Iran Affairs

How the US armed Saddam - more sources

Just in case someone claims that the US didn't arm and back Saddam:

Dozens of U.S. Items Used in Iraq Arms;
Exports Often Approved Despite Warnings From Pentagon, Others
The Washington Post July 22, 1992, Wednesday, Final Edition
Copyright 1992 The Washington Post
by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer

International inspectors discovered evidence of American commercial assistance to Iraq's nuclear weapons program while searching last October through an industrial warehouse on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.

Inside a large packing crate they pried open at the Daura complex was a sophisticated welder fitted with a special clamp for attaching end caps to the main cylinder of a centrifuge meant to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.

The welder, U.S. and United Nations officials say, was shipped to Iraq by the American subsidiary of a German firm -- Leybold Vacuum Systems Inc. in Enfield, Conn. -- along with a high-tech lathe useful in missile and nuclear applications.

Internal Commerce Department documents obtained by The Washington Post show that in 1988, the Leybold exports were approved by the department over the objections of some licensing officers who warned that the equipment might be used in an Iraqi effort to build weapons of mass destruction. Leybold said at the time that the equipment was for general military repair purposes and maintains it has no reason to believe the equipment was misused. . .

In addition to U.N. discovery of the welder, congressional investigators here have uncovered evidence showing the United States approved dozens of exports that found their way into Iraq's missile, nuclear, poison gas and germ weapon programs.

These exports included bacteria or fungus cultures, computers and electronic instruments, chemical process control equipment, and missile navigation and communications gear, according to a formerly secret State Department document made public yesterday by House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.).

About two of every seven export licenses approved between 1985 and 1990 "went either directly to the Iraqi armed forces, to Iraqi end-users engaged in weapons production, or to Iraqi enterprises suspected of diverting technology" to weapons of mass destruction, Gonzalez said in a speech on the House floor.

He and other legislators also contend that the executive branch either neglected or deliberately ignored a series of warnings about Iraq's procurement of U.S. equipment for its unconventional arsenal...

Gonzalez disclosed yesterday, for example, that a dozen or so high-tech exports were approved for use at Iraq's Salah Al Din, Saddam and Nassr State Establishments, all linked by secret U.S. government reports before the gulf war to arms production or military research.

Six U.S. exports of biological material were approved for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, which the CIA said in a secret report last year had acted as a "cover" for the Iraqi germ weapon program. Another 11 biological exports were sent to the University of Baghdad, now also suspected of fronting for Iraq's weapons program.

In addition, the Bush administration approved 10 U.S. exports for the Technical and Scientific Materials Division of the Iraqi Trade Ministry, tied in a classified 1990 CIA report to "biological warfare support and numerous other military activities," according to Gonzalez.

"Iraq was able to obtain . . . equipment of a predominantly commercial or civilian character, such as computers, from American firms for the Sa'ad 16 facility," Iraq's principal research and development center for ballistic missiles, said last year's classified interagency report to Congress. At least two of these exports occurred after 1986, when Sa'ad 16's purpose had been described in a secret Defense Department report to Commerce officials.

Some of the exports were approved with conditions proscribing their use in nuclear or missile applications. But U.S. officials verified that Iraq was observing these conditions on only one occasion, according to Gonzalez. "Tragically, in the case of Iraq, the United States did not adopt a policy of conducting post-installation checks," Gonzalez said yesterday.

Confidential Commerce Department files also reveal that the Reagan and Bush administrations approved at least 80 direct exports to the Iraqi military. These included computers, communications equipment, and aircraft navigation and radar equipment, Gonzalez said.

Many of these exports were made before Iraq's eight-year war with Iran ended in 1988, a period in which Washington maintained an official policy of neutrality toward the combatants but vigorously worked to block foreign military purchases by Iran.

In addition, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq secretly informed the administration six months ago that equipment from 11 American companies was found in Iraqi missile and chemical manufacturing plants. The equipment included a "filling system for projectiles," a "pressure and temperature regulator," a ballistic missile "X-ray machine" and the chemical ingredients of a deadly nerve agent, according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

Also, a recent confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has identified at least 15 American companies that inspectors believe made major machine tools used or earmarked by Iraq for its nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition that they not be named.

Only a few of the U.S. exports to Iraq involved munitions. Virtually all the rest involved so-called "dual-use" equipment, ostensibly meant for civilian application but also capable of being used in a military program. U.S. law proscribed such exports to countries listed as supporting terrorism, a label Washington applied to Iraq before 1982 and reinstated one month after Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In between those years, Iraq allowed at least three major terrorist organizations to operate from its territory, and provided refuge to Abul Abbas, a terrorist blamed for the notorious 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in which an American tourist was killed. But the Reagan and Bush administrations decided to leave Iraq off the terrorist list during this period in what officials say was a deliberate effort to avoid an interruption of trade that would jeopardize political ties and harm U.S. commercial interests.

As a result, Iraq was officially described under Commerce Department rules as a Free World nation -- a designation that lumped Iraq with Britain and France in gaining access to America's high-tech goods. Export licenses could be refused to a Free World nation only for a few reasons, such as risk of diversion to the Soviet Union, threat to regional stability or use in developing nuclear weapons...

Paul Freedenberg, who served as assistant secretary of commerce for trade administration in 1988 and 1989, said the White House rejected his proposal at that time to impose such foreign policy controls in response to Iraq's use of poison gases against Iranian soldiers and ethnic Kurds. The National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan responded that "the licensing policy with regard to Iraq was . . . normal trade," he said.

Saddam's chemical weapons use: The world was silent.

Just in case you forget, Iraq's use of chemical weapons against its own citizens and Iran was ignored:

WORLD SILENT ON IRAQ'S CHEMICAL WAR.
Albany Times Union August 28, 1988

By Michael Reisman (Reisman teaches international law at Yale Law School.)

On Aug. 1 an independent team of experts appointed by the United Nations issued a report condemning Iraq for using chemical bombs containing mustard gas and other substances against Iran. Utilization was "repeated" and had "become more intense and frequent." ...

The evidence suggests that Iraq was losing the war that it had started against Iran until it began to use chemical weapons...

The ultimate sanction for the protocol, as for all international law, rests on the expectation that the world community will respond harshly and unequivocally to violations...

In the case of Iraq the system did not work, but not for lack of information. The United Nations on Tuesday issued another report charging Iraq with the use of mustard gas against Iranian civilians in early August. The increasing accumulation of evidence of violations, including previous U.N. reports, was printed, but without significant condemnation.

In July, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz said openly and without apology at a press conference in Bonn that his government was using chemical weapons. No reaction. The New York Times didn't even headline the final U.N. report; it tucked it into a story on Javier Perez de Cuellar's negotiation efforts.

The big international players who should have been shrieking were content to let Iranians suffer and Iraq benefit from the use of chemical weapons. The United States, a tacit ally of Iraq in the late stages of the war, never used its considerable influence on Baghdad, or on the Arab governments that it's financially dependent on, to stop using the weapons. Of course, there were ceremonial slaps on the wrist. In May the Security Council called for the strict observance of the protocol by both parties. The message was clear to Saddam Hussein.

The fact that Iraq has been neither condemned nor sanctioned by the international community for its use of chemical weapons has grave implications for arms control and, more generally, for the way we can expect future wars to be fought. Security specialists everywhere must conclude that adversaries will produce these weapons and use them with impunity. Hence they will insist that their governments produce and stockpile the same weapons.

Islam=Terrorism? The myth of the Islamofascist Threat

One of the favorite talking points of the pro-Israeli fascist neoCon Right in the US is to claim that there exists some particular connection between Islam and terrorism or violence around the world. You've heard the hatemongering, I am sure, most recently mouthed at the annual AIPAC conference by Daniel
Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations:

"Most muslims aren't terrorists but most terrorists are Muslim"

(Incidentally, and just to set the record straight: according to the State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, until prior to the invasion of Iraq, most terrorist incidents occurred in Latin America not the Mideast, and didn't involve Muslims.)

This myth of Islamofascism is promoted heavily by the pro-Israeli warmongers (read Bernard Lewis' "What went wrong" for example) who insist that Israel's battles against the Palestinians is part of the battle of the enlightened West against "Islamofascism" -- despite Israel own rather long and sordid history of employing terrorism of its own, against Western target as well as fleeing Palestinians.

For example, this is what the former Israeli PM Yitzak Shamir
once wrote about terrorism:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of law in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man."

This myth of Islamofascism has a particularly appeal to those who view the world in tribalistic, "Us versus Them" or "Clash of Civilizations" terms, because it is based on the implicit assumption that the people of the world can be divided into particular, discrete and objectively identifiable groupings, which can further be judged to be "better" or "worse", "backward" or "advanced", "violent" or "non-violent" etc. And, these groupings are usually vaguely identified primarily by ethnicity ("Sinic", "Islamic", "Western", etc) -- which is itself simply a stand-in for race. So, this view is really simply crypto-racism used to justify expansionism and military aggression - a modernized form of 19th century White Man's Burden. After all, race is still a major defining factor in how people view the world - particularly in America (ask any Iranian and he'll tell you stories of how Americans express frustration at the inability to "pigeon-hole" Iranians into their racial classifications - the label "White" being reserved primarily for Anglo-Saxons.)

But the suggestion that Islam is somehow equated with violence or terrorism overlooks many facts. Leaving aside the long, blooy history of the Englightened West at its various atrocities, the Great Islamic Pathology myth is simply a case of a logical fallacy known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation implies causation.) Even assuming that being a terrorists correlates to being of Arab ethnicity or Moslem religious beliefs, that doesn't mean that Arab-ness or Moslem-ness is the cause of the terrorism.

But in fact there is no particular correlation of Islam or Arab-ness with terrorism either. So, in addition to that logical fallacy, the myth also displays a cognitive error known as confirmation bias (the tendency to select facts to support pre-conceived conclusions.)

The promoters of this myth have arbitrarily taken a large geographic area of the world, stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, arbitrarily labelled it as "the Middle East", and mushed together a variety of violent events there with the disparate people who live in the region, to support a rather broad conclusion about Muslims/Arabs/"those people" are inherently violent, terrorist, opposed to modernity, "hate our freedoms" etc.

Similarly, one could take the area between Tijuana and Tierra Del Fuego, and then attribute the long and bloody history of various misdeeds and atrocities in the history of Latin America to "The Latin Character" or to the influence of Catholicism. Or similarly, one could attribute the long and bloody history of terrorism and warfare in Africa to the blackness of skin color.

Iran nuclear links to remember

I just want to remember these two links since they come in handy whenever someone makes the "flared gas" argument (Bolton claimed that Iran doesn't need nuclear power since it can capture gas flared from its oil fields. The LYING SACK OF SHITS at the ECONOMIST repeated the allegation more recently, without bothering to check any facts as any REAL journalists would have done - nor bothering to publish a retraction once their bullshit was exposed)

A report of a Select Committee on Foreign Affairs of the British parliament specifically stated that "the gas flared off by Iran is not recoverable for energy use" and that "other energy-rich countries such as Russia use nuclear power to generate electricity and we do not believe that the United States or any other country has the right to dictate to Iran how it meets its increasing demand for electricity"(See Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Third Report, 9 March 2004)

Also whenever someone LIKE THE LYING SACKS OF SHIT AT THE ECONOMIST suggest that Iran does not have a sovereign right to nuclear technology, then remind them that even Bush had to acknowledge this fact:

"The world is united and concerned about their desire to have not only a nuclear weapon, but the capacity to make a nuclear weapon or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon...," Bush declared in an April 2006 press conference. Since the "knowledge" to build nuclear weapons largely overlaps with the knowledge of civilian nuclear technology, this standard would mean that Iran would be deprived of an independent civilian nuclear program. Furthermore, to attempt to deprive Iran of such knowledge would be contrary to the text of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which recognizes an inalienable right to nuclear technology, to the fullest extent possible and without discrimination.

Indeed, the technical knowledge to make nuclear weapons is not a secret, as the Nth Country Experiment showed, and highly technical designs of nuclear bombs have already been placed in the public domain by declassified government documents.

In November 2007, Bush appears to have modified his position, acknowledging that Iran has a sovereign right to civilian nuclear technology.(See ABC News Transcript of interview of George and Laura Bush, Nov 2007). Its not exactly clear how Bush seems to imply that Iran's uranium enrichment, which is done under IAEA safeguard more stringent than applied to Brazil or Argentina's enrichment programs, is somehow not part of that sovereign right.

NEWS! Bush lied about Iraq!

Study: False statements preceded war :

President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

WOW! What surprising news! LOL!

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.

Sure. They did much worse too. They violated international law and committed war crimes. They blatantly violated the most basic principles of the US Constitution. They tortured, murdered, and lied.

And you know what? Nothing will be done about it. They will never be prosecuted. They will never be held accountable. So the next time someone tells you about the "Rule of Law" bullshit, just laugh at them.

Iran and UN Sanctions

So here's how the United Nations Security Council works:

While they're busy trying to come up with sanctions that would supposedly punish Iran for perfectly legal activities, they decide to ignore and overlook Israel's war crimes in Gaza.

Note that this is the same UNSC that collectively sat on its hands when Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds with the full blessings of the United States, and drafted Resolution 598 only to save Saddam's ass (but which made no mention of the chemical attacks.)

(For a laugh, note how the story is being reported: Iran is being sanctioned because it has failed to abide by the "will of the international community" -- note that there's no law being violated, just the "will" of some countries who have claimed that they represent "the international community")

A "Cutting Tradition" indeed: The NY Times, FGM & unethical Muslim-bashing

So the Sunday Jan 20 2008 New York Times Magazine has an article about the practice of "female genital mutilation" aka femal circumcision, which is of course a weird thing to do to anyone especially females but what caught my eye was how the article openly and repeatedly attributes this practice to Islam and Muslims when it fact it has no religious basis - and worse, how apparently the editors of the NY Times edited the online version of the article to remove the more blatant attributions of the practice to Muslims.

This is the print version of the article (presented under the terms of the Fair Use doctrine since we're discussing this very article) Note the headline:

A cutting tradition - Inside a female circumcision ceremony for young Muslim girls.

And now compare that to the the headline for the online version of the same article:

A Cutting Tradition, By SARA CORBETT

Notice the elimination of any reference to "young Muslim girls" in the headline of the online version?

That's not an accident. See, someone at the NY Times remembered that FGM is in fact not a "Muslim" tradition. It has no actual religious basis. Rather, it is a social custom in some places, and predates the arrival of Islam. It is virtually unknown in the vast number of predominantly Muslims countries of the world, including Iran, China, Turkey, Syria, etc.

Indeed, of the places where FGM is widely practiced, the practice is not even limited to Muslims. As the US State Department says about Ethiopia, for example: These practices cross religious boundaries, including Christians, Muslims and Ethiopian Jews (Falashas).

But of course you wouldn't know that by reading the article in the NY Times which repeatedly invokes Islam and Muslims, without any concern for any of these facts.

But apparently someone at the NY Times' website caught this and decided to eliminate the overt reference to "Muslim girls" in the headline. Now, I don't have a problem with that. Fixing errors is the job of editors, after all. However, what I do have a problem with is the unethical way this was done. If the NY Times has made an error in the print version of the paper, especially one that taints an entire population of 2 billion Muslims as mutilators of the genitals of little girls, then the only ethical way to deal with it would be to formally publish a retraction that openly acknowledges the error - rather than quitely fixing the headline with the hopes that no one would notice.

Nor is this the first time that I have seen this sort of practice at the NY Times. Just last week, the print version referred to Saudia Arabia and Bahrain as "predominatly Sunni" states - when in fact Bahrain is mostly Shia (their rulers are Sunni but most people there are Shia - a cause for some discomfort for the autocratic rulers who look to the US to support them in power.) The online version substited Kuwait for Bahrain, again without any acknowledgment of their error. That's too bad, because I happen to have the print version and it won't just disappear if you ignore it.

Anyway I wrote a letter about this to the NY TImes Public Editor, who isn't terribly trustworthy as far as I am concerned, so I don't expect anything to come of it. Perhaps you'd like to give it a try so here's how you can contact the Public Editor at the NY Times:

public@nytimes.com

Phone: (212) 556-7652

Address:
Public Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036-3959 USA

UPDATE: A kind reader notes that FGM is practiced by the Maasai in Africa - who are not Muslims. Would the NY Times have published an article entitled "A cutting tradition" and attributed the practice to all Black people? No. But making hyperbolic claims about FGM and Muslims is OK, apparently.

Iran did NOT violate the NPT

I just wanted to post a follow-up my previous 2 posts about the (il)legalities of the referral of Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council, and the oft-repeated and inadequately-examined claim that UNSC Resolution 1696 which demands that Iran give up enrichment is "binding" on Iran regardless of what the NPT says.

I've already covered most of the details in the previous posts about how the resolution is ultra vires and non-binding; this post is limited to the question of whether Iran "violated the NPT" - specifically Article III of the NPT and Article XII.C of the IAEA Statute which was cited as the legal authority that supposedly required reporting Iran to the UNSC.

It is often claimed that Iran's supposedly "hidden" enrichment program means that Iran was "non-compliant" with some vaguely-defined legal obligation. Leaving aside whether Iran's enrichment program was really "hidden" nor not, this vagueness about Iran's non-compliance is deliberate: no distiction is made between non-compliance with the actual requirements of the NPT and the IAEA Statute (a serious matter) versus non-compliance with a safeguards agreement due to a "failure to report" otherwise legal activity (a relatively common occurrance.)

This whole argument over whether Iran violated Article XII.C can be easily resolved by simply reading the text of statute. Fortunately, the IAEA Statute is available online. A full reading Article XII.C makes things a bit clearer about what "non-compliance" refers to by setting out three requirements for compliance:

1- The first requirement for compliance is "accounting referred to in sub paragraph A-6 of this article"

Paragraph A-6 of Article XII, in turn, states that inspectors are to be sent to account for fissionable materials and ensure none has been diverted for a "military purpose".

The IAEA did send these inspectors to Iran - many many times. El-Baradei confirmed in Paragraph 52 of his November 2003 report that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons programme." And again, after extensive inspections, El-Baradei wrote Paragraph 112 of his November 2004 report that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is
not diverted to prohibited activities."

This statement by the IAEA is very significant, legally, because IT MEANS THAT IRAN DID NOT VIOLATE THE NPT.

As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has written:

"The conclusion that no diversion has occurred certifies that the state in question is in compliance with its undertaking, under its safeguards agreement and Article III of the NPT, to not divert material to non-peaceful purposes. In the case of Iran, the IAEA was able to conclude in its November 2004 report that that all declared nuclear materials had been accounted for and therefore none had been diverted to military purposes. The IAEA reached this same conclusion in September 2005."

Testimony presented to the Foreign Select Committee of the British Parliament by Elahe Mohtasham:

"The enforcement of Article III of the NPT obligations is carried out through the IAEA's monitoring and verification that is designed to ensure that declared nuclear facilities are operated according to safeguard agreement with Iran, which Iran signed with the IAEA in 1974. In the past four years that Iran's nuclear programme has been under close investigation by the IAEA, the Director General of the IAEA, as early as November 2003 reported to the IAEA Board of Governors that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities ... were related to a nuclear weapons programme." ... Although Iran has been found in non-compliance with some aspects of its IAEA safeguards obligations, Iran has not been in breach of its obligations under the terms of the NPT."

Siddharth Varadarajan of the Hindu wrote:

Despite this finding, the Board of Governors — acting under the pressure of the U.S. and the E-3 — voted on September 24 last year to find Iran in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement in the context of article XIIC of the IAEA Statute. Conveniently overlooked was the fact that article XIIC, as well as articles 18 and 19 of Infcirc 214 [Iran's Safeguard Agreement], define non-compliance essentially as diversion of safeguarded material for prohibited purposes, something Dr. el-Baradei had explicitly ruled out.

In short, Iran allowed the required IAEA inspections, and no diversion of fissile material to a "military purpose" was found. Thus, Iran did not violate this section of Article XII.C of the IAEA Statute and so there was no basis for referring Iran's file to the UNSC under the terms of this article.

2- The second requirement under Article XII.C of the IAEA Statute is "determining whether there is compliance with the undertaking referred to in sub paragraph F-4 of article XI"

A quich check of Article XI shows that it applies to "Agency Projects" meaning the projects in which the the IAEA has provided technical assistance to a requesting country. And, subparagraph F-4 specifically requires that the assistance provided by the IAEA shall not be used for military purposes and shall be subject to safeguards.

Last I checked, the IAEA did not provide any such assistance to Iran which has been used for military purposes - in fact the US killed the IAEA's technical assistance to Iran's enrichment program in 1983, as well as all of Iran's other contracts with other nations to provide the necessary enrichment technology that Iran was quite legally entitled to obtain. Thus, I don't see how this provision applies, let alone how Iran could have violated it.

3- The third requirement is compliance "with the measures referred to in sub-paragraph A-2 of this article"

Subparagraph A-2 of Article XII requires observance of "health and safety" standards. Again, there hasn't even been an allegation of any violation of this section either.

In short, past breaches of safeguards agreements do not constitute a violation of the statute unless there's been a diversion for militay purposes - which the IAEA has repeatedly said is not to case in Iran.

In fact the IAEA has found discrepancies the accounting of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries at a time (including S. Korea, Taiwan, and Egypt) - a few of which were later caught conducting secret and potentially weapons-related nuclear experiments - and yet they weren't referred to the UNSC for supposedly violating Article III of the NPT.

There was thus no basis under Article XII.C to refer Iran's file to the UNSC, and Iran did not violate the NPT.
However, the US got the IAEA Board to go along with them after spying in IAEA Director Elbaradei and threatening to oust him, and bribing India with the carrot of nuclear cooperation (which is itself a violation of the NPT by the US since India is not an NPT signatory)

Economist Iran coverage - more BULLSHIT as usual

I've been having a rather interesting "chat" with Peter David, some hack at over at the Economist, about the quality of their Iran coverage. David is acting all upset that I've dared to call the Economist a "mouthpiece" - which they most obviously are.

Proof? Heck you don't have to look too hard. Here's the latest example of the Economist's bias:

"Mr Ahmadinejad's fiery talk goes down well at home, and the stand-off with the United Nations, and in particular with the United States, over Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme continues." SOURCE: A winter of Iran’s discontent? Economist, UK, Jan 18, 2008

Which "nuclear weapons programme" would that be, David? Lets see now...after 5 years, the IAEA has said that they still haven't found a nuclear weapons program in Iran. In fact, quite recently, 16 American intelligence agencies supposedly agreed that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration doesn't even claim that Iran has a nuclear weapons program (only that Iran is seeking a "nuclear capability") ... and yet here's the Economist talking about the "Iran's nuclear weapons programme" as if its existence is an established fact.

And you call that accurate journalism? Is it my fault the Economist is so obviously promoting bullshit, David?

Mind you, that's just the latest embarrassment by the Economist. They've published worse before.

Bush's peace plan countdown

So as a swansong Bush went to the Middle East, and while mouthing the usual threats over Iran, made a belated effort to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem too. Among other empty rhetoric he claimed that there would be a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians before he leaves office in a year.

Well, today is day 364 in the countdown to the end of the Bush presidency. Israel has cut off power to Gaza, in violation of international law, thus inflicting mass punishment on refugees forced to live in what European human rights workers refer to as the largest open-air prison in the world.

Stay tuned.

More on coffee in Iran

I was thinking of my last post about knock-off Starbucks coffee shops in Iran. Just when did Iranians become a tea-drinking culture?

While there are apparently a number of coffee shops in Tehran, they all appear to be quite ritzy, not some place you average neighborhood guy or gal can go and just hang out. Iranians remain firmly a tea-drinking culture...for now.

Coffee brings up a lot of memories. It wasn't so long ago that you couldn't get a decent cup of coffee in all of Iran (sad little packets of freeze-dried Nescafe and some tepid water was all you could hope the waiter would bring you) but that was before the onslaught of the coffee shop craze in the US too.

I remember seeing the Crown Jewels of Iran (which put the British crown jewels to shame in comparison) and noticing the rather ornate, jewel-encrusted coffee pots that they used to serve coffee to the Shah and his guests. Coffee, not tea. Hmm...

I also remember an episode of an American TV series (one in the "JAG" series starring some starlet named Catherine Bell who is apparently half-Iranian herself) in which an "evil" Iranian politician who admits to "fooling" the simple-minded Americans into believing that he's a moderate--offers coffee to the visiting "good guy" Americans, and in which Iranians are repeatedly shown to be "bedouins" (both coffee and bedouins are stereotypes applicable to Arabs, not Iranians - a nuance apparently the writers weren't overly concerned about in their rush to promote the usual Hollywood hatemongering stereotypes.)

Ironically, (until now) when Iranians usually refer to a "ghahveh-khaneh" (literally, "coffee house") it is understood that no actual coffee will be served there - which is why the name is used interchangeably with "chai-khaneh" (tea house). However, the name has stuck probably because centuries ago, Iran was in fact a coffee-drinking culture before becoming tea drinkers. The 17th century traveler Chardin reported on coffee houses in Isfahan, for example, which among other things were places of somewhat ill-repute since the travelers were offered more than just coffee by the "serving youths." But apparently a particularly up-right prime minister came to power during the Safavid era who went on a anti-vice crusade, and coffee shops were cleansed of prostitution and turned into social hangouts for intellectual chatting, games, and the retelling of traditional Persian poetry - oh, and smoking the "ghalyun" of course. The same prime minister then implemented a policy of having mullahs give a sermon or two each day at the local coffee houses, to remind the useless louts who were hanging out in coffee shops all day to go out and get a real job.

Coffee was imported into Iran from Yemen. The Turks already drank coffee of course. Coffee was recognized for as a medicine too - supposedly good for digestion but also a cause of hemroids (!) The Dutch tried to get in on the trade to Iran but were not succesful so they instead concentrated on moving the stuff to Europe, where they could earn more money for their coffee, leaving the trade to local Gujarati and Persian Gulf traders who had always dominated the field.

For some reason though, coffee never quite caught on. Despite the large number of coffee houses that were reported to exist in Iran (all the way up to Mashad) apparently it was viewed as something that you consumed in the social scene at a coffeeshop, and not at home. I don't know why or how tea came to take coffee's place - one of these days I'd like to investigate that...

Obama's Iran problem

Obama has been judged "not good for the Jews" apparently because he isn't as willing to launch a war on Iran:

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz grades US presidential candidates based on how "good for Israel" they appear. Obama is currently judged to be the least "good for Israel" among the still-contending presidential candidates, and his rank is falling.

Why? From the Jerusalem Post:

Thank goodness, the position papers of candidates and Members of Congress are now so uniformly pro-Israel, regardless of party (with some exceptions) that it is almost impossible to distinguish between them...[but] Obama placed the risk of a US military response to Iran and the risk of lengthening the US stay in Iraq as higher and more important than the risk that international sanctions being too weak to stop an Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Such logic is warped and mistaken.

Warped and mistaken indeed!

And the Forward reported this about a memo that was passed around at the American Jewish Committee:

After stating that the senator’s interpretation of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran “raises questions” Feuer includes a half-dozen statements the Illinois lawmaker has made in support of renewed diplomacy with Iran, and notes that “he also calls for negotiating with other rogue states, notably Syria.”

How dare a US presidential candidate support diplomacy and negotiations! My god, the Presumption of these people! LOL!

Self-mutilation for God.

Iran police detain mourners for "mutilating themselves"

"They were using daggers as well as slashing their shoulders with spiked chains."

Ahhh...fellas? as a sign of your "piety" couldn't you just go feed homeless kittens or do something, ummm, you know...CONSTRUCTIVE...instead? How about picking up litter?

I say give these guys guns instead of chains to use on themselves. You'd be doing the gene pool a favor.

This reminds me of an Easter ceremony I heard about in the Philippines where a fellow literally had himself nailed to a cross. Apparently, tourists are welcome to see it all. Kinda like a reality-based Mel Gibson movie...

Ah, Religion....what can I say.

Nuclear punditocracy repeats baloney

Ray Takeyeh and Susan Maloney have an article entitled "Time to Talk to Tehran"

I met Susan Maloney very briefly a few years ago at a conference in Washington DC featuring Madame Secretary of State Albright, the child-killing war criminal. We had suffered a scare since she had gone incommunicado for a few days while in Iran, and I had been asked to make some calls to see what happened to her. She turned up safe and sound though - don't remember the details.

I have never met Ray Takeyeh but his name should be familiar as he's a certified member of the punditocracy ... and so I didn't expect much since the punditocracy have a way of turning fake nonesense into "conventional wisdom" through sheer repetition. If you keep saying it, people will start to believe it. And if you doubt this fact, just remember the "WMDs in Iraq" fiasco.

Anyway their article is frankly ridiculous since they say, among other bs, that "Iran should be told that it must agree to an unprecedented, intrusive verification scheme involving permanent inspectors and 24-hour monitoring of its facilities."

I don't know about "unprecedented" but Iran's nuclear facilities are already under 24-hour monitoring and Iran has repeatedly offered to station permanent inspectors. As for "negating the impact of its nuclear weapons" and "dismantling its nukes", I should point out--yet again--that there's is no evidence of any nuclear weapons which need to be negated or dismantled.

Its one of the characteristic of the Bush administration that they insist on presenting fiction as fact and keep repeating it in the face of all contrary evidence. Sad to see that these two authors are doing the same. I can understand why some mouthpieces SUCH AS THE ECONOMIST insist on referring repeatedly to a "nuclear weapons program" in the face of 5 years of IAEA inspections which have failed to turn up any evidence of such weapons, but why do otherwise respectable specialists on Iran resort to such sloppy sophistry?

Iran, the NPT and the UN Security Council

We often hear from certain elements that Iran had "violated the NPT" by not reporting the importation of centrifuges components. This is of course nonsense, because it confuses a breach safeguards agreements for failure to report otherwise legal activities (a relatively common occurance) with a violation of the NPT.

I think this bit of expert testimony presented to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the British Parliament should clarify this point, yet again:

17. In the list of behaviours, Iran's failure to report to the IAEA in a timely manner its enrichment, processing and reprocessing activities using nuclear material, in the 1980s and 1990s, and the way Iran has acquired centrifuge technology through non-state procurement networks for almost twenty years, has added to the suspicions and provided circumstantial evidence to those states who have been accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons. The technological options that would be available to Iran to use the civilian nuclear capability for use in a military programme are as follow. First, Iran could master the enrichment and other related nuclear technologies for the current overt civilian enrichment programme and build a parallel covert programme to enrich uranium for military use. Second, Iran would have the right under Article X.1of the NPT to withdraw from the treaty after providing three months notice for such a withdrawal, and then to convert its civilian enrichment facilities, which has been legitimately developed under Article IV of the NPT, to a military one. Arguably, such an option is currently available to a number of other non-nuclear weapon states such as Brazil, Germany, Japan and Netherlands.

18. However, the above suspicions and circumstantial evidence of the type argued by some states against Iran, do not fall under the international legal obligations that Iran has signed in the 1970 and 1974 in respects of the NPT and its associated IAEA safeguards measures. Under the terms of the NPT, like the other non-nuclear weapon states, Iran has to fulfil two fundamental obligations. The first obligation relates to Article II of the NPT, which requires from the non-nuclear weapon states not to manufacture or acquire nuclear weapons. The second obligation relates to Article III of the NPT, which requires from the non-nuclear weapon states to accept safeguards, implemented by the IAEA, to prevent the diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to weapons.

19. There has never been a specific enforcement mechanism in relation to implementation of Article II of the NPT obligations. Therefore, for example, if Iran were to decide to develop undeclared centrifuge nuclear facilities for the enrichment of uranium for military purposes, the IAEA would not have any type of monitoring system to detect such clandestine production of enriched uranium. In fact, such a wide area monitoring system would be considered as being unreasonably expensive by the IAEA and has never been before deployed anywhere else in the world. At the present time, only the centrifuges using UF6 as feed material based at Natanz are under the IAEA safeguards system. The construction of other centrifuges at other workshops in Iran not using any nuclear material would not fall under the standard IAEA safeguards measures, which Iran signed in 1974.

20. The enforcement of Article III of the NPT obligations is carried out through the IAEA's monitoring and verification that is designed to ensure that declared nuclear facilities are operated according to safeguard agreement with Iran, which Iran signed with the IAEA in 1974. In the past four years that Iran's nuclear programme has been under close investigation by the IAEA, the Director General of the IAEA, as early as November 2003 reported to the IAEA Board of Governors that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities ... were related to a nuclear weapons programme."[2] The same conclusion was confirmed by the IAEA Director General, in February 2006, which stated, "As indicated to the Board in November 2004, and again in September 2005, all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for."[3] In his latest report on Iran, the IAEA Director General confirmed again on 23 May 2007, that there has been "no-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran", and that Iran "has been providing the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and facilities."[4]

21. Through several resolutions passed between 2003 and 2006, the IAEA Board of Governors made a ruling that Iran has failed, over a period of almost twenty years, to comply with some of its required reporting obligations. However, the IAEA has also emphasised that it "has not seen any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devises."[5] Therefore, although Iran has been found in non-compliance with some aspects of its IAEA safeguards obligations, Iran has not been in breach of its obligations under the terms of the NPT.

22. Although the IAEA has stated that it is not yet in a position "to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear or activities in Iran", the Director General of the IAEA has acknowledged that "the process of drawing such a conclusion ...is a time consuming process,"[6] and that "the process of drawing such a conclusion, under normal circumstances, is a time consuming process even with an Additional Protocol in force."[7] It is important to note that there is an Addendum to the 2005 IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report, published in June 2006, which states that 45 other countries are in the same category as Iran, including 14 Europeans and several members of the Security Council.[8]

Canada Supports Torture - Shades of Savak

This is pretty comedic: The Canadian government put out a list of countries that practice torture, which includes Israel and the US along with China and Iran. The Americans and the Israelis objected -- despite the absolutely undeniable fact that both the US and Israel do most certainly and without any question whatsoever practice legalized torture--and so the Canadian government has -- yet again -- buckled to US pressure and removed the US (and I assume also Israel) as a list of countries that practice torture. Heck if Canada won't protect its own citizens who are falsely charged with terrorism from being "renditioned" to Syria where they're savagely tortured, why should they bother making such a list at all?

This is of course so counter-factual as to be funny. There is in fact a long, long history of the use of torture by US forces, which predates Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In fact, the US trained the secret police of quite a few tin-pot dictators around the world in the use of torture. 'Hidden Terrors,' a well-documented book on U.S. police training efforts in Latin America by former New York Times Saigon bureau chief A.J. Langguth, provided a searing indictment of these programs and the men who ran them. A more recent contribution to the study of the use of torture in democracies is by Darius Rejali.

And one of the tin-pot dictators who benefitted from this was of course the Shah of Iran:

The respected American journalist, William Worthy, visiting Iran, wrote in his journal on February 10, 1980: Two months ago, Kurt Waldheim was badly shaken when introduced in Tehran to five-year-old Abolfazi Safayi, who at the age of three, had been tortured by SAVAK in the presence of his father, to make the father reveal who had given him a taperecording of a Khomeini speech. Both the boy's arms were cut off. The father still wouldn't talk. Two of Abolfazi's brothers, one six months old, were then tortured to death in the father's presence. He still refused to talk.

On January 9, 1979, the New York Times reported: "Jesse J. Leaf . . . had been chief CIA analyst on Iran before resigning from the agency in 1973. . . . Mr. Leaf said a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in SAVAK on torture techniques. . . . The CIA torture seminars, Mr. Leaf said, 'were based on German torture techniques from World War II. . . . I know that the torture rooms were toured (by Americans) and it was all paid for by the USA'."

French actress: "Iranian women are like Italian women"

French actress Juliette Binoche says:

I recently took a year off from making movies and it was great. I went to Peru to walk in the mountains. I met some fantastic people in Iran. The Iranian women are like Italian women: they rule the house. Iran is full of life and the history is very rich - we have to learn from them. They influenced all the philosophers when they first came to Europe hundreds of years ago.

Well, she can forget about ever working in Hollywood now.

Starbucks coffee in Tehran?

Would you like some StarBOX coffee or Tex-Mex-Tehrani food?

They used to have a Kentucky Fried Chicken knock-off too - don't remember what it is called now...

Update: I guess there's always "StarCups" coffee too...

Talk to Iran - literally

New York park to get US-Iran hotline
Agence France Presse Jan 17 2008

NEW YORK (AFP) — A US group lobbying for Washington to engage Tehran in direct talks is to invite members of the public to chat with people in Iran at the weekend using three hotlines set up in a New York park.

"Americans and Iranians will begin an important conversation Saturday from 11 am to 1 pm," the Enough Fear campaign behind the stunt said in a statement.

The group will be using three vintage red telephones, meant to evoke the hotline that connected US and Soviet leaders during the Cold War.

"Our goal is to initiate dialogue, person to person," said Nick Jehlen, Enough Fear co-founder...

Israel threatens Iran, blackmails the US (again)

Israel is trying to (once again) blackmail the US and EU into sanctioning Iran, or else it will launch a nuclear attack on Iran.

Israel Radio has stated that a recently-tested missile was capable of carrying an "unconventional payload". This is in conjuunction with the Israeli PM statement that "all options are on the table" with respect to Iran, and coincides with a scheduled meeting of the US/EU on "expanded sanctions" on Iran.

If I am not mistaken, I believe this is the closest Israel has gotten to admitting that it does indeed have nuclear weapons, and explicitly threatening another country with unconventional attacks.

Clearly, Israel is sending a message here. I don't think Israel has ever referred this explicitly to its "unconventional" capabilities before- but to whom? Is the intended recipient of this nuclear threat Iran, or the US?

Remember, during the 1973 war there were hints of using nuclear weapons, which according to some historians blackmailed Nixon to airlift military aid to Israel:

Thus started the subtle, opaque use of the Israeli bomb to ensure that the United States kept its pledge to maintain Israel's conventional weapons edge over its foes. There is significant anecdotal evidence that Henry Kissinger told President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, that the reason for the U.S. airlift was that the Israelis were close to “going nuclear.”

Until now, we have heard a lot about how Ahmadinejad has supposedly "threatened to wipe Israel off the map" but we also know that Bush has explicitly threatened Iran with nuclear war, and now so has Israel. But Israel's threat is not just against Iran but also indirectly against the US and the entire world: leaving aside the legalities/moralities of launching a nuclear bomb against Iran, Israel has just threatened to put a bomb in the world's gas tanks. Everyone would suffer those consequences.

Remember that the next time we're told that Iran represents a "threat" to the world.

Iran and Judaism

"There is more evidence for Iranian influence on the formation of Jewish ideas than the reverse. The belief in a messianic savior, a bodily resurrection, and a last judgement are just some of the notions that Judaism (and subsequently Christianity and Islam) seem to have absorbed from the Persians. The concepts of a heavenly paradise (Old Persian paira daeza) and a hell of punishment for the wicked (an idea later developed in Christian tradition) are also seen in ancient Iranian religion but absent from pre-exilic Israelite sources. Eventually, the evil figure of Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, evolves into the Jewish, Christian. and Muslim devil, whose Jewish form first appears in the book of Job as ha-saran, "the accuser."

Like some other Indo-European peoples, Iranians believed time would end in a great apocalyptic event. The Scandinavians called ths apocalypse Ragnarok; the Iranians called it Frasho-kereti. In Iranian tradition this event would signal the return of a savior, the Saoshyant. It is surely no coincidence that the apocalyptic writings of Jewish tradition, such as those found in the books of Ezekiel and Daniel, appear in the context of the Babylonian captivity and after. Finally, it is likely that the Jewish festival of Purim was originally derived from the ancient Iranian springtime festival of Fravardigan, which, like Purim, began on the fourteenth day of the month of Azar and included an exchange of gifts.' "

- Judaism and the Silk Route
Richard Foltz
The History Teacher, Vol. 32, No. 1. (Nov., 1998), pp. 9-16.

Sen. Tom Lantos to retire - Good Riddance!

So Sen. Tom Lantos has announced that he plans on retiring next year. The news articles are full of praise about how Lantos -- who happens to be a Holocaust-survivor (in case you missed it the Nth-time you're reminded of it) -- is supposedly oh-so caring and concerned about human rights around the world. And oh he's now critical of the Iraq war, even though he tried to justify the torture of prisoners at Gitmo by appealing to ... you guessed it! the Holocaust.

But what the articles tend to forget is that during the run-up to the Gulf War, Lantos used his "Congressional Human Rights Caucus" to host a well-spoken young Kuwaiti woman identified only as "Nurse Nayirah".

The "nurse" testified oh so tearfully about how she had "witnessed" Iraqi soldiers tear babies from their incubators in Kuwait and leave them to die on the cold, hard floors of the Kuwaiti hospitals.

Of course, there was no truth to any of that, and "Nurse Nayirah" was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US - the whole thing was a con-job, created by the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton, intended to fool Americans into sending their boys and girls to risk their lives to prop up a dictatorship in Kuwait that had been toppled by Saddam's invasion.

In fact, Lantos' "Congressional Human Rights Caucus" is a fake - it has nothing to do with the US Congress and has to official status. It is a purely manufactured forum, which is legitimated by being associated (in appearances alone) with the US Congress. That's why Nurse Nayirah and Hill & Knowlton were not brought up on charges of lying to Congress - which happens to be a crime.

As John Macarthur wrote in his book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992). :

"The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied. ... Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations." (p.58)

Yes, good ol' Tom Lantos - he's so caring about human rights . . .