But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

Contrary to sensational stories by the Associated Press and the New York Times, the excerpts on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reveal that the IAEA’s Safeguards Department, which wrote the report, only has suspicions – not real evidence – that Iran has been working on nuclear weapons in recent years.

The newly published excerpts make it clear, moreover, that the so-called “Alleged Studies” documents brought to the attention of the agency by the United States five years ago are central to its assertion that Iran had such a programme in 2002-03.

Whether those documents are genuine or were fabricated has been the subject of a fierce struggle behind the scenes for many months between two departments of the IAEA.

Some IAEA officials began calling for a clear statement by the agency that it could not affirm the documents’ authenticity after the agency obtained hard evidence in early 2008 that a key document in the collection had been fraudulently altered, as previously reported by this writer. As journalist Mark Hibbs reported last week in Nucleonics Week, opposition to relying on the intelligence documents has come not only from outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei but from the Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination.

Since September 2008, however, the Safeguards Department, headed by Olli Heinonen, has been pressing for publication of its draft report as an annex to a regular agency report on Iran.

Heinonen leaked the draft to Western governments last summer, and in September it was leaked to the Associated Press and ISIS. That has generated sensational headlines suggesting that Iran can already build a nuclear bomb.

The draft report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device”. But other passages indicate the authors regard such knowledge only as a possibility, based on suspicions rather than concrete evidence.

It says the “necessary information was most likely obtained from external sources and probably modified by Iran”. But it cites only the 15-page “uranium metal document” given by the A. Q. Khan network to Iran when it purchased centrifuge designs in 1987.

“Based on the information in the document,” it says, “it is possible that Iran has knowledge regarding the contents of a nuclear package.”

The IAEA “suspects” that the 15-page document was part of “larger package that Iran may have obtained but which has not yet come to the Agency’s attention”, according to the leaked excerpts.

But that document only outlines procedural requirements for casting uranium into hemispheres, not the technical specifications, as the IAEA report of Nov. 18, 2005 noted. No evidence has ever surfaced to challenge the Iranian explanation that Khan’s agents threw in the document after a deal had been reached on centrifuges in an effort to interest Iran in buying the technology for casting uranium.

The IAEA affirmed that it has found no evidence that Iran ever acquired such technology.

The only external “nuclear package” ever reported to have been provided to Iran is a set of flawed technical designs for a “high-voltage block” for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon, which was slipped under the door of the Iranian mission in Vienna by a Russian scientist working for CIA’s Operation Merlin in February 2000.

Another far-reaching claim in the draft report is that the IAEA “has information, known as the Alleged Studies, that the Ministry of Defence of Iran has conducted and may still be conducting a comprehensive programme aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system.”

It does not explain how the “Alleged Studies”, which are documents on work done in 2002 and 2003, could have any bearing on whether Iran is now conducting work on nuclear weapons.

Using the same language found in published IAEA reports, the draft suggests that the Alleged Studies intelligence documents represent credible evidence. “The information, which has been obtained from multiple sources, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent,” it says.

But that characterisation of the intelligence first shown to the IAEA by the United States in 2005 has been contested by sceptics in the agency. A senior IAEA official familiar with the documents suggested in an interview with IPS last month that the claim of “multiple sources” may be misleading.

Given the existence of “intelligence sharing networks”, the official said, “one can’t rule it out that one organisation got the intelligence and shared it with others.” That would explain the reference to “multiple sources consistent over time”, he said.

The initial U.S. account, according to the official, was that the documents came from the laptop computer of one of the Iranian participants in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme. Later, however, that account was “walked back”, he said.

“There are holes in the story,” said the official.

The introduction by ISIS to the excerpts from the report, evidently based on conversations with the IAEA personnel, confirms that the documents did not come from Iran on a laptop computer, as U.S. officials had claimed in the past. It suggests that the documents were smuggled out of Iran as “electronic media” by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by German intelligence and was later arrested.

That new explanation is highly suspect, however, because an intelligence agency would not confirm the identity of one of their agents, even if he were arrested. Asked about the ISIS account, Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence office for the Middle East when the “laptop documents” surfaced, said it “sounds unusual”.

The draft report also argues that the information in the documents is credible, because it “refers to known Iranian persons and institutions under both the military and civil apparatuses, as well as to some degree to their confirmed procurement activities”.

But the senior IAEA official cast doubt on that claim as well. The names of people working in the relevant Iranian military and civilian organisations are readily obtainable, he observed. “It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official told IPS.

The draft paper states that the agency “does not believe that Iran has yet achieved the means of integrating a nuclear payload into the Shahab 3 delivery system with any confidence that it would work”.

That statement hints at the fact that the reentry vehicle studies were found to have serious technical problems. The senior IAEA official told IPS that the Sandia National Laboratories, which ran computer simulation analyses of the plan, not only found that none of them would have worked, but had expressed doubt that they were genuine.

The paper makes an indirect reference to a plan for a bench-scale facility for uranium conversion, but does not mention that it had several technical flaws, as acknowledged by Heinonen in a February 2008 briefing for members.

Nor do the draft report’s conclusions deal with the fact, confirmed by the senior IAEA official to IPS, that none of the intelligence documents have any security markings, despite the fact they are purported to be part of what presumably would have been Iran’s most highly classified programme.

From Iran’s perspective, the meeting could not have gone better. Iran didn’t agree to suspend its enrichment of uranium, or even to suspend construction of a new underground uranium enrichment plant near the city of Qom. According to Iranian news media, the suspension of uranium enrichment was never even discussed, and appears to have been a de facto precondition for talks. This, Iran argues, is a tacit recognition of Iran’s right, as a sovereign nation and as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Likewise, the threat of “crippling sanctions” was never made, at least within the confines of the meeting. Economic sanctions seem unlikely to have any effect, and this is probably why they were never on the table. With so few economic ties between the countries, America has little economic leverage over Iran. The US has already confiscated all possible Iranian assets and sold them off to compensate victims of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and that’s about as tough as a sanctioner can get. Public threats to block the sale of refined gasoline to Iran were met by offers from Venezuela and China to take up the slack. Most likely, crippling sanctions weren’t proposed simply because Iran would recognize such threats as a bluff.

Barack Obama also declared the meeting a success, although it’s unclear what he has actually achieved, other than a slight change in tone in US-Iranian relations. Obama has held off neoconservative warhawks for the time being, if that was his goal. Whatever other game plan he may have had went out the window when Iran disclosed the Qom facility just days before the Geneva meeting. This shifted the debate, from how to convince Iran to change its course, to demanding that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) be allowed to inspect the facility “within two weeks.”

The American reaction to the disclosure was both hasty and defensive. Officials argued that they’d known about the Qom facility for years, and had intended to surprise the Iranians with their knowledge at the Geneva meeting. Iran must have gotten wind of their plans, they said, and disclosed the facility to avoid embarrassment. This story doesn’t hold water, though. First of all, there’s no denying the benefit Iran received to its negotiating position. Practically nothing was discussed except for whether and when Iran would allow the IAEA to inspect the facility. And, of course Iran will allow IAEA inspections. Iran highly values its relationship with the IAEA, its first line of defense against the kind of disaster precipitated by Hans Blix’ inconclusive search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Excavation of the underground facility was obvious from satellite imagery, and its purpose could not have remained a secret indefinitely. The timing of the disclosure turned what might have been a problem into a negotiating advantage. It was clearly meant to influence the Geneva meeting. That’s more likely than believing Iran was able to discover the P5+1’s strategy going into Geneva.

There is some debate over whether Iran was legally obligated to disclose the facility six months before it went online, or when construction of the facility first began. According to the original terms of the NPT, which were signed and ratified by Iran, Iran only needed to give six months notice. Iran says that the Qom facility is still 18 months away from completion, and it has met its legal obligations. The legal history is a little more complex, though. An additional protocol to the NPT, Section 3.1, requires all signatories to inform the IAEA at the time construction of any new facilities began, and Iran initially agreed to the amendment. Iran’s parliament refused to ratify it, and Iran informed the IAEA that it did not consider itself bound by Section 3.1. Iran did not, then, violate its legal obligations by not disclosing the Qom facility when construction first began, since the amendment never became binding law, but it did put itself on “the wrong side of the law,” as outgoing IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei put it. Or, at least on the wrong side of the other signatories of the NPT.

Obama prepared for Geneva by making his own surprise announcement: the US would be scrapping a nascient missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The program might have been cancelled for budgetary reasons, or to improve relations with Russia in order to secure Russian support for crippling sanctions. Nevertheless, the reason given to the public was that “western intelligence” had determined that Iran was not as far along in its missile development program as originally thought, and was no longer believed to be capable of striking Europe. This was answered within days by an Iranian missile test, clearly demonstrating Iran’s ability to strike Eastern Europe, if that was ever an issue. The missile test was misperceived by many as a threatening gesture, but seems to have been intended to put the lie to Obama’s stated reason for trash-canning the missile shield.

Initial news reports seemed disappointed that the two sides had had an amicable meeting, and that another one would be scheduled in two weeks time. No frightening options on the table, and no scandalous insults to report. A typical headline reads “Iran agrees to let in inspectors.¹ Buried within this particular article was a quote from Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, saying that Iran had agreed to export low-enriched uranium from a small research facility in Tehran producing isotopes for medical purposes, for further enrichment outside of Iran. According to Mr. Solana, this tentative agreement did not apply to the main Iranian enrichment facility in Natanz.

Some hours later, Barack Obama gave a press conference and broke the big news: Iran had agreed, “in principle” to transfer the majority of its stockpile of low enriched uranium to Russia, and then to France, where it would be enriched to 19.75%, a level needed for the medical isotope reactor.² This was widely seen as a breakthrough in the negotiations. As Iran continued enriching uranium and building another enrichment plan, the international community would buy up its supply,

refine it to the level needed to make medical isotopes (but not enough to make weapons), and everyone would be happy. Well, almost everyone, anyway. Neoconservative commentator John Bolton argues that rather than being a clever way to reduce Iran’s stockpile, Iran could simply enrich the material in 19.75% fuel rods to weapons grade at a later date.

A day later, Peyman Jebelli, Press Secretary for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told Iranian Press TV that Obama’s story was untrue. Iran had offered to purchase 19.75% refined uranium from the West, he said, not to transfer its own stockpile for offshore processing. Press TV reiterated the denial in another story the following day, citing unnamed Iranian officials.³ One of Iran’s threats all along has been to increase its enrichment from 3.5% to 19.75%, inching its way towards High Enriched Uranium (HEU), the fuel for nuclear weapons, if the West refused to provide it. So, between Javier Solana, Barack Obama, and the Iranian Press Secretary, the main issue in the next round of negotiations would seem to be that of the medical isotopes. Iran seems likely to go along with this idea, although it may be uneasy about putting its entire uranium stockpile in the hands of the French, even for a short time.

Several other aspects of Obama’s press conference are worth noting. Obama gave Iran a two week deadline to allow the IAEA to inspect the Qom facility. But when Mr. ElBaredei visited Tehran two days later, he agreed with the Iranians that inspections would occur on October 25.⁴ This not only snubbed Obama’s deadline. It also placed the inspection a week after the next P5+1 meeting, scheduled for October 19th. This preserves the inspection of the Qom facility as an distracting issue, such that Iran will probably not have to make any real concessions at the next meeting, either.

This is not to say that Iran is getting everything it wanted in the negotiations. The West has successfully narrowed the agenda of the meetings to Iran’s nuclear program. The meetings don’t look like a prelude to more general discussions about nuclear disarmament, which Iran would love to be involved in. But the hawks have been outmaneuvered for now, and absent some further provocation from Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Western press may soon grow bored with the Iranian nuclear story. After all, this has been going on for years and years. There is really nothing new about it, and still no indication that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Many people do believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, though, and there seems to be a mad rush to prove it. But there is a far simpler explanation, which is self-evident when you think about it. If Iran has the capability to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, and has a significant stockpile of low enriched uranium, it could further enrich the stockpile and produce nuclear weapons on fairly short notice. This is sometimes referred to as “the Japan option,” although Brazil also has this capability. Having a Japan option is a deterrence in itself. Just as no one needs to actually use nuclear weapons to realize their political leverage, if you’re always six months away from having a nuclear weapon, you already have a significant deterrent capability. Case in point: a few months ago, the Japanese parliament debated whether to develop nuclear weapons in response to threatening gestures made by North Korea. I’m sure the Japanese debate was heard loud and clear in Pyongyang.

Considering what happened to its neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s desire for a nuclear Japan option is understandable. We shouldn’t automatically side with the “international community” against Iran. We should balance the goal of nuclear nonproliferation against the legitimate concerns of the Iranian people. These include both security and technological development. The Japan option may be safer than we think.

1. ”Iran agrees to let in inspectors,” by Jason Koutsoukis, The Age, Oct 3, 2009.
2. ”Iran, Major Powers Reach Agreement On Series of Points: Obama Sees a ‘Constructive Beginning’,” by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, October 2, 2009.
3. ”Iran: We reached no deal to ship nuclear fuel,” Press TV, Oct 3, 2009.
4. ”IAEA to inspect Fordo facility late October,” Press TV, Oct 4, 2009.

At a Sep. 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

The U.S. charges on the Qom facility, coming a week before the first opportunity for negotiations with Iran on a full range of issues since 1981, appear to have been a deliberate ploy to make the Obama administration appear tough and on the offensive when the talks started.

Iran’s Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told a news conference Tuesday that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 to begin work on the enrichment facility near Qom.

Meanwhile, a new photo analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) of the Qom site in 2004 and 2005 suggests it was not dedicated to building a uranium enrichment facility at that time.

In a brief analysis posted on the ISIS webpage Tuesday, Paul Brannan, a specialist in interpreting satellite photography at ISIS, said he believed that the site on which the Qom enrichment facility was later constructed was “originally a tunnel facility associated with Iran’s military” rather than a “construction site for a uranium plant”.

Brannan wrote that there was evidence of some construction between June 2004 and March 2005, but that the pace appeared “slow”. That tunneling activity, Brannan wrote, “may not have been originally associated with the later construction activity for the suspected uranium enrichment site”.

Brannan told IPS it is “technically possible” that the relatively slight changes he saw from 2004 to 2005 were associated with the enrichment facility, but said the images of the site at that stage appear similar to many other tunnel facilities built into a mountain that are maintained by the Iranian military.

“The Iranian military has hundreds of these around Iran,” Brannon said.

Brannan said he is now in the process of obtaining satellite imagery for 2006 through 2008 in order to establish more clearly when the construction on the facility began.

In his press conference, Salehi described the second enrichment facility as “a small version of Natanz” – Iran’s large-scale commercial enrichment plant – and explained it as a measure aimed at ensuring the continuity of the programme if its nuclear sites were attacked.

If construction on the Qom site did not begin until 2008, as Salehi claimed, it would have been long after Iran had withdrawn from an agreement with the IAEA — the so-called “modified Code 3.1″ — obligating it to report design information on nuclear facilities as soon as the decision is made.

That would further suggest that Iran is serious about remaining in compliance with its obligations under the Safeguards Agreement.

Iran notified the IAEA in March 2007 that it intended to revert to the earlier version of the “Code 3.1″ Subsidiary Arrangement with the agency, which obligated it to provide design information at least 180 days before introduction of nuclear material into the facility. Subsidiary Arrangements are codicils to the Safeguards Agreement – the document which defines the basic transparency and other obligations of each IAEA member state.

In a briefing for reporters last week a “senior administration official” asserted that Iran had begun construction on the Qom enrichment facility “with the intent that it be secret”, thus giving Iran “an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it”.

A key element of that charge was that Iran had violated the “modified Code 3.1″ agreement at the very time it had been ostensibly implementing that agreement.

“We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that obligation,” the official declared.

But the briefing official seemed to confirm the conclusion of the ISIS analysis of the satellite imagery by suggesting that the site was considered as an enrichment site even though there was evidence that it had a different function. “[A]t a very early stage of construction,” the official said, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.”

There were other hints as well that the U.S. charge was not based on visual evidence of construction but on the supposition that the site was intended for the enrichment facility, even though little or no construction was actually taking place.

“[W]e wanted to wait until the actual construction caught up with that intent,” said the official at one point.

The unnamed senior official declined on three different occasions during the briefing to answer questions on when construction on the facility had started.

When a reporter asked directly, “Do you have a clear idea of when the construction started?” the official flatly refused to answer. The official also refused to answer when asked if the construction was started before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in August 2005.

The official also said, “These kinds of things are always a matter of degree.”

If the satellite imagery for 2006, 2007 and 2008 shows that construction did not begin until after the Iranian withdrawal from its commitment to modified Code 3.1, it would provide new evidence that Iran intended to remain within the letter of its safeguards agreement and was not planning a covert enrichment facility.

President Obama called the second enrichment facility “a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the non-proliferation regime”, saying Iran had broken “rules that all nations must follow”.

Outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei declared in New Delhi Wednesday that Iran is “on the wrong side of the law… insofar as informing the agency about the construction.”

Although it has remained unreported in the news media, however, Iran has a legal case that it has remained in compliance with its Safeguards Agreement.

In March 2009, the director of the IAEA Office of Legal Affairs, Johan Rautenbach, called Iran’s reversion to implementation of the earlier version of the Code 3.1 “inconsistent with its obligations under the Subsidiary Arrangements”.

But he went on to say that it was “difficult to conclude that providing information in accordance with the earlier formulation in itself constitutes non-compliance with, or a breach of, the Safeguards Agreement as such.”

The Safeguards Agreement itself clearly forbids unilateral “modification” of a Subsidiary Arrangement, but it says nothing about withdrawal from such an agreement, which is what Iran is asserting it did in March 2007.

The distinction between “modification” and “withdrawal” from provisions of an international agreement is well established in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

Unilateral withdrawal is permitted under that Convention, provided that the provision in question is separable from the remainder of the agreement, is not the essential basis of consent by the other party and continued performance of the remainder of the agreement would not be “unjust”.

The head of the IAEA Legal Department appears to have accepted that those three conditions applied to the case of Iran’s “Modified Code 3.1″ agreement.

“The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counter-proliferation officials tell Newsweek. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.

“The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that U.S. intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed since the formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s ‘Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities’ in November 2007. Public portions of that report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘high confidence” that, as of early 2003, Iranian military units were pursuing development of a nuclear bomb, but that in the fall of that year Iran ‘halted its nuclear weapons program.’ The document said that while U.S. agencies believed the Iranian government ‘at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,’ U.S. intelligence as of mid-2007 still had ‘moderate confidence’ that it had not restarted weapons-development efforts.

“One of the two officials said that the Obama administration has now worked out a system in which intelligence agencies provide top policymakers, including the president, with regular updates on intelligence judgments like the conclusions in the 2007 Iran NIE. According to the two officials, the latest update to policymakers has been that as of now — two years after the period covered by the 2007 NIE — U.S. intelligence agencies still believe Iran has not resumed nuclear-weapons development work. ‘That’s the conclusion, but it’s one that—like every other—is constantly checked and reassessed, both to take account of new information and to test old assumptions,’ one of the officials told Newsweek.”

In this connection, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair — the insider’s insider — testified before Congress in February that there was no evidence Iran is producing the highly enriched uranium required for nuclear weapons.

The September-October issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists contained an interview with Mohamed El Baradei, the retiring long time director of the IAEA, in which he declared: “We have not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program …. But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world….

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community …. But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.”

The Sept. 21 issue of Newsweek reported that “quarrels concerning the ultimate aim of Iran’s secretive nuke program have become so heated that some UN officials are making comparisons to the proliferation of misinformation in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” The article continued:

In a private email sent last week to nuclear experts and obtained by Newsweek, Tariq Rauf, a senior official with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote that the mainstream media are repeating mistakes from 2003, when they ‘carried unsubstantiated stories on Iraq and WMD — the same mistakes are being repeated re IAEA and Iran.’ Rauf added that ‘the hype is likely originating from certain (known) sources.’ The message does not specify the sources, but U.S. and European officials have previously accused Israel of exaggerating Iran’s nuclear progress.

On Feb. 22, India’s mass circulation daily The Hindu reported:

Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said. The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile. ‘If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, the agency’s inspectors will find out,‘ he said. The expert added that ‘so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications.’

The French news agency AFP reported Sept. 20:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei today denied the West’s charge that Tehran aims to develop nuclear weapons under a covert program, insisting the Islamic Republic bans such activity. ‘They falsely accuse [Iran] of producing nuclear weapons. We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the production and the use of nuclear weapons,’ Khamenei said in a speech broadcast by state television. ‘They know themselves that it’s not true … but it is part of Iran-phobia policy that controls the behavior of these arrogant governments today.’

Iran is no danger to Israel, the United States, or the Sunni Arab world. It wants to protect its revolution, independence and what it considers its precious Islamic Republic. The Ahmadinejad government and Ayatollah Khamenei fully understand that heavy U.S. sanctions are capable of causing extreme agony for the masses of its people and would lead to a weakening of the state. Tehran is also aware that if it produces one nuclear weapon it may be mercilessly attacked.

Iran’s leadership is not suicidal, and is well aware that if Tehran not only produced a weapon but actually launched a nuclear missile toward Israel, the massive retaliation from the U.S. and Israel would obliterate most of Iranian society, whether or not its weapon was deflected by the U.S. anti-missile system that the Obama Administration is now going to place aboard Navy ships in the Mediterranean. (President Bush wanted to deploy the system to Poland and the Czech Republic to threaten Russia, not to defend Europe against an Iranian attack. By moving the ABMs south, Obama achieved two objectives: He got Russia off his back, while assuring Israel of yet another layer of U.S. protection.)

For all its fiery international rhetoric, Iran’s leadership is essentially cautious, and its military intentions are defensive. The country hasn’t started a war in almost 200 years, and the Iranian people have no desire to replicate the horror of the defensive war they waged against the Iraqi aggressor for most of the 1980s.

Developing nuclear weapons in today’s world makes a country a recognized power, and is a great defense against imperial aggression, particularly for a country that has long been on Washington’s hit list and narrowly avoided an invasion during the Bush years.

Iran — even if it knows how to produce a nuclear bomb — will not weaponize because it wishes to demonstrate its adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and because it desires to survive the hostility of America and Israel. At the same time, Iran does not intend to be humiliated and hampered by hugely excessive restrictions and intrusive surveillance that is not applied to other countries in compliance with the NPT. Nor does it intend to turn tail because of threats from those who object to its support of the Palestinian people and its opposition to imperialism.

If the United States genuinely wishes to resolve its dispute with Iran, it is possible to do so rationally and without violence. But this means President Obama must treat Iran as an equal, accept the reality that Tehran and Washington see the world differently, and negotiate in good faith.

Most Americans and virtually the rest of the world have high hopes about Obama, especially after the dreadful Bush Administration. We certainly recognize the improvement, but have doubts, not high hopes, when it comes to the direction of American foreign policy. We see little difference, other than the cosmetic, between the Obama Administration’s international strategy and the strategy of American global domination and hegemony based on military power that has prevailed in Washington in its present incarnation since the end of World War II.

We’d like nothing better than to be proven wrong. But that would take the development of a massive progressive movement in this country, focused in this instance on world peace, the equality of peoples, and justice for all, a not unreasonable goal worth struggling for, in our view. And as far as nuclear proliferation is concerned, the only true solution is total nuclear disarmament, a position, by the way, that Iran appears to be putting forth these days.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran’s notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sep. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of “senior administration officials” who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had “learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised”, one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because “they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid…”

Later in the briefing, however, the official said “we believe”, rather than “we learned”, in referring to that claim, indicating that it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

The official refused to explain how U.S. analysts had arrived at that conclusion, but an analysis by the defence intelligence consulting firm IHS Jane’s of a satellite photo of the site taken Saturday said there is a surface-to-air missile system located at the site.

Since surface-to-air missiles protect many Iranian military sites, however, their presence at the Qom site doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran believed that Washington had just discovered the enrichment plant.

The official said the administration had organised an intelligence briefing on the facility for the IAEA during the summer on the assumption that the Iranians might “choose to disclose the facility themselves”. But he offered no explanation for the fact that there had been no briefing given to the IAEA or anyone else until Sep. 24 — three days after the Iranians disclosed the existence of the facility.

A major question surrounding the official story is why the Barack Obama administration had not done anything — and apparently had no plans to do anything — with its intelligence on the Iranian facility at Qom prior to the Iranian letter to the IAEA. When asked whether the administration had intended to keep the information in its intelligence briefing secret even after the meeting with the Iranians on Oct. 1, the senior official answered obliquely but revealingly, “I think it’s impossible to turn back the clock and say what might have been otherwise.”

In effect, the answer was no, there had been no plan for briefing the IAEA or anyone.

News media played up the statement by the senior administration official that U.S. intelligence had been “aware of this facility for years”.

But what was not reported was that he meant only that the U.S. was aware of a possible nuclear site, not one whose function was known.

The official in question acknowledged the analysts had not been able to identify it as an enrichment facility for a long time. In the “very early stage of construction,” said the official, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.” Intelligence analysts had to “wait until the facility had reached the stage of construction where it was undeniably intended for use as a centrifuge facility,” he explained.

The fact that the administration had made no move to brief the IAEA or other governments on the site before Iran revealed its existence suggests that site had not yet reached that stage where the evidence was unambiguous.

A former U.S. official who has seen the summary of the administration’s intelligence used to brief foreign governments told IPS he doubts the intelligence community had hard evidence that the Qom site was an enrichment plant. “I think they didn’t have the goods on them,” he said.

Also misleading was the official briefing’s characterisation of the intelligence assessment on the purpose of the enrichment plant. The briefing concluded that the Qom facility must be for production of weapons-grade enriched uranium, because it will accommodate only 3,000 centrifuges, which would be too few to provide fuel for a nuclear power plant.

According to the former U.S. official who has read the briefing paper on the intelligence assessment, however, the paper says explicitly that the Qom facility is “a possible military facility”. That language indicates that intelligence analysts have suggested that the facility may be for making low-enriched rather than for high-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.

It also implies that the senior administration official briefing the press was deliberately portraying the new enrichment facility in more menacing terms than the actual intelligence assessment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer the day after the denunciation of the site by U.S., British and French leaders to allow IAEA monitoring of the plant will make it far more difficult to argue that it was meant to serve military purposes.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Iran never intended to keep the Qom facility secret from the IAEA but was waiting to make it public at a moment that served its political-diplomatic objectives.

The Iranian government is well aware of U.S. capabilities for monitoring from satellite photographs any site in Iran that exhibits certain characteristics.

Iran obviously wanted to make the existence of the Qom site public before construction on the site would clearly indicate an enrichment purpose. But it gave the IAEA no details in its initial announcement, evidently hoping to find out whether and how much the United States already knew about it.

The specific timing of the Iranian letter, however, appears to be related to the upcoming talks between Iran and the P5+1 — China, France, Britain, Russia, the United States and Germany — and an emerging Iranian strategy of smaller back-up nuclear facilities that would assure continuity if Natanz were attacked.

The Iranian announcement of that decision on Sep. 14 coincided with a statement by the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, warning against preemptive strikes against the country’s nuclear facilities.

The day after the United States, Britain and France denounced the Qom facility as part of a deception, Salehi said, “Considering the threats, our organisation decided to do what is necessary to preserve and continue our nuclear activities. So we decided to build new installations which will guarantee the continuation of our nuclear activities which will never stop at any cost.”

As satellite photos of the site show, the enrichment facility at Qom is being built into the side of a mountain, making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs.

The pro-administration newspaper Kayhan quoted an “informed official” as saying that Iran had told the IAEA in 2004 that it had to do something about the threat of attack on its nuclear facilities “repeatedly posed by the western countries”.

The government newspaper called the existence of the second uranium enrichment plan “a winning card” that would increase Iran’s bargaining power in the talks. That presumably referred to neutralising the ultimate coercive threat against Iran by the United States.

As we proceed with our analysis, here are a few things that should be kept in mind.

• So far there is absolutely no evidence Iran is going to “weaponize” its nuclear power program and build atomic bombs. So far it has been abiding by the NPT, has pledged not to produce nuclear weapons, is under very close scrutiny by the IAEA, and obviously its program is the target of intensive surveillance by the United States. There is no secret way in which it can construct nuclear weapons under such circumstances.

• Israel possesses an arsenal of up to 200 nuclear weapons and thumbs its nose at the IAEA and the NPT, with which it is notoriously non-compliant. If President Obama must sternly castigate Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, for “breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world,” why does he protect Israel from international sanction and subsidize its military machine? Pakistan and India are also non-compliant, but they too are allies of Washington and thus have been granted immunity.

• In this connection it must be noted that the far right wing Tel Aviv government appears to be on the verge of launching an attack on Iran and has made this well known to the world. But it receives no censure for such threats from the U.S. and its European allies, or for the horror it inflicted on Gaza a few months ago. Imagine the outcry if Iran threatened to attack Israel, or its army entered the territory of a neighboring society and inflicted terrible cruelties largely upon its civilian population for not submitting to national oppression. And yet Tel Aviv calls Iran an “existential” threat despite Israel’s nuclear weapons, it’s superior military force and its support from the entire American military apparatus, including 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on hair-trigger readiness. But as we’ve noted before, the only concrete threat to Israel’s existence would be if the U.S. government withdrew its political, military and financial support.

• Washington’s geopolitical interests are key to America’s relationship to Iran and the Middle East in general. The U.S. desires to control — or at minimum to keep out of “unfriendly” hands — the immense oil reserves possessed by Iran and neighboring Iraq. It fears a future alliance between these resource rich developing countries, who also happen to be the only two nations in the world governed by Shi’ite Muslims. The U.S. invaded to overthrow the “unfriendly,” Sunni-backed Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. But it can neither rely totally on its selected successor regime in Baghdad, nor has it yet been able to remove the theocratic government in Tehran, which is conservative domestically but puts forward an anti-imperialist foreign policy that drives the world’s remaining superpower to distraction.

Washington’s objective at the talks beginning Oct. 1 is to coerce Iran to accept extremely intrusive controls on its nuclear development, combining dire threats for refusal with small rewards for agreement. The Tehran government said it will reject demands that it halt uranium enrichment, a main concern of the five members of the Security Council plus Germany, but indicated without elaboration that “Iran is ready to … help ease joint international concerns over the nuclear issue.” (Enriched uranium is required to power nuclear plants for civilian uses. Much greatly enriched uranium is required for weapons.)

Washington wants to confine the seven-party discussions to Tehran’s nuclear project, but the Iranian government put forward it own proposal in early September for “comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive negotiations.” The U.S. rejected the proposal, but accepted it with seeming reluctance the next day. (We don’t know what happened to change things.) The Iranian suggestions include hastening global nuclear disarmament, ending nuclear proliferation and working toward world peace. Theoretically, Washington agrees with these goals, but doesn’t really want to discuss them with Iran.

The White House knows that in a broader discussion of nonproliferation issues Iran would draw attention to the three U.S. allies presently defying the NPT and getting away with it, and also show that the U.S. itself is non-compliant because it was supposed to have made more progress by now in reducing the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. Further, the U.S. will hardly discuss an Iranian proposal for a comprehensive agreement to achieve “global peace and security based on justice” that includes an inquiry into America’s aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s astonishingly disproportionate violence against Gaza and Lebanon.

The Obama Administration wants at minimum to impose stringent sanctions on Iran if no progress is made to its satisfaction in the next few months as demanded by U.S. neoconservatives, the right wing in general and those influenced by AIPAC, which describes itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby.”

One reason for harsh sanctions would be to hasten the downfall of the Ahmadinejad government, if possible, by creating a serious economic crisis, unemployment, and suffering to exacerbate existing social tensions within the Islamic Republic. The last time Washington engaged in deep sanctions was from 1991-2003 when it has been verified that over a million Iraqis, including a huge number of children, died from various deprivations from hunger to unclean drinking water.

If sanctions are the minimum, the maximum response would be unleashing Israel to attack Iran — an action that would backfire as surely as there is water in the Hudson River.

After his Pittsburgh speech Obama told the press he wasn’t “taking any options off the table,” a phrase he has used a number of times in relation to Iran. It means war remains an option for the U.S., even over the relatively petty issue of an empty building still under construction that’s probably intended to produce energy, not violence. This same statement was a favorite of Bush II as well, and he used it repeatedly in relation to Iran. In April 2006, at a time when Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives and their supporters were pushing hard for war against Iran, the BBC reported that “Bush says all options, including the use of force, are on the table.” As they say, the more things change….

Although some in Washington are hopeful that Ahmadinejad will be weakened in the nuclear talks because of opposition claims that he “stole” the June 12 election in Iran, we don’t believe this is a factor. So far, more than three and a half months later, there has not been any concrete evidence to support the opposition allegations of electoral fraud.

While the U.S. mass media depicts Ahmadinejad as being under virtual siege from a majority of Iranians, other information shows this is exaggerated. Inter-Press Service reported the following Sept. 19 in an article by Jim Lobe headlined, “New Poll Finds Strong Domestic Support for Iran Regime.”:

“A new survey of Iranian public opinion released here [today] suggests majority domestic support for both him [Ahmadinejad] and the country’s basic governing institutions. Four out of five of the 1,003 Iranian respondents interviewed in the survey released by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the highly respected Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, said they considered Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president of Iran.

“Sixty-two percent of respondents said they had ‘a lot of confidence’ in the declared election results, which gave Ahmadinejad 62.6% of the vote within hours of the polls’ closing Jun. 12 and which were swiftly endorsed by the Islamic Republic’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Three of four respondents said Khamenei had reacted correctly in his endorsement.”

No mass demonstrations have taken place from early August until Sept. 18, when thousands of protestors marched in Tehran in an attempt to rival much larger government-sponsored annual rallies in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle on what is called “Jerusalem Day” in Iran. Coming just two weeks before the opening of the nuclear talks, it was obviously intended to convey the impression internationally that Ahmadinejad did not really represent the will of the Iranian people. Police handled the dissenters with kid gloves.

A number of the demonstrators and signs seemed to oppose the Tehran government’s support for the Palestinians as well as Ahmadinejad’s re-election. The Economist reported chants of “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, I’ll only give my life for Iran,” although Jerusalem Day observances never suggested Iranians should give their lives for either Gaza or Lebanon, both of which have been targets of Israeli military aggression. There were also chants of “Death to Russia” and “Death to China,” evidently a reference to their refusal to join the U.S. and Israel in denunciations of the Tehran government.

In a speech that day, Ahmadinejad in effect pulled the rug from under his own feet in terms of international opinion by once again charging that the Holocaust was a “lie.” Wisely, the Iranian leader did not repeat the preposterous allegation during his 35 minute speech to the UN General Assembly in New York Sept. 23. He mainly discussed building durable world peace and “elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to pave the way for all nations to have access to advanced and peaceful technology.”

He criticized the U.S. and Israel, but seemed somewhat subdued. According to Sarah Wheaton in the New York Times blog that evening, he “said the United States was aiding Israel in ‘racist ambitions,’ called Israel’s attack on Gaza in December ‘barbaric’ and said the economic blockade of Palestinians amounts to ‘genocide’” — comments that provoked the U.S. and 10 other delegations to walk out. Israel didn’t attend in the first place.

Soon after Ahmadinejad’s speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the General Assembly that “The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” and urged the delegates to oppose Iranian “barbarism.”

Back in Israel Sept. 26, according to an AP dispatch from Jerusalem, “Netanyahu spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a number of unidentified U.S. senators and told them that now is the time to act on Iran. Israel maintains the Islamic republic is seeking nuclear weapons. ‘If not now then when?’ the official quoted Netanyahu as saying. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak with the media. He did not disclose what kind of action Netanyahu recommended be taken.

“Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said earlier in the day that the Iranian nuclear facility proves ‘without a doubt’ the Islamic republic is pursuing nuclear weapons. ‘This removes the dispute whether Iran is developing military nuclear power or not and therefore the world powers need to draw conclusions,’ Lieberman told Israel Radio. ‘Without a doubt it is a reactor for military purposes not peaceful purposes.’”

Read Part 1.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

Iran says it looks forward to the talks and promises to be forthcoming. But judging by the stance of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany last week at the UN conferences in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, draconian sanctions may be enacted against Iran in a few months. This would result in yet another crisis that the world doesn’t need just now.

Russia and China — which hold veto power in the Security Council that can weaken or prevent additional sanctions — have up to now resisted the Obama Administration’s drive for tough new UN punishments. President Barack Obama met separately during the week with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao in an effort to obtain their agreement to threaten more stringent sanctions should Iran procrastinate during the talks.

The White House later suggested to the press that Medvedev may be coming around to Obama’s point of view, but this seems to be based on very skimpy evidence — a remark that “in some cases sanctions are inevitable.” Hu evidently didn’t even go that far. China opposes sanctions in principle as a means of resolving international disputes.

Moscow and Beijing do not subscribe to the negative depiction of Iran promoted by Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Paris and Bonn. They understand the situation to be far more complex than the U.S. and its allies publicly acknowledge.

The Iran question suddenly took center stage Sept. 25 during a week of hectic political activity. The White house set up a hastily arranged and theatrically produced press conference at the start of the G20 meeting in order to detonate a political bombshell intended to destroy Tehran’s contention that it is only interested in nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.

The conference opened with Obama standing at the microphone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown positioned solemnly to his left and right. It was explained that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would have joined the trio but was delayed.

Obama then declared that Iran had for several years been secretly building an underground plant in mountainous terrain to manufacture nuclear fuel near the city of Qom about 100 miles from Tehran, in addition to the plant and facilities in Natanz already known to the world. He suggested the new plant was intended to produce weapons without the world’s knowledge, though that was not proven.

Obama then charged that “Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime … Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.” Refusal to “come clean,” he said, “is going to lead to confrontation.”

Sarkozy and Brown followed Obama and seemed to go even further than the American leader in denouncing Iran, explicitly demanding harder sanctions. Said Brown: “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community.”

The New York Times reported that “after months of talking about the need for engagement, Mr. Obama appears to have made a leap toward viewing tough new sanctions against Iran as an inevitability … American officials said that they expected the announcement to make it easier to build a case for international sanctions.”

The majority of House and Senate members have long been critical of Iran’s government and the new allegations have only fanned the flames of their hostility. Right wing Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared: “The U.S. and other countries must immediately impose crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime, including cutting off Iran’s imports of gasoline. The world cannot stand by and watch the nightmare of a nuclear-armed Iran become reality.” Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated “now is the time to supplement engagement with more robust international sanctions.”

As intended, the hyped disclosure created headlines around the world. It probably convinced many Americans, already primed to detest Iran, that Tehran is building nuclear bombs to obliterate the U.S. and Israel. This is not an unlikely conclusion for many people to accept after 30 years of Washington’s incessant campaign to demonize the government that overthrew and replaced America’s puppet, the dreaded Shah of Iran. The U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Iran after this act of lèse majesté and the subsequent “hostage crisis,” and has nourished a grudge to this day.

If push does come to shove with Iran it is important to remember how effortless it was to hoodwink the majority of American politicians and the masses of people into backing a completely unnecessary war against Iraq. As in the buildup to the unjust invasion of Iraq, today’s U.S. corporate mass media is playing its principal part to perfection — uncritically echoing government distortions about the danger of Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons. The Iran situation is different, but yet similar in terms of mass public manipulation and the possibility of a future confrontation getting out of hand.

Can this be, once again, a situation of high-stakes geopolitics where things are rarely as they seem? We think so. Let’s look at the immediate charge against Iran, based on the “revelations” of the last week, then take on the bigger picture in Parts 2 and 3.

The “shocking” news may have been delivered with a sense of surprise and high urgency, but U.S. intelligence agencies, joined by their counterparts in some allied countries, were aware since 2006 that Iran was constructing a second uranium processing plant that still remains under construction and is not operational. According to a Sept. 26 article circulated by the McClatchy newspaper group quoting a U.S. intelligence official, “There was dialogue with allies from a very early point.”

Bush Administration Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnel first informed Obama about the facility soon after he won election. He has been kept up to date since then. Before going public with the information last week, the president saw to it that several other governments were told in advance, as was the IAEA and others.

Washington officials claimed Iran became aware “in late spring” that the U.S. was spying on the “secret” facility. They said Iran then informed the International Atomic Energy Agency Sept. 21 about the existence of its project, implying Tehran did so because its cover was blown. In a statement Sept. 24 the IAEA acknowledged that Tehran had informed them that a “pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country,” and that it “also understands from Iran that no nuclear material has been introduced into the facility.”

Iran insisted to the Vienna-based IAEA and the world that the enrichment plant under construction is designed only for fueling nuclear power installations. Soon after Obama’s G20 speech, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization declared the new “semi-industrial enrichment fuel facility” was “within the framework of International Atomic Energy Agency’s regulations.” Press reports said “The head of Iran’s nuclear program suggested UN inspectors would be allowed to visit the site.” The invitation was extended before Washington’s demand that it do so.

A quite unruffled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared at a press conference in New York after Obama’s disclosures. He seemed to regard the American president’s allegations, and the staged manner in which they were delivered, not only the making of a mountain out of a molehill but an act of bad faith just before the talks are to begin, suggesting non-threateningly that Obama will come to regret his confrontational demeanor.

Ahmadinejad told the press that the plant in question wouldn’t be operational for 18 more months and that it did not violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He went further and said nuclear weapons “are against humanity [and] they are inhumane,” comments in keeping with his recent calls for eliminating all nuclear weapons. The Iranian leader also said that Iran informed the IAEA about the plant only a few days ago instead of when ground was broken because construction had reached the stage where it should be reported, not because it found out that a U.S. spy agency was watching.

What are we to make of this? First it must be understood there is a dispute over the IAEA’s safeguard provisions governing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran considers itself to be in total compliance with the NPT, and this appears to be true. Inter-Press Service reporter Jim Lobe wrote Sept. 25 that “Under the basic Safeguards Agreement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory, member states are required to declare their nuclear facilities and designs at least 180 days before introducing nuclear materials there.”

According to an article in the Sept. 26 New York Times by Neil MacFarquhar, “Tehran’s stance hinges on different interpretations of the agency’s regulations, said Graham Allison, the director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center and an Iran nuclear expert.

“For two decades, the agency required Iran to report only when nuclear material [for uranium enrichment] was introduced to a facility. By 2003 it rescinded that, in line with the guidelines for most [but not all] countries, demanding reporting when construction began, Mr. Allison said. But the agency never declared Iran out of compliance when Tehran claimed the old agreement was still in place.”

In talking to the press after Obama’s speech, Ahmadinejad said that the new facility would be completed in 18 months, so under Iran’s understanding of its responsibilities, the notification was a year in advance. The U.S. maintains that Iran informed the IAEA when it learned U.S. spy agencies had become aware of the plant, but if that were so, why did Tehran wait three months before contacting the nuclear agency? Had they acted out of fear of being exposed as non-compliant wouldn’t they have contacted IAEA immediately?

“What we did was completely legal, according to the law,” the Iranian president said. “We have informed the agency, the agency will come and take a look and produce a report and it’s nothing new.” According to the Associated Press Tehran’s notice to the IAEA specified that the enrichment level would be up to 5%, suitable only for peaceful purposes. Weapons-grade material is more than 90% enriched.”

The AP also noted that the IAEA now “says Iran is obliged to make such a notification when it begins design of such facilities” and that “a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.” This is confusing, of course. But since Iran was never designated as non-compliant and was allowed to proceed under the previous rules for years after it registered its rejection of the new terms, the thunderous criticism emanating from the U.S., Britain and France appears to have no serious merit.

On 23 September, many western delegates walked out of the United Nations General Assembly chambers during Ahmadinejad’s speech. The United States accused Ahmadinejad of using “hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Canada boycotted the address because, according to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Ahmadinejad had said “absolutely repugnant” things about Israel. Neither country quoted what was repugnant or anti-Semitic.

A JTA article stated, “The lowlight, I suppose, would be this portion, where he attacks the ‘Zionist regime,’ accuses Jews of controlling the world and then blasts the United States, too.”²

From another JTA article:

Ahmadinejad spoke of “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” during his speech to the UN, but otherwise didn’t mention his country’s nuclear program. Instead, he criticized Israel’s “inhuman policies in Palestine” and said the Jewish state had committed “genocide” in a speech that led to walkouts by numerous other countries in the General Assembly.³

First, Ahmadinejad never mentions the word “Jewish” in his speech. Second, the only time he uses the word “Jews” is when he talked about “prepar[ing] a conducive ground for all Palestinian populations, including Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in peace and harmony…”

Third, as for “genocide,” Ahmadinejad said: “How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.”

JTA does not deny the charges by Ahmadenejad.

There are plenty of Jews that acknowledge the “Jewish state” is committing “genocide.” There are plenty of Israeli academics who acknowledge the Nakba.⁴

The Goldstone report — as mitigating of Israeli war crimes as it may be in equating the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed — is further acknowledgment of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.⁵

JTA mentions an “apparent reference to Jews, ‘It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the U.S., to attain its racist ambitions.’”³

JTA conflates Zionism with Jewry. It is Zionism that is the enemy of Jews.⁶ It is Zionists who collaborated with Nazis during WWII.⁷ It is Zionists who practice racism. Ahmadinejad made an apparent reference to Zionists.

Without a doubt Zionism is rife in Israel,⁸ and it is much supported by Jews outside Israel, but there is also significant opposition to Zionism among Jews outside Israel. Humanity is diverse and so are Jews.

Double Standards in the West

The Iranian disclosure of a second uranium enrichment facility in Iran has raised the hackles of neoliberal politicians in the West.

Stephen Harper called it a “grave threat to international peace and security.”

At a G20 news conference in Pittsburgh, Harper said, “Iran, the combination of its abhorrent ideology and its interest in nuclear technology, combined with increasing evidence of its obvious disregard for international law and for its obligations, constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Since when is “interest in nuclear technology” a crime or something bad? To pursue nuclear technology is a right of all nations. Canada has a nuclear program; it enriches uranium. Does Canada mention its nuclear program in speeches to the United Nations? Does Israel mention its nuclear program?

As for “obvious disregard for international law,” is that unlike Israel with a string of condemnatory UN Security Council resolutions on record against it and numerous others vetoed by the US?⁹ Or is this not obvious disregard?

What is the “abhorrent ideology”? He couldn’t mean the pursuit of nuclear weapons because that would include the US, Britain, France, and Israel. And certainly Zionism is not an “abhorrent ideology” for Harper. He promised Israel would always have a “steadfast friend” in his government. Erstwhile Canadian prime minister Paul Martin once remarked, “Israel’s values are Canada’s values.”

US president Barack Obama stated that Iran must “be held accountable to international standards and international law.”

Are all states states to be held equally accountable by Obama? What about Israel? Will the state cited several times as a violator of international law by UN Security Council resolutions “be held accountable to international standards and international law”? Will Israel’s nuclear weapons be dismantled and its nuclear facilities subjected to IAEA inspection? Will the US — the aggressor of Iraq, frequent violator of international law, found guilty by the World Court in 1987 of terrorism — “be held accountable to international standards and international law”?¹⁰

Obama threatened, “When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite.”

Diplomacy (if one can call it that) hasn’t worked for many decades in historical Palestine, and the only US sanctions are against the oppressed Palestinians for daring to resist dispossession and genocide. Conversely, the oppressor state receives billions in US “aid” and diplomatic cover in the UN.

Obama added, “I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path.”

One wonders if that is like the “responsible path” that the US took in aggressing Iraq on pretext of possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction and killing over a million people? Or is the “responsible path” the one Obama took in deciding to up the military ante in Afghanistan, thereby increasing the violence and killing?

British prime minister Gordon Brown said, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

One wonders: is that like the lines the imperialist British regime drew in the Middle East when it carved up the Arab world, breaking its promise to its World War I allies? Is it like how the British decided to give away Arab land to Occidental Jews without asking permission from the Oriental inhabitants of the land? It would seem that Britain has a far from marvelous history of drawing lines in the sand.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy charged that Iran’s enrichment facility is “a challenge made to the entire international community… We cannot let Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running.”

Yet France is the country that helped Israel develop the Dimona nuclear facility and become a nuclear power.¹¹ What about the Israeli “challenge made to the entire international community”?

Furthermore, the US, Britain, and France have a responsibility under the NPT to dismantle their nuclear weaponry. So what moral weight do such pronouncements from western leaders have? Is there something about the US, Britain, France, Canada, and Israel (this bellwether of colonizing or colonized states) that gives them some superiority in rights over other states?

Moreover, what does this reveal about the western corporate media, which merely serve as mouthpieces for the state’s interests rather than scrutinizing concentrations of power?

Choosing the Responsible Path

The US and other nuclear-armed states could gain much legitimacy if they act henceforth to eliminate stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

CBC warned, “Beyond sanctions, the leaders’ options are limited and perilous. Military action by the United States or an ally such as Israel could set off a dangerous chain of events in the Islamic world.”¹²

Would that be, as Obama puts it, choosing “the responsible path”?

1. Western media purports the revelation is because the US and its allies were aware of its existence. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. and Allies Warn Iran Over Nuclear ‘Deception’,” New York Times, 25 September 2009.
2. Eric Fingerhut, “Ahmadinejad’s speech to the General Assembly,” JTA, 23 September 2009.
3. JTA Staff, “Ahmadinejad slams Israel as world powers turn up heat,” JTA, 24 September 2009.
4. For example, Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). Does Pappe go far enough? See Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007. Ethnic cleansing is argued to be genocide: Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007. See also Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
5. Richard Goldstone, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” Human Rights Council, 15 September 2009.
6. See Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One: The False Messiah (Clarity Press, 2009). I will write a review upcoming.
7. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal (1983).
8. Etgar Lefkovits, “Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op,” Jerusalem Post, 15 January 2009.
9. ”List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel,” Wikipedia.
10. See Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States (Clarity Press, 2008). Review.
11. Peter Pry, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984): 11.
12. ”Iranian nuclear revelation a grave threat: Harper,” CBC News, 25 September 2009.

The United States and other Western states have cited Iran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on resolving issues related to intelligence documents on a purported covert nuclear weapons programme as further evidence of its guilt.

“They’ve been asking for Shahab-3 drawings for about a year,” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview. “We found out a year ago and that’s when we stopped the meetings with IAEA.”

A senior official of the IAEA familiar with the Iran investigation, who insisted on anonymity as a condition for being interviewed, confirmed to IPS that the agency had requested not only that Iranian officials discuss the details of the Shahab-3’s reentry system, but access to the actual engineering designs for the missile.

“We want them to explain to us that the design studies are not for nuclear weapons,” said the official. “We’re saying, you say you’ve done reentry vehicle reengineering [on Shahab-3], so show us some documentation.”

The latest IAEA report, dated Aug. 28, notes that the agency “has been unable to engage Iran in any substantive discussions about these outstanding issues for over a year”, but it does not link the Iranian disengagement to the demand for military secrets.

The Sep. 15, 2008 report said, however, that in a Sep. 5 letter Iran had “expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.”

Asked whether this request would not compromise Iran’s national security secrets, the official conceded to IPS, “Yes there will have to be some compromise on their part, because the charges are serious. If someone is accused of nefarious crimes, it is in their interest to share a little of their security to show they are baseless.”

Defending the IAEA’s request, the official said, “All verification is a compromise of national security. Natanz [the Iranian uranium enrichment facility] is the most heavily verified enrichment plan in the world. It’s a compromise of national sovereignty.”

Soltanieh said he had protested the demand for such conventional military secrets at meetings of the IAEA Governing Board in 2008 and 2009. “They denied they asked for this information,” said Soltanieh.

The Iranian ambassador first expressed concern about being asked to give the IAEA access to national security secrets about its missiles and other conventional military technology in a letter to ElBaradei Sep. 5, 2008.

The September 2008 IAEA report strongly implied without saying so explicitly that the agency was seeking access to actual plans for the missile. It said the IAEA had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the reentry body from the time of the missile launch to payload detonation.”

The most recent report of the IAEA, dated Aug. 28, 2009, referred to “the need to hold discussions with Iran on the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload.”

In a letter to IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei Sep. 4, 2009, Soltanieh complained that the report which had just been released had “reflected the unjustified previous requests by your staff in Tehran [for] discussing with Iranian military staff the issue of missiles and explosives!”

He noted that the director general had on several occasions “emphasised that the Agency is not intending to enter into the domain of the national security of Member States”.

The agency also requested “additional information and documentation, and access to individuals, in support of [Iran's] statement about the civil and conventional military applications of its work in the area of EBW detonators,” according to the September 2008 IAEA report.

The IAEA further asked to meet individual scientists named in one of the intelligence documents as being part of the purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme. The senior IAEA official acknowledged in the interview with IPS, however, that it would be relatively easy for an outside agency to identify individuals who belonged to an organisation.

“It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official said.

In his letter to ElBaradei, Soltanieh said these IAEA requests represented “interference in confidential conventional military activities of a Member State, related to its national security…”

The IAEA has offered to “discuss modalities that could enable Iran to demonstrate credibly that the activities referred to in the documentation are not nuclear related, as Iran asserts, while protecting sensitive information related to its conventional military activities.”

But the senior IAEA official interviewed by IPS made it clear that such modalities would not preclude access to the documentation on the Shahab design.

Iran’s enemies, especially the United States and Israel, are eager for intelligence on the design of the Shahab-3’s reentry vehicle.

According to a detailed analysis by the Armed Combat Information Group (ACIG), the upgraded version of the Shahab-3 has an improved guidance system and warhead, as well as completely new re-entry vehicle with a different guidance system based on rocket-nozzle steering rather than a spin-stabilised re-entry vehicle.

The new reentry vehicle is smaller than the previous version, according to the former head of Israel’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation. That gives the improved version greater precision.

But the most significant feature of the new variant, according to the ACIG analysis, is the capability for changing trajectory repeatedly during re-entry and in the missile’s terminal phase. That capability allows the Shahab-3 to evade the radar systems associated with Israel’s Arrow 2 missile.

If Israeli and the United States were able to get more information on the design of the reentry vehicle, they would be able to make adjustments in the Arrow 2 system to increase its effectiveness against the Iranian missile.

The IAEA secretariat is well-known to be major source of intelligence on Iran for the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, 10 of the 35 members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna were Central Intelligence Agency personnel, according to the 2007 book The Italian Letter, by journalists Peter Eisner and Knute Royce.

Ambassador Soltanieh told IPS that the IAEA safeguards department, to which the Iranians pass much sensitive information, has repeatedly leaked that information — usually out of context — to journalists for stories portraying the Iranian nuclear programme in a menacing light.

“Leakage of confidential information is a matter of serious concern,” said Soltanieh. “In many cases, we give information to inspectors and soon it is in the media.”

A Western diplomatic source in Vienna who insisted on not being identified said, “I don’t think it would help a lot to get the specific plans of Shahab-3.” For one thing, he observed, “They could be working on other studies and we wouldn’t know about it.”

The official admitted that it was “always difficult to prove that something is nonexistent”.

Nevertheless, it would be “much safer for Iran to compromise on these issues than to keep its present attitude,” the official said.

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power.” Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit.” Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests.”

“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft — he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness.” The defense exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance.. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honored place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie — the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer.”

Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi’s defense.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power.” What a disgrace.

But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, IPS has learned.

The agency has strongly suggested in its published reports that the documentation it is supposed to be investigating is credible, because it “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent”.

IAEA Safeguard Department chief Olli Heinonen signaled his de facto acceptance of the “alleged studies” documents when he presented an organisational chart of the purported secret nuclear weapons project based on the documents at a February 2008 “technical briefing” for member states.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has portrayed Iran as failing to respond adequately to the “substance” of the documents, asserting that it has focused only on their “style and format of presentation”.

In fact, however, Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in spring 2008 that none of the supposedly top secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from defence ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Soltanieh recalled that he had made the same point “many times” in meetings of the Board of Governors since then. “No one ever challenged me,” said the ambassador.

The IAEA has never publicly acknowledged the problem of lack of security markings or official seals in the documents, omitting mention of the Iranian complaint on that issue from its reports. Its May 26, 2008 report said only that Iran had “stated, inter alia, that the documents were not complete and that their structure varied”.

But a senior official of the agency familiar with the Iran investigation, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be identified, confirmed that Soltanieh had indeed pointed out the lack of any security classification markings, and that he had been correct in doing so.

The “alleged studies” documents include purported correspondence between the overall “project leader” in Iran’s Defence Ministry and project heads on what would have been among the regime’s most sensitive military secrets.

Even though the official conceded that the lack of security markings could be considered damaging to the credibility of the documents, he defended the agency’s refusal to acknowledge the issue.

“It’s not a killer argument,” said the official.

The official suggested that the states that had provided the documents might claim that they had taken the markings out before passing them on to the IAEA. It is not clear, however, why an intelligence agency would want to remove from the documents markings that would be important in proving their authenticity.

“We don’t know whether the original letters were marked confidential or not,” he said, indicating that the IAEA had not questioned the United States and other states contributing documents on the absence of the confidential markings.

The IAEA’s apparent lack of concern about the absence of security markings and seals on the documents contrasts sharply with the IAEA’s investigation of the Niger uranium documents cited by the George W. Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq in 2002-2003.

In the Niger case, the agency concluded that the documents were fabricated based on a comparison of the “form, format, contents and signature” of the documents with other relevant correspondence, according to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s Mar. 7, 2003 statement to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran has also provided the IAEA with evidence that the handwritten notes on a May 2003 letter, which supposedly link a private Iranian contractor to the “alleged studies”, were forged by an outside agency. The letter was from an engineering firm to the private company Kimia Maadan, which other documents in the collection identify as responsible for part of the alleged covert nuclear weapons programme called the “green salt project”.

The letter itself has nothing to do with any “green salt” project, but handwritten notes on the copy of the letter given to the IAEA by an unidentified government referred to individuals who are named in other intelligence documents as participants in the “alleged studies”, according to the latest IAEA report.

But the original letter, which Iran has provided to the IAEA, has no handwritten notes on it. Amb. Soltanieh recalled that he showed that original letter to an IAEA team led by the deputy director of IAEA’s Safeguards Department, Herman Nackaerts, in Tehran Jan. 22-23, 2008.

He said the IAEA team was able to compare the original document with the copy that they had been given as part of the alleged studies documents and that Nakaerts declared that his team accepted the authenticity of the original they were shown.

The IAEA confirmed in its Aug. 28, 2009 report that it had been given access to the original letter. But the report suggested that the existence of the original letter supports the authenticity of the alleged studies documents, because it “demonstrates a direct link between the relevant documentation and Iran”.

That argument appears to have deliberately conflated the original letter, which the agency admits has nothing to do with the alleged studies, and the copy with the allegedly incriminating handwritten notes on it.

The senior official sought to discredit the original letter by suggesting that the Iranians might have “whited out the handwritten notes”. But the official then offered an alternative theory, asserting that there were two original letters, one of which was kept by the sender, and that the handwritten notes had been found on the second original.

But the IAEA could have checked with the engineering firm that sent the letter to ascertain whether a second original exists and whether the Iranian government had obtained the letter from it.

The senior IAEA official gave no indication that the IAEA had done so.

Iranian officials have also claimed other inaccuracies in the documents, involving technical flaws and names of individuals who they say do not exist.

The IAEA has not referred in its reports to any specific efforts to subject the “alleged studies” documents to forensic tests or to get data about such tests from governments holding the documents.

The senior IAEA official recalled that Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer had written that the documents had been sent to three different labs, and that two had said they were credible, whereas the third had expressed doubt about their authenticity.

But Linzer’s February 2006 story reported only that the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico had run computer simulations on the studies of a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle — which suggested that they were aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon — and had concluded that none of the plans would have worked.

Contacted by phone last week, Linzer, now a senior reporter for the public interest journalism organisation Pro Publica, told IPS she had never reported that two other labs ran tests on the documents.

Linzer expressed doubt that any other national labs would have had the capabilities to do the kind of tests carried out at Sandia labs.

When asked if the IAEA had sought to obtain the Sandia simulation results, the official refused to comment, except to say, “Our people follow up.”

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

The Israeli moves

In their annual meeting, on February 18th 2009, The Israeli military leaders had officially declared Iran as their number one strategic enemy in the region, and that the alleged Iranian nuclear arms program constitutes an “existential threat” to the state of Israel. They declared the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat a top priority for the Israeli military and political leaderships.

Yet the Israelis seem to differ in the method of dealing with the Iranian threat. One group, represented by Barak, Netanyahu, Olmert, and Lieberman, called for a military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strike, they claim, would at least set the Iranian nuclear program back by ten years. They site Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in June 1981, and the bombing of alleged Syrian Al-Kibar nuclear facility in September 2007 as safe and effective solution to any nuclear threat. They claim that since Western countries, especially US, and the neighboring Arab states are opposed to Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s attack would receive tacit approval, and similar to Iraqi and Syrian bombings Israel would not face any military or political consequences.

The second group, represented by the Israeli intelligence agencies, warns that Israel, alone, is not capable of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, and is in dire need of American help. They remind the Israelis of the events of previous wars such as 1973 war against Egypt and 1982 and 2006 wars against Lebanon, both countries are not as strong as Iran. They recommend that Israel should be only a partner in a joint military strike against Iran.

Third group, represented by Israeli President Shimon Perez, seemingly wants a political solution. Perez stated to George Mitchell, the American special envoy to the Middle East, last April 2009 that Israel has no plans to strike Iran. He urged for an international alliance against Iran to be formed in order to politically deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

Despite Perez’s seemingly political approach the Israeli military leaders are preping the army for a coming strike against Iran. They have purchased and acquired the most sophisticated American fighter planes, 100 advanced LJDAM (Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition) smart bombs, and small tactical (nuclear) bombs. The Israeli army has been testing the Arrow interceptor missile defensive shield in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in the American missile range in the Pacific Ocean west of California. The Israeli air forces sent their F16C fighter jets to participate with the Americans in war exercises, named Red Flag, at American Nillis Air Force base in Nevada, and their C130 Hercules aircraft to compete in the Rodeo 2009 competition at McChord Air Force base in Washington.

The Israeli navy has sent one of its six Dolphin class nuclear missiles carrier submarines accompanied by two Saar class missile boats through Suez Canal ostensibly heading towards the Persian Gulf.

Israeli leaders are crying wolf everywhere they go. Distorting Ahmadinejad’s speeches they declared him the new Hitler, who wants to wipe Israel off the map. They accused Iran of sponsoring terror by arming Hezbollah and Hamas. They keep claiming that Iran is only few months away from building its first nuclear bomb and such a weapon in the hands of the mad Mullahs is an existential threat to Israel. Such a threat, they keep claiming, endangers the whole region including the oil producing Gulf States, and could expand to endanger the rest of the world.

The American moves

The American administration, on the other hand, seems to favor a diplomatic solution for now. Yet like the previous Bush administration the Obama administration has also declared that all options, including a nuclear military strike, are still on the table if Iran did not respond positively to the diplomatic solution. Obama is also pressuring Israel to freeze its illegal settlements in Palestinian occupied territory, at least for the time being, in order to gain the support of Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, and Gulf States). Putting Israel, the American watchdog in the region, on a leach has always worked to garner the Arab support for attacking a neighboring country.

Although a US National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear arms research program in 2003, Obama issued a deadline of mid September for Iran to respond to the American offer. He had also warned Israel not to surprise his administration with a strike against Iran that might sabotage his diplomatic approach, and could drive the whole region into wider conflict.

At the same time Obama’s administration had sent Iran many hostile messages such as American determination not to allow Iran to build its bomb, expressing America’s strong support and commitment to the security of Israel, supplying Israel with the most advanced weapons and fighter planes, conducting joint military training with the Israelis in preparation for possible strike, having many congressmen and military experts stating openly that an Israeli strike is the only and best solution, sending American aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to flex its muscles in war games, and openly broadcasting America’s own military preparation to strike Iran such as accelerating the development of the largest bomb ever dubbed “MOP”; Massive Ordnance Penetrator. With its 20 feet long, 30,000 pounds weight, and 5,300 pounds of explosives this bomb is designed to penetrate through 200 feet of hardened surfaces before detonation in order to destroy underground structures such as the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility.

The Iranian moves

Iran, on the opposite side, is adamant on exercising its own legal right of developing its own peaceful nuclear program similar to any other nuclear member countries in the NPT. Since 2003 Iran had been harassed by the Bush Administration over its nuclear program. Being a member of the NPT the IAEA was sent several times to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities, but found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Refusing to accept the outcome the Bush administration pushed the UN to impose economical sanction on Iran until it suspends its nuclear program.

In order to address any concern about its nuclear program Iran offered to place additional restrictions on its enrichment program including ratifying the Additional Protocol to allow more stringent inspections by the IAEA, open its nuclear program to foreign private and public participation, and allow the participation of foreign representatives within its Natanz facility among others. But the Bush administration rejected the Iranian offer, pushed the UN to impose the sanctions, and in a threatening move sent American military fleet into the Persian Gulf.

Putting Iran under real existential threat, being surrounded on the four sides by American troops, and continually being threatened by the Israelis and the Americans of being hit by nuclear bombs, Iranians had no choice but to exhibit their deterring muscles through their own war games on land, sea, and air. They also purchased the most sophisticated Russian missiles, and recently had joined the Russian navy in their military maneuvers in the Caspian Sea dubbed “Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian”.

Besides Russia the Iranians formed an alliance with Syria and Turkey, and gained the support of the Non-Aligned countries, and lately signaled its readiness to improve cooperation with North Korea.

As for the threat of the Israeli strike the Iranians warned that such a strike would only come as a joint effort with the US, and that Iran’s “firm and precise” response would reach all American assets in the Gulf region and the Israeli nuclear sites.

The real intentions behind the moves

Israelis know very well that they cannot strike Iran. They fully recognize that decisions concerning the Iranian issue are exclusively American due to Iran’s strength and geopolitical importance in the region. Iran is a large and a strong military country. Economic sanctions did nothing but helped Iranian rely on their own resources. The threats of possible attacks forced the Iranians to strengthen their military forces. Netanyahu’s “Iran first”, “Israel’s existential threat”, and “striking Iran” messages are directed towards the international political community first and towards the Israeli population second.

With the convening of the UN General Assembly this September, Netanyahu is trying to divert and engage the Assembly’s attention into the alleged Iranian nuclear threat. He hopes that such diversion would not give the Assembly enough time to discuss Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine and especially in Gaza Strip as reported by Human Rights Watch groups. Netanyahu’s “Iran first” message is also meant to freeze re-opening any peace negotiations with the Palestinians and to escape American and European pressure to suspend colonial settlements in the West Bank.

Internally Netanyahu, like all previous Israeli Prime Ministers, is manipulating the media to bombard the Israeli population with a propaganda campaign filled with the images of the monstrosity of the enemy (Israel’s existential threat) to incite the feelings of fear and hatred of others and of elitecism (God’s chosen people) to unite and to rally the Israelis behind his leadership.

Israelis have come from different countries with different nationalities, social norms, backgrounds, and political ideologies. To unite them together Israeli leaders resort to tactics of fear, hatred, elitecism and war to create some type of national bond among them.

The US wants to control all the energy resources in the Middle East and South East Asian regions. The US has firm footings in the Gulf States, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it started expanding in South East Asia starting with Afghanistan, jumping to Iraq then back into Pakistan. Now Iran is left in between as a gab in the US continuum presence.

The US wants also to control and manipulate the nuclear technology. After securing Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs and facilities, the US is now directing its attention towards North Korean and Iranian nuclear facilities. It seems hypocritical of the still nuclear arms producing US to deny the Iranians peaceful nuclear technology. This is especially so since the US had agreed to provide India with nuclear fuel for its reactors, and had entered into agreements with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to help them build their own peaceful nuclear facilities.

The US knows very well that it could not stop Iranian nuclear program especially with the present Iranian government. To delay Iranian nuclear program the US is threatening to use the UN to impose economic sanctions not only on Iran alone, but also on countries who would continue dealing with Iran on any level especially those selling refined oil products to Iran. The effectiveness of such sanctions is still to be seen since a lot of countries have trade and business dealings with Iran.

The endgame

Since the US is heavily involved in at least three open military confrontations, and since many of the American military assets are sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf region for possible Iranian retaliatory strike, and since Iran is a large country that is not weak militarily or been weakened yet by economical sanctions, and since Iran might withdraw from the NPT and might pursue an accelerated nuclear military program if faced with more pressure and more existential threats, the US has no viable solution but to accept Iran as a nuclear country compliant to the NPT and subject to IAEA monitoring.

The nuclear threat or attack of the US, a nuclear country, against Iran, a non-nuclear country, would be a fatal attack on the NPT itself. Other NPT-member countries might withdraw from the treaty and start developing their own nuclear arsenals as a deterrent weapon against nuclear threats from nuclear countries. The NPT would be annulled and nuclear proliferation would become world spread.

An attack, even surgical, on Iran would not happen for it has a catastrophic consequences on the whole world. A draw seems to be the most reasonable endgame.

Concluding remarks

Accepting Iran as a nuclear country would not stop the US and Israel from supporting terrorist attacks within Iran as they have been doing for the last six years. The two countries have been supporting terrorist organizations such as Mujahedeen Khalg, Jundallah, and Kurdish groups within Iran. These terrorists are responsible for attacks against Iranian military targets, interrupting power and communication lines to the nuclear facilities, and assassinations of some Iranian nuclear scientists such as Ardeshire Hassanpour. The US will also continue funneling American tax money to the Iranian opposition, as was done during the Iranian election (as confessed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with CNN’s reporter Fareed Zakaria) to topple down, to weaken, and to hinder the operation of the Iranian government.

Meanwhile the US is planning to take full advantage of the Iranian threat in the region in order to strengthen its grip on the oil producing Gulf States, and to siphon their oil money into the budgets of the American military companies under the guise of security. Hillary Clinton touched briefly on that plan during a televised interview in Thailand stating that nuclear Iran could be contained by an American so-called “defensive nuclear umbrella” over the region. The notion of this nuclear umbrella, if there is such a thing, was the brainchild of Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Dennis Ross, then senior editor of Middle East Quarterly in 2004. Of course such an umbrella would be developed, built, and paid for by oil money from the Gulf States.

Clinton in her remark had acknowledged the inevitability of Iran, faced with existential nuclear threats from both US and Israel, gaining a nuclear arsenal, and the inevitable American acceptance of this fact.

You confront evil, you do not negotiate with it.

– Natan Sharansky

While it may be a long way from Tel Aviv to Pyongyang, Israel bears considerable responsibility for North Korea’s increasingly fraught relations with the world. Indeed, through its small but influential support network in the United States, the self-styled Jewish state has played a rarely acknowledged but arguably decisive role in undermining progress towards a peaceful resolution of America’s longest running conflict. Though totally oblivious to this unwarranted intervention by a seemingly distant and irrelevant power, hundreds of millions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese could have paid, and may yet pay, a terrible price for Israel’s covert meddling in East Asian politics.

In his State of the Union Address delivered on 29 January, 2002, George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “Axis of Evil” that was allegedly supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. It later emerged that the provocative phrase which arbitrarily linked Pyongyang to Israel’s two greatest regional rivals had been written by David Frum, Bush’s Canadian speechwriter. An ardent Zionist, Frum recently said that the occupied West Bank belongs to Israel but that Palestinians living there shouldn’t have the vote. He is also the co-author with Richard Perle of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, in which the Likudnik neo-conservatives advocated a confrontational approach to North Korea.

Even more threatening from a North Korean perspective than being officially designated “evil” was the National Security Strategy of the United States announced by Bush in September 2002. Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative columnist for the Washington Post, coined the phrase “Bush doctrine” to describe the policy of preemptive strikes, which specifically targeted Iraq, Iran and North Korea. However, Philip Shenon, a New York Times reporter, claims in his book The Commission that it was Philip Zelikow, a neo-conservative member of Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board later appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who wrote the policy that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that its supposed “weapons of mass destruction” posed a threat to the United States.

Yet, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia, “I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel.” No doubt because this would not be, as Zelikow admitted, a “popular sell” to the American people, the grandiose words given Bush to read were somewhat less candid: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

The “Zelikow doctrine” had an immediate, and probably foreseeable, catalysing effect on an already fearful North Korean regime. Bruce Cumings, a specialist in modern Korean history, wrote, “From October 2002 onward they acted as if their only deterrent to this irresponsible administration was a nuclear one, a decision that any general sitting in Pyongyang (or Tehran) would have made.” Writing in 2004, Cumings predicted that if North Korea were to develop a nuclear deterrent, it would be known as “Bush’s bomb.” But since it was the Israel-centered neo-conservatives in the Bush administration that scuttled the 1994 Agreed Framework which had frozen Pyongyang’s nuclear developments for eight years, perhaps it might be more accurate to call it “the neo-con bomb.”

If the North Koreans really had the capacity to hit America with a missile — and if Kim Jong-Il were sufficiently “crazy” (as the pro-Israeli media portrays him) to start a war with a global superpower that has up to 5,000 nuclear warheads in its arsenal — they may have considered their own preemptive strike against one particular target in Washington D.C. For the building at 1150 17th Street, home to such neo-con strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and The Weekly Standard, is the source of much of Washington’s apparent animus toward Pyongyang.

It was there on November 22, 2004, for example, that William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, wrote a PNAC memo to “opinion leaders” entitled “Toward Regime Change in North Korea.” In the memo, Kristol praised an article in The Weekly Standard by Nicholas Eberstadt, “one of AEI’s in-house hawks on North Korea.” In “Tear Down This Tyranny,” Eberstadt had called for the ouster of Kim Jong-Il, to be achieved in part by “working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government.”

For neo-cons like Kristol and Eberstadt, it is seemingly preferable to risk provoking war with North Korea than to “appease” an “evil tyrant” like Kim Jong-Il — as if Kim were another genocidal Hitler and the then South Korean leader Roh another naive Chamberlain. Such “moral clarity” presumably comes easier to those who live at a comfortably safe distance from the firing zone.

Eberstadt is also the author of The End of North Korea, whose title summed up the Bush administration’s policy toward Pyongyang, as a New York Times reporter was once told by Eberstadt’s AEI colleague John Bolton, Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, whose hawkishness did much to wreck arms control. Bolton, described by the Zionist Organization of America as “one of Israel’s truest friends in the world,” sabotaged Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempts to start nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

Project for the New Israeli Humanitarianism

While the infamous militarist policies of the pro-Israel neo-conservatives undoubtedly intimidated Pyongyang, the Israel lobby’s lesser known “humanitarian” activism played a complementary role in provoking the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The appointment of Bill Kristol’s friend and fellow neo-con Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights was one of the Bush administration’s more provocative acts toward North Korea.Lefkowitz, who considers legitimate criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitism,” was not slow to criticize Pyongyang’s abuses, however. In January 2008, speaking at the AEI, he said, “The way the North Korean government treats its own people is inhumane and therefore deeply offensive to us. It should also offend free people around the world.” Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Lefkowitz’s selective condemnation, his undiplomatic language was hardly calculated to promote a smooth dialogue with the North Koreans.

Drawing on a study entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” Lefkowitz advocated linking humanitarian aid to human rights issues, a counterproductive strategy opposed by career diplomats in the State Department. As chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it, “We have no interest in weaponizing human rights.” The same, however, could not be said for Lefkowitz. As Suzy Kim and John Feffer wrote in Foreign Policy in Focus, “Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights.”

“The Hidden Gulag” report had been published by the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, an NGO which has among its officers and directors more than a fair share of pro-Israelis. It should, of course, strike people as a little odd to see the likes of Nicholas Eberstadt, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Congressmen Stephen Solarz and Gary Ackerman, and Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, championing North Koreans’ human rights while at the same time condoning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Lefkowitz’s appointment as human rights envoy came about as a result of the U.S. Congress passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004, legislation which his cousin, Michael Horowitz, played a key role in instigating. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the hawkishly pro-Israel Hudson Institute, hailed the passing of the bill as a “miracle” in an interview with Christianity Today. As director of Hudson’s Project for International Religious Liberty, he had mobilized Christian evangelicals to support the legislation based on the religious persecution of North Korea’s approximately 10,000 Christians.

Meanwhile, the plight of the rapidly dwindling Christian population in Israel and occupied Palestine, down from 350,000 in 1948 to about 175,000 today, goes unheeded by Horowitz’s evangelicals, many of whom are misled by Christian Zionist leaders like John Hagee to believe that the Bible endorses the modern state of Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land.

But the prize for chutzpah in Israel’s human rights advocacy for North Koreans must surely go to Natan Sharansky. In 2005, the “acclaimed human rights activist” told a Freedom House sponsored symposium advocating regime change in North Korea, “The people of North Korea must be free!” That same year Sharansky resigned from the Israeli cabinet in protest over then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza. As Housing Minister, Sharansky had, according to Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, “systematically enlarged the settlements on expropriated Arab land in the West Bank, trampling on the human and national rights of the Palestinians.”

Nevertheless, Sharansky was such a major influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy that he has been dubbed “Bush’s guru.” The thought that someone more extreme than Sharon helped shape the worldview of the world’s once most powerful leader is, as Avnery put it, “rather frightening.”

“You confront evil,” Sharansky told the Freedom House symposium, “you do not negotiate with it.” And that in a nutshell is the policy prescription pushed by Frum, Perle, Zelikow, Kristol, Eberstadt, Bolton (proof that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist), Lefkowitz, Horowitz, et al. on the Bush administration in its dealings with “evil” North Korea. The result of heeding that dangerously simplistic advice — a nuclear North Korea — has been an unmitigated failure for American diplomacy in East Asia.

But does Israel’s American lobby see its efforts to undermine negotiations with Pyongyang as a failure? Or to put it another way, does Israel actually benefit from the North Korean nuclear crisis?

With the U.S. having been induced by neo-con lies about weapons of mass destruction to eliminate the Iraqi threat to Israel, the focus of Israeli security concerns has shifted to the alleged Iranian threat. And the threat that an “unpredictable” nuclear-armed North Korea now supposedly poses to the United States is invariably cited by pro-Israelis in their efforts to push Washington toward war with Iran before its “mad Mullahs” too acquire nuclear weapons.

The real threat to Israel, however, is not that Iran is going to “wipe it off the map” (a mistranslation endlessly repeated by the media), but that its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East might end. For without that monopoly on the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, not only would Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions be forestalled, but the apartheid Jewish state might be forced to pay a little more attention to the egregious human rights abuses closer to home.

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that “several” officials from those states had said the IAEA has “credible information” suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was “incorrect.”

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear programme in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published August 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.

Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.”

Jahn explained ElBaradei’s refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to “avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency” and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear sites.

He also suggested ElBaradei had made “barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy” in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as “overtly political.”

In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei’s public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger — later known as the “Niger forgeries” — were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.

Charbonneau quoted a “senior Western diplomat” as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, which the IAEA has referred to as “alleged studies”.

What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau’s report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an “annex” to the coming report.

What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the “alleged studies” documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.

The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA told IPS that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the “alleged studies” documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.

The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the “alleged studies” documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence “sources and methods”, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.

The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.

The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.

However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.

That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a “green salt” conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.

According to a February 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran’s civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.

The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it “considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage”.

Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a “green salt” conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have “technical errors,” and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.

Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.

After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.

The AP’s Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran’s intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. “Iran’s stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring,” he wrote, “has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use.”

Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed August 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

Assassinations

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline

The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death squads’ under US occupation.

Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’(a child’s game)” justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007

The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.

The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics – with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary… and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

Warning to Iran

The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO’s during their post-election ‘Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Tehran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.

Conclusion

What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.

In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forgo its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.

Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.

This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.

The PMOI and the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) are the modern day representatives of an Iranian resistance group that goes back to the days of the Shah. Their beginnings are in the student movement that rose up against the Shah and US imperialism, ultimately throwing the Shah out of the country. The group itself has undergone several ideological changes since its inception and is currently best typified as a secular organization opposed to the social conservatism of the theocratic government in Tehran. To go beyond this general description requires considerably more space than is available here.

Unfortunately for the PMOI, it was categorized as a terrorist organization by the Bill Clinton administration. It continues to carry this designation in the US, although the designation was removed by the European Union earlier in 2009. On top of this label, which has certainly isolated the NCRI and PMOI from potential support among certain elements of the US power structure, the PMOI and NCRI have found their friendliest allies in the US amongst the pro-Zionist wing of the neoconservative movement. Although one can conceive of this support as simply a cynical move by the neocons to gain Iranian intelligence available to the NCRI in their neverending drumbeat towards an attack on Iran, the other side of the coin is that the NCRI and PMOI have curried this favor. This fact alone has made it next to impossible for the members of these groups to get any positive press or support from the US left and antiwar movement. Indeed, this coziness was enough to convince this writer to view these organizations with considerable caution, despite professing guarded support for them in the past. After all, in the US, it does matter who one shares their political bed with.

This attack and its aftermath is not about the PMOI’s all too apparent coziness with elements of the neoconservative establishment in the United States. It is about a human rights violation by Washington’s client government in Iraq. This is also not the recent elections in Iran and whether or not they were fair. It is about a group of dissidents who appear to be somewhat isolated from their natural constituency while also being surrounded by well-armed US and Iraqi military with instructions to keep them penned where they are.

It is wrong that the members of the PMOI were attacked by forces of the Maliki government in Baghdad on July 28 and 29, 2009 while US forces looked on. It is the right thing to expose this action and to ask that it not be repeated. The attack exists as a human rights violation in a country that is a vast ocean of human rights violations, many of them the result of the US invasion. It should be condemned. Yet, for some reason, the PMOI is asking one of the greatest human rights violators in Iraq and elsewhere around the world–the US government–to protect them.

In one prominent example, on June 7, five days before Iran’s presidential election, the website Tehran Bureau reported:

In an open letter, a group of employees of Iran’s Interior Ministry (which supervises the elections) warned the nation that a hard-line ayatollah, who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has issued a Fatwa authorizing changing votes in the incumbent’s favor.

According to Tehran Bureau, the letter stated:

After several polls taken by the government in May that indicated a rapid loss of support for the President, an ayatollah, who used to speak about political philosophy in Tehran’s public Friday prayers, held a confidential meeting with the elections’ supervisors. Quoting the Bagharah Soureh, verse 249, of the holy Quran, to justify vote fraud, he stated that,

“If someone is elected the president and hurts the Islamic values that have been spread [by Mr. Ahmadinejad] to Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela, and other places, it is against Islam to vote for that person. We should not vote for that person, and also warn people about that person. It is your religious duty as the supervisors of the elections to do so.”

According to Tehran Bureau’s translation, the letter said,

“After the meeting the elections supervisors, who had become happy and energetic for having obtained the religious fatwa to use any trick for changing the votes, began immediately to develop plans for it.”

Tehran Bureau adds that despite this alleged plot,

The letter ends by saying that a huge turnout by the people will nullify these unlawful attempts to rig the elections, and will save the nation from another four years of Mr. Ahmadinejad governance.

No author attribution is given for this article at Tehran Bureau. The site provided the text of the letter in Persian. But they offer nothing in the way of verification of its authenticity, and the letter itself is preceded by a brief introductory note. Similarly, no author for this introduction is given.

Did someone at Tehran Bureau write the introduction in Farsi? Or did they merely pass along the introductory note along with the text of the letter from another source? Why is the author’s name not given? Why is no source given? They offer not even the slightest hint of how they came by this letter. They say this is an “open letter”, so what, then, would be the problem with naming the source? Did these employees of the Interior Ministry who allegedly wrote the letter post it on a website somewhere? Did they publish it in a newspaper? Did they e-mail it directly to Tehran Bureau? Or did it perhaps originate from an opposition group, such as, perhaps, the campaign office of Mir Hossein Mousavi?

What’s more, if an ayatollah issued a “fatwa”, an opinion on matters relating to Islamic law, ordering the election to be rigged to result in a win for Ahmadinejad, why haven’t we heard about this elsewhere? While the claim has been widely circulated in alternative media and on blogs, the mainstream media has been silent on this one.

So who issued this “fatwa”? The letter as presented by Tehran Bureau simply says that it was “an ayatollah, who used to speak about political philosophy in Tehran’s public Friday prayers”. Tehran Bureau inserts its own speculation as to who this “ayatollah” is:

The reference to the “political philosophy preaching” person is clearly pointing to Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who used to do the preaching in Tehran’s Friday prayers. He is a reactionary cleric and the spiritual leader of the President and the hard-liners in the Basij militia and the armed forces.

From this report, the claim that Ayatollah Yazdi issued a fatwa commanding that the election be rigged to give Ahmadinejad a win would be circulated around the internet, asserted as fact, despite the total lack of verification or corroboration.

Tehran Bureau

Who is Tehran Bureau? Originally, it was a blog hosted by Blogspot.com. Tehran Bureau was announced in a press release on February 26 – little more four months prior to the election. The press release stated:

Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, M.S. ’05, M.A. ’06, has launched Tehran Bureau, an online news magazine. The blog-style site aims to separate fact from misinformation about Iran by having specialized, bilingual journalists from around the world report on the country.

There’s a little more about others involved:

At present, Niknejad divides her time between New York City and Boston. Fariba Pajooh is the chief correspondent in Tehran, while Jason Rezaian will cover the Iranian presidential campaign from the capital city. Leila Darabi ‘06 will contribute reporting from New York City. Other reporters are based in Isfahan in Iran, Dubai, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Florence and Berlin. Thor Neureiter will develop video for the Web site. Most of Tehran Bureau’s staff is bilingual.

And a little more about Niknejad:

Niknejad, who was born in Iran and lived there until age 17, is a lawyer-turned-journalist. As an M.S. student at the Journalism School, she specialized in newspaper reporting. The following year, Niknejad earned an M.A. in journalism with a focus on politics.

She has reported for the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, California Lawyer and PBS/Frontline. Most recently, she was a staff reporter for the new English-language newspaper The National in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Niknejad is a syndicated columnist with Agence Global and a freelance producer and consultant on Iran to ABC News.

The press release concludes with this interesting statement (emphasis added): “A recurrent theme in Tehran Bureau’s coverage this year will be revolution and exile.”

The blog still exists in part. But the only content remaining there is the text of the “fatwa” letter.

Curiously, the domain TehranBureau.com is owned not by Niknejad, but by Jason Rezaian. Even more curiously, that domain name was created on June 12, 2008 – exactly one year to the day before Iran’s presidential election, and months before Niknejad says she set up Tehran Bureau in 2008, which was several months before she actually announced the launch of Tehran Bureau on Blogspot, which was prior to its actual move to TehranBureau.com.

And yet, despite having had the name registered for a year before the election, there’s no indication the domain was actually in use before Niknejad’s Tehran Bureau came along. The site is new enough that it doesn’t show up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and Alexa shows little to no traffic to that domain until April, with a sharp spike in June as a result of their coverage of the election.

“Not an opposition news organization”

Tehran Bureau’s About page states:

Tehran Bureau is an independent news organization. It is not affiliated with or funded by any government, religious organization, political party, lobby or interest group. Yet it’s reporting has been most favorable to Mousavi. A prominent theme is that the election was stolen; a theme of which the alleged “fatwa” letter is but one example. Either in spite or because of this, Niknejad and Tehran Bureau have gotten some prominent and positive media attention.

In a June 17 op-ed in the Guardian entitled “Diaspora Iranians spreading the message”, David Mattin speaks of “the ‘green wave’ that was sweeping” Iran, which, the author and his friends “thought” would “install Mir Hossein Mousavi as president”. He adds towards the end:

For diaspora Iranians, then, the answer may lie in projects such as the brilliant Tehran Bureau, a news website that connects journalists, bloggers and photographers in Iran with those in the diaspora, set up by American-Iranian journalist Kelly Golnoush Niknejad.

So Tehran Bureau is considered an “answer” for Iranians who support Mousavi and the “green” revolution, the color Mousavi chose to represent his reformist party for the campaign.

The Associated Press called Tehran bureau “a must-read for many who closely followed the disputed re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

NPR called Tehran Bureau “one of the most reliable sources for news” on Iran while “the government of Iran cracks down on journalists there”. Noting the site’s success, NPR notes, “Tehran Bureau gets quoted now in the New York Times and has become well-known and respected.”

In an interview with NPR, Niknejad explained that she “just started posting” information “as fast as I could.” “The information was raw,” she said, and she “didn’t have time to sculpt it into stories”, so she would “just copy and paste to put out information.”

This method of copying and pasting information was similarly used by prominent commentators Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic’s “Daily Dish” and Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, both of whom were live-blogging events following the election and both of whom relied heavily on anonymous or unknown sources, such as Twitter users. The overriding theme of both Sullivan’s and Pitney’s blogs was the fraudulent nature of the election and the brutal response by the government attempting to silence those protesting the vote. Their respective blogs became rumor mills, flooded with completely unverifiable information, but always favorable to Mousavi and his supporters.

NPR notes that “Niknejad also knows her site is big enough now to be noticed by the Iranian government. She publishes most reports without bylines.” As noted previously, the piece on the “open letter” was published without author attribution. So here, despite being characterized as “one of the most reliable sources for news” by the mainstream media, we have an acknowledgment that Tehran Bureau would simply “copy and paste” information about events in Iran without attribution or sourcing.

A June 20 piece in the Boston Globe called Tehran Bureau “a go-to source” for news on Iran. It notes that the site is “edited from Niknejad’s parents’ living room in Newton”, a Boston suburb, and quotes Niknejad saying, “Everybody thinks this is some kind of extensive bureau, but it’s just me”.

But it’s not “just” Niknejad. As we’ve seen, the site is actually owned by someone else, who registered the domain months before Niknejad launched her blog, which then was only later moved to the domain owned by Jason Rezaian.

The Boston Globe article quotes Niknejad saying, “Tehran Bureau is not an opposition news organization.” The article explains:

The English-language site has generated a lot of attention over the past few weeks as tensions escalated over allegations of electoral fraud by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. When demonstrators were shot and communication with the West was curtailed in a government clampdown, Tehran Bureau’s stream of news alerts and Twitter feeds became a valued source of information cited by The New York Times and other Western news organizations.

The Globe offers some further information about Niknejad:

Niknejad’s family emigrated from Iran to San Diego when she was 17, after living through the Iranian Revolution and the first stage of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. She went on to study law, and then got two master’s degrees from the Columbia Journalism School. Her parents moved to the Boston area seven years ago. She has not returned to Iran since she left in 1984, but she found herself pulled constantly toward her native land, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. This past September, she returned to Boston from nearly a year of reporting for an English-language newspaper in Dubai – a major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran – and resolved to launch a blog.

The “listening post” of Dubai

Dubai certainly is a “major Persian Gulf listening post for events in Iran”. The State Department called Dubai a “natural location” for a regional office due to its “proximity to Iran and access to an Iranian diaspora.”

That was in a State Department cable discussing the creation of the Office of Iranian Affairs (OIA) under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The OIA sought to “reach out to the Iranian people” and recruit more Iran experts and Persian-speaking officers into the Foreign Service, the Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), and other branches of the State Department.

According to the cable, the Dubai office of the OIA would be modeled on the listening station in the Latvian capital of Riga to gather information on the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

The Iranian media has called the OIA the “regime-change office”. A State Department official based in Dubai denied that, saying “It is not some recruiting office and is not organizing the next revolution in Iran.”

As British writer Claud Cockburn famously said, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”

The leaked State Department cable said that the Deputy Director of the Dubai station would be responsible for seeking “ways to use USG programs and funding to support Iranian political and civic organizations” and “to alert Washington on [the] need to issue statements on behalf of Iranian dissidents.”

And a State Department senior official told CNN that the purpose of the OIA was “to facilitate a change in Iranian policies and actions”.

The OIA was established in 2006 under funding from Congress allocated “to mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Tehran government,” in the words of the Guardian. The Christian Science Monitor reported candidly that the “implicit goal” of the funding was “regime change from within”.

The Obama administration has continued support for Iranian dissident groups through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been soliciting applications for $20 million in grants to “promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran” even while President Obama insists that the U.S. “is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs”.

In a report on the funding, USA Today observed that “The State Department and USAID decline to name Iran-related grant recipients for security reasons.” In other words, the Obama administration doesn’t want the strings attached to Iranian dissident groups to be seen, a policy much more in line of critics of the Bush administration’s overt financing for the promotion of regime change.

It’s reasonable to assume that the UAE remains a central hub for U.S. efforts to further the U.S. policy of regime change, enshrined in law under the guise of the Iran Freedom Support Act, which authorizes the President “to provide financial and political assistance (including the award of grants) to foreign and domestic individuals, organizations, and entities working for the purpose of supporting and promoting democracy for Iran.”

In another example, the State Department subcontracted an initiative to develop a news website to provide information to Iranians through new media and to recruit Iranian journalists to contribute to the effort to “promote democracy”, the usual euphemism.

Obama’s “hands-off” approach has been looked upon much more favorably than Bush’s overt support for Iranian groups seeking regime change by the leadership of opposition groups themselves. Niknejad has herself been a critic of the Bush administration’s overt strategy for regime change.

Niknejad has written elsewhere that she was “the diplomatic affairs correspondent for a new English-language newspaper” in the capital of the UAE.

In what has been called a cold war between Iran and the United States, the UAE has emerged as a Vienna of sorts – a place where America’s Iran-watchers can mingle with thousands of Iranians. One hub for this is the expanded Iran Desk at the U.S. consulate in Dubai, the more cosmopolitan UAE city-state up the coast from the capital. If Iranians are suspicious of journalists, it’s partly because our reporting jobs can seem like the perfect cover to gather intelligence.

As they often are. She criticized the Congressional funding for the OIA, however, saying:

Things got worse the following year, when the Bush administration asked Congress for tens of millions of dollars to secretly fund NGOs and activists to destabilize the Iranian government. It stoked government paranoia and became an effective tool in the hands of officials who have used it to stifle dissent and spread fear.

The objection, in this widely shared criticism of the Bush administration, generally isn’t that the U.S. is engaging in such activities, just that by doing so in such a blatant and open manner it actually undermined the efforts of Iranian dissident and opposition groups struggling to accomplish a change of government in Iran. In other words, the U.S. shouldn’t be perceived as interfering in Iranian affairs. The implied corollary is that if the U.S. is going to interfere, it should do so in a manner that allows it a measure of plausible deniability – something the U.S. didn’t have under Bush.

Niknejad offered a little more information on the English-language newspaper she was writing for:

At that time, the circumstances in the UAE were stacked against me. The paper I was writing for had no name and was still months away from being published. As we started dry runs, I wrote stories on deadline for a paper with no name that no one outside the newsroom saw.

As noted in the press release announcing the launch of Tehran Bureau, the paper she was referring to is The National out of Abu Dhabi, owned by the Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC). According to the ADMC website:

Abu Dhabi Media Company is a vertically integrated media company created in 2007 as a public joint stock company from the assets of Emirates Media Incorporated…. The company is headquartered in Abu Dhabi with offices in Cairo, Dubai and Washington D.C.

Emirates Media Incorporated (EMI) was established in 1999 by the government of the UAE under the Ministry of Information and Culture. Financing for EMI includes funding includes grants. The Minister of Information Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayid described it by saying, “the Government has relinquished formal control over the country’s largest media group. Emirates Media Incorporated now enjoys editorial and administrative independence. It remains somewhat dependent, however, on government funding, while ownership is still officially vested in the government.”

In 2006, EMI worked with the BBC World Service to set up Radio Al Mirbad to broadcast information covering southern Iraq while it was still occupied by the British military. The BBC’s Persian service, of course, has been accused by Iran of fomenting unrest such as by encouraging protests to dispute the election results.

“We stand with them and support them”

On one hand, Niknejad says Tehran Bureau is “not an opposition news organization”. On the other hand, a principle source for her reporting on events in Iran is a member of the Mousavi election campaign, a fact she revealed during an event coordinated to teach people how to show “solidarity” with pro-Mousavi Iranians.

Niknejad is a member of The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA). On June 23, AMEJA held a teach-in to discuss the ongoing events in Iran following the election. The teach-in was webcast on the Voices from Iran website, which was created the day prior to the event and which has little content other than an embedded video of webcast, hosted on USTREAM.

During the event, the terms “pro-Mousavi” and “pro-democracy” were curiously used synonymously, despite an admission at the beginning that calling Mousavi’s campaign “pro-democracy” was perhaps “wishful thinking”.

The first speaker at the event was Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He spoke on how the protests that erupted following the election were “not spontaneous”, but rather organized by the young volunteers who gravitated to Mousavi’s campaign and had learned how to organize and distribute information prior to the election. Various organizations were also involved, such as women’s organizations, journalist organizations, youth organizations, and others. The protests, he said, were an “outgrowth” of the campaigning in early June.

One prominent organization campaigning for women’s rights in Iran is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation (ABF) in Washington D.C., a recipient of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is mandated financing under U.S. law from the Congress, despite its pretense of being a “non-governmental organization”.

Another group that has received substantial funding from NED is the National Iranian American Council, which has been granted money in part to carry out a “media training workshop” to train participants in public relations and otherwise support groups both within and outside Iran.

Interestingly, Keshavarzian also listed “election irregularities” included in the “fatwa”, including the charge that mobile polling stations the printing of a large number of extra ballots were suspicious activities. He also stated that Mousavi’s campaign headquarters had been attacked, and that all these things were evidence of fraud. Every one of these claims can be traced to Tehran Bureau.

Even more interestingly, he said that the Mousavi campaign had showed great foresight in their pre-election efforts. “Their narrative that they constructed prior to the election fit in nicely into the events after the election”, he said. Presumably, this includes the narrative that the election would be stolen that he had just outlined from information that had appeared before the election took place, such as the “fatwa” letter.

As Paul Craig Roberts has observed, “Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote.”

When Iran declared the results of the election early, the charge was made that “the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted”.

Another speaker, journalist Kouross Esmaeli, also a member of AMEJA, addressed the question of how to show “solidarity” with Mousavi’s supporters protesting in the streets. “We stand with them and support them,” he said. But he also urged caution against the perception of U.S. interference and said that any connection of the protests with U.S. “imperialism” would taint them and serve only to undermine them.

Perhaps the most interesting comments, though, came from Niknejad. She explained more about her reporting of events in Iran and her sources from which she would “copy and paste” onto Tehran Bureau. She explained that she used Facebook and other social networking sites for information, until the Iranian government shut such websites down. Then “it was very difficult for us”, she said, to get information.

But she did mention one source that was able to continue to provide information. “I was connected to someone that I know very well”, she explained, “and that I trust very much, who works – who happens to work – at the Mousavi campaign. So we were getting, you know, almost like minute by minute updates on what was going on there.”

Among the information received from the source at the Mousavi campaign was that the campaign headquarters was “stormed by militia” (evidence of election funny-business, remember, from the previous speaker), of which Niknejad emphasized, “I knew it was coming from a very credible source”.

Niknejad also explained how, based on the information this source who “happens” to work for the Mousavi campaign (purely a coincidence), it looked like “Mousavi was winning” early on. This just “happens” to fit perfectly with the “narrative” constructed by the Mousavi campaign early on to be used following the election in order to try to discredit the election and to call for its result to be nullified (surely another strange coincidence).

Niknejad also rightly observed how the information Tehran Bureau would “copy and paste” from sources such as someone working for Mousavi’s campaign was picked up off of Twitter and posted on other blogs, making “Tehran Bureau a source of information” about the election and subsequent events.

Niknejad also claimed that Tehran Bureau was “hacked”, the implication being that it was targeted by the Iranian regime. She explained that when she tried to log on and do other things with the site, it became very slow.

There’s a much simpler explanation for this, which is the enormous increase in bandwidth the new site was faced with (visible in a dramatic spike on Alexa) very suddenly at the time of the election. This alternative explanation would also fit with what she said next, that they had a company called MidPhase that put the website back up. In other words, Tehran Bureau changed hosting plans – no doubt to a plan on a new server that included more bandwidth allocation.

But the claim that the website was “hacked” by the Iranian government fits in much more nicely with the constructed “narrative”.

Another interesting point was made during the question and answer session. One of the panelists warned, without so much as a hint of recognition of the irony, to be wary because there is a lot of “misinformation” coming out on Facebook and Twitter – from the Iranian regime. We have to find sources that we trust, therefore, the panelist continued, like Tehran Bureau, which gets its information from trusted sources like members of Mousavi’s election campaign. Again, there was no indication whatsoever that the speaker was aware of the irony.

The differentiating variable becomes clear: information sympathetic towards the Iranian regime is deemed not credible while information sympathetic towards Mousavi and his reformist supporters is considered trusted. This is simply a matter of faith.

The ‘Fatwa’ letter and ‘talk of a ‘green revolution’

The Guardian on June 8, a day after Tehran Bureau had posted the “open letter” claim, reported another useful part of the “narrative” constructed prior to the election: “Experts agree the higher the turnout the greater the chance that Mousavi will unseat Ahmadinejad, possibly in a second round run-off. Iran’s interior ministry said it was hoping for a record turnout among the country’s 46 million voters.”

So if it turns out there is a high turnout and Ahmadinejad wins, it must therefore be a dubious result, if we trust the unknown “Experts”. This part of the “narrative” is eerily similar to the assertion in the “fatwa” letter itself that a high turnout could serve to counteract the regime’s alleged attempts to fix the election. And the Guardian report refers to that letter in the very next sentence: “But there was no response to a report that ministry employees were instructed to rig the election results on the basis of a fatwa – religious edict – from a pro-Ahmadinejad ayatollah.”

Tehran Bureau is the named source of this “report”.

On June 9, still three days before the election, the website Rooz ran an article on the “fatwa” entitled “Mesbah Yazdi’s Decree to Rig Votes”. The website is published by a self-described “reformist journalist” as a part of the Iran Gooya media group.

Rooz has prominent ad links to WashingtonTV, a “Washington, D.C.-based news site” offered in both English and Persian. Curiously, that website was launched in early May, barely a month before the Iranian presidential election. And that site’s “About” page interestingly states:

With the approach of Iran’s tenth presidential election, to be held on 12 June 2009, the site is also devoting a special section to daily updates of news and events on the election.

It also states that “WashingtonTV has writers and contributors in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including contributions by citizen journalists from inside Iran.” The website is registered by Proxy, Inc. through GoDaddy.com, Inc. This is a means of protecting the privacy of the registrant.

Why would a legitimate news organization want to hide its organizational information? If you do a WHOIS lookup of the New York Times website, for example, you’ll see that it is registered to “New York Times Digital, 620 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10018, US”. There are administrative and technical contacts. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, etc., are all registered to their respective news corporations, with organization street addresses and contact phone numbers and e-mail address.

There is some contact information available on the WashingtonTV website. The phone numbers are all area code 202, Washington, D.C. In fact, they’re all the same number, 470-3030. The News Desk, Video Production Lab, Advertising Department, Editors, and more are all the same phone number, with only three different extensions between them.

There is also a mailing address given. However, it’s to a P.O. box with ZIP code 20043-4151. A lookup of ZIP code 20043 on the U.S. Postal Service website reveals that this ZIP code is a “Special Case”. What are special cases? They include cases where “The ZIP CodeTM is used for a specific company or organization.” It could also be a military ZIP Code: “Military – This is a military specific ZIP code for an APO/FPO (Air/Army Post Office or Fleet Post Office) or a domestic military installation.” Or it could be: “PO Box Only – This ZIP Code is for a specific PO Box.”

In other words, this ZIP Code doesn’t exist, except for by use by a single organization, the U.S. military, or a single P.O. Box – or a perfect cover, perhaps, for an intelligence black propaganda or PSYOPS operation.

Rooz is also registered through a proxy. While there are numerous proxy services available (many servers provide them), it happens to also be by Proxy, Inc. through GoDaddy.com.

As already noted, Rooz’s “About” page states, confusingly, that it is published by “an independent and reformist journalist”, but also states that the “Publisher” is “Iran Gooya media group, registered in France on January 21, 2005”.

Gooya is a website that has come up repeatedly in my investigations into numerous claims that have been made throughout the events that followed the election. The site’s homepage has prominent ads for BBC Persian, the Voice of America Persian News Network, and Radio Farda.

The VOA and Radio Farda are operated out of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and are prohibited from broadcasting into the U.S. because it would violate the Smith-Mundt Act, which forbids USIA (the Ministry of Propaganda, if we drop the Orwellian euphemism) from being used “to influence public opinion”.

Gooya is similarly registered through the same proxy as Rooz. Its news website similarly features ads for BBC Persian, the VOA Persian, and Radio Farda.

Returning to the alleged “fatwa” letter, Rooz reported:

Following the discovery of a “Fatwa” (”religious decree”) issued by ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi which sanctions cheating in Friday’s presidential election and was published in an open letter written by a group of Ministry of Interior employees, the heads of the Election Supervision Committees established by reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi sent a letter to the head of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Jannati, warning about the possibility of manipulating election results.

This article states that the alleged letter “has been signed by a number of Ministry of Interior employees”. Interestingly, the text of the letter at Tehran Bureau had no signatures. Rooz adds: “The letter does not reveal the identity of the seminary school professor, but describes the qualities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spiritual guide, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.”

According to the translation of the letter, the “fatwa” supposedly issued by Yazdi stated:

If someone is elected president whereby Islamic principles that are currently on the rise in Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela and other parts of the world, start diminishing, it is Haraam [forbidden by Islam] to vote for that person. We shouldn’t vote for that person and we should inform the people not to vote for him either, or else. For you, as administrators of the election, everything is permitted to this end.

The “fatwa” also appeared in an article in Newsmax by Kenneth Timmerman. Writing a day before the election, Timmerman followed the “narrative”: “As the wildest campaign of the past 30 years winds down, Iranians are worried that their votes won’t decide the result of the election Friday. Instead, they fear, the unelected officials at Iran’s Interior Ministry in charge of counting those votes will sway the outcome.”

Timmerman provides some further insightful information about the “fatwa” letter:

Supporters of “reformist” candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, with the backing of the Persian Service of Voice of America, claim to have discovered a secret “fatwa” or religious ruling issued by a radical cleric close to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They contend that it encourages bureaucrats at the Interior Ministry to do “whatever it takes” to get their man elected…. The “fatwa” was revealed in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei from a pro-Mousavi group of Interior Ministry officials, who asked him to intervene to keep the election fair.

Thus, if Timmerman is correct, the “open letter” was an example of a “copy and paste” job by Tehran Bureau of information propagated by the Mousavi campaign and the VOA.

Timmerman also reported that while there was a movement among opposition groups both in Iran and the U.S. (and elsewhere) to boycott the election, the VOA had “urged Iranians to go to the polls no matter what” in coverage slanted towards Mousavi:

Well-respected parties, including the Iran Nation’s Party, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, Marze Por Gohar (Glorious Frontiers), and others have called for a boycott. But in recent weeks, editors and supervisors at the Voice of America’s Persian Service have banned them from the airwaves.

“It would be one thing if they just closed their eyes,” Roozbeh Farahanipour, a spokesman for Marze Por Gohar, told Newsmax. “But it’s as if the State Department and Voice of America had become campaign advisers to Mousavi.”

Some Iranians believe that has happened.

Saeed Behbehani, the owner of Mihan TV in suburban Washington, D.C., says he recently spoke with a well-known Iranian-American businessman who boasts of his ties to the State Department and who just returned from a trip to Dubai. The businessman said he met with Mousavi’s campaign manager, Mehdi Khazali.

“The day after they met, VOA put Khazali on the air,” Behbehani said.

Some of the VOA broadcasters themselves are upset at how slanted the U.S.-taxpayer funded network has become.

Timmerman also had this prescient comment (again, recall this was one day prior to the election): “And then, there’s the talk of a “green revolution” in Tehran, named for the omnipresent green scarves and banners that fill the air at Mousavi campaign events.”

The “green revolution” as it has since come to be called, refers to protestors who support Mousavi and charge that Ahmadinejad’s win was the result of electoral fraud. Why would there be talk of a “green revolution” before the election results were announced? Unless, of course, it was all part of the “narrative”, planned beforehand to lead to the protests – which were “not spontaneous”, we may recall – in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime.

Timmerman continues with a perhaps even more extraordinary acknowledgment about the role of the NED (emphasis added):

The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting “color” revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.

And Kenneth Timmerman, as Daniel McAdams has pointed out, is perhaps in as good a position as anyone to know. He’s the President and CEO of The Foundation for Democracy, “established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.” He’s also the author of the book Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

The claim of the “fatwa” was picked up by Jeremy J. Stone and repeated in the Huffington Post in a piece entitled “How the Iranian Election Was Stolen”. Stone touts the report from Tehran Bureau as evidence for his assertion that the election was stolen:

According to an open letter of early June by a group of employees who work on elections in the Interior Ministry — after May polls showed that Ahmadinejad would lose the election – [Iranian Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah] Yazdi gave the Interior Ministry employees a Fatwa, a religious degree, authorizing the changing of votes.

Muhammad Sahimi likewise repeated the claim at Antiwar, stating matter-of-factly that the results of the election had been “rigged” and describing it as an “election coup”. The men behind this “coup” have as their “spiritual leader” Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the person who allegedly issued the “fatwa” for the elections to be rigged. Sahimi states without qualification (and without a source) that: “Two weeks before the elections Mesbah issued a secret fatwa – which was leaked by some in the Interior Ministry – authorizing the use of any means to reelect Ahmadinejad, hence giving the green light for rigging the elections.”

This is the only piece of evidence in the entire article to support the assertion that the election was “rigged”.

“As loony and baseless as possible”

The Iranian regime, of course, has claimed that the U.S., Britain, and Israel are behind the claims of a fraudulent election. “Americans and Zionists sought to destabilize Iran”, asserted Intelligence Minister Mohseni Ejei, rejecting allegations of vote rigging.

While remarks from Iranian government officials are certainly not evidence for it, it nevertheless certainly remains a perfectly plausible explanation, despite a strong tendency by commentators in the U.S. media, both mainstream and alternative, corporate news and blogs, not only to dismiss the possibility, but to portray the very suggestion as an absurdity.

Noted journalist Fareed Zakaria explained this phenomenon quite candidly. He begins with an acknowledgment:

And it is worth remembering that the United States still funds guerrilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic. Most of these are tiny groups with no chance of success, funded largely to appease right-wing members of Congress. But the Tehran government is able to portray this as an ongoing anti-Iranian campaign.

Notice his use of the word “portray”. The Iranian regime “is able to portray” an ongoing anti-government campaign “as an ongoing anti-Iranian campaign.” Again, the issue isn’t what the facts are, but what the perceptions are. Zakaria then praises President Obama’s response to events in Iran, saying, “In this context, President Obama has been right to tread cautiously — for the most part — to extend his moral support to Iranian protesters but not get politically involved.”

Remember, it’s not that funding “guerilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic” isn’t being “politically involved”. It’s simply that Obama has wisely, and not without success, created the perception of being politically detached. With this as his framework, Zakaria concludes:

Ahmadinejad is also a politician with considerable mass appeal. He knows that accusing the United States and Britain of interference works in some quarters. Our effort should be to make sure that those accusations seem as loony and baseless as possible. Were President Obama to get out in front, vociferously supporting the protests, he would be helping Ahmadinejad’s strategy, not America’s.

So, accusations that the U.S. is interfering in Iran are true. But acknowledging that would be strategically unwise. “Our effort” – and by “our” Zakaria presumably includes journalists like himself – should not be to report the truth (drawing the obvious corollary), but to work to discredit anyone who observes that the long arm of the U.S. has certainly not been withdrawn from Iranian affairs.

There is a vast amount of unverified or, in some cases, verifiably false information floating around, often originating from sources with a clear bias. Tehran Bureau’s use as a primary source someone who is a member of the Mousavi campaign is just one notable example. Information from such sources is then spread around the internet, sometimes with viral effect, without attribution or sourcing and with a completely uncritical eye. This is often on account of the commentator’s own bias, such as the assumption of the teach-in Niknejad participated in that we should express “solidarity” with the “pro-democracy” – that is to say, the “pro-Mousavi” – movement.

Our effort should not be to take sides in an election campaign in a foreign sovereign nation, but rather to make the best effort to be objective and, far from reporting only that information which suits our own personal political ideology, to discern from the available information in an effort to learn the truth.

Regrettably, numerous commentators on recent events in Iran obviously disagree, preferring instead the creed of Fareed Zakaria.