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Syria regime change PR in high gear: More ‘newborn baby slaughter’ propaganda

February 13, 2012

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
February 12, 2012

LONDON – We can already see exact parallels with the current PR operation to bring down Syria with how Libya went down. In one story published today, it seems that one award-winning mainstream newspaper has been caught red-handed running faux news on Syria - and incredibly, it’s not the first time this exact story has been used.

Late last week, reporter Alastair Beach of The Independent newspaper based in London, cited “evidence” in his article entitled “Assad’s slaughter of the innocents“, claiming that Syrian President Assad’s security forces have indiscriminately killed scores of newborn babies in Homs this week, as his article claims:

“Bashar al-Assad’s bloody siege of Homs intensified yesterday as clear evidence emerged that his indiscriminate shelling of the restive town had started claiming innocent victims, including at least 18 premature babies and three entire families. The evidence came as civilians in the besieged city endured a fifth day of incessant shellfire – the worst yet, according to eyewitnesses – with dozens of other people being killed as the brutal assault continued.”

Writer Beach’s source for his claims seem to originate from only one organization, not in Syria – but in London. Surprisingly, the Independent’s chief source for the alleged horrors in question is a nearly invisible organization known as the ”Syrian Observatory for Human Rights”(SOHR) (and to make matters worse, there are two competing SOHR orgs in London- with the same name although the Independent does not provide a link to either org), who claim to have an office based in London, but apparently have no address or contact phone number listed - only and email address. Even murkier however, is that fact that there are no names associated with the SOHR on their website, and many of its articles have been written under the fictitious pen name known as “Rami Abdul Rahman“.

It’s likely that “Rami Abdul Rahman” could be one Rami Abdelrahman, depicted in other online press coverage as head of the SOHR, and is reported to have met with Britain’s Foreign Secretary,William Hague at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on November 21, 2011.

One can only conclude that with no names or contact information, the SOHR is – by definition - a very well-hidden, clandestine lobbying organization, and in this case, it appears to be lobbying for regime change in Syria, from inside Britain’s Foreign Office.

 Before regime change in Tripoli, the US, France and Britain relied on the likes of Soliman Bouchuiguir, the former Libyan League for Human Rights president with ties to NATO’s National Transitional Council (NTC), helped to generate numerous lies needed by the west to justify NATO’s now famously titled “humanitarian intervention” – allegedly to protect Libyans.  This human rights impostor – like his present day Syrian counterpart Rami Abdelrahman who may very well have ties to the Paris-based rebel coalition known as Syrian National Council (SNC), made then Colonel Moumar Gaddafi a targeted by spreading lies of alleged state crimes – but with with no evidence, as outlined in documents released last October by the publication Voltaire. Syria’s President Assad is currently undergoing the exact same treatment, and in the exact same manner.

Babies in incubators: a recycled media hoax

Amazingly, this exact same story was also making the rounds recently in August of 2011, when a similar claim was busy circulating online through various social networks including Twitter in Arabic - the exact same tale of premature babies who died in their incubators when Syrian forces cut off electricity to hospitals during their assault, not in Homs, but on the city of Hama.

Even though it admits that it could not independently verify the account, CNN still ran with the SOHR rumor back in August, broadcasting: ”Rights Group: 8 babies die after power cut to Syrian hospital“.

Electronic Infidada reported on the August 2011 baby hoax, stating back then, “Evidence suggests it is a cruel hoax, and the pictures of the “dead babies” widely circulated online are false.”  They went on to outline parallels between the August faux story and other past regime change PR campaigns:

“URGENT – Syria | The electricity was cut today from the city of Hama, and the outage included the hospitals. Following this, the Shabiha [state militia] deliberately destroyed the electricity generators in the hospitals which led to the deaths of all the premature babies (more than 40 in a single hospital).”

To me the story was immediately suspicious. First of all it sounded too much like the false reports of invading Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait in August 1990 — reports that were used to build public support and urgency for the 1991 Gulf War. These claims were part of an elaborate propaganda effort by the Washington PR consultancy Hill & Knowlton hired by the Kuwaiti government.

The fact that an award-winning newspaper like the UK’s Independent would use such a shadowy outfit to support one of its most shocking headlined stories on the crisis in Syria – is also surprising in itself. The biggest problem with both seperate claims of dying babies in incubators put forward by the SOHR, and circulated in the corporate media by the likes of  The Independent and CNN, is that at no point along the line, has the SOHR been held accountable for what are patently unsubstantiated claims.

Lobbying groups and their governments in-exile are traditionally the source of anti-regime “heart-string” reports which have in the past been passed on for broadcast by major media outlets, which naturally follows with favoring pre-emptive military strike, or as recently seen with Libya – a ‘humanitarian intervention’. 

We can see how the corporate media will knowingly run sensationalist, unverified accounts of human rights events in countries like Libya and Syria, but what about out elected leaders? Will they too run with these same wild claims in order to make their public case for war?

No doubt. Members of the NATO governments have also been assigned their roles in making intervention possible. Britain’s William Hague seems to be running point on the PR campaign for regime change in Syria. Following Russia and China’s veto of the UN’s recent revolution for action in Syria, Hague condemned the decision – and used wild, unverified statistics most likely gleaned from his friend at the SOHR, as reported by the Guardian:

“More than 2,000 people have died since Russia and China vetoed the last draft resolution in October 2011,” he said after the vote. “How many more need to die before Russia and China allow the UN security council to act?”

Journalist Tony Cartalucci reported back in December regarding the clandestine activities of SOHR, adding:

It is quite clear that the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” based in London and receiving the entirety of their reports via “phone” & YouTube videos from Syria, is working in coordination with both US-funded NGOs and the British Foreign Minister. Considering that Hague similarly coddled Libyan opposition leaders in London while playing a key role in promoting the NATO attack on Libya and the subsequent installation of a BP oilman as “prime minister,” Abdelrahman’s consorting signifies a verbatim repeat of the now openly fraudulent and genocidal NATO campaign in Libya.

Just as in Libya, where “human rights activists” have now admitted to fabricating the evidence used by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to rubber stamp Wall Street and London’s designs for regime change, likewise the “evidence” from Syria has turned out to be a complete fraud, derived by opposition “witnesses” and compiled by a corporate D.C. think-tank director into a UN “human rights report.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights serves as the exclusive source of “reports” coming out of Syria despite the fact that it is actually, entirely based in London. While it is verified that the NGOs it works in tandem with are US-funded, the Observatory itself fails to publish where its money comes from or the backgrounds of those that constitute its membership. We then, are expected to simply believe on face value a mysterious organization whose head meets with the British government and their unverified “witness accounts” as evidence to initiate military intervention at the cost of potentially millions of lives.

The UN based the whole premise for its Security Council Resolution 1973 for Libya on reports from western-backed Libyan rebels and the NTC. Their wild claims included – unbelievably and highly reported by the western media - that Gaddafi led jet attacks on his own people, and killed more than 6,000 unarmed protester cum civilians in the run up to NATO intervention. This jet claim was needed as a key component in order to get a No Fly Zone included in resolution 1973.

During the run-up to their vote on the matter, no due diligence was carried out by any of the UN member states, which stands to reason, why the whole UN Libyan affair – from beginning to end, was planned and executed as a political operation - hardly of any humanitarian concern. 

Here we are again, at another crossroads, so soon after the last one. And like clockwork, the same patterns are emerging to sway western public opinion, this time against President Assad and his Syrian government. It seems that consumers of the press in the west are being force fed another endless diet of false claims designed to sway public opinion in favor of military action by NATO, or NATO-backed allies in Syria, and later in Iran.

This writer has already attempted to contact SOHR via their email address, in order to receive further clarification as to the source of their recent claims that Assad’s security forces are responsible for the death of 18 newborn babies, but have yet to receive any response from the London-based organization.

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Posted in 2012, 2012 Election, Afghanistan, International News, Iran, Syria, Uncategorized, US Politics, WORLD NEWS | 1 Comment »

Obama’s Secret Letter to Tehran: Is the War against Iran On Hold?

January 25, 2012

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
4th Media
January 23, 2012

“The Road to Tehran Goes through Damascus”

The New York Times announced that the Obama Administration had sent an important letter to the leadership of Iran on January 12, 2012. [1]

On January 15, 2012, the spokesperson of the Iranian Foreign Ministry acknowledged that the letter had been delivered to Tehran by way of three diplomatic channels:

(1) one copy of the letter was handed to the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Khazaee, by his U.S. counterpart, Susan Rice, in New York City;

(2) a second copy of the letter was delivered in Tehran by the Swiss Ambassador to Iran, Livia Leu Agosti; and

(3) a third copy went to Iran by way of Jalal Talabani of Iraq. [2]

In the letter, the White House spelled out the position of the United States, while Iranian officials said it was a sign of things as they really are: the U.S. cannot afford to wage a war against Iran.

Within the letter written by President Barak Hussein Obama was a U.S. request for the start of negotiations between Washington and Tehran to end Iranian-U.S. hostilities.

“In the letter, Obama announced readiness for negotiations and the resolution of mutual disagreements,” Ali Motahari, an Iranian parliamentarian, told the Mehr News Agency. [3] According to another Iranian parliamentarian, this time the Deputy Chairperson of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Hussein Ebrahimi (Ibrahimi), the letter went on to ask for Iranian-U.S. cooperation and negotiations based on the mutual interests of both Tehran and Washington. [4]

Obama’s letter also tried to assure Tehran that the United States would not engage in any hostile action against Iran. [5] In fact, in the same timeframe, the Pentagon cancelled or delayed major joint drills with Israel. [6]

To the Iranians, however, the gestures are meaningless, because the Obama Administration’s actions with Iran have always contradicted its words. Moreover, Iran believes that the U.S. has not attacked, because it knows that the costs of a war with an opponent like Iran are too high and its consequences far too risky.

This, however, does not mean that an Iranian-U.S. showdown has been avoided or will not eventually happen. The currents can go either way, so to speak. Nor does this mean that the Obama Administration is not currently waging a war against the Iranians and their allies. In fact, Washington’s bloc and Iran’s bloc have been fighting a shadow war from the digital arena and television airwaves to the valleys of Afghanistan and the bustling streets of Beirut and Baghdad.

The War Against Iran Started Years Ago

The war in Iran did not start in 2012 or even 2011. Newsweek Magazine even stated the following on a cover title in 2010: “Assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage – has the war against Tehran already begun?” The actual war may have started in 2006.

Instead of attacking Iran directly, the U.S. has started a covert and proxy war. The covert dimensions of the war are being fought by intelligence assets, cyber attacks, computer viruses, secretive military units, spies, assassins, agent provocateurs, and saboteurs. The kidnapping and assassination of Iranian scientists and military commanders, which started several years ago is a part of this covert war. In this shadow war, Iranian diplomats in Iraq have been abducted and Iranians visiting Georgia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have been detained or kidnapped. Syrian officials, various Palestinian figures, and Hezbollah’s Imad Fayez Mughniyeh have also all been assassinated in this shadow war.

The proxy wars started in 2006 when Israel attacked Lebanon with the intention of expanding the war against Syria. The road to Damascus goes through Beirut, while Damascus is on the way to Tehran. After their failure in 2006, realizing that Syria was the lynchpin of the Resistance Bloc, which Iran dominated, the U.S. and its allies spent the next five to six years trying to de-link Syria from Iran.

The U.S. is also fighting Iran and its allies on the diplomatic and economic fronts through the manipulation of international bodies and proxy states. In the 2011 to 2012 context, the crisis in Syria on a geo-political level is a front in the war against Iran. Even the Israeli-U.S. drill Austere Challenge 2012 and the U.S. deployment of troops were primarily aimed at Syria as a means of combating Iran.

Syria in the Eye of the Storm

What Washington is doing is exerting psychological pressure on Iran as a means of distancing it from Syria, so that the United States and its cohorts can go for the kill. Up until the start of January 2012, the Israelis have continuously been preparing to launch an invasion of Syria in a rematch of 2006, while U.S. and E.U. officials have continously tried negotiating with Damascus for a deal to de-link from Iran and the Resistance Bloc. The Syrians, however, have always refused.

Foreign Policy, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article in August 2011 stating what was on the Saudi King’s mind about Syria in context of attacking Iran: “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” [7] Whether the above statement genuinely came from Abdul Aziz Al-Saud or not, this strategic outlook is representative of the reasons for the targeting of Syria. Obama’s own security advisor has also said the same thing, just a few months after the piece by Foreign Policy was released, in November 2011. National Security Advisor Donilon gave a speech saying that the “end of the Assad regime would constitute Iran’s greatest setback in the region – a strategic blow that will further shift the balance of power in the region against Iran.” [8]

The Kremlin has also made statements that corroborate that Washington wants to de-link Syria from its Iranian ally. One of Russia’s highest security officials has announced that Syria is being punished, because of its strategic alliance with Iran. The Secretary of the National Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai (Nikolay) Platonovich Patrushev, has publicly stated that Syria is the subject of Washington’s pressure due to geo-political interests tied to cutting Syria’s ties with Iran and not due to any humanitarian concerns. [9]

Iran has also given signals that should the Syrians be attacked, it will not hesitate to intervene militarily to come to Syria’s aid. Washington does not want this. The Pentagon would much rather swallow Syria first, before turning its full and undivided attention to Iran. The Pentagon’s objectives are to fight its targets piecemeal. Despite the U.S. military doctrine of fighting simultaneous wars in multiple theatres and all the Pentagon literature about it, the U.S. is not ready yet to wage a conventional regional war against both Iran and Syria or risk an expanded war with Iran’s Russian and Chinese allies yet. The march to war, however, is far from over. For now the U.S. government will have to continue the shadow war against Iran and intensify the media, diplomatic, and economic war.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Sociologist and award-winning author. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He Specializes on the Middle East and Central Asia. He Has been a contributor and guest discussing the Broader Middle East on numerous international programs and networks such as Al Jazeera, Press TV and Russia Today. His writings have been published in more than ten languages​​. He also writes for the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow.

NOTES

[1] Elisabeth Bumiller et al., “US sends top Iran leader warning on Hormuz threat,” The New York Times, January 12, 2012.
[2] Mehr News Agency, “Details of Obama’s letter to Iran released,” January 18, 2012.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Yakkov Katz, “Israel, US cancel missile defense drill,” Jerusalem Post, January 15, 2012.
[7] John Hannah, “Responding to Syria: The King’s statement, the President’s hesitation,” Foreign Policy, August 9, 2011.
[8] Natasha Mozgovaya, “Obama Aide: End of Assad regime will serve severe blow to Iran,” Haaretz, November 22, 2011.
[9] Ilya Arkhipov and Henry Meyer, “Russia Says NATO, Persian Gulf Nations Plan to Seek No-Fly Zone for Syria,” Bloomberg, January 12, 2012.

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Posted in 2012, 2012 Election, America, BREAKING NEWS, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Russia, US Politics, WORLD NEWS | 4 Comments »

WARNING: CONDITIONS ARE RIPE FOR A COMING NUCLEAR WAR

August 19, 2011

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
August 19, 2011

It is perhaps difficult to understand why our leaders and mainstream media have not fully recognized and discuss openly the real and present danger that nuclear weapons and facilities pose to our communities worldwide.
 
It is possible that political elites know, but they are perhaps too stupid, or too reckless and arrogant, so they simply ignore what it all means.
 
We are currently entering the hot zone. The nuclear fuse can easily be lit now with Syria and Iran as prime NATO and Israeli targets. Just like “Mad Dog” Gaddafi suffered a trial by media, few western spectators will have much sympathy for Syria’s Basher el Assad.
 
Those in the US and Europe who are sworn to protect Israel’s ‘security’ will also have you believe that Iran does have quite long-range missiles.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: Elites know, but do want to talk about the iminent danger of nuclear material and the predictable use of these weapons.

But what they will not tell you is that Iran could also take out the Dimona bomb-making factory the Zionist militarists are so terribly proud of. Any day of the week, weekends too. The same works in reverse as Israel could also target a nuclear power facility in Iran.  Who would blink first?
 
The same applies to Hezbollah. They aren’t going to like their el Assad “patron” going down the tube. In theory, they could deploy a Scud-type missiles with enough range to hit the Dimona facility.
 
The environmental and economic blow-back from any such incident would be huge, and in most cases, the regions involved would not be able to recover- ever.
 
So what are all these massive nuclear arsenals for, if not for military use? Why has depleted uranium already been sprayed via US, NATO, and Israeli munitions across the Middle East and North Africa? Still, no one in the MSM or in our halls of government seems to take the asymmetric nuclear war threat seriously – so far.

TOO LATE FOR NON-PROLIFERATION

The venerable and creaking NPT Treaty, first signed by only 3 States in March 1970 (US, USSR, UK), which now has 189 member state signatories, but even more than in 1970 the treaty- on its face, has no meaning.

Only explosive nuclear weapons, that is conventional nuclear weapons, are covered and theoretically limited by the treaty.

The treaty makes no mention of Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, or the vast Dirty Bomb targets of civil nuclear power reactors. This in no way prevents these “Doomsday Machines” being the most daunting nuclear weapons we face, taking account of their annual nuclear waste production, their in-reactor nuclear materials, their fuel rod stores and reprocessing centres, uranium mining wastes, reactor assemblies and nuclear fuels used on the world’s 1100 submarines and surface ships powered by the atom, and the ever-growing numbers and amounts of lost or stolen nuclear equipment and materials.

Taking only the world’s presently operating 430-odd civil power reactors (about 441 before Japan’s Fukushima disaster), their annual production of nuclear wastes is around 30 000 tons per year, to be sure much of it defined as low-level, relatively low risk in radiological terms and relatively low risk in chemical toxicity terms. Although exact data is secret, Depleted Uranium weapons production is a major value-adding spinoff from civil power reactor wastes, producing weapons with proven and high carcinogenic effects, and chemical toxicity effects on both humans and animals, but as already mentioned these weapons are not covered by the NPT Treaty.

DU – YOU ARE DEAD

Annual production of Depleted Uranium weapons, mainly anti-tank ordinance but including others, is as noted secret, but estimates suggest the main producers – the USA, Russia, France, China, the UK (ironically, the five declared nuclear weapons states as defined by the NPT), Germany, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and an increasing number of other countries – manufacture about 4000 tons of DU ordnance per year. Stocks are high and rising, due to low and limited use, although the two Gulf wars against Iraq (1991 and from 2003) and the war against Afghanistan (since 2001) have used an estimated 3000 to 3500 tons of DU weapons to date. Small and limited amounts of DU weapons utilisation are reported in the NATO war against the Gaddafi regime of Libya. Cancer deaths due to these radioactive and chemically toxic weapons, especially in Iraq, are estimated to be as high as 10 000 to date, and deaths will certainly continue for decades ahead.

Make no mistake: DU is a killer.

EFFECTS OF DU: Many military and medical workers can tell you first-hand the shocking effects of DU on humans.

DU weapon stocks in the USA alone are estimated to be more than 25 000 tons, and world stocks are likely well above 70 000 tons.

The so-called attractiveness of DU weapons is directly linked to their origin – wastes from so-called civil nuclear power, used to make weapons of war. The basic material, uranium alloys with various levels of radioactivity and chemical toxicity is above all cheap. Secondly, it has major technical characteristics making it almost ideal for producing anti-tank and anti-building weapons. Uranium metal is heavy and dense. It is easily machined. Being radioactive, it is easy to trace and track, for example during weapons testing and through the industrial production process. But perhaps its main trump card is its incendiary nature – that is very easily catching fire and liberating large amounts of heat, triggering secondary fires, for example in tank and armed vehicle fuel reservoirs, and wall claddings and flooring of targeted buildings.

This incendiary, heat-liberating characteristic explains the acronym for the biggest single type of DU ordnance: anti-tank shells and missiles. These are called HEAT ordnance, for High Energy Anti Tank.

The usual type of shell or missile is called “discarding sabot”, designating a machined uranium sheath or nose cone on the shell, behind which a titanium or iridium high-strength metal dart is positioned, with the explosive “military payload”, for example pentrite or TNT, placed further behind. When the shell hits the armour of the targeted tank, the uranium alloy cone or sheath explodes, liberating fine dust particles which instantly ignite. The heat liberated massively weakens the armor, through which the dart penetrates, breaching the tank hull, enabling the conventional explosive ‘stage’ of the shell to enter and explode. Typical times needed for this sequence are around 400 milliseconds (0.4 seconds).

To be sure, all kinds of other dust particles can also be incendiary – for example rice or wheat dust, able to totally explode and destroy 65 000-ton cargo ships in worst-case explosions, phosphates as used in home-made bombs, and aluminium, magnesium or iron dust and filings as used in fireworks and in weapons, but uranium is extremely incendiary. Also to be sure, generous amounts of the uranium dust do not catch fire, are transported by wind, fall to earth with rain, and enter the food chain and water table – causing decades-long cancer epidemics in most affected areas. Our democracy-loving, human rights-defending political deciders with clean finger nails and a clean conscience, who order the use of these filthy weapons would apparently be unconcerned about that.

  The image of the mushroom cloud has become part of our cultural lexicon.

CIVIL POWER REACTOR DIRTY BOMBS

As we know from the Fukushima disaster, and the Chernobyl disaster any industry standard 900 MW light water or other type of reactor using uranium fuel contains a “radiological inventory” roughly equal to 150 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. Each reactor.

Fuel rod stores, and dumps, can radically increase this equivalence, when spent fuel rods are stored, or buried on-site, usually only a few metres under the soil. Depending on the age and type of the reactor, its operational history, and other parameters like spent fuel rod inventories on-site, one single industry standard civil power reactor can be considered equivalent to as much as 250 or 350 Hiroshima-sized bombs in its capacity to kill by radiation poisoning, and totally sterilize hundreds of square kilometres of land – becoming a Total Exclusion Zone for decades ahead.

Using HEAT ordnance, or in fact any kind of conventional military ordnance, or unconventional ordnance such as drone airplanes with stand-off missiles, or simply a 50-kilogram explosive charge, no conventional civil power reactor’s core shielding will resist. Attack also targeting the reactor’s cooling systems, and its IT and control centre, will assure almost 98% “target acquisition” as the military jargon puts it, in restricted-audience advertising and promotion of HEAT ordnance. The myth of nuclear deterrence, and the fatuous irrelevance of the NPT Treaty is shown by this. All component parts of the civil nuclear power system are equally vulnerable to conventional military attack, especially spent fuel production and reprocessing, even using 1914-1918 war ordnance, Somali “Technicals” or home-made drone bombs.  No country with conventional civil nuclear power has any meaningful national security

Of one thing we can be sure: no leading politician in any country using civil nuclear power will admit this basic truth. This curious primitive-minded and schizophrenic separation of civil nuclear power, from military nuclear weapons, is all the more hypocritical and evil when it concerns Western leaders almost proudly using DU weapons against Afghans, Iraqis, or Libyans. This is an open and permanent challenge to attacked people and nations to hit back using “asymmetric” and devastating weapons already positioned in the Oppressor’s country: their civil nuclear Dirty Bombs.

When we wake up to a successful asymmetric nuclear weapons attack – to be sure described as an industrial accident, and then later on as a terrorist attack – it will be much too late to whine “but we didn’t know”.

Both Chernobyl and Fukushima have provided all we need to know about the weapons potential of so-called civil nuclear power. Thousands of victims of DU-caused cancers in Iraq and Afghanistan can explain to the educated middle class voters of the countries producing and using DU weapons that these are genuine nuclear weapons – which kill by cancer.

Understandably, one single case of using this asymmetric nuclear weapon in the Aggressor countries will be worth millions of words and online rantings, and those who voted for producing and using these weapons – either knowingly or not – will have paid the price of their destructive democratic decision.

So when will the discussion begin? It should begin now, before it’s too late.

-

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Posted in 2012, Afghanistan, America, Energy, Environment, Europe, GREEN NEWS, International News, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Libya, Middle East, Military, NATO, NEWS, Obama, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, Uncategorized, US Politics, WORLD NEWS | 1 Comment »

Former CIA Official: Israel Will Bomb Iran in September

July 17, 2011

MJ Rosenberg
HUFF POST WORLD
July 17, 2011

A longtime CIA officer who spent 21 years in the Middle East is predicting that Israel will bomb Iran this fall, dragging the United States into another major war and endangering U.S. military and civilian personnel (and other interests) throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Robert Baer made his prediction on the provocative KPFK Los Angeles show Background Briefing, hosted by Ian Masters.

Baer has had a storied career, including a stint in Iraq in the 1990s where he organized opposition to Saddam Hussein. (He was recalled after being accused of trying to organize Saddam’s assassination). Upon his retirement, he received a top decoration for meritorious service. Incidentally, George Clooney won an Oscar for playing a character based on Baer in the film Syriana (Baer also wrote the book).

HELL BENT ON WAR? Israel's Netanyahu still talking tough on Iran.

Baer didn’t name sources for his prediction of an Israeli attack, but the few he did cite are all Israeli security figures who have publically warned that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are hell-bent on war.

Baer is especially impressed by the unprecedented warning about Netanyahu’s plans by former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan. Dagan left the Israeli intelligence agency in September 2010 and two months ago predicted that Israel would attack and that doing so would be “the stupidest thing” he could imagine. According to Haaretz:

When asked about what would happen in the aftermath of an Israeli attack Dagan said that: “It will be followed by a war with Iran. It is the kind of thing where we know how it starts, but not how it will end.”

The Iranians have the capability to fire rockets at Israel for a period of months, and Hizbollah could fire tens of thousands of grad rockets and hundreds of long-range missiles, he said.

According to Ben Caspit of Israeli daily Maariv, Dagan’s blasts at Israel’s political leadership are significant not only because Mossad chiefs, in office or retired, traditionally have kept their lips sealed but also because Dagan is very conservative on security matters.

Caspit writes that Dagan is “one of the most rightwing militant people ever born here. … When this man says that the leadership has no vision and is irresponsible, we should stop sleeping soundly at night.”

Dagan describes the current Israeli government as “dangerous and irresponsible” and views speaking out against Netanyahu as his patriotic duty.

And his abhorrence of Netanyahu is not uncommon in the Israeli security establishment. According to Think Progress, citing the Forward newspaper, 12 of the 18 living ex-chiefs of Israel’s two security agencies (Mossad and Shin Bet), are “either actively opposing Netanyahu’s stances or have spoken out against them.” Of the remaining six, two are current ministers in Netanyahu government, leaving a grand total of four out of 18 who independently support the prime minister.

In short, while Congress dutifully gives Netanyahu 29 standing ovations, the Israelis who know the most about both Netanyahu and Israel’s strategic situation think he is a dangerous disaster.

But according to Baer, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

There is almost “near certainty” that Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict,” Baer explained.

The Israeli air force would attack “Natanz and other nuclear facilities to degrade their capabilities. The Iranians will strike back where they can: Basra, Baghdad,” he said, and even Afghanistan. Then the United States would jump into the fight with attacks on Iranian targets. “Our special forces are already looking at Iranian targets in Iraq and across the border [in Iran] which we would strike. What we’re facing here is an escalation, rather than a planned out-and-out war…it’s a nightmare scenario. We don’t have enough troops in the Middle East to fight a war like that. I think we are looking into the abyss.”

Masters asked Baer why the U.S. military is not mobilizing to stop this war from happening. Baer responded that the military is opposed, and so was the civilian head of the military, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who used his influence to thwart an Israeli attack during the Bush and Obama administrations. But he’s gone now and “there is a warning order inside the Pentagon” to prepare for war.

It should be noted that the Iranian regime is quite capable of triggering a war with the United States on its own through some combination of colossal stupidity and sheer hatred. In fact, Baer says, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would welcome a war. They are “paranoid.” They are “worried about … what’s happening to their country economically, in terms of the oil embargo and other sanctions.” And they are worried about a population that increasingly despises the regime.

They need an external enemy. Because we are leaving Iraq, it’s Israel. But in order to make this threat believable, they would love an attack on their nuclear facilities, love to go to war in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and hit us where they could. Their defense is asymmetrical. We can take out all of their armored units. It’s of little difference to them, same with their surface-to-air missile sites. It would make little difference because they would use terrorism. They would do serious damage to our fleet in the Gulf.

Given all that, is it possible that the United States would allow Israel to attack when the president knows “we would be forced” to join the war on Israel’s side?

Baer’s response: “the President is up for re-election next year” and Israel is “truly out of control.”  

What happens when you see 100 F-16′s approaching Iraq and there is a call to the White House [from Netanyahu] that says “We’re going in, we’re at war with Iran”? What does the President of the United States do? He has little influence over Bibi Netanyahu. …We can’t stop him. And he knows it.

It’s a pretty frightening scenario, made infinitely more so by the fact that top Israelis (who have heard Netanyahu’s thinking from Netanyahu himself) also see the future the same way. Those Israelis deserve a world of credit for sounding the warning bell loud enough that we would hear it and do something about it – although it’s impossible to know if the people who matter are paying attention.

Actually, only one person matters: the president. If Israel bombed Iran tomorrow, Congress would forget all about partisan differences and run, not walk, to the House and Senate floors to endorse the attack and call for unstinting support for Israel. That is what Congress always does, and will always do so long as the lobby (and the donors it directs) are the key players in making our Middle East policies.

And who knows what Obama would do? So far, he has not exactly distinguished himself when it comes to standing up to Netanyahu.

But an Israeli attack on Iran would be different. It would endanger countless Americans (in the region and here at home, too). It would kill off any economic recovery by causing oil prices to skyrocket. It would engulf us in another Middle East war. And it would threaten the existence of the state of Israel.

This is something the President needs to focus on instead of being forced to nickel and dime with the likes of  Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell. How incredible that these two, and their right-wing allies, have our government tied in knots in their incessant effort to elevate themselves by destroying the President of the United States.

When did Congressional leaders decide that the only thing that matters is not national security — but their party’s fortunes and, mostly, their own? It is sickening.

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Posted in 2012, Afghanistan, America, International News, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Military, NATO, Syria, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR, Wikileaks | Leave a Comment »

YOUTH UPRISING 2011: A PLANETARY 1968

February 24, 2011

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
February 24, 2011

Today’s surging youth-led revolution in the Arab world has common points with the 1968 student’s revolt that rocked developed countries including the USA, France and several other European countries, with lasting sequels – of student and youth unrest – in Latin America, the then-USSR, Japan, developed countries in East and SE Asia, and even Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.

THEN AND NOW…

But the shared themes and common goals tend to stop there: today’s youth revolt has a planetary dimension, already moving out from the Arab world, and changing as it goes. The uprising, today, may be mostly of young persons but the goals and themes of this much more massive, probably world scale revolt are not only political, but also economic. In turn this likely makes them even more “impossible” than the euphoric hippy-oriented peace and love, anti-war, drug influenced alternate society dreams of the 1968 revolt in the rich world, that carefully ignored such boring old-style issues such as the economy.

A key slogan of the French 1968 student revolt summed this up:  ”… be reasonable – demand the impossible”.

By an interesting time warp, Mouammar Gaddafi’s rise to power was under way in 1968 and was completed in 1969. This part-educated self-declared tribal ruler, himself drug-influenced, at first claimed to be reproducing the power grab of his supposed mentor, Nasser’s mid-rank army revolt in Egypt, and both of these models served elsewhere in Africa- for example in the bloody coup that gave sergeant Mobutu Sese Soko decades of corrupt power in the Congo. This he promptly renamed Zaire, like Gaddafi renamed Libya as the Arab Jamahiriya, but for any average citizen of these 3 countries little or nothing changed for the better and almost everything changed for the worse.

The antiquated other-worldliness of these flashback regimes takes us back to the postwar world of two competing superpowers in an abundant oil and other fossil-fuelled era of constant economic growth. The difference with today’s real world is massive and striking. With the fall of the dictator and mass killer Gaddafi, following hard on the heels of Tunisia’s and Egypt’s creaking leaderships being overthrown, a page of history is being rapidly turned, after decades of being frozen into deathlike inertia. But today’s world is vastly different from that of 1968, and the differences do not only include mass cellphone and Internet-based communications. Through 1968-2008 world population almost exactly doubled, adding 3 400 million people. If by some miracle of 1950s and 1960s style economic growth– as in China and India today, the world’s 3.4 billion population increment could consume oil at today’s OECD average of about 12 barrels per person each year, world oil demand would be about 90 million barrels a day more than present. In other words demand would be more than double today’s demand, needing roughly 50 or 60 “New Libyas” to make up the difference.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP: Libya was worth approximately 1.4 million barrels a day.

This immediately sets one parameter for the post-revolutionary world of the next 10 years or so, and generates one basic need:  learning what is possible to change, and eschewing economic growth dreams of the 1950s and 1960s variety, even if China and India are soldiering along that path. For delirious and malevolent dreamers like Gaddafi, and like the 1968 crop of student and alternate society leaders of the rich world, all and every economic detail was as uninteresting as it was unimportant.

In both cases there was however sufficient fat to trim, or existing wealth slopping around the system to permit these almost 18th century mindsets, more influenced by J-J Rousseau than by Nietzsche or Sartre– or effectively and in reality by Hitler and Mussolini in the case of Gaddafi. Both the type and kind of Flash Mob cellphone and Internet-based revolutions that are possible, today, will be heavily influenced by existing wealth, and the lack of it in affected countries- and as noted the current wave of revolutionary change is potentially global, exactly like the economy.

GMO EPOCH AND THE NEW FOOD CRISIS

Another interesting flashback to the late 1960s and early 1970s is that period was marked by serious and recurring famine outbreaks which were solved by the one-time, once-only science and technology quick fix called the Green Revolution. Today’s GM crop hybrid “revolution” is far behind in its scope and potential for raising world food output, despite loud claims to the contrary, and for a battery of simple and basic reasons. These start with the fact, using FAO and other data, the world had an average of nearly 1 hectare of arable land per person in 1968, but today has less than 0.25 hectares per person.

THE GREEN REVOLUTION: Monsanto and GMO giants work to create global food markets for their products.

Food shortages- even famine, therefore has a short fuze today.  As the initially joyful Flash Mob youth rebellion in some countries (Tunisia is in fact the only one) are followed by increasingly bloody and lengthening struggles we can easily fear these will degenerate into, and generate, long civil wars. Prolonged breakdown of civil society is a sure and certain threat. During civil wars, all through history, famine is the common fellow rider able to further intensify the loss of life and trigger further, more bloody struggles and massive flows of refugees.

It is likely- but not certain, that this parameter is understood by leaders of the developed world, somewhat rocked and shocked by the rapidity and intensity of events in the Arab world since this new start of 2011. The non-ideological dimension is also troubling – so troubling that conspiracy theories are flocking to fill the void: obviously Iran is behind the Bahraini uprising, to inflict collateral damage on Saudi Arabia and deprive the west (and China, India and more than 100 other importer countries) of Saudi oil. Egypt’s uprising, when it is not the fruit of CIA and US Joint Chiefs of Staff plotting, is surely the result of Hamas infiltrating Egyptian youths’ minds using Facebook. Tunisia’s revolution was almost certainly remote-controlled by neighboring ex-Algerian islamic terrorists, when it was not the product of French socialist intellectuals and trade unionists. And so Western conventional wisdom goes. Gaddafi’s very welcome downfall poses problems for cobbling rosy conspiracy theories, but with time these will flourish. We might suggest his downfall could or might be linked to Wikileaks, like any other unexplained geopolitical event, inch’allah.

But in all cases of revolt in the Arab world no conspiracy theory can claim the objective is to deprive the world of food supply. Taking simply Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, these 4 countries import more than 45 percent of world total wheat export supply. As traders in their exuberant excesses of panic and euphoria reasoned, in their own way through February 21-23, any prolonged civil strife in the Arab food importer countries could crater demand, and therefore a rigorous sell-off was needed. To be sure, the long-only bets will be back in a few days. Much more important and more grave, the world is in a long-term process of depriving itself with food. Rebellion, revolt and revolution inside countries totally dependent on food imports is a dangerous signal not only for their citizens but for the world. The list of urgent measures in these countries – and in the huge number of countries outside the Arab world but like them heavily dependent on food imports – starts with the development of farming and food production. To date, this basic need is almost inaudible, along with other economic realities.

THE FOOD AND JOB CRISIS

One sure cause or intensifier and accelerator of today’s Arab revolt is the twin – in fact interrelated – crises of not enough food and not enough jobs. To be sure, citizens listening to the high-flown delirium of a megalomaniac like Gaddafi, or a despot like Mubarak or Ahmedinejad of Iran will be less than thrilled by the ranting rhetoric, when they do not have enough to eat and their job outlook is close to zero. We can suggest that rising strains, and coming fractures in the world food production and supply system will initially be good for democracy but the best-before date on the packaging will be short. The massive rate of urban growth in the Arab world, both due to and causing rural and agricultural under-development, low productivity and poor paid jobs outside cities, is only an extreme version of the same general process in all developing and emerging countries. Inside the fast-growing cities of the entire world outside the OECD countries, which count for 15 percent of world population, the growing capital intensity of low paid manufacturing jobs, to play a humble export platform role in the global economy, also chokes off job growth.

Solving both these crises is the challenge for the world that arises from the ashes of the fossil regimes of the Arab world, in Africa and elsewhere, set in a moment of time that disappeared decades ago.

Returning again to their time, in the 1960s and 1970s, we can take a swift look at Mao’s failed but deadly rural development and regeneration revolution, and the extreme war crimes of the Khmer Rouge forced return to village living in Cambodia. Both these acts of criminal folly were failures. Their total body count was perhaps as high as 40 million – the same as the total death toll from World War 2. What is important and usually missed out in analyzing these sombre events is that both were either directly, or in major part driven by an attempt to solve chronic or acute food shortage – and create jobs.

We are currently offered a bizarre, even eccentric mix-and-match of supposed Green Growth, and intensified consumer society growth economy, by institutions and agencies such as World Bank, IMF, the UN development and economic agencies and some major private corporations. We might ironically think that the dreamers producing these concepts for the economic way ahead are working on a basis that if one fails the other could work, if God wills. The gravest problem is that neither can or will work due to these models being totally antinomic or exclusive. Case in point: at this moment in time, when the post-uprising civil societies of countries experiencing the Flash Mob youth revolt need support, advice, help and direction, the policy void in the OECD developed countries is a grave threat to recovery and sustained change in the world.

LES FLASH MOBS: Tunisian youth takes to the streets with calls for reform.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

The rate of change since the start of January 2011 is high and may be growing, not weakening. The Arab revolt now means what it says: anti-regime movements now span almost the whole Arab world, from Morocco to Yemen, and can likely soon spill over and spread to African countries, Iran, Armenia, the Central Asian republics, and perhaps China. All the autocratic and unelected governments unable or unwilling to solve the basic issues of food and jobs will now suffer rising popular opposition and the risk of overthrow by mass uprising. By contagion, this movement could spread to the elected governments in many countries which are unwilling or unable to solve exactly the same challenges and can lose what remains of their own popular credibility and support.

Unlike the student revolts of 40 years ago, and totally unlike the rock-solid economic growth of the time, during les Trente Glorieuse, today’s weakened and fragile global economy is exposed to a host of challenges always bringing the economic issues closer to the surface. These as we said, start with the basic issues of failure to feed large chunks of humanity, or employ the youth of nearly all countries, whether rich or poor. Given the resource pinch, geopolitical climate change concerns, rising threats of major ecosystem collapse and heightened awareness of these economic constraints the way forward is both complex and difficult. This however does not mean we can avoid grasping the nettle: on the geopolitical front, endlessly avoiding the basic humanitarian need to eliminate toy-sized Hitlers (many of whom serve at the pleasure of Western powers) like Gaddafi- is returning home to roost. The coming storm of refugee, economic, security and energy problems for the whole Europe-North Africa region, and beyond, is a clear proof of this.

Exactly the same applies to meeting the nested challenges of feeding humanity and creating sustained employment within resource and ecological limits, that is within a set of sometimes clear – and often growing – constraints and limits. Time is short, and the heavy weight of avoided and ignored problems over several decades, the ultimate in laisser faire, shows that finally action is the only choice.

COPYRIGHT ANDREW MCKILLOP 2011

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Andrew McKillop is guest writer for 21st Century Wire. He has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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Posted in 2012, America, China, CIA, Culture, Economic collapse, Economy, Egypt, Energy, FOOD, fuel, GMO, History, International News, Iran, Israel, Libya, Middle East, money, New World Order, Politics, REVOLUTION, Russia, Trends, Uncategorized, US Politics | 2 Comments »

STUXNET virus attack: Russia warns of ‘Iranian Chernobyl’

January 18, 2011

Con Coughlin
The Telegraph
January 17, 2011

Russian nuclear scientists are providing technical assistance to Iran’s attempts activate the country’s first nuclear power plant at the Gulf port.

But they have raised serious concerns about the extensive damage caused to the plant’s computer systems by the mysterious Stuxnet virus, which was discovered last year and is widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack.

Russia raises concerns over safety of Iranian Bushehr nuclear plant (PHOTO: REX)

According to Western intelligence reports, Russian scientists warned the Kremlin that they could be facing “another Chernobyl” if they were forced to comply with Iran’s tight deadline to activate the complex this summer…

READ FULL REPORT HERE

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Posted in Computers, Cyber Security, Energy, fuel, International News, Iran, Israel, Russia, STUXNET, Technology, Terrorism, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR | Leave a Comment »

‘STUXNET’ SUPER COMPUTER VIRUS PROMPTS STATE CONTROL OF WEB

January 18, 2011

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 16, 2011

On Saturday, the Gray Lady of establishment propaganda, the New York Times, passively admitted that the Stuxnet virus responsible for crippling Iran’s nuclear energy program was engineered by Israeli and U.S. intelligence.

“Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it,” writes the Times. “But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects.”

 Al Jazera detailed report on STUXNET virus and potential cyber warfare

A number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, say the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with help from the Germans and the British.

The effort to sabotage Iran began during the Bush administration. In early 2009, Bush signed off on an effort to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. Obama was briefed on the plan before he took office.

In addition to gumming up Iran’s enrichment hardware, the U.S. and Israel have engaged in an assassination campaign aimed at the country’s scientists.

STUXNET Computer virus

The STUXNET virus will be used through a media scare by Gov'ts to shutdown the free internet.

In November of last year, Iranian president Ahmadinejad accused Israel and the United States of killing a nuclear scientist and wounding another with a pair of bomb attacks. In January of 2009, a senior physics professor was assassinated. In 2007, Iranian state TV reported that nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, died from gas poisoning. Israel’s Mossad was suspected. During the news conference, Ahmadinejad also admitted to the Stuxnet attack.

In November, it was reported that the Stuxnet virus had infected 44,000 computers worldwide.

Stuxnet is a double-edged sword. In addition to setting back Iran’s nuclear program, the sophisticated malware engineered by the U.S. and Israel at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert has been exploited to push for restrictive cybersecurity measures in the United States.

  Alex Jones breaks down STUXNET and what it means in terms of coming US Govt policy.

“The very fact that Stuxnet exists shows that we can no longer pretend that a cyber attack on our critical infrastructure is hypothetical and hyperbolic,” declared Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Joe Lieberman in November. “You’re talking about a very well-resourced and structured adversary.”

Lieberman and Susan Collins, the panel’s ranking Republican, used Stuxnet to push for their cyber-security bill, entitled The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010.

The bill would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and extend the already-broad definition of “critical infrastructure” to the internet and would allow Obama to shut down not only entire areas of the internet, but also businesses and industries that fail to comply with government orders following the declaration of a national emergency, thus increasing fears that the legislation will be used as a political tool.

“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” Lieberman said in June.

“The Senator’s reference to China is a telling revelation of what the cybersecurity agenda is really all about. China’s vice-like grip over its Internet systems has very little to do with ‘war’ and everything to do with silencing all dissent against the state,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote at the time…

READ FULL REPORT HERE


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Posted in America, Business, Cyber Security, International News, INTERNET FREEDOM, Iran, Media, Politics, Technology, The Matrix, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR, war zone | 2 Comments »

A New Independent Poll is Needed on Iran

August 23, 2010

By Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
August 23, 2010

Infowars.com Editor Kurt Nimmo’s recent piece entitled Corporate Media Poll Claims Majority of Americans Support Iran Attack, raises a number of key and timely points on the quality of Rasmussen’s poll sampling and whether such a poll actually represents American public opinion on this particular issue. But let’s take this a step further and try to construct our own independent poll on the Iranian question, one which will more accurately reflect real public feelings on this impending geopolitical face-off.

Far from being objective, the Rasmussen Poll was designed to lend support an existing policy- to test the public waters on a Pentagon-planned pre-emptive military strike on Iran. The actual results produced are far from useful in measuring the country’s true public opinion on the matter, much less America’s willingness to add a new front to its already bloated global “war on terror”. In addition to this, their poll  contains some obviously loaded questions- questions which solicit amateur opinions on facts which polling participants are not even privy to know one way or the other. The Rasmussen Poll contained questions like:

1. Iran is an enemy?

2. Iran’s uranium enrichment program is developing nuclear weapons?

3. If Israel attacks Iran, the United States should lend a helping hand?

Clearly, polling participants cannot have an opinion on a factual matter like whether or not Iran’s uranium enrichment program is developing nuclear weapons. Therefore, the results from such questions are fairly useless, unless, however, Rasmussen is trying to measure the level of  the public’s disinformation on that issue (there is a touch of irony there). The last question is particularly loaded in itself, casually characterizing US support of Israel as a mere “helping hand”, but not considering for a second whether or not Israel’s pre-emptive strike is wrong in the first place. The US mindset has become so conditioned in accepting Israeli policy objectives (regardless of their effects on real US interests), therefore this is reflected in standard language we see throughout corporate media polling. Here we can see the way in which these types of mainstream corporate  polls are used to reinforce and construct a simplistic streamlined  groupthink on very complexed issues.

Spreading more democracy: grown men in Washington are getting desperate to play with their new toys again.

By asking a series of loaded and pejorative questions as they have done, Rasmussen can only produce poll results akin to that of an uneducated angry mob, thus containing very little useful information which can be used later in intelligent political discourse on the subject. Rather, these type of polls are used as supports within a larger propaganda exercise.

The painful lessons of 2001 and 2003 should be clear by now- that the US and its allies can and will go to war on the basis of fabricated intelligence and will do so without a declaration from Congress, preferring instead to use a House Joint Resolution Authorizing a Use of Force against the country it wishes to attack. This has already been set in motion by HR 1553: Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to “defend itself” with a pre-emptive attack- you can’t get any more Orwellian than that. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that certain public opinion polls are key tools used by Washington and her major media outlets for bolstering any pre-emptive strike which is on the drawing board.

Alex Jones has commissioned polls in the past on very important issues, the results of which have been valuable in building a case for common sense. Of all the issues that are facing Americans directly today, none is potentially more hot than a US or US-supported pre-emptive strike on Iran. It would certainly be a valuable exercise should Infowars.com consider commissioning its own independent Zogby Poll into whether Americans really consider Iran a national security threat. A new poll should contain questions which gauge relevant public opinions and not whether participants believe general hearsay, rumours of possible intelligence on Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, or general mainstream media propaganda designed to prime the war pump- all of which were demonstrated by Rasmussen’s latest hit piece on Iran.

An independent poll should probe into the essential and fundamental questions about Iran including:

1. Would you support a pre-emptive US strike on Iran?

2. Is Iran a genuine threat to US national security?

3. Do you think that the Iranian threat is being exaggerated?

4. Do you see parallels between the current campaign to characterize Iran as a WMD threat and the previous case against Iraq?

5. Should Israel be launching a pre-emptive strike on Iran?

6. Is the US obligated to support Israel if it carries out a pre-emptive strike on Iran?

With so much at stake, we cannot afford to get the fundamentals of this conversation wrong. What could be worse than another fake war that will cost our economy billions(trillions?) and our morality a priceless fortune? The conversation about Iran must be set straight on record and free from the obvious spin we have become so used to in The New American Century. Together, conscious members of the alternative media must keep working to reframe the conversation based on the principles of critical thinking, rather than the predictable mainstream media’s popular innuendo that caters to the whims of the mob.

One would hope that better and more intelligent polling might influence better and more intelligent foreign policy.

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Posted in Afghanistan, International News, Iran, Media, NATO, Obama, Politics, Terrorism, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR | 7 Comments »

MIDTERM WARNING: We Are Being Set-up for Another Fake War

August 11, 2010

Sporting the traditional department-issued pearl necklace and looking ever worse for wear: the USA's unofficial War Secretary.

21st Century Wire
August 11, 2010

Editor’s Note: As autumn gradually rolls around and US midterm elections just ahead, we are hearing the tell-tale beats of the war drum repeatedly throughout the US media. Iran is clearly a target of the US and Israel in their bid to up the stakes and add a third theatre to the current global war on terror, flanked by Pakistan and North Korea (Russia and Venezuela also getting some minor airtime). The war drums have been banging for Iran for quite some time now and recent intensity indicates that a bombing raid may be months, if not weeks away. Overstating Iran as a nuclear threat will unfortunately suffice in US opinion polls. Watch this space.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has added another dimension to this latest chapter of the fabled New American Century, as she takes the Vietnamese side in their current dispute with China over a set of small islands in the South China Sea. Clinton claims that these islands are “in the US national interest”. Are they really? America, much less the world, cannot affort another multi-front conflict. Trends Research director Gerald Celente explains in clear English why Clinton and the rest of Washington are blowing rather dangerous hot air…

  In case you are baffled by current events, Gerald Celente lays it on the line.

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Posted in Afghanistan, America, Energy, Iran, Journalism, Media, NATO, Obama, Politics, Terrorism, UK Politics, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR, war zone, Wikileaks | Leave a Comment »

Botched CIA Kidnapping and the PR War- is the Agency is Losing Its Touch?

July 17, 2010

By Patrick Henningsen
Editor
21st Century Wire
July 17, 2010

The public relations war waged by the US-Euro-Israel axis block was dealt an unfortunate blow this week when it was revealed that an Iranian nuclear scientist was kidnapped by CIA and Israeli assets during a Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, drugged and spirited away to the US, then offered millions for information regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, only to return back to Iran to tell all. In his most recent article, The Independent’s award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn outlines this story which you can read here. It’s a bizarre one to say the least.

Such an event will no doubt  be scored as a major setback in the effort for hearts and minds, and men and women pacing the halls of Langley, Pennsylvania Avenue and the Pentagon are most certainly scrambling to limit the PR damage from this incident. In today’s world of extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial state-sponsored assassinations, a routine CIA abduction would normally raise few if any eyebrows outside of the morally inclined who send their yearly cheque to Amnesty International. “Nothing interesting here, move along” says the mainstream media and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, except when there is big money involved. US officials have admitted on record that Mr Shahram Amiri was paid a cool $5m by the CIA, apparently for information about Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme. And the fact that he is Iranian- and not Iraqi or Arab further moves this spook novel tale into uncharted territory.

As if the embarrassment of this revelation was not enough, the CIA dropped the ball by losing their prized catch after a year in custody, only to see him turn up at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington. Upon his triumphant repatriation to Tehran this week, the scientist  stated that he was offered $50m to stay in the US- where he would most likely be refashioned into a ladder day Ahmed Chalabi-type US marionette puppet to be paraded in front of Senate committee Hearings on Iran and churning out regular pro-democracy proclamations, human rights rhetoric and shadow reports about weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere inside his home country… all from a heavily guarded witness protection compound in Beverly Hills. In his own words, Amiri denied he had ever had information about an Iranian nuclear programme explaining, “I am an ordinary researcher… I have never made nuclear-related researches. I’m not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information.” It’s entirely possible that like most of the taxi drivers, farmers and delivery boys locked up in Guantanamo and Bagram prisons, Mr Amiri was the wrong guy in the right place and by the time he was Gulf-Streamed back to Washington the politics of modern desktop intelligence had overtaken old fashion common sense.

Shahram Amiri reappears after a year in CIA custody (Photo: BBC)

After a 6 year public relations bout between the powers of the West and Iran, with Iran out-manned and out muscled by the West’s immense PR machine,  Mr Amiri’s return to Iran appears to have awarded Iran, in PR terms anyway, a tenth round decision by knockout. In an arena where the  Pentagon spends at least $4.7 billion a year on PR trying to win the hearts and minds at home and abroad, the CIA’s botched operation here resembles the demise of someone like Mike Tyson, the heavy weight fighter who following a series of high profile blunders, embarked on a long and painful career downward trajectory.

There was a time when he had it all. We all remember ‘Iron Mike’ in his heyday dropping his opponents in 90 seconds, the toughest guy on the block, a consummate underdog, untouchable, a man of the people and with all the money and a celebrity wife to boot. And then it began to go all a bit wrong for Iron Mike- first came the allegations of wife-beating, a rape conviction, jail time, chewing off the ear of an opponent, the bankruptcies, followed by circus-like appearances alongside Jake the Snake on the WWF circuit, B movie cameos… and finally all those the tattoos, lots of them. It’s safe to say that the glory days are long gone. What, with all the abductions, assassinations, torture and fabricated intelligence, one could say that like the Champ, the CIA- or “The Agency” as it’s romantically referred to in modern folklore, has not only lost its touch, it’s lost its way and has become a parody of itself.

IRON MIKE: the former heavyweight champ lost his touch

The Importance of the PR War

Time will tell the full scope and severity of the PR damage sustained by the CIA with the botched kidnapping of this Iranian scientist. How well or how widely this CIA kidnapping story was covered in the domestic US media is difficult to measure without running real focus groups and getting Joe the Plumber’s take on the incident.  European or World headlines don’t always penetrate US minds. One example being the infamous ‘Downing Street Memo’ which was a major scandal in the British press, but was somehow barely mentioned on American network television for two months when it ran in Europe. First published by The Sunday Times on May 1, 2005 this document detailed, amongst other things, President Bush’s plan to provoke Saddam or even by shooting down its own US aircraft(a False Flag Attack), thus providing a pretext for the initial invasion. During those two months in the US, ABC ran a virtual fire blanket of approximately 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories featuring Michael Jackson and 70 on Natalee Holloway- with the Downing Street Memo practically nonexistent in the news cycle. Ect, ect. So much for the fabled watchdog. We should be aware that there is a massive gulf between the quantity and the quality of the news we are fed by the majors.

Public Perception vs Opinion

The reality of the dominant mainstream media influence on public perception- which in turn, influences foreign and military policy decisions, is something which often eludes the passive viewer. As we are witnessing today with Iran, the run-up to the big event is everything. When it comes to a pre-war campaign, your government with do as much as it can get away with, unless… there is a sizeable public backlash in the run-up to a particular event. In the case of Iraq, the public’s resistance to the imminent US-British invasion in March 2003 was significant but not large enough to tip the scales of overall public perception of the supposed Iraqi threat. We say perception here, not opinion, because perception deals with perceived fact, whilst opinion is something else altogether. It’s important to note the difference between the two and that perception comes before opinion. We are forever being told how important public opinion is to the formation of policy, but it’s the perceived reality of a situation that supplies the spark needed to get political wheels in motion. For example, the public cannot actually have an ‘opinion’ on whether or not Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction hidden in his palace because the answer to this question relies on actual fact and the existence physical evidence. But after a sustained public relations media campaign, over time, enough of the public(and Congress) can- and did, perceive that these weapons were there in Iraq , thus providing Washington and London for a pretext to prepare the attack or invasion later. Afterwards, the public would then be asked their opinion on where or not we should go to war. Ditto for our elected representatives.

Once the occupation was underway and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ had already sunk $500 billion into their colonial venture, it was obvious to even the most ardent anti-war activist that no matter how hard they tried, they could not stop the juggernaut, and so elites and opportunists were not denied the spoils of the Iraq War. Yet, there was a point in late 2002 and early 2003 where the public perception of the nature of the threat from Iraq was not clear enough to endorse an invasion. Few would disagree that the US could not have had a ‘coalition’ without Tony Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with Washington, because in American eyes, his endorsement of Washington’s fabricated intelligence and cooked-up dossiers gave a sort of credence to America’s bumbling Dubya Jr and Daddy Bush Sr’s somewhat questionable designs on the Middle East. The Pentagon’s PR victory was achieved before the invasion in 2003 during a very long(and expensive) public relations war to mislead the public about WMDs and won enough hearts and minds in the West to get a green light. Open the bomb doors. The same is happening now with regards to Iran, as spin doctors and spooks in the West work to construct a public perception of Iran’s nuclear capability, afterward they will return to ask us our opinion on whether or not we should attack or invade the alleged rogue state.

CIA: Losing its touch?

Has the CIA lost its touch? When events spill into the public arena, even the Agency knows that perception and opinion are much harder to control than their operations in the field. Some might argue that they lost it a long time ago. After the forged document for Yellow Cake uranium from Niger and Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell’s now legendary “Dodgy Dossier”, a generation of educated readers will almost certainly be sceptical of any serious intelligence claims which originate from Langley, Virginia, much less informants or foriegn nationals who were drugged and kidnapped. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has stated this week in his editorial that ‘Amiri wasn’t going to play curveball’ and that despite what Hilary Clinton and the White House claim, Iran has no nuclear weapons capabilities now- and certainly won’t have any time in the near future. This conclusion, of course, is based on the CIA’s own Intelligence Estimate published in 2007, so it seems the Agency is offering $50 million to strangers in order to undo their intelligence findings. Interesting. He has described repeatedly on record an agency marginalized by an ever-growing bureaucracy and sycophantic culture that fears the opinions of experienced analysts will clash with political and military industrial ambitions. In the end, we can only watch in amazement and place our bets on what will be the next move in the public relations war against Iran. No matter which way the Iranian project goes, intelligent politcal circles are already debating the relevancy and long term fate of the Agency. From a cost-benefit point of view an argument certainly can be made today that the effectiveness of this monster of a department has already peaked.

To understand better the full size and scope of this intelligence monster we can look to The Washington Post who recently published a brave volume of information on the subject entitled, “Top Secret America”, a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. See their full report online here.
Max Keiser talks live on the Alex Jones Show about the size of the “Secret Government” in the US.

Nonetheless, all eyes are currently on Iran. For anyone who is still on the fence as whether or not Iran actually presents some kind nuclear threat to the West, just remember that you too may have to endure the aftermath of an attack which could trigger WWIII proper. Think long and hard about that one, because you can be guaranteed that Dr Strangelove and the War Hawks have not. Hardly a “surgical” operation, and all the more reason to keep an eye on what’s going on in Washington, London and Tel Aviv.

The truth about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme or even its alleged intent to “wipe Israel off the map” (this was never actually said by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) will not be coming out of the mouths off politicians or their frontmen. Ask yourself what lessons we have learned from the Iraq invasion. After the attack, comes the war. Remember during the early days of Iraq, the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, assuring us all that “I think we have a clear strategy for success, and there is great progress being made on the ground. We are succeeding and we will succeed.” This followed by President Bush saying, “We have a clear path forward.” It sounded good at the time- to them anyway.

Whether it’s McClellan-Bush or Gibbs-Obama, the message and the game are one in the same. Don’t be fooled, don’t be distracted by Brad, Angelina, Michael Jackson, Paris or LeBron, just know that you are in the middle of the PR War- and make no mistake… it’s a war for your mind.

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Mr Amiri denied that he had ever had any information about the Iranian nuclear programme. “I am an ordinary researcher… I have never made nuclear-related researches. I’m not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information.”

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Posted in Afghanistan, America, International News, Iran, Journalism, NATO, Obama, Uncategorized, US Politics, WAR ON TERROR, Wikileaks | 11 Comments »

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