Iran – Page 8 – Antiwar.com Blog

Don’t Attack Iran!

An Appeal to United States and Israeli Air, missile and drone crews to stand down from orders to attack Iran.

We are at an historic moment when decisions are being made in the United States and Israel on whether and when to attack Iran.

These will be decisions by politicians and individual commanders and air, missile and drone crewmembers charged with the responsibility of raining down munitions in a strike that will likely kill hundreds if not thousands of Iranian people and potentially spread deadly nuclear contamination to millions in Iran and surrounding nations.

Beyond this, an attack on Iran will almost certainly bring retaliation that will result in even more human casualties and will disrupt global oil shipments, with severe human consequences around the world.

An attack against Iran by the United States and Israel will violate morality, international and domestic law and the interests of humanity. Additionally, both Iran and the United States are parties to the Kellogg-Briand Pact which forbids the use of war.

There are those of us signing this appeal who have been members of the United States and other armed forces and understand very well the difficulty of refusing to follow an order to attack. At the same time, each of us has the responsibility to preserve human life and nature in the face of inhumane and illegal orders, a responsibility defined by the Nuremberg Conventions.

We urge all of you who may be called upon to attack Iran from the air, and indeed all military personnel who may be engaged in any kind of attack on Iran, to refuse to do so.

MEK Threatens Antiwar Radio Guest for Calling Them Terrorists

“Shawn’s ego is writing checks that his body cannot cash.”

So say the Mujahedeen e-Khalq terrorists in the comment section below my recent interview of Huffington Post writer Shawn Amoei. They’re angry with him for having the temerity to say that they are the enemies of Iranian reformers and friends of the Israelis and Americans who want war with Iran. And that they are terrorists.

At least they only threatened to sue me. Not that I would mind making the case in court for what commie-murderer-cultist former puppets of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Donald Rumsfeld, disgraced neocons and the Israeli Mossad they are — or what a pathetic pile of lies their K-Street front, the NCRI, is constantly pushing about Iran’s nuclear program — not at all.

But fair warning. I’ll counter-sue for court costs. And will win. And will have fun humiliating you.

Herr Hillary, of course, is planning to de-list the MEK from the State Department’s list of officially designated terrorist organizations.

Speaking of which, here’s a nice little summary of the MEK’s crimes by the U.S. State Department:

“The group’s worldwide campaign against the Iranian government uses propaganda and terrorism to achieve its objectives and has been supported by reprehensible regimes, including that of Saddam Hussein. During the 1970s, the MEK assassinated several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians working on defense projects in Tehran and supported the violent takeover in 1979 of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Despite U.S. efforts, MEK members have never been brought to justice for the group’s role in these illegal acts.

“In 1981, MEK leadership attempted to overthrow the newly installed Islamic regime; Iranian security forces subsequently initiated a crackdown on the group. The MEK instigated a bombing campaign, including an attack against the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister’s office, which killed some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei, and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar. These attacks resulted in a popular uprising against the MEK and an expanded Iranian government crackdown which forced MEK leaders to flee to France. For five years, the MEK continued to wage its terrorist campaign from its Paris headquarters. Expelled by France in 1986, MEK leaders turned to Saddam Hussein’s regime for basing, financial support, and training. Near the end of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Baghdad armed the MEK with heavy military equipment and deployed thousands of MEK fighters in suicidal, mass wave attacks against Iranian forces.

“The MEK’s relationship with the former Iraqi regime continued through the 1990s. In 1991, the group reportedly assisted in the Iraqi Republican Guard’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime; press reports cite MEK leader Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to ‘take the Kurds under your tanks.'”

And I don’t know what they’re saying here, but the MEK’s former cult leader (it’s now run by his widow, the cult leader runner-up) looks like he had a much warmer thing going with Saddam Hussein, that great ally of the Iranian people, than even Rumsfeld had back in their mutual good old days:

NYT Iran Scare Piece Just Lies, Innuendo

David Sanger carries on Walter Duranty, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon’s lying legacy at the New York Times. In his new piece, co-written with William J. Broad, Sanger spends eleven-hundred words speculating and propagandizing about what it might meant that an Iranian scientist got a promotion.

Eat your heart out, George Jahn.

Sanger’s* entire argument – it ain’t reporting – is that the new enrichment facility at Qom exists. He repeats the tired, nonsensical lie, which first appeared in Sanger’s "journalism" at the time, that the Iranian government disclosed the existence of the new facility they were building there back in September 2009, as he now puts it, "only after learning that the United States and European powers were about to announce that they had discovered the complex, deep inside the Iranian base."

What a bunch of nonsense. How in the world could the Iranian government know that President Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were "about to announce that they had discovered the complex"? Is it (Broad and) Sanger’s case that Iranian Intelligence infiltrated the American president’s speech writers’ offices? That they have a high-level mole inside the CIA? The MI-6?

Of course not. These are simply hollow lies fed to Sanger by his anonymous government sources, and uncritically passed by him to the rest of the mindless media.

The Iranians simply abided by their Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA and notified them that they would be introducing nuclear material into equipment to be installed at a new facility they were building long before the required 6 months out.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is required to maintain a "Safeguards Agreement," which allows IAEA inspectors access to Iran’s nuclear material to verify its non-diversion to military purposes, and requires notification in due time before the introduction of nuclear materials new locations so that the verification of non-diversion will not be interrupted. (The NPT also guarantees the "unalienable rights" of all signatories to the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.)

But, since hardly anyone else in the world was aware of the Qom disclosure to the IAEA, the Western politicians decided they would seize the opportunity – four days after the disclosure – to pretend they had caught Iran "red handed," making a "secret" uranium enrichment site.

Sanger bought it. Or at least sold it. "They only admitted it first because somehow they knew we were about to call them on it," unbelievably, became the linchpin of the entire government/media argument of Iran’s corrupt deception at Qom.

One may wonder why they even need arguments at this point.

But this one did serve the administration’s purpose of finding a way to refuse to accept Iran’s damn-near complete acceptance [.pdf] of the 20% enriched u-235 fuel swap deal that Obama had offered them in the first place, and complain that the end-of-2009 deadline for falling in line and avoiding more sanctions had been violated by the Iranians.

Once the IAEA was done looking around the facility that November, then-director Mohamed ElBaradei said it was "nothing to be worried about." It was just a hole in the ground then, and has taken all this time to be ready for use. Apparently Sanger has trouble remembering things from a year and a half ago, if they’re true.

The rest of Sanger and Broad’s harangue is simply innuendo stemming from the obvious-to them premises that 1: the Qom facility must have been constructed for nuclear weapons development and 2: that if an Iranian nuclear scientist (that the U.S. and/or Israel has tried to murder**) who used to work with another man Sanger claims is "suspected" of unspecified nuclear weapons work inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been made the new head of their Atomic Energy Agency, and he continues on the exact same path of enriching small amounts of uranium up to 20% for alleged medical uses that his predecessors were on, then that could only mean one thing: an atom bomb program.

Yet the American intelligence community is unanimous [.pdf] in this year’s National Intelligence Estimate that the Iranians have no nuclear weapons program, secret or declared, as they’ve said since 2007 [.pdf], long after, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, they claim to have discovered the existence of the Qom site.

As even Sanger admits in the article, the administration doesn’t see any cause for alarm here, other than the typical "they’re not supposed to be enriching at all" boilerplate – an answer given only when pressed by the Times. And we know Obama will use any excuse to start a war.

And why should weapons development be the most likely reason for 20% enrichment, Qom’s construction or this scientist’s promotion?

Yes, 20% enriched uranium is closer to the 90-plus percent required to make atom bombs than the rest of Iran’s stockpile of 3.6% enrichment for their electricity program, but it’s also needed for targets in their medical isotope reactor that the U.S.A. helped build for them back in the 1970s when their dictator was our loyal puppet.

During the so-called negotiations of 2009, Iran’s counter-offer to Obama that they swap their 3.6% LEU for finished 20% fuel rods, instead of their relying on the good faith of the French to honor the agreement was perfectly reasonable, as was the Turkish-Brazilian efforts to arrange the swaps on their territory. It was the U.S. government that was the intransigent party in all this, refusing to take Iran’s initial counter-offer as an opening to further talks, and even – shades of Dick Cheney – loudly criticizing the Brazilian and Turkish governments’ good faith efforts to bring a resolution to the dispute.

It is the president and secretary of state who deserve the blame from those worried about Iranian production of 20% enriched U-235, but they should also relax a bit because, after all, the Iranians have remained prepared to negotiate away production at those levels as recently as a few months ago – not the best way for them to stockpile eventual weapons material, right?

Why should the construction of a new uranium enrichment facility at Qom be an indication of a future weapons program? After all, the U.S. and Israel have threatened to bomb Iran for years under the pretext that their open, declared nuclear electricity facilities amount to a weapons program already. Why shouldn’t they diversify their supply and harden their defenses?

And why should the promotion of this one scientist be viewed as as some game-changing milestone on the road to the apocalypse in the context of the rest of these facts? Oh, right, these facts are here, not in the Times piece. So there you go.

*I pick on Sanger because Broad’s work is okay when he writes with Mark Mazzetti for example.

**Such attacks continue.

Update: That last link about an assassination today, turns out not to be right.

AP Iran Scare Piece Proves Itself Wrong

Where’s old Doc Prather when we need him? George Jahn, the David Sanger of the Associated Press, has a scary new piece out. And though the story seems to have gotten plenty of attention with it’s big headline “Iran Prez Said Pushing for Nukes,” on further inspection the “Said” amounts to, well, pretty much nothing:

“Iran’s president wants to shed the nation’s secrecy and forge ahead openly with developing nuclear weapons but is opposed by the clerical leadership, which is worried about international reaction to such a move, says an intelligence assessment shared with The Associated Press.

“That view, from a nation with traditionally reliable intelligence from the region, cannot be confirmed and contrasts with assessments by other countries that view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as relatively moderate on the nuclear issue compared to the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”

So the vast majority of Western intelligence agencies agree that Ahmadinejad is “relatively moderate” on the issue, and one dissents. On what basis exists this discrepancy? Jahn never says.

If Ahmadinejad’s supposed ambitions are opposed by the religious leadership, who have the real say in the matter, then what’s so headliney about that anyway?

Are we to understand that Jahn’s source(s) swore him to secrecy regarding not just their names, but the name of the country which they presumably work for and produced this “intelligence”? Could it be that they anticipate readers may not agree with Jahn’s assessment their assertions about Iranian nuclear capabilities have been “traditionally reliable”?

The piece continues:

“Ahmadinejad is pushing ‘to shake free of the restraints Iran has imposed upon itself, and openly push forward to create a nuclear bomb,’ says the assessment. But Khamenei, whose word is final on nuclear and other issues, ‘wants to progress using secret channels, due to concern about a severe response from the West,’ says the report.”

Jahn provides no evidence that Ahmadinejad is pushing for anything, and nothing in the article even acknowledges the fact that the unanimous opinion of all 17 American intelligence agencies [.pdf] is that the Iranians are not pursuing nuclear weapons openly or in secret. Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tells this writer that the rest of the West agrees. But in AP Land, inconvenient facts are omitted rather than confronted head on.

The new head of the IAEA is quoted complaining that Iran has made it “difficult for us to draw a conclusion [Iran’s nuclear program] is exclusively for peaceful purposes.” But that, as our dear retired Dr. Prather would put it, is “none of the IAEA’s beeswax.” Their mandate under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and Safeguards Agreement with Iran is the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear material, accounting for its quantity and quality on a regular basis and verifying its non-diversion to military purposes. Their further mandates from the UN Security Council to completely prove a negative, ask endless questions based on forgeries and inspect non-nuclear facilities are rightly considered illegitimate by the Iranians.

The rest of the article elaborates on the theme that that the “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, is the one with the power to decide and that he is the more “cautious” and “circumspect” about the prospect of starting a nuclear weapons program and perhaps stoking a regional arms race than his already-willing-to-deal presidential frontman.

George Jahn’s new Iran piece in the Associated Press, despite its emotional headline and anonymous scare quotes, actually makes a strong case that neither Iran’s president, nor its head-Ayatollah are interested in obtaining nuclear weapons.

Is Iran a Threat?

Antiwar.com columnist David R. Henderson and Paola Gilbert will be on a panel, “Is Iran a Threat?” on Sunday, June 19 from 3 PM to 5:00 PM at the Peace Resource Center, 1364 Fremont Blvd., Seaside. Free admission.

David R. Henderson is an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution. Paola Gilbert is a Muslim and an Army “brat.” She is an Instructor at Monterey Peninsula College and has observed Iran from afar and up close for 30 years.

Please contact David Henderson (831-648-1776) or Phil Butler (831-649-1336) for more information.

Iran: Parallax view

NOAM CHOMSKY: The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. …They show that Arab opinion …â€”holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, thatâ€™s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, thatâ€™s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that …it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. …
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When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. Thereâ€™s also a minor problem. Thatâ€™s the major problem. The minor problem is that we donâ€™t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So thereâ€™s a filtering process. We donâ€™t know how much it distorts the information. But thereâ€™s no question that what is a radical distortion isâ€”or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesnâ€™t matter, even if itâ€™s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere…. –Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”