.”

“Iran’s military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,” Iran’s Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted an unnamed source as saying on Sunday.”

“The semiofficial Fars news agency,” Al Jazeera averred, said “that the plane is now in the possession of Iran’s armed forces. The Fars news agency is close to the powerful Revolutionary Guard.”

“Fars reported that the drone had been brought down through a combined effort by Iran’s armed forces, air defence forces and its electronic warfare unit after the plane briefly violated the country’s airspace at its eastern border.”

An unnamed source, according to AFP, warned that Iran’s armed response would “not be limited to our country’s borders” for the “blatant territorial violation.”

AFP also reported that in June, “Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Guards’ aerospace unit, said Iran had shown Russian experts the US drones in its possession.

“‘Russian experts requested to see these drones and they looked at both the downed drones and the models made by the Guards through reverse engineering,’ he said.”

In a further sign that the “shadow war” is heating up, last week’s occupation of the British embassy in Tehran may have been a warning to the U.K. over sanctioned leaks by the British defense establishment to The Guardian which suggested that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.”

“In anticipation of a potential attack,” The Guardian disclosed that “British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.

The embassy occupation and subsequent downgrade of diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran mean these threats are being taken very seriously indeed.

Asia Times Online reported that Iran’s claim “to have arrested 12 spies working for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is potentially a major blow to American intelligence-gathering efforts in Iran and to American intelligence generally.”

Following closely on the heels of last month’s arrest in Lebanon of some 30 CIA operatives by Hezbollah “is suggestive of a major American intelligence defeat, if not a full-blown disaster,” Asia Times analyst Mahan Abedin wrote.

Far from being a high-quality intelligence operation, Abedin averred that the “CIA is operating a lower threshold of quality control in terms of agent recruitment and management” and that this reflects “a scatter-gun approach by the CIA inasmuch as the agency is targeting virtually any Iranian citizen it believes could potentially provide useful information on the CIA’s target set.”

According to Abedin’s Iranian sources, the CIA’s team of “operatives and analysts” appears to have been “embedded within numerous official and unofficial American organizations, including US embassies, multinational corporations, medium-sized commercial organizations, recruitment consultancies, immigration and wider legal services, academic and quasi-academic institutions and reputable (i.e. longstanding) as well as newly set up think tanks.”

In other words, as many researchers have amply documented, efforts by the U.S. secret state to subvert a target nation’s internal defenses prior to full-on “regime change” either through direct warfare (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, now Syria) or via an American-brokered “color revolution” (Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Ukraine, Georgia) are not about “freedom and democracy” but to achieve Washington’s geopolitical goals: total economic and political domination.

“But despite clear improvements in counter-espionage capabilities and protective security measures,” Abedin writes, “Iran is still some way away from making it prohibitively costly for Western agencies to operate inside the country. Indeed, all the major West European, North American and Israeli intelligence services are either active inside Iran or work closely with some elements of the Iranian diaspora.”

Describing the “psychological warfare” dimensions of a looming confrontation, Abedin wrote in a subsequent Asia Times Online piece that the covert war operates on two fronts, “one visible and rhetorical and conducted through official and unofficial media and the other secret and centered on sabotage.”

“In so far as the former is concerned Iran has risen to the challenge by superseding tough American and Israeli rhetoric with even tougher rhetoric.”

“However,” Abedin averred, “it is on the sabotage front–where Iran appears to be under attack from several directions–that the Islamic Republic is raising eyebrows even amongst its hardcore supporters by displaying remarkable tolerance in the face of intolerable provocations.”

“More broadly, the Iranians are not paying sufficient attention to the long-term consequences of military confrontation with the United States and her allies.”

That the “long-term consequences” of a Western-led attack will be an unmitigated disaster for the Iranian people, indeed for people across the entire region and for world peace and stability as a whole, doesn’t mean that Washington won’t gamble that a “limited war” could be “contained.”

As analyst William Blum wrote in his Anti-Empire Report: “The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away.”

“Examine a map,” Blum observed. “Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions–Iraq and Afghanistan … directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions–the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas … it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination–Russia and China … Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!”

Commenting on the Isfahan attack which described Israeli “black ops” as a “route to war,” left-wing analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site, that “the tragedy of this black ops program is that it will not rattle or deter Iran, as Israeli intelligence believes.”

“Contrary to what Israeli generals believe,” Silverstein wrote, “the Iranians are not pushovers, they can’t be intimidated. They’re willing to die for their country even more than Israelis. They’ve fought defensive wars going back decades and lost millions in conflict. A few explosions, assassinations, and computer viruses will not spook them.”

The drift towards war, which include moves to strangle Iran’s economy prior to a strike, has gained traction on multiple fronts.

On Friday, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed legislation as part of the $644. 3 billion 2012 Defense Authorization Act that “would give the president the power starting July 1 to bar foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank from having correspondent bank accounts in the U.S.,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported.

Coupled with reports that Germany and other EU member states will “considerably strengthen” sanctions against Iran, the leftist publication German Foreign Policy disclosed that “Berlin is participating in the intensification of western pressure on Teheran.”

Rejecting NATO rhetoric that new punitive economic measures are over “the so-called nuclear dispute,” GFP’s analyst correctly states that the “conflict is, in fact, over hegemony, with the West seeking to defend at all costs its predominance in the Middle Eastern resource-rich regions.”

While “Berlin’s politicians are still divided over Iran … Transatlantic oriented forces are preparing the public for possible military strikes.”

Regarding the strengthening of the West’s sanctions regime, the World Socialist Web Site reported that the EU has “agreed to sanction some 200 Iranian companies, individuals and organisations. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy met with Obama on Monday and issued a joint statement expressing ‘deep concern’ over Iran’s nuclear program, raising the possibility of ‘additional measures’ against the Iranian regime.”

“France,” left-wing critic Oliver Campbell noted, “which is not a major importer of Iranian oil, issued a statement calling for ‘new sanctions on an unprecedented scale,’ including freezing the assets of the Iranian central bank and putting an embargo on Iranian oil.”

“Russia, which has acquiesced in imposing previous sanctions on Iran, has bluntly opposed further punitive measures. Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich denounced the latest sanctions as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘contradictory to international law.’ China and Turkey have also opposed additional UN penalties.”

There are new signs that this sharply escalating crisis is fraught with peril.

Last week, Russia Today reported that “Moscow is deploying warships at its base in the Syrian port of Tartus. The long-planned mission comes, providentially, at the very moment when it could help prevent a potential conflict in the strategically important Middle Eastern country.

­”The Russian battle group will consist of three vessels led by the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser, Admiral Kuznetsov.”

“Of course, the Russian naval forces in the Mediterranean will be incommensurate with those of the US 6th Fleet, which includes one or two aircraft carriers and several escort ships,” former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Viktor Kravchenko told Russia Today.

Pointedly, Kravchenko warned, “today, no one talks about possible military clashes, since an attack on any Russian ship would be regarded as a declaration of war with all the consequences.”

Richard Silverstein grimly observed “that Israel knows that black ops will turn Iran more intransigent. It welcomes such Iranian rigidity because it means the day is closer when it will be set loose on the Iranians. Israel’s policy toward Iran is scorched earth.”

The clock is ticking…

As William Blum documented in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1953′s CIA-organized coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, guilty of the “crime” of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, may have “saved” Iran from a nonexistent “Red Menace,” but it left that oil-rich nation in proverbial “safe hands” — those of the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Similarly today, a nonexistent “nuclear threat” is the pretext being used by Washington to install a “friendly” regime in Tehran and undercut geopolitical rivals China and Russia in the process, thereby “securing” the country’s vast petrochemical wealth for American multinationals.

As the U.S. and Israel ramp-up covert operations against Iran, the Pentagon “has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch ‘offensive cyber operations’ in response to hostile acts,” according to The Washington Post.

Citing “a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday,” we’re informed that “hostile acts may include ‘significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military’,” unnamed Defense Department officials stated.

However, Air Force General Robert Kehler, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) told Reuters, “I do not believe that we need new explicit authorities to conduct offensive operations of any kind.”

The Pentagon report, which is still not publicly available, asserts: “We reserve the right to use all necessary means — diplomatic, informational, military and economic — to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests.”

Washington’s “interests,” which first and foremost include “securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia” as the World Socialist Web Site observed, may lead the crisis-ridden U.S. Empire “to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East … as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.”

Recent media reports suggest, however, that offensive cyber operations are only part of Washington’s multi-pronged strategy to soften-up the Islamic Republic’s defenses as a prelude to “regime change.”

Terrorist Proxies

For the better part of six decades, terrorist proxies have done America’s dirty work. Hardly relics of the Cold War past, U.S. and allied secret state agencies are using such forces to carry out attacks inside Iran today.

Asia Times Online reported that “deadly explosions at a military base about 60 kilometers southwest of Tehran, coinciding with the suspicious death of the son of a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, have triggered speculation in Iran on whether or not these are connected to recent United States threats to resort to extrajudicial executions of IRGC leaders.”

And Time Magazine, a frequent outlet for sanctioned leaks from the Pentagon, reported that the blast at the Iranian missile base west of Tehran, which killed upwards of 40 people according to the latest estimates, including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program, was described as the work “of Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad.”

An unnamed “Western intelligence source” told reporter Karl Vick: “‘Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,’ adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. ‘There are more bullets in the magazine,’ the official says.”

While Iranian officials insist that the huge blast was an “accident,” multiple accounts in the corporate press and among independent analysts provide strong evidence for the claim that Israel and their terrorist cat’s paw, the bizarre political cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were responsible for the attack.

Richard Silverstein, a left-wing analyst who writes for the Tikun Olam web site, said that the blast was a sign that “the face of the Israeli terror machine may have reared its ugly head in the world.”

Citing “an Israeli source with extensive senior political and military experience,” Silverstein’s correspondent provided “an exclusive report that it was the work of the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK.”

Hardly a stranger to controversial reporting, Silverstein published excerpts of secret FBI transcripts leaked to him by the heroic whistleblower Shamai Leibowitz. Those wiretapped conversations of Israeli diplomats caught spying on the U.S., “described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran.”

In a Truthout piece, Silverstein wrote that Leibowitz, a former IDF soldier who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, “explained that he was convinced from his work on these recordings that the Israel foreign ministry and its officials in this country were responsible for a perception management campaign directed against Iran. He worried that such an effort might end with either Israel or the US attacking Iran and that this would be a disaster for both countries.”

Unfortunately, while Leibowitz sits in a U.S. prison, his warnings are all but ignored.

According to Silverstein’s latest account, “it is widely known within intelligence circles that the Israelis use the MEK for varied acts of espionage and terror ranging from fraudulent Iranian memos alleging work on nuclear trigger devices to assassinations of nuclear scientists and bombings of sensitive military installations.”

Silverstein noted that “a similar act of sabotage happened a little more than a year ago at another IRG missile base which killed nearly 20.”

Terrorist attacks targeting defense installations coupled with the murder of Iranian scientist, five “targeted killings” have occurred since 2010, aren’t the only aggressive actions underway.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that “a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases … have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.”

According to the Post, “suspicions have been raised in Iran by what industry experts say is a fivefold increase in explosions at refineries and gas pipelines since 2010.”

With Iran’s oil industry under a strict sanctions regime by the West, maintenance of this critical industrial sector has undoubtedly suffered neglect due to the lack of spare parts.

However, “suspicions that covert action might already be underway were raised when four key gas pipelines exploded simultaneously in different locations in Qom Province in April,” the Post disclosed.

“Lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency that the blasts were the work of ‘terrorists’ and were ‘organized by the enemies of the Islamic Republic’,” hardly an exaggerated charge given present tensions.

Whether or not these attacks were the handiwork of Mossad, their MEK proxies or even CIA paramilitary officers and Pentagon Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) commandos, as Seymour Hersh revealed more than three years ago in The New Yorker, it is clear that Washington and Tel Aviv are “preparing the battlespace” on multiple fronts.

‘Collapse the Iranian Economy’

Along with covert operations and terrorist attacks inside the Islamic Republic, on the political front, a bipartisan consensus has clearly emerged in Washington in favor of strangling the Iranian economy.

Indeed, congressional grifters are threatening to crater Iran’s Central Bank, an unvarnished act of war. IPS reported that neocon Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), “a key pro-Israel senator,” has offered legislation “that would effectively ban international financial companies that do business with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from participating in the U.S. economy.”

“Dubbed the ‘nuclear option’ by its critics,” Jim Lobe reported that “the measure, which was introduced Thursday in the form of an amendment to the 2012 defence authorisation bill, is designed to ‘collapse the Iranian economy’… by making it virtually impossible for Tehran to sell its oil.”

However, “independent experts,” Lobe wrote, “including some officials in the administration of President Barack Obama, say the impact of such legislation, if it became law, could spark a major spike in global oil prices that would push Washington’s allies in Europe even deeper into recession and destroy the dwindling chances for economic recovery here.”

That amendment was introduced as tensions were brought to a boil over allegations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its latest report that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano claims the Agency has “identified outstanding issues related to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme and actions required of Iran to resolve these.”

“Since 2002,” Amano averred, “the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency has regularly received new information.”

However, despite the fact that the “Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities,” to wit, that such materials have not been covertly channeled towards military programs, Amano, reprising former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous gaff that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” the IAEA “is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Far from being an independent “nuclear watchdog,” the IAEA under Amano’s stewardship has been transformed into a highly-politicized and pliable organization eager to do Washington’s bidding.

As a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies cheerily reported:

Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.  (emphasis added)

Although the new report “offered little that was not already known by experts about Iran’s nuclear programme” IPS averred, “it cited what it alleged was new evidence that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ since 2003 — the date when most analysts believe it abandoned a centralised effort to build a nuclear bomb’.”

But as the United States, with the connivance of corporate media, bury the conclusions of not one, but two National Intelligence Estimates issued by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, it is clear to any objective observer that “nonproliferation” is a cover for aggressive geopolitical machinations by Washington.

Both estimates, roundly denounced by U.S. neoconservatives and media commentators when they were published, insisted that “in fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” a finding intelligence analysts judged with “high confidence.”

In contrast, the highly-politicized IAEA report is a provocative document whose timing neatly corresponds with the imposition of a new round of economic sanctions meant to crater the Iranian economy. Never mind that even according to the IAEA’s own biased reporting, they could find no evidence that Iran had diverted nuclear materials from civilian programs (power generation, medical isotopes) to alleged military initiatives.

Indeed, with sinister allusions that hint darkly at “undeclared nuclear materials,” the agency fails to provide a single scrap of evidence that diverted stockpiles even exist.

Another key allegation made by the Agency that Iran had constructed an “explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion,” was denounced by former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley as “highly misleading,” according to an IPS report filed by investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

With “information provided by Member States,” presumably Israel and the United States, the IAEA said it “had ‘confirmed’ that a ‘large cylindrical object’ housed at the same complex had been ‘designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives’. That amount of explosives, it said, would be ‘appropriate’ for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons programme,” Porter wrote. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” the former nuclear inspector said.

But as Mark Twain famously wrote, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is certainly proving to be the case with the IAEA under Yukiya Amano.

Another player “solidly in the U.S. court” is David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, D.C. “think tank” funded by the elitist Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

In an earlier piece for IPS, Porter demolished Albright’s “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 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,” Porter wrote.

“In fact,” Porter averred, “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 … 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.”

It is no small irony, that Albright, corporate media’s go-to guy on all things nuclear, penned an alarmist screed in 2002 entitled, “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?”, an article which lent “scientific” credence to false claims made by the Bush White House against Iraq.

As investigative journalist Robert Parry pointed out on the Consortium News web site, “Albright’s nuclear warning about Iraq coincided with the start of the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign to rally Congress and the American people to war with talk about ‘the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’.”

“Yet,” Parry noted, “when the Washington Post cited Albright on Monday, as the key source of a front-page article about Iran’s supposed progress toward reaching ‘nuclear capability,’ all the history of Albright’s role in the Iraq fiasco disappeared.”

History be damned. Congressional warmongers and corporate media who cite these fraudulent claims, are “spurred by Israel’s whisper campaign to create a sense of urgency on Capitol Hill where the Israel lobby, acting mainly through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, exerts its greatest influence,” as IPS noted, and punish Iran for the “crime” of opening its nuclear facilities to international inspection!

That “whisper campaign” has now bloomed into a full court press for war by “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike, even as public approval of Congress’s work by the American people tracks only slightly higher than the popularity enjoyed by child molesters or serial killers.

As tensions are dialed up, the United States is spearheading a relentless drive to throttle Iran’s economy. The New York Times reported that “major Western powers took significant steps on Monday to cut Iran off from the international financial system, announcing coordinated sanctions aimed at its central bank and commercial banks.”

A strict sanctions regime was also imposed on Iran’s “petrochemical and oil industries, adding to existing measures that seek to weaken the Iranian government by depriving it of its ability to refine gasoline or invest in its petroleum industry,” the Times reported.

In a move which signals that even-more stringent sanctions are on the horizon, the U.S. Treasury Department “named the Central Bank of Iran and the entire Iranian banking system as a ‘primary money laundering concern’.”

That’s rather rich coming from an administration which slapped Wachovia Bank on the wrist after that corrupt financial institution, now owned by Wells Fargo Bank, pleaded guilty to laundering as much as $378 billion for Mexico’s notorious drug cartels as Bloomberg Markets Magazine reported last year!

Going a step further, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the major imperialist powers “to freeze the assets of the central bank and suspend purchases of Iranian oil.”

The Guardian reported that Britain “went the furthest by, for the first time, cutting an entire country’s banking system off from London’s financial sector.”

Playing catch-up with war-hungry Democrats and Republicans, President Obama stated that the “new sanctions target for the first time Iran’s petrochemical sector, prohibiting the provision of goods, services and technology to this sector and authorizing penalties against any person or entity that engages in such activity.”

“They expand energy sanctions, making it more difficult for Iran to operate, maintain, and modernize its oil and gas sector,” Obama said.

“As long as Iran continues down this dangerous path, the United States will continue to find ways, both in concert with our partners and through our own actions, to isolate and increase the pressure upon the Iranian regime.”

Last summer, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a strong backer of punishing sanctions, echoed Richard Nixon’s vow to “make the economy scream” prior to the CIA’s overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and wrote in The Hill that “critics … argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

With a new round of crippling economic sanctions on tap from the West, “liberal” Democrat Sherman might just get his wish.

Targeting Civilian Infrastructure

While the Obama administration claims that their aggressive stance towards Iran is meant to promote “peace” and “help” the Iranian people achieve a “democratic transformation,” ubiquitous facts on the ground betray a far different, and uglier, reality.

Anonymous U.S. “intelligence officials” told The Daily Beast “that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.”

According to Newsweek national security correspondent Eli Lake, “Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to ‘sleep,’ effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.”

But Israel isn’t the only nation capable of launching high-tech attacks or, borrowing the Pentagon’s euphemistic language, conduct “Information Operations” (IO).

The U.S. Air Force Cyberspace & Information Operations Study Center (CIOSC) describe IO as “The integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

In this light, The Daily Beast disclosed that “Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran’s big-city electric grids, which are not ‘air-gapped’ — meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack–officials say.”

The anonymous officials cited by Lake informed us that “a highly secretive research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands, known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), discovered the weakness in Iran’s electrical grid in 2009,” the same period when Stuxnet was launched, and that Israeli and Pentagon cyberwarriors “have the capability to bring a denial-of-service attack to nodes of Iran’s command and control system that rely on the Internet.”

But as Ralph Langer, the industrial controls systems expert who first identified the Stuxnet virus warned in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, the deployment of military-grade malicious code is a “game changer” that has “opened Pandora’s box.”

Among a host of troubling questions posed by Stuxnet, Langer said: “It raises, for one, the question of how to apply cyberwar as a political decision. Is the US really willing to take down the power grid of another nation when that might mainly affect civilians?”

But as we have seen, most recently during the punishing air campaign that helped “liberate” Libya — from their petrochemical resources — the U.S. and their partners are capable of doing that and more.

Future targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure may, in fact, have been one of the tasks of the recently-discovered Duqu Trojan, which Israeli and U.S. “boutique arms dealers” are suspected of designing for their respective governments.

And whom, pray tell, has the means, motives and expertise to design weaponized computer code?

As BusinessWeek disclosed in July, when one of America’s cyber merchants of death, Endgame Systems, pitch their products they “bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

According to BusinessWeek, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region — the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions’.”

“A government or other entity,” journalists Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance revealed, “could launch sophisticated attacks against just about any adversary anywhere in the world for a grand total of $6 million. Ease of use is a premium. It’s cyber warfare in a box.”

Kaspersky Lab analyst Ryan Naraine, writing on the Duqu FAQ blog averred that Duqu’s “main purpose is to act as a backdoor into the system and facilitate the theft of private information. This is the main difference when compared to Stuxnet, which was created to conduct industrial sabotage.”

In other words, unlike Stuxnet, Duqu is an espionage tool which can smooth the way for future attacks such as those described by The Daily Beast.

As The Washington Post disclosed last May, while the military “needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later,” it does not need such authorization “to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities.”

According to the Post, these activities include “studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate,” and can “leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses.”

Or more likely given escalating tensions, Iranian air defenses and that nation’s power and electronic communications grid which include “emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers” who would respond to devastating air and missile attacks.

Countdown to War

We can conclude that Israel, NATO and the United States are doing far more than placing “all options on the table” with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Along with ratcheting-up bellicose rhetoric, moves to collapse the economy, an assassination and sabotage campaign targeting Iranian scientists and military installations, cyber warriors are infecting computer networks with viruses and “beacons” that will be used to attack air defense systems and civilian infrastructure.

After all, as Dave Aitel, the founder of the computer security firm Immunity told BusinessWeek, “nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky warned last year, now confirmed by CIA and Pentagon leaks to corporate media: “It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran’s nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.”

With the global economy in deep crisis as a result of capitalism’s economic meltdown, and as the first, but certainly not the last political actions by the working class threaten the financial elite’s stranglehold on power, the ruling class may very well gamble that a war with Iran is a risk worth taking.

As Chossudovsky warned in a subsequent Global Research report, “there are indications that Washington might envisage the option of an initial (US backed) attack by Israel rather than an outright US-led military operation directed against Iran.”

“The Israeli attack — although led in close liaison with the Pentagon and NATO — would be presented to public opinion as a unilateral decision by Tel Aviv. It would then be used by Washington to justify, in the eyes of world opinion,” Chossudovsky wrote, “a military intervention of the US and NATO with a view to ‘defending Israel’, rather than attacking Iran. Under existing military cooperation agreements, both the US and NATO would be ‘obligated’ to ‘defend Israel’ against Iran and Syria.”

This prescient analysis has been borne out by events. As regional tensions escalate, the USS George H.W. Bush, “the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, has reportedly parked off the Syrian coast,” The Daily Caller reported.

Earlier this week, the financial news service Zero Hedge disclosed that “the Arab League (with European and US support) are preparing to institute a no fly zone over Syria.”

“But probably the most damning evidence that the ‘western world’ is about to do the unthinkable and invade Syria,” analyst Tyler Durden wrote, “and in the process force Iran to retaliate, is the weekly naval update from Stratfor.”

According to Zero Hedge, “CVN 77 George H.W. Bush has left its traditional theater of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz, a critical choke point, where it traditionally accompanies the Stennis, and has parked… right next to Syria.”

In an earlier report, citing Kuwait’s Al Rai daily, Zero Hedge warned that “Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria’s skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians.”

The BBC reports that the Arab League “has warned Syria it has one day to sign a deal allowing the deployment of observers or it will face economic sanctions.”

“Meanwhile,” BBC averred, “France has suggested that some sort of humanitarian protection zones,” à la Libya, “be created inside Syria.”

American moves towards Syria are fraught with dangerous implications for international peace and stability. As analyst Pepe Escobar disclosed in Asia Times Online the Arab League, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and repressive Gulf emirates, dances to Washington’s tune.

“Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated,” Escobar wrote.

“Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident,” Escobar notes, “Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.”

“From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.”

“In other words,” Zero Hedge warned, “if indeed Europe and the Western world is dead set upon an aerial campaign above Syria, then all eyes turn to the East, and specifically Russia and China, which have made it very clear they will not tolerate any intervention. And naturally the biggest unknown of all is Iran, which has said than any invasion of Syria will be dealt with swiftly and severely.”

Despite, or possibly because no credible evidence exists that Iran is building a nuclear bomb as a hedge against “regime change,” belligerent rhetoric and regional military moves targeting Syria and Iran simultaneously are danger signs that imperialism’s manufactured “nuclear crisis” is a cynical pretext for war.

Under “transparency president” Barack Obama, the U.S. government initiated a criminal probe of the organization after the site began releasing a virtual tsunami of confidential military and State Department files.

In the last two years alone, WikiLeaks revealed that the United States had committed grave war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and other global hot-spots of interest to America’s resource-grabbing corporate masters.

This year’s release of 779 classified dossiers on prisoners housed at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag fleshed out the public’s knowledge of ongoing torture programs run by the military and the CIA under cover of it’s murderous “War on Terror.”

But it was their publication of some 250,000 secret State Department cables which sparked a new round of hysterical denunciations in Washington culminating in the witchhunt against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks supporters, a demonization campaign aided and abetted by U.S. financial institutions such as Bank of America and Pentagon cyberwar contractors.

Cable after cable revealed “the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”

Leading politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell have called the web site’s founder a “high-tech terrorist,” and commentators such as right-wing Washington Times columnist Jeffery Kuhner and others have demanded that Assange and his co-workers be treated “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.”

The Obama administration, loathe to pursue criminal probes of the previous regime’s lawbreaking, the better to immunize themselves over their own contemporary lawless acts, including the torture of prisoners at Bagram Airbase, clandestine CIA drone killings and the due process-free assassination of an American citizen who was never charged, let alone convicted of a crime, was up to the challenge and empaneled a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

And when Justice Department inquisitors first sought to seize the activist’s information, in keeping with the new “Washington consensus” that constitutional rights are nothing more than empty platitudes duly trotted out on national holidays, they demanded that Twitter turn over the files without benefit of a warrant.

American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Aden Fine denounced the ruling. “Internet users don’t automatically give up their rights to privacy and free speech when they use services like Twitter,” Fine said.

“The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.”

According to the ACLU, it wasn’t only Twitter that was served with record demands by the Justice Department. “Based on the file numbers that have been created, it appears likely that there are additional orders whose existence remains secret.”

The public first became aware of the government’s fishing expedition only because Twitter informed the three activists, Jacob Appelbaum, a founding member of the online anonymity network, Tor Project, Rop Gonggrijp, a founder of the Dutch web portal XS4ALL and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a left-wing member of Iceland’s Parliament.

As Antifascist Calling reported in March, Jónsdóttir was specifically targeted for her role in helping WikiLeaks release the Collateral Murder video last year.

That scandalous video exposed the wanton slaughter of a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter crew. Two children were also seriously wounded in the unprovoked attack.

The Army’s thrill-kill gun camera video wasn’t concealed from the public because of any alleged threat to “national security” or to protect intelligence “sources and methods,” standard boilerplate used to hide war crimes by the U.S. Empire, but precisely to cover-up imperialism’s murderous rampage that helped “liberate” Iraqis of their lives.

Commenting on the ruling, Jónsdóttir told The Guardian, “This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media. We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Unfortunately, under Section 213 of the oxymoronic USA Patriot Act, which was not subject to a “sunset” provision of the constitution-shredding legislation, FBI agents can do precisely that and obtain so-called “delayed notification” warrants for the search and seizure of evidence of any federal crime, not only those related to “terrorism” investigations.

Called “sneak and peek” searches, federal snoops are permitted to clandestinely seize property or conduct electronic searches on a home computer if a court deems such seizures “reasonably necessary.” Indeed, notification of a covert FBI home invasion “may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.”

The sweeping ruling by Judge Liam O’Grady upheld demands by U.S. investigators that they should have virtual free-reign to pillage private records related to the users’ IP address, the unique identifier used by a computer or hand-held device to log onto the internet.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who represent Jónsdóttir along with American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, O’Grady “also blocked the users’ attempt to discover whether other Internet companies have been ordered to turn their data over to the government.”

“When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to dozens of companies who host or transfer your data,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said.

“In light of that technological reality, we are gravely worried by the court’s conclusion that records about you that are collected by Internet services like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google are fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

Among other things, O’Grady wrote in his 60-page decision that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

O’Grady, appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2007 by President George W. Bush, argued that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over their IP addresses when they signed up for an account, they lost any expectation of privacy.

In other words, simply because users click through opaque “Terms of Service” agreements with Twitter, Google, Facebook or any other internet vendor, “petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy.”

However, as security researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed out in Slight Paranoia, “The federal judge in the Wikileaks case cited in his order a version of Twitter’s privacy policy from 2010, rather than the very different policy that existed when Appelbaum, Gonggrijp and Jonsdottir created their Twitter accounts back in 2008.”

“That older policy,” Soghoian wrote, “actually promised users that Twitter would keep their data private unless they violated the company’s terms of service. It is unclear how the judge managed to miss this important detail.”

“There is a slight problem with relying on a privacy policy created on November 16, 2010 to decide the reasonable expectation of privacy of these three individuals: They created their Twitter accounts several years before the document was written.”

Indeed, as Soghoian observes, “not only is a federal judge ruling that 3 individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to the government getting some of their Internet transaction data, but the judge isn’t even citing the right version of a widely ignored privacy policy to do so.”

“If the judge were to examine the privacy policy that existed when these three targets signed up for a Twitter account,” Soghoian concludes, “he might decide that they do in fact have a reasonable expectation of privacy and that the government needs a warrant to get the data.”

While true as far as it goes, and Soghoian should be commended for pointing out this glaring contradiction in the government’s case, readers are well aware that the WikiLeaks Twitter case is about politics not process, that is, moves by the secret state to clamp-down on dissent and dissenters, and not whether someone has read and “voluntarily” signed-off on a vendor’s “Terms of Service” agreement.

Among other things, O’Grady’s ruling revealed that the government was seeking not only IP addresses but “1. subscriber names, user names, screen names, or other identities; 2. mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses and other contact information; 3. connection records, or records of session times and durations; 4. length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; 5. telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and 6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.”

It doesn’t take a computer forensics expert to conclude that the government, in obtaining “connection records,” will also get their hands on information about anyone else who corresponded or “followed” the activists on Twitter.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with EFF told CNET News that the ruling means that “essentially any data about you collected by an Internet service is fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

The District Court’s ruling can be situated within the wider context of the Obama administration’s unprecedented drive to criminalize whistleblowing.

The persecution of Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks supporters is a shot across the bow not only against those who leak sensitive information to the public that expose egregious acts by the well-connected, but at investigative journalists and researchers who in their course of their work uncover high crimes and misdemeanors by powerful corporations and governments.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out, “Assange’s real ‘crime’ is that, through its publication of a mass of secret US military documents, diplomatic cables and video footage, WikiLeaks has exposed the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and numerous other conspiracies carried out against the world’s people by Washington and its allies.”

Make no mistake, this ruling is a warning of further draconian moves to come.

Speaking at the Security Innovation Network (SINET) “Showcase 2011″ shindig at the National Press Club in Washington, Alexander told security grifters eager to gouge taxpayers for another piece of lucrative “cybersecurity” pie: “What I’m concerned about are the destructive attacks. Those are the things yet to come that cause us a lot of concern.”

That’s rather rich coming from the head of a secretive Pentagon satrapy suspected of designing and launching the destructive Stuxnet virus which targeted Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

According to fresh evidence provided by IT security experts it now appears that the same constellation of shadowy forces which unleashed Stuxnet are at it again with the newly discovered Duqu spy Trojan.

In a follow-up analysis, Kaspersky Lab researcher Alex Gostev wrote that “the highest number of Duqu incidents have been recorded in Iran. This fact brings us back to the Stuxnet story and raises a number of issues.”

Not least of which is the continuing demonization of the Islamic Republic by an unholy alliance of U.S. militarists, their Israeli pit bulls and congressional shills hyping the “Iran threat.”

War Drums Beating

With the United States and the other capitalist powers incapable of digging the world economy out from under the slow-motion meltdown sparked by 2008′s market collapse, and with tens of millions of enraged citizens rejecting austerity measures that will further enrich financial elites at their expense, will the Obama administration “go for broke” and set-off a new conflagration in the Middle East?

Ratcheting up bellicose rhetoric, John Keane, a retired four-star general, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army now currently perched on the board of General Dynamics, a major purveyor of cyber attack tools for the government, told the House Homeland Security Committee October 26, “We’ve got to put our hand around their throat now. Why don’t we kill them? We kill other people who are running terrorist operations against the United States.”

AFP reported that “Iran made a formal protest” over Keane’s remarks which urged “the targeted assassination of members of its elite Quds Force military special operations unit,” over a fairy-tale plot allegedly cooked-up by Tehran, which employed a failed used-car salesman, a DEA snitch and members of the Zetas drug gang in a scheme to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

While the plot lines are as preposterous as allegations prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks, one cannot so easily dismiss the propaganda value of such reports by administration “information warriors.” The same can be said of the series of controlled leaks emanating from London, Tel Aviv and Washington urging immediate air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Guardian reported that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran’s nuclear enrichment programme.”

Chillingly, the “Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.”

On the same day that MoD’s sanctioned leak appeared in the British press, Haaretz disclosed that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a ‘small advantage’ in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.”

“Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon said he preferred an American military attack on Iran to an Israeli one. ‘A military move is the last resort,’ he said.”

The Associated Press reported that as Netanyahu moved to persuade his cabinet to “authorize a military strike against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program,” Israel successfully test-fired “a missile believed capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to Iran.”

Adding to the disinformational witch’s brew, The Washington Post reported that “a new spike in anti-Iran rhetoric and military threats by Western powers is being fueled by fears that Iran is edging closer to the nuclear ‘breakout’ point, when it acquires all the skills and parts needed to quickly build an atomic bomb if it chooses to,” anonymous “Western diplomats and nuclear experts said Friday.”

Post stenographer Joby Warrick informed us that a “Western diplomat who had seen drafts of the report” told him “it will elaborate on secret intelligence collected since 2004 showing Iranian scientists struggling to overcome technical hurdles in designing and building nuclear warheads.”

And late last week Reuters disclosed that “a senior U.S. military official said on Friday Iran had become the biggest threat to the United States and Israel’s president said the military option to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining nuclear weapons was nearer.”

“‘The biggest threat to the United States and to our interests and to our friends … has come into focus and it’s Iran,’ said the U.S. military official, addressing a forum in Washington.” Conveniently, “reporters were allowed to cover the event on condition the official not be identified.”

While some critics argue that Israel does not presently have the capacity to launch such an attack, and that “the volume of the war hysteria is being turned up with one purpose in mind: the Israelis want the US to do their dirty work for them,” such reasoning is hardly reassuring.

Indeed, as the World Socialist Web Site points out, “the Israeli government has already made advanced preparations for an attack on Iran.”

“On the military front,” analyst Peter Symonds warned that “Israeli warplanes last week conducted a long-range exercise–of the type required to reach Iran–using a NATO airbase on the Italian island of Sardinia.” In other words, the IDF drill was not a “rogue” exercise unilaterally conducted by Israel, but further evidence of Washington’s “desperate bid to offset its economic decline by securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.”

In the context of escalating tensions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, seeded by manufactured “terror” plots, the imperialist powers may choose the “cyber” route prior to launching devastating missile and bomber strikes against Iranian military installations and civilian infrastructure.

Pentagon planners now believe that attack tools have reached the point where blinding Iran’s air defenses while sowing chaos across population centers with power outages and the shutdown of financial services may now be a viable option.

This is not idle speculation. During the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, the National Journal disclosed that Central Command “considered a computerized attack to disable the networks that controlled Iraq’s banking system, but they backed off when they realized that those networks were global and connected to banks in France.”

Facing growing opposition at home and abroad to endless wars and imperial adventures, would the Obama administration have such qualms today?

Attack Tools Already in Play

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, when the Duqu virus was discovered last month, analysts at Symantec believed that the remote access Trojan (RAT) “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.”

“The threat was written by the same authors (or those who have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered,” researchers averred.

Since their initial reporting, Symantec, drawing on research from CrySyS lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary, the organization which discovered the malware, reported they located an installer file in the form of a Microsoft Word document which exploits a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability.

Like Stuxnet, Duqu’s stealthiness is directly proportional to its uncanny ability to capitalize on what are called zero-day exploits hardwired into it’s digital DNA; security holes that are unknown to everyone until the instant they’re used in an attack.

Similar to other dubious commodities traded on our dystopian “free markets,” zero-days are bits of tainted code sought by criminal hackers, financial and industrial spies and enterprising security agencies that can sell for up to $250,000 a pop on the black market.

When Stuxnet appeared in dozens of countries last year, targeting what are called programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on industrial computers manufactured by Siemens that control everything from water purification and food processing to oil refining and potentially deadly chemical processes, researchers found it was designed to harm only one specific target: PLCs processing uranium fuel at a nuclear facility in Iran.

As Wired Magazine reported, when Symantec analysts who had been picking Stuxnet apart convinced internet service providers who controlled “servers in Malaysia and Denmark” where the virus “phoned home” each time it infected a new machine, to reroute the virus to a secure “sinkhole,” they were in for a shock.

“Out of the initial 38,000 infections,” journalist Kim Zetter wrote, “about 22,000 were in Iran. Indonesia was a distant second, with about 6,700 infections, followed by India with about 3,700 infections. The United States had fewer than 400. Only a small number of machines had Siemens Step 7 software installed–just 217 machines reporting in from Iran and 16 in the United States.”

“The sophistication of the code,” Wired averred, “plus the fraudulent certificates, and now Iran at the center of the fallout made it look like Stuxnet could be the work of a government cyberarmy–maybe even a United States cyberarmy.

“This made Symantec’s sinkhole an audacious move,” Zetter wrote. “In intercepting data the attackers were expecting to receive, the researchers risked tampering with a covert U.S. government operation.”

Writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Thomas Rid, a former RAND Corporation employee and “Reader in War Studies at Kings College in London,” who has close ties to the Western military establishment, observed in relation to Stuxnet that network “sabotage, first, is a deliberate attempt to weaken or destroy an economic or military system. All sabotage is predominantly technical in nature, but of course may use social enablers.”

“The resources and investment that went into Stuxnet could only be mustered by a ‘cyber superpower’, argued Ralph Langner, a German control system security consultant who first extracted and decompiled the attack code.”

In an interview with National Public Radio, Langer said that the “level of expertise” behind Stuxnet “seemed almost alien. But that would be science fiction, and Stuxnet was a reality.”

“Thinking about it for another minute, if it’s not aliens, it’s got to be the United States.”

“For the time being it remains unclear how successful the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program actually was” Rid noted. “But it is clear that the operation has taken computer sabotage to an entirely new level.”

Researcher Vikram Thakur, commenting on the latest Duqu discoveries reported: “The Word document was crafted in such a way as to definitively target the intended receiving organization.” And whom, pray tell, was being targeted by Duqu? Why Iran, of course.

“Once Duqu is able to get a foothold in an organization through the zero-day exploit, the attackers can command it to spread to other computers.”

Thakur wrote, “the Duqu configuration files on these computers,” which did not have the ability to connect to the internet and the author’s command and control (C&C) server, “were instead configured not to communicate directly with the C&C server, but to use a file-sharing C&C protocol with another compromised computer that had the ability to connect to the C&C server.”

“Consequently,” Thakur concluded, “Duqu creates a bridge between the network’s internal servers and the C&C server. This allowed the attackers to access Duqu infections in secure zones with the help of computers outside the secure zone being used as proxies.”

As Kaspersky Lab researchers pointed out, “in each of the four instances of Duqu infection a unique modification of the driver necessary for infection was used.”

“More importantly,” analysts averred, “regarding one of the Iranian infections there were also found to have been two network attack attempts exploiting the MS08-067 [MS Word] vulnerability. This vulnerability was used by Stuxnet too.”

“If there had been just one such attempt, it could have been written off as typical Kido activity–but there were two consecutive attack attempts: this detail would suggest a targeted attack on an object in Iran.” (emphasis added)

Simply put, before the Pentagon decides to “kill them” as Gen. Keane indelicately put it, battlefield preparations via directed cyber attacks and other forms of sabotage may be part of a preemptive strategy to decapitate Iranian defenses prior to more “kinetic” attacks.

‘Boutique Arms Dealers’

Despite media hype about future cuts in the so-called “defense” budget, Defense Industry Daily disclosed that “the US military has announced plans to spend billions on technology to secure its networks.”

According to the Defense Department’s FY 2012 budget proposal, “the Pentagon said it plans to spend $2.3 billion on cybersecurity capabilities.”

However, when NextGov “questioned why the Air Force’s $4.6 billion 2012 budget request for cybersecurity was $2.3 billion more than Defense’s servicewide spending proposal, Pentagon officials upped their total figure from $2.3 billion to $3.2 billion.”

Why the discrepancy? A “Pentagon spokesperson explained that the service’s estimate differed dramatically because the Air Force included ‘things’ that are not typically considered information assurance or cybersecurity.”

What kind of “things” are we talking about here?

As BusinessWeek reported in July, firms such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics, “the stalwarts of the traditional defense industry,” are “helping the U.S. government develop a capacity to snoop on or disable other countries’ computer networks.”

Capitalizing on the Defense Department’s desire to develop “hacker tools specifically as a means of conducting warfare,” this “shift in defense policy gave rise to a flood of boutique arms dealers that trade in offensive cyber weapons.”

Investigative journalists Mike Riley and Ashlee Vance averred that “most of these are ‘black’ companies that camouflage their government funding and work on classified projects.”

As last winter’s hack of HBGary Federal by Anonymous revealed, “black” firms, including those like Palantir which received millions of dollars in start-up funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, hacker tools, such as sophisticated Trojans and stealthy rootkits, believed to be the route used to introduce the Stuxnet virus, have also been used to target political activists and journalists in the United States at the behest of financial institutions such as the Bank of America and the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As researcher Barrett Brown revealed, “Team Themis was a consortium made up of HBGary, Palantir, and Berico (with Endgame Systems serving as a ‘silent partner’ and providing assistance from the sidelines) that was set up in order to provide offensive intelligence capabilities to private clients.”

Although Endgame Systems “went dark” after Anonymous released thousands of HBGary files, The Register disclosed that the firm “helps US intelligence identify and hack into vulnerable networks, and is targeting a similar role in Britain’s nascent national cyber security operations.”

The Register noted that the “limited publicly information currently available on the firm hints at its further role assisting clandestine government cyber operations by identifying targets and developing exploits.”

As BusinessWeek revealed, the firm is “a major supplier of digital weaponry for the Pentagon. It offers a smorgasbord of wares, from vulnerability assessments to customized attack technology, for a dizzying array of targets in any region of the world.”

Unsurprisingly, this was a major draw for venture capital firms “Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,” who collectively fronted Endgame some $30 million. According to Riley and Vance, “what really whet the VCs’ appetites, though, according to people close to the investors, is Endgame’s shot at becoming the premier cyber-arms dealer.”

While a client list has yet to emerge, it’s safe to assume that secret state agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are lining up to purchase Endgame’s toxic products.

Although no definitive answer has emerged as to whom might targeting Iran with Duqu, as BusinessWeek revealed Endgame “deals in zero-day exploits. Some of Endgame’s technology is developed in-house; some of it is acquired from the hacker underground. Either way, these zero days are militarized–they’ve undergone extensive testing and are nearly fail-safe.”

“People who have seen the company pitch its technology–and who asked not to be named because the presentations were private–say Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices.”

According to Riley and Vance, “the executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

Indeed, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region–the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions.’ There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies.”

“The quest in Washington, Silicon Valley, and around the globe is to develop digital tools both for spying and destroying,” BusinessWeek observed. “The most enticing targets in this war are civilian–electrical grids, food distribution systems, any essential infrastructure that runs on computers.”

“This stuff is more kinetic than nuclear weapons,” Dave Aitel, the founder of a computer security company in Miami Beach called Immunity told Riley and Vance. “Nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

While Aitel and a host of other “little Eichmanns” who enrich themselves servicing the American secret state refused to discuss his firm’s work for the government, a source told the publication that Immunity “makes weaponized ‘rootkits’: military-grade hacking systems used to bore into other countries’ networks,” and that Aitel’s clients “include the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.”

We do not know if, or when, the United States, NATO and Israel will opt for a military “solution” to the so-called “Iranian problem.”

We do know however, as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “as global capitalism lurches from one economic and political crisis to the next, rivalry between the major powers for markets, resources and strategic advantage is plunging humanity towards a catastrophic conflict that would devastate the planet.”

According to researchers, the malicious program was dubbed “Duqu” because it creates files with the prefix “~DQ.” It is a remote access Trojan (RAT) that “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.” Mark that carefully.

In simple terms, a Trojan is malicious software that appears to perform a desirable function prior to its installation but, in fact, steals information from users spoofed into installing it, oftentimes via viral email attachments.

In the hands of enterprising security agencies, or criminals (the two are functionally synonymous), Trojans are primarily deployed for data theft, industrial or financial espionage, keystroke logging (surveillance) or the capture of screenshots which may reveal proprietary information.

“The threat” Symantec averred, “was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered.”

The malware, which began popping-up on the networks of several European firms, captured lists of running processes, account and domain information, network drives, user keystrokes and screenshots from active sessions and did so by using a valid, not a forged certificate, stolen from the Taipei-based firm, C-Media.

Whereas Stuxnet, believed to be a co-production of U.S. and Israeli cyber-saboteurs, was a weaponized virus programmed to destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear power infrastructure by targeting centrifuges that enrich uranium, Duqu is a stealthy bit of spy kit that filches data from manufacturers who produce systems that control oil pipelines, water systems and other critical infrastructure.

Sergey Golovanov, a malware expert at Kaspersky Labs told Forbes that Duqu is “is likely the brainchild of a government security apparatus. And it’s that government’s best work yet.”

Speaking from Moscow, Golovanov told Forbes in a telephone interview that “right now we are pretty sure that it is the next generation of Stuxnet.”

“We are pretty sure that Duqu is a government cyber tool and are 70% sure it is coming from the same source as Stuxnet,” Golovanov said.

“The victims’ computer systems were infected several days ago. Whatever it is,” Golovanov noted, “it is still in those systems, and still scanning for information. But what exactly it is scanning for, we don’t know. It could be gathering internal information for encryption devices. We only know that it is data mining right now, but we don’t know what kind of data and to what end it is collecting it.”

Whom, pray tell, would have “access to Stuxnet source code”?

While no government has claimed ownership of Stuxnet, IT experts told Forbes “with 100% certainty it was a government agency who created it.”

Suspects include cryptologists at the National Security Agency, or as is more likely given the outsourcing of intelligence work by the secret state, a combination of designers drawn from NSA, “black world” privateers from large defense firms along with specialists from Israel’s cryptologic division, Unit 8200, operating from the Israeli nuclear weapons lab at the Dimona complex, as The New York Times disclosed.

Analyst George Smith noted:

Stuxnet was widely distributed to many computer security experts. Many of them do contract work for government agencies, labor that would perhaps require a variety of security clearances and which would involve doing what would be seen by others to be black hat in nature. When that happened all bets were off.

Smith averred, “once a thing is in world circulation it is not protected or proprietary property.”

While one cannot demonstrably prove that Duqu is the product of one or another secret state satrapy, one can reasonably inquire: who has the means, motive and opportunity for launching this particular bit of nastiness into the wild?

“Duqu’s purpose,” Symantec researchers inform us, “is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party.”

In other words, while Stuxnet was programmed to destroy industrial systems, Duqu is an espionage tool that will enable attackers “looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”

Although it can be argued, as Smith does, that “source code for malware has never been secure,” and “always becomes something coveted by many, often in direct proportion to its fame,” it also can’t be ruled out that military-intelligence agencies or corporate clones with more than a dog or two in the “cyberwar” hunt wouldn’t be very interested in obtaining a Trojan that clips “industrial design” information from friend and foe alike.

Black Programs

The circulation of malicious code such as Duqu’s is highly destabilizing. Considering that the U.S. Defense Department now considers computer sabotage originating in another country the equivalent to an act of war for which a military response is appropriate, the world is on dangerous new ground.

Speaking with MIT’s Technology Review, Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto think tank that researches cyberwarfare, censorship and espionage, told the publication that “in the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned.”

Indeed, given the fact that it is the United States that is now the biggest proliferator in the so-called cyber “arms race,” and that billions of dollars are being spent by Washington to secure such weapons, recent history is not encouraging.

With shades of 9/11, the anthrax mailings and the Iraq invasion as a backdrop, one cannot rule out that a provocative act assigned to an “official enemy” by ruling elites just might originate from inside the U.S. security complex itself and serve as a convenient pretext for some future war.

A hint of what the Pentagon is up to came in the form of a controlled leak to The Washington Post.

Last spring, we were informed that “the Pentagon has developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.”

The list of “approved weapons” or “fires” are indicative of the military’s intention to integrate “cyberwar” capabilities into its overall military doctrine.

According to Ellen Nakashima, the “classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months and has been approved by other agencies, including the CIA.”

The Post reported that the new “framework clarifies, for instance, that the military needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later.”

On the other hand, and here’s where Duqu may enter the frame, the “military does not need such approval, however, to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities. These include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate.”

Additionally, Nakashima wrote, Pentagon cyberwarriors “can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses, the official said.”

As part of Washington’s on-going commitment to the rule of law and human rights, as the recent due process-free drone assassination of American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, followed by that of his teenage son and the revenge killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi by–surprise!–Al Qaeda-linked militias funded by the CIA clearly demonstrate, the “use of any cyber-weapon would have to be proportional to the threat, not inflict undue collateral damage and avoid civilian casualties.”

Try selling that to the more than 3,600 people killed or injured by CIA drone strikes, as Pakistan Body Count reported, since our Nobel laureate ascended to his Oval Office throne.

As George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins described in their recent paper, Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy, despite overheated “rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention,” there is a lack of “clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

However, as Brito and Watkins warned, “the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War,” one where “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well.”

A “demand” which will inevitably feed the production, proliferation and deployment of a host of viral attack tools (Stuxnet) and assorted spybots (Duqu) that can and will be used by America’s shadow warriors and well-connected corporate spies seeking to get a leg-up on the competition.

While evidence of “a serious threat” may be lacking, and while proponents of increased “cybersecurity” spending advanced “no evidence … that opponents have ‘mapped vulnerabilities’ and ‘planned attacks’,” Brito and Watkins noted there is growing evidence these are precisely the policies being pursued by Washington.

Why might that be the case?

As a declining imperialist Empire possessing formidable military and technological capabilities, researcher Stephen Graham has pointed out in Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, the United States has embarked on a multibillion dollar program “to militarize the world’s global electronic infrastructures” with a stated aim to “gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth.”

Graham writes that “the sorts of on-the-ground realities that result from attacks on ordinary civilian infrastructure are far from the abstract niceties portrayed in military theory.”

Indeed, as “the experiences of Iraq and Gaza forcefully remind us,” robotized drone attacks and already-existent cyberwar capabilities buried in CIA and Pentagon black programs demonstrate that “the euphemisms of theory distract from the hard fact that targeting essential infrastructure in highly urbanized societies kills the weak, the old and the ill just as surely as carpet bombing.”

A Glimpse Inside the Complex

In the wake of the HBGary hack by Anonymous earlier this year, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence released a 2009 Defense Department contract proposal from the firm.

Among other things, it revealed that the Pentagon is standing-up offensive programs that “examine the architecture, engineering, functionality, interface and interoperability of Cyber Warfare systems, services and capabilities at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, to include all enabling technologies.”

HBGary, and one can assume other juiced defense contractors, are planning “operations and requirements analysis, concept formulation and development, feasibility demonstrations and operational support.”

“This will include,” according to the leaked proposal, “efforts to analyze and engineer operational, functional and system requirements in order to establish national, theater and force level architecture and engineering plans, interface and systems specifications and definitions, implementation, including hardware acquisition for turnkey systems.”

Indeed, the company will “perform analyses of existing and emerging Operational and Functional Requirements at the force, theater, Combatant Commands (COCOM) and national levels to support the formulation, development and assessment of doctrine, strategy, plans, concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques and procedures in order to provide the full spectrum of Cyber Warfare and enabling capabilities to the warfighter.”

During the course of their analysis Symantec learned that Duqu “uses HTTP and HTTPS to communicate with a command-and-control (C&C) server that at the time of writing is still operational.”

“The attackers were able to download additional executables through the C&C server, including an infostealer that can perform actions such as enumerating the network, recording keystrokes, and gathering system information. The information is logged to a lightly encrypted and compressed local file, which then must be exfiltrated out.”

To where, and more importantly by whom was that information “exfiltrated” is of course, the $64,000 question.

A working hypothesis may be provided by additional documents published by Public Intelligence.

According to a cyberwar proposal to the Pentagon by General Dynamics and HBGary, “Project C” is described as a program for the development “of a software application targeting the Windows XP Operating System that, when executed, loads and enables a covert kernel-mode implant that will exfiltrate a file from disk (or other remotely called commands) over a connected serial port to a remote device.”

We’re informed that Project C’s “primary objectives” was the design of an implant “that is clearly able to exfiltrate an on-disk file, opening of the CD tray, blinking of the keyboard lights, opening and deleting a file, and a memory buffer exfiltration over a connected serial line to a collection station.”

“As part of the exploit delivery package,” HBGary and General Dynamics told their prospective customers, presumably the NSA, that “a usermode trojan will assist in the loading of the implant, which will clearly demonstrate the full capability of the implant.”

Duqu, according to Symantec researchers, “uses a custom C&C protocol, primarily downloading or uploading what appear to be JPG files. However, in addition to transferring dummy JPG files, additional data for exfiltration is encrypted and sent, and likewise received.”

While we don’t know which firms were involved in the design of Stuxnet and now, Duqu, we do know, thanks to Anonymous, that HBGary had a Stuxnet copy, shared it amongst themselves and quite plausibly, given what we’ve learned about Duqu, Stuxnet source code may have been related to the above-mentioned “Project C.”

Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of product management told The Register that “the people behind Stuxnet are not done. They’ve continued to do different things. This was not a one-shot deal.”