| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 11:27 am Post subject: Juggernaut Gathering Momentum, Headed For Iran |
| Juggernaut Gathering
Momentum, Headed For Iran
By Ray McGovern
2-6-6
What President George W. Bush, FOX news, and the Washington Times were saying about Iraq three years ago they are now saying about Iran. After Saturday's vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report Iran's suspicious nuclear activities to the UN Security Council, the president wasted no time in warning, "The world will not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons."
The next IAEA milestone will be reached on March 6, when its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, makes a formal report to the Security Council regarding what steps Iran needs to take to allay growing suspicions. The Bush administration, however, has already mounted a full-court press to indict and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key question is why.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she did last month, "There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment," she is being, well, disingenuous again.
If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today, and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need alternatives to oil in coming decades.
Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell through when the Shah was ousted three years later.
It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to. Iran is one of three countries earning the "axis-of-evil" sobriquet from President Bush and it has watched what happened to Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to North Korea, which does have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes widespread opprobrium, has a formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery systems.
Israeli threats to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities simply provide additional incentive to Tehran to bury and harden them against the kind of Israeli air attack that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981. Although the US (together with every other UN Security Council member) condemned that attack, Dick Cheney and other senior officials do not disguise their view that it was just what the doctor ordered at the time ... and that the same prescription might take care of Iran.
Who Is Threatened by Iranian Nukes?
The same country that felt threatened by putative nuclear weapons in the hands of Iraq. With at least 200 nuclear weapons and various modes of delivery at their disposal, the Israelis have a powerful deterrent. They appear determined to put that deterrent into play early to pre-empt any nuclear weapons capability in Iran, rather than have to deal with one after it has been put in place. Israeli leaders seem allergic to the thought that other countries in the region might be able to break its nuclear monopoly and they react neuralgically to proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
Bending over backwards to such sensitivities, the US delegation to the IAEA delayed the proceedings for a day in a futile attempt to delete from Sunday's report language calling for such a zone. The final report called for a "Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction." This is the first time a link has been made, however implicitly, between the Iranian and Israeli nuclear programs.
The argument that the US is also threatened directly by nuclear weapons in Iranian hands is as far-fetched as was the case before the war in Iraq, when co-opted intelligence analysts were strongly encouraged to stretch their imaginations - to include, for example the specter that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be delivered by unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) launched from ships off the US coast. No, I'm not kidding. They even included this in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 1, 2002.
That canard was held up to ridicule by the US Air Force, which was permitted to take a footnote in the NIE. The scare story nonetheless provided grist for the president's key speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002 - three days before Congress voted to authorize war. That was also the speech in which he also warned, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
While Congress was voting for war on October 10, more candid observations came in highly unusual remarks from a source with excellent access to high-level thinking at the White House. Philip Zelikow, at the time a member of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and confidant of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (and later Executive Director of the 9/11 commission), said this to a crowd at the University of Virginia: Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990 - it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name ... the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.
More recently, in the case of Iran, President Bush has been unabashed in naming Israel as the most probable target of any Iranian nuclear weapons. He has also created a rhetorical lash-up of the US and Israel, referring three times in the past two weeks to Israel as an "ally" of the US, as if to condition Americans to the notion that the US is required to join Israel in any confrontation with Iran. For example, on February 1 the president told the press, "Israel is a solid ally of the United States; we will rise to Israel's defense if need be." Asked if he meant the US would rise to Israel's defense militarily, Bush replied with a startlingly open-ended commitment, "You bet, we'll defend Israel."
In repeatedly labeling Israel our "ally," Bush is following his own corollary to the dictum of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that if you repeat something often enough, most people will believe it. In an unusual moment of candor in a discussion of domestic affairs last May, Bush noted: That's the third time I've said that. I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
Why No Treaty?
The trouble is that, strictly speaking, allies are not picked by presidential whim - or by smart staffers like the top Bush aide who bragged that he and his colleagues are "history's actors ... creating new realities." Bush's speech writers are acting as though the "new realities" they create can include defense treaties. But unless they've changed the Constitution, in our system nations become allies via treaty; and treaties have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
There is no treaty of alliance with Israel.
But why? Earlier, I had had the impression that it must be because of US reluctance - despite widespread sympathy for Israel - to get entangled in the complexities of the Middle East and gratuitously antagonize Arab countries. Comparing notes with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues with more experience in the Middle East, however, I learned that the Israelis themselves have shown strong resistance to a US-Israel defense treaty - for reasons quite sound from their perspective, and quite instructive from ours.
The possibility of a bilateral treaty was broached after the 1973 Yom Kippur war as a way to reduce chances of armed conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. But before the US could commit to defending Israel, its boundaries would have had to be defined, and the Israelis wanted no part of that. Moreover, the Israelis feared that a defense pact would curb their freedom of action - as would signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were aware that in a crisis situation, the US would almost certainly discourage them from resorting to their familiar policy of massive - often disproportionate - retaliation against the Arabs. It became quite clear that the Israelis did not want the US to have any say over when they would use force, against whom, and what (US or non-US) equipment might be employed.
Aside from all that, the Israelis were, and are, confident that their influence in Washington is such as to ensure US support, no matter what. And, as President Bush's rhetoric demonstrates, they are correct in thinking they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too - a commitment equivalent to a defense treaty, with no binding undertakings on Israel's part.
That is a very volatile admixture. Congress would do well to wake up to its Constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities in this key area - particularly now that the juggernaut to war has begun to roll.
Preparing the Public
One major task is to convince the public and, as far as possible, our allies that the Iran-nuclear problem is critical. This would be an uphill task, were it not for the success of our domesticated media in suppressing the considered judgment of the US intelligence community that Iran is nowhere near a nuclear weapon.
Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer, to her credit, drew on several inside sources to report on August 2, 2005, that the latest NIE concludes Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest. That important information was ignored in other media and quickly dropped off the radar screen.
In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with unwelcome intelligence that does not support the case you wish to make. Polls show that hyped-up public statements on the threat from Iran are having some effect, and indiscriminately hawkish pronouncements by usual suspects like senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed Chalabi-type Iranian "dissidents" have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels for nuclear weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps reminding the world that Iran is the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian interference on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes readily replayed in FOX channel news and the Washington Times. This morning's Chicago Tribune editorial put it this way: There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic efforts are highly unlikely to sway Iran.
On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that Congress has the political will to use military force against Iran, if necessary, repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear nation." Even Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to add a convoluted new wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on Iraq. Since one cannot depend on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a matter of "take action now or lose the option of taking action."
One of the most influential intellectual authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his "neo-conservative" colleagues see themselves as men of biblical stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle prophesized: If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
Those songs have turned out to be funeral dirges for over 2,250 US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
--------
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and
is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS). | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 11:29 am Post subject: How To Prevent Another 9/11 |
| How To Prevent Another 9/11
by Paul Findley
On a recent Sunday morning, NBC's Meet-the-Press host Tim Russert, CBS veteran newsman Dan Rather and retired ABC Nightline host Ted Koppel mused about the stormy debate over President Bush's spy policies.
Koppel declared that the debate will end the instant America suffers another 9/11, and he added, ominously “as we certainly will.” He implied, of course, that Congress would then swiftly give the president all the latitude in spying that he wants. Neither Russert nor Rather dissented.
Our present policies make another 9/11 inevitable. Our acts of war strengthen the insurgency in Iraq and elsewhere. U.S. forces, using white phosphorus gas, destroyed most of Fallujah, an ancient Iraqi city of 300,000. A bombing by the CIA—not widely known for war making—caused bitter protest in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda operatives now enjoy rising public approval in both Iraq and Pakistan, but still no change in U.S. policies.
Our government should explore every avenue of diplomatic settlement, but when Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden proposed a truce, the White House contemptuously said no. Bush calls bin Laden's insurgents terrorists. They call themselves fighters for justice. At the least, our officials should ask privately for truce details but, more importantly, for details about Arab grievances against America.
These grievances are soaring, but the U.S. administration has done nothing to try to identify them, much less redress them. In Iraq, our forces try to kill insurgents who mainly want our forces to leave. In Israel and Palestine, we, in effect, help Israel destroy the lives and livelihood of Arabs who resist occupation, as well as those who don't. There, the main Arab grievance is U.S. unconditional support despite Israel's take-over of Arab land and its daily violation of Arab human rights.
Arab fury led to 9/11. Months ago, bin Laden stated publicly that the deadly assault was payback for America's involvement in Israel's lawlessness, principally in 1982 when our government donated the guns, planes and bombs with which Israel slaughtered more than 18,000 Arabs in Beirut. Our long, major in the denial of Arab rights doomed the U.S. invasion of Iraq before it started.
Still, a just peace beckons. Our government can prevent another 9/11 without firing a shot or spending more billions in a futile attempt to encase America in a protective cocoon. All we need to do is stand resolutely for justice. This requires a halt to U.S. acts of war in Iraq and the suspension of all aid until Israel treats Palestinians justly, either by ending its occupation of their land seized in 1967 or by according them full citizenship in Israel. The U.S. government cannot force Israel to do its bidding, but it can and should put firm conditions on further aid.
No matter how Israel responds, these U.S. decisions would elicit pro-American rejoicing worldwide and reduce, perhaps stop the insurgency in Iraq. They would restore luster to the name America, a country now reviled for starting wars, incarcerating insurgents without due process and routinely sending detainees to secret prisons for torture.
Why doesn't Washington act? From long personal experience, I provide the answer: almost all U.S. politicians fear that any criticism of Israel will cause them big trouble the next time they seek reelection.
Fear reaches far beyond Washington. Citizens capable of expressing moral outrage in newspapers, on television, from pulpits, and in the halls of academia are as silent as the politicians. Is everyone afraid that calling Israel to account will lead to false but painful charges of anti-Semitism? Is that why no one—not Russert, Koppel or Rather, not a single journalist of prominence in the nation-- is willing to speak or write about the folly of our lop-sided, lethal pro-Israel policies?
Are we fated to suffer more wars, more dead soldiers and marines, more blighted families here and abroad, more billions in public debt, and searing hostility worldwide, simply because America's national leadership, almost to the last person, quakes before Israel's political power in this land?
President Bush could swiftly transform the grim clouds of war into the bright promise of peace. All he needs to do is sheath his sword and take a firm stand for justice. But will he? -0-
___________________________
Paul Findley, a Republican, served in Congress 1961-83, 12 of those years on the House Middle East subcommittee. He is the author of five books, one a 7-week Washington Post bestseller. He resides in Jacksonville, Illinois. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 12:09 am Post subject: Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran |
| Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran
http://www.bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=10282
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11812.htm
Ex-U.N. Inspector: Decision Already Made To Attack Iran
Ex-U.N. inspector: Iran's next: Ritter warns that another U.S. invasion in Mideast is imminent
By Brandon Garcia
02/06/06 (Santa Fe New Mexican, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The former U.N. weapons inspector who said Iraq disarmed long before the U.S. invasion in 2003 is warning Americans to prepare for a war with Iran.
"We just don't know when, but it's going to happen," Scott Ritter said to a crowd of about 150 at the James A. Little Theater on Sunday night.
Ritter described how the U.S. government might justify war with Iran in a scenario similar to the buildup to the Iraq invasion. He also argued that Iran wants a nuclear energy program, and not nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration, he said, refuses to believe Iran is telling the truth.
He predicted the matter will wind up before the U.N. Security Council, which will determine there is no evidence of a weapons program. Then, he said, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, "will deliver a speech that has already been written. It says America cannot allow Iran to threaten the United States and we must unilaterally defend ourselves."
"How do I know this? I've talked to Bolton's speechwriter," Ritter said.
Ritter also predicted the military strategy for war with Iran. First, American forces will bomb Iran. If Iranians don't overthrow the current government, as Bush hopes they will, Iran will probably attack Israel. Then, Ritter said, the United States will drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
The only way to prevent a war with Iran is to elect a Democratically controlled Congress in November, said Ritter, a lifelong Republican. He later said he wasn't worried his advice would be seen as partisan because, "It's a partisan issue." He said the problem is one party government and if Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress, he would advise people to elect Republicans.
Most of Ritter's hour-long speech focused on Iraqi weapons programs from shortly before the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. He also discussed the weapons-inspections process during that time.
Ritter was in charge of U.N. weapons inspections until he resigned in 1998. Before the Iraq invasion, Ritter said, he told Congress that inspections needed to continue.
He also said he was a Marine in the Persian Gulf War and was part of an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s.
Throughout the 1990s, Ritter said, America's real policy for Iraq was regime change -- not forcing Iraq to disarm and destroy chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programs. The U.S. insisted on regime change, he said, because it believes transforming the Middle East countries into democracies will help ensure American access to oil.
The policy, he said, was borne from a political problem, not a threat to national security.
Ritter said the CIA knew Iraq had no ballistic, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by 1995. "We knew there were no WMDs in Iraq," he said.
Ritter blamed Americans' apathy for allowing Bush to claim there was an intelligence failure. Presidents can lie to the public too easily about national security issues because Americans aren't paying attention, he said.
"It's a damn shame there's so many more people interested in the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers," he said in reference to the two teams that played in Sunday's Super Bowl.
After his speech, Ritter took questions from the audience. The first questioner wondered whether the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were faked. Ritter, a fiery speaker, seemed irritated by the question and said the attacks were real.
Someone else asked if he was interested in running for Congress. While the question drew applause, Ritter responded, "I hate politics."
Ritter, 44, was promoting his book Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein. The speech was sponsored by Peace Action New Mexico.
Contact Brandon Garcia at 995-3826 or at bgarcia@sfnewmexican.com. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: John Pilger: The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon |
| http://www.truthout.org
The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 10 February 2006
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."
But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June.
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 10:53 am Post subject: Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn |
| http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/02/12/iran_is_prepared_to_retaliate_experts_warn/
Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | February 12, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country's nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists.
US and Israeli officials have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Among the options are airstrikes on suspected nuclear installations or covert action to sabotage the Iranian program.
But military and intelligence analysts warn that Iran -- which a recent US intelligence report described as ''more confident and assertive" than it has been since the early days of the 1979 Islamic revolution -- could unleash reprisals across the region, and perhaps even inside the United States, if the hard-line regime came under attack.
''When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them," said John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, referring to Iran's religious leaders.
''There could be a cycle of escalation."
President Bush has said military force should be the last resort in international efforts to deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet Bush has stated unequivocally that the United States would not tolerate an Iranian nuclear arsenal, which the CIA estimates could be in place in three to 10 years. Iran maintains its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electricity, not weapons.
Israel, which Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has threatened to annihilate, asserts that Tehran is much closer to going nuclear and has been far more direct with its counter-threats.
The Israel Defense Forces, which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, has said it is perfecting ways to launch a preventative strike against Iranian nuclear sites, including outfitting its Air Force with American-made, bunker-busting munitions.
US intelligence officials have said that Iran, which fought a war with Iraq from 1980-1988 that cost one million lives, still has the most threatening armed forces in the immediate region. Its combined ground forces are estimated at about 800,000 personnel. The CIA has concluded that Iran is steadily enhancing its ability to project its military power, including by threatening international shipping.
But it is Iran's unconventional weapons and tactics -- rather than its conventional military -- that would pose the greatest threat, according to the intelligence officials.
Bush's new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, outlining the conclusions reached by a variety of US spy agencies, warned in his first overall annual threat assessment this month to Congress that Iran is capable of sparking a much wider conflict it comes under threat.
A major worry: newly acquired long-range missiles. Obtained with the assistance of North Korea, the Shahab 3 could strike Israel and perhaps even hit the periphery of Europe, according to a recent report by the Pentagon's National Air and Space Intelligence Center.
The missiles could also be tipped with chemical warheads and threaten US military bases in the region.
Iran is believed to have at least 20 launchers that are frequently moved around the country to avoid detection.
''Iran has an extensive missile-development program and has received support from entities in Russia, China, and North Korea," the Pentagon report said, estimating their range to be at least 800 miles.
New missile designs under development could travel 400 miles farther, it said, while Iran purchased at least a dozen X-55 cruise missiles from Ukraine in 2001 that are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Italy.
Meanwhile, Iranian agents and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, widely believed to have a large presence in Iraq, could attempt to foment an uprising by the their fellow Shi'ite majority in Iraq or join insurgents in directly attacking US troops there, Negroponte warned.
He reported that Tehran has ''constrained" itself in Iraq because it is generally satisfied with the political trends in favor of the Shi'ite majority and to avoid giving the United States another excuse to attack Iran. But that could change if Iran were targeted militarily.
A leading Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia has clashed with US troops and rival Shi'ite groups, vowed in a visit to Tehran last month to defend Iran if it were attacked.
The assessment presented by Negroponte said the Iranian regime already provides ''guidance and training" to militant groups in Iraq and ''has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anticoalition attacks by providing Shia militants with the capability to build" improvised explosive devices.
Government and private analysts assert that Iran's intelligence apparatus and Revolutionary Guard Corps could cause serious damage to US efforts to pacify Iraq.
''The Iranian ayatollahs may deploy an 'asymmetric' answer and incite a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq," the respected Russian military publication ''Defense and Security," warned last month, referring to a military strategy that employs such tactics as guerrilla warfare. ''That would be disastrous for the United States."
Iran, believed to be responsible for the bombing of a US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, also would be expected to enlist its terrorist allies around the world to come to its aid if attacked, US officials and private specialists contend.
''Tehran continues to support a number of terrorist groups, viewing this capability as a critical regime safeguard by deterring US and Israeli attacks, distracting and weakening Israel, and enhancing Iran's regional influence through intimidation," according to Negroponte's assessment to Congress.
Primary among them is Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group that killed 241 US Marines when it bombed a Beirut barracks in 1983.
''Lebanese Hezbollah is Iran's main terrorist ally, which . . . has a worldwide support network and is capable of attacks against US interests if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened," according to the report.
''They have all kinds of people that would like to embrace martyrdom," Pike said of Iran, raising the specter that a terrorist group allied with Iran would be capable of launching attacks inside the United States to avenge a strike against Iran.
Intelligence officials also point out that Iran controls a small island at the mouth the Strait of Hormuz and could use missiles and gunboats to temporarily shut off access to the economically vital Persian Gulf, sparking an oil crisis.
''Military attack is not the solution to this problem," Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading dissident group, said in a telephone interview from Paris. ''The regime is absolutely focusing on nonconventional responses. Missiles and terrorist operations are the strong points." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:15 am Post subject: Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran? |
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Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 13 February 2006
The question looms large against the backdrop of the hearing on whistleblowing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon by Christopher Shays, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Among those testifying are Russell Tice, one of the sources who exposed illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, and Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told his superiors of the torture he witnessed at Abu Graib, got no satisfaction, and felt it his duty to go public. It will not be your usual hearing.
I had the privilege of being present at the creation of the international Truth-Telling Coalition on September 9, 2004 and of working with Daniel Ellsberg in drafting the coalition's Appeal to Current Government Officials to put loyalty to the Constitution above career and to expose dishonesty leading to misadventures like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Whether or not encouragement from the Coalition played any role in subsequent disclosures, we are grateful for those responsible for the recent hemorrhaging of important information - from the "Downing Street Minutes," showing that by summer 2002 the Bush administration had decided to "fix" intelligence to "justify" war on Iraq, to disclosures regarding CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, and state-sponsored torture.
As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who leads the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, keeps reminding us, "Information is the oxygen of democracy." And with this administration's fetish for secrecy and our somnolent Fourth Estate, we would likely all suffocate without patriotic truth-tellers (aka whistleblowers).
Whistleblowing and Vietnam
There are several times as many potential whistleblowers as there are actual ones. I regret that I never got out of the former category during the early stages of the Vietnam War, when I had a chance to try to stop it. I used to lunch periodically with my colleague Sam Adams, with whom I trained as a CIA analyst and who was given the task of assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in the war. Sam proved himself the consummate analyst. Relying largely on captured documents, he concluded that there were twice as many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in the South as the US military there would admit to.
Adams learned from Army analysts that Gen. William Westmoreland had placed an artificial cap on the official Army count rather than risk questions regarding the prospects for "staying the course" (sound familiar?). It was a clash of cultures, with Army intelligence analysts following politically dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast. In a cable dated August 20, 1967, Westmoreland's deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, set forth the rationale for the deception. The new, higher numbers, he said "were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press." Noting that "We have been projecting an image of success over recent months," Abrams cautioned that if the higher figures became public, "all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion."
When Sam's superiors decided to acquiesce in the Army's figures, Sam was livid. He told me the whole story over lunch, and I remember a long silence as each of us ruminated on what might be done. I recall thinking to myself, someone should take the Abrams cable down to the New York Times (at the time an independent newspaper). The only reason for the cable's "SECRET EYES ONLY" classification was to hide the deception.
I adduced a slew of reasons why I ought not to: a plum overseas assignment for which I was in the final stages of language training; a mortgage; the ethos of secrecy; and, not least, the analytic work (which was important, exciting work, and which Sam and I both thrived on). One can, I suppose, always find reasons for not sticking one's neck out. For the neck, after all, is a convenient connection between head and torso. But if there is nothing for which you would risk your neck, it has become your idol, and necks are not worthy of that. I much regret giving such worship to my own neck.
As for Sam, he chose to go through grievance channels and got the royal run-around, even after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt that his count of Communist forces was correct. When the offensive began, as a way of keeping his sanity, Adams drafted a cable saying, "It is something of an anomaly to be taking so much punishment from Communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged." But he did not think the situation at all funny.
Dan Ellsberg Steps In
Sam kept playing by the rules, but it happened that - unbeknownst to Sam - Dan Ellsberg gave Sam's figures on enemy strength to the (then independent) New York Times, which published them on March 19, 1968. Dan had learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos, and up to the Chinese border - perhaps even beyond. Later, it became clear that his timely leak - together with another unauthorized disclosure to the Times that the Pentagon had requested 206,000 more troops - prevented a wider war. On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering, "The leaks to the New York Times hurt us ... We have no support for the war ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men."
Ironically, Sam himself played by the rules; that is, until he learned that Dan Ellsberg was on trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers and was being charged with endangering national security by revealing figures on enemy strength. Which figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967! "Imagine," said Adams, "hanging a man for leaking faked numbers," as he hustled off to testify on Dan's behalf.
Ellsberg, who copied and gave the Pentagon Papers - the 7,000-page top secret history of US decision-making on Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post, has had difficulty shaking off the thought that, had he released them in 1964 or 1965, war might have been averted.
Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else - above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.
And so was I, it now seems, in not asking Sam for that cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had strong regrets. When the war drew down, he was tormented by the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled by the system, the left half of the Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there, for there would be no names to chisel into such a wall. Sam Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging remorse that he had not done enough.
In a letter appearing in the (then independent) New York Times on October 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to 1970, confirmed Adam's story after Sam told it in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper's magazine:
My only regret is that I did not have Sam's courage ... The record is clear. It speaks of misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of outright dishonesty and professional cowardice. It reflects an intelligence community captured by an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed institutional self-interest or personal advancement before the national interest. It is a page of shame in the history of American intelligence.
Next Challenge: Iran
Anyone who has been near a TV in recent weeks has heard the drumbeat for war on Iran. The best guess for timing is next month.
Let's see if we cannot do better this time than we did on Iraq. Patriotic truth tellers, we need you! In an interview last year with US News and World Report, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said that on Iraq, "The White House is completely disconnected from reality ... It's like they're just making it up as they go along."
Ditto for an adventure against Iran. But the juggernaut has begun to roll; the White House/FOX News/Washington Times spin machine is at full tilt. This is where whistleblowers come in. Some of you will have the equivalent of the Gen. Abrams cable, shedding light on what the Bush administration is up to beneath the spin. Those of you clued into Israeli plans and US intelligence support for them might clue us in too. Don't bother this time with the once-independent Congressional oversight committees; you will have no protection, in any case, if you choose that route - CIA Director Porter Goss's recent claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor should you bother with the once-independent New York Times. Find some other way; just be sure you get the truth out - information that will provide the oxygen for democracy.
Better Late Than Never?
Don't wait until it's too late - like Dan Ellsberg and Sam Adams did on Vietnam. Any number of people would have had a good chance of stopping the Iraq war, had they the courage to disclose publicly what they knew BEFORE it was launched.
One of them, Paul Pillar, was national intelligence officer for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, and has just published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq." It is an insider's account of his tenure and the "disturbing developments" he witnessed on the job. In substance it tells us little more than what we have long since pieced together ourselves, but it provides welcome confirmation.
Sadly, Pillar speaks of the politicization of intelligence as though it were a bothersome headache rather than the debilitating cancer it is. Interviewed on NPR, he conceded without any evident embarrassment that, with respect to Iraq, "intelligence was not playing into a decision to be made. It was part of the effort to build support for the operation." So, in the vernacular of Watergate, Pillar's article is "modified limited hangout," in which he pulls many punches. Nowhere in Pillar's 4,450 words, for example, appears the name of former CIA director George Tenet, whom he now joins at Georgetown University.
It should qualify as another "disturbing development" that Pillar parrots the administration's default explanation for what drove its decision to topple Saddam: "namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures in the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region." The word "oil" appears once in Pillar's article: "military bases" and "Israel" not at all. He splits hairs to be overly kind to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. "To be fair," writes Pillar, "Secretary Powell's presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda." Pillar seem to have forgotten how Powell used that speech to play up "the potentially more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder," and spoke of a "Saddam-bin Laden understanding going back to the early and mid-1990s."
Truly Disturbing
Generally absent is any sense of the enormity of what the Bush administration has done and the urgent imperative to prevent a repeat performance. With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - like torture, for example.
If this doesn't qualify for whistleblowing, what does? Let us hope that administration officials, or analysts - or both - will find the courage to speak out loudly, and early enough to prevent the "disconnected-from-reality" cabal in the Bush administration from getting us into an unnecessary war with Iran.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A veteran of 27 years in the analysis division of CIA, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
