Iran Affairs

"Watch your back, dude!"

I posted a comment by one "Fred Astaire" who objected to my use of he word "riotor" to refer to the ... RIOTORS...who were burning buses etc inTehran during the last rioting, implied that he was a very significant person, and concluded by "watch your back, dude!" Yes, Mr Fred Astaire expresses objections to my characterization of the riotors, by resorting to thuggery thus proving my point. Brilliant. A comment worthy of being "approved" for publication on this site.

I got a lot of emails privately regarding Fred Astaire's comment, and some comment (most of which I didn't post to avoid repetition) telling me to be careful etc.

So instead of replying to my well-wishers one at a time, let me do it all at once: Truth is I get a lot of threatening emails and comments. This is normal, and a bit flattering. Years ago I used to work for a particular cable news service that would regularly receive missives from viewers, threatening to never watch the program again - and they would send this same letter week after week, while continuing to watch our station. An older editor told me something interesting: some people like to get pissed off. They experience a sort of cathartic high.

Most of the threatening messages I receive go straight into the delete file since they're not even imaginative. There are a lot of lunatics in the world, and they're all on the internet. One fellow who is obviously a schizophrenic sends me long, ranting emails about how "they" are out to get him. There's another fellow who I see everyday while going to work, who is always yelling at a building. I don't know what the building did to him. So, in short, none of these things worry me the slightest. After all, once you have driven in Tehran traffic, nothing else seems worth being afraid about.

I can also take care of myself as a long-time student of judo and krav maga. My fiance, incidentally, has a black belt in kung fu and has studied Aikido for 15 years -- and I've seen what she can do to men who get overly familiar on the subway (she can kick your ass in MANY different-yet-painful ways, with so little effort, before you even know what happened.) 

But one thing I have learned, is that a guy who uses the word "dude" is not a threat So relax everybody!.

TIME and Ahmadinejad's jacket.

Time magazine has elected Ahmadinejad as one of the top worst-dressed politicians. This is the nonsense which passes for news nowdays. I guess Time doesn't realize that "$30 dollar Chinese jacket" on Ahmadinejad carries far more fundamental symbolic value than all the costumes that George Bush put on -- including as a fighter pilot and cowboy. In making fun of that cheap jacket, you're only proving that you just don't get it.

Iran hawks sidelining Obama; bumrush to war continues.

Like I said before, Obama is powerless (assuming he really wanted to implement any "change) with respect to Iran policy. With the new sanctions bill that just passed in the Senate, the Israelis who effectively own the US Congress have managed to effectively remove the president from having any real say in the conduct of US foreign policy with respect to Iran -- another step in the buildup towards war. As Ali Gharib writes in AntiWar:

Disney of NIAC said that the bill, rather than giving the president more tools for negotiating with Iran, virtually takes the embargo off the table as a U.S. bargaining chip.

"This means that no president can lift the embargo without certifying to Congress that Iran has met a laundry list of demands that no president in his right mind will certify," Disney told IPS.

"All of the things that this bill sought to do, the president had the power to do already," he said. "By Congress passing these bills, it removed the president’s ability to walk things back without Congress."

Green in the flag; Iran opposition gets ridiculous again.

So if you remember a few months ago there was a story promoted in the Telegraph that Iranian soccer players were wearing green wristbands as evidence of their support for the so-called "Green Movement" in Iran. it was picked up from there and widely repeated mindlessly until it became "truth". The problem with this story -- as ONLY I pointed out -- was that their uniform also had green collars and a green design on the front of their shirt. In fact, green was simply part of their uniform's color combination. Apparently no one at the NY Times or CNN or NPR which repeated this story bothered to actually look at the photos of the team's uniforms even though this was plainly obvious from the photos they used. The players individually may or may not have supported the riotors but their green wristbands were not evidence of their views.

Now, there is gossip being promoted mindlessly that Ahmadinejad is attempting to remove the green bar from Iran's flag and replace it with blue (as if changing the flag -- whose design is defined by the Iranian constitution -- is in the hands of Ahmadinejad.) And of course, as I wrote about gossip before, this is being repeated until everyone assumes it is true. The only "evidence" is a still shot of a video backdrop which may or may not have been photoshopped, or was simply an error by the graphics artist who designed/dispalyed it. Scott Lucas of "Enduring America" claims that two photos have "emerged" showing a blue flag but the first photo displayed on his site doesn't even show a flag - it shows the sky which is usually blue.

When the "opposition" engage in this sort of nonsensical exaggeration of their importance and significance by pretending that they've got the regime so scared that the regime has resorted to fighting a color, they only discredit themselves. But I guess when you're desperate to "prove" that your movement is really strong and effective, and not really limited to a certain class of Iranians as widely reported, you resort to promoting these sorts of rumors and gossip as evidence of your supposed importance and impact on the regime. Sorry, I'm laughing at you instead. Like I said before, there are many green things in the world, and they don't all prove support for your movement. If you lack support, don't try to fake it.

[ PS; this is the photo Scott Lucas uses to promote the story that Iran is replacing the green in the flag with blue. Yes, as you can see, the display behind Ahmadinejad shows a blue bar. And yet, the flag right next to him shows a green bar. Why is that? I mean, if the regime is so scared of the color green that the deliberately resorted to change it to blye, why not change that flag too? What, did they forget? I mean, COME ON! How can you not notice the OTHER flag in the same photo? LOL!]

Alavi Foundation investigation in 1996

As I previously mentioned, I like to dig up old news articles and see what was going on then. Here's one about an FBI investigation of the Alavi Foundation (I am looking for an op-ed  written by Tom Friedman in which he calls Clinton a C-O-W-A-R-D for not bombing Iran, and a front-page article published by USA Today which showed map of Iran and the places that should be bombed. Anyone have these?)

FBI FEARED IRAN NUKE PLOT HERE FEELING BETRAYED, MOLE SPEAKS OUT
By GENE MUSTAIN

Sunday, February 18th 1996, 1:95AM

An alleged Mafia moneyman says that one month after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 the FBI enlisted him to bug a posh Park Ave. building and spy on Iranians suspected of plotting a nuclear terror attack on New York.

Dennis Pappas, then an electrical contractor, says FBI agents gave him eavesdropping equipment and a blueprint for installing it on all 21 floors of the building.

The building, 52 Park Ave., had been just secretly purchased by investors with ties to an Iranian foundation suspected of aiding terror groups in the U.S. and abroad.

Pappas at the time was under investigation by other FBI agents for helping a mob boss launder money and was ultimately charged last July with racketeering.

He says the FBI counter-intelligence agents who recruited him said the Iranians were "very bad people" conspiring to import "nuclear materials" for a devastating strike against the city.

"One of the agents said, `These are very bad people. They're terrorists. They're the kind of people who blow up buildings and kill children.' "

Pappas, who also is a lawyer, says he agreed to cooperate with the agents after they promised to make the money-laundering case "go away."

Nine months later, he says, they broke the promise and threatened physical harm if he ever told his story.

...

Two Iranians Pappas says he spied on are ex-presidents of the New York-based Alavi Foundation, which the FBI and other intelligence agencies say is controlled by Iran, which the U.S. calls a state sponsor of terrorism.

In 1992, one of the ex-presidents of the Alavi Foundation, Mohammad Hossein Mahallati, was questioned by federal agents about an alleged plot to export germ-warfare toxins to Iran; the other, Manoucher Shafie, was charged with conspiring to export prohibited U.S. technology to Iran.

In court papers detailing Shafie's arrest, he is identified as an agent of the Iranian mission. Charges in the case were later dropped.

Court records show that Mahallati, whose brother is a former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, and Shafie, who headed the Alavi Foundation after a fundamentalist regime took power in Iran in 1979, retain close ties to the foundation.

Using rental payments it gets from a Fifth Ave. tower it owns, the foundation has given money to groups that federal investigators say are suspected of aiding terrorists.

Revell said the Alavi Foundation was "essentially an arm of the Iranian government operating through" the UN mission. He added that "it keeps track of Iranian nationals in the U.S. and funds groups loyal to" the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader.

...

As marketing director for Coyne, Pappas met an architect who had been hired by Miri Holding Corp., the new owner of 52 Park Ave., to oversee a $5 million renovation of the building.

Through the architect, he met Mahallati, Shafie and others and began negotiating a contract for the electrical part of the job.

"Those people took a liking to me," he said.

"I ingratiated myself with them."

He says Shafie told him that if the job went well, the Iranians would give Coyne further business, including a contemplated expansion of the Iranian UN mission on Third Ave.

The stage was now set.

In March 1993, an FBI agent from the bureau's counter-intelligence division asked Pappas to meet him and another agent at a restaurant on E. 43d St.

He says the agents already knew he was negotiating a contract on 52 Park with the Iranians. "They said, 'We need you. We have to get into this building and put listening devices on all 21 floors.' "

Pappas says he told them that before they went any further they should know he was under investigation by the bureau's organized crime agents.

"They said, 'Nah, nah, don't worry about it. This is national security. It far takes precedence over anything that any mundane investigation of you could be about.' "

RIP, Howard Zinn

One of my favorite writers, Howard Zinn, died today. His book, A People's History of the United States, has a prime position in my bookshelf, and helped many people question the standard drivel they're taught in American schools about the history of this country.

Howard Zinn on Barack Obama’s one year in the top job:

I’ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.

As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that’s hardly any different from a Republican–as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there’s no expectation and no disappointment.

The Cyrus Cylinder and other rocks and stones

As the saga of the British Museum's loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran continues, there's another museum piece which I have seen but which I think most people including Iranophiles aren't familiar with as much as they should be: the Stele of Darius which marked the Persian construction of a canal connecting the Red Sea to the Nile, forerunner of the modern Suez Canal, thus allowing goods to flow by sea into the Mediterranian from the Persian Gulf. People tend to not realize that Egypt was ruled by Persians for 200 years.

 The stele reads:

“Saith King Darius: I am a Persian. Setting out from Persia, I conquered Egypt. I ordered this canal dug from the river called the Nile that flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. When the canal had been dug as I ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, even as I intended 

(Well, modesty doesn't suit a King of the Persians I guess)

Obama on Iran: Give in to our ultimatums or face consequences!

Did anyone catch Obama's State of the Union speech? Because I didn't. Still, if this report by Haaretz is accurate, I have to laugh. Iran is supposedly "stalling", "refusing to cooperate", "stonewalling" ... why? Because they Iranians didn't simply accept Obama's bullshit uranium exchange offer? Were the Iranians under some sort of obligation to allow themselves to be cheated by Obama? How are they "refusing to cooperate" when they've made a perfectly good and reasonable counter-offer along with many compromise proposals that the US simply ignores?

" Iran has rebuffed diplomatic overtures by Obama's administration to engage in direct dialogue to resolve the crisis."

Really? When? When did the US even offer "direct dialogue" rather than issue ultimatums and threats?

Iran has "failed to come clean" about its nuclear program? Gee, the IAEA has consistently said it has no evidence of any nuclear weapons program, and has performed more inspections that it was legally allowed to peform of Iran.

Iran is failing to meet its "obligations"?? Who says that Iran has any obligation to give up its pefectly legal nuclear program which is an unquestionable, absolute sovereign right?

Like I said, this isn't the first time that Iranians have been issued ultimatums by foreign powers. Funny how the US is now filling the role of the colonialists British and Russians. Great job! You're really "winning hearts and minds" with this sort of talk, Clinton. LOL

The 'U.S. Caused The Haiti Earthquake' Meme

RFE/RL has an interesting article about the "US caused the Haiti earthquake" claim, that was started reportedly by a Russian military report, picked up by a Venezualan news report, repeated by Chavez, and reported by Iran's PressTV.

RFE/RL derides this meme as a case of an "anti-American conspiracy theory". Well, yes it is, but the propogation of these sorts of ridiculous and unverified reports is hardly limited to PressTV or the Venezuleans. All you have to do is look at the latest media report of "leaked secret intelligence documents" about Iran's nuclear program which are then repeated and further embellished ad nauseum to see the same sort of "conspiracy theories" repeated in the US media until the reports are simply assumed to be true. In fact, RFE/RL has itself propogated such rubbish too. Needless to say, RFE/RL isn't so quick to talk about "memes" when they're promoting conspiracy theories about Iran as they are when dealing with anti-American conspiracy theories.

See, what we're dealing with here -- whether it is reports of secret US weapons that cause earthquakes, or of secret Iranian nuclear weapons programs -- is GOSSIP peddling. The study of dynamics of gossip -- specifically, as used by marketers (whether of consumer products or of political hype)-- is very interesting. Rulers have for centuries tried to promote gossip that suited them, while attempting to silence gossip that they found unflattering or dangerous. Why? Well, because gossip can be quite powerful as a weapon of persuasion and propaganda due to its unique characteristics:

First of all, gossip works best with claims whose veracity cannot be proven or disproven conclusively. Its hard to promote gossip about something that can be proven easily to be untrue. Statements about "secret weapons" used by the US or "Secret nuclear programs" in Iran naturally fit this requirement quite well. After all, who can prove that Iran isn't seeking nuclear weapons or that the US doesn't have a secret weapon that causes earthquakes? No one. The beauty of gossip is that you're not expected to verify it before you pass it on, so you don't have to vouch for the credibility of the claim yourself.

Then, gossip involves repetition. People tend to believe claims that they hear repeatedly, simply because they grow more familiar with the claim -- and they inevitably confuse familiarity with veracity. This is known as the "illusion of truth effect" of repetition. One person says something to someone else, and then they repeat it to 4 more people, and so on...until suddenly "everyone knows" that the claim is true -- simply because "everyone" has become familiar with the claim.

Then there's the bandwagon effect ("peer pressure") aspect of gossip -- people tend to (want to) believe things simply because they think other people also believe it. The popularity of the gossip reinforces the believability of the gossip. It becomes easier to believe in gossip, if you're "backed up" by other people who think the way you do. You don't want to be the weirdo who stands out of the crowd by not believing the gossip, do you?

Gossip also involves orchestration. People tend to believe a repeated claim when it comes from multiple sources that all say the same thing.

Then there is the "source credibility" characteristic: people naturally tend to believe things they hear from sources that appear to be familiar or authorities on the subject -- regardless of whether the sources are honest or not. Gossip tends to reach you through people you tend to know -- and so are familar with. In the US there is a whole industry of "experts" who are actually paid spokesmen for various interests. So for example, your favorite weekly op-ed writer who repeats the gossip that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons program, is particularly persuasive even though he has no real expertise on the matter. He's familiar, and he seems like an authority (why else would his views be written in a big fancy newspaper?)   

Then there is the confirmation bias -- people tend to believe things that corresponds to their previous beliefs, and disbelieve things that challenge their preconceptions. Gossip has this characteristic simply because people tend to associate with other people who share their beliefs and so will pass on claims that they find appealing.

So, here's how you start a gossip campaign: Start with (yet another) totally unverifiable and unsourced report about a "leaked secret document" about an Iranian nuclear weapons program published in a newspaper. Watch various bloggers pick up the report, embellish it, and propogate it on their sites. Eventually, once it has received a certain amount of attention, another news agency will pick it up and propogate it. Now, it has gone from gossip to news. Meanwhile the claim will be stripped of nuances -- "Iran reportedly may have a nuclear weapons program...or not" will become "Iran is about to nuke Denver!"  as it is repeated so often that everyone is unconciously familar with it (and so believes it) And then,  presto, you have manufactured a truth out of nothing but speculation and repetition.

Then, to cap it all off, you can add another flourish: once you know the gossip that you started has made its rounds and repeated enough by other people, publicly endorse that claim, and cite those other people as your source.

Now I am not saying that PressTV was consciously doing this about the Haiti earthquake thing - they were reporting what the Venezualans said, and I don't think the Iranian propaganda operations are sophisticated enough to pull off a deliberately designed gossip campaign. Gossip has a way of spontaneously occurring too, after all, and a bit of careless speculation is all it takes to light a fire. However, deliberate gossip campaigns have often been promoted in the US media, and like I said, RFE/RL has had its own role in that.

Of course, sometimes these gossip campaigns don't last long -- like the time they said that Ahmadineajd was Jewish, or the other time that they said the Iranian government had passed a law that required Jews to wear yellow badges. Those claims were not ambiguous enough. They were inartfully created, and so too easily debunked to get much traction. They lasted about a week in the headlines, and then were forgotten. However, even those campaigns had their effect of generally creating a negative impression about Iran in the public mind. The nasty thing about gossip is that it leaves a residue, even once it is debunked. People may forget the substance of the gossip, but they're left with a negative perception anyway which makes them more susceptible to believing negative things in the future.   

Offtopic: Cy is not a bitter hermit

People ask me what I do for fun when I don't work on the blog. Truth is the blog is hardly time consuming and not a big deal to me. I started it grudgingly and have promised myself to give it up once Iran starts up the Bushehr reactor. In the meantime I go sailing and am a big fan of photography (old school -- with cameras made in 1910.) I also visit sites like Failblog.org for a daily chuckle.

Cycle of escalation towards a war with Iran

So the neocon Kagan has written an editorial in the Washington Post calling for regime change in Iran. In this, he is joined by the "realist" Haass. This is hardly a surprise though. I always said this was coming.

See, we started out with seeking to "modify the behavior" of the Iranian regime through sanctions, disavowing regime change. Since that didn't work, now we're hearing talk about how sanctions should in increased for a "regime change." Next, we'll hear how the sanctions for regime change have proven ineffective, so there has to be yet another escalation -- say, a blockade. And then, comes "pin point attacks" etc. until there is a full-on war.

This is the cycle of escalation that the Iran hawks are getting Obama into, and he's not fighting it. Like I said before,

 Step by step, they're eliminating peaceful ways out of the standoff, deterring any sort of US-Iran engagement which is anathema to Israel, and building up to war. THAT is why Kagan and this buddies support sanctions. Like I said before, everytime you see the word "sanctions" you should read "war" because that's where it is INTENDED to lead.

Detained "hikers" in Iran and consular access: how chickens come home to roost

The case of the US hikers in Iran shows how US unilateralism and exceptionalism in dealing with international law can come back to haunt US citizens.

So the US is complaining that the three "hikers" (or whatever they are) who are detained in Iran have apparently not been granted consular access by Iran (consular access means  the detained individuals get to see their government's consular officials.) as required by international law. I'm not sure how consular acccess would work when there is no American consulate in Iran (the Swiss?) but in any case the hypocricy on this point is just laughable. But more importantly, it shows how US unilateralism and disregard for international law can come back to haunt the US, since the Iranians can choose to legally disregard the law jsut as does the US. 

Specifically, Article 36 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires consular access. The Optional Protocol to the Convention which allows the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to make the final decision whether a detained individual has been denied this right. The US signed on to both the Convention and its Optional Protocol in 1969 but has failed to implement the Convention and has since then also withdrawn from both the ICJ and the Optional Protocol. Thus, it can't legally sue in the International Court of Justice to enforce the Protocol or the Convention against other countries either.

There are currently about 50 Mexican nationals convicted of murder in the United States who have not been granted access to Mexican consular officials. Most prominent among them was one Jose Medellin, who was even executed by the state of Texas -- without ever having had a chance to see the Mexican government consul.

Mexico took the United States to the International Court of Justice at the Hague twice and won both instances, in which the Court determined that by refusing consular access to the detained Mexicans, the United States was in violation of international law. (Read more here.)

And of course none of the "detainees" in Guantanamo, nor the "rendition" victims in CIA "black" sites, have been granted consular access under international law (both the Obama and the Bush administration claim that even US laws and the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution don't protect them either as they are not "persons" within the definition of Constitution.) 

Nevertheless, despite the hypocricy, international law should still be observed, and if it requires consular access to the hikers, it should be provided by Iran. Even the Bush administration made a pretense of abiding by the Convention, and tried to get Texas to review the cases of the Mexicans, but the US Supreme Court ruled that the US President didn't have the authority to tell Texas what to do regarding Texas criminal law matters, even if Texas was violating international law, unless Congress specifically passed a law which implemented the international Convention as domestic law which was applicable to Texas and other states.

Of course, neither the US Congress nor the government of Texas were about to appear "soft on crime" during an election year by making the Convention enforceable as domestic law, especially when foreigners (worse yet, Mexicans!) were involved (needless to say, if it involved "white" Canadians, things would have been different since there's a lot of racial prejudice in the US) so nothing has been done in this regard since then.

Currently, as the law stands in the United States, states are not required to provide consular access to foreign detainees, regardless of what the Vienna Convention says. (Obama hasn't shown any interest in doing anything about that either.)

As one commentator as written,

Thus, when foreign nationals have sought a judicial remedy for a violation, state and federal courts in the United States have typically held either that they have no right or that, even if they have a right, they are not entitled to a remedy. Other courts have rejected such claims by foreign nationals on the basis that even if they have a right and are entitled to a remedy, prejudice must be found to have flowed from the violation, and because the courts did not find prejudice, the particular foreign national was not entitled to a remedy...

So in short, the US is effectively ignoring the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the same international law it complains that Iran is violating. So, now just imagine if Iran also decided to follow the US in its interpretation of its international obligations and rules that the hikers in Iran either don't have a right to consular access. 

Here's another Iran angle to all of this: Back in 1979 as a result of the hostage incident, the US took Iran to the International Court of Justice, complaining that the Iranian government had failed to provide consular access to the hostages. In doing so, the US specifically invoked the Optional Protocol which would allow the International Court of Justice to make the final decision on whether Iran had violated the convention. However, as a result of the Medellin case, the US officially withdrew (scroll down to see the article text) from the Optional Protocol. (The US had already withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in 1985, when the court ruled that the US had violated international law by mining Nicaraguan harbors and sponsoring armed rebellion against the government of Nicaragua.) Ironically, by withdrawing from the Optional Protocol, the US can no longer bring suits against other countries (such as Iran) for denying  the hikers their right to consular access, as it did with the hostages.

Imagine if the following Q&A with the US State Department spokesman who claimed that the US doesn't need to respect the International Court of Justice because the US justice system was deemed sufficient (aka exceptionalism) - was instead conducted with the Iranian spokesman:

QUESTION: But this protocol came in handy for the United States during the Iran hostage crisis. Then there's criticism that we're now cherry-picking the provisions that we like and don't like, that this might be short-sighted in the long-run.

MR. ERELI: Well, again, I don't think we're cherry-picking. I think that this is a really unexpected and unwelcome precedent where people who don't like decisions of our state courts can use an international court as a court of appeal. And that doesn't make any sense at all. And so what we're talking about is, we've got a system of justice that works in the United States and I don't think you should compare it to other countries, like Iran in 1979. We have a system of justice that works. We have a system of justice that provides people with due process and review of their cases. And it's not appropriate that there be some international court that comes in and can reverse the decisions of our national courts.

Not only has the US failed to implement the Vienna Convention, it has step by step withdrawn from international treaties and conventions, and refused to abide by international normsm ultimately to the discredit of its own citizen's rights who are detained abroad. After all, what's good for the goose...

Israeli propaganda blitz planned for Obama's State of the Union speech

So the Israelis are apparently planning to launch a propaganda operation consisting of promoting scaremongering about Iran in advertisements displayed on TV during President Obama's upcoming annual "State of the Union" speech:

Israel Project Plans State Of The Union Ad Buy
Cable ad buy to air hundreds of times over next three days addressing issue of a nuclear-armed Iran
By John Eggerton
 
The Israel Project, a nonprofit group pushing for Middle East peace, will use the President's State of the Union Address, and cable coverage of it in particular, to address its own key issue: preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.

The group said it is renewing its ad campaign for peace with a cable ad buy in and around the State of the Union on CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. The message is one that should get attention during a speech by the president about the present state of the Republic: "Imagine Washington, D.C. under missile attack from nearby Baltimore," the spot begins.

The campaign starts today (Jan. 26) and continues over the next three days, with "hundreds" of airings over that time.

Of course, the Israeli Project's repeated self-characterization as a "peace group" is just too funny and transparent (they love this sort of idiotic double speak) but their agenda is hardly a secret to anyone.

But really, what this advertising blitz during Obama's speech shows is just how much Obama is hoplessly encompassed and neutralized by the Israelis. The poor man can't even say a word without the Israelis butting in and inserting their own agenda!

Indonesia mulls tearing down Obama statue

Well I guess it took less than a year for the hype to start to wear off:

Indonesian authorities said Monday they are considering a petition to tear down a statue of US President Barack Obama as a boy, only a month after the bronze was unveiled in Jakarta.

I'm not suprised. When it comes to Iran policy specifically, Obama is really no different than George Bush. The same "engagement" offers that are really meant to be refused, coupled with the same sanctions and threats, and the same lying and propaganda about an Iranian "nuclear weapons program". So what's new? What's "changed"?

In 3.5 more years when Obama's term expires, Americans will be lucky to have a slightly different way of getting screwed in their healthcare insurance. And that will be all. The Israelis will still have a lock on US foreign policy, the rich will still be getting richer in the US as they have been since Reagan.

I often wondered what things were like at the fall of Rome.

Israeli bluff over attacking Iran exposed

So I finally caught the Charlie Rose interview with the participants of mock US-Iran negotation session. It was the usual stuff that was all previously noted, but this sentence from the Israeli representative - Ehud Eiran who in addition to being a researcher at Harvard is a reservist in the Israeli military and a former advisor to Ehud Barak - caught my attention:

EIRAN: [I]n the game, Israel’s main effort was to lobby the United States and make sure that the negotiations are not a pretense to ongoing Iranian progress. So Israel — Israel tried to set specific benchmarks of what will be negotiated. But it felt that the Americans were not very attentive to its requests. As for the broader issue, Israel had a hard time outsourcing its defenses or allowing the U.S. veto on its right to defend itself. And this was the main point of contention between the Americans and the Israelis in the game…

BURNS: I’m not aware of any military solution to this problem that would fix the problem. And in fact, I think you would have to assume that the Iranians would hit back through Hezbollah, through Hamas, through Palestinian Islamic jihad. We risk a wider war. I frankly think this longer, careful containment strategy is the right thing for the United States.

CHARLIE ROSE: Does Israel think that, Ehud?

EHUD EIRAN: First of all, let me say that a potential aggressive Israeli posture can be part of the strategy in the sense that Israel plays the aggressive dog that has to be contained. So even just signaling the potential of an attack can be part of this broader strategy, which we offered this in the simulation. It wasn’t advanced.

So Israel (at least in this simulation) is basically playing the role of the rabid dog which needs to be "contained" in order to get the US to make concessions to it over Iran. So, who is the "threat to the Middle East" now?

But the most interesting point is this: Gary Sick (who played the role of the Iranian representative) wrote later that the participants were not even willing to acknowledge the compromise offers that the "Iranian" side offered:

No one ever had the courage or imagination to take our puny offers as an excuse to sit us down at the table and begin to push us on our plans and to feel out our intentions. That would have made us actually think. It would have required some real decisions on our part, which in this game we were spared entirely...

Why did no one go back to the Iranian offer of a negotiating agenda presented in 2003? Or the more recent catalogue of issues introduced as part of the Geneva/Vienna meetings? The reason seems to be the all-consuming obsession with the nuclear issue and the apparent belief that Iran’s  words, in whatever form, are irrelevant. The nuclear issue is indeed important, but AfPak, Iraq, Hezbollah, Persian Gulf stability, etc. are also not to be dismissed out of hand. And Iran over the years has offered some interesting suggestions that have never been explored.

Why not? He doesn't explain. Obviously, because the US side is hemmed in by the Israeli demands. The tail wagging the dog. The Americans can't even simulate violating Israeli's red lines.

“The most difficult problem we have is how to restrain Israel,” said Burns.

No shit, Sherlock. But when have you EVER restrained Israel? They OWN you, lock stock and barrel.

Incidentally, for all you people who say Iran shouldn't support Hamas and Hezbollah etc... apparently they serve a very useful function as a check on israeli aggression against Iran, don't they?

(HT to Philip Weiss)

Greenwald and Weiss on Cass Sunstein: making mountains out of PR molehills.

Glen Greenwald points out that an Obama appointee named Cass Sunstein has written a paper advocating the use of undercover agents to infiltrate online fora to counter anti-American "false conspiracy theories". There are a number of things wrong with Sunstein as well as Greenwald's piece but I think Philip Weiss is wrong to attribute an Islamophobic view to Sunstein (he specifically derides the notion that Muslims are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories due to "bad parenting.")

First, I am familar with Cass Sunstein and a careful reader of his many works, which I once planned to use for a doctoral thesis on the prevalence of First Amendment legitimation myths in court decisions. I find this paper by Sunstein to be strangely contradictory with his well known theory of information as a cause of polarization and extremism (particularly on the internet). My interest in Sunstein's theory was due to the fact that it was contrary to the central dogma of democracy and the First Amendment, according to which the unrestricted flow of information and free exchange of ideas is supposed to lead to compromise views and a unified "Will of the People" which politicians are then supposed to dutifully put into effect a the risk of not being re-elected. But political thinkers have long been aware of the fact that democracy-in-theory is not the same as democracy-in-practice (read up for example on Democratic Elitism - in reality democracy works the other way around.) 

 I think both Phil Weiss and Glen Greenwald are making a little too much of Cass Sunstein's paper.

There's nothing particularly new about Sunstein's theory that people whose views and beliefs are challenged will only stick to those beliefs even more resolutely: Psychologists know this as a form of cognitive dissonance. So I wonder how he would reconcile his view that the US should engage in secret internet-based advocacy with his belief that people who believe in conspiracy theories generally don't change their minds.

And there is nothing new about SUnstein's endorsement of the use of such techniques to specifically counter anti-Americanism amongst Muslims. Yes, Sunstein advocates the use of grey and black propaganda -- something which governments in the US and elsewhere have been practicing for centuries. Cutouts, fronts, whored "journalists", planted editorials, and secretly-paid spokesmen have often been used to manipulate public opinion. This is part of how democracy really functions: the government tells the people what to think, not through force but through (hidden) persuasion. This is standard practice in the PR field and familar to any PR practitioner. Hidden persuasion is the best form of persuasion and is commonplace. Nowdays, most Hollywood movies you see are actually advertisements for particular products or brand names which are shown in the movie. 

And yes, in theory it is illegal for the Executive to engage in this domestic propaganda activity, but the particular law cited by Greenwald is effectively unenforceable and has no teeth.

I also agree with Sunstein that repressive governments who forcibly prevent the free exchange of ideas foster conspiracy theories amongst their people. Repressive governments have also learned (usually too late) that to resort to force to shut people up, not only fails  to restrict information but  ultimately only robs them of their most precious commodity: the perception of legitimacy. So even if they (temporarily) manage to supress an anti-government view, the long term cost will be far more significant than the short-term cost of acknowledging and at least appearing to rectifying whatever issue is the underlying cause of the complaint, re-framing it as a positive rather than a negative ("poverty is due to laziness and not systematic unfairness") or at least distracting public opinion from it through mass entertainment (which is why the "golden age" of Hollywood corresponded to the Depression.)

The irony of course is that every few years we have an "information expert" in the US government who espouses a massive PR undertaking to "win the hearts and minds" of the Muslims, but eventually they simply give up. They believe naively, as does Sunstein, that if only those poor, misinformed muslims are instructed in their errors of thinking about the US, then they will stop believing in anti-American conspiracy theories.

Why aren't US government propaganda techniques against anti-Americanism more successful? The problem is that firstly, more often than not, those "conspiracy theories" are accurate and factual enough to resist any debunking. Secondly, and more importantly, such US efforts to propagandize amongst the Muslims are doomed to failure because they require an honest examination and debate over facts - a can of worms that no US administration wants to open up. For example, no US government can overcome the "conspiracy theory" that Israeli agents are secretly running the US government's foreign policy with respect to the Mideast because, 1- this is a hell of a lot of truth to this "conspiracy theory", and 2- no US government wants to officially start a debate about the influence of pro-Israeli lobby on US policies (heck it was only recently that the whole issue was even acknowledged by Walt and Mearsheimer -- who as a result probably can never work in government positions.) Nor are these "anti-American" conspiracy theories particularly limited to Muslims.   

So I suggest that Greenwald and Weiss not get their shorts in a bundle, because Sunstein's agenda is hardly new, and will die just as previous US attempts to win the hearts and minds of Muslims using similar techniques eventually petered out. 

[PS: Perhaps Weiss and Greenwald are particularly upset because they didn't except OBAMA to resort to such practices. Well, guess what? Obama's just another politician.]

Iran's healthcare model in Mississippi - and Google's Public Data function

THe Los Angeles Times "news blog" (an oxymoron) has picked up a story about the Iranian healthcare model being adapted by rural Mississippi. This was reported last month in the Times of London. There have been many other articles about the increased literacy rates, access to clean water and electricity, much improved child mortality rates, and presence of women in the workforce. Currently, Iran's HDI (Human Development Index) stands at 88th in the world, placing it high on the "medium developed" nations list. From 1975 through 1980 Iran's Human Development Index remained stagnant at 0.569. By 1990 it was up to 0.693, and in 2002 it was 0.732.

I thought this would be a good time to tell my readers of Google's Public Data function which presents very interesting graphs. For example, did you know that per capita, Iranian put out far more carbon dioxide than the Chinese (and still far less that your average American, of course...)

Life expectancy rates in IRan vs. world

Chemical Ali executed; US complicity in Saddam's war crimes covered-up

So they quitely executed Chemical Ali, the man who was reportedly responsible for Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons use -- but the news reports are totally ignoring the US role in supporting Saddam's chemical weapons program.

This is now CNN reported it:

Al-Majeed had been sentenced to death in four separate trials, including one that focused on his involvement in a poison gas attack against Iraqi Kurds that killed about 5,000 people...

Al-Majeed had been held in United States custody since his capture in 2003. But he was handed over to the Iraqi authorities in the 24 hours before his execution, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill told CNN's Diana Magnay on Monday.

The 1988 poison gas attack on the village of Halabja, which earned al-Majeed his nickname, was part of the Anfal campaign, in which the Hussein regime killed at least 100,000 Iraqi Kurds. The campaign is believed to be worst poison gas attack on civilians ever.

Course, CNN left out this:

Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.

THe Washington Post similarly left out these little details.

And remember, when Iraq filed a "full and final" declaration of its WMDs, the United States took possession of the report and tried to remove several pages from it, claiming they contained "secret information" -- which largely consisted of lists of American and German companies that had helped Saddam's WMD programs. However this list was leaked, and published by Andreas Zumach in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (translation) The major media in the US ignored the story but not DemocracyNow!

There is an effort by the US media to ignore the US role in Saddam's acts however I've collected some articles on how the US armed Saddam here and here. There's more here. Of course, lets not forget the Howard Teicher affidavit which is a primary-source document and not just a reporter's analysis (it was later sealed by the court.)

And here's an AP article that is being shoved down the internet memory hole:

War Crimes Trial for Saddam Could Reveal Details of Past U.S. Help
By Ken Guggenheim Associated Press Writer
Published: Jan 24, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) - Saddam Hussein's loyalists may not be the only ones edgy about the prospect of a war crimes trial for the former Iraqi leader.
Vexing questions also could surface about how much the United States helped Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran - and whether it tried to stop Iraqi atrocities.

Among the questions that could arise in any such trial:

-What did U.S. officials know about products shipped to Iraq that could have been used for weapons? What intelligence did they provide Iraq that could have been used for chemical attacks?

-How hard did Donald H. Rumsfeld try to persuade Saddam Hussein to stop using chemical weapons against Iran? Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, met with Saddam and other top Iraqi officials during visits to Baghdad in 1983 and 1984, when he served as President Reagan's envoy.

Saddam and officials from his government could describe their dealings with Americans as they defend themselves from charges stemming from the Iran and Kuwait wars and the repression against Kurds and other Iraqis. The Iraqi Governing Council is creating a tribunal and some international jurists have called for a U.N. court.

"I don't think there's going to be much there that a leading Iraqi is going to be able to say, 'Hey, we had significant, witting cooperation from the United States government in our program of weapons of mass destruction,'" said Richard Murphy, head of the State Department's Near Eastern affairs bureau in the 1980s.

But testimony could provide embarrassing new details about American assistance to Iraq, what U.S. officials knew about Iraqi atrocities and what they did - or didn't do - to stop them.

"I think there will be a dramatic embarrassment factor for the U.S. government," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archives, a foreign policy research center. Blanton and other analysts said the embarrassment could be even worse for countries with closer relations to Iraq, such as France.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Saddam's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, support of terrorists and human rights abuses became grounds for war. But in the 1980s, the United States had a more pressing concern: Iran.

After the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, U.S. and Arab leaders feared that if Iran defeated Iraq, Iran could threaten other countries in hopes of spreading its strict form of Islam.

Iraq was seen more favorably even though it started the war and Saddam was clearly a dictator. It was a secular nation, influential among Arab states. It had vast oil reserves and offered lucrative opportunities for U.S. businesses. The United States also wanted to prevent Iraq from becoming too close to the Soviet Union.

Many details about the U.S.-Iraqi relationship are already known through congressional investigations, court proceedings and declassified documents.

"I think most of the embarrassing stuff has already come out," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council specialist on Iraq under Reagan.

But the historical record isn't complete. Questions remain about Rumsfeld's visits, which came at a time when the United States already was well aware of Iraq's use of chemical weapons.

Declassified documents indicate that Rumsfeld did not raise the issue with Saddam in their December 1983 meeting, although Rumsfeld said he did raise it during a one-on-one meeting with foreign minister Tariq Aziz.

Rumsfeld returned to Iraq in March 1984 to try to smooth relations after the United States condemned Iraq's use of chemical weapons. He was instructed to stress U.S. interests in preventing an Iranian victory and in improving relations with Iraq, despite the condemnation. What he told Aziz is unknown because notes of the meeting remain classified.

Aziz is now in U.S. custody.

David L. Mack, who held various top Middle East positions in the State Department in the 1980s and '90s, said he doubts Iraqis would have heeded any warnings not to use chemical weapons.

"In general I think there is a high degree of exaggeration about the degree to which we could have done anything about Iraqi bad behavior," he said.

During the war, the Reagan administration worked aggressively to prevent other nations from shipping arms to Iran, but did little to prevent conventional arms from going to Iraq.

Questions have been raised about whether the United States not only ignored foreign arms shipments to Iraq, but actually encouraged or even arranged them. A former National Security Council official, Howard Teicher, said in a 1995 court affidavit that the CIA made sure Iraq received weapons from non-U.S. manufacturers.

The affidavit was filed in the case of a company accused of illegally exporting to Chile material used in Iraqi cluster bombs. A defendant claimed the CIA had arranged the deal, but the court rejected the argument after viewing classified documents.

While prohibiting U.S. arms sales to Iraq, the Reagan administration allowed exports of products that could be used for civilian or military purposes. Questions remain about whether pesticides or helicopters were used to make or spray chemical weapons.

Questions also linger about whether the United States may have inadvertently helped Saddam's biological weapons program. U.S. officials have acknowledged that in the 1980s, the government and private companies sent to Iraq strains that could be used for biological weapons, including anthrax and the West Nile virus. Iraq claimed the samples were for medical research, but they were sent to sites believed to be part of Iraq's biological weapons program.

Perhaps the most sensitive issue is intelligence sharing.

U.S. officials have acknowledged providing intelligence on Iran, but what information they provided isn't clear. Teicher claimed in the affidavit that the United States provided strategic military advice to Saddam. In one example, he alleged that Reagan used then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to send a message that Iraq should step up its bombing of Iran.

Blanton said the biggest question is whether the United States provided intelligence that could have been used for chemical attacks against Iran. Top officials from that era deny that happened.

People ask me why I "support the regime" over nuclear matters. At a broad level I see Iran as evolving. This is a gradual process and I so I don't believe in particular personalities or movements as magic "cures" so I don't support them. More specifically regarding nuclear issues: there are no doubt people in charge in Iran wholate tempted to sacrifice the nuclear issue in order to remove it as a threat to the regime. My main "target" if you will, are these people. I want them to know that we're watching them and won't let them sell off Iran's nuclear program in order to keep themselves in power. Not only will sacrificing the nuclear program not save them (the US only uses it as a pretext after all) but the moment they try to sell off Iran's rights is the moment they will lose all legitimacy and must be brought down. Irans nuclear rights do not belong to any particular regime after all.

Turning Greens into Pawns through Marketing

Yesterday, the Egyptians reportedly claimed that the Mossad was fueling demonstrations in Iran, and today James Glassman writes in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the US should try to co-opt the "green movement" in Iran to serve US interests:

We should, for instance, publicize reports on what worked in Ukraine or Georgia, spread testimony by leaders like the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel, and distribute, in Farsi, guides to nonviolent change like Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy" and Peter Ackerman's "A Force More Powerful." It's time to dub into Farsi documentaries on the fall of Ceausescu, Milosevic and Pinochet; the transitions in South Africa and Poland; and the achievements of the U.S. civil-rights movement.

The reference to Gene Sharp is sort of ironic because not so long ago we were told that Iran's warnings to its population about these sorts of tactics are simply the regime's "self-fulfilling paranoia" and should not be taken seriously...and yet here is Glassman extolling the same. If the Iranians were seen as paranoid, they won't be when the US does really step in with the sort of tactics that Glassman endorses.

However I suspect that  the slick PR operations endorsed by Glassman won't really reach into Iran because Iranians are just tough customers and not so easily manipulated. I don't know if that makes a difference to the Glassman's of the world though - I suspect that their main "target audience" are not the Iranians but the policy-makers in the US. Remember, the real goals of the Glassmans of the world is not to bring democracy to Iranians (they couldn't care less!) but to prevent any sort of US-Iran rapprochement that would be contrary to Israeli interest. So, it doesn't matter if these tactics can ever be successful in overthrowing the regime in Iran, as long as they can portray the Iranian regime as weak and about-to-fall, and thus not worth negotiating with. After all, they've been promising the imminent demise of the IRI for 30-years now, and need something to justify the continuation of the same policy.

Anyway, what Glassman endorses here is essentially what advertisers call a marketing campaign. The use of colors, slogans, etc. are all part of branding used to gain consumer loyalty -- and whether the product is a washing machine or a revolution makes little difference. The people who fall for it are simply "the consumer". Essentially, Glassman is calling for the use of political marketing to help overthrow the regime to serve US interests. The Iranians may not be big in advertising and PR and may not know how to launch a counter-marketing campaign, and may respond with more repression -- which is the wrong way to go, since that only justifies the propaganda. 

Interestingly, while he mentions the experience of the Czech Republic, Poland and S. Africa, there's no mention of the fact that the "colored revolution" in Georgia merely replaced one corrupt, authoritarian government with another, and that the new Ukranian government is considered by the people there to be worse than the previous one. As Justin Raimondo noted:

The Ukrainian Orange phenomenon was modeled quite explicitly on the example of the Rose Revolution [of Georgie], which featured a disputed election, massive youth-oriented street protests, and plenty of subsidies from U.S. government agencies. The evil neo-communist leftovers from the old order, led by Eduard Shevardnadze, were swept away by the rising tide of pro-Western, modernizing young “democrats,” exemplified by Saakashvili, said to be a Georgian combo of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Or so went the official narrative.

It wasn’t long, however, before the wolf disdained his sheep’s clothing and openly began to exhibit distinctly wolfish characteristics, imprisoning his political opponents and cracking down on the opposition in the name of “national security.”

ANd like I said before, some revolutionary overthrow of tyrants is not so welcome in the US.

Anyway, you have to admit that the events in Iran have a striking similarity to the other US-backed "coup-lite" carried out in other countires. So, is the Iranian regime "paranoid" for believing that US and Israeli intelligence is behind the demonstrations in Iran? Well, to quote an old saying (by Henry Kissinger?) "just because you're paranoid is no reason to believe they're NOT after you."

"Israeli Superman" fuels protests in Iran?

Reportedly, an editorial in the Egyptian Al-Ahram newspaper lauds the Israeli intelligence cheif Meir Dagan as an "Israeli Superman" who has "dealt painful blows to the Iranian nuclear program, diplomatic action to embarrass the Islamic republic, action to fuel opposition protests, assassinations and covert attacks against nuclear facilities."

Great. I'm sure the protesters in Iran will love how the Mossad is taking credit for their actions, according to the Egyptians.

Dogma and intellectual thuggery on Iran

This morning I saw a rather unpleasant portrayal of what happens when "conventional wisdom" becomes dogma, as I read Ilan Berman's attack on the Leveretts due to their influential and controversial (because it is accurate) editorial in the NY Times which was entitled "Another Iranian revolution - Not Likely".

See, what happens in the US is this: as a democracy, it is important for people who have an agenda to carry out, to capture public opinion on their side via a process called the manufacture of consent (no, it wasn't Chomsky who invented the idea. It was Walter Lippman's catch phrase and Jacques Ellul called it the "falsification of majorities") which works in two steps:

First, an idea is floated by a party or person which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with reality (ie: Iraq has WMDS). This idea is repeated and further embellished by the media and the pundits, until it becomes accepted as if it was unquestionably true. At this stage, it has become "conventional wisdom" merely due to the "illusion of truth effect" of repetition: people tend to believe claims that they hear repeatedly.

The next step occurs when "conventional wisdom" becomes dogma. You can tell this is happening when dissenters are silenced, and no room is left open for alternative views. Issues are turned into simple "black versus white" and and an old smear  weapons is deployed against dissenters: "Either you're with us or against us" - remember those words? People who were outspoken in expressing dissenting views are selected for particularly harsh punishment, mainly to be used as an example to others and to thus preemptively silence critics. In short, dogmas become enforced through thuggish mob mentality.

When it comes to Iran matters, many forms of "conventional wisdom" can be easily identified by any regular Iran-watcher: That the elections were stolen, that Iran's nuclear program was a "secret", that Iran seeks nuclear weapons capability etc -- all inadquately supported assertions, all presented as fact by our media.

And now the conventional wisdom that the recent rioting in Iran supposedly proves that Iran is teetering on the verge of revolution as "the people" and the government have become cleaved - has acheived the status of dogma particularly (but not exclusively) with the Right and the Iran Hawks for reasons best explained by another commentator:

"By holding out the illusion of substantial political change in Iran, hawks can push for delaying meaningful negotiations and can gain support for destructive sanctions measures... After all, if Western policymakers start banking on domestic political unrest to undermine the Iranian government in a major way, they will pursue policies that would be very different than if they assume that the current Iranian government is not changing and not going anywhere."

 And so here comes Ilan Berman. First of course he does some proforma ass-covering by conceding that most of what the Leveretts have said about "the opposition" in Iran may be true, and that "the future is uncertain". Nevertheless he deploys the "either you're with us or against us" smear anyway:

But it is already clear what side the Leveretts have chosen: that of Iran’s thuggish theocracy, and not of its people.

 -- and then, just to add a bit of thuggery, he finishes with an additional flourish of a vague, implied threat: "That choice won't soon be forgotten". What will happen, Berman? Will you be lynching the Leveretts or something because they disagreed with you?

 Ilan Berman's problem is that he was a little too quick to resort to this sort of thing, and a little too ham-fisted in doing it.

The Sunday Times and Iran - Nuclear Deceit

I highly recommend reading this article (also here) entitled "Nuclear Deceit: the Times and Iran" published by MediaLens on how the Sunday Times promotes war propaganda in the form of the alleged "neutron initiator documents" which summarizes the issues that debunked the Time's claims as fraudulent.

Gary Sick is wrong on the assassination of the Iranian scientist .

I have to disagree with Gary Sick's suggestion that the bombing assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi is similar to the "Chain Murders" and furthermore,

Stop and think for a moment about what the official Iranian announcement of the killing really means. It suggests that US and Israeli agents are able to penetrate not only Iran but residential areas in the capital city, Tehran. It indicates that they have access to powerful explosives and are able to target individuals almost at will, conduct a dramatic assassination, and then escape completely undetected. What does that say about the Iranian security services? 

It could mean that they're simply human and not omni-potent.

It is reminiscent of the earlier claim that US and Israeli agents were able to operate with weapons on Iranian streets and shoot Green protesters in order to create incidents that would embarrass the Islamic regime. If you believe these allegations, I have some prime real estate in the Florida swamps that you may find attractive.

I don't know why allegations of Israeli and US operatives (or their Iranian agents) operating on Iranian territory would be so unbelievable. After all, this is hardly the first bombing in Iran, and there have been bombings in many cities in many countries in the past including the US and the UK -- countries with supposedly excellent intelligence agencies. How many times were the US security services theoretically capable of stopping the 9-11 bombers but failed to do so? So while the Iranian security services may want to appear invicible, there is no reason to assume they are, and so there is no reason to simply assume that any foreign-backed operatives would have necessarily been caught by them before they carried out a bombing in Tehran. Whatever the merits of "earlier claims" by the Iranians about who shot protestors, the fact that foreign operatives can carry out such operations in Iran cannot simply be ruled out so easily.

As for the Chain murders similarity, the difference is that the victim in this case hardly had equivalent stature to the victims of that tragedy.

As I said before, we'll never know what really happened and thus speculation an run rampant, but the fact is that there are previous reports of Israeli plans to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. Those reports shoud not be simply ignored by Dr. Sick.

Iran launches website on nuclear matters: Irannuclear.net

So Iran has reportedly launched a website to "publish the latest developments about Iran's nuclear program." and leaves me pulling my little remaining hair in frustration.

The website was launched by Iran's foreign minister Mottaki, who said the website "will show that "there is a minority in the world that eyes maximum interests through monopolizing everything, including science and technology." I'm sorry to say that most of the reason they've been "monopolizing everything" is because Iran has made it so easy for them to do so.

Of course, it goes without saying that I am happy that we have an alternate soure of information about Iran's nuclear program now and the website seems very well designed and quite informative too.

However, I am also frustrated. For YEARS I have been publicly decrying the lack of use of the internet by Iran to explain its nuclear program. On one hand, they complain about how "Zionists control the media"and thus misrepresent Iran, and on the other hand they refused to spend a small amount of money to at least start a blog just as millions of 14-year old kids have done around the world, in order to circumvent the US corporate-dominated mass media and instead directly reach billions of people around the world.

I was quite happy when PressTV announced that Iran had finally launched a website on its nuclear program. Hey, 6 years late is better than never, I guess. And I'll overlook the fact that the PressTV report announcing the site didn't bother to actually mention the name of the website, and instead simply linked to it, thus ensuring that once the link is broken in copy & paste jobs by other bloggers who choose to disseminate the news, no one will be able to actually locate the site.

So I happily click on the link anyway -- which goes to Irannuclear.net by the way -- and discover to my great disappointment that it is entirely in Farsi. "Great. Wrong audience," I though to myself. And what's with the ".net" domain name? Did you know that irannuclear.COM is on sale, and so now the opponents of Iran's nuclear program can simply purchase that domain, and make a derrogatory site, and get MORE traffic because of the ".com" domain which is more popular? Could you not have come up with a different domain name that used all three of the major extentions -- .net, .com and .org -- thus avoiding "cybersquatting" -- or at least spent some of that oil money to purchase the .com version from its current owner? This is basic internet Public Relations. As I said, 14-year olds know about this.

*Sigh*

Many years ago the news reported that Iran had published a book on Iran's nuclear program. In Farsi. In Iran. I mentioned that a book in farsi eating dust on some bookshelf somehwere isn't going to be very useful and instead the money should have gone to a website. So I guess this is progress. Perhaps they have plans for an English version of the website in the near future?

The Iranian Madoff?

You know your people have really "made it" in the US when they have footbball players, scientists, more scientists, college professors, many more college professors, did I mention scientists? mathematicians, gamblers, basketball players, businessmen and businesswomen, fashionistas, journalists, movie stars, directors, comedians, lawyers, etc and of course... con artists? Is this the Iranian Madoff?

The tight-knit Iranian-American Jewish community in Southern California is coming to terms with what could be its own mini-Madoff scandal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged John Farahi, a popular Persian-language radio host and financier, along with his wife and an employee, with defrauding $20 million from members of the Iranian-American community, using the funds to make risky financial bets and to build a luxurious mansion in Beverly Hills. While the amount of money that the Farahis are accused of taking is drawfed by Bernard L. Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, the case is bound to have major repercussions inside the established, and relatively affluent, Iranian-American diaspora.

Mr. Farahi, 52, was the host of a daily financial talk show on the only Persian-language radio station in the United States, Radio Iran. The show, which has been on the air for eight years, was followed by a large cross-section of Iranian Americans, from older Iranians who speak very little English and have yet to assimilate to life outside the community, to younger Iranian Americans who were born and raised in Southern California.

Mr. Farahi used the show to peddle the services of his own investment firm, NewPoint, which he ran with his wife, Gissou Rastegar Farahi, and the employee, Elaheh Amouei, the S.E.C. said in a civil complaint. From mid-2003 to mid-2009, the Farahis persuaded about 100 mostly Iranian-Americans to invest more than $20 million in NewPoint.

The S.E.C. alleges that potential investors were told that NewPoint investments were low risk and that they would be investing in government bonds, certificates of deposit insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and corporate bonds issued by companies backed by government bailout money. They were told that their money was safe and that they were guaranteed to get their entire investments back.

But the S.E.C. says Mr. Farahi was really using the cash to trade risky options futures, a move that did not pan out well, resulting in more than $18 million in losses throughout the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

But apparently he's not the first one...

The scandal follows the collapse of the real estate investment firm Namco, run by the prominent Jewish Iranian-American financier Ezri Namvar. Mr. Namvar used his and his family’s strong reputation in the community to collect millions of dollars from Iranian-American Jews in order to finance his real estate ventures. The company filed for bankruptcy in late 2008 as the property market in Southern California fell apart, sending the community into shock. More than 40 creditors are seeking some $420 million in connection with the failed business venture.

– Cyrus Sanati

US unemployment rate over 10%

Well, with this sort of news, is a war more or less likely?

The unemployment rate for the month was unchanged from November at 10 percent, the government said Friday, but that was only because droves of people -- including many discouraged about the prospects of finding work -- dropped out of the labor force and were no longer counted as unemployed.

One stark statistic in the latest employment report is the staggering number of people who have dropped out of the labor force. In December, the number of people working or looking for work totaled 153.06 million, a decline of 661,000 from November and more than 1.5 million from December 2008. The last time there was an annual decline in the labor force was in 1951.

Iranian scientist assassinated: was he really a nuclear scientist?

As a followup post on the assassination ofin Masoud Ali Mohammadi who was said to be a nuclear scientist specializing in particle physics, Dr. Ahmad Shirzad (a former reformist Member of Parliament) states that the victim was not involved in Iran's nuclear program:

زمینه های کاری و پژوهشی اش همان طور که گفتم بسیار متنوع بود اما به یاد نداردم در زمینه های مرتبط با هسته ای کار پژوهشی کرده باشد. البته او هم مثل همه ی ما از مبانی مسایل هسته ای سر در می آورد و می توانست اظهار نظر کند، اما به معنای کسی که کار پژوهشی هسته ای کرده باشد نمی توان او را دانشمند هسته ای نامید

"As I mentioned, his work and research was varied but I do not remember him researching nuclear-related issues. Of course he like the rest of us understood nuclear issues and could express opinions in that regard, but someone who may have done nuclear-related research work can not be called a nuclear scientists."

مسعود به لحاظ مشی و مرام سیاسی جزو نیروهایی بود که به طور عام از انقلاب اسلامی و امام خمینی دفاع می کرد

"Masoud was, politically, overtly a defender of the Islamic revolution and Imam Khomeini."

Apparently he did not work with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran but he was a "reformist" (such labels in Iran are confusing) since he signed petitions and encouraged students to demonstration. But his signature appeared amongst 400+ others nor was he a particular threat to the government to be killed in such a spectacular manner. Perhaps some "vigilante" group took it upon itself to act independently. Things are only a little bit clearer but wide open to speculation - so naturally, just watch the media go at it as they toss this matter around. I predict in a few weeks, once all is said and done, there will be a plot woven around this event worthy of a James Bond novel amd equally fictitious (or at least totally unverifiable.)

MEK has its day in court

You want to know how desperate some people in Washington are to find someone -- anyone -- who can possibly ever one day perhaps topple the regime in Iran? As I previously mentioned, the MEK terrorist cult's public relations makeover provided to them with the assistance of their NeoCon friends has reached a culmination as their lawyer argued before a court in the US that they would not be included in the US State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Their argument is essentially: Look, we haven't terrorized anyone lately.

The whole thing is so absurd and laughable. Not only is this group totally and irredeemably discredited amongst Iranians, they're on the same list as Al-Qaeda and Hamas and yet they operate quite brazenly in the US anyway, and have even held fundraisers in Washington, steps from the White House, with the attendance of US congressmen, who made it clear why they supported the MEK:

 "I don't give a shit if they are undemocratic," he told the Voice. "OK, so the [MEK] is a terrorist organization based in Iraq, which is a terrorist state. They are fighting Iran, which is another terrorist state. I say let's help them fight each other as much as they want. Once they all are destroyed, I can celebrate twice over."

And anyway it is not as if Iranians need the US State Department to tell them who is and isn't a terrorist when the US State Department it self was not so long ago helping terrorize Iranians:

Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the [poison gas] attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.

THe only problem I see here is the government's reliance on "secret evidence" to justify its decision. there is no reason to rely on "secret evidence" to back up the terrorist label on the MEK. Dana Milbank gets pretty hypocritical when he writes in this article: "How many other countries would allow a terrorist organization to sue the government for name-calling?" He doesn't seem to realize that the courts have been uniformely discredited in this "war on terror" and the only reason the MEK has access to the court is because they're backed by NeoCons. There should be no such thing as "secret evidence" in a democracy, and yet here we are, along with legalized torture, renditions, indefinite detention without charges, lack of due process ... and the courts have shielded US officials from war crimes charges,. How many other countries claim "official immunity" to torture and war crimes charges brought against their officials, Dana?

Anyway, what else is really funny about all this is how Saddam's support for the same MEK group was cited as evidence by the US of support for terrorism:

"Former Clinton administration official Martin Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in 1997, told NEWSWEEK that one of the reasons the group was put on the terrorism list in the first place was part of a 'two-pronged' strategy that included ratcheting up pressure on Saddam. Like the Bush White House, the Clinton administration was eager to highlight Iraqi ties to terrorism and had collected extensive evidence of Saddam providing logistical support to the MKO in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. (The MKO's headquarters are located on a heavily guarded street in central Baghdad.) But the United States could find no other hard evidence linking Saddam to terror groups, Indyk said. 'That was about all we had on [Saddam] when it came to terrorism,' Indyk told NEWSWEEK."

(SOURCE: Ashcroft's Baghdad Connection - Why the attorney general and others in Washington have backed
a terror group with ties to Iraq, By Michael Isikoff, NEWSWEEK Thursday, 26 September, 2002 )

Killing Iranian scientists: assassination is a two-way street

I have no idea who was behind the bombing that killed the Iranian nuclear scientist professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi. The Iranian government points to Israeli and American intelligence operatives, but others say that the Iranian government itseld ordered the bombing because the victim was supposedly a "Green movement" supporter. This seems unlikely to me becuase he was certainly not important enough to kill, and in such a public and spectacular manner, especially when there are far more active activists who could be targetted instead. Course, we don't really know whether the professor was really involved enough or at all in Iran's nuclear program to be worthy of being targetted by the Israelis either (except for purely PR purposes?) So until these questions are answered, everything said about this incident is purely speculation and spin.

On the other hand, as a kind reader pointed out to me, there were media reports not long ago of Israelis targetting Iranian nuclear scientists. If this was in fact a hit-job by Israelis and Americans, remember, boys and girls, assassination is a game that two can play - so lets see who else mysteriously blows up next.

Anyway, here's what else the kind reader had to say:

I am an avid reader of your blog and I have found several items that I think you may find interesting.  First is this gem of a YouTube channel I have discovered that has a lot of brilliant archival footage of various Middle Eastern events dating back decades.  A lot of rare footage such as Shah thugs roaming around Isfahan with "chomaghs" and various news reals from the Iran-Iraq war.  Here is the channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/hijazna#g/a

Here are some good videos from there, (though you should dig more there are much more interesting ones):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4xJ14bOFmg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOPXyg-NxHQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbNC7gKquzQ

Offtopic: Seaslugs, the solution to the world's hunger problem.

In a previous life, I was a student of biology and an avid scuba diver, so I find this news that seaslugs have incorporated the genes for photosynthesis (like plants, they get energy from the sun) quite fascinating:

A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It's the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.

The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis - the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

Well, thanks to genetic engineering, one day humans can incorporate the same genes into our own genome -- and then there would be no need to eat! Just lounge around the pool, getting a nice suntan instead.

Maleki: Iran's nuclear file - recommendations for the future

I am posting the following article from the Winter 2010 issue of Daedelus with the permission of the author. 

Iran's nuclear file: Recommendations for the future (pdf)
Abbas Maleki
Daedalus, Winter 2010, Vol. 139, No. 1, Pages 105-116

Abbas Maleki is Associate Professor of Energy Policy in the School of Energy Engineering and Chairman of the Research Centre for Scientific, Technological, and Industrial Policy-Making at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. He is a former deputy advisor to Iran's Foreign Minister and a former member of the Board of Trustees of the International Institute for Energy Studies (IIES). His recent publications include Iran's Foreign Policy and Its Future (2009) and “Energy Supply and Demand in Eurasia: Cooperation between EU and Iran,” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (2007).

While the article as a whole is quite well-written and fascinating, I thought I should hightlight some of the many parts that were of particular interest to me, as I am bored of debunking NY Times fiction:

Dr. Maleki starts out by pointing out the importance of nuclear energy, the benefits it can provide to Iran as well as the challenges, and Iran's insistence on its inalienable right to it.

For the interest of those who say that Iran "must be" interested in nukes if only as a deterrent, or must be interested in obtaining "Japan-option breakout capability" for the same reason, note this paragraph which cites Iran's UN Ambassador Javad Zarif:

Iran does not need nuclear weapons to protect its regional interests in the immediate neighborhood. In fact, to augment Iranian influence in the region, it has been necessary for Iran to win the confidence of its neighbors, an effort that will inevitably suffer from such perceptions. Furthermore, with the current state of its technological development and military capability, Iran cannot reasonably rely on nuclear deterrence against its adversaries in the international arena or in the wider region. Engaging in a spiraling arms race to establish and maintain nuclear deterrence would also be prohibitively expensive, draining the limited economic resources of the country

I previously dealt with the fallacious argument that Iran "must be" working on obtaining nuclear weapons capability if only as a deterrent (here and here.) 

Other Iranian officials such as Salehi have also dismissed the deterrent utility of nuclear weapons to Iran:

We have come to the conclusion that the best security for Iran is to have the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. If we have weapons of mass destruction we are not going to use them – we cannot. We did not use chemical weapons against Iraq.

Secondly, we do not feel any real threat from our neighbours. Pakistan and the Persian Gulf, we have no particular problems with them, nor with Afghanistan. The only powerful country is Russia in the north, and no matter how many nuclear weapons we had we could not match Russia.

Israel, our next neighbour, we do not consider an entity by itself but as part of the US. Facing Israel means facing the US. We cannot match the US.

We do not have strategic differences with our neighbours, including Turkey.

And so has Ahmadinejad, so it is not a point of division between the so-called "moderates" and "hardliners" in Iran:

Again, did nuclear arms help the Soviet Union from falling and disintegrating? For that matter, did a nuclear bomb help the U.S. to prevail inside Iraq or Afghanistan, for that matter? Nuclear bombs belong to the 20th century. We are living in a new century...Nuclear energy must not be equaled to a nuclear bomb. This is a disservice to the society of man.

Dr Maleki then proceeds to recount the various compromise suggestions in the form of operating Iran's enrichment program as a multinational enrichment facility, as well as the non-proliferation benefits inherent in such arrangements especially when combined with market mechanisms, but:

In 2005, using the model suggested by IAEA experts, Iran proposed to convert its enrichment facilities to regional or multinational schemes, which provide the greatest degree of transparency by allowing the concerned parties to participate in the ownership and operation of these facilities. However, none of these proposals, which were presented by Iran from January 2005 to October 2006, received any meaningful consideration, primarily due to the tendency of the United States to manufacture a nuclear crisis instead of searching for a solution.

One must therefore ask why the US has this tendency to "manufacture crisis instead of searching for solutions," - a matter that is not pursued further in the article.  Iran has made far-reaching compromise offers that would address any legitimate concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation, and these offers have simply been ignored by the US. If nuclear weapons were really the issue, that should not have happened and the US should have at least taken up the Iranian offers as starting points for negotiations. Why didn't it?

For whatever it is worth, my opinion has always been that this "tendency" of the US to manufacture crisis instead of searching for solution says a lot about the true nature of this conflict over Iran's nuclear program: specifically, that this is ultimately a political conflict which really has nothing to do with nuclear matters, and the whole nuclear issue is merely a pretext for a different policy just as WMDs in Iraq was a pretext. THis means that ultimately, there is no "technical" way out of the conflict unless the underlying political issues are resolved, and so all the talk about multinational enrichment programs is wasted.  As Salehi recounted:

In the year 2000, I was invited to Columbia university by Mr Gary Sick for a review conference on the NPT. I gave a talk about our nuclear activities. A Japanese representative proposed that Iran sign the additional protocol – and this was before the issue of Iran popped up, everything was calm. Before I had the opportunity to answer, an American gentlemen, a retired state department employee who specialised in disarmament, said, and this was exactly the phrase he used: ‘No matter how many times Iran signs the additional protocol, we will keep up our pressure until Iran yields to a political détente.

So, one must ask what the real political agenda under all this hype about IRan's nuclear weapons program really is, because unless that's resolved, no amount of compromise offers, inspections, transparency, and self-imposed limitations on Iran's nuclear program will ever suffice for the United States, which will continue to simply raise its demands and move the goalposts (in a tactic that Cheney apparently referred to as "rope a dope".) I for one don't believe that the real US agenda is simply to achieve "political détente" as Salehi says; it is intead regime change in favor of Israel. Again, all the discussions about multinational enrichment and other technical arrangements to ensure Iran's nuclear transparency are therefore pointless and will not resolve the conflict but will only be an incremental step towards more conflict using different pretexts.

Dr Maleki points out that,

Any viable solution needs to meet the bottom lines of all sides. For Iran, this means reliable civilian nuclear energy, defense of its rights under the NPT, maintenance of its pride and technological development, and assurances against attack. For the United States and Europe, the bottom lines are no nuclear weapons in Iran; a broad and on the global nuclear future verifiable gap between the nuclear activities that would continue in Iran and a nuclear weapons capability...

However, such a deal cannot be struck as long as the US insists on characterizing possession of nuclear enrichment technology (which is an inherent part Iran's bottom line) as equivalent to having nuclear weapons capability. I should point out that the pretextual nature of this issue is again highlighted by the fact that possession of enrichment technology is not so characterized in the case of other countries such as Argentina, just as how egregious IAEA safeguards violations by other countries such and Egypt and S. Korea were not used to justify demands on those countries to give up their nuclear programs. Clearly, the dispute with Iran is based on something other than purely nuclear matters.

Mr Maleki states that some intellectuals in Iran propose a way out of this confrontation by Iran keeping a 'de jure' right to enrichment, whilst at the same time giving it up in practice "for the time being" - effectively a suspension of enrichment:

It is hoped that in the next round of talks Iran will agree that while it has every right to enrichment, it will not exercise this right for the time being, or will do so by way of a multilateral mechanism. This approach would not require Iran to disavow any of its NPT rights to peaceful nuclear pursuits.

However it seems to me that this approach is hard to reconcile with Iran's bottom line as identified by Dr. Maleki, since giving up de facto control over enrichment will inevitably lead to the de jure creation of more haves and have-nots with Iran in the have-nots category. After all we should remember that Iran already tried a suspension of enrichment that lasted for over 2 years, and the result was ultimately a failure. I remember quite clearly that the EU (the US had simply boycotted the deal) immediately started characterizing Iran's temporary suspension as a permanent obligation. Furthermore, we must remember that prior Iranian offers to limit their enrichment program and to even suspend them for an additional two years, were also met  with total disregard by the US. As ElBaradei said,

I have seen the Iranians ready to accept putting a cap on their enrichment [program] in terms of tens of centrifuges, and then in terms of hundreds of centrifuges. But nobody even tried to engage them on these offers. Now Iran has 5,000 centrifuges. The line was, "Iran will buckle under pressure." But this issue has become so ingrained in the Iranian soul as a matter of national pride.

Even after the EU violated the Paris Agreement, the Iranians again offered to extend their suspension of enrichment but were dismissed. As Dr Kaveh Afrasiabi noted,

Early last week, Europe instantly rejected, without pause for breath, an Iranian offer of a two-year moratorium on uranium enrichment, thus setting its seal on a major international crisis.

Iran's "six-point" proposal was submitted by the Iranian delegation headed by Javad Veidi to the EU-3 (Germany, France and Britain) in Brussels on January 30. Instead of giving it careful consideration, the EU-3 diplomats rejected it as old news, devoid of anything new, and then, rather disingenuously, went on to blame Iran for "lack of progress".

So basically, by offering more suspension of enrichment, the Iranians would be only redoing what was already tried and failed. This approach is a dead-end because it ignores the underlying political nature of the conflict: again, nuclear isses are merely pretextual and not the real issue. Even if  Iran gives up enrichment entirely, there will be additional demands to give up other "sensitive technology" that "could be" used to make weapons -- missile technology, biological technology, etc. etc. -- all in order to "manufacture crises".

Ultimately, in my opinion, Iran cannot expect to resolve the standoff through compromise. Perhaps their belief that it can do so is based on a cultural background in which each side to a conflict, once presented with an opportunity to engage in a "face saving" compromise, will take it and back down. People who endorse such an approach proceed on the assumption that flexibility and good will shown by one side will necessarily be met by flexibility and good will on the other side in order to resolve the conflict. I think this is a naive approach to international relations. What if one side doesn't see a particular need to resolve the conflict? Rather than compromise, I suggest that readers look up the definition of word "chutzpa" -- because I believe that better defines the US approach to Iran. Remember, Nixon didn't "go to China" because he was simply a nice man who wanted to resolve/avoid US conflict with China; he did so because of the strategic imperative of allying against the Soviet Union, and because years of military conflict with China via proxy in Vietnam and Korea had shown the US that they can't topple China.

It is a dog-eat-dog world out there, sorry to say. The US will be willing to compromise with Iran only when it is forced to do so, not out of a simple good will and a naive belief in compromise per se. In order to get to that point, Iran must be willing to take the risks and create" facts on the ground" that make it clear that the US has no choice but to compromise. Offering to give up enrichment -- again -- even "for the time being" is no way to do this.

 

 

Real threat to Israel: Iranian nukes, or Jewish emigration out of Israel?

So the Israelis can't make up their mind on whether Iran is really a nuclear threat or not.

A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”.

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.Eilam, who is thought to be updated by former colleagues on developments in Iran, calls his country’s official view hysterical. “The intelligence community are spreading frightening voices about Iran,” he said.

He suggested that the “defence establishment is sending out false alarms in order to grab a bigger budget” while some politicians have used Iran to divert attention away from problems at home.

Which is hardly new

Iran does pose a threat to Israel: the threat that the US and Iran may start to get along, which threatens israel's strategic importance to the US as well Israel's ambitions to dominate the Mideast . That's one reason why Israel hypes Iran as a threat. And of course there are domestic reasons for Israel too. Afterall, you can't wallow in victim status unless you're perpetually "threatened", thus conveniently justifying your own atrocities and also distracting people from your rapidly disintegrating civil society (after all, it wasn't Iranian nukes that killed Rabin, was it?)

I wonder how much of this hyped "threat" from Iran to Israel is actually harming Israel itself? As Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania wrote (google cache pdf link) in 2004 in a paper about Jewish emigration out of  Israel (aka yeridah) due to violence on the Palestininas:

The high levels of immigration in the early 1990s, especially from the former Soviet
Union, have disappeared, with fewer than 22,000 immigrants registered for 2003.
Other reports indicate that since 2002 no more than 30% of these immigrants have
been classified by the government as Jewish. In mid-2003 it was reported a
“moribund” annual rate of 1,000 immigrants from North America, with 50% of them
leaving Israel after their arrival. The head of manpower for the Israel Defense
Forces reported in mid-2003 that 34% of Israelis of conscription age were not
serving in the army. Five per cent of those, he noted, were Israelis who “left
the country prior to their recruitment and lived abroad.” Wide attention was
paid to the departure of 1,000 of the 7,000 Argentine immigrants who had come to
Israel since 2001 as part of an emergency rescue program. In Haaretz Aluf Benn,
reported sharp increases in Israelis applying for citizenship papers at the
German, Polish, Czech, Austrian, and Slovakian embassies in Israel in 2002
and 2003. A Market Watch poll commissioned by the newspaper Maariv in January
2002, found 20 percent of adult Israelis had recently considered living in a
different country andthat 12 percent of Israeli parents “would like their
children to grow up outside Israel.”

Newsweek science editor: Iranians are just crazy

The Newsweek science editor Sharon Begley has an article in which she essentially claims that Iranians who support their nuclear program are simply acting "irrationally" in refusing to give up the program, because "nukes" have become a sacred value, and as such they share charactertistic with terrorists.

This sort of thing displays the usual hypocrisy. If the Americans are steadfast in defending its rights, its because they're "patriotic" but if Iranians do it, they're just crazy terrorists.

Here's a thought experiment: suppose the Iranians threatened to bomb the US unless the US gave up all oil extraction in Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, etc. (in other words, exactly what Iran is being told to do, except for nuclear fuel rather than oil) and instead the US must agree to only buy oil from OPEC and only in the amounts and price that OPEC determines to be appropriate for the US. How do you suppose Americans would react? Why assume that Iranians are crazy for reacting any differently? 

First of all, its not "nukes" that have a sacred value. It is an independent source of nuclear energy, which is the sole source of energy in the near future as well as a major field of technological progress. Exactly what sort of compensation are iranians supposed to "rationally" accept to give that up? $40 million seems quite cheap. No rational person would give that up.

Second, the issue is even deeper than that -- it is about national sovereignty. If the US and EU can gang up on Iran and deprive her of an "inalienable right" such as enriching uranium, then why not tomorrow demand that Iran give up Tabriz too?

Neda wasn't really shot on the street?

So Iranian TV apparently broadcast a program claiming that Nega Aghasoltani wasn't really shot on the street. I thought they had said that she was shot, but either not deliberately or not by the police/Basij as alleged.

This reminds me Mohammad al-Dura, the 12-year old boy who is seen on video as he is shot by Israeli forces as he cowers behind his father. The Isrealis claimed later that the whole thing was a "blood libel" and hoax, and either he was shot by the Palestinians, or he wasn't shot at all and has since grown up and gotten married.

The Second Revolution in Iran continued...

So as you know there is an ongoing debate about whether Iran is on the brink of imminent regime collapse (participants include the Leveretts and Juan Cole, among others.) I previously pointed out that the media have long predicted an imminent "Second Revolution" in Iran, because of hype and wishful thinking more than anything else. Anyway one of the participants in this debate has stated my view of the whole issue so succinctly that I thought I should link to it (way at the bottom):

"By holding out the illusion of substantial political change in Iran, hawks can push for delaying meaningful negotiations and can gain support for destructive sanctions measures... After all, if Western policymakers start banking on domestic political unrest to undermine the Iranian government in a major way, they will pursue policies that would be very different than if they assume that the current Iranian government is not changing and not going anywhere."

NY Times propaganda on "pressure transducers" from Taiwain

So, a new day and a new bit of scaremonging by the NY Times about Iran's nuclear program, with an article about Iranian purchases of pressure tranducers. Except after you read the article a second time, without all the hype, you realize there's a lot less to the story:

1- Pressure transducers have many civilian applications, and are not necessarily used for making "weapons grade uranium" as the Times repeatedly implies,

2- The Taiwanese sold the pressure tranducers because they are not on Taiwan's list of export restricted items. As I mentioned before, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency, the Taiwanese Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) concluded a probe that the deal did not breach international rules on the proliferation of nuclear arms because the 108 pressure transducers to Iran in March were not included on a list of strategic high-tech commodities (SHTC) in Taiwan at the time.

3-The transaction processes was "common in international trade."

4- THe only "evidence" provided by the NY Times that the transducers were used for anything nefarious is David Albright's unsupported assertion that they were used for uranium centrifuges, however Iran's centrifuges are under IAEA safeguards and even then there's nothing to support the NY Times' implication that they were used to make "weapons grade" enriched uranium.

5- The deal was not on the "black market" as it had the approval of all the governments involved,

6- The "Nuclear Suppliers Group" has not and cannot "ban" Iran or any other country from doing anything. Oh, and neither Iran nor Taiwan are members of the Nuclear Supplier's Group anyway, something the NY Times left out. 

The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is an informal association (a cartel) of certain countries that own nuclear technology, not a UN entity and not empowered to enforce bans on anyone. Between them, the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group agreed to some "guidelines" to place restrictions on the transfer of "sensitive" nuclear technology to other countries, ostensibly due to weapons non-proliferation concerns -- which, incidentally, has brought them under a lot of criticism by Developing Nations who say that such restrictions are a violation of their Non-Proliferation Treaty's obligation to share nuclear technology and merely uses the guise of nuclear weapons non-proliferation to impose a monopoly on the development of nuclear energy.

So here's a quick summary of the debate over the NSG: Most people think that the NPT only imposed a burden on non-nuclear armed countries such as Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. They forget that the NPT also provided benefits, in the form of specific obligations on the nuclear-armed states. One of these is enshrined in Article VI of the NPT which says:

1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

2. All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so shall also co-operate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

Paragraph 2 of Article VI was drafted to address the concerns of developing countries to ensure that their right to develop and possess nuclear know-how is not taken away from them under the guise of Non-Proliferation.The initial draft of the article were vague and referred only to  parties having the right to participate in the “fullest possible exchange”, but the Developing Nations added the words “to facilitate” to emphasize that the nuclear-have countries were required to actively assist in their development of nuclear know-how. Also, the earlier drafts focused on sharing scientific and technological information,  but that was expanded to over equipment and materials as well,  thus enlarging the scope of what was to be shared. Since then, of course, the nuclear-have countries have simply thumbed their noses at their NPT obligations, and instead characterize Paragraph 2 of Article VI as merely advisory and non-obligatory. In the meantime, they're also pressing developing states into giving up their right to enrich uranium too -- again, in violation of the NPT -- all in the name of "non-proliferation".

According to a 2004 analysis by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies,

"Many NPT state parties, particularly those from the Non-Aligned Movement(NAM), have already stated their opposition to President Bush’s proposals to restrict enrichment. In their view, precluding states from developing enrichment and reprocessing capabilities contradicts an important tenet of the NPT-that is, the deal made by the nuclear weapon states (NWS) to the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS). Article IV of the NPT states that NNWS have the inalienable right to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, a right intended to provide an incentive for NNWS to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Bush proposals, however, introduce another element into the nonproliferation regime by segmenting countries into those that can engage in enrichment and reprocessing and those that cannot. Since most states with fuel cycle capabilities are from the developed world, it is clear that the target group of the proposal is the developing world."

And as I said before, the developing nations are mighty pissed off at that, and take every opportunity to decry this (and other) violations of the NPT bargain by the nuclear-armed states. As I mentioned in yet another post,

The Final Document of the United Nations General Assembly resolution S-10/2 which was adopted at the 27th plenary meeting of the tenth special session on 30 June 1978 stated in paragraph 69: "Each country's choices and decisions in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy should be respected without jeopardizing its policies or international cooperation agreements and arrangements for peaceful uses of nuclear energy and its fuel-cycle policies".

This position was reiterated in the 1980 NPT Review and Extension Conference and has been consistently reiterated in every Review Conference since then, including the 1995 Review Conference and in the Final Document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference. The Final Document of the 10th Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2002 also reiterated that non-proliferation measures should not be used to jeopardize the inalienable rights of all States to have access to and be free to acquire technology, equipment and materials for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and that each country's choices regarding nuclear fuel cycle policies should be respected.

Roubini: Iran crucial to Nabucco success

With the opening of a new Turkmenistan-Iran gas pipeline, I think this article by Nuriel Roubini is apt in describing how by seeking to isolate Iran in the race of access to Caspian petro-riches, the US has shot itself in the foot and strenghtened the hand of China instead.

If Nabucco is to succeed, there is one potential supplier that could step into the supply void, but for Washington, it is a country too far – Iran. Iran contains 16 percent of the world's natural gas reserves, second only to Russia. Washington has clearly and repeatedly stated its opposition to including Iran in Nabucco, as last month U.S. Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar stated, "We have been constantly saying that, in our opinion, Iran is not in a position to become a part of any new projects in the Southern Corridor."

Caspian energy now indeed does flow through new multiple pipelines. The only problem for the wizards of Wall Street and the City is that they now flow mostly eastwards, to China.

Interesting background on him: Nouriel Roubini was born in Turkey to Iranian Jewish parents, and spent part of his childhood in Tehran.

More questions about the "nuclear initiator" documents revealed by the Times

Remember the  "leaked document" which the Times touted as proof-positive of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which turned out to have been a "retyped" and edited version of the supposed original, as questionable as that was?

According to a professor of theoretical physics writing in the Guardian:

 

This is no smoking gun, nor Iranian bomb
Nothing in the published 'intelligence documents' shows Iran is close to having nuclear weapons

 

According to the Times: "Critically, while other neutron sources have possible civilian uses, UD3 has only one application – to be the metaphorical match that lights a nuclear bomb." That is a surprising statement. In fact the document's only mention of UD3 states that it would prefer not to use it but to replace uranium with titanium. That gives a clue about what the Iranians are doing....

 

Both fusion and fission physics involve processes which can be used either in military or civil applications. But I have read nothing in the documents published by the Times to be able to conclude that they are describing an initiator for a nuclear weapon.

The New York Times' Lede Blog sets the (mouthpiece) agenda PART II

In continuation of my previous post about the bias in the NY Times Lede blog, Robert Mackey points to this article -- dated today, Jan 7th -- which is about an "anti-Egypt rally in southern Gaza" but incidentally contains a reference to the Gaza peace march in a single paragraph:  

The Egyptian forces also fired tear gas at demonstrators who waved Hamas and Turkish flags, witnesses said. A Palestinian aid convoy was stopped by Egypt in the northern Sinai city of El Arish and included Turkish activists. The group, called Viva Palestina, consisted of 500 people, including Americans, British and Jordanians. It had scuffled earlier with Egyptian security officials in El Arish. Dozens were hurt.

Only problem is that the Gaza peace march hardly consists of only 500 people, and they are not "Turkish" but consists of Americans and Europeans and others from 43 different countries -- 1300 of whom demonstrated in Cairo after they were blocked from going to Gaza, and thousands of whom showed their support for the peacemarchers by holding demonstrations around the world. So even this little paragraph is false and selective reporting.

And apparently Robert Mackey of the NY Times "Lede" blog thinks this is sufficient coverage and doesn't need any "supplementation" along the lines of all the other articles on the Lede about the Crotch Bomber story and Iran rioting -- both of which are oh-so under-reported, right?

As a side note, Mackey protests that he's not biased against the Palestinians. Well, I'm sure he's not, conciously. The bias is built-in, systematic. It simply never really occurred to him to give equal coverage to the Gaza peace marchers because that story was ignored by the media in general in the US, and the habit of journalits is to be deferential to power and engage in "pack reporting". So you see Mackey, you don't have to be conciously biased against Palestinians or anyone else in order to be a bad journalist.

The New York Times' Lede Blog sets the (mouthpiece) agenda (UPDATED WITH RESPONSE BY ROBERT MACKEY)

UPDATE: For a good laugh, see Robert Mackey's response to me via email below. (See continued response from Mackey in my new post)

So the NY Times "Lede Blog" has wall-to-wall coverage of rioting in Iran, but not a whisper about the Gaza Freedom Marchers which is an amazing story as people are confronted by Egyptian riot police etc. Read more here.

Here's some numbers for you based on my count.

Total number of entries in the NY Times Lede Blog since Dec 20, 2009: 30

Number of those that had to do with Iran: 11

Number of those  that had to with Gaza Peace Marcher: 0

Big Fat ZERO. No stories AT ALL about the Israeli-Palestinian issue - and its not as if there's nothing has been going on there to report, nor is there a dearth of electrons available to the Lede.

You see, the media in the US rarely (unless you're Judy Miller...in the NY Times...hmm) resorts to blatant lying as in the old Soviet Union. Lies makes for poor propaganda because of the risks of exposing and discreting the authors as frauds. No, the best propaganda is "truthful," as Jacque Ellul said. It is a question of selective emphasis, spin and "agenda setting." The media don't tell you what to think, but what to think about and when. And nice compliant "journalists" who have internalized these values and don't question them are the ones who are put in charge of deciding what is "Fit to Print". Gaza suffering is Out, rioting in Iran is In.

There there, nice little sheep. Nevermind Gaza. See how a crazy lady knocked over the Pope...and hey! pornographic body scanners! instead.

UPDATE: Robert Mackey -- who does something or other over at the NY Times Lede Blog -- responded to me via emaill regarding this post:

Mr. Safdari,

You seem not to realize that The Lede supplements coverage by other reporters for the newspaper - and since this subject has been covered by reporters in the region, who are not barred from working as in Iran, there is no need to replicate their work. You also seem not to be aware that The Lede has covered Palestinian issues several times over the past year in a manner very different than the one you have repeatedly sneeringly implied marks all Times coverage. You might want to read the blog before issuing any more knee-jerk criticism of it.

Robert Mackey

Which is pretty laughable and sneer-worthy because:

1- As others have noted, the other reporters at the NY Times also did not cover the Gaza march so there was no danger of the Lede "replicating" anything, and...

2- the Lede blog has dedicated oodles of space to the Crotch-Bomber and the Pope attack, both stories which were widely reported by the NY Times and others, and so there was no need for the Lede to "supplement" the coverage -- and yet the Lede did so, but totally ignored the Gaza peace march.

3- The self description of the Lede says nothing about it "supplementing". It says:

The Lede is a news blog that remixes the day's top stories, adding information gleaned from Web sites around the world or gathered through original reporting ... blah blah blah

Well, here's some "original reporting" for you to "remix" in your "news blog", Mackey:

Police punched and kicked international activists during scuffles in the Egyptian capital on Thursday which left one person with broken ribs, protest organisers said.

"Members of the Gaza Freedom March are being forcibly detained in hotels around [Cairo] as well as violently forced into pens in Tahrir Square by Egyptian police and additional security forces," a statement from the organisers said.

Scuffles erupted between the police and the protesters which saw "women being kicked, beaten to the ground and dragged into pens, at least one confirmed account of broken ribs and many left bloody", they said.

Witnesses at the protest outside the Cairo Museum told AFP that police punched several activists in the face.

Yet more Iran propaganda from the NY Times on Iran's nuclear program

So here we go again with some more NY Times propaganda, this promoting speculation how all sorts of evil things are going on inside tunnels in Iran, based on nothing except their own imagination:

Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort.

Sorry, but Iran's nuclear program is not "notoriously opaque" and is in fact the subject of far more scrutiny and IAEA inspection than the nuclear programs of any other country on the face of the earth.

And of course, if you really want to scaremonger about something in Iran, you somehow have to connect it to Ahmadinejad, no matter how tenuous the connection may be:

Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadnejad has played a recurring role — first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president.

See, since Ahmadinejad has a degree in civil engineering, and civil engineers are known to make tunnels among other things, therefore the tunnels in Iran must be nefarious. Right. Nevermind that IRan's nuclear program started under the Shah, long before Ahmadinejad was elected, and that he's not even in charge of the program. So the NY times continues... 

No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden.

 Or if ANY of it is "hidden." As if years of regular IAEA reports haven't consistently stated that all nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and none has been diverted for weapons.

Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed — and easy to attack — buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.

No mention of the fact that the Isfahan complex is under 24-hour surveillance by the IAEA. How dare thos Iranians make it harder for the US and Israel to bomb them. Obviously, if they're trying to avoid being bombed, they must deserve to be bombed:

“If they wanted it for peaceful purposes,” [Gates] of the Qum plant on CNN, “there’s no reason to put it so deep underground, no reason to be deceptive about it, keep it a secret for a protracted period of time.”

What impecable logic. No, no reason at all -- certainly not the regular threats of bombing Iran that have been going on for over a 20 years now. And the NY Times certanly can't be expected to question what government officials such as Gates say but should only dutifully report it.

In fact, the real job of the NY Times is to promote worn out propaganda memes, such as the old "Iran doesn't need nuclear power because it has oil" meme which it decided to throw in just for good measure:

Iran denies that its nuclear efforts are for military purposes and insists that it wants to unlock the atom strictly for peaceful aims, like making electricity. It says it wants to build many enrichment plants to fuel up to 20 nuclear power plants, a plan many economists question because Iran ranks second globally in oil and natural gas reserves.

Of course, the NY Times can't be bothered to check its own back issues for facts that debunk this very claim, such as this one or this one, or all the other sources listed here.

Now the NY TImes tries to rehabilitate the terrorist MEK:

In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, revealed that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear plant at Natanz that turned out to be for enriching uranium

Actually, the Natanz site was not "secret" and Iran was simply not yet legally required to officially disclose it since it was not within the 180-day time limit specified by Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA. And, Iran's plans for nuclear enrichment were well known, started before the 1979 revolution, were announced on national radio in the 1980s, IAEA inspectors visited Iran's uranium mines in the early 1990s, and Iran declared the completion of a uraniun conversion facility to the IAEA in 2000. Thus, Iran's enrichment program was NEVER a secret. As the Times itself makes clear, the facility was easily observed by satellite, and so was already known to US intelligence too.

Two years later, the International Atomic Energy Agency found to its surprise that Iran was tunneling in the mountains by the Isfahan site, where uranium is readied for enrichment. “Iran failed to report to the agency in a timely manner,” an I.A.E.A. paper said in diplomatic understatement.

Actually, the IAEA was not "surprised" by the tunnel construction, since the Natanz facility is under IAEA safeguards. Fruthermore, this is what the IAEA report metioned by the IAEA report actually says:

The Agency has continued implementing the measures of the Additional Protocol. Complementary access at the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) site on 15 December 2004 revealed underground excavation activities which Iran had failed to report in a timely manner to the Agency as required under Code 3.1. of the Subsidiary Agreements to its Safeguards Agreement (i.e. at the time the decision was taken to authorize or carry out such construction).

Here, the NY Times is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Remember, until then (and currently) Iran was only required to abide by the original Code 3.1 of the 1976 version of the Subsidiary Arrangements, which only required states to report on new facilities to the IAEA “no later than 180 days before the facility is scheduled to receive nuclear material for the first time” rather than "at the time the decision was taken to authorize or carry out such construction." And in fact, according to the same IAEA report, it was Iran that reported the tunnel construction to the IAEA, and the decision to build the tunnel had been reached only three months earlier:

 Through a letter received by the Agency on 13 December 2004, Iran submitted an updated Design Information Questionnaire (DIQ) for UCF providing preliminary design information for a tunnel that was being constructed at the UCF site. In the DIQ entry related to the purpose and nature of the tunnel, Iran indicated that, "in order to increase capacity, safety and security of nuclear material, a storage is considered and will be constructed".  Iran also indicated that the modifications had been initiated in September 2004.

So at most, Iran was 3 months late in reporting the start of the tunneling construction, which could be easily seen by satellites anyway.

More importantly, the NY Times totally leaves out what ELSE the same IAEA report said:

Since the November 2004 meeting of the Board of Governors, Iran has facilitated in a timely manner Agency access to nuclear material and facilities under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol. During this period, the Agency has carried out inspections at facilities in Tehran, Natanz and Esfahan, as well as complementary access at three locations.

In other words, Iran was providing the access it was equired to provide under its Safeguards Agreement, and more acccess than it was required to provide under the Additional Protocol (which is not binding on Iran, or the 40+ other members of the NPT) How suspicous of those Iranians to provide MORE inspectiuns than they are required! - how "opaque" of them!!

The NY Times continues:

Then, in late 2005, the Iranian opposition group held news conferences in Paris and London to announce that its spies had learned that Iran was digging tunnels for missile and atomic work at 14 sites, including an underground complex near Qum. The government, one council official said, was building the tunnels to conceal “its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The council further charged that Mr. Ahmadinejad and the tunneling association were providing civilian cover for military work and acquisitions.

The council’s assertions got little notice. Some Western experts saw them as overstated. Some questioned the council’s objectivity because it sought the government’s overthrow.

Um, no. First of all, Iran is perfectly entitled to build as many tunnels as it wants. Unless the tunnels contain nuclear material, it is none of the IAEA's business. And thus far" the Council" (actually, the MEK, a Saddam-backed Marxist terrorist group -- something the NY Times leaves out) has failed to back up any of its claims, as the IAEA head said. But US intelligence has proven bogus too:

"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," said a senior diplomat at the atomic energy agency.

(As a sidenote, see now how the NY Times tries to rewrite the history of the invasion of Iraq, attributing it "in part" to false claims by Iraqi dissidents, as if the Bush administration was simply fooled by them into invading Iraq:

Perhaps the biggest impediment was a suspicion of defectors at a time when the American invasion of Iraq was proving to be based in part on Iraqi dissidents’ false claims about Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons.

No, the war in Iraq was due in NO part to "dissident's false claims" and was instead due entirely to the Bush administration's lies about WMDs which included promoting dissidents like Chalabi who only said what the Bush administration liked to hear, and the NY Times was directly involved in promoting those falsehoods in the mass media.)

United Nations atomic inspectors did check out a few of the tunnels at Isfahan, but not at Qum because the plant was on a military base and thus off limits for inspection without strong evidence of suspicious activity.

So what this sentence in the NY Times really says is 1- the tunnels in Isfahan were checked out and nothing was found, and 2- there was nop reason to check the tunnels in Qom because there was no "strong" evidence (or any actual evidence) of anything nefarious there, and note that the NY Times out that 3- to this day the IAEA says that the facility in Qum is "nothing serious"

Anyway and in summary: in promoting this sort of scaremongering, the NY Times is resorting to the old fallacy of disproving a negative. Since there is no way for anyone to see inside all of the tunnels in Iran, there is no way for anyone to disprove all the speculation promoted by the Times. about their contents. It is simply unverifiable, so the NY Times is free to engage in all sorts of imaginative fiction about what could be going on in tunnels in Iran, without fear of being debunked. This is the old "black swan" problem: you can't prove there are no such things as black swans unless you gather all the swans in the world and check them each to make sure none are black -- a practical impossibility. However, the bottom line is that after years of IAEA inspections -- many of which went well beyond any legal bounds -- no evidence of any nuclear weapons program has been found in Iran.

Maria Zavala backpacks in Iran

A lone Venezualen female backpacker goes to Iran -her travel diary is here

Iran is a place of contrasts. It is a “Islamic Republic”, but it is not backwards. Religion is important, but it is not all what’s in people’s mind. I actually haven’t even heard the early call for prayers from the mosque since I arrived in Iran. Unmarried sex and alcohol are illegal, but people still enjoy both if they want to- as long as they are discreet about it.

I am still amazed at how modern Iran is, considering that the country has been under severe economic sanctions for over 20 years. Yet, Iranians have managed to keep on with the modern world. You can find anything you need in Iran, it probably wont be from an international brand, but locally made.

Booz Allen Hamilton Launches Persia-House.com -- why?

"Persia-House.com is a membership website that relies solely on the revenue generated from our member subscribers. We do not use or allow advertising, thus enabling our members to focus solely on the information we deliver, without distraction. The subscription fees enable us to do the extensive research, media monitoring, translation, and analysis that results in the distinctive insights you can’t find anywhere else. Potential members do, however, have a free-trial period to “test drive” Persia House products."

I have no relationship to Booz Allen or this project, and am curious why a major US business consultancy would decide to launch such a project now. Anyway, the choosen name -- Persia House -- is sort of funny considering "Persia House" was how the CIA's Iran operations division is known internally after it was spun off agency's Near East division in 2006.

Iran's Season of the Witch -- propaganda BS in the media (updated)

A kind reader pointed out this article by Laura Rozen on Politico about propaganda on Iran, and specifically singles out an article in the Bagkok Post about a certain "Mohammad Reza Madhi," supposedly a former high ranking Iranian intelligence official who (naturally) claims that the regime in Iran is about to fall etc etc. Laura points out that the exiled son of the Shah is in Bangkok too, and the author of the article is a former intelligence operative whose cover has been blown.

THe fact is that the news for the last 30 years is peppered with such references to "high ranking defectors" and also "leaked intelligence documents" that turn out to be plainly bogus on even the slightest examination (which the NY Times for some reason never performs before touting it in screaming headlines -- how hard would it be for the NY Times to see that an allegedly "secret" document from a high Iranian intelligence agency is printed using Arabic and not Farsi fonts, for example?) This sort of bullshit is normal, and its absence would be cause for remark, and so I was reluctant to bother with a post about it.

[UPDATE: According to the indefatigable Gareth Porter:

On Dec. 14, The Times published what it explicitly represented as a photocopy of a complete Persian language document showing Iranian plans for testing a neutron initiator, a triggering device for a nuclear weapon, along with an English language translation.

But in response to a reader who noted the absence of crucial information from the document, including security markings, Oliver Kamm, an online columnist for The Times, admitted Jan. 3 that the Persian language document published by The Times was "a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document".

LOL!!! I wonder if a taxi driver was involved...]

Anyway, the defectors usually have sponsors who open doors for them and vouch for them in the media (in return, the defector says things that the sponsor wants to be said.) For example, remember a certain "Witness C" (Abolghasem a.k.a Farhad Mesbahi) promoted by exiled former Iranian president Bani Sadr, who claimed that he was a former Iranian intelligence official and who further claimed that high-ranking Iranian officials had ordered to assassination of Iranian Kurdish separatist leaders in a restaurant in Mykonos? As Seyyed Hossein Mousavian pointed out in his book supposedly  Mesbahi later retracted his tesitmony. However, conveniently enough, the same guy went on to implicate Iran in both the Pan Am 103 bombing and the  bombings in Argentina too (and then apparently retracted those claims too, and former Argentine officials pointed out that Meshabi has links with the terrorist MEK.)

So, in short, you'll see a lot of strange things in the media about Iran, and you have to keep on your toes and pay a lot of attention to figure out what is false and what is true. To quote Donovan:

When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be
That it's strange, so strange.
You've got to pick up every stitch,
You've got to pick up every stitch,
You've got to pick up every stitch,
Mm, must be the season of the witch,
Must be the season of the witch, yeah,
Must be the season of the witch.

Dr. Gary Sick is a funny guy!

I have communicated with Dr Gary Sick for many years as a member of the Columbia University Gulf2000 Project and I read his blog Gary's Choices regularly. I have enormous respect for him as an Iran-watcher. But I never knew that he had such an ironic sense of humor ... because his latest article in Foreign Policy can only be explained as comedy.

Dr. Sick recounts how Obama came into the administration intending to pursue one policy on Iran, but he was quickly overwhelmed and bum-rushed by the "punditocracy" and Neocons into giving up on that policy and instead adopting another policy entirely -- a policy that will "start us down the slippery slope to another disastrous war in the Middle East"-- but Obamas has delayed the inevitable for "at least for a few months" -- and this is deemed to be a success by Obama?

    Not bad for a beginner, Mr. President!

Hilarious stuff.

If this article wasn't meant to be funny, then it is a case of wishful thinking run amok. For example, Dr Sick writes regarding the NY Times article containing the "strategic leaks":

Of course, having fed the Washington Post, the New York Times is jealous and needs its own exclusive. Provide that over the New Year holiday by letting as many as six top administration officials meet privately and anonymously with two NYT reporters to let them in on some more secrets: (1) In another cunning success, the administration has outed the covert Iran bomb production facility at Qom thereby rendering it useless; (2) hint that the administration may be responsible for sabotaging Iran's centrifuges, which accounts for the fact (completely unacknowledged until now, despite being reported for the past two years by the IAEA) that Iran is not actually using about half of its installed centrifuges; (3) reiterate that the coming sanctions are to be aimed at the Revolutionary Guards, not the average Iranian citizen, and are likely to succeed because the regime is so weakened internally; and (4) declare unequivocally that the Iranian "breakout capability," i.e. its ability to shift from nuclear energy to actually building a bomb, is now years away.

You can sense in this paragraph a very hard effort at misreading what the NY Times says. For one thing, that Iran was known to be "years away" from bomb-making capability was already known, so that point is moot as it has never made a difference to the war-drumbeaters. Second, the "covert bomb production facility in Qom" is how the NeoCons characterized it, and the Obama administration seems to have bought into that (false) characterization of Iran operating covert, parallel bomb-making programs, which only supports the same war-drumbeaters. Third, yes, the sanctions are supposedly going to be limited to the Revolutionary Guard, but that's a distinction without a difference since sanctions are simply increments to war. By caving in on the sanctions issue -- even limited sanctions --  the Obama administrations is taking yet another step back from the pledge of negotiating (presumably, in good faith) with Iran. Finally, there is no real reason to believe that the Obama administration's offer for a uranium exchange was meant to be taken seriously and was not simply a pro-forma offer that was meant to be rejected so as to taint Iran as being "intransigent." Since then, the administration has made it clear that the offer was meant to merely buy time for the administration, and that "zero enrichment" remains their goal. That is a Bush legacy that Obama does not seem to question, along with "using force is on the table".

Finally, you left outsomething: the bit about how the Obama administration no longer accepts the 2007 NIE which had concluded that Iran did not have an active nuclear weapons program. Since its disclosure, the NIE was always a favorite target of the NeoCons who saw it as an obstacle to their desired war on Iran, and apparently the Obama administration has caved in on that point too. So again, the point goes to the NeoCon war-drumbeaters.

So if anything, this article proves that there are people in this administration who are intent on yet again ignoring the findings of the intelligence community to pursue their own agenda, and are either pressured into this by outside forces or are agents of the outside forces who are pressing for a war and are dilligently working step-by-step to build up to that point -- and Obama is simply a tool in their hands.  

No, Dr. Sick, the Times article is ultimately about how the Obama administration has fallen into line with the Bush administration and worse. We are already careening down on the "slippery slope" you mentioned, and Obama doesn't seem to have what it takes to stop it, assuming he ever wanted to do so in the first place.

Iranians to be hassled at US airports -- again.

So in yet another case of security theater, the Transportation Security Administration is reportedly going to hassle travelers from Iran and other "terror countries" some more -- nevermind that Iranians were already on the TSA's list of "selectees" to be hassled.  

All because of the so-called "crotch bomber" - a Nigerian posing as a Sudanese who boarded an airplane In Amsterdam bound for Detriot -- was caught trying to blow up the airplane. Course, the fact that this guy was reportedly already on a terrorist list which was ignored, or the fact that the alleged terrorists he reportedly met in Yemen had been released from Gitmo by the Bush administration, and that despite being on a terrorist watchlist the bomber had been issued a multiple-entry visa by the US ... all argue that none of us are going to actually be any more secure whilst flying.

NY Times biased reporting on Iran continues

So the New York Times has decided to re-write reality to suit itself, thus signalling that the Obama administration isn't going to be bound by even the minimal standards of Bush administration's objectivity on Iran's nuclear program to claim that Iran is actually working on nuclear weapons.

For example, according to the New York Times, it was the US and Sarkozy who 'first exposed' the 'secret' enrichment facility in Qom -- nevermind that Iran declared it first. Of course, the NY Times also never mentions that according to IAEA head ElBaradei, the site is "nothing to worry about" and instead goes on to repeat the Goldilocks meme about how the facility is too small to power a reactor and thus was meant for nukes -- again never mind that it was really meant as a bomb shelter and NOT to power a reactor.

Note also the claims about "internal" IAEA reports which supposedly prove that Iran is making nukes -- nevermind that the IAEA has denied the existence of such reports of "secret annexes" that were supposedly "suppressed" by the IAEA -- a fact that the NY Times does not see fit to print.

And if there are any doubts about the new spin, note how anonymous "administration officials" have conducted their own "analysis" which, while it "did not amount to a real intelligence assessment," nevertheless supposedly was enough to debunk the 2007 intelligence estimate which concluded that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program.

The next Iran nuclear "secret" to be leaked?

This is an open thread post where commentators can participate in the discussion (post comments below.)

Arnold Evans of Mideast Reality blog writes:

Let's do a pool. I expect that the next "secret document" will hit the presses on February 15, 2010. The story about this secret document will be broken by the New York Times. The document will say Iran offered to buy a full weapon from Pakistan in 2008. It will be revealed that the document was false all along by July. Anyone want to play? When will the next secret document reach the press? Who will "leak" it? What will it say? When will it be debunked? (Not by us, who aren't going to believe it from the beginning, but when will there be documentation in the press that the paper was most likely forged)

True but for my part, I said previously that the next big hype will not be about a document, but a person: an "Iranian nuclear weapons scientist defector" who will of course say all the right things that the bomb-Iran crowd want to be said -- that Iran is hellbent on making nukes, that it has a secret program that the IAEA is too incompetent to discover, that the laudable US pressure policies and Israeli intelligence successes have thus far in slowing it down, but that the program is nevertheless continuing, and Iran is on the verge of getting the bomb. He will of course publish books (conveniently ghost-written for him by far-right think tanks) that will have titles like "The Mullah's Bombmaker: the daring escape of the man who built Iran's secret nuclear weapon" and he'll be on all the talk shows, etc. etc.

In short, we will soon see another Khidir Hamza, the alleged "Iraqi WMD scientist" who was later discredited, or Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, the civil engineer who falsely claimed that he had personally visited 20 Iraqi WMD sites (including one under the Baghdad hospital.) As Hersh recounts in a New Yorker article, 

Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell's claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council that the United States had "firsthand descriptions" of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq were unable to verify any of al-Haideri's claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. "No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far," he said.

So anyone else have any bets?