OMNI
IRAN NEWSLETTER # 25, January 17, 2014.
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE
OF PEACE (#11 Oct. 8, 2011; #12 Jan. 31,
2012; #13 Feb. 22, 2012; #14 Feb. 26, 2012; #15 March 17, 2012; #16 April 12,
2012; #17 May 21, 2012; #18, July 9, 2012; #19 August 13, 2012; #20 Sept. 10,
2012; #21, Dec. 14, 2012; #22 March 5, 2013; #23 Nov. 12, 2013; #24 March 5,
2014)
The opening
of a Jewish prayer from the Sabbath service:
“Disturb us, Adonai, ruffle us from our complacency; make us
dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with the
peace of ignorance, the quietude which arises from a shunning of the horror,
the defeat, the bitterness and the poverty, physical and spiritual, of
humans. Shock us, Adonai, deny to us the
false Shabbat which gives us the delusions of satisfaction amid a world of war
and hatred.”
US crimes against Iran Israel United States
What is the mission of OMNI?
To seriously support the Quaker call for
a world
free of war and the threat of war,
a society with equity and justice for all,
a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled,
and an earth restored.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore,
is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole." -- Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S.
Prosecutor, Nuremberg
“It has been a mainstay of this book that successful antiwar movements are
those that have been able to make direct
links with those in the flight path of US
aggression and to bring their struggles and concerns directly into the US
J. William Fulbright during the height of the Cold War attempted to extend
his Exchange Program to the Soviet Union,
but his plan to acquire a part of WWII Lend Lease money the Russians were
repaying was scuttled by US Sovietphobes.
See The Price of Empire. Another Arkansas
native, Betty Bumpers, wife of then Senator Bumpers, created the women’s
organization, Peace Links, to exchange women from the US and Russia
Here is the link to all the newsletters archived in
the OMNI web site.
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ These newsletters offer information that
enables us to examine morality and judgment of our leaders and their policies,
of power. Here is the link to the
Index: http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
Contents Nos. 18-24
at end.
Contents Iran Newsletter #25 January 17, 2014
US Hostility Today
Cole, Republican
Control of House and Senate, Disasters Ahead
Clifton and
Gharib, Iranophobic Lobbying Machine Dominates Congressional
Hearings
Hearings
Peace Action, Diplomacy Now
Council for a
Livable World, Support Kerry and Diplomacy
FCNL, Lobby
Congress
FCNL, Contact
Congress
Move On,
Berim: Contact Congress, Support
Diplomacy
Public Peace
Efforts During Viet Nam War
History of US/Iranian Relations: the
1953 Coup, After the Shah, Reagan,
Fear/Hate Mongers (see
preceding newsletters)
Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of
Modern U.S.-Iranian
Relations (rev. by Abouyoub in Monthly Review)
Relations (rev. by Abouyoub in Monthly Review)
Cole, CIA: Embassy
and Ambassador
Stockman, US
Started the Nuc Conflict During Reagan Admin.
Gareth Porter
Interviewed by Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s
Edward Herman,
rev. of Gareth Porter’s Manufactured
Crisis of Iran’s Nuclear
Scare
Scare
US
HOSTILITY TODAY
Juan
Cole, Top 5 Disasters if GOP Senate Derails Iran Talks. Juan Cole,
Informed Comment ,
Reader Supported News, Nov. 16, 2014.
Cole writes: "The Republican Party is already conniving at ways to derail the US-Iran negotiations over Tehran's civilian nuclear enrichment program."
READ MORE
Cole writes: "The Republican Party is already conniving at ways to derail the US-Iran negotiations over Tehran's civilian nuclear enrichment program."
READ MORE
The
Iranophobia Lobby Machine
BY
ELI CLIFTON AND ALI GHARIB, THE NATION,
JULY 17, 2014 [August 4/11. –Dick]
Neocon think
tanks get millions from wealthy donors, which they use to game the system, buy
influence — and push for regime change.
DOUG CHAKA/THE
NATION [Enemies of Iran Gather in Washington]
In the basement
of Washington's swank Mandarin Oriental Hotel on a balmy spring day, the
conference guests were finishing up their boxed lunches as the conversation
shifted to their host's pet topic — Iran. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, perhaps DC's premier
neoconservative think tank, had gathered donors, supporters, press, and other
interested parties for a two-day meeting on Middle East policy. And some of the
Hill's most rapacious hawks for sanctions on Iran were in the room that day to
receive awards.
The moderator,
a veteran Bloomberg reporter, hailed FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz as
"the architect of many of the sanctions we have against Iran right now,
who advised Congress on how to draft that legislation and has also advised
Treasury and the White House on his opinions about sanctions." The praise
was telling. Although Dubowitz tried to give credit to Congress, the White
House and the departments of Treasury and State, groups like the FDD play an
outsize role in shaping policy on the delicate and potentially explosive issue
of Iran's nuclear program.
Since the
moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran last June, the Obama
administration has engaged in an intensive round of diplomacy aimed at placing
permanent curbs on that program. The talks have progressed further than anyone
expected, with an interim deal in November that set a late July deadline for
reaching a final accord. On Capitol Hill, though, diplomacy has been dismissed
by a parade of influential naysaying hawks. And these organizations are already
talking up ways of making sure that a deal, if one is reached, is dead on
arrival.
Within
Washington's corridors of power, the institution that has done the most to
focus attention on the alleged Iranian nuclear threat — Congress — has also been among the most skeptical when it comes to
using diplomacy to do anything about
it. But the members of Congress don't come up with these ideas on their own. A
handful of organizations — especially
the FDD, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) — do most of the legwork in shaping policy. An
even smaller network of right-wing donors funds these groups (see the sidebar
for more).
Over the past
decade, this small network of advocates
has become incredibly effective at getting its way. A 2010 bill slapping
sanctions on foreign banks and companies doing business — especially oil
business — with Iran passed the Senate 99–0, and a 2011 amendment sanctioning
international companies dealing with Iran's Central Bank passed 100–0. In 2012,
another sanctions amendment passed the Senate 94–0, and a 2013 resolution
backing Israel should it attack Iran was passed 99–0. "By far and away the
most powerful voices are what you can term the hawkish groups on Iran
policy," says a former congressional aide.
In the boxing
ring that is Washington, the match-up isn't even. Compare, for example, the budgets of groups that oppose diplomacy
with those that support it. Four of Washington's pro-diplomacy groups are
significant players on the Hill: the Center for a New American Security, the
National Iranian American Council, the American Iranian Council and the Council
on American-Islamic Relations. According to their most recent tax filings,
these organizations boasted an annual combined budget of approximately $9.4
million.
Meanwhile, the
latest tax filings for just two of the groups that push hardline policies, the
FDD and AIPAC, have a combined budget of approximately $75 million. And that
doesn't include the annual budget of an AIPAC offshoot, the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy ($8.7 million), or aggressive right-wing PR
groups like United Against Nuclear Iran ($1.6 million), whose spokespeople are
regularly quoted by national media.
All that cash
helps produce papers and reports advising Congress, flashy DC conferences and
other ways of accessing power. For example, a more modestly funded dovish group
might request a meeting with members of Congress, but some members will meet
only with advocates who bring along a constituent, which could require buying a
plane ticket. "That's obviously easier for lobby groups that have a lot of
money, because they can fly someone out," says Kate Gould, a lobbyist with
the pro-diplomacy Friends Committee on National Legislation.
The hawkish groups skillfully work the Hill with regular
briefings and frequent contacts with staffers. Their battalions of policy
analysts and lawyers "package [sanctions] bills and hand them to
congressional offices," says the former Hill aide. They also assiduously
ply the mainstream media, regularly providing op-eds and quotes in news
coverage. In other words, this is a full-scale operation: the hawks generate
the ideas, translate them into policy, shepherd bills through Congress, and
celebrate their passage.
To see how
deeply these groups have influenced Congress, one need only glance at the docket of House and Senate committee
hearings on Iran. It's at these hearings that members of Congress vie to
burnish their credentials as being tough on Iran, calling for ever-harsher
sanctions. "Congressional hearings are not weighted to be some objective
analysis of some foreign policy issue," says the former congressional
aide. "The people who are calling the hearings have an agenda."
Since November
2012, eleven separate hearings on Iran policy have considered a total of
thirty-six expert testimonies from outside groups. Of that number, two
neoconservative organizations dominated: FDD fellows made five appearances, and
those from the AEI had four. Neoconservative allies like David Albright, who
co-chairs a nonproliferation group with Dubowitz and spoke before Congress four
times in this period, also gave testimony. All told, people associated with
groups taking a hard line on Iran sanctions accounted for twenty-two of the
thirty-six testimonies solicited by House and Senate committees.
Centrist think
tanks, on the other hand, were underrepresented. Employees of the Council on
Foreign Relations testified twice, while the Brookings Institution, the RAND
Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for
Strategic and International Studies fielded only one witness apiece over the
period reviewed by The Nation. Experts from dovish think tanks hardly appeared
at all: the only witness from such a group, Barak Barfi of the generally
left-of-center New America Foundation, made one appearance.
Since 2010,
when the GOP retook the House, the Foreign Affairs Committee has been led by
hard-liners. Florida's über-aggressive Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was replaced last
year by California's Ed Royce, who is only slightly less extreme. In 2013,
Royce's committee unanimously approved legislation that the FDD helped write —
and that AIPAC has backed — which would tighten the screws on Iran, giving
"the ayatollah a choice between the collapse of his economy or compromise
on his nuclear weapons program and giving up that program," in Royce's
words. The bill came to a full House vote at the end of July, just days before
Rouhani's inauguration. MORE http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/2002/the_iranophobia_lobby_machine
Eli Clifton is a reporting fellow with The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute who focuses on money in politics and
US foreign policy. He previously reported for the American Independent New
Network, ThinkProgress, and Inter Press Service. Clifton is coauthor of the
Center for American Progress's report "Fear Inc.: The Roots...
Ali Gharib is a reporting fellow with The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where he focuses on US foreign
policy. He previously served as a senior editor at Open Zion, a Mideast blog at
the Daily Beast. His pieces have appeared in Foreign Policy, Washington
Monthly, ...
PEACE
ACTION, DIPLOMACY
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Dear Dick,
Like clockwork, opponents
of diplomacy are back at work trying to throw a wrench in the recently
extended nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Members of Congress who
fear losing the upper hand at the negotiating table are pressing for even
more sanctions. But instead of gaining leverage, a move like this only would
give Iranian hardliners a reason to get up and walk away--and likely get back
on track toward a nuclear weapon.
We must do all we can to
prevent a nuclear-armed Iran without perpetuating war in the Middle East and
putting even more American lives at risk.
This potentially historic
deal would make our world safer and more secure; more sanctions could mean
the end of diplomacy, more war in the Middle East, a nuclear-armed Iran, or
all three. You've helped us push back on Congress's attempts to scuttle these
important talks before, and we can do it again. If you agree, tell Congress by signing our petition!
Thanks for making your
voice heard.
Sincerely,
 Angela Canterbury & John Isaacs
Council for a Livable
World
322 4th Street, NE
Washington, D.C. 20002
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Dear James
Bennett,
With U.S.
bombs dropping in Iraq and Syria, the fall of 2014 might seem like a dark
time for nonviolence and diplomacy. But, just out of national headlines,
negotiators with Iran are quietly making history. A year ago, the U.S. and
Iran were barely on speaking terms. Now, we're just months away from a
long-term deal on Iran's nuclear program. That's diplomacy at work.
 Looking
at the crises of this fall, it's clear that we need to lift up diplomacy
andengagement as an alternative to bombing and more violence. Your calls and
letters are critically important, but I want you to take it a step
further: come to Washington and lobby with us for diplomacy
this November.
This year's
lobby day is just days before the deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, and
there's no better time to remind Congress that diplomacy works. It's the best
way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and it's the best way to
keep the U.S. from entering yet another war.
Join us in
Washington, DC for two days of trainings, panels and lobbying. We're excited
to welcome special guest Parker Palmer, acclaimed author of Healing
the Heart of Democracy. He'll be joined by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—former
chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell—who champions diplomacy on
and off the Hill.
I hope you'll be able to join us. If you're not
ready to register yet,get more information about the Quaker Public Policy
Institute.
We already
know that the best path to a safer and more peaceful world is through
diplomacy. Congress needs to hear it.
Sincerely,
  Jim
CasonAssociate Executive Secretary Strategic Advocacy |
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SUPPORT
DIPLOMACY WITH IRAN
From: Sara Haghdoosti <noreply@list.moveon.org>
Subject: Will
you add your name?
Date: July 24, 2014 at 3:06:17 PM PDT
To: <ahobson@uark.edu>
Reply-To: Sara Haghdoosti <info@berim.org>
Dear Art -
The extreme
flank of the Republican party is trying to undermine the President’s diplomacy
with Iran. Over the last few days, two bills have been introduced in the Senate
and House. One calls for increasing sanctions on Iran the other attempts to tie
the President’s hands in regards to the negotiations. If passed, these bills
would undermine the Iran/US negotiations and drag us down the path of another senseless
war in the Middle East.
At the
moment these bills are only getting traction within the Republican party.
Here’s the thing though - if these voices continue to be the only ones in the
debate they will push legislators away from reasonable policies that support
the President’s diplomacy and towards more hawkish measures.
That’s where we
come in. On Monday over 21 Berim members from all over the country
will be flying to DC. They’ll be meeting with their representatives and telling
them why they support diplomacy with Iran. For their words to have impact,
Members of Congress need to know that these Berim members are not alone.
We need to
ensure that our voices are a continued presence in this debate so that we can
push representatives to take positive stances as opposed to moving from
terrible legislative options to bad ones.
It doesn’t matter
where your representative stands personally - your voices still have impact. If
they’re supportive, your petitions will show them that we stand along side
them. If they’re on the fence, it could help them find the courage to speak out
in favor of diplomacy. If they’re against, showing them that they’re
disconnected from their voters may convince them to stay silent on the issue.
We only have
a few days before the peace delegation flies into DC - so please spread the
word by forwarding this email to friends and family so our petition will be as
strong as it possibly can be.
Yours -
Sara on behalf
of the Berim team.
Tell
Congress: Don't Break the Iran Deal
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International
Antiwar Coalitions During Vietnam War: Parallels During Long US/Iran Cold War?
REVIEW: Vietnam War Era Journeys: Recovering
Histories of Internationalism by Michele
Hardesty. Monthly Review (Oct. 2014)
Judy Tzu-Chun
Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism
during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 346
pages, $26.95, paperback.
The cover of
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s Radicals on the Road features a sepia-toned
photograph of Eldridge Cleaver raising his fist in a Black Power salute behind
three Vietnamese women in combat helmets, one of whom is kneeling behind an
anti-aircraft gun. While you have probably seen a similar photograph of Jane
Fonda from her North Vietnam trip in 1972, images like that of Cleaver are less
common, if circulated at all. In this
second book by Wu, she documents three sets of journeys, like Cleaver’s,
that have remained at the margins of both the scholarship and the popular
memory of the antiwar movement.… | more | [Wu documents three sets of journeys “of
traveling radicals who consciously crossed national borders and made coalitions
across race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in order to build an
international antiwar movement.” Wu’s
subject in Section One, “Journeys for Peace,” is Robert Span Browne, a leader
for black liberation in the US and for decolonization in the Third World from
the 1930s to the 1970s. In Section Two,
“Journeys for Liberation,” she recounts the tour of North Korea, North Vietnam,
and China in 1970 by the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation, headed by
Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver and Ramparts editor Robert Scheer.
And in Section Three, “Journeys for Global Sisterhood,” she examines the
Indochinese Women’s Conferences in 1971 in Canada. –Dick]
HISTORY,
CONTEXTS OF US/IRAN CONFLICT
A Defining
Moment: The Historical Legacy of the 1953 Iran Coup by
Younes
Abouyoub. Monthly Review (Oct. 2014)
ABSTRACT
Ervand
Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern
U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2012), 304 pages.
The Cold War
between the Soviet Union and the United States began in earnest as soon as the
Second World War ended, shaping most of the remainder of the twentieth century.
The U.S. doctrine of “containment” required confronting the Soviets at every
point of contact, accompanied by the claim that lasting peace could be reached
only through the establishment of an international order based on national
states which enjoyed a U.S.-defined political liberty and a capitalist economic
order. The Soviets bolstered their security through providing support to
countries seen as friendly and close to their borders. Therefore, maintaining
influence in Iran was a goal of Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. U.S.
foreign policy was shaped by its own state interests and ideology and driven by
the American postwar, worldwide systems of military bases.… It is this
turbulent period of geopolitical maneuvering that Ervand Abrahamian's The
Coup revisits. Yet, unlike other books on the 1953 events in Iran,
Abrahamian locates the U.S.-backed coup less in the Cold War ideological
confrontation between East and West than in the conflicts which opposed
imperialism and nationalism; between the center of world capitalism and the
underdeveloped economies heavily dependent on exporting raw natural resources.
FULL TEXT:
Monthly Review
Foundation | 146 W. 29th Street, Suite 6W, New York, NY 10001
Tel: (212)
691-2555; Outside of NY: (1-800) 670-9499; Fax: (212) 727-367
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog, posted
April 13
The author teaches history at the University of Michigan
By David Stockman, "Stockman's
Corner" blog, posted March 26, 2014.
[from HAW]
The
author was director of the Office of Management and the Budget under President
Reagan.
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HARPER’S BLOG
HEART OF EMPIRE, SIX QUESTIONS — May 6, 2014, 2:37 pm
Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare
Gareth Porter on the true history of Iran’s nuclear program
Share
Single Page
Gareth Porter. Photograph
by Mike Chiaverina
In
all the discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, the consequent international
economic blockade directed by the United States, and the ongoing negotiations
to resolve the issue, Washington’s official history of the program has rarely
been challenged. InManufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran
Nuclear Scare (Just World Books), award-winning investigative
journalist Gareth Porter traces the true history of the program, as well as
how and by whom the official narrative was constructed. I put six questions
to Porter about his book.
1. Although the Iraqi nuclear “threat” was
discredited as an utter fraud years ago, the idea that across the border Iran
has sought, at least in the past, to build a nuclear weapon has long been
widely accepted in political and media circles. Are you saying that the claim
of secret work on nuclear weapons is equally fraudulent, and that the
Iranians have never had a nuclear-weapons program?
Yes. In Manufactured Crisis, I show that the claim
of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program has been based on false history and
falsified records. The description of the Iranian nuclear program presented
in official documents, in commentaries by think-tank “experts,” and in the
media bears no resemblance to the essential historical facts. One would never
know from the narrative available to the public over the years that Iran had
been prepared in the early 1980s to rely entirely on a French-based company
for enriched uranium fuel for its Bushehr reactor, rather than on enriching
uranium itself. Nor would one learn that the Reagan Administration sought to
strangle Iran’s nuclear program, which was admitted to have presented no
proliferation threat, in its cradle by pressuring Germany and France to
refuse to cooperate in any way. The significance of that missing piece of
history is that Iran was confronted with a choice of submitting to the U.S.
effort to deprive Iran of its right to a peaceful nuclear program under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty or else acquiring its own enrichment capability.
Not surprisingly, the
Iranians chose the latter course, and went to the black market in defiance of
what was by that point a unilateral U.S. policy. Their decision is now
described in the popular narrative as evidence that Iran was seeking nuclear
weapons early on.
The other relevant
historical reality that has been systematically excised from the story of the
Iranian nuclear program is what happened in regard to chemical weapons during
the Iran–Iraq war. Contrary to disinformation issued by the U.S. Defense and
State departments, which suggested that both sides had used chemical weapons
in the Iraqi city of Halabja in 1988, the evidence is very clear that Iran
never used chemical weapons during the war. The only explanation consistent
with the historical record is that Ayatollah Khomeini forbade the use of such
weapons, on the ground that both the possession and use of weapons of mass
destruction are illicit under Islamic jurisprudence.
This policy, maintained
despite the terrible losses Iran was suffering from Iraqi chemical attacks,
represents powerful evidence that Shia jurisprudence is a fundamental
constraint on Iranian policy toward weapons of mass destruction. It also
makes credible the claim that Iran is forbidden by a fatwa from Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei from possessing nuclear weapons. But senior Iranian
officials, including a former president of Iran, Hashami Rafsanjani, have
been making cogent arguments against nuclear weapons based on strategic
grounds since the early 1990s.
2. The U.S. produced various items of
evidence over the years to demonstrate the felonious intent of the Iranian
program. Where did this evidence come from, and how well does it stand up to
scrutiny?
The evidence adduced to
prove that Iran secretly worked on nuclear weapons represents an even more
serious falsification of intelligence than we saw in the run-up to the war in
Iraq. I tell the real story behind a large collection of intelligence
documents that appeared mysteriously in 2004 and have been crucial to the
Iran nuclear narrative. They supposedly came from the purloined laptop of an
Iranian participant in a nuclear-weapons research project, but a former
senior official with the German foreign office told me the real story: the
documents were provided to Germany’s intelligence service by an occasional
source who was part of the Iranian-exile terrorist organization
Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).
The obviously
self-interested MEK member was thus the Iranian equivalent of the
now-discredited Iraqi source known as “Curveball,” whose tales of mobile
bioweapons labs in Saddam’s Iraq became the centerpiece of the Bush case for
invading Iraq. It is well documented, however, that the Israeli Mossad was
using the MEK to launder intelligence it didn’t want attributed to Israel,
with the aim of influencing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and
foreign governments. Further pointing to the Israeli origins of the documents
is the fact that Israel was the only country in the world known to have a
special office responsible for influencing news coverage of Iran’s nuclear
program.
Some key points in the
documents give away the fact that they were falsified. The most important
example is a set of studies, supposedly done in 2002 and 2003 on the Shahab-3
missile’s reentry vehicle, with the purported aim of allowing the missile to
accommodate a nuclear weapon. Evidence from the U.S. intelligence community
and authoritative independent sources shows that the Iranians had already
abandoned the Shahab-3 by then, and were far along in developing an improved
missile with a reentry vehicle that bore no resemblance to the one depicted
in the studies. And we now know from Mohamed ElBaradei’s 2011 memoirs that in
2009 Israel provided a new series of intelligence reports and documents to
the IAEA that offered further claims of Iranian work on nuclear weapons both
before and after 2003.
Those claims were
ultimately published in an IAEA dossier of intelligence reports in November
2011. The most sensational assertion made there was that Iran had constructed
a large metal cylinder for testing nuclear-weapons designs at its
military-research base at Parchin in 2000. This led officials from the IAEA
and some of its member states, including the United States, to charge that
Iran was altering the site to eliminate evidence. But as I document in the
book, Iran had allowed the IAEA to carry out inspections at ten sites of the
agency’s choosing on two different occasions in 2005. Furthermore the IAEA
obtained satellite images of the site covering February 2005 to February
2012, and found no indication that Iran had been concerned about hiding
anything. Finally, a former chief IAEA inspector in Iraq, Robert Kelley, has
said that the agency’s description of the alleged cylinder made no technical
sense.
3. How did the IAEA end up endorsing the
notion that the Iranians have had a covert bomb program in the past and may
still have one today?
The IAEA was crucial in
legitimizing claims of a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons program, because it
was seen as a neutral actor. That image was largely the result of the
independence of its former director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, from the Bush
Administration. In 2005, when the IAEA received the documents that had come
in through Germany’s intelligence service, ElBaradei was deeply skeptical of
their authenticity and warned publicly against using them as evidence in a
case against Iran.
But his control over the
Iran issue was eroded starting in 2008, when the head of the IAEA’s
Department of Safeguards, Olli Heinonen, began collaborating with U.S.
officials on how to treat the documents. Diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks, when read against the background of 2008 IAEA reports, show that
Heinonen and his Western allies came up with a strategy to falsely portray
Iran as having conceded the authenticity of some of the documentation. Their
aim was to justify IAEA demands for highly classified information on Iran’s
missile and conventional-weapons programs. When Iran predictably refused, the
IAEA and a U.S.-led coalition cited this as evidence of a cover-up.
The IAEA came to play an
even more partisan role after Yukia Amano of Japan replaced ElBaradei in
November 2009. A WikiLeaks cable from July 2009 reveals that Amano promised
U.S. officials he would be firmly in their camp on Iran in return for
American support of his election as director general. “In their camp” could
only have meant that he would support the publication of the intelligence
dossier — based entirely on intelligence reports and documents from
Israel — that ElBaradei had refused to authorize. The dossier’s November
2011 publication date was timed to provide a political boost to the U.S.-led
campaign for crippling international sanctions against Iran.
4. The U.S. intelligence community became a
global laughingstock when its assessments of Iraqi WMDs were revealed as entirely
bogus. Yet its pronouncements about the Iranian nuclear program are treated
with deferential respect. How do you compare the performance of the U.S.
intelligence community on Iran with its record on Iraq?
The same political and institutional dynamics drove both
failures. The March 2005 Robb–Silberman Commission Report cited analysts who
worked on the Iraq WMD file as admitting freely that they had effectively
reversed the burden of proof, refusing to believe that Iraq didn’t have
WMD unless a highly credible human source said otherwise.
The same thing happened
on Iran. It began in 1991, when then CIA director Robert M. Gates singled out
Iran as the premier assessment target for the agency’s new center for
proliferation issues. Not surprisingly, analysts immediately began
interpreting even the most ambiguous evidence as indicating Iran’s intention
to develop nuclear weapons. This predisposition just happened to be in line
with American policy of forbidding its allies from providing nuclear
technology to Iran. In other words, the intelligence followed the policy, not
the other way around.
CIA brass apparently
went so far as to suppress WMD intelligence obtained by one of its best
covert agents in the Middle East because it didn’t fit the conclusion they knew
George W. Bush’s administration wanted. I reveal for the first time in the
book that a former undercover operative who brought a lawsuit against CIA
leadership in 2004 claimed that a highly respected source in Iran had told
him in 2001 that Iran had no intention of “weaponizing” its nuclear program.
The CIA apparently never informed the White House of that information, and
refused to circulate it within the intelligence community.
National Intelligence
Estimates in 2001 and 2005, and a draft estimate in mid-2007, all concluded
that Iran had a nuclear-weapons program. Paul Pillar, a former National
Intelligence Officer for the Near East who participated in the 2001 and 2005
exercises, has recalled that no hard evidence of weaponization informed
either estimate, and that their conclusion was based on inference. In the
2005 estimate and the 2007 draft estimate, the conclusion was influenced by
the intelligence documents that had come from Israel by way of the MEK. The
failure of the CIA’s well-staffed weapons-proliferation center to detect the
fraud paralleled its failure to notice the obvious signs that the “Nigergate”
document offered as evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger was a rather
amateurish fabrication.
The final 2007 NIE,
which was issued in November, asserted that the 2005 NIE and the mid-2007
draft had both been dead wrong in their assertions that Iranian still had a
nuclear-weapons program at the time of their writing. It concluded, rather,
that based on intercepted “snippets of conversation,” Iran had had a
nuclear-weapons program as of 2003, then stopped it. This finding, which gave
additional credibility to the official narrative of Iran’s nuclear
intentions, is itself highly questionable. It is very likely that the 2007
NIE authors interpreted evidence of one or more individuals’ work as
confirmation of the existence of a full-fledged program — a belief in
which they had clearly acquired a strong vested interest.
5. The news media generally disgraced
itself in its coverage of the Iraqi nuclear issue. How has it comported
itself with respect to Iran?
With Iraq, there was at least dissent over issues like its
alleged illegal importation of aluminum tubes, which reflected debates within
the intelligence community. Coverage of Iran, on the other hand, has been
virtually unanimous in reporting the official line without the slightest
indication of curiosity about whether it might be false or misleading. The
closest we got to investigative work in the commercial media were hints,
buried inside longer stories in the Washington Post, of
skepticism in the intelligence community about the 2004 laptop documents.
Some of the most egregious misinformation came in late 2007
and early 2008, in stories in the New York Times and Washington
Post about two IAEA reports containing the final results of a major
agency investigation. Rather than reporting the fact that the agency had been
unable to challenge any of Iran’s explanations of the six issues under
investigation, the Times and Post stories
simply quoted Bush Administration officials and an unnamed IAEA official as
dismissing the Iranian responses.
When the media challenged the official line, it was only
because that line wasn’t hawkish enough. David Sanger of the New York
Times carried out a relentless campaign in innumerable articles
after the 2007 NIE attacking its conclusion that Iran had ceased work on
nuclear weapons in 2003.
 6. What impact do you believe the essentially
unquestioned acceptance of this fraudulent nuclear narrative is likely to
have on negotiations with Iran and beyond?
It creates serious obstacles.
For one, it makes the Obama Administration much more vulnerable to the
arguments of Israel and its followers in Washington that Iran cannot be
allowed to have any enrichment capacity. But then, the administration itself
has absorbed the essential elements of the narrative into its own analysis,
notably via the creation of the “breakout” concept.
“Breakout” is defined as
the time it would take Iran to enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level
to allow it to construct a single nuclear bomb. But it was a bogus idea from
the beginning, because it assumed that Iran had the desire to rush-build a
nuclear weapon. Furthermore it was based on highly unlikely worst-case
scenarios for very rapid Iranian enrichment of uranium to a level sufficient
for a bomb. According to the worst-case scenarios conjured up by
conservative U.S. think tanks and others promoting the myth, Iran has had the
same theoretical capacity for breakout — a month or two — since 2010.
But rather than racing for a bomb, it has instead converted much of the
uranium it enriched to a concentration of 20 percent uranium-235 (the
enrichment level that has most worried the United States) to an oxide form
that makes it unavailable for enrichment to weapons-grade level.
Nevertheless, the Obama
Administration has been so intimidated by the breakout drumbeat that it has
now adopted a policy of limiting Iran’s breakout period to between six and
twelve months. That translates into a demand that Iran agree to be stripped
of 80 percent of its centrifuges, which is all but certain to ensure the
breakdown of the talks. Unless the administration changes its posture —
which became less likely after it publicly cited that goal as a
baseline — fear-mongering propagandists may well succeed in pushing the
United States into a situation of increased tension with Iran, including the
possible mutual escalation of military threats. That, of course, would be the
result that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought
|
Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare By Gareth
Porter. Review by Edward S. Herman
SUNDAY, 30 MARCH 2014 23:08
Journalist-scholar Gareth
Porter has published another fine book on U.S. U.S. power has permitted it to bully and
manipulate the UN, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other
elements of the “international community,” with the collaboration of Israel and its other Western allies, into
selective harassment and even low-level warfare against Iran
Porter points out that the United States United States quickly
turned from encouraging Iran ’s
nuclear program to active hostility, going to great pains to discourage any
material or technology transfers to the new regime, even browbeating suppliers
from fulfilling contracts that would have permitted Iran Iran U.S. U.S. puppet and was independent, i.e., no longer
a U.S.
This U.S. hostility was displayed early in the
Carter administration’s failure to try to stop the Iraqi invasion of Iran , for which the United States Iran Iraq
with war materials, including cluster bombs, providing strategic advice, and
working to persuade other countries not to supply arms to Iran Iraq
Porter notes that the Iranians did not retaliate with their own
chemical weapons, and he points out later that there is no evidence that the
Islamic Republic has ever built any chemical weapons capability. The Islamic
leadership of Iran
In 1983 the Reagan administration obtained a cancellation of an
IAEA program of aid to the Iranian nuclear program, which was the
beginning of a systematic U.S.
effort to prevent any international assistance to Iran Iran Iran United States
Iran persisted in trying to develop its nuclear capability partly
for reasons of a desire to build up its entire range of technical
resources, partly perhaps to have a stand-by nuclear capability for a
weapons construction in case of urgent need (a “hedging” strategy), and partly
as a matter of national pride. Porter describes how universally the
Iranian populace supports a nuclear program, and not for its weaponization
capability, and thus how much pressure there is on its leadership to not
abandon it altogether under external threat.
Because of U.S.
power and hostility, whatever Iran
did in the way of acquiring nuclear materials or technology could be
portrayed as sinister; suppliers to Iran U.S.
instrument of attack on Iran
Because of these hostile reactions to any of its nuclear
transactions, along with Israel ’s
public threats, beginning in 1997, to bomb Iran ’s
nuclear facilities, Iran Iran Clinton Israel
The U.S. Iran policy of regime change, made explicit during
the Bush-Cheney years, made for unrelenting hostility toward and demonization
of the Iranian government. The Bush administration expected to attack Iran once they had done with Iraq , but the setback in Iraq not only stalled this invasion plan, it
made it harder for them to get the Iran United States
and Israel kept up a tattoo
of charges against Iran
Of course the charges against Iran Iran U.S. Israel Iraq Iraq
threat at the UN in February 2003, and in 2004 once again cited Curveball 2 in
supporting the Bush administration charges against Iran
There were many other claims of an Iranian pursuit of
nuclear weapons, and there was a steady struggle both within the IAEA and U.S. Iran Iran
Porter stresses throughout
the important role the mainstream media have played in manufacturing the Iran
The other major actors in this manufactured crisis are the leaders
of Israel Iran Palestine
by portraying Israel Iran Clinton threw his
weight into this campaign to win Israeli and hence U.S.
Porter spells out the confusion and contradictions in
Obama’s policy toward Iran Iran in public, he secretly gave a go ahead to a
joint U.S.-Israeli cyber-warfare program to disable Iran West Bank , which Netanyahu never fulfilled. Porter also
contends that Obama and Netanyahu colluded on a phony war crisis whereby
Netanyahu would threaten an attack on Iran ,
and the U.S. would not
oppose it publicly but with the understanding that Netanyahu would not
attack—the point being to worry Iran
and also worry Russia and China into agreeing to more severe sanctions on Iran
The Obama-Netanyahu alliance eventually fell apart, because
Netanyahu failed to carry out his part of the agreement and also
over-reached in putting pressure on Obama. Netanyahu counted on a Republican
electoral victory in 2012, and called on AIPAC and his political allies in
congress to force Obama to accept a “red line” beyond which the military option
would enter the picture. Following the election Obama backed off from the phony
war crisis plan, and he made it clear that he was not committed to the
red line and war option and couldn’t be counted on to follow Netanyahu into
war.
Porter gives great weight to the June 2013 election of Hassan
Rouhani as president of Iran
Porter’s book is notable for its focus on empirical evidence and
factual detail in making his cases and effectively refuting the claims
of the manufacturers of the crisis. In some respects this makes his book
more powerful and likely to be taken seriously by members of the establishment.
On the other hand, it sacrifices some of the drama and larger meanings of his
findings. For example, he points out that the Israelis have carried out a number of assassinations of Iranian
scientists, and that the Israelis and United States Israel
and the United States Iran ’s nuclear
facilities, and U.S.
So this is not merely a manufactured crisis, it is a joint
criminal enterprise that is not yet at an end. But like Porter we may hope that
it is or soon will be.
[Dick: I read this in Z
Magazine (April 2014)]
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