Month: December 2010

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 2nd, 2010:

Commentary: Abe Greenwald writes on Commentary’s Contentions blog that the Obama administration’s “paralysis” in responding to North Korea’s recent artillery attack on South Korea “makes one thing clear: we cannot, for any reason, allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” Greenwald warns that, “If guessing at Kim Jong-il’s motives makes fools of us all, just imagine trying to react to a nuclear theocratic thug-state perpetually sponsoring regional terror and frozen in a cold domestic revolution.” While Pyongyang might settle for talks or further aid, he argues Iran’s leaders seek only to destroy the United States and Israel.

The Weekly Standard: Thomas Joscelyn blogs that WikiLeaks cables have shown a link between Iran and al-Qaeda. Citing a cable which summarizes a conversation with Saudia Arabia’s Prince Nayif bi Abdulaziz, Joscelyn points to Iran’s alleged hosting Osama bin Laden’s youngest son, Ibrahim bin Laden. Joscelyn rather looks into this and finds “There is little publicly-available information on him. However, U.S. intelligence officials contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD say that he is quickly rising through al Qaeda’s ranks – just like his brothers.” He concludes, “The State Department’s September 2009 cable is just the latest U.S. government document released by WikiLeaks that connects Iran and al Qaeda.”

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies president, Clifford May, writes that when being frisked at the airport it’s important to remember that “jihadi terrorists are the enemy” and thus responsible for our privacy invasions — and not the TSA. May segues into the warning that “the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” and takes a swipe at Turkey. “Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been moving closer to Iran’s rulers even as they have unleashed waves of repression against Iranian dissenters,” he writes. May concludes, “For the traveling public, that means directing our anger not at the TSA but at the Islamist terrorists…who see[s] the airport as a field of battle in the great war of the 21st century.”

Earlier today, Amazon.com took down the cloud servers that were being used by WikiLeaks to serve their site. One of the products Amazon sells is space on their cloud servers at a very competitive rate. Thousands of websites, including WikiLeaks, use their service.

Amazon.com gave no notice to WikiLeaks. Normally, in an ethical and legal business relationship, notice is given when contracts are terminated to allow for smooth transition. In fact, if WikiLeaks had chosen to terminate the contract with Amazon, they would have been required to give 30 days notice.

Amazon.com gave no such notice, they just unplugged the servers. As a result, WikiLeaks was down for several hours today.

Why did they do this? Amazon.com got a call from Senator Joe Lieberman who threatened to start a boycott. Other officials reportedly leaned on Amazon. I can understand Amazon’s fear of the government, but that is no excuse to unethically target a customer without notice.

In the past year, Antiwar.com has received about $10,000 from Amazon.com for referrals on the sale of books and merchandise. We cannot continue to profit from or deal with Amazon.com. We are removing the Amazon ads and book widgets from our website, and urge other supporters of WikiLeaks to join the boycott.

from Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles’s Sketchpad today –

At a time when the White House and Homeland Security are yammering about how the TSA needs to squeeze our butts for our own good, the feds are screwing the economy with enough deficit spending to wreck practically everyone’s future. Or at least wreck the future of anyone who is not politically connected…

From the Guardian:

• If all our emails, however personal, are to become subject to the scrutiny of the government, why shouldn’t all the government’s emails, however sensitive, become subject to the scrutiny of us? If we can’t plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament without their knowledge, why can they and Saudi Arabia plot to blow up Iran without ours?

Allan Baker

Kettering, Northamptonshire

Breaking with many of his colleagues in both parties, Republican Congressman Connie Mack of Florida appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano and said that the rush to demonize WikiLeaks is wrong.

“Absolutely, we have a right to know.”

Watch the clip (first half is about the TSA):

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 1st, 2010:

The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin, in her first day on the job blogging on her new Right Turn blog, interviews former UN ambassador and current American Enterprise Institute fellow John Bolton. Bolton tells her that “Arab states don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than Israel does, and they fear that Obama is going to deliver them into the hands” of a nuclear-armed Iran.” He considers Obama is “in over his head on national security” and that “unlike every president since FDR, this president doesn’t think foreign policy is a top priority.”

The Wall Street Journal: Former deputy national security adviser and Project for the New American Century signatory Elliot Abrams writes that the double-speak of non-democratic Arab leaders, who “[t]ell the truth to foreigners but not to your own population[s],” is being put to a test by the WikiLeaks releases. “We find the king of Bahrain telling American officials privately that the Iranian nuclear program ‘must be stopped,’ while in public he carefully avoids any comment that might anger Iran’s aggressive leaders,” he writes. Abrams writes that it is easy to criticize the “gap” between the public and private discourse of the United States’ non-democratic Arab allies, but “when we consider the identities of some of the people they fear—the ayatollahs in Tehran, terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah, al Qaeda itself—we see that the WikiLeaks disclosures are less likely to promote more open government than to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

The New Republic: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes that the WikiLeaks document dump should prove that those “…who have suggested—or asserted boldly—that Arab leaders don’t want the United States to stop militarily Iran’s nuclear program have been (i) fibbing, (ii) hopelessly ill-informed, or (iii) so ideologically purblind that they now appear intellectually dishonest.” Gerecht concludes by quipping, “They at least owe Mr. Assange a ‘thank you’ for helping them see, as the Quran says, ‘the straight path.’”