Iran Affairs

To catch a pro-Israeli propagandist

Philip Weiss catches a pro-Israeli "journalist" in a lie

So, Johnson self identifies here as a "supporter" of Netanyahu and the Likud - did that not raise any red flags back at The Hill when she was asked to write about the Obama Administration's engagement in the Middle East peace process?

Juvenile executions in Iran

An article by Farnaz Fassihi in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Debate over child executions roils Iran's presidential elections" has elicited some of the usual comments and posts especially on right-wing blogs about how bloodthirsty and barbaric those Iranians must be ... which is very ironic, because until 2005 the deplorable distinction of "leading the world in juvenile executions" was applicable to ... not China, not Iran, but the US.

The prohibition of execution of minors in the US is very recent and only came into force in 2005, in a narrowly decided Supreme Court decision (all the conservative justices voted in favor of the practice.)

Until then, 20 states in the US did allow the execution of minors and there had been 22 such executions, plus another 78 such people who were on death row when the practice was abolished in the US.

See http://www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvjus/dparticles/factsheetfactsfigures.pdf

[Having said that, two wrongs don't make a right either. I am very opposed to the death penalty, anywhere and for any reason. That's why I hesitate to post this because I don't want to seem to be in support of the death penalty, and certainly not in support of the death penalty for juvenile offenders.]

Colin Powell, the incredibly incurious moron

Colin Powell plays dumb: "Lies about WMDs? Me? Naw!!! I'm just a talking parrot, too stupid to know when I'm lying."

US failing to properly probe war crimes

In the "no  duh" category (or as we say in Persian "gheyb gofti!")

 

UN expert: US failing to properly probe war crimes

By FRANK JORDANS – AP May 28 2009

GENEVA (AP) — A U.N. human rights expert said Thursday that the United States is failing to properly investigate alleged war crimes committed by its soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although some cases are investigated and lead to prosecutions, others aren't or result in lenient sentences, said Philip Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council's independent investigator on extrajudicial killings.

"There have been chronic and deplorable accountability failures with respect to policies, practices and conduct that resulted in alleged unlawful killings — including possible war crimes — in the United States' international operations," Alston said in a report dated May 26 and published on a U.N. Web site.

Officials at the U.S. mission in Geneva said they were unable to comment immediately on the report, which is scheduled to be presented to the rights council Wednesday...

Nuclear Iran "inevitable"

Looks like the pundits are finally starting to get it.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry explains why Iran has no other choice but to carry on with its nuclear operations. Perry suggests that as the Iranian population supports a nuclear program, not developing it would result in the overthrow of the current regime.

More...

Gary Sick's new blog

Those of you who follow Iran-related matters no doubt have heard of Dr Gary Sick. He has a new blog called Gary's Choices which I plan to follow closely.

I am surprised that he has the time to do this, considering how time-consuming running the Gulf2000 project must be. Perhaps now that a real pain-in-the-ass like me is no longer participating in Gulf2000, he finally has some free time?

Dennis Ross wants a US war with Iran

Flint and Hillary Mann Leverett write in the NY Times that Dennis Ross sees any potential  negotiations with Iran as merely a formality, designed to fail, and ultimately only intended to fortify a case for a US attack on Iran:

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

Which should not come as a surprise because this is exactly what I said previously in when I decoded Ross' "Zionist Speak" into plain English:

"We have to at least make a pretense of talking to Iran, in order to at least make going to war more palatable with public opinion. These negotiations must be accompanied by greater economic pressure on Iran through sanctions, in order to force Iran to give up its enrichment program and accept Israeli regional domination. If the Iranians do not buckle, we can then claim that they have proven to want nuclear weapons, and then we can proceed with attacking Iran."

Bush's apocalype complex and the Iraq war, redux.

So Jacque Chirac hasreportedly confirmed the story that Bush invoked the biblical story of Gog and Magog as a reason for his invasion of Iraq. (I hope someone who has access to the newly-published French book that cites Chirac can confirm this.)

In case you don't know your bible stories:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

It wouldn't come as a surprise that apocalyptic dispensationalist religious fervor had something to do with Bush's reason for invading Iraq, but what about Cheney etc? The bottom line is that year later, and many deaths later, we still don't know why the US invaded Iraq. Though we do know that Israel strongly supported the war, despite later denials when things went bad.

Cutting off Iran's gasoline by sanctions - oh the irony!

Come see the irony in the proposed gasoline sanctions on Iran, boys and girls: pushed by the pro-Israeli lobby, the US has been demanding that Iran abandon uranium enrichment, the process of making nuclear reactor fuel. The US insists that Iran instead excusively import its reactor fuel from other countries, such as Russia -- the same country that Cheney accused of practicing energy blackmail.

THe US claims that they are simply worried about the potential of countries using their uranium enrichment programs to making nuclear bombs. The Iranians -- and the rest of the developing world -- are concerned that this is merely a pretext to monopolize nuclear fuel production, and that any country that accepts such an arrangement would be open to energy blackmail in the form of sanctions and fuel cut-offs.

And in order to force Iran to accept this arrangement, the US Congress proposes to impose a sanctions on the supply of refined gasoline to Iran -- thus only proving that Iran's concerns about energy cut-offs are valid.

Nicoullaud in the LA Times isn't being honest

In a couple of articles in the LA TImes, Francois Nicoullaud, the former French envoy to Tehran, is trying to hide is the true reason why the Paris Agreement negotiations fell apart.

If you remember, under the terms of the Paris Agreement, Iran suspended enrichment for what was supposed to be only a few months, in return for the EU-3's promise to present Iran with a negotiation package. Specifically, the Iranians made it perfectly clear from the outset that they would NOT accept a demand for permament cessation of enrichment. The EU-3 first dragged out the "temporary" suspension for 2 years, rejecting Iran's requests to meet their obligations in time. When Iran finally decided to restart enrichment, the EU-3 presented Iran with an offer that one analyst called an "empty box in pretty wrapping" that among other insults, demanded that IRan permanently cease enrichment -- a total breach of the Paris Agreement.

However, contrary to those facts, this is how Nicoullaud spins the history:

LAT: There was this window of opportunity from 2003 to 2005 when Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program, but then restarted. What lessons can we draw from that experience, if any?

Nicoullaud: One basic mistake on the part of the West, of the Europeans, was to think that we could seduce Iran with carrots. The Europeans tried to put together some kind of package containing civilian planes, oil drilling equipment, power plants, economic cooperation, membership to the World Trade Organization. ... But the package could not take form as long as the Americans were not ready to lift their economic sanctions. And furthermore, it was basically a wrong approach to reward Iran for not trying to produce a nuclear bomb. Being a member of international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is Iran's simple duty to remain away from such a endeavor. So we created a sort of bazaar atmosphere, which was very detrimental to the negotiation.

Of course, there was no evidence then or now that IRan was "trying to produce a nuclear bomb" as Nicoullaud claims, and furthermore, it was the EU that was already obligated to do some of the things that they kindly offered to do -- for example, international law already requires sellers of civilian airplanes to provide spare parts for it, and international law already requires the EU-3 to respect other nations and not attack them or undermine their governments. Like I said before,o the EU-3 "offer" to Iran consisted of either things that they were already obligated to do, things that were not binding upon them, and things that only ultimately benefitted themselves. 

AIPAC and foreign lobby influence-peddling in the US

John Newhouse has an interesting article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs entitled Diplomacy Inc. which compares the various foreign lobby and pressure groups that operate in the US including AIPAC and other members of the pro-Israeli Lobby, and the Indian, Armenian etc. lobbies. I have written previously on why AIPAC is so obsessed with Iran as part of the Iran-bashing industry.

Ironically, I remember a time not too distant in which anyone who even mentioned the phrase "Israeli lobby" was instantly branded an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist. Thanks to the war on Iraq, the pro-Israelui lobby and its techniques of influence-peddling has been "outed" and is subject to debate.

Anyway, this is what Newhouse has to say about what he considers is the "Model Lobby"

 Although AIPAC characterizes its role as promoting financial assistance to Israel from the U.S. government, most of this appropriation has become routine and is rarely challenged. Where AIPAC devotes most of its energies is in defending Israel's hard line on the Palestinians to a U.S. audience and deflecting criticism in the United States of Israel's equally hard line on Hezbollah and, above all, Iran. Under the Bush administration, officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were determined to support AIPAC in its efforts to align U.S. foreign policy with that of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud Party--namely, in identifying Iran as not only a regional threat but also a global threat to peace and stability. In pressing for votes and support, AIPAC does not threaten members of Congress so much as it makes them worry about angry phone calls from wealthy constituents. Defying AIPAC can make life complicated for those in Congress who are looking toward their reelection.

Whether AIPAC will be able to sustain its dominant role is not clear, however. A growing number of Jewish Americans regard the lobby as a group of largely ethnocentric extremists and oppose its tactics. Support for Israel is becoming age-related--a recent poll conducted by New York University, for example, showed that more than two-thirds of the young, non-Orthodox Jewish students surveyed did not consider the situation with Israel and the Palestinians a high priority for the 2008 U.S. presidential election, whereas more than half of the Jewish Americans over the age of 65 who were surveyed did. Another poll, part of the Middle East Academic Survey Research and Exposition, conducted by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, showed that an overwhelming majority--roughly four-fifths-of those U.S. academics polled regarded the Israel lobby as "negative" to "extremely negative" to U.S. interests. A slightly greater majority of those polled said they believed that the lobby's tactics expose the United States "to avoidable hostility in the Middle East."

Historically, the notable exception to AIPAC'S uniform hold on the Israel lobby has been the Israel Policy Forum. According to M.J. Rosenberg, the group's director of research and its key figure, the forum's mission is to encourage the United States to pursue an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the establishment of a two-state solution.

An alternative group calling itself J Street was launched in April 2008. J Street defines itself as "the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement," with the purpose of ending the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically and supporting a new direction for U.S. policy in the Middle East. It has a lobbying arm that operates on Capitol Hill, and its political action committee endorsed 41 candidates in the 2008 congressional elections and distributed $578,000 among them. Thirty-three of these candidates won, although the degree to which J Street may have helped is unclear.

Reactions to J Street have been mixed. Skeptics, of whom there are many, feel that its efforts will founder---the two major political parties have trained themselves to listen to AIPAC first and act accordingly. Although an increasing number of Jewish Americans take issue with Israel's position on the Palestinians and favor a two-state solution to the Palestine problem, AIPAC holds several advantages, the first of which is that hard-liners in the Jewish American community care much more about advancing their position than do those who lean toward a two-state solution. Second, a deep fear of Arab intentions still leads many Jews in the United States to be more comfortable with AIPAC'S politics. And lastly, and of no small importance, AIPAC is run by professionals who are rightly considered to hold black belts in the art of Washington politics.

This March, the clout of the Israel lobby and its allies on Capitol Hill was forcefully displayed by their successful derailment of the appointment of Charles Freeman to be chair of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman is among the most widely respected foreign policy analysts, and he has often taken exception to Israeli policies. In withdrawing from the appointment, Freeman wrote, "There is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired.... It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."

Iran won in the US Supreme Court

This is interesting:

Emory School of Law Professor David Bederman triumphed in a U.S. Supreme Court case on Tuesday despite representing an unpopular client in a case that raised a question of statutory interpretation.

Six justices signed the majority opinion deciding for the petitioner in Ministry of Defense and Support for the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran v. Elahi, while three dissented. The Supreme Court overturned the previous decision in favor of Dariush Elahi by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

...

Now if only the US would stick by the rest of the Algiers Accords, for example to not interfere in Iran's domestic affairs...

New York Times lies about Iran's nuclear program -- yes, again.

Note this lovely gem of misinformation and scaremongering from the New York Time's David Sanger:

Iran seems to have made significant progress in at least two of the three technologies necessary to field an effective nuclear weapon.

The first is enriching uranium to weapons grade, now under way at the large nuclear complex at Natanz...

Which of course is total bullshit be cause Natanz is under IAEA surveillance and the IAEA has consistently stated that Iran is NOT enriching uranium "to weapons grade" there. But hey, since when has NY Times let piddly little things like facts get in the way of their scaremongering and blatant lying about Iran's nuclear program? H/T to Philip Weiss.

Iran, missiles and propaganda

Jeremy Hammond of the Foreign Policy Journal takes apart the western media's attempt to put words into Ahmadinejad's mouth regarding the recent test of Iranian long range missiles:

The London Times’ headline alarmingly read “Ahmadinejad claims Iran’s new missile is capable of hitting Israel”.

But the paper failed to produce a quote of the Iranian president actually specifying Israel as being within range of the missile. Instead, the text of the article only states that Ahmadinejad merely announced that a missile with a range of 1,200 miles had been successfully tested.

The headline claim that the “missile is capable of hitting Israel” is simply a corollary drawn by the Times, but falsely attributed to Ahmadinejad himself in a not atypical demonizing media account.

Multinational nuclear fuel banks - a bad idea.

The AP has an article full of wishful thinking about creating multinational nuclear fuel banks as an alternative to letting individual countries develop their own enrichment facilities. The idea is that there will be some sort of depot of nuclear fuel at some central place, from which all other countries (who don't have enrichment capability on their own) will be able to buy their nuclear fuel. (Of course, the countries that already have enrichment technology will be able to keep their technology, and will be the suppliers.) Supposedly, this fuel will be sold in a non-discriminatory fashion to all buyers, at market rates.

Nice fairytale.

Now, in reality, what this means is that the world will be further divided into the haves and have-nots of nuclear fuel. And, it is inevitable that politics will intefere in the "non-discriminatory" distribution of this fuel. How do we know this? Because under the terms of the NPT, the 5 nuclear-armed countries are already under an obligation to share civilian nuclear technology with the rest of the NPT signatories -- but instead they totally ignored that (and many other) requirements of the NPT and formed a "Nuclear Suppliers Group" which is essentially a cartel of countries with nuclear know-how, intended to restrict the distribution of that technology (under the guise of fighting weapons proliferation, of course, but the economic benefits to the 5 of monopolizing the technology are obvious) 

And how exactly will "Market rates" be set for a commodity that is essentially subject to monopoly control? Is it any wonder that developing countries don't trust these sorts of arrangements? Note that exceptions are already being carved out for "friends". FOr example, under the US proposal, Canada will be able to develop enrichment technology. Brazil and Argentina get a pass, but Iran will have to give up its enrichment technology.

Ex-AIPAC official: no military option on Iran

Well, this is interesting:

There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat, and efforts by the Israeli government and its supporters to link that threat to progress in peace with the Palestinians and Syria are "nonsense" and an obstacle to the Arab-Israeli and international cooperation essential to changing Iranian behavior.

That's the conclusion of Keith Weissman, the Iran expert formerly at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), speaking publicly for the first time the government dropped espionage charges against him and his colleague, Steve Rosen, earlier this month. 

This confirms what I was always saying:

"President Bush's demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment before we would talk with the regime was an excuse not to talk at all," Weissman said.

Why not talk at all? Because the whole "nuclear weapons" thing was and is a pretext, that's why.

Iran "biggest threat to Israel" ... really?

OK read this and guess the date:

THE greatest threat to Israel comes from Iran's nuclear program,  [Israeli] Foreign Minister XXXXX told a special Knesset session yesterday...
XXXX said the new reality in the Middle East was the threat from fundamentalists armed with nuclear weapons...

Give up? Well, you'd be excused if you thought it was Netanyahu who said that just recently. Actually, it was from Shimon Peres' speech to the Knesset in 1995. Almost 15 years ago. Some things never change.The Israelis have been portraying Iran's nuclear program as the "biggest threat" for more than 15 years now, just as Iran has been supposedly "just 2 years away from making nukes" for 20 years now.

Ashcroft v. Iqbal: Racial profiling is now legal in the USA.

So the culture of legal impunity won another victory when the the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal today, essentially OK-ing racial profling of "Arab Muslims" as suspected terrorists. According to this decision, FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft cannot be sued by a former Sept. 11 detainees who claimed they were abused because of their religion and ethnicity, thus making it harder to sue government officials for civil rights abuses.

In effect, the court's reasoning invoked the concept of guilt-by-perceived-ethnic-association :

The September 11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers who counted themselves members ingood standing of al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist group. Al Qaeda was headed by another Arab Muslim—Osama bin Laden—and composed in large part of his Arab Muslim disciples. It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims. On the facts respondent alleges the arrests Mueller oversaw were likely lawful and justified by his nondiscriminatory intent to detain aliens who were illegally present in the United States and who had potential connections to those who committed terrorist acts. As between that “obvious alternative explanation” for the arrests, Twombly, supra, at 567, and the purposeful, invidious discrimination respondent asks us toinfer, discrimination is not a plausible conclusion.

So imagine you're waiting in line at the airport to board your plane, and you specifically are pulled out of line, harrassed, questioned, searched and generally insulted. If you complain that you are being discriminated against, the official can now simply shrug his shoulders and say "Al-Qaeda members were Moslem Arabs, you appear to be Moslem Arab, so I can single you out based on your ethnicity, and yet your ethnicity was merely incidental to my decision to search you and it so was not discriminatory".

Eh? Run that by me again?

There's too much irony here to address. For one thing, it seems that the court is making two different and contradictory justifications for the policy: First, that it would be OK to arrest Muslim Arabs since the hijakers were Muslims Arabs. Second, that the petitioners weren't arrested because they're Muslim Arabs so the action wasn't discriminatory (but then why does the court take such pains to explain that Al-Qaeda consisted of Muslim Arabs?)

Secondly, even assuming that "Muslim Arabs" are legitimate targets, the petitioner Iqbal was not "Arab". He was Pakistani. In fact many of the people who were arrested for no reason weren't Arab and therefore did not share that characteristic with Al-Qaeda. But racist rarely take such nuances in mind when playing guilt-by-ethnic-association.

And I'm not even sure that Iqbal was a "Muslim." What if he was actually an athiest? or agnostic? or recently converted to Buddhism? Like a lot of ignorant Americans the Court is using the term "Muslim" here in an ethnic identifier, but it is a false one. You cannot be "ethnically" Muslim any more than you can be ethnically Christian. The world's 2 billion muslims do not consititute a single ethnicity but instead constitute a wide variety of peoples. To suggest that Al-Qaeda or "Arabs" somehow exclusively represent "Muslims" and to conflate the two together is the height of ignorance and a hallmark of intolerance. But I guess such nuances are lost when talking about the rights of brown-skinned people who are all grouped together as a uniform, homogenous "Them". To acknowledge that "they" are as different and varied as "Us" would be too humanizing, I suppose.

And the court's claim that the people arrested just coincidentally happened to be Arab Muslims  -- their perceived ethnicity was "incidental" to legitimate law enforcement, according to the court, and not part of a policy of specifically arresting Arab Muslims -- is simply ridiculous. But to make things clearer, lets play a "what if" game. What if after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a bunch of innocent people were rounded up and thrown into prisons -- and these people all happened to be of Japanese ancestry. Would a claim that their Japanese-ness was merely "incidental" to their treatment, be taken seriously by anyone? Of course not. In such a case, discrimination would not only be plausible, it would be probable.

Or, what if after a bombing of an abortion clinic by blonde, blue-eyed Christian terrorists, the FBI went and gathered up all Christian blondes. Would that also be really just "incidental"? I think not!

But when it comes to "Arab Muslims", the Court plays dumb.

Through this language, the Supreme Court has just given its imprimatur on the old hatemongering Far Right claim that all Moslems/Arabs/Brown people should be considered to be suspects since members of Al-Qaeda happened to be Moslem (supposedly) Arab or brown-skinned.

And I suppose the same court wouldnt find anything discriminatory about how the FBI felons as informers on Mosque attendants either.

Rumsfeld's Jihad

As you may remember, no one really knows why the US attacked Iraq, since none of the official (and constantly changing) explanations make much sense, and neither do the assumptions/guesses. That's one mystery that historians will have to solve, perhaps.

But what if the war was really a religious war against Islam, a religious crusade in the exact meaning of that term? Well, it seems that Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush saw it that way, based on the Biblical quotes that Rumsfeld used on the cover pages of the Defense Secretary's Worldwide intelligence updates that he gave Bush everyday. GQ Magazine has displayed some of these cover pages, for our amusement, in a slide show entitled "Onward Christian Soldiers".

Now, just imagine the reaction if this sort religious-militaristic jingoism was found in official documents in Iran.

Messianic nuts with nukes: Iran, or Israel?

Just when you thought the apocalyptic nuttiness was over: Jeffrey Goldberg of the New York Times published an op-ed in which he cites an advisor to Israeli PM Netanyahooooo on how he views Iran as "Amalek", an indigenous tribe in the Levant who, according to the Bible, were supposedly opposed to the ancient Hebrews and were eventually exterminated by King David (I should add "mythical" to that sentence since most of the old bible stories are wilting; including the story of King David and the Exodus from Egypt.) Acording to the Bible, God herself had promised the land of the Amalek to the Hebrews, and so the Hebrews were commanded by God to exterminate the Amalek and take their lands by force:

"When the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget."

And when God says "blot out" she apparently really, really means it:

"Strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey." (1 Sam. 15:2-3).

The Hebrew King Saul, who was to finish the job, apparently wondered why he should kill the women and children too, and God supposedly told him not to be a wise-ass and just do as he's told. And when King Saul was insufficiently bloodthirsty to carry out this Godly command to completely exterminate the Amalek by murdering unarmed prisoners, the prophet Samuel stepped-in and stripped Saul of his crown, and then executed the Amelekite prisoners himself. 

Naturally, all this massacre by the ancient Hebrews was "pre-emptive" and/or in self-defense. Isn't it always?

So anyway, lets get this straight: the Iranians are said to be crazed religious nuts who seek to "wipe out" other people with weapons of mass destruction, and yet here's an official from nuclear-armed Israel which is citing one of the bloodiest chapters of the Bible on justifying mass murder.

Gosh, I wonder what would have happened had some advisor to a top Iranian official said these sorts of things?

The "real threat": Iran or Israel?

Roger Cohen writes about how the kleptocratic petty tyrants of various Arab puppet states in the Mideast are willing to stoop so low as to make common cause against Iran in order to maintain their failing grip on power just a bit longer:

When popular rage rises, the region’s Arab autocrats look in the mirror and see the Shah. They don’t want a rerun of Tehran 1979.

“The Arabs are very worried that, for expediency’s sake in Iraq or Afghanistan, we’ll cut some deal with Iran that will leave Tehran as the regional hegemon,” one U.S. official told me.

The israelis of course fear the same thing, which is what I've been saying all along. After all, if you think about it, why does the US need Isael now, or ever? Meanwhile, the Arab League head Amr Moussa says that the real danger is Israel's nukes, not Iran -- and Iran agrees -- and the Palestinian chief negotiator Erekat  says that the real danger is the expanding Israeli occupation, not Iran.

Photographer Tom Loughlin's "Pictures of You" project

'pictures of you' is a multimedia installation featuring photographs and sound from Iran. It can be shown indoors or outdoors. The photographs are printed on translucent silk, and can be viewed from either side. From time to time, exhibit goers will find themselves face-to-face with another visitor on the other side of the portrait.

'pictures of you' will be traveling throughout the United States in 2008-2009. If you would like to bring the exhibit to your town, please contact the artist by email at info@manjushriproject.org

Amusing conspiracy theories about the 1979 revolution

Oh you have GOT TO read this if only for the entertainment value. Iranians are said to be prone to perpetuating conspiracy theories (but in fact conspiracy theories are a cottage industry in the US) and one of the more weird conspiracy theories which is particularly popular with the old-timey Monarchist crowds is the idea that the US/Britain/Big Oil secretly engineered the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and his replacement with Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.

And so according to James Perloff's version of What Really Happened: Iran and the Shah, the overthrow of the SHah was actually the work of the US (Kissinger, Carter and Kennedy in particular) working hand-in-glove with the Tudeh party (the Communist party in Iran -- which was actually pretty weak and irrelevant) --- and oh yeah, mysterious "blonde" and "Palestinian" revolutionary demonstrators (how do we know they're specifically Palestinian? Hmmm?) who during the revolution doused themselves with fake blood in the form of "mercurochrome" (aka iodine antiseptic solution) and paraded around coffins (which were actually either empty or obtained from graveyards) around as evidence of the Shah's brutality. Oh, and Savaak's prisons were all open to the Red Cross and not nearly as repressive and they were made out to be.  etc etc 

It is a long article and frankly I got too bored to finish it. Trying to argue with these peole about facts is like trying to rationally convince an insane person. I've heard these sorts of fevered rantings before (from relatives, even) and they get tiresome but I encourage you to read it anyway.  

Impressed by Ahmadinejad at Durban

You may all remember that Ahmadinejad delivered a speech to the anti-racism conference in Durban. Traditionally, the pro-Israeli crowd are annoyed at this event because the members tend to equate Zionism with racism -- which it is -- and they turn it into a circus with charges of "anti-Semitism" flying all over the place in order to silence criticism of Israel. Anyway it turned into more of a circus when Ahmadinejad addressed the conference, in a speech that as usual was widely criticized by the western media. However at least one Jewish attendant was not so quick to dismiss what Ahmadinejad had to say:

  As a delegate from Independent Jewish Voices, I had watched the drama unfold on April 20, as I sat in the UN gallery. I knew that both Ahmadinejad and the Durban Review were getting a bum rap which was now drawing progressive Jews into a fatal alliance with right-wing supporters of racism and injustice.

In the polarized context of opposing narratives, it is risky to appear to defend the “bad guy.” Everyone “knows” Ahmadinejad equals bad, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denier. So why defend his speech? I don’t endorse his values and I regret that, in his speech, he did not acknowledge injustice, anti-Semitism, and racism in Iran. However, it is NOT true that this particular speech was an anti-Semitic diatribe that denied the Holocaust.

 You can hear his actual speech by going to http://www.un.org/webcast/durbanreview/archive.asp?go=090420 and scrolling down to 15:00.  …

Saberi and American Propaganda

I highly recommend reading Glen Greenwald's article on Roxana Saberi's plight and American media propaganda in which compares Saberi's treatment to the plight of journalists held by the US:

One finds only a tiny fraction of news coverage in the U.S. regarding the treatment of al-Haj, Hussein, Jassam and these other imprisoned journalists as has been devoted to Saberi.  It ought to be exactly the reverse:  the American media should be far more interested in, and opposed to, infringements of press freedoms by the U.S. Government than by governments of other countries.  Yet the former merits hardly a peep, while the latter provokes all sorts of smug and self-righteous protests from American journalists who suddenly discover their brave commitment to press freedoms when all that requires is pointing to a demonized, hated foreign government and complaining.

Iran airport fiasco costs official his job

PressTV reports Iran airport fiasco costs official his job

The Director General of Shiraz airport has been dismissed from his post for holding a plane en route from Shiraz to Tehran during take-off.

Iran Air Flight 234 was stopped during take-off on Friday morning, so that the Iranian vice president for scientific and technology affairs, Sadeq Vaez-Zadeh, could board the plane.

The plane was scheduled for take-off at 10:45 am local time but finally took off at 11:17. The incident deeply shocked some 15 European tourists aboard the aircraft.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded by issuing the boot order for Shiraz airport official Majid Hejazi.

Personally, I would have fired the late passenger rather than the airport director. But frankly, considering the hours I've spent on the tarmac in various US airports (I'm talking about you, American Airlines!) I'm not sure if an half-hour delay is worth firing anyone over! Those "shocked" Europeans on board should get a life.

Torture to connect Iraq to 9-11

I recommend Juan Cole's blog entry on how the Bush administration used false confessions obtained under torture to connect Saddam to 9-11, in order to justify the attack on Iraq.

This reminds me of another Mollah Nasreddin story:

A powerful King once told Nasreddin that unless he proved immediately that he had a great gift of insight into magical things as often claimed, he would have Nasreddin's head chopped off.

Nasreddin replied, "Oh wise and powerful Lord, I look up at the sky and see angels singing your praises, and I look down into the earth and see demons shudder at your greatness!"

"How is it that you see these things?" the King asked.

"Fear. Fear helps a lot" the old Mollah responded.

Roxanna Saberi was naughty?

So turns out Roxanna was a bit naughty, and there was a slight something to the spying charges after all:

TEHRAN, Iran – A joyful Roxana Saberi on Tuesday thanked those who helped win her release after four months in a Tehran prison. Her lawyer revealed that the American journalist was convicted of spying for the U.S. in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the U.S. war in Iraq.

Saberi, who holds American and Iranian citizenship, had copied the report "out of curiosity" while she worked as a freelance translator for a powerful body connected to Iran's ruling clerics, said the lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht...

Saberi admitted that she copied the document two years ago but said she didn't pass it on to the Americans as prosecutors claimed. She apologized, saying it had been a mistake to take the report, Nikbakht said. He gave no details on what was in the document because it remains confidential.

Well, had she done this in the US she would be in jail right now. There are several US statutes prohibiting accesss of national security information, intercepted communications or codes (18 U.S.C. §§793, 794, 797, 798 and 952); statute prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of restricted data (42 U.S.C. §2277); the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (50 U.S.C. §421 et seq.); and Internal Security Act (50 U.S.C. §783). The Iranians could have dealt with this better if the true nature of the facts were provided to the media in greater detail, and allowed a more fair trial where she was allowed to defend herself.

Molla Nasreddin on politics

I was perusing a book on Sufi poetry entitled "Perfume of the Desert" by Andrew Harvey and came across this Molla Nasreddin story that I thought described political populism very well:

Nasruddin addressed a large crowd and shouted: "Do you want knowledge without ordeal, truth without lies, attainment without any hard work, and progress without any sacrifice?"

Everyone yelled: "Yes!"

"Marvelous!" said Nasruddin, "I do also, and if I ever find out how to manage it, I'll be thrilled to let you know."

Traces of enriched uranium: Iran vs. Egypt

Its funny how the news coverage differs when traces of highly-enriched uranium are found in Egypt versus when traces are found in Iran (which were in fact ultimately found to be due to contamination and not due to a hidden enrichment facility)

This, incidentally, is the same Egypt that flatly refuses to sign the Additional Protocol (unlike Iran) and which was found to have engaged in undeclared nuclear experiments. However, in the case of Egypt, the confidentiality of IAEA reports are maintained and there are no screaming editorials about being caught red-handed making nukes.