Iran Affairs

Secret spy camera sold on Ebay

Top secret MI6 camera brought on eBay
Metro.co.uk Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Details of the camera held information about Osama Bin Laden's men A man who purchased a second-hand camera from eBay for £17 has discovered it held top-secret MI6 information including details of an al-Qaeda terrorist.

In the latest in security blunder, the Nikon coolpix camera, which was previously owned by an MI6 agent, held names, finger prints and suspects' information...

Special Branch is now trying to trace the whereabouts of the MI6 agent that the camera belongs to.

You know, Ebay was founded by an Iranian -- perhaps this is one vast Iranian conspiracy!

Ahmadinejad agrees to Israel's existence?

Peter Tatchell of the Guardian reports on what he calls an "extraordinary shift" by Ahamadinejad over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The Iranian president has said he would accept a two-state solution if the Palestinians agree...Since most Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, the Iranian president is, in effect, agreeing to Israel's right to exist and opening the door to a peace deal that Iran will endorse.

However, in fact there has been no "extraordinary shift" and basically this has been the position of the Iranians all along: they'll agree to whatever the Palestinians themselves agree to. Khatami said that Iran would agree to whatever the Palestinians agree to, and so did Rafsanjani before him.

Tatchell thinks this is an extraordinary shift because the media tends to hype Iran's position on foreign policy matters, and so misses the nuances. However, Tatchell still buys into the framing that Israel's "right to exist" is at issue -- no, its the Palestinians' "Right to Exist" which is endangered, by the Israeli demand for a "Right to Ethnically-Cleanse" them. So lets get that straight and stop always portraying Israel as the victim.

And anyway, the Israelis killed off the two-state solution long ago. They want one state -- a Jewish state in which Palestinians are either dead or gone.

Milhollin and Pollack foist the false choice fallacy in dealing with Iran

Both Gary Milhollin and Kenneth Pollack have recently published pieces in which they insist that the US must seek to deprive Iran of her absolute, unquestionable, inalienable and sovereign right to enrich uranium. Pollack suggests that Iran should be given an offer -- an ultimatum of sorts, really -- and Milhollin insists on threats of more sanctions. But in either case, they are presenting the issue as a fundamental false choice, according to which Iran must either be deprives of uranium enrichment or else Iran will build nukes.

I have written about this false choice fallacy in the past. Basically, in presenting the matter as "either prevent Iran's enrichment or else Iran will go nuclear", they're  conveniently limiting the range of choices leaving out a significant option: accepting Iran's compromise proposals that would address any real concern that Iran's nuclear program could be used to make bombs.

This is known as the False Choice fallacy -- a classic example.

And why are they presenting the issue as a false choice? Because nuclear proliferation is not really their concern -- they're more interested in depriving Iran of nuclear energy, ensuring Israel's domination over the Mideast, and eventually toppling the Iranian government and replacing it with a puppet regime like in Jordan. THAT is their real agenda, and so no amount of Iranian compromises on the nuclear issue will ever suffice. Even if IRan gives up enrichment, they'll come back with yet more demands.

And I have to say, I find it amusing that Pollack and Milhollin have the nerve to still show their faces in public, considering how wrong they were over Iraq. This is the same Milhollin who characterized weapons inspectors as being "timid" and "irrelevant" for their "failure" to find the non-existent WMDs in IRaq. And don't even get me started on Pollack.

However, just to clarify: the "threat" that Iran could re-enrich its stock of low-enriched uranium and make weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium -- which Milhollin harps on so much -- was specifically addressed by Iran's compromise proposals too. Specifically, the Iranians offered to:

Limit the enrichment of nuclear materials so that they are suitable for energy production but not for weaponry;

Immediately convert all enriched uranium to fuel rods, thereby precluding the possibility of further enrichment

ANd yet their compromise offers were dismissed without consideration, thus proving yet again that the whole nuclear weapons issue is merely pretextual.

Iran and "clandestine nuclear activity"

So ElBaradei is quoted by the media as saying that the IAEA can't guarantee that Iran isn't running a clandestine nuclear program:

 A six-year probe of Iran has failed to rule out the possibility that the country may be running clandestine nuclear programs...

This is a case of the media spinning the IAEA's conclusions in order to make it appear that Iran has an on-going clandestine nuclear program.

As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Comittee for Nuclear Policy has explained:

For some it is tempting to declare, based on the inability of the IAEA to presently draw a conclusion on the absence of nuclear activities, that Iran continues to operate concealed facilities and that any such facilities must be for a military program. But the IAEA has cautioned that the lack of a conclusion does not imply suspicion of undeclared nuclear materials and activities, as the matter is frequently spun in the media and by some governments.

Note how the media reports fail to mention that ElBaradei himself has repeatedly said that the IAEA has "no concrete evidence" of any such undeclared nuclear activities in Iran either. For example this is what ElBaradei stated regarding the 2007 NIE:

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei ... notes in particular that the Estimate tallies with the Agency´s consistent statements over the last few years that, although Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities, the Agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran.

And in his interview with Wolf Blitzer:

We haven´t seen any concrete evidence to that effect, Wolf. We haven´t received any information there is a parallel ongoing active nuclear weapon program. What we have seen in the past that certain procurements that have not been reported to us, certain experiments. And that´s where we are working now with Iran to clarify the past and the present, but I have not received any information that there is a complete active nuclear weapon program going on right now. . .But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No.

This is what the media is spinning:

The IAEA has verified that all of Iran's known (declared) nuclear activities are progressing under IAEA safeguards exactly as they're supposed to be, and are not being used to make weapons. However, the IAEA has said that it cannot legally verify that there are no undeclared nuclear activities in Iran.

Naturally, this point is being manipulated and spin-doctored by the media to make Iran appear suspect. However, the IAEA's refusal to guarantee the absence of clandestine nuclear activities in Iran is not because there's actually any reason to suspect the existence of such undeclared activities -- rather, its because the IAEA does not verify the absence of undeclared activities for ANY country that has't signed and ratified the Additional Protocol. In short, it is a legal technicality, which is being exploited and misrepresented by the media for political purposes.

According to the IAEA's own Annual Safeguards Implementation Report of 2004, of the 61 states where both the NPT safeguards and the Additional protocol are implemented, the IAEA has certified the absence of undeclared nuclear activity for only 21 countries, leaving Iran in the same category as 40 other countries including Canada, the Czech Republic, and South Africa:

"With regard to 21 States with both CSAs [Comprehensive Safeguard Agreements] and AP [Additional Protocol] in force or otherwise applied, the Agency concluded that all nuclear material in those States remained in peaceful nuclear activities. For 40 other such States, the Agency had not yet completed the necessary evaluations, and could therefore only draw the conclusion that the nuclear material placed under safeguards remained in peaceful nuclear activities."

Iran has signed the Additional Protocol, voluntarily implemented it for 2 years (during which time no evidence of any clandestine nuclear activity was found in Iran) and has offered to ratify the AP once its nuclear rights are recognized. However to allow excess inspections under the AP when Iran is being threatened with bombings is to give away crucial intelligence that can only be used to make such bombings more effective.

"I hate all Iranians"

BOO!

Remember this story from last year?

So I wonder where she is now?

Not in jail or a war crimes tribunal, where they all belong...

"Bailout": Americans just got screwed for $700 billion

In discussing the recent "bailout plan" a friend of mine  -- a former investment banker -- noted how bank profits are their own, but bank losses are everyone else's.

So if you're an American, you now are the proud owner of your share of $700 billion in "toxic debts" -- and the bailout plan does not punish the CEOs who created the toxic debt nor does it provide any real aid to the people who are losing their homes (including around 700 million elderly Americans, according to the AARP.) 

Smart Iranians: Roshanak Hakimzadeh

Just heard a BBC interview with Dr. Roshanak Hakimzadeh, MSEE (1986) Chief of the Photovoltaic and Space Environments Branch NASA Glenn Research Center. She's a specialists in photovoltaics and wanted to be an astronaut!

But of course, photovoltaics "could be" used to make WMDs...

"Inside Iran's fury"- history of the US-Iran conflict by Kinzer

The Oc 2008 issue of the Smithsonian magazine has a large article on Iran by Kinzer, entitlted "Inside Iran's Fury"

One error in the article is the total absence of any references to AIPAC and the malign role of the pro-Israeli lobby in this whole matter.

Another error is where he quotes Fawaz saying that Iraq's US-backed use of chemical weapons against Iran "convinced the [Iranian] mullahs that they needed to pursue a program to develop unconventional weapons of their own."

No, actually the Iranians who were legally entitled at the time to respond to Iraqi CW use to respond in kind, specifically did not do so. Khomeini explicily ruled that out.

Also, I don't approve of articles that play down the level of involvment of the US in Iraq's CW use. The US did far more than just provide political cover to Iraq -- US companies were actively involved in shipping CW weapons components to Iraq, with the full knowledge and appreciation of what the material was going to be used for.

After all, the United States had a key role in the development of the Iraqi chemical weapons program, which included providing cluster munitions, sharing intelligence, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological weapons components. Leaked portions of Iraq's "Full, Final and Complete" dislosure of the sources for its weapons programs lists many American companies which provided the chemical precursors to Iraq's weapons program, even though the US tried to suppress the disclosure. These reportedly include thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture deadly mustard gas, which made its way to Iraq via Alcolac International, Inc., a Maryland company, since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc., and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum and now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and energy company. The US was fully aware of the use of these chemicals - in fact, the Reagan administration had to first remove Iraq from the State Department list of terrorist nations in order to ease the transfer of the technology and material to Iraq.

U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup

Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page A01

The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague....

A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.

The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide." ...

In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation

Zionism and AIPAC have been "outed"

In reviewing blogs and commentary on Iran, I find it interesting that so many people can discuss the issues by mentioning the influence of AIPAC and the role of Zionism and books like The Israel Lobby by Mearsheimer/Walt.

I've been screaming my head off on the internet about the malign influence of the pro-Israeli lobby since 1996, when I first "got on" the Web. Back then, I remember that if you dared speak of Israeli influence-peddling, you were automatically labelled a kook. The issue was completely a no-go area. If I remember right, I could find only 1 PhD thesis discussing the role of the Israeli lobby in shaping US foreign policy. The only books on the topic were by members of the lobby themselves, and were NOT widely distributed. I think it was AIPAC boss Sy Kenan who said that "Lobbying is like a night flower -- it blooms best in the dark and dies in the sun" -- or somethign to that effect.

How things have changed! Now, a "mainstream" foreign affairs journal dares to publish issues with titles such as "Does the pro-Israeli lobby have too much influence". Wow! 

I guess the "outing"  and exposure of the Pro-Israeli lobby is one of the consequences of their vehement, maniacal push for the US invasion of Iraq and the resultant catastrophe there.

Of course, the same lobbyists have since tried their hardest to disassociate themselves from the mess in Iraq and vehemently deny pushing the US into invading that country. And predictably, they're maniacally pushing for a US attack on Iran too, while again trying to hide their role.

My point is: the lobby has been dragged into the sunlight. Don't let them scurry back into the dark where they can scheme and thrive. Keep the bright lights focussed on them.

Re-framing the Iran nuclear dispute

Bloomberg reports that the Iranians have said that it was a mistake to provide excess cooperation with the IAEA in a vain effort to refute the allegations of "alleged studies" - in other words, to try to disprove a negative.

I could have told them that a while ago, when I wrote about the problem of trying disprove a negative:

During the course of reasoned argument, it is usually the case that the person who makes an accusation has the obligation to provide the necessary proof to support it. The fallacy of shifting the burden of proof occurs when the accused is required to disprove the accusation against him, a practical impossibility...The accused is faced with two equally bad choices: either he can simply refuse to attempt to disprove the accusation, or he can try to do so fruitlessly. Whichever option the accused chooses, he will simply make himself appear to be guilty.

And in case that was too much reading, I even drew a picture of why Iran's attempts to cooperate with the IAEA over the "Laptop of Death" allegations were doomed to fail: meet Nukie.

You see, it is practically impossible to disprove a negative -- that Iran does not have secret nuclear weapons intentions. Rather, the burden should be on those who accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons to prove their claims -- which thus far they have plainly failed to do. But through a constant drumbeat of hype and propaganda, innuendo and speculation, Iran's accusers have shifted the burden of proof and now demand that Iran somehow refute these ill-founded allegations.

THis is no accident -- they tried the same trick with Iraq too: they created massive hysteria about WMDs in Iraq and then demanded that Iraq prove that it no longer had any WMDs. When the Iraqis attempted to meet this burden of proof by filing a highly-detained, 12200-page report about the destruction of their WMDs program, the US simply vilianized the Iraqis for filing such a large document and accused them of attempting to hide something. A lonely article in the NY Times explained why Iraq's efforts to disprove the WMD allegations were doomed to fail:

''Suppose you assert that there are no black swans...You'd have to produce all the swans in the world to show there are no black ones -- an impossible undertaking.  

So, how do you get out of the no-win situation such as this, when you're made to look guilty regardless of whether you try to refute an allegation, or whether you do not? I'll leave to answer to that up the Iranians and the PR professionals that the Iranians SHOULD HAVE HIRED long ago to deal with this sort of thing, though there are many books on the topic of argumentation that may interest readers. 

However, I'll repeat what I just said during a PressTV interview: it is not enough for Iran to merely deny the allegations made by the US. The US has framed the issue as "suspicious Iran has to prove that it is not making nukes" -- and when the IRanians deny they're making nukes, not only are they incapable of being convincing (since it is logically impossible for them to prove they're not making nukes with certainty) but the very act of denial by Iran simply strengthens and propogates this frame. In other words, by denying the accusation, they're buying into and promoting the US's framing of the issue and getting buried deeper. 

No amount of denials, no matter how vehemently asserted, will solve this conundrum, and no amount of cooperation with the IAEA will help either because 1- the inspections can be dragged out indefinitely to every closet and cupboard in Iran, and even then more suspicions and allegations can be manufactured by the US in the shape of yet more "Laptops of Death" and 2- even the IAEA cannot verify that Iran won't potentially make bombs in the future anyway (notice that the US accuses Iran of seeking a "breakout capability" -- no amount of IAEA inspections and prove that Iran -- or any other country -- won't one day decide to break out of the NPT and make nukes.)

So something fundametally different has to happen. Iran has to fundamentally break out of this frame constructed by the US in which the US makes accusations and Iran is required to disprove them.

This is what I suggest: that Iran reframe this issue as a conflict between the developing and developed nations of the world. And by doing so, the Iranians can put the US on the defensive, and require the US to disprove that it isn't seeking to deny Iran's nuclear rights in order to monopolize nuclear fuel technology for its own benefit. There is good support for this view already. After all, it is pretty obvious that the US allegations against Iran have nothing to do with nuclear weapons, as claimed, but are really intended to deny Iran its sovereign right to possess and operate enrichment plants. That's why the US has consistently ignored Iranians compromise offers that would address any real concern about nuclear weapons proliferation, such as the Iranians' offer to open their nuclear program to multinational joint ventures (even though this was endorsed by US and international experts)

And, the developing countries have already long resented efforts by the US to place restrictions on the sharing of nuclear technology with them, as required under the NPT. Both the Non-Aligned Nations and the OIC have already expressed their support for Iran. The developing countries have consistently made it clear that non-proliferation efforts should not be used as an excuse to deprive countries of their right to possess and operate nuclear enrichment facilities either.  

Such an approach would be fruitful on the international stage, and would benefit Iran's position with respect to those developing countries.  However, another appeal has to be shaped to communicate Iran's position when it comes to the audiences inside the US and EU states, since the populations of the US and EU probably don't share the same resentment of developing states.

And now my fingers hurt from typing too much!

EU misleading claims about Iran's nuclear "capacity"

The EU has reportedly stated that Iran is reaching a nuclear weapons "capability"

As I have explained before, they use this deliberately ambiguous language about "intentions" and "capabilities" to make up for the undeniable fact that there's no evidence of any nuclear weapons program in Iran:

The intentional conflation of a nuclear weapons programme with a nuclear-energy programme takes several forms. For example, in addition to overt references to a weapons programme, there may be references to Iran's nuclear "threat", or vague statements about Iran's nuclear "ambitions", or even more tenuously, allusions to Iran's "intentions" to obtain a nuclear-weapons "capability".

The low-enriched uranium cannot be used to make bombs -- and Iran can't convert it into highly enriched uranium without the IAEA inspectors noticing. So in short, Iran is doing everything it is perfectly legally entitled to do.

And as usual, the article invited David Albright to run the numbers and scaremonger about how Iran is about to nuke the world.

Iran has even offered to place additional voluntary restrictions on its nuclear program beyond its legal requirements to ensure that it can't evey hypothetically make nukes -- such as operating its nuclear program as multinational ventures with other countries -- and that offer by Iran has been rejected offhand by the Bush administration despite the fact that it was endorsed by US and international experts.

Note that Brazil and Argentina are also producing enriched uranium and "could" make bombs with it too. In fact according to the IAEA there are about 40 countries right now (more to come) that can be similarly accused of having the "capability" to build nukes if they wanted to do so. This is essentially an open-ended, unrefutable accusation without basis in fact.

The BBC goes dumb on Ahmadinejad

This was just weird: a BBC segment last night quoted Ahamadinejad's statement at the UN about how "the American Empire will soon collapse" or something to that effect - then spent a large chunk of time discussing with some academic whether the US technically can be described as an empire or not. They spent 90% more time on that issue rather than report on the rest of Ahmadinejad's speech.  I guess no one at the BBC has ever heard of a METAPHOR before. Ahmadinejad's comparison of the US to an empire was METAPHORICAL rather than literal.

For the benefit of the BBC, here's the definition of a metaphor from Dictionary.com:

met·a·phor (noun)

1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God"

2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

Ahmadinejad interview with Larry King on CNN

Quote: "We have no issues with the American people."

C-SPAN interview of Ahmadinejad

Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran held a press conference on the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday Sept 23 2008. New York, NY :

1 hr. 2 min. - the interview starts in Farsi but Ahmadinejad's words are in English.

Quote: "They are trying to force us to prove something does not exist"

 

 

Missing Iraqi billions blamed on Iran

Remember the many $23 billion dollars in Iraqi money in US hands that have gone missing through corruption and fraud? Its all Iran's fault, dont you know.

The search for the missing billions apparently led the BBC program Panorama to Hazem Shalaan, who lived in London until he was appointed to the new Iraqi government as minister of defence in 2004:

He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2bn out of the ministry. They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top-class weapons. Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.

He said he was innocent and that it was all a plot against him by pro-Iranian MPs in the government.

Of course! Its the fault of the Iranians. Who else? Pretty much every cockup in Iraq can be traced to Iran. Heck one way or another, the Iranians must be responsible for stealing Iraqi oil too.

Scott Peterson pre-emptively smears Ahmadinejad as a kook

Poisoning the well is a fallacy and rhetorical tool where adverse information about a person is pre-emptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the person is about to say.

Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor has engaged in a bit of 'poisoning the well'  by pre-emptively smearing Ahmadinejad's speech before the UN as that of a crazy messianist -- even before Ahmadinejad had made his speech:

Amid the combative rhetoric expected from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday at the United ations, he will almost certainly renew his call for the quick return of the Shiite Messiah to vanquish oppressors and bring perfection to the world.

Actually, and contrary to Peterson's claims, Ahmadienejad denies that he's being led by  the Messiah:

Q: You have been reported as saying that the messiah is managing the daily affairs of the Iranian economy. . .

A: I'm not aware where you found that quote from. The government is responsible for the economy.

Its really funny that the US and Israel regularly assert that attacking Iran is an "option on the table" and yet Peterson accuses Ahmadinejad of supposedly engaging in "combative rhetoric" for standing up to these threats and defending Iran against such threats.

And Scott Peterson is plain wrong when he claims that the return of the Mahdi (messiah) is "equivalent to the second coming of Christ for many Christians" -- because the Christians (especially the dispensationalists embraced by the Bush administration) believe that the coming of the messiah can be rushed along by causing the apocalypse to happen, where as Shiites do no beleive that humans can set the timetable in that manner. In short, Ahmadinejad is not apocalyptic as Peterson implies.

The fact is that the Persian language is a poetic language which contains a lot of ecstatic appeals to the tanscendant -- especially of notions of justice and peace. The appeal to the Messiah is a metaphorical appeal for justice. It doesn't mean that the speaker is apocalyptic and wants to bring about the end of the world as Peterson implies. To Persian ears, Ahmadinejad's claim of being surrounded by an "aura of light" simply means that he felt particularly inspired. Its not taken literally.

Ahmadinejad uses this language because he knows it appeals to his domestic constituents who are mostly the "religious poor" -- and he has been criticized for that by his critics -- but despite what Peterson suggests, even Ahmadinejad's critics don't claim that Ahmadinejad seriously believes that he is an agent of the messiah. They simply criticize his use of such rhetoric.

And finally, Peterson says

"Three years ago, he was quoted telling local officials concerned with overspending: 'Don't worry, Imam [Mahdi] is going to come in two years and all the problems will be solved.' "

Yes, Ahmadinejad was quoted widely as saying that -- because THIS WAS A COMMON JOKE and not factual incident. But I guess Peterson is desperate to find anything to demonize Ahmadinejad so he resorts to reporting a third-hand rumour. 

Con Coughlin's "missing uranium" story update

Heathlander updates on the "missing uranium" article in the Daily Telegraph by Con Coughlin:

[W]while [IAEA spokesman Melissa] Fleming’s refutation of Coughlin’s propaganda was reported by Press TV and other Iranian news sources, not to mention by numerous blogs, in the British media there has been a complete black-out.

Kuwait's belligerence towards Iran during the Iran-Iraq war

I have received private emails questioning my post about the role of Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq war and whether it was a "neutral" country. (Last night Mottaki also mentioned how Ayatollah Khomeini had warned Kuwait that it would be the subject of Saddam's attentions next so let me add that in context) Here's the way I see it:

Kuwait was providing direct material support to Saddam's regime in waging a war of aggression against Iran, thus in ffect making Kuwait a co-belligerent in the war.

Referring to the Persian Gulf states' "precarious, and one must add in some cases largely fictitious, neutrality" during the Iran-Iraq war, Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp wrote in 1988:

"There was thus little question that the [Persian] Gulf states, and especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, were aware of the Iraqi plan to attack Iran, and did little to restrain Baghdad, possibly offering some assurances to encourage the attack. Iraq's dispersal of its air force into the territory of some of these states, and its deployment of helicopters on their territory for use as a stagingpost for an attack, almost saw the [Persian] Gulf states directly involved in hostilities." ("Iran and Iraq at War" p.163)

And,

"[T]he aid given to Iraq by the [Persian] Gulf states has been substantial and could be said to have been a decisive factor in enabling the regime to withstand the rigours of an extended war. Although the size of the financial loans cannot be known definitively, estimates of the sums involved range from $35 billion to $50 billion since the beginning of the war, and it seems certain that very little of this is a loan in the strict commercial sense, but rather an outright gift....Because of the crucial role they have played in sustaining Iraq's war effort, these two states (Kuwait and KSA) are the ones which Iraq has been at most pains to cultivate. .. At the same time, the help which they have given has enabled Iraq to withstand seven years of war without succumbing either to military or economic collapse. In averting such a catastrophe, they have also served their own particular interests..."

Or did they?

"However, such acquiescence also meant that the [Persian] Gulf states would have to accept the consequences, spelt out by the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs in early 1986: 'We wish to live in peace and co- operation with our neighbours. But we cannot allow some countries to sell oil on behalf of our enemy and calmly transport the oil in the Persian Gulf.'"

The issue of neutrality and the legal implication of the Tanker War are still being debated, but this much is pretty clear:

"[T]he direct contribution of massive war loans to Iraq by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf Sheikhdoms fatally compromised their alleged neutrality toward the Iran-Iraq War... Iran was entitled to treat the provision of such military and economic assistance by these countries to Iraq as an act of hostility directed against it." - "International Crisis and neutrality: United States foreign policy towards the Iran-Iraq war" by Francis A. Boyle, Mercer Law Review Vol. 43 p.523, Winter 1992.

Chubin & Tripp also have an interesting quote by Khomeini which in retrospect certainly seems well-justified and ironically corresponds to the later-proferred US justification for pressing the war to topple Saddam:

"For in order to defend Islam, this tumour must be removed . . . otherwise this country will never experience peace; neither our country nor Iraq, nor all the Gulf states. These Gulf states do not realize what Saddam would do to them." (Chubin & Tripp, p. 161)

Ahmadinejad last night and interview on NPR

Thanks to Arnold Evans of Middle East Reality, here's the text of Ahmadinejad's interview on NPR. He was basically attacked. But, he threw it back well.

I love how the interviewer kept asking him provocative and loaded questions, and when Ahmadinejad tried to respond by providing a substantive response, the interviewer tries to cut him off by saying "time is short":

NPR: If you will forgive me, the time is short.

Ahmadinejad: Well, everything is related to history. Imagine, somebody comes and occupies the United States, and say it's history, don't say anything else about it.

I also love how the interviewer accuses Iran of being "provocative" as if its the Iranians who have declared that attacking the US is an "option on the table" and not vice versa.

Anyway this exchange makes me wish I had stuck around to listen to Ahmadinejad's full speech last night. I had received an invitation to go to a hotel near the UN (so did lots of other people so I'm not trying to show off!) I had taken the day off from work because I was sick but I decided to go anyway and meet a few people I knew would be there. Had some good Iranian food too -- which I shouldn't have eaten since I was still not feeling well enough to eat so much. Anyway, I heard Mottaki  speak and a few others but by the time Ahmadinejad came by I had to leave. Too bad.

I was wrong about Strait of Hormuz

I had a previous post mentioning that the Strait of Hormuz is not international waters. That point was correct, however I also said that submarines have to surface whilst passing through the straits. A better informed commentator pointed out that as of 1994, that's no longer true. My mistake. I love hearing from informed people.

Encyclopedia Britannica's bias on Middle East affairs

Funny that the Encyclopedia Britannica has a blog -- which seems to exclusively feature very biased writers such as Mitchell Bard, an AIPAC staff member who has essentially made a career as a self-admitted pro-Israeli propagandist (note that his bio on the site makes no mention of his association with AIPAC) 

I suggest we email the Encyclopedia Britannica and ask if objectivity has any value for them. Their email is blogs@eb.com

Remember when... Iraq attacked Iran, sparking the Iran-Iraq War

On September 22, 1980, Iraqi aircraft ineffectively attacked six Iranian air bases and four army installations. On September 23rd, the Saddam Hussein's army crossed the border into Iranian territory in a four-pronged, six-division ground attack along a 400 mile front, igniting a war that was to last nearly eight years.

By September 28, Iraqi forces had secured Ahvaz in southwest Iran. The war rapidly spilled over into the Persian Gulf. Iran declared its coastal waterways a war zone, established new shipping lanes and identification procedures for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and instituted a blockade of Iraqi ports on September 22.

Iraq responded on October 7 by declaring the area of the Gulf north of latitude 29 degrees 30 minutes a prohibited war zone. Maritime traffic along the Alvand Rud (aka "Shatt al Arab" waterway) came to a halt, trapping at least 83 merchant vessels in the zone of hostilities. On December 24, 1980, Iraqi aircraft struck the main Iranian oil export terminal at Kharg Island.

Prior to attacking Iran, Saddam Hussein had declared the Algiers Agreement of March 1975 to be null and void on September 17th. The Algiers Agreement had set the border between the two countries at the center of the Alvand Rud (aka "Shatt al-Arab") waterway. Regaining exclusive control over the waterway was one of Saddam's most important strategic objectives.

Saddam also sought to conquer and annex the entire oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan (which he called "Arabistan") and hoped in vain that an invasion would result in a rebellion against Tehran by the province’s Arab minority. Saddam also sought to reestablish Iraqi control over the vicinity of Qasr e-Shirin that the 1975 Algiers Accord had ceded to Iraq. If successful, Saddam would have made Iraq the foremost power in the Persian Gulf, and the Arab world.

Saddam timed the attack to take advantage of post-revolutionary anarchy of Iran, and the resultant poor condition of the Iranian military. He believed that the rapid success of a quick invasion would force Iran to cede territory and sue for peace. He did not realize that the Iranians would rally against the foreign invader and fight the war with such a ferocity and zeal that his own rule over Iraq would be imperiled, and force him to turn to the United States for support.

The Iranians, who viewed the war as as “Imposed War,” rallied to the cause of pushing out the invader, and sought to permanently remove the threat to their country by toppling Saddam from power. By the autumn of 1981, the ground war had turned against Iraq as Iranian offensives successfully expelled the Iraqi army out of many of the areas conquered in the 1980 invasion, forcing Saddam Hussein to call for a ceasefire. Iran, which considered Saddam's regime to be an on-going threat, dismissed the ceasefire demand and successfully recaptured the Iranian city Khuzestan. By July, the Iranian army had commenced offensive operations aimed at Basra. Iran would remained on the offensive throughout 1983, until the US effectively entered the war on the side of Saddam.

Iraq sought to prevent the transportation of Iranian oil exports by foreign shipping, thus cutting off Iran's economic power to continue fighting the war. On May 30, Iraqi forces attacked the Turkish-flagged tanker Atlas I, which become the first tanker damaged in the war. Iran responded by deploying surface to air missile-equipped ships to the area and by providing armed escort for tanker shipping. In 1984, Iraqi aircraft struck 58 merchant vessels resulting in six sinkings and 28 ships being declared total losses.

This was a fourfold increase in attacks from the previous year. By late April, Iraqi anti-ship capabilities were enhanced with the introduction of five Dassault Super Entendard attack aircraft, which were loaned to Iraq by France. Armed with French-built Exocet missile, the Super Entendard improved Iraqi capability to strike targets at greater ranges. On March 27, 1984, Iraq used the French-provided Super Etandards to sink the South Korean vessel Heyang Ilho. The French later armed the Iraqis with Mirage F-1 planes armed with Exocet missiles to be used against Iran too.

Iraq had declared the area north of 29 degrees 30 minutes north latitude a prohibited war zone on October 1980 and had also declared a maritime exclusion zone around the main Iranian oil export terminal at Kharg Island was declared in August 1982. In effect, Iraq treated this area as a free-fire zone and attacked any vessels found there, regardless of nationality. The dangers posed to Persian Gulf shipping by Iraq's long-range Mirage F-1 fighters armed with Exocet missile system were made clear to the United States with the May 17, 1987, attack on USS Stark (FFG-31).

Ironically, after the Iraqi attack on the US naval vessel, President Reagan gave a speech in which he accused Iran of threatening shipping in the Persian Gulf. This was part of the US 'tilt' towards Iraq which originated in 1981, when the US gave AWACs air radar planes to Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge that the intelligence gathered by the planes would be shared by the Saudis with the Iraqis. The Reagan administration also formally removed Saddam Hussein's regime from the US State Department's list of terrorist-supporting regimes, opening the way for the overt & direct transfer of significant quantities of arms components, "dual use" supplies, battle field intelligence as well as US financing and political aid to Saddam's regime. Donald Rumsfeld was sent to meet Saddam on December 20, 1983, to reassure him of US backing in the war against Iran despite Saddam's use of chemical weapons.

Iran, which had already cut off Iraq's access to oil export routes through the Persian Gulf, responded to the Iraqi attacks on merchant shipping by launching its own attacks on Saudi and Kuwaiti ships. Kuwaiti vessels were transporting Iraqi oil and the government of Kuwait, along with Saudi Arabia, was actively aiding Saddam in the war against Iran, thus legally making them co-belligerents in the war and legitimate targets.

Iraq expanded the "Tanker War" when, by 1986, Iranian army units successfully captured of the Faw peninsula, and in mid-March commenced operations to capture of Iraqi city of Basra. Iraq responded by conducting 62 attacks on merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf, resulting in four sinkings. Iran responded by conducting 41 successful attacks, damaging two Kuwaiti and six Saudi vessels.

Iraq's attacks on Iranian oil exports were only mostly ineffective, and Iran managed to continue shipping oil. In fact, by the end of 1986, Iran and Iraq had combined to strike 269 vessels resulting in 21 vessels being sunk. This represented less than one percent of all shipping transiting the Persian Gulf. Persian Gulf oil shipping had not been seriously threatened by the Tanker War, and the price of oil had remained remarkably constant during this period.

Kuwait was not a neutral in the Iran-Iraq war. Kuwait provided monetary grants to Saddam Hussein, opened its ports to Iraqi weapons shipments, and assisted in exporting Iraqi oil. However, the strategy of Kuwait and Iraq was successful in encouraging further overt American intervention in the war on behalf of Iraq. In December 1986 the Kuwaiti government approached the United States seeking protection for its tanker fleet from Iran. The United States agreed to the Kuwaiti request. In order to further pressure the Reagan administration to come to the aid of Kuwait, they let it be known that they had also approached the Soviet navy for similar protection. US Secretary of Defense Weinberger agreed to offer protection to Kuwait’s vessels on March 7th. The Reagan Administration then formally informed Congress of the reflaging decision on March 12, 1987.

The decision to provide protection for Kuwaiti-owned shipping resulted in several direct military confrontations with the Iran forces in the Persian Gulf. This was seen as an overt US intervention in the war on behalf of Iraq, despite Iraqi attacks on Iranian shipping, Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran as well as the Iraqi Kurds, or the use of SCUD missiles against Iranian population centers.

In October 1987, the United States navy responded to an Iranian attack on two tankers owned by non-neutral Kuwait, by attacking and destroying Iranian oil platforms in what the International Court of Justice later ruled was an unjustified action.

The Iraqi air force continued attacking ships using Iran’s oil facilities, sinking four vessels and damaging five beyond repair, including the 564,000 DWT tanker Seawise Giant. Iran responded by attacking non-US flagged vessels. Rear Admiral Anthony Less, who had assumed command over the American naval forces in the Persian Gulf in February 1988, ordered US forces to engage in a more aggressive strategy intended to provoke a direct confrontation between the US navy and Iranian forces.

On March 1 1988, the US vessel Samuel B Roberts, under command of Captain Rinn, prevented Iranian naval vessels from exercising their right under international law to board and inspect an Iraqi merchant vessel. The Iranians responded by distributing mines, which on April 14th seriously damaged the Samuel B Roberts. The US countered by sinking the Iranian naval vessels Sahand, Sabalan and Joshan, with the assistance of Saudi AWACs planes.

On the same day of April 18th, with the assistance of US and Saudi battle field intelligence and extensive use of chemical weapons, the Saddam's forces managed to regain the Faw peninsula. The Reagan administration further increased its involvement by declaring on April 29th that it would protect non-Kuwaiti ships in the Persian Gulf as well, which in effect amounted to a further tilt in favor of Iraq since the new US policy allowed Saddam Hussein to continue Iraq’s attacks on tankers without fear of concomitant attacks on vessels supporting Iraq's allies. This onlyreinforced Iran's belief that the United States was now a belligerent in the Iran – Iraq War.

On July 4 1988, a helicopter launched by the USS Vincennes flew closer than the 4 mile limit set by their Rules of Engagement to Iranian speedboats, and drew warning fire from small arms. Captain William C Rogers III of the USS Vincennes used the incident to enter into Iranian territorial waters, ostensibly to respond to the "hostile acts" of the speed boats. At about the same time, a civilian Iranian Airbus was departing for a scheduled flight from Iran's Bandar Abbas to the UAE, unaware of the Vincennes' actions. Despite the fact that the Iranian aircraft was transmitting the correct transponder code and ascending, the USS Vincennes identified it as an descending F-14. Warnings sent to the Airbus were ignored, since according to the ICAO report of the incident, the warnings were directed to a non-existent F-14. A video tape recording of the events on the USS Vincennes clearly indicates that the ship's commander was well aware of crossing international boundary lines into Iranian territorial waters.

Captain William C. Rogers III, at 9:54 AM on July 4th, 1988, did with reckless and culpable indifference to human life, and whilst engaged in an act of aggression in violation of international law, ordered the shoot down of a civilian airliner which was still inside Iranian airspace, resulting in the death of 290 innocent civilians on board the regularly scheduled flight.

On July 17, 1988, Iranian President Khameini wrote the U.N. Secretary General, “We have decided to declare officially that the Islamic Republic of Iran – because of the importance it attaches to saving the lives of human beings and the establishment of justices and regional and international peace and security – accepts U.N. Resolution 598" thus ending the war.

A white-wash investigation by the US Navy commission headed by Adm Fogarty resulted in a report that largely attempted to shift blame for the incident onto the Iranians. The US Navy continued to insist that the USS Vincennes had acted in "self-defense" whilst in international waters for 4 more years, until (retired) Admiral Crowe admitted on Nightline, in response to a report in Newsweek, that the Vincennes had actually been inside Iranian waters -- a fact that he claimed was irrelevant anyway (which raises the question of why this "irrelevant" fact was so vehemently denied for so long.)

Rabbis welcome Ahmadinejad

Rabbis Say Iran Seeks Peace, Respects Judaism - Calls for True Dialogue With Ahmadinejad

A Counter demonstration will take place against protestors of the Iranian President

Date: TODAY! Monday, September 22, 2008

Time: 12:00 noon

Place: 2nd Ave. between 46th and 47th Streets (Dag Hammarskjold Plaza) in NYC

NEW YORK, Sept 22, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman of Neturei Karta International, issued the following statement on the eve of the arrival of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

"It has been our honor and privilege to meet with President Ahmadinejad, as well as other Iranian leaders, several times in the past. In addition we have had the pleasure of visiting Iran on different occasions. At each encounter with the Iranian leadership, we have emphasized to them that, despite media hysteria and the statements of some misinformed Jews, we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful."

"Likewise, although we as Jews are not to be involved in politics, (according to Jewish law, Jewish people are required to be loyal citizens to the countries wherein they reside), we have found the Iranian President to be a deeply religious man, dedicated to a peaceful world, based on mutual respect, fairness and dialogue."

 

"Judaism seeks peace. Unfortunately, there are some Jews today, influenced by the barely century old, philosophy of Zionism, who feel that the proper Jewish response to enemies, be they real or fantasized, is aggression and calls for violence and unfortunately attempts to drag other nations down the path of war."

 

"It as sad that so few have actually attempted to speak to the Iranian President or seek the true opinion of Iranian Jewry who live in peace and practice their faith throughout that nation. We have met this man who has demonstrated time and again that he is sincerely interested in the well being of Iran's Jewish community and has deep respect for world Jewry and their Torah faith, The Zionist attempt to socially isolate this man and his people is immoral and disastrous"

 

"Zionism is antithetical to Torah beliefs. It believes in creating our own sovereign entity which is expressly forbidden due to the Divine decree of exile. This ideology leads to aggression against nations and is incarnated in the State of "Israel". This State continually oppresses other people in the name of Judaism and the entire Jewish people. This movement has exacerbated anti Semitism throughout the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this distinction between traditional Judaism and Zionist distortion."

 

"We view our approach to Iran as a model for all Jews and all mankind. The Torah is the Almighty's blueprint of mercy and justice for all creation. We have followed this model in our dealings with the Iranian President and found in him an individual dedicated to these same ideals. There is much to be gained by talking and listening and everything to be lost by raising the rhetoric in the direction of war." The grave tragedy of our era is the inordinate power garnered by Zionism, whose acceptance of force as the only means to reconcile conflicts, has influenced some to abandon Torah fundamentals. We hope and pray that those Jews who have fallen prey to Zionism will return to the traditional Jewish approach of dialogue, respect and reconciliation."

 

"War is a horrible thing. The dark clouds of a future conflict are now on the horizon in the Middle East. Torah Jewry hopes and prays that this may yet be averted."

"In preparation to the High Holidays, we pray to the Almighty that this New Year should usher in a year of peace and prosperity for our great host country, the United States of America, as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the entire world. May we merit to see, soon in our days, the Holy Land free of Zionism, with the peaceful and speedy dismantlement of the State of 'Israel'. May we merit to the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophesies (Isaiah 2.4): 'And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. No nation will lift its sword against any other, nor will they learn warfare anymore'. Ultimately, may we merit to the day when all nations will recognize the Kingdom of the Almighty and serve Him in harmony and peace. AMEN."

 

In conclusion says Rabbi Weiss, "Out of great respect to the Iranian Nation and their leadership we proudly welcome the Honorable President Ahmadinejad to New York, WELCOME!"

 

For more information please contact Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss at 914-262-8342

Neturei Karta International, Jews United Against Zionism - www.nkusa.org - info@nkusa.org

SOURCE Neturei Karta International

 http://www.nkusa.org

Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

AP: Iran LYING, hiding nuclear activities according to the IAEA

Sorry for the title but I bet it caught your attention. The point is that the media has displayed a nasty habit of putting words in the mouth of the IAEA and attributing their own conclusions to the IAEA. Here are two recent examples, which are so blatantly false as to be obviously deliberate efforts to mislead:

IAEA Chief Inspector: Iran may be hiding secret nukes

VIENNA (AP) — The chief U.N nuclear inspector says Iran may be hiding secret nuclear activities.

Mohamed ElBaradei says it is impossible to guarantee that Iran is not hiding such activities unless it allows his inspectors much broader access and answers allegations that it hid past attempts to make nuclear arms.

ElBaradei's statements are being misrepresented - note the difference between the first and second sentences (one sugests that iran is hiding something, the other states that the IAEA cannot guarantee that Iran is not hiding something.) This is a deliberate obfuscation of the issue by the Associated Press, in order t0 falsely attribute suspicions to the IAEA.

 The media has often treated the IAEA's refusal to verify that there are no "undeclared" nuclear activities in Iran as reason for suspicion of Iran. However, the truth is that the IAEA does not verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities in any country (including Iran) unless that country signs on to the Additional Protocol.  This is simply a legalistic standard adopted by the IAEA, not a basis for suspicion of Iran.

 As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Comittee for Nuclear Policy has explained:

For some it is tempting to declare, based on the inability of the IAEA to presently draw a conclusion on the absence of nuclear activities, that Iran continues to operate concealed facilities and that any such facilities must be for a military program. But the IAEA has cautioned that the lack of a conclusion does not imply suspicion of undeclared nuclear materials and activities, as the matter is frequently spun in the media and by some governments.

According to the IAEA's own Annual Safeguards Implementation Report of 2004, of the 61 states where both the NPT safeguards and the Additional protocol are implemented, the IAEA has certified the absence of undeclared nuclear activity for only 21 countries, leaving Iran in the same category as 40 other countries including Canada, the Czech Republic, and South Africa. Note especially the last sentence:

"With regard to 21 States with both CSAs [Comprehensive Safeguard Agreements] and AP [Additional Protocol] in force or otherwise applied, the Agency concluded that all nuclear material in those States remained in peaceful nuclear activities. For 40 other such States, the Agency had not yet completed the necessary evaluations, and could therefore only draw the conclusion that the nuclear material placed under safeguards remained in peaceful nuclear activities."

The IAEA itself has denied the suggestion that it suspects Iran of having undeclared nuclear activities. In reponse to the issuance of the 2007 NIE, ElBaradei specifically stated:

[A]lthough Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities, the Agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran.

To verify the purely peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program, the IAEA would legally have to also verify that there are no undeclared activities in Iran. The IAEA can only do this for coutries which have ratified the Additional Protocol agreement and have a "Comprehensive Safeguards" in force, which allows more stringent inspections. Iran has signed the Additional Protocol, and did implement it for 2 years as a good faith gesture during the Paris Agreement negotiation -- at which time the IAEA found no evidence of undeclared activities in Iran in places such as Parchin despite all the hype. But Iran (along with many other countries) has not legally ratified the Additional Protocol and so is not technically bound by it -- and so the IAEA cannot legally conclude that there are no undeclared activities in Iran and therefore that Iran's nuclear program is purely peaceful. Iran has offered to ratify the AP once its legal rights are recognized.

In the case of countries such as Iran, which are no subject to the Additional Protocol, the IAEA's legal standard of compliance is set lower: non-diversion. In other words, under Iran existing safeguards, the job of the IAEA is to verify that there has been no diversion of nuclear material for non-peaceful uses (which the IAEA has consistently verfied is the case for Iran in every report)

Read the text of Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA, specifically Article 19 which states that he IAEA may refer Iran to the UN Security Council ONLY if the IAEA is "not able to verify that there has been no diversion of nuclear material required to be safeguarded under this Agreement, to nucle ar weapons or other nuclear explosive devices" and Art. 2 which states that the purpose of the safeguards agreement is for the "exclusive purpose of verifying that such material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."

Again, as Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has stated:

"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 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."

All you have to do to verify all this is read the IAEA Safeguard Glossary which defines these two legal standards in paragraphs 2.8 and 2.9 on page 15.

Ben Bernanke's bail-out plan is "audacious in its simplicity"?

So I was listening to a Natiional Public Radio interview with some "financial expert" who characterized the Fed's bailout and economic recovery plan as being "audacious in its simplicity".

When you're describing a plan to save an economy from repeating the Great Depression, about the last thing I want to hear is that the plan is "audacious its simplicity".

Is it too late to buy gold?

Oh, and apparently we're already seeing tent cities of homeless people popping up around the country. What's next - apple sellers? Bootleggers with Tommy-guns?

The whole American dream seems to have been built on nothing more than debt.

Allow me a moment of personal reflection: why does this shit always happen to me? I lived through a revolution, a war, becoming an immigrant, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of rap music. Enough tragedy already! I don't need to add worldwide financial collapse to the list!

The US economic decline.

People are emailing me about my previous post on how to ensure that your US bank account is safely insured by the FDIC, to ask what I thought about the trillion-dollar bailout plan to deal with the problem of bad mortgage debts which have been sold on the securities markets.

I'm no economist. I have no real insight on how these things work. With that disclaimer aside, I wonder whether this is really a solution to the problem, or just a temporary bandaid. Basically, it looks like the US government is going to be operating one enormous distressed debt hedge fund. What is going to happen to the debts? Who will buy them? It is true that the US government can simply print money or issue yet more bonds to cover the trillion bucks -- but over-inflating the money supply and/or national debt hardly sounds like a solution. We're talking potentially massive inflation!

I have no idea where this will end but would someone PLEASE get this Nouriel Roubini fellow from NYU off the airwaves? Of course he was right in predicting this stuff back in Oct 2007 -- BUT HE's SO DEPRESSING!

Ahmadinejad: Israel to be "wiped off the map...

...by democracy!

If the libel that Ahmadinejad wants to "wipe Israel off the map" hadn't been debunked enough already as a political ploy, here you go again:

From an exclusive interview with PressTV:

Source: http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=69866&sectionid=3510302

Press TV: So you did not threaten to wipe Israel off the map as an Iranian
leader? That we will wipe Israel off the map?

Ahmadinejad: No. We say that the people of Palestine should have rights
and when the people of Palestine exercise this right, this will happen.
Where is the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union has been wiped off the map.
What happened to the Soviet Union? The decision of the people, the vote of
the people. When the people of the Soviet Union, the Russian people, were
allowed to decide to take charge of their destiny, the Soviet Union
disappeared.

The Zionist regime is an artificial regime, a fictitious regime. You
brought people from different parts of the world and you have built this
state. No, that cannot last, it is not sustainable. If they do not listen
to our solution, this will happen one day.

(Hat Tip: Hoder)

Is Iran building nukes or the "capability" to build nukes?

When the Bush officials speak, they very carefully avoid saying that Iran is actually building nukes because they know there's no evidence the back that up as the UN and the US Congress have said.

If you pay attention, the US doesn't accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons. They accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapons "capability" or of "intending" to develop the "capacity" of making nukes and then invite you to speculate about how awful it would be IF Iran gets nukes.

They make up for that missing evidence by using ambiguous language and innuendo and fearmongering about Iranian 'threats' and 'capacities' and 'intentions' etc. instead -- which is just as effective since most people miss the nuance anyway, especially when the media and propagandist do the job of hyping the "threat" for them. Then they rely on the "truth effect" of constant repetition to convince you that their claim is true.

Iranian-born British police chief harassed, discriminated against.

DOCTOR Ali Dizaei, the highest-ranking "Asian" or "Black" (that's how the Brits racially classify Iranians) police officers in the UK, has been subjected to massive discrimination:

Flamboyant and controversial, the Iranian-born Muslim bodybuilder has been spied on, bugged, and then wrongly accused and charged - all by his own colleagues...

Colleagues investigated him under the codename Helios over allegations of corruption, using drugs and prostitutes, and spying for Iran – all charges which were later dropped. In 2001 he was suspended.

The Metropolitan police said the investigation cost the taxpayer £2.2m. Dizaei argued the figure was more like £7m.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, later apologised for the inquiry, saying it had caused "considerable damage" within the force.

Anti-Zionist Jews

Anti-Zionist Jews petition Hollywood movie starts to not attend a celebtration at Paramount Studios of the 60th anniversary of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians:

We write to you with sadness and outrage as we learn that you plan to attend the September 18 event “From Vision to Reality,” a Hollywood celebration of sixty years since the establishment of the state of Israel. The vision that led to the reality of the Israeli state is one of systematic and ongoing ethnic and religious discrimination against the Palestinian people. This does not deserve to be celebrated.

Iranian exporters targetted to exaggerate Iran's connection to IEDs in Iraq.

The Washington Post has a highly exaggerated headline "Material Was Sent To Iran for Bombs, Indictment Alleges" -- thus falsely suggesting that the accused deliberately sought out material with the intention of making IEDs:

A federal grand jury in Miami has indicted 16 foreign individuals and companies in a broad conspiracy to send restricted dual-purpose U.S. electronics and other items to Iran for use in roadside bombs against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, the indictment does't say that the material was sent "for bombs" as the Washington Post claims. All it does is accuse some foreign-based traders with violating US export control laws. In fact the undersecretary for Commerce is quoted as merely saying that the exported material were "capable of producing improvised explosive devices (IED) similar to those being used in Iraq and Afghanistan." The indicment doesn't even say that any of the specific items exported by these accused were found in the IEDs made in Iraq or Afghanistan either, as the Washington Post implies. The whole connection IEDs is baloney and hype, similar to the baloney accusations that Jose Padilla planned to explode a nuclear "dirty bomb" .

The "material" in question here includes microcontrolers -- which are electronic components that have a vast range of uses in toys and office equipment too. Here is a picture of an IED. Note that it too uses off-the-shelf electronics components which can be purchased anywhere, or even recylced from toys and office equipment. Note also the use of a Nokia phone -- made in Finland. Are the Finns making and exporting Nokia phones "for bombs" too?

Truth is they've been trying to connect Iran to the IEDs in Iraq for a long time, using various theories. Remember when they claimed that the IEDs required such "precision machining" that it could only have come from Iran -- nevermind that IED factories were found in Iraq? That wasn't very believable so now they're trying to connect the IEDs to Iran using off-the-shelve electronics components.

Is your money safe in a US bank?

I don't want to get into economics and finance but since the experts say that more banks will be failing in the US, there is an error I think everyone who has some money in a bank in the US should know about:

Yes, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp provides insurance for US bank deposits up to $100,000. So, in other words, if you have a bank account with less than $100,000 in it, then your money is insured by the FDIC if the bank fails. (How reliable is FDIC insurance? See below)

But if you have a personal account with more than $100,000 at a bank, you should know that FDIC insurance is provided PER DEPOSITOR  PER ACCOUNT TYPE PER BANK. So, if for example you have $200,000 in a single personal savings bank account at a particular bank, there is no use in dividing that amount into two personal savings accounts at the same bank, with $100,000 in each. You have to divide the money into two or more TYPES of accounts at that bank (for example a single-owner account and joint account) or divide up the money at two or more different banks, to make sure that the entire sum is covered under FDIC insurance. 

Also, remember that FDIC insurance does not apply to your investments in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, life insurance policies, annuities, or municipal securities, even if you purchased these products from an insured bank. Also, non-banks are not covered (such as PayPal accounts!)

[UPDATE 1: People have been asking me about brokerage accounts. As I understand it, brokerage accounts are not FDIC insured. They're insured under a separate entity called the Securities Investor Protection Corp. which is a nonprofit organization that provides some insurance to investors if the firm becomes insolvent - I think the limit is $500,000 including $100,000 in cash.]

I am leaving out a lot of complicated details so if you have a lot of cash or other investments, it would be a good idea to start to read up.

HOW RELIABLE IS FDIC INSURANCE?

The FDIC was created in 1933, after the Great Depression and the bank panics which caused several thousand banks to fail. The purpose of the FDIC is to insure deposits, so people don't have to worry about losing the money in their accounts if a bank goes bankrupt. The FDIC is required to have a reserve of slightly over 1.2% for deposits. In other words the FDIC has about 1.2 cents to insure every dollar in your bank account. In total, the Deposit Insurance fund has about 52 billion dollars in reserve (but has recently dropped to something like 47 billion dollars as a result of the failure of IndyMac bank.)

Normally, this is enough insurance since normally there is a low risk of bank failures. But there's speculation that multiple bank failures cound easily wipe out the insurance reserve. If Washington Mutual goes down, that's potentially up to $20 billion gone right there. 

Of course, if the FDIC reserve starts to run dry as a result of a major bank run, it may seek money injections from the US government however the US government is not required to provide the money to keep the FDIC solvent. The FDIC is not fully backed by the US treasury. Section 14(a) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act allows the US government to only loan up to 30 billion dollars to the FDIC in order to keep it solvent, and only at "current market yeilds".

Also, the FDIC is only required under Section 11 of the same law to pay depositors "as soon as possible". Usually, if a bank has failed, the FDIC has paid the insured depositors within a couple of days -- but the FDIC is not obligated to do so. What does "as soon as possible" mean in case of a major banking crisis? Who knows.

UPDATE 2:

I didn't want to get into these sorts of details but I should point out also that the FDIC can raise its premium rate on other banks to make up for the loss of reserves for bank failures, thus helping ensure that it remains solvent. In other words, the FDIC can force other banks to make up for the failure of one bank.

However, there's something else to consider too. Until now, FDIC insurance only applied to commercial "depository" banks -- and did not protect subsidiaries such as investment banks and broker-dealers. A few days ago, the Federal Reserve Board (which basically regulates the US central bank) -- without asking for the FDIC's OK -- allowed commercial banks to lend money to their failing investment bank subsidiaries. So in effect, the investment bank losses are now part of the liabilities of the commercial banks that the FDIC has to insure.

What does this mean?

Lawmakers are increasingly worried about the FDIC's ability to pay for a growing number of bank failures, and relaxing the barriers between banks and riskier affiliates is likely to raise some concerns.

Well, my concern is raised, that's for sure.

Also, there's yet something else: the Federal Reserve has been lending money to the failing banks -- which is not entirely unheard of but rarely happens -- but the Fed has been accepting equities as collateral for those loans. That doesn't sound like a good idea when the values of the equities of banks are falling rapidly.

But hey, I'm no economist, so don't take my word any of this.

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Yet another Israeli prediction about Iranian nuclear weapons

Add this to the long, long line of predictions about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapons capability:

Iran is "not likely" to obtain nuclear capabilities by 2010, an Israeli military intelligence official said Monday.

"The most optimistic scenario as far as the Iranians are concerned is that they will have obtained nuclear capabilities by 2010. However, such a scenario is not likely," Yossi Baidatz, head of the research division of Israeli military intelligence, was quoted by local daily Yedioth Ahronoth as saying.

Sigh. I've seen this movie already a million times. Can we please change the channel?

Iranian public opinion on nuclear issues

The findings of the WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO) and Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT) polls show the vast majority of Iranians want their country to develop nuclear energy. TFT found that 89 percent of Iranians favor (including 78% who strongly favor) "the Iranian Government developing nuclear energy." WPO found that 90 percent of Iranians believe it is important (including 81% very important) for Iran "to have a full fuel cycle nuclear program." 

US was just "rope-a-doping" Iran all along.

Have you heard of the term "rope-a-dope"? Is was a phrase coined by the boxer Muhammad Ali to describe a strategy he employed of misleading his opponents until they had weakened themselves and an opportunity was presented for him to win.

Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, while discussing his new book on Cheney entitled "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" on National Public Radio, said something quite interesting: that Cheney would play "rope-a-dope" with foreign governments that he wanted to see toppled, by agreement to talk to the foreign governments whilst at the same time also imposing preconditions on talks that were meant to make it impossible for talks to happen, all the while waiting for an opportunity to engage in regime change.

Gellman used the example of North Korea, but naturally the example of Iran comes to mind too, when the US agreed to talk to Iran but only on the condition if Iran first abandoned enrichment. And according to Gellman, in the meantime Cheney was busy holding talks with the "baby Shah" and Khomeini's grandson in the hopes of finding a way for regime-change.

This is proof of what I have ALWAYS said: that the US is not really interested in resolving the nuclear dispute with Iran, but instead wants to keep it alive as a pretext for another policy entirely: regime change. In short, they've been playing rope-a-dope with Iran, and so no amount of concessions by Iran on the nuclear issue would have ever sufficed since it would have only led to more rope-a-dope games and endless preconditions intended to prevent any resolution.

And remember when they sent Willian Burns to attend the last set of EU-Iran nuclear talks in Geneva back in July 2008? A lot of people quite credulously thought that signalled some sort of change of policy even though Burns had been instructed to not talk with Iran and instead reassert the same old preconditions on talks -- in short, they were playing more rope-a-dope with Iran then too, as I suspected. 

Nuclear weapons: the 'secret' is out, and Iran knows it.

I just love reading news articles which portray a James Bond-style plotline about how Pakistan/China etc supposedly gave "nuclear secrets" to some other country. They're so compelling in how they weave such an elaborate plot around total bullshit. You may be shocked to learn that the design of nuclear weapons is NOT a secret, certainly not one exclusive to "high tech" countries like Pakistan. And so the next time some moronic reporter claims that Country X gave "secret nuclear design documents" to Country Y, you should laugh in his face, then punch him in the nose for being such a moron.

As I was l reading up on the history of the US atomic weapons program, I ran across a book at the Housing Works Bookshop called "At Work in the Field of the Bomb" by Robert Del Tredici which, among other things, has fascinating photos of US military nuclear facilities taken from above.

The book was published in the 1980s but I still can't figure out how the author managed to get an airplane to fly over the (presumably restricted?) sites. In any case, the photos were reproduced at NuclearFiles.org & one of the interesting photos was of Howard Moreland holding a model nuclear bomb.

Howard Moreland was the author of an article in the left-leaning Progressive magazine in 1979 in which he claimed (perhaps accurately) to have elucidated the inner workings and design of the hydrogen bomb. This resulted in an attempt by the US Department of Energy (which administers the US nuclear weapons program) to prevent the publication of the article on national security grounds -- however the DOE failed to do so when it became obvious that Moreland had relied on non-secret sources to write his article (including a children's encyclopedia found at any local library.) Also, by then others had started collecting and disseminating information about the bomb, such as Chuck Hansen.

But others had also elucidated the workings of nuclear weapons a decade earlier. In fact, in the early 1960s, the Lawrence Livermore Labs (which designs and makes nukes) decided to conduct an experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how easy it would be for "amateurs" to come up with the design of The Bomb using only open-source material. So they hired a couple of recent physics graduates to do exactly that. They were probably quite surprised when the students managed to come up with what was apparently an accurate design of a nuclear weapon, using nothing more than pencils and their public library cards.

Remember - that was in the 1960's - long, long before the "information age" and personal computers and the internet.

To top if off, since then both the US and UK governments (and presumably others) have inadvertently declassified and released highly detailed nuclear weapons design information, made freely accessible to anyone who wanted to see them. 

So, let me get to the point that I have made before, but it bears repeating. It is claimed that Iran was given a 4,7, or 15 page document by the Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan, which shows how to make a uranium sphere of the sort that is used in nukes. We're all supposed to conclude from this that Iran was seeking design information on nuclear weapons -- nevermind that according to even Albright, the document did not contain details to make it actually useful. Considering the amount of information found in a public library even in the 1960s on nuclear weapons designs, do you really think that modern Iran needed a 1970's-era document from Pakistan to figure out how to make nukes?

Get real. 

Is Iran "stonewalling" or "blocking" the IAEA?

The media (including, once again, the New York Times) claims that the latest IAEA report accuses Iran of "stonewalling" or even "blocking" the IAEA however, as usual, the report says no such thing.

Indeed, by concentrating on Paragraphs 14-21 of the IAEA report which request "transparency measures" from Iran that go beyond Iran's safeguards agreement, the media are deliberately totally overlooking and failing to report a single word about paragraph 2-13 of the same report which explicitly states Iran's nuclear program is proceeding entirely as reported and under safeguards. 

But lets get something straight about these alleged studies which are the subject of paragraphs 14-21:

According to the Aug 2007 "Modalities Agreement" between Iran and the IAEA, Iran agreed to address an exclusive list of "outstanding issues" and Iran also agreed to "review and assess" the "alleged studies" claims, as good faith gesture, "upon receiving all related documents".

Note further that according the Feb 2008 IAEA reports, Iran had in fact addressed all the outstanding issues, with no evidence of any nuclear weapons program having ever existed in Iran -- thus giving Iran a clean bill of health, leaving only the "alleged studies". ElBaradei himself stated: "We have managed to clarify all the remaining outstanding issues, including the most important issue, which is the scope and nature of Iran´s enrichment programme" with the exception of a single issue, "and that is the alleged weaponization studies that supposedly Iran has conducted in the past."

However, both the March 2008 and the latest Sept 2008 IAEA reports state as a "cause for regret" that the IAEA was not permitted by the US to present Iran with the documentation from the Laptop of Death about the alleged studies which Iran is supposed to refute,  even though the the Modalities Agreement clearly required Iran to "receiv[e] all related documents" regarding the alleged studies.

So, who is "stonewalling" and "blocking" whom? Why won't the US simply let the IAEA present these documents to Iran rather than insist that Iran should refute evidence it cannot see?

 

Zionist pollsters smear Obama as PLO-backer

Richard Silverstein reports that there's a professional Republican public relations agency consisting of hard-Right Zionists who are actively smearing Obama by calling up people in their homes under the pretext of conducting a poll, and telling them that Obama backed the PLO! (this practice is called "push-polling" and is considered to be unethnical, but commonplace)

Richard Silverstein also writes about how they're also distributing a DVD film produced by a Hollywood director called "Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against the West" which was financed by an anonymous "concerned citizen" -- most probably casino magnate and ultra Zionist Sheldon Adelson.

Incidentally, did you wonder why Carter didn't speak at the Democratic National Convention? Because he had criticized Israel.

"Cosmopolitan Iran" and Prof. Fatemeh Keshavarz

A local US newpaper has profiled Prof. Fatemeh Keshavarz -- a poet, author and chairman of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University at St. Louis. She will give the first presentation in a one-year speaker and film series called "Cosmopolitan Iran" at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. (I wish someone would put it on YouTube!)

Apparently, at least one of her students gets it:

"The people we are demonizing are human beings," she said. "They compose beautiful poetry and literature. They create wonderful films that receive awards at international film festivals."

Keshavarz's presentation is called "The Iran that Smiles: Art, Literature and Culture in Post 1979 Iran." It will begin at 5 p.m. Thursday in the Hickory, Hackberry, Oak and Redbud rooms on the second floor of SIUE's Morris University Center. Admission is free.

'Cosmopolitan Iran' schedule

5 p.m. Thursday -- Presentation on "The Iran that Smiles: Art, Literature and Culture in Post 1979 Iran" by Fatemeh Keshavarz in the Hickory, Hackberry, Oak and Redbud rooms at SIUE's Morris University Center.

5 p.m. Oct. 15 -- Screening of the film, "The Wind Will Carry Us" by Abbas Kiarostami in Abbott Auditorium (Room 0044) at SIUE's Lovejoy Library.

5 p.m. Oct. 16 -- Presentation on "Islamic Cyborgs? A Study of Iran's Mystical Cinema" by Negar Mottahedeh in the Hickory, Hackberry, Oak and Redbud rooms at SIUE's Morris University Center.

5 p.m. Nov. 19 -- Presentation on "Classical Persian Music Structures" by Hossein Omoumi in the Meridian Ballroom at SIUE's Morris University Center.

5 p.m. Feb. 3, 2009 -- Screening of the film "The Runner" by Amir Naderi in the Multifunction Room at SIUE's Evergreen Hall.

5 p.m. Feb. 4 -- Presentation on "The World is My Home: On the Poetics of Cosmopolitan" by Hamid Dabashi in the Hickory, Hackberry, Oak and Redbud rooms at SIUE's Morris University Center.

5 p.m. March 18, 2009 -- Screening of the film "Offside" by Jafar Panahi in the Multifunction Room at SIUE's Evergreen Hall.

5 p.m. March 19, 2009 -- Presentation on "'What Would You Like to Become?' Answers from Iranian School Children" by Farshad Aminian-Tankei in Abbott Auditorium (Room 0044) at SIUE's Lovejoy Library.

5 p.m. April 7, 2009 -- Screening of the film "The Willow Tree" by Majid Majidi in the Multifunction Room at SIUE's Evergreen Hall.

5 p.m. April 8, 2009 -- Presentation on "From Cloistered to Cosmopolitan: Women's Representation in Iranian Cinema" by Hamid Naficy in Abbott Auditorium (Room 0044) at SIUE's Lovejoy Library.

5 p.m. April 29, 2009 -- Presentation on "Cosmopolitan Iran, Remembrance and the Future: An Open Forum" by Lucian Stone in the Hickory, Hackberry, Oak and Redbud rooms at SIUE's Morris University Center.

---

"United Against Nuclear Iran" is LYING about Iran's nuclear program - 2nd post

(This is a newer version of a previous post since the Blip.tv video segment in the old one has gone missing and a new video has been posted in its place - I wonder why. If you can't see this video either, let me know and I'll try to find one that works.)

So it didn't take long before the "United Against Nuclear Iran" organization I mentioned in my last post showed what sort of organization it is. Of course I am not in the least bit surprised that they're lying through their teeth about Iran's nuclear program but I just wonder whether the media or ISIS and all the other media-appointed "expert think tanks" who have thus far made a living out of casting suspicion on Iran will step up to the plate and correct the claims promoted by "United Against Nuclear Iran" too -- but don't hold your breath.

Basically, the same people who lied to you about WMDs in Iraq have started lying about Iran's nuclear program. When you view the following video from "United Against Nuclear Iran", remember this:

"A senior official close to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohamed ElBaradei accused unnamed Western powers of using the same 'hype' tactics employed against Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to justify imposing further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program."

Pretty much ever sentence in this video is a lie:

- The IAEA has never said that Iran produced "highly-enriched uranium" as repeatedly asserted in this video -- even now Iran can now barely manage to produce low-enriched uranium that cannot be used to make bombs. A previous reports issued in the US Congress which claimed (among other things) that Iran had produced highly-enriched uranium was branded as dishonest by the IAEA itself, as reported by the BBC:

Signed by a senior director at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vilmos Cserveny, the letter raises objections over the committee's report released on 23 August. It says the report was wrong to say that Iran had enriched uranium to weapons-grade level when the IAEA had only found small quantities of enrichment at far lower levels.

The few traces of highly-enriched uranium found in Iran were traced by IAEA and international scientists to contamination, thus vindicating Iran. The Washington Post reported this three years ago:

No Proof Found of Iran Arms Program
Uranium Traced to Pakistani Equipment

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Page A01

Traces of bomb-grade uranium found two years ago in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and are not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, a group of U.S. government experts and other international scientists has determined.

"The biggest smoking gun that everyone was waving is now eliminated with these conclusions," said a senior official who discussed the still-confidential findings on the condition of anonymity.

- Iran's nuclear enrichment program was not "hidden" nor a "secret" -- in fact it started in the 1970s with the cooperation of France. After the revolution, not only did Iran openly and repeatedly announce its enrichment plans on national radio, Iran had openly sought to cooperate with the IAEA in developing the program until the US blocked it:

U.S. in 1983 stopped IAEA from helping Iran make UF6
Nuclear Fuel August 4, 2003

Four years after the Islamic revolution, and two years after Iran's new leaders dusted off the nuclear program of the deposed Reza Shah Pahlevi, IAEA officials were keen to assist Iran in reactivating a research program to learn how to process U3O8 into UO2 pellets and then set up a pilot plant to produce UF6, according to IAEA documents obtained by NuclearFuel.

Sources said that when in 1983 the recommendations of an IAEA mission to Iran were passed on to the IAEA's technical cooperation program, the U.S. government then ''directly intervened'' to discourage the IAEA from assisting Iran in production of UO2 and UF6. ''We stopped that in its tracks,'' said a former U.S. official.

 Due to US interference, Iran did fail to report otherwise legal nuclear activity (such as importing uranium) but the IAEA has said that none of Iran's undeclared activity had any relationship to a nuclear weapons program.

- Iran has never "obstructed inspectors" as claimed and in fact it has allowed more inspections that its safeguards agreement requires. When the same sort of people issued a report making a similar claim about Iran "obstructing inspectors", the IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire replied: 

"We have not been denied access at any time, including in the past few weeks. Normally we do not comment on such reports but this time we felt we had to clarify the matter...If we had a problem like that we would have to report to the [35-nation IAEA governing] board ... That has not happened because this alleged event did not take place."

- Iran's nuclear program makes perfect economic sense, which is why the US encouraged and supported Iran's nuclear program in the first place. As the Washington Post reported:

Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran's nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said, "They're already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy."

Yet Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and outgoing Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz held key national security posts when the Ford administration made the opposite argument 30 years ago.

- Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr is perfectly legal, operated under IAEA safeguards, and IAEA head ElBaradei himself has said that it poses no concern:

He denied US claims that the Bushehr reactor could be used to make weapons..."Bushehr is not apparently at the centre of international concern," Mr ElBaradei told reporters on Tuesday. The IAEA chief said the reactor was aimed at producing nuclear energy only, and there was an agreement to return spent fuel to Russia. "It is not something that is of any concern on our part," he added.

- Iran has never "violated" the Non-Proliferation Treaty (the accusation itself is quite ironic, considering that the US just violated its own obligations under the treaty with regard to India.) In fact,  IAEA reports on Iran have consistently stated that there is no evidence that Iran diverted nuclear material for weapons use. As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has explained:

"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 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."

This was backed up by expert testimony presented to the Foreign Select Committee of the British Parliament:

"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."

- Finally, note how long the video dedicates to scaremongering about how a nuclear Iran will "spawn" a nuclear Middle East by forcing other countries to develop nuclear weapons too. I dealt with this claim before:

[I]t is highly ironic that Iran's mere capability to build nuclear weapons can supposedly spark this uncontrollable cascade of nuclear proliferation in the Mideast, and yet Israel's existing nuclear weapons are not believed to have this effect. Indeed, if we are to accept, as the fallacious argument assumes, that one country's nuclear capability will force other countries to acquire their own nuclear deterrent, then the real regional culprit for proliferation must be the original nuclear power in the region: Israel. Note also that similar predictions of regional arms races have not been made when, for example, Brazil recently acquired the same nuclear technology that Iran is seeking to develop. Finally, the argument assumes that the other countries in the region aren't already working to develop their own nuclear programmes...

Anyway, these are just some of the blatant lies in the video that I've just debunked -- I have grown too bored to continue with the rst. I'm looking at for sale ads for sailboats. 

Incidentally, I am sort of disappointed to see Holbrooke in bed with these liars. I once briefly knew his son, and frankly I never expected Holbrooke to mix in with human scum like these.

Five former US Secretaries of State urge US talks with Iran

So apparently five former US Secretaries of State (that's the American equivalent to Foreign Minister) all agree that the US should talk to Iran:

Five former secretaries of state, gathering to give their best advice to the next president, agreed Monday that the United States should talk to Iran. The wide-ranging, 90-minute session in a packed auditorium at The George Washington University, produced exceptional unity among Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher, Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker III.

But they didn't agree on who should move into the Oval Office next January.

Too bad at least three of the five are war criminals. I think between them, Powell and Albright are responsible for the deaths of something like a million Iraqis. There's a particularly warm place in hell for Kissinger -- go ask the relatives of the people who were massacred in the Santiago stadium by Pinoche's forces (that's right - you know about Tiananmen massacre, but you've never heard of the Santiago stadium, have you? Ever wonder why?)

Economic facts in the USA

So today on the way to work I ran into some investment banker buddies who were laid off. With the news today that 3 major financial institutions are either bankrupt or teetering on bankruptcy, I thought it may be a good idea to remind people of who will actually be hurt in this crisis and whom you should feel sorry for -- and its not the investment banker that were making millions of dollars a year.

You see, American CEOs earned 411-times as much as average workers in 2005, up from 107 times in 1990. And, the top one percent of US households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. This is the greatest concentration of income since 1928, when 23.9 percent of all income went to the richest one percent.

And in case you don't realize what that REALLY means, let me make it clearer:

 

Clear now? 

Analysis of Sept 2008 IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program

So the September 15 2008 IAEA report on Iran is out. Here's what it says.

First of all, the London Telegraph article by the infamous fiction-writer Con Coughlin who cited anonymous experts in claiming that Iran ahad "removed significant quantities of UF6", is flatly disproved by the IAEA report. Paragraph 9 of this report plainly states that all of the UF6 "remains under Agency containment and surveillance."

Secondly, despite media reports claiming that Iran had "blocked" or "stalled" the IAEA are simiarly false - and nothing in the report says anything of that sort. These are value-laden descriptors which don't represent the true state of affairs, where Iran has stated that the "alleged studies" pushed from the so-called "Laptop of Death" were false, provided a 117 page written response to the allegations, was not allowed to actually see the documents making the claims -- and the IAEA had suggested ways to resolve that dispute - and that is all. The report does NOT say Iran rejected the proposed modalities to resolve the issue or "blocked" anything.

The most important paragraph in the report is Paragaph 22 which states:

The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and has provided the required nuclear material accounting reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities.

You may wonder why this paragraph, way at the end of the report, is the most important one. The answer is this: it means that Iran continues to be in compliance with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty for reasons explained in this post.

Paragraphs 2 through 4 states that Iran's enrichment facilities are operating under IAEA safeguards, exactly as they're supposed to be, producing low-enriched uranium (which cannot be used to make bombs, contrary to all the news report that insist on calculating how many bombs Iran can make with these machines)  and were even the subject of 17 surprise inspections. The previous report had said that the same facilities were subject to 14 surprise inspections too. (I should point out that there is a legal limit to the number of inspections that are allowed, since the inspections are not supposed to unduly interfere with the operations of the facilities - I wonder how close to the limit we are now.) 

Paragaph 5 and 6 are about reprocessing of nuclear fuel. Iran has said that there is no reprocessing going on at the listed facilities, and the IAEA has affirmed that.

Here, the report also adds that the IAEA can't verify there are no undeclared facilities and so the IAEA can't verify the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. THis is repeated in Paragraph 23  too. This language has often been seized upon by the Iran bashers to cast suspicion on Iran by innuendo. So let me reiterate the facts: the IAEA does not verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities for any country unless they have signed and ratified the Additional Protocol (which permits more stringent inspections of nuclear facilities.) According to the IAEA itself, there are currently something like 40 other countries for which the IAEA similarly cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities. Some other countries - like Egypt (recently held up by Rice as a model nuclear program) have refused to even sign the Additional Protocol, unlike Iran. That doesn't mean that the IAEA suspects there are any undeclared facilities.

As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Comittee for Nuclear Policy has explained:

For some it is tempting to declare, based on the inability of the IAEA to presently draw a conclusion on the absence of nuclear activities, that Iran continues to operate concealed facilities and that any such facilities must be for a military program. But the IAEA has cautioned that the lack of a conclusion does not imply suspicion of undeclared nuclear materials and activities, as the matter is frequently spun in the media and by some governments.

Second point: Iran did in fact voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol by allowing the more stringent inspections for the course of 2 years during the course of the Paris Agreement negotiations with the EU3 - even though it was not legally obligated to do so - and still no evidence of nuclear weapons or undeclared activities was found in Iran (in fact the IAEA complained publicly that the intelligence that the US had given the IAEA of supposedly "secret" Iranian nuclear sites had proven to be bogus.) And, Iran has offered to ratify the Additional Protocol, once its nuclear rights are recognized.

Paragraphs 7 and 8 say that Iran's construction of their planned heavy water nuclear reactor and related facilities continue to be monitored by the IAEA, exactly as they're supposed to be. 

Paragraph 9 just describes Iran's uranium conversion efforts. Cconversion is the step before enrichment: raw uranium is turned into yellow cake, then into a gas called UF6 or uranium hexaflouride, before being enriched in centrifuges as nuclear fuel. This paragraph and says that all of the converted uranium remains under IAEA safeguards. There's no mention of any "missing" UF6 as claimed by the Con Coughlin in the Telegraph (actually, the Coughlin article makes a number of confused and contradictory claims, ie: repeatedly confuses UF6 with "enriched uranium.")

Paragraph 10 and 11 are about "preliminary design information" -- the information that Iran agreed as a voluntary, non-binding measure to provide to the IAEA about nuclear facitilies it plans to build in the future, but had not yet built. Iran had agreed to provide this info during the course of the Paris agreement, as it had agreed to allow inspections beyond its legal obligations -- but pulled back when the EU tried to cheat Iran by raising their demands and insisting that Iran turn a temporary suspension of enrichment into a permanent ban on enrichment. Here, the IAEA has request that Iran go back to providing that preliminary information. Tough luck. Why should Iran do more than the NPT requires when it is getting less than what it is entitled to receive?

Paragraph 12 is where the phrases "as a transparency measure" is first mentioned in this report. "Transparency" actually means "inspections beyond Iran's legal obligations"  - beyond Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA, and even beyond the Additional Protocol requirements that are not applicable to Iran anyway. As footnote 6 in the report states, the UN Security Council has demanded that Iran give in to these transparency measures -- but the demand is ultra vires and illegal, since among other things the Security Council does not have the legal authority to force a country to abide by an agreement it has not signed (such as the Additional Protocol.)

You see, under Iran's existing standard safeguards agreement, Iran is only required to allow IAEA inspections of sites which contain (or are meant to contain) nuclear material -- such as the uranium enrichment plants where Iran's centrifuges turn uranium hexaflouride (UF6) gas into  low-enriched uranium fuel. Iran does NOT have to allow inspections of other sorts of weapons facilities, such as rocket design sites, or even facilities where other forms of nuclear-related technologies are developed but which do not involve nuclear material. (That is why this very same IAEA report states clearly in Paragraph 21 that it has no evidence that nuclear material was used in these "alleged studies")

According to this paragraph, the IAEA has requested that Iran provide access to non-nuclear facilities, such as the facilities where the centrifuges themselves are manufactured. This is outside of the scope of Iran's legal obligations. And as I have mentioned before, this is precisely the sort of targetting intelligence that the US and Israel would need to attack Iran (since blowing up Iran's enrichment facilities is useless if Iran can then just build more centrifuges and contiue the program.)

Coincidence? You decide.

I should point out that Iran had allowed such "transparency" inspections in the past even though it was not obligated to do so -- the inspection of the Parchin military base for example, long the subject of lurid and baseless speculation, but which turned up exactly nothing -- and had continued to allow such inspections on an "ad hoc" basis according previous IAEA reports -- but does not allow such "transparency" inspections on a regular basis for a number of reasons (Iran probably doesnt' want to set a precedent of being treated as a 2nd class member of the NPT, subject to additional, extra-legal inspections when similar demands are not made on other NPT signatories. And, Iran would not want to give away intelligence to be used for targetting intelligence when Israel and the US regularly threaten to bomb Iran in blatant violation of international law.)  

Paragraph 13 simply says that the Bushehr reactor is under safeguards as usual. Iran and Russia have announced that the reactor will become operational in a few months. The interesting point I should mention is this: the IAEA made it clear years ago that the Bushehr reactor is not considered to be a nuclear threat. The Bush administration even conceeded that point. However, as I have mentioned the latest video by the "United Against Nuclear Iran" NeoCon lobbying group has gone back to claiming that Bushehr is some sort of threat. Gotta wonder why... Since Bushehr is not a weapons threat but only produces energy, and as a lightwater reactor cannot be used to secretly make bombs, then obviously these people basically have a problem with Iran having civilian nuclear power rather than just weapons.

Paragraphs 14-21 are about the allegations of the so-called  "Laptop of Death" that the US intelligence supposedly obtained from someone who smuggled it out of Iran.These are the paragraphs that the media reports are selectively concentrating on -- totally ignoring the previous paragraphs which state that Iran's nuclear program continues to function under full IAEA safeguards. 

Basically, they say that the IAEA wants Iran to address the Laptop of Death allegations in greater detail, even though they have not presented Iran with the actual documents that contain the allegations as required by the August 2007 modalities agreement -- and the IAEA has made some specific proposals for Iran to be able to do so. NOWHERE in these paragraphs does it say that Iran has "blocked" anything. Iran may very well decide to accept the IAEA's proposals -- which the IAEA report itself says are "transparency measures" which means they are outside of what Iran is legally required to do.

Also, note specifically that Paragraph 21 states that the IAEA itself has found

no evidence on the actual design or manufacture by Iran of nuclear material components of a nuclear weapon or of certain other key components, such as initiators, or on related nuclear physics studies ... Nor has the Agency detected the actual use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies.

As a preliminary matter, lets get some facts straight: In August 2007, Iran and the IAEA reached a "modalities agreement" about how Iran would clear up all the outstanding issues regarding its nuclear program with the IAEA. As part of this agreement, Iran said it considered the "alleged studies" claims to be fabrications, but as a good faith measure, would address the claims upon receiving the documentation about the "alleged studies" too. BUT IRAN HAS STILL NOT RECEIVED THE DOCUMENTATION BECAUSE THE US REFUSES TO LET EVEN THE IAEA SEE THE FULL DOCUMENTATION.

Three months later, in its November 2007 report, the IAEA said that Iran had in fact cleared up 9 of the outstanding issues -- with no evidence of a nuclear weapons program having been discovered. In February 2008, despite pressure and false allegations by some Western countries, the IAEA Director ElBaradei declared that all the remaining issues had been cleared up too:

"We have managed to clarify all the remaining outstanding issues, including the most important issue, which is the scope and nature of Iran´s enrichment programme" with the exception of a single issue, "and that is the alleged weaponization studies that supposedly Iran has conducted in the past."

Needless to say, this was a remarkable conclusion by the IAEA since it effectively gave Iran a clean bill of health about its the so-called hidden past nuclear activities.

So my point is this: while the current IAEA report talks a lot about the "alleged studies" lets not forget the source of these studies, the logically fallacy of requiring Iran to disprive a negative (see Nukie the Nuclear Spaghetti Monster) and lets not forget that after years of the most intensive inspections in the IAEA's history, Iran had come up clean -- no actual evidence of a nuclear weapons program. And that's precisely why the US finally, belatedly and only partially presented the "Laptop of Death" evidence to the IAEA in 2008 (after years of shopping it around as evidence of Iran's perfidy without letting the IAEA actually see it.)

Other than this highly questionable Laptop of Death, no evidence of any nuclear program has ever been found to exist in Iran, as certified by the IAEA itself. (The Russians have been saying that they've never seen any "objective evidence" of a nuclear program either.)

(I'm going to rush things along a bit here are this post is getting too long)

The most important paragraph in the Summary section is Paragraph 23 which I briefly touched upon when addressing Paragraphs 5 and 6 above, and which requests that Iran provide more detailed information on how the alleged studies claims are false, and the IAEA says that the allegations are serious -- but it does NOT say that that Iran has blocked or refused to address them. So we'll have to see how the ongoing negotiations with Iran play out.

"Obama will lose the elections due to Jewish influence"

Philip Weiss explains why Obama can't criticize the neocons around McCain:

"Jews are mobbed-up with neoconservatism and the Democratic Party is mobbed-up with Jews."

But the issue is not really "Jews" per se as Weiss himself  explains that many prominent progressive Jewish individuals in the US have sought to disassociate Jewishness from the NeoCons and their reactionary Zionism.  This is a positive trend which should be encouraged, but holding conferences in which holocaust deniers are featured prominently and which ends up giving ammunition to those who wish to paint Iran as anti-Jewish rather than simply anti-Zionist, doesn't exactly help this process (aside from the immorality of it.)

The bottom line: Pro-Israelis have infiltrated both parties in the US.

Anyway - Obama's fear of the so called "Jewish vote" is why, my friends:

1- Obama will lose the election, since he can't use the main wedge issue in this election (the Irax war and Bush's foreign policy -- which is supported by the NeoCons in the Democratic party which sees it as pro-Israel), or...

2- Even if he wins, his foreign policy with respect to Iran won't be too different from Bush's.

The only difference under a President Obama: Overt calls for war may be put aside since the US population doesn't have a stomach for another protracted war, and instead the pro-Israeli element pushing for this war will take care to hide itself better and instead present this as not-just a pro-Israel agenda, that's all. They'll try to dress up attacking Iran as a broad-based liberal, democratic cause rather than simply a pro-Israeli cause.

BBC uncovers "evidence" of Iran arms to Taliban...?

The BBC is reporting that they've "uncovered evidence" that Iran has been sending weapons to the Taliban -- which should come as a surprise to US-NATO General McNeill:

"There certainly are weapons or munitions of Iranian origin, but when you say weapons being provided by Iran that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting those weapons here," he said at ISAF's heavily fortified main base in Kabul. "That's not my view at all."  Iranian mortar rounds arrive in Afghanistan from many countries, he said. "I just have no information to support that there's anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here."

I don't know whether the Iranians are deliberately arming the Taliban or not, but I can still tell bad reporting: as far as the BBC report itself goes, the "evidence" pesented simply consists of uncorroborated claims by an anonymous self-admitted Taliban official with a disguised voice, and nothing more.

That's not "evidence" -- that's simply an allegation.

An allegation, incidentally, from a rather unreliable source (would the BBC have so automatically believed a Taliban official if he had said Iran was NOT sending arms to them?)

Did they actually try to locate and see one of these supposed "dragon" landmines that supposedly come from Iran? No. It seems that the only effort the BBC reporter made to try to confirm this allegation is to ask a British official whether it was true or not. Wow. Talk about gutsy independent journalism.

Now I realize that finding unimpeachable evidence is practically impossible - but that doesn't mean that a reporter should overinflate what they have found either. I personally have no doubt that Iranian weapons are flowing to the Taliban. As the report itself makes clear, the major source of weapons is Pakistan. Chinese and Russian weapons are floating around there too -- and so are US weapons. After all, this is a lawless, conflict-riven area of the world, full of smugglers of various sorts.

But that's not an excuse for bad reporting.

This isn't a new claim, of course -- last year ABC claimed that Iran had been "caught red handed" supplying arms to the Taliban (but if you read the body of the article, you realize that there was actually nothing "red-handed" involved there either; rather it was simply surmised that Iran was officially th source of the alleged weapons cache.) This is pretty much the same game they've been playing with claims of Iranian arms going to Iraq's insurgents. Remember how they insisted that EFPs in Iraq were from Iran...nevermind the fact that EFP factories had been found in Iraq itself? Do you suppose they're any less likely to lie about Iran in Afghanistan?

"United Against Nuclear Iran" is LYING about Iran's nuclear program

So it didn't take long before the "United Against Nuclear Iran" organization I mentioned in my last post showed what sort of organization it is. Of course I am not in the least bit surprised that they're lying through their teeth about Iran's nuclear program but I just wonder whether the media or ISIS and all the other media-appointed "expert think tanks" who have thus far made a living out of casting suspicion on Iran will step up to the plate and correct the claims promoted by "United Against Nuclear Iran" too -- but don't hold your breath.

Basically, the same people who lied to you about WMDs in Iraq have started lying about Iran's nuclear program. When you view the following video from "United Against Nuclear Iran", remember this:

"A senior official close to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohamed ElBaradei accused unnamed Western powers of using the same 'hype' tactics employed against Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to justify imposing further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program."

 

 

Pretty much ever sentence in this video is a lie:

- The IAEA has never said that Iran produced "highly-enriched uranium" as repeatedly asserted in this video -- even now Iran can now barely manage to produce low-enriched uranium that cannot be used to make bombs. A previous reports issued in the US Congress which claimed (among other things) that Iran had produced highly-enriched uranium was branded as dishonest by the IAEA itself, as reported by the BBC:

Signed by a senior director at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vilmos Cserveny, the letter raises objections over the committee's report released on 23 August. It says the report was wrong to say that Iran had enriched uranium to weapons-grade level when the IAEA had only found small quantities of enrichment at far lower levels.

The few traces of highly-enriched uranium found in Iran were traced by IAEA and international scientists to contamination, thus vindicating Iran. The Washington Post reported this three years ago:

No Proof Found of Iran Arms Program
Uranium Traced to Pakistani Equipment

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Page A01

Traces of bomb-grade uranium found two years ago in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and are not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, a group of U.S. government experts and other international scientists has determined.

"The biggest smoking gun that everyone was waving is now eliminated with these conclusions," said a senior official who discussed the still-confidential findings on the condition of anonymity.

- Iran's nuclear enrichment program was not "hidden" nor a "secret" -- in fact it started in the 1970s with the cooperation of France. After the revolution, not only did Iran openly and repeatedly announce its enrichment plans on national radio, Iran had openly sought to cooperate with the IAEA in developing the program until the US blocked it:

U.S. in 1983 stopped IAEA from helping Iran make UF6
Nuclear Fuel August 4, 2003

Four years after the Islamic revolution, and two years after Iran's new leaders dusted off the nuclear program of the deposed Reza Shah Pahlevi, IAEA officials were keen to assist Iran in reactivating a research program to learn how to process U3O8 into UO2 pellets and then set up a pilot plant to produce UF6, according to IAEA documents obtained by NuclearFuel.

Sources said that when in 1983 the recommendations of an IAEA mission to Iran were passed on to the IAEA's technical cooperation program, the U.S. government then ''directly intervened'' to discourage the IAEA from assisting Iran in production of UO2 and UF6. ''We stopped that in its tracks,'' said a former U.S. official.

 Due to US interference, Iran did fail to report otherwise legal nuclear activity (such as importing uranium) but the IAEA has said that none of Iran's undeclared activity had any relationship to a nuclear weapons program.

- Iran has never "obstructed inspectors" as claimed and in fact it has allowed more inspections that its safeguards agreement requires. When the same sort of people issued a report making a similar claim about Iran "obstructing inspectors", the IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire replied: 

"We have not been denied access at any time, including in the past few weeks. Normally we do not comment on such reports but this time we felt we had to clarify the matter...If we had a problem like that we would have to report to the [35-nation IAEA governing] board ... That has not happened because this alleged event did not take place."

- Iran's nuclear program makes perfect economic sense, which is why the US encouraged and supported Iran's nuclear program in the first place. As the Washington Post reported:

Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran's nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said, "They're already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy."

Yet Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and outgoing Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz held key national security posts when the Ford administration made the opposite argument 30 years ago.

- Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr is perfectly legal, operated under IAEA safeguards, and IAEA head ElBaradei himself has said that it poses no concern:

He denied US claims that the Bushehr reactor could be used to make weapons..."Bushehr is not apparently at the centre of international concern," Mr ElBaradei told reporters on Tuesday. The IAEA chief said the reactor was aimed at producing nuclear energy only, and there was an agreement to return spent fuel to Russia. "It is not something that is of any concern on our part," he added.

- Iran has never "violated" the Non-Proliferation Treaty (the accusation itself is quite ironic, considering that the US just violated its own obligations under the treaty with regard to India.) In fact,  IAEA reports on Iran have consistently stated that there is no evidence that Iran diverted nuclear material for weapons use. As Michael Spies of the Lawyer's Committee on Nuclear Policy has explained:

"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 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."

This was backed up by expert testimony presented to the Foreign Select Committee of the British Parliament:

"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."

- Finally, note how long the video dedicates to scaremongering about how a nuclear Iran will "spawn" a nuclear Middle East by forcing other countries to develop nuclear weapons too. I dealt with this claim before:

[I]t is highly ironic that Iran's mere capability to build nuclear weapons can supposedly spark this uncontrollable cascade of nuclear proliferation in the Mideast, and yet Israel's existing nuclear weapons are not believed to have this effect. Indeed, if we are to accept, as the fallacious argument assumes, that one country's nuclear capability will force other countries to acquire their own nuclear deterrent, then the real regional culprit for proliferation must be the original nuclear power in the region: Israel. Note also that similar predictions of regional arms races have not been made when, for example, Brazil recently acquired the same nuclear technology that Iran is seeking to develop. Finally, the argument assumes that the other countries in the region aren't already working to develop their own nuclear programmes...

Anyway, these are just some of the blatant lies in the video that I've just debunked -- I have grown too bored to continue with the rst. I'm looking at for sale ads for sailboats. 

Incidentally, I am sort of disappointed to see Holbrooke in bed with these liars. I once briefly knew his son, and frankly I never expected Holbrooke to mix in with human scum like these.

NeoCons form (another) anti-Iran lobbying group

The Forward reports on the formation of a self-proclaimed "broad-based coalition" against Iran called United Against Nuclear Iran. And get this! The head of the group is a protege of none other than our favorite raving lunatic, John Bolton. Richard Silverstein investigates further.

This should come as no surprise. There's apparently a lot of "seed money" for starting up anti-Iran groups available out there. Freedom's Watch was also created by pro-Israeli former Bush administration officials (including Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary) and have also sought to replicate progressive groups -- but actually, so far they've just sucked up Sheldon Adelson's money. 

Hello, Sheldon? Instead of throwing your money away on these groups who don't actually accomplish anything, buy me a sailboat. Seriously - we're talking less that $200,000 - chump change for you. I want a sailboat. I deserve a sailboat. It is a nice weekend, and I'm going to go looking at sailboats in my area.

US-Israel relations debated at Yale University

Philip Weiss reports on a debate about US-Israel relations at Yale which involved John Mearsheimer:

Because of relentless expansion that seems to be part of Zionism, Israel had all but foreclosed the possibility of a two-state solution. This would leave three choices in Greater Israel: a binational state that would give Arabs and Jews equal rights and would mean abandoning the original Zionist vision of the state; 2, ethnic cleansing to maintain a Jewish majority, or 3, most likely, some form of apartheid with limited autonomy for Palestinians, living in “statelets.” Everyone bridles at the word apartheid, Mearsheimer said.  “But that is the future they face.... No one who wishes Israel well should be enthusiastic about” these alternative.

The NeoCon side lost, by a vote of 44-25.

I suggest similar debating sessions in Iran and with Iranians, as well as in Yale with Iranians.

Law school Dean speaks up on US-Iran relations and Israel

Lawrence Velvel, the Dean of the Massachussets School of Law, tells it like it is about torture, and the pro-Israeli Neocons' role in influencing US foreign policy on Iran:

It is often said that Jewish neocons -- guys like Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Abrams, Lieberman, in my judgment Mukasey, and others -- take the positions they do (on Al Qaeda, Iran, etc.) because of their concern for Israel. It is also said that they have had outsized influence during the last eight years. I cannot say these accusations are wrong. Truth be told, I think they are right. But my deep concern for Israel and for Jews as a people lead me to revile those bastards because not only have they been a disaster for the United States itself, but they also seem to have gone far toward achieving the very opposite of what they wanted to achieve in behalf of Israel. By leading the U.S. down a terribly wrong path, they have caused many Americans -- with whom I agree about most other things -- to revile Israel, they have caused Arabs to hate Israel even more, and they have lessened, not increased, Israel’s security. Nice work, guys.