Richard Silverstein — Tikum Olam June 6, 2013

Alex Fishman, Yediot’s security correspondent, reports that the Pentagon spent millions of dollars to build an exact replica of an Iranian underground nuclear facility in the U.S.  I presume we’re talking about the Fordo complex.  It then armed a B-2 bomber with a new type of bunker buster bomb, which was used to great success in entirely destroying the facility.  The goal of the field exercise was to prove to U.S. allies (read, “Israel”) that our military had sufficient weaponry and delivery capability to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat if and when we decided that this was necessary.  In other words, the mission was to remove any possibility that Bibi Netanyahu could argue that Israel had to do the job itself because the U.S. either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Fishman describes in great detail the provisions for the test, indicating he had a very knowledgeable source.  I’m guessing it was either Dan Shapiro or perhaps the U.S. military attaché.  There is also a chance his sources were within the Israeli military: specifically those opposed to a unilateral Israeli strike.  That might explain why, in his article he never mentions the test was meant to convince Israeli officials.  He uses the oblique term, “friendly states” to describe Israel.  This might indicate he was skirting the military censor.

Fishman reports the Pentagon test involved the most advanced version of bunker buster bomb, first developed in July 2012.  It’s named the GBU 57B and is so heavy it can only be delivered by a B-2 bomber.  The bomb succeeded in penetrating not only the dirt and rock protective barriers, but the concrete roof of the underground facility.  What remained was an entirely obliterated complex.

Though the U.S. was loath to use one of the special new weapons because of its extremely high $3.5-million cost (the overall cost of developing the new weapon was $500-million).  The military determined that it would be money well spent if it could persuade Israel to restrain itself from an attack.  The size of the munition was six times greater than any other known bunker buster.  It weighs 13 tons and has a speed of penetration two times greater than the speed of sound at a rate of accuracy of five meters.

American officials meeting with their Israeli counterparts have assured them that looming cuts in the defense budget will not effect this program, which is one of the president’s top priorities.

As with almost everything regarding Iran, Israel and the U.S., much is play-acting and posturing.  This announcement too is part of the game.  Obama understands the absolute mess an Israeli attack would cause.  He can see how unstable the region is with Syria currently in shambles.  The last thing he needs is yet another match lit under this tinderbox.  So he tells his generals to prepare a grand field demonstration of American might that will persuade the IDF, and more importantly the war-party within the current government, that it doesn’t need to attack, since we can do the job quite nicely, thank you.

Source

Peter Osborne — The Telegraph May 29, 2013 via Stop the War Coalition

Almost four years have passed since Sir John Chilcot called a press conference to launch his inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War.

He grimly acknowledged that “there have been inquiries which have taken very long periods of time: they are being held on a quite different basis from ours”.

Sir John insisted that he was “determined to avoid… a long, drawn-out inquiry”. His would all be over within “a year and a half, maybe a bit more” – in other words, by the summer of 2011.

Sad to report, Sir John’s inquiry was (apparently) still at work in the summer of 2011. Then 2012 came and went. Earlier this year, there was a buzz around Whitehall that Sir John was due to announce his findings this summer, but this hope has also vanished.

Eyes are now starting to turn, in the words of one senior figure very close to the inquiry, towards “the end of this year and maybe 2014”.

Comparisons are being made privately to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which was published an unfeasible 12 years after being commissioned, and an outrageous 38 years after the events it investigated.

Furthermore, just the faintest stench is starting to surround Sir John’s inquiry: there is talk of documents being withheld, perhaps because too many senior reputations are at stake.

Until now, these worries have not been publicly articulated. This has now changed. David Owen, the former foreign secretary, who has followed the Iraq invasion and its consequences carefully from the start, last weekend made a series of extraordinary, and indeed devastating, allegations.

Speaking at a public meeting, Lord Owen said that the inquiry “is being prevented from revealing extracts that they believe relevant from exchanges between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair”. The culprits, he said, are Tony Blair and David Cameron: “Publication of the Bush extracts would not be blocked if Tony Blair had not objected, nor if that objection had not been supported by the present prime minister, David Cameron. Both men are hiding behind conventions that are totally inappropriate given the nature of the inquiry.”

Lord Owen then went further. He suggested that Cameron and Blair have entered into a private deal: Mr Cameron is helping to prevent publication of vital documents, essential to discovering the truth about the background to the Iraq War, in return for political support for the Tories. “No 10 reveals that they are in constant contact on many issues with Tony Blair and Blair’s own people confirm this,” he said. “Not for nothing does Cameron see himself still as the ‘heir to Blair’. It is hard to escape the conclusion that No 10 hopes to… win the neutrality or possibly tacit support of Blair by the General Election.”

Many people will be eager to dismiss Lord Owen’s allegation, and no wonder. He is in effect asserting that there is an active conspiracy between past and present prime minister to hide the truth about Iraq. It sounds absurd.

Nevertheless, Lord Owen’s comments deserve to be taken seriously, and not simply because he is a former foreign secretary and privy counsellor who knows the issues – and many of those involved – extremely well. For example, he is right to draw attention to the political closeness between Tony Blair and the current Prime Minister. It is true that Tory strategists have long worked on detaching Tony Blair from Ed Miliband, just as Blair in his day successfully encouraged Margaret Thatcher to turn on John Major. Indeed, the Blair business empire, which has made millions giving very profitable advice to Middle Eastern and African dictators, could not exist for a second without the implicit consent of the Foreign Office.

But now for the core of Lord Owen’s accusation. It is not ridiculous for the ex-foreign secretary to claim that sinister forces may have been at work when it comes to Chilcot. Certainly, something went very wrong with each of the first four inquiries into the Iraq War.

For example, the report by the foreign affairs committee in 2003 was almost completely worthless, because it was effectively controlled by the government whips office. The following year, as we have recently learnt, vital facts were withheld from the Butler Inquiry, of which Sir John was a member. None of this comes as a surprise, for very powerful interests are at stake.

If Chilcot were to conclude that Tony Blair lied over Iraq (and many well-placed people are convinced he did) it would be a first-order catastrophe for the former prime minister. He would be disgraced, just as Anthony Eden was after it emerged that he had lied to Parliament over the invasion of Suez in 1956. His political life would be over and his reputation destroyed. It is not merely that he would be unable to return to British politics. He would also be forced to abandon all ambitions on the international stage, such as his professed desire to become European Union president.

The central allegation against Mr Blair is that he gave a private assurance in early 2002 to President Bush that Britain would join the United States in an invasion of Iraq. Thereafter, it is said, all was decided. Even though Mr Blair later highlighted Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and misrepresented what he was being told by the intelligence services to the House of Commons, it was of little significance to him, because the die had been cast anyhow.

Hence the central importance of access to those conversations. They are likely to cast much-needed light on whether or not the allegations that the prime minister struck a private deal with the president are true. Yet, amazingly, the Chilcot Inquiry’s website states that it has “not yet” even “begun its dialogue” with government over the treatment of these Blair/Bush conversations.

Four years ago, when still in opposition, David Cameron claimed that Chilcot was part of an “establishment stitch-up”. Now he has changed his mind. He suggests instead that it wasn’t needed in the first place. “I would want to reassure people and say the lessons of Iraq have been learned,” he told the BBC last month, when asked whether intelligence concerning the use of chemical weapons in Syria could be trusted. But this is not reassuring at all: it was the job of Sir John Chilcot to learn the lessons of the Iraq fiasco, and his report is now three years overdue.

Sir John’s failure to deliver on time is part of what is becoming a Whitehall pattern. The Gibson Inquiry into powerful allegations that Britain was involved in extraordinary rendition and torture, also supported by the prime minister in opposition, has been abandoned. We ought to have enough confidence in our magnificent values to be able to cast daylight on our national errors, crimes and misfortunes. Yet, as the experience of Gibson, Chilcot and Hillsborough suggests, the culture of secrecy seems always to prevail.

Source

Secretary of State John Kerry told Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that Iraq must take steps to stop the flow of Iranian weapons and fighters to Syria through Iraqi airspace. But a nearly two hour long “spirited discussion” between Kerry and Maliki failed to produce any immediate agreement.

The U.S. believes that Iraqi allows Iran to use its airspace to deliver arms to the Assad regime on an almost daily basis. In a press conference following their meeting, Secretary Kerry said that the overflights from Iran are “problematic” and that they are “helping to sustain President Assad and his regime.”

Kerry said that he agreed to provide more information on the Iranian overflights and their lethal cargo to the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government maintains that the Iranian planes are only delivering humanitarian support. A senior U.S. official traveling with John Kerry said that there is “substantial” intelligence that contradicts that claim but declined to detail how that intelligence was gathered or how many of these Iranian flights have taken place.

The Secretary of State also mentioned that there are members of Congress and others “who are increasingly watching what Iraq is doing.” That comment recalled remarks by then-Senator Kerry who suggested last September that Congress should consider making U.S. aid to Iraq dependent on their compliance.

Kerry’s visit to Iraq, the first by a U.S. Secretary of State in nearly 4 years, comes amidst concern that U.S. influence is waning and that Prime Minister Maliki’s government is growing closer to neighbor Iran. Maliki has long-standing relationships with Iranian and Syrian officials from his time as Shia dissident. He built those relationships during the late 1970s in an effort to get their help to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Since Maliki became Prime Minister, those ties have proved useful to maintain his own hold on power. However, they are problematic for the U.S. and its efforts to isolate Iran and cut off the regime of Syria’s Bashar al Assad.

The U.S. believes that the Iranian army and Iranian-backed fighters like Hezbollah have been fighting alongside Bashar al Assad’s military during the past two years of the Syrian civil war. The U.S. is also concerned that Al Qaeda fighters have been entering Syria across the Iraqi border. A senior U.S. official cited the recent fighting between an Al Qaeda in Iraq column and the Syrian military as evidence of the spillover.

Prime Minister Maliki has publicly stated his fears that the fall of the Assad regime will cause a political vacuum and that the sectarian tensions and violence of the Syrian civil could spillover into Iraq. During his meetings in Baghdad, Kerry warned Prime Minister Maliki that Iraq’s influence in the future of Syria will be limited unless his government cuts off support for the Assad regime.

The visit by Secretary Kerry came just a week after the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Secretary Kerry acknowledged the “remarkable sacrifices by so many Iraqis and Americans who gave their lives” in war to oust Saddam Hussein. While the U.S. has spilled much blood and treasure in Iraq, U.S. officials quietly acknowledge that their leverage is diminishing.

There are no remaining U.S. troops in Iraq and the U.S. diplomatic presence has also shrunk. U.S. Embassy Baghdad, the largest diplomatic compound in the world, has seen staff reductions. By the end of 2013, there will be 5,100 personnel who are direct U.S. government hires. There were 16,000 employed last year

Source

The Iraqi army has reportedly shelled Free Syrian Army positions inside Syria near the border with Iraq. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Iraq was helping Syrian government forces regain control of a border checkpoint seized by the insurgency.

Syrian troops have recaptured the Al-Ya’robiya checkpoint on the border with Iraq on Friday night. According to witness reports on Twitter, Iraq’s armed forces moved in to help with the operation and shelled the border post, which was held by the rebels.

An Al-Arabiya correspondent also confirmed that targets inside Syria had been shelled while Iraqi snipers took positions near the crossing. Massive reinforcements have also been deployed in Baghdad near the Syrian border, the correspondent said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights announced that a border checkpoint on Syria’s northeast border with Iraq had been overrun by rebel fighters from the Al-Nusra Front on Thursday but were recaptured by government troops after less than 24 hours. 

Earlier on Friday, the conflict once again spilled into neighboring Iraq after a Scud missile fired from Syria landed near a village in Iraq’s Nineveh province, causing no significant damage. Last time rockets fired from Syrian territory hit Iraq, in September 2012, they killed a 5-year-old girl.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned on Wednesday that a Syrian rebel victory could spark sectarian violence in his own country and the whole region.

“Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish each other off,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian war in Iraq.”

Source

Transcript 

Hassan Ghani: An award for integrity and honesty, for work that essentially prevented a war. Thomas Fingar, now a Professor at Stanford University, oversaw the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in 2007, during a period when the Bush administration was beating the drums of war. Its conclusion, that all 16 US intelligence agencies judged with high confidence that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, placed an insurmountable obstacle on the path to conflict.

Critics of the report’s conclusions say it was politicised. But speaking to us in Oxford, where he’s currently teaching as part of an overseas programme, Thomas Fingar told us that unlike the flawed WMD report on Iraq in 2002, his assessment has withstood scrutiny over the years.

Professor Thomas Fingar, Chairman of National Intelligence Council (2005-2008): “The assessment of our estimate has been reviewed many times. Many times before we issued it, many times in the years since, in the years since with additional information. Judging by the public statements, the annual threat testimony and the other statements of the administration, which must be consistent with the classified report, they haven’t changed it. It stood up as good analytic tradecraft. There are people who characterise it as if it was written in order to prevent war – that’s not why it was written, it was written to describe the situation as best we understood it.

Hassan Ghani: When asked what went wrong in 2002, Fingar says those authoring the NIE on Iraq caved in to pressure to produce a rushed report.

Professor Thomas Fingar, Chairman of National Intelligence Council (2005-2008): “They produced an estimate in 17 days. That was the congressionally imposed deadline agreed to by George Tenet. So they produced something in 17 days, which had two weekends in there. It’s a classic case of you want something real bad, you get something real bad. Stuff pulled off the shelf not really re-evaluated, no ability to go back and really tear into this stuff. And we were not going to make that mistake again with the Iran estimate. So we took the heat and said ‘you don’t get it until we’re ready’.”

Hassan Ghani: But he that ultimately politicians can choose to ignore the intelligence agencies, if they don’t get the results they want.

Professor Thomas Fingar, Chairman of National Intelligence Council (2005-2008): “The decision to go to war had clearly been made before that estimate was undertaken. Troops were moving, you could not have been in Washington and not known there was going to be war. For I&R we said there’s not evidence of a reconstituted nuclear programme – that was the only one that really mattered – and we said no, evidence isn’t there, the evidences can all be explained in other ways. That’s the third sentence of the estimate. So if you cared about this enough to read to the third sentence, you’d know that there was a dissent on the major justification for the conflict.”

Hassan Ghani: The Sam Adams associates present their award each year for integrity in intelligence. Many previous awardees have been intelligence professionals and whistleblowers.

2010 Sam Adams awardee, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, was piped into the ceremony by video link. He used the opportunity to tackle an upcoming Hollywood movie, which he says is an attack on Wikileaks, and renews the push for war with Iran.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks: “We have something here, which is a recent acquisition of Wikileaks. The script to a tens of millions of dollar budget Dreamworks movie. What is it about? It is about us, nominally. It is about Wikileaks the organisation. It is a mass propaganda attack against Wikileaks the organisation and the character of my staff and our activities and so on. But it is not just an attack against us, it fans the flames to start a war with Iran. It’s coming out in November, it’s being filmed now. So that’s the reality of where we’re at. Not merely a war of intelligence agencies, but a war of corrupt media, corrupt culture.”

Hassan Ghani: Sam Adams himself was a CIA analyst in the Vietnam-era, tasked with estimating enemy strength in numbers. His conclusion that the Viet-cong numbered at least half a million, twice the official figure, was swept under the rug at the time, seen as politically unacceptable. He later did go public, but too late to have an impact on the war.

Raymond McGovern, Former CIA Analyst: “He went to an early death at age 55, with great remorse that he had not gone outside the system, that he had not said what he knew back in 1967, half way through the war. The way he explained it to me is, that Vietnam memorial, made of granite in a V, that whole left section wouldn’t be there, because there would be no names to carve into that granite. If he had spoken out, if I had spoken out, if we had spoken around 1967, when we had that cable from General Abrahams saying ‘we can’t go with the honest figures, because we’ve been projecting a view of progress’.”

Hassan Ghani: And so just as interesting as this year’s award winner, are those presenting it to him. Former US Army Colonel Ann Wright resigned as a State department official in protest over the Iraq War. She argues that too many within government are carried along with political tides, often at the expense of what’s best for the nation.

Ann Wright, Former US State Dep. Official: “There were so many people, that were a part of the decision to go ahead and invade and occupy Iraq, that knew better. That knew that the rationale for it was wrong, but they went along with the senior leadership of our country, who for whatever reason it was, whether it was for oil or for whatever it was, wanted to take out the Saddam Hussein regime.”

Hassan Ghani: Like other Sam Adams associates, she sees whistleblowers as an essential check to keep the system in balance.

Ann Wright, Former US State Dep. Official: “So many whistleblowers find that the system doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. Because usually it’s something that the government system is doing wrong and whistleblowers are saying ‘wait wait, this is going wrong’ or ‘maybe there’s even criminal acts that are happening that the government’s involved in and we’ve got to stop that and change it’. And we find that many times the government and senior officials in the government don’t want to hear that.”

Hassan Ghani: Previous Sam Adams award winner, Coleen Rowley, blew the whistle after 9/11 on major intelligence sharing failures within the FBI in the run up to the attacks. Her 9/11 commission testimony helped re-organise the agency and the way information is shared.

Coleen Rowley, Former FBI Agent, Whistleblower: “They realised that 9/11 occurred because the agencies blocked information from each other, they blocked it vertically, horizontally, and they blocked it from the public. So the people who are in those environments, when information is blocked and there is lack of sharing, what is their choice? They almost have to either become a whistleblower or then live forever with the consequences of knowing that they could have done something. That’s why Wikileaks, or a method of sharing information, and of course I talked about sharing information between agencies, but it’s also with the public. The 9/11 commission said if the information even had been shared of Moussawi’s arrest, that would have probably prevented 9/11. So it’s an incredible situation, most people think that secrecy is protecting them, and it’s the exact opposite.”

Hassan Ghani: Rowley believes much more information should be made public, whether or not it’s politically embarrassing.

Coleen Rowley, Former FBI Agent, Whistleblower: “We’ve had some good inspector general investigations, for instance of torture in the CIA, to this day though it remains secret. And you see the opposite is Abu Ghraib, that report was made public, and so at least the public learned about it, and there was at the time an outcry about the fact that it was discovered that abuses were occurring in Abu Ghraib. But the CIA torture report, I think it’s probably a good investigation, but the public still doesn’t know, and so what’s happened? There’s a movie out there that’s using a false narrative – the public doesn’t know that it’s false, because how would they know? Because they’ve never seen the truth. It’s a pretty incredible situation, the truth really matters.”

Hassan Ghani: The US government says it’s necessary to prosecute whistleblowers to protect national security. And for whistleblowers who do choose to go public, the consequences are increasingly dangerous.

Coleen Rowley, Former FBI Agent, Whistleblower: “Especially under Obama, there have been prosecutions, I think it’s 7 now, twice as many as all Presidents of all time, under the official espionage act. If you go back to deepthroat, and the FBI who knew that the highest level of President’s men were actually engaging wrongdoing – would that repeat today? I really wonder, especially now with the surveillance and the monitoring.”

Hassan Ghani: Thomas Drake is the only whistleblower so far who’s managed to fight espionage charges under Obama and win – there are six other cases. A former senior executive at the NSA, he blew the whistle to the media on a failed billion dollar surveillance programme which he believed violated the constitution.

Thomas Drake, Former NSA Executive, Whistleblower: “I would I eyewitness to massive fraud, waste and abuse on a multi-billion dollar program, a boondoggle programme called trailblazer, when there was actually a superior alternative, and was also a program that would have completely honoured the fourth amendment and the exclusive statute by which the US government, NSA, was authorised to violate the fourth amendment rights fo Americans. That was under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wilfully broke the law, criminally. But what happened later, as all of this came out and I ended up going to a reporter, decriminalised the reporting of the government wrong doing. They criminalized the reporting of government criminal conduct.”

Hassan Ghani: Drake says he was careful not to reveal any classified information, and after reviewing laws on disclosure, thought that the worst that could happen is that he would lose his job. Instead, he faced espionage charges amounting to 35 years in prison.

Thomas Drake, Former NSA Executive, Whistleblower: “I was turned into enemy of the state, I mean I’m charged with the espionage act, I’m being put into the same category as historical spies in US history, the Alder Hiss’, the Robert Hanssens, the Alrdich Ames of the world. That the category of people you become associated with. So it’s probably one of the worst things an american can be charged with, under the espionage act, because you are painted into a very dark corner, you have betrayed your country. I was put under investigation by the bush administration, but the Bush administration never actually indicted me, it took the Obama administration to actually indictment me. And when they indicted me, they threw everything they had at me.

In 2008, his presidential campaign, he actually lauded whistleblowers, he called them out as patriots. Who better to call the government onto the carpet when they’re up to no good. And yet he’s presided over the most draconian crackdown on truth tellers and whistleblowers of any administration, actually all administrations combined. It truly is unprecedented.

Hassan Ghani: Despite immense pressure to plead out, Drake maintained his innocence, and on the eve of trial government prosecutors dropped the charges. But Thomas Drake has been left blacklisted, financially bankrupt, and disturbed at the path his country is following.

Thomas Drake, Former NSA Executive, Whistleblower: “I’m having great difficulty recognising my own country, in terms of the government, the form of government under which I took an oath to support and defend four times in my government career. Any yet I was criminalized, and was painted as an enemy of the state, for simply speaking truth to power, and it was clear they were going to make me an object lesson, and they threw everything they had at me.

Hassan Ghani: Of course, it’s not just US administrations that face accusations of covering up fraud and criminal acts under the guise of national security. Annie Machon was an agent in the British spy agency MI5. She claims Britain is ahead of the US in terms of stifling whistleblowers from within the intelligence community.

Annie Machon, Former MI5 Agent, Whistleblower: “They a rethink about the official secrets act and launched a new in 1989, the 1989 official secrets act, which obviated, got rid of, the public interest defence. And the only reason that clause was put in was to stifle whistleblowing. There’s already that old law to stop treachery, so this is designed to stifle whistleblowers. And it has been used many times in the UK since, against David Shayler, Richard Tomlinson, Katherine Gun, and it has a very chilling effect on the idea that if you see crimes committed by the spy agencies, what do you do with that information? The only person that you can go to legally under the OSA of 1989 is the head of the agency you wish to make a complaint against. So you can imagine how many of those complaints are upheld.

And I think it’s particularly pertinent at the moment, certainly in the last 10 years, where we’ve seen false information fed into the political process, where we’ve seen politicisation of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war, with the Downing Street memo and the head of MI6 saying the intelligence facts had to be fitted around the policy. And also where we see torture and extraordinary rendition, where our British spies are being used to do that and they are protected under a lot of secrecy laws, and the government in fact wants to make greater protection for them by setting up secret courts, where the accused can’t even see what they’re accused of. It’s Kafkaesque.”

Hassan Ghani: Allegations against British intelligence services of complicity in torture do still make it through to the media when the alleged victims speak out. But with tight laws around disclosure in the UK, it’s impossible to say whether or not what we hear is just a fraction of what’s taking place.

Annie Machon, Former MI5 Agent, Whistleblower: “I worked in MI5 in the mid-1990s for six years. That I would say would be the only marginally ethical decade of its hundred year existence, because up until 1989 it did not officially exist – it could do whatever it wanted – and post 9/11 the gloves came off with the intelligence agencies. So in the 1990s peace was breaking out, they didn’t get involved in torture, they stopped looking at political activists, the whole shebang. So that was actually the more ethical era, and yet in those six years David Shayler and I saw so much going wrong that we felt compelled to blow the whistle. So how much worse is it now? That has to be the question. I think all we’re seeing now with extradition and torture cases is definitely very much the tip of the iceberg.

Hassan Ghani: It’s clear that the act of whistleblowing, even in the public interest, is under serious threat. Some may consider this a positive development in terms of national security. Others see it as the end of public accountability for those in positions of power.

Thomas Drake, Former NSA Executive, Whistleblower: “If the government begins to exercise increasing influence, even if it’s self-censorship where people will not speak up because they’re afraid that they’re going to be noticed by the government, that means that critical information about government activities will never see the light of day. And especially the secret side of government, you would think that’s the part of government you want the most accountability with. Well, if they’re choking off the sources and they’re making it very clear, even though I was able to prevail and hold off the government and remained a free man, the message was still sent.”

Source

“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare…. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” (Winston S. Churchill, 1874-1965, from War Office minute, 12th May 1919.)

As the sabre rattling against Syria gets ever louder, the allegations ever wilder and double standards, stirring, plotting and terrorist financing (sorry: “aiding the legitimate opposition”) neon lit, it is instructive to look at the justifications presented by US Administrations for a few other murderous incursions in recent history.

This month is the twenty third anniversary of the US invasion of Panama on 20th December 1989, as Panamanians prepared their Christmas celebrations. A quick check reminds the late Philip Agee recalling President George H.W. Bush telling the American people that the threat from Panama (pop: 3,571,185 – 2011) was such that: “our way of life is at stake.” Agee referred to this in his aptly named talk “Producing the Proper Crisis.”(i) Apt then as now. Nothing changes.

The aim of the invasion was to capture the country’s leader General Manuel Noriega and, of course, to: “establish a democratic government.” Regime change.

With the approaching transfer of control of the Panama Canal to Panama (originally scheduled for 1st January 1990) after a century of US colonial stewardship, America wanted to ensure it was in the hands of malleable allies.

Noriega a CIA asset, since 1967 (ii) who had also attended the notorious School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia, came to power with US backing, but seemingly his support for the US was cooling. To encapsulate a long story, the US kidnapped him and sentenced him to forty years in jail.

Plans to invade were called: “Operation Prayer Book.” It was later re-named “Operation Just Cause”, with General Colin Powell commenting that it was a moniker of which he approved as: ”Even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ whilst denouncing us.” (Colin Powell, with Jospeh E. Persico: “My American Journey”, 1995.)

All military marauding should simply be called: “Operation Silly Name 1, then 2,3,4” etc., until the numbers finally run out.

Twenty seven thousand US troops backed by Apache helicopters decimated much of the small country, with a defence force of just three thousand. George Bush Snr., said he was removing an evil dictator who was brutalizing his own people (sound familiar?) and that the action was needed to:” protect American lives.” It was also to: “defend democracy and human rights in Panama” – and to “protect the Canal.” Surprise, eh?

Manuel Noriega was released from US jail in 2007, extradited to France which had awarded him the country’s highest honour, The Legion d’honneur in 1987. He remained in jail in France until December 2011, when he was returned to Panama, where he is still imprisoned.

In the near forgotten Panama decimation (unless you are Panamanian) the densely populated, poverty stricken neighbourhood of El Chorillo was incinerated by American actions to such an extent that it became named “Little Hiroshima.”

One woman charged that: “The North Americans began burning down El Chorillo at about 6.30 in the morning. They would throw a small device in to a house and it would catch on fire – then they would move to another, they burned from one street to the next, coordinating the burning on walkie-talkies.”

US soldier was recorded stating: “We ask you to surrender … if you do not, we are prepared to level each and every building.”

“Everything that moved they shot”, said a city resident.

The dead were consigned to mass graves with witnesses stating that US troops used flame throwers on the dead, noting the bodies shriveling as they burned. Others were bulldozed in to piles.(iii)

There was worse. As the current self righteous, if contradictory statements flow from Washington and Whitehall about Syria’s unproven chemical weapons, proven facts relate to America’s.

“From the 1940s to the 1990s the United States used various parts of Panama as a testing ground for chemical weapons, including mustard gas, VX, sarin, hydrogen cyanide and other nerve agents in … mines, rockets and shells; perhaps tens of thousands of chemical munitions.” (William Blum: Rogue State, 2002.)

Further, on departing Panama at the end of 1999 they left: “many sites containing chemical weapons. They had also: “conducted secret tests of Agent Orange in Panama …” In the 1989 invasion, the village of Pacora, near Panama City: “was bombed with (chemicals) by helicopters and aircraft from US Southern Command, with substances that burned skin, caused intense pain and diarrhea.”

Many analysts felt that Panama was the testing ground for Iraq.

Nine months after the poisoning of Panama, on Hiroshima Day 1990, the strangulating US-driven embargo on Iraq was enforced by the UN, after the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie had given the green light for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, after Kuwait’s considerable provocation and financial and geographical destabilization.(iv.)

The hype over chemical and other weapons went in to overdrive, leading Saddam Hussein to comment: “I am afraid, one day, you will say ‘You are going to make gunpowder out of wheat.’ ”

Thirteen months after Panama, America led a thirty one country coalition to “reduce Iraq to a pre-industrial age.” The only chemicals released from Iraq were the poisonous mix from the bombed pharmaceutical and fertilizer factories, the car manufacturing plants and the factories of Iraq’s entire industrial base, including the compounds holding the chemical and biological substances, including medical ones, sold to Iraq by the US, UK Germany and others over the previous decades, sales ironically, still ongoing at the time of the onslaught. (v.)

Highly toxic and radioactive substances were introduced into Iraq however, in the form of up to seven hundred and fifty tonnes of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium munitions (DU) which have a toxic “half life” of 4.5 billion years. Iraq’s litany of deformed, still born, aborted babies, infants born with cancers, the tiny graves, silent testimony to weapons of mass destruction of unique wickedness. Iraq was bombed for forty two days and nights.

The hyped chemical weapons alleged to have been manufactured by Iraq were, of course, never deployed.

On 24th March 1999, NATO began to liberate Kosovo from Serbia. (US Silly Name: Operation Noble Anvil) Kosovo had an estimated ten trillion dollars worth of “inexhaustible” minerals in the Trebca mines.

The “liberation” was seventy eight days of relentless bombardment, including use of depleted uranium weaponry. Twenty thousand tonnes of bombs were dispatched. Destroyed systematically were communications centres, fuel depots, airports, traffic communications, trains, markets, the Chinese Embassy – China was against the attack, NATO, resoundingly unconvincingly, said they had the wrong map. And of course, the media centre. Murdering journalists is now another routine, unaccountable war crime.

Before the attack, the Pentagon stated that the Army of Yugoslavia possessed at least two kinds of poisonous gasses, with the facilities to produce them. The US Department of Defense warned Slobodan Milosevic the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army : “If Belgrade uses poisonous gasses sarin and mustard gas against NATO, the response of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will be devastating.”

Oddly, after the air strikes began, NATO mentioned not one word to indicate that it was attacking Serbia’s US-stated capacity to produce chemical weapons. (Zagred Globus, 16th April 1999, pp 18-19.)

The industrial scale destruction, however, left the Trebca mines unscathed.

On 14th August 2000, nine hundred heavily armed British, French, Italian, Pakistani and KFOR troops were landed from helicopters at the mines. Managers and workers tried to fight them off and were beaten, tear gassed with plastic bullets used. The resisting staff were arrested.

UN papers described the action as: “ … induction of democratization in Kosovo.” The attack in fact, paved the way for selling of the mines -containing “the inexhaustible” estimated 77,302,000 tons of coal, copper, zinc, lead, nickel, gold, silver, marble, manganese, iron ore, asbestos and limestone “to name a few” – to private foreign groups. (News reports, websites.)

The “Kosovo Liberation Army” had been: “ … trained for years and supported with millions of US dollars and German Marks … through the CIA and BND” (German Intelligence) “for this war, misleadingly called a civil war”(vi) by NATO governments and spokespersons.

DU’s chemical and radiological properties were rained down throughout former Yugoslavia too. By 2001, doctors in the Serb run hospital in Kosovo Mitrovica stated that the number of patients suffering from malignant diseases had increased by two hundred percent since a 1998 survey.

A 2003 study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) found drinking water and air samples contaminated in Bosnia Herzegovina. There was, of course: “no cause for alarm.” Pekka Haavisto, former Environment Minister of Finland, Heading UNEP, called for a wide and thorough scientific investigation to establish the full extent and hazards of the contamination. The US – cited as the only country to use DU weaponry in that conflict – blocked the request. (vii.)

However alarm was raised in Europe when Italian, Portuguese, Belgian and French peacekeepers in the region developed cancers, within a matter of months, a high proportion of those diagnosed died. Norwegian peacekeepers refused to be deployed.(viii.)

“Less than a month after the war in Yugoslavia ended in 1999, the British National Radiological Protection Board warned British citizens about the dangers from staying in Kosovo because of the contamination of its territories by D.U. weapons.”

The peacekeepers, of course were there for just weeks or months, the people of the region live there, the plight of their health and that of future generations ignored and forgotten by their “liberators.” They had other “tyrants” to topple, other populations to relieve of their lives and limbs and livelihoods.

Iraq, had again been bombed by the US and UK during the Christmas season of 1998, four months before the assault on Yugoslavia and had been back on the invasion radar ever since. The lies were familiar – and relentless, a currently topical example, one of of countless:

“2nd September 2002: Experts: Iraq has tons of chemical weapons.

“As some in the Bush administration press the case for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, weapons experts say there is mounting evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has amassed large stocks of chemical and biological weapons he is hiding from a possible U.S. military attack.

“Washington’s concern is that Iraq could supply those weapons to terrorist groups … ‘If we wait for the danger to become clear, it could be too late’ said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.”

With Biden now Vice President, it is impossible not to wonder whether he has any input in to the Syria spin, with its uncannily similar words.

“Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Iraq’s inventory is significant: ‘Iraq continues to possess several tons of chemical weapons agents, enough to kill thousands and thousands of civilians or soldiers’, Wolfsthal said.” (ix)

Further: “U.N. weapons experts have said Iraq may have stockpiled more than 600 metric tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, VX and sarin. Some 25,000 rockets and 15,000 artillery shells with chemical agents are also unaccounted for, the experts said.

“The concern is they either have on hand — or could quickly re-create the capability to produce — vast amounts of anthrax, tons of material”, was Wolfsthal’s additional spin.

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld” asserted :“… Iraq has mobile biological weapons laboratories, which would be nearly impossible for U.S. forces to target.” The lives of thousands of people were at stake, he said. Indeed, since the invasion, Iraqi deaths at American and British hands or that of their militias, and imposed puppet government, are nothing short of holocaustal.

According to Jonathan Schwartz, who revisited General Colin Powell’s pack of lies on Iraq to the UN on 5th February 2003 : “ My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence …” Powell is now regretful.

Schwartz is unsympathetic. On the fifth anniversary of Powell’s misleading nonsense, 5th February 2008, he commented: “As much criticism as Powell has received for this – he calls it ‘painful’ and something that will ‘always be a part of my record’ – it hasn’t been close to what’s justified. Powell was far more than just horribly mistaken, the evidence is conclusive that he fabricated evidence and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false.”

The entirely illegal invasion of Iraq, based on a trans-Atlantic pack of lies had commenced just forty five days later. Operation Very Silly Name? “Operation Iraqi Liberation”: OIL.

The lies over Libya – which under Colonel Quadaffi came top of the Human Development Index for Africa – are of recent memory. Nevertheless a few reminders:

CIA paid Quislings abound in the above invasions and others over many decades. Meet General Abdul Fatah Younis, Colonel Gaddafi’s Interior Minister, who “defected to the opposition” – wonder what his price was – and became chief of staff of the insurgents: “ … he pleaded for NATO allies to arm the rebels with heavy weapons, including helicopters and anti-tank missiles, to defend the besieged city of Misurata.. He predicted the dictator … would be ready to use chemical weapons in a last stand against rebels or the civilian population.” (Amazing, words straight out of the current Syria “opposition” check list.)

“Gaddafi is desperate now. Unfortunately he still has about 25 per cent of his chemical weapons, which he might use as he’s in a desperate situation. …”

“Col. Gaddafi is known to have around ten tons of mustard gas remaining from stocks that he had been destroying under the supervision of a United Nations body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”(x.)

In context, back in 2002, Neil Mackay, multi-award winning investigations Editor of the Sunday Herald explained that: “Driven by greed and a profound lack of morality, the British government violated the Chemical weapons Convention by selling chemicals “that could be converted to weapons of war.”

Countries benefiting from UK sales, Mackay stated, included Libya, Yemen, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, India, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey and Uganda, a charge the Department of Trade and Industry “clearly admitted.”

After Tony Blair’s embrace of Colonel Gaddafi in March 2004, the British government announced plans to send their experts to Libya to destroy the chemical weapons they had sold, stating that Colonel Gaddafi had mislead Blair over their existence. That they had the remittance documents seems to have escaped them. Identical to UK duplicities over Iraq.

Between the start of Libya’s destruction on 19th March 2011 and NATO taking over on 31st March 2011, the US and UK dropped one hundred and ten Cruise missiles on a country with a population of under six and a half million. When NATO assumed command of the “humanitarian intervention” they assaulted this minimal population with 26,500 bomb- releasing sorties.

There were, of course no Presidential tears for Libya’s lost children, whose demise would have been preceded by unimaginable terror, in an onslaught which had two Silly Names, one for the US: “Operation Odyssey Dawn” and one for NATO: “Operation Unified Protector”, the latter, comment defying.

Quadaffi himself lost three small grandchildren and three sons. In 1986 in another US bombing, he lost a just toddling adopted daughter.

Moments after she learned of his terrible death at the hands of a rabid NATO “protected” mob, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on television laughing as she said: “We came, we saw, he died.”

What an age since she said: “I really believe that it takes a village to raise a child.” Now her beliefs are apparently to wipe out the village, its children, parents and lynch the village elder for a tele-opportunity of raucous mirth.

On 4th December 2012, Clinton warned that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad may be moving, guess what – a “chemical weapons stockpile.”

“We have made our views very clear.This is a red line for the United States. I’m not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against his own people, but suffice to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur,” she said at a press conference in Prague.

Weapons of course: “could be used to contain sarin gas”, according to another U.S. official. Another added: “ … we are concerned about any move that might signal that they are somehow ready to use those chemical weapons on their own people.” (xii.)

“Déjà vu all over again”, as the saying goes.

Syria responded on 6th December: “Syria stresses again, for the tenth, the hundredth time, that if we had such weapons, they would not be used against its people. We would not commit suicide,” Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Al Maqdad told Lebanon’s Al Manar television …”

“We fear there is a conspiracy to provide a pretext for any subsequent interventions in Syria by these countries that are increasing pressure on Syria.” Indeed. It would hardly be a first.

In late October US troops arrived in Jordan for a major joint exercise near the Syrian border. Operation Silly and Childish Name: “Operation Eager Lion.” Al Assad in arabic translates as: the lion.

Ironically the first allegation of Syria having chemical weapons would seem to have come from John R.Bolton, alleged by Congressman Henry Waxman to have persuaded George W. Bush to include the fairy story of Iraq purchasing yellow cake uranium from Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address.The allegation is unproven, however, since the documents are still classified.

Bolton is involved with a plethora of less than liberal organizations, including the Project for the New American Century, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the currently in the news, The National Rifle Association.

Relating to Syria, it should also be remembered that the country has been under increasingly strangulating sanctions since 2004.

Former Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter has written that: “chemical weapons have a shelf life of five years. Biological weapons have a shelf life of three.” They also give off an “ether”, say experts, which can be picked up by satellite surveillance, which Syria, as Iraq before it is certain to be comprehensively subject of.

Heaven forbid Washington, Whitehall, Tel Aviv and the coalition of the coerced are crying “Wolf!” again. Heaven help anyone who believes them.

Notes

i.http://www.serendipity.li/cia/agee_1.html

ii.http://revcom.us/a/017/us-invasion-panama.htm

iii.http://www.addictedtowar.com/docs/panama.htm

iv.http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-war-on-iraq-five-us-presidents-five-british-prime-ministers-thirty-years-of-duplicity-and-counting/20510

v.http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.htm

vi.http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=785

vii. http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/un_du.htm

viii.http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1803/18030580.htm

ix.http://articles.cnn.com/2002-09-02/world/iraq.weapons_1_biological-weapons-weapons-inspectors-iraqi-president-saddam-hussein?_s=PM:WORLD

x.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8481250/Libya-Col-Gaddafi-still-has-quarter-of-chemical-weapons-stockpile.html

xi.http://news.yahoo.com/clinton-assads-chemical-weapons-red-line-us-170103890–abc-news-politics.html

Source

Over 3,000 US troops have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait for missions pertaining to the recent developments in Syria and northern Iraq, Press TV reports.

According to our correspondent, the US troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province.

Reports say the troops include US Army officers and almost 17,000 more are set to secretly return to Iraq via the same route.

All US troops left Iraq by the end of 2011, after nine years of occupation, as required by a 2008 bilateral security agreement between the two countries. The troops left Iraq for the neighboring Kuwait.

Washington decided to pull out all its troops from Iraq after Baghdad refused to grant legal immunity to the remaining US soldiers.

Washington claims that the only US military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the US Embassy, as well as a small contingent of marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

US-led forces attacked Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein on the pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. But no WMD was ever discovered in Iraq. At the peak of the US-led military operation in Iraq, there were 170,000 US troops and more than 500 bases in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

HM/PKH/SS

Source

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief has drafted a plan to cause an environmental disaster in the Strait of Hormuz to block seaborne oil exports with the goal of removing economic sanctions imposed on Tehran, the German weekly Der Spiegel has said.

The German news magazine said Mohammad Ali Jafari’s plan, codenamed “Muddy Water”, envisages the Iranians steering a tanker onto the rocks in the Strait, the world’s most important oil shipping waterway.

The magazine said: “The aim is to block shipping temporarily through the contamination, to ‘punish’ adjacent Arab states that are hostile to Iran and to force the West to take part in a large-scale clean-up of the waters.

“A decontamination would only be possible with technical help from the Iranian authorities and for this the embargo would have to be at least temporarily lifted. Iranian firms, some of them owned by the Revolutionary Guards, could even profit from the rescue operations.”

Der Spiegel gave no source for its report, but said Western intelligence services were studying the plan, which it said now required only the approval of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for it to be put into effect.

Iran’s economy is buckling under the weight of Western sanctions – expanded again yesterday by the European Union – aimed at forcing the country to suspend its nuclear programme and negotiate seriously to resolve concerns that it is covertly trying to develop atom bombs, a charge Iran denies.

About 40 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil exports pass out of the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has previously threatened to disrupt Gulf oil shipping if Israel or the United States carries out any attacks on its nuclear facilities.

Source

Comment – Oct 16, 2012

Remember the sort of plot once associated with Saddam Hussein? The Iraqi dictator was associated with every kind of heinous plan until Coalition forces invaded Iraq and found absolutely no proof of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Those stories had served their purpose however, and primed the Western public for the invasion and overthrow of the ‘evil’ Iraqi dictator. Are stories like the above being circulated with a similar aim?  

So just in case you had forgotten, a few of the sort plots once associated with Saddam Hussein. These few stories are the results of a brief cursory search using the words “Saddam planned”. If I searched a little longer I’m sure many more could be retrieved but even these few should provide an inkling of how the media is routinely used to disseminate disinformation:  

Saddam Planned to Provide Aerial Drones to Terrorists

Saddam planned to deploy ‘camels’ of mass destruction

Saddam Hussein planned the Oklahoma City bombing

Confirmed: Saddam Planned Terror Strike on Prague RFE Headquarters

In the build-up to the Iraq war, the United States used Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the decision to invade the country.

What were the real reasons for the war? What were the costs and benefits from the US point of view? 

REAL REASONS OF THE WAR

1. Control of Iraq’s oil: Second only to Saudi Arabia, Iraq possesses more than 60% of the world’s known oil reserves, amounting to 115 billion barrels. Thanks to the war, American oil companies returned to Iraq, 36 years after Saddam nationalized them. Remarkably, when the war started, oil was just at $26.00 a barrel. After the invasion, prices kept rising to new heights and reached a record of $145.75 in 2008.

2. Preservation of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency: In late 2000, Iraq converted to the Euro in exchange for oil. Had an increasing number of countries followed suit and shifted away from the dollar, the U.S. would have been dealt a huge blow inflicted by a plummeting dollar.

3. Elimination of a threat to Israel: The centrality of Israel in any U.S. Mideast strategy is a foregone conclusion. Iraq possessed Scud long-range ballistic missiles which directly threatened Israel. In 1991, Iraq attacked two Israeli cities with Scud missiles. It was the first time Tel Aviv had been hit in the history of the Israel-Arab conflict. Saddam also doled out thousands of dollars to families of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel. Toppling him stemmed a source of support to Palestinians and eliminated the direct missile threat.

4. Weapons field-testing: In real-battle mode, the Pentagon could use a long list of high-tech and newly developed weapons, such as the highly destructive nano-wave weapons, e-bombs, sensor fuzed weapons, laser weapons and agent defeat bombs.

5. War profiteering: The U.S. targeted the privatization of the Iraqi infrastructure by granting lucrative (no-bid) contracts to the likes of Halliburton, Blackwater, Chevron, Shell, Lockheed, DynCorp, and KBR, all of whom were unwavering supporters of the Bush administration.

Costs of the War

Continues …

FARS is reporting that a senior Iranian air defense commander underlined that the country’s Armed Forces are “fully capable of repelling enemy threats, adding that Iranian air defense units are closely monitoring US bases in the region round the clock.”

“At present, we are monitoring all military bases around Iran 24 hours a day. Also, any flying object which enters Iranian airspace is monitored by Air Defense forces,” Commander of the Air Defense Unit in Northeastern Iran General Abdollah Reshadi told reporters on Wednesday.

The General admitted his forces are “monitoring all the US military bases and all aircraft and flights near the country’s borders.”

“In addition to the 24-hour monitoring of their aircraft we record their flight information and data and we will definitely give a rapid and decisive response to any aggression against Iranian soil”, he said.

“We even have the statistical data of the enemies’ aircraft in their bases across region,” Reshadi stated (see article: Commander: Iran’s Air Defense Fully Prepared to Repel Enemy Threats http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9106060560 ).

The FARS news report also included the comments of a highly respected Iranian military commander – Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who previously indicated the IRGC had contingency plans in place to strike 35 U.S. military bases in the region within the first few minutes of a pre-emptive American military strike against the country.

“We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack,” Hajizadeh said at the time, referring to Iran’s contingency plans for any potential confrontation with the US.

He said that the US has 35 bases around Iran, and stated, “All these bases are within the reach of our missiles. Meantime, the occupied (Palestinian) lands (Israel) are good targets for us as well” (see article: Iran will target 35 U.S. bases within minutes of any attack http://www.examiner.com/article/iran-will-target-35-u-s-bases-within-minutes-of-any-attack ).

Source

As the Washington and Tehran engage fitfully in what may be the last best chance at negotiations before a war to halt Tehran’s nuclear program, it is useful to remember that America has already fought one war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.  In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan intervened in the Iran-Iraq war on the side of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein to tilt the conflict to an Iraqi victory.  By 1987 America was engaged in a bloody naval and air war against Iran, undeclared of course, while Iraq fought a brutal land war.  The lessons of our first war with Iran should be carefully considered before we embark hastily on a second.

The Iran-Iraq War was devastating—the largest and longest conventional interstate war since the Korean conflict ended in 1953. A half-million lives were lost, perhaps another million were injured and the economic cost was over a trillion dollars. One index of the scale of the tragedy is that the battle lines at the end of the war were almost exactly where they were at the beginning of hostilities. It was also the only war in modern times in which chemical weapons were used on a massive scale. Iraq gassed the Iranian army repeatedly and then turned the weapons on its own Kurdish population. No comparable use of weapons of mass destruction had occurred since 1918.

The 1980-1988 war led, in addition, to other disasters: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the liberation of Kuwait a year later and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The bloody U.S. war just ended in Iraq last year by President Obama was the finale in this march of folly.  The seeds of multigenerational tragedy were planted in the Iran-Iraq war. We will live with its consequences for decades, perhaps longer.

The first lesson of Reagan’s war is: Expect to be blamed for all that goes bad.  Both Iraqis and Iranians came to believe the U.S. was manipulating them during the war. Ironically (and perhaps naively) the U.S. tried to reach out to both belligerents during the course of the conflict—in great secrecy both times—to try to build a strategic partnership. The disastrous arms for hostages-policy, which came to be known as Iran-Contra, convinced Iraqis rightly that the U.S. was trying to play both sides of the conflict. The result was that when the war ended, the Iraqi regime and most Iraqis regarded the U.S. as a threat, despite Washington’s support during the hostilities: critical intelligence support to Baghdad; considerable diplomatic cover; and ignoring the largesse of our Arab allies, who loaned tens of billions of dollars to Baghdad to sustain Iraq’s war effort.

Iranians call the battle the “imposed war” because they believe the U.S. inflicted it upon them and orchestrated the global “tilt” toward Iraq during the fighting. They note that the United Nations did not condemn Iraq for starting the war—in fact, it did not even discuss the war for weeks after it started, and it eventually blamed Iraq as the aggressor only years later as part of a deal to free U.S. hostages held by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon.  The UN never sanctioned Iraq for the use of chemical weapons.

Though the war had tragic consequences for Iranians, they nevertheless consolidated their revolution by successfully portraying the war as a David and Goliath struggle, started by the U.S. and its allies. The country was mobilized to defend the revolution.  The opposition was discredited, especially the Mujahedin e Khalq, which supported Saddam and Iraq.  The Islamic revolution of 1979 was fairly short in duration and its cost minuscule in comparison to the Iran-Iraq war.  For the generation of Iranians who are now leading their country, men like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the war was the defining event of their lives and it has shaped their worldview. Their anti-Americanism and deep suspicion of the West generally can be traced directly to their understanding of the Iran-Iraq War.  So expect another conflict to make Iran more extreme and more determined to get the bomb while it rallies Iranians behind the mullahs.

Another lesson of the first war is that Iran will not be easily intimidated by America.  Iran by 1987 was devastated by the fighting; many of its cities like Abadan had been destroyed, its oil exports were minimal and its economy shattered.  But it did not hesitate to fight the U.S. Navy in the Gulf and to use asymmetric means including terrorism to retaliate in Lebanon and elsewhere.  Even when our navy had sunk most of theirs, Iran kept fighting, and the Iranian people rallied behind Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran fought smartly, avoiding escalating matters too rapidly and too dangerously.  As the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Major General Dempsey, and his Israeli counterpart, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, have noted, Iranian behavior is rational, not suicidal.  Iranian leaders will not take steps that endanger the revolution’s survival; they will look for our vulnerabilities in Afghanistan and Bahrain, Israel’s in Lebanon and the Saudis’ in Yemen to exploit.

No two wars are identical, but we should not expect Iran to back down easily if history is a guide.  A few air strikes will not be the end of it.

A third key lesson is that ending the war will be a challenge.  In 1988, Iran sued for a cease-fire only after catastrophic defeat on the ground by Iraq and when Saddam was threatening to fire chemical warheads into Iranian cities.  Iranians believe they faced a second “Hiroshima” if they did not accept a truce.  Many evacuated Tehran in fear of Iraqi chemical attack. For Khomeini it was drinking poison to accept a truce.  No two wars are identical, but we should not expect Iran to back down easily if history is a guide.  A few air strikes will not be the end of it.

Finally, be careful to weigh your ally’s advice.  Ironically in the 1980s the closest U.S. partner in the region, Israel, pressed Washington hard and repeatedly to, in effect, switch sides and offer assistance to Iran.  Israeli leaders, generals and spies were obsessed by the Iraqi threat in the 1980s, just as they are preoccupied by the Iranian threat today.  They longed to restore the cozy relationship they had with the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s.  Israel was the only consistent source of spare parts for the Iranian air force’s U.S.-built built jets throughout the war.  Israeli leaders, notably Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, brought considerable pressure to bear on Washington for an American engagement with Tehran.  Iran-Contra was in many ways their idea.  American diplomats and spies abroad were told to turn a blind eye to Israeli arms deals with Tehran even when it was official U.S. policy to (in the Washington euphemism of the day) “staunch” all avenues by which the Iranians might obtain weapons or other material needed for their war effort.

Many Israeli security professionals quietly told their American counterparts in the 1980s that they thought Peres’ dream of rebuilding the alliance with Iran was crazy and foolish.  They whispered to American intelligence officers that it would end in disaster. They were right.

Today many former Israeli intelligence officers are warning America not to listen the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to avoid a military clash with Iran.  Yuval Diskin, the retired head of the Shabak, the Israeli internal security service, has said Bibi is guided by “messianic feelings” which impair his judgement. Meir Dagan, his counterpart at the Mossad, the external security service, has said a military attack on Iran would be “stupid.” This time the warnings from our professional Israeli allies are not quiet.

Our Arab allies in the 1980s gave equally awful advice to the Reagan team.  Saudi King Fahd assured a succession of visitors to the royal palaces in Riyadh and Jidda that Saddam was a changed man, a new moderate who could be trusted to act responsibly even if he was a tad violent.  The Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis gave Saddam billions of loans to fight the war. They pressed Washington to take strong action against Iran, to “kill the head of the snake.” It all sounds very familiar today.

Even King Hussein of Jordan, one of the wisest leaders of his generation in the world was enamored of Saddam.  He traveled often to Baghdad to see Saddam and the road link from Aqaba to Baghdad was the critical logistical supply line to keep Iraq in the war.  Jordanian “volunteers” fought with Iraq. The King urged Reagan to help Iraq and brokered the first CIA visit to Baghdad with critical intelligence for Saddam’s generals.

Many Americans have forgotten the lessons of our undeclared war in the 1980s.  We have fought so many other wars since, in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan and Libya it is easy to forget.  No Iranian has forgotten.  As part of any serious political debate on whether to go to war again with Iran, President Obama and others would be wise to study the past.

Source  

Bruce Riedel, a former longtime CIA officer, is a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. At President Obama’s request, he chaired the strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009. He is author of the book Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad and The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future.

The BBC has been caught out once again, this time using a photo taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate a story about the massacre in Houla on Sunday. 

Only after it emerged that the photo was taken in Iraq in 2003 did the BBC “try to track down the original source of the image”. Had they been so scrupulous from the outset the photo would not have been posted anyway.

Thereafter the British Broadcast Corporation’s spokesman went in to damage control mode as he tried to limit criticism. Trouble is he wasn’t very convincing.

Claiming that the photo was posted along with a disclaimer, as the spokesman did, was pretty deceptive in itself. Given that if the Corporation had used the photo knowing it originated from Iraq in 2003 they would have posted the disclaimer anyway, if only to cover their backs.   

The fact that the BBC originally claimed the photo was “provided by an activist” raises still more question. For many Syrian “activists” are known to be working in close cahoots with Western intelligence.

Yet the BBC accepts photos from these unnamed “activists” without serious scrutiny.

What’s more, once the photo was removed the BBC omitted to mention in later editions of the story that it had been removed and that it was originally taken in Iraq in 2003. 

No apology, no explanation. Nothing. Because the BBC is doing what it does best, dissembling. To add insult to injury viewers are legally obligated to pay for this in the form of an annual licence fee. 

In other words the BBC has become a sort of corporate confidence trickster. Winning its viewers trust, then feeding them carefully contrived untruths before demanding money in exchange. 

BBC News uses ‘Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre’

Hannah Furness – Telegraph.co.uk May 28, 2012

Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.

The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.

It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.

The caption states the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but says it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.

A BBC spokesman said the image has now been taken down.

Mr di Lauro, who works for Getty Images picture agency and has been published by newspapers across the US and Europe, said: “I went home at 3am and I opened the BBC page which had a front page story about what happened in Syria and I almost felt off from my chair.

“One of my pictures from Iraq was used by the BBC web site as a front page illustration claiming that those were the bodies of yesterday’s massacre in Syria and that the picture was sent by an activist.

“Instead the picture was taken by me and it’s on my web site, on the feature section regarding a story I did In Iraq during the war called Iraq, the aftermath of Saddam.

“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all.

He added he was less concerned about an apology or the use of image without consent, adding: “What is amazing it’s that a news organization has a picture proving a massacre that happened yesterday in Syria and instead it’s a picture that was taken in 2003 of a totally different massacre.

“Someone is using someone else’s picture for propaganda on purpose.”

A spokesman for the BBC said: “We were aware of this image being widely circulated on the internet in the early hours of this morning following the most recent atrocities in Syria.

“We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently verified.

“Efforts were made overnight to track down the original source of the image and when it was established the picture was inaccurate we removed it immediately.”

Source

BBC Online – May 27, 2012

The photo used above is real enough, only it wasn’t taken in Syria on Sunday but in Iraq in 2003. Once the photographer who took the original pointed this out the BBC removed the offending photo but without any explanation or apology. So if the BBC is prepared to use photos from Iraq in 2003 and claim they were taken in Syria yesterday, what else in the above story has been contrived?

The story remains on BBC Online, minus the photograph in question, and without any reference to  its earlier featuring a photo taken in Iraq in 2003.

This is what BBC licence fees pay for: contrived reports and outright lies. Ed.  

As the US beefs up its military presence in the Persian Gulf region, Pentagon strategists estimate that they would need less than a month to defeat Iranian forces should a military conflict take place.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) believes it can destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s conventional armed forces in about three weeks using air and sea strikes, a defense source told The Washington Post.

“We plan for any eventuality we can and provide options to the president,” Army Lt. Col. T.G. Taylor, a spokesman at CENTCOM told the newspaper. “We take our guidance from the secretary of defense and from our civilian bosses in [Washington] DC. So any kind of guidance they give us, that’s what we go off of [sic].”

The American military has been building up its presence in the region amid rising tension in the area.

The US Navy currently has two aircraft carriers deployed near Iran and is upgrading mine-detection and removal capabilities.

The US Air Force recently dispatched a number of F-22 Raptor strike fighters to a base in the United Arab Emirates. The move caused backlash from Tehran, which said Wednesday it threatened regional stability.

Deploying a “floating base” in the Persian Gulf – a converted transport ship that would serve as a semi-stationary base of operations for the US military – is also on the table. USS Ponce is expected to host mine-sweeping helicopters, speed boats and probably commando teams.

The Pentagon has also intensified training of elite troops of its allies in the region. The members of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council commando team, who serve as instructors, may be ordered to go into the field as well, should such a need arise.

The measures are taken as contingency for possible attack by Iran on US troops or blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil transit route, the US says.

CENTCOM says there are about 125,000 US troops in close proximity to Iran. The majority of them – 90,000 – are deployed in or around Afghanistan. Some 20,000 soldiers are ashore elsewhere in the Near East region; and a variable 15,000 to 20,000 serve on naval vessels.

Oil battlefront

The military threat is just part of the mounting pressure on Tehran. Washington says it would use force only as a measure of last resort and is instead focusing on economic pressure.

On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama signed an order giving the Treasury Department more power to impose financial sanctions against those trading with Iran.

“Treasury now has the capability to publicly identify foreign individuals and entities that have engaged in these evasive and deceptive activities, and generally bar access to the US financial and commercial systems,” the department said in a statement.

The US and the EU have issued a ban on buying Iran-produced crude in a bid to cripple the country’s export-dependent economy. Part of this effort involves sanctions against companies and institutions engaged in the oil trade with Iran financially. They are banks transferring payment for the crude or firms insuring tankers transporting Iranian oil.

The Iranian oil industry is not suffering from sanctions alone. The country’s Oil Ministry reported last week that it had finally managed to contain a cyber attack on the industry’s facilities.

“The software attack has been fully contained and controlled with the help of experts three days after it was hit,” Iran’s deputy oil minister for engineering affairs, Hamdollah Mohammadnejad, told the state-run Mehr news agency.

In 2010 a malicious computer worm called Stuxnet damaged computer software at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. Some computer security experts said the malware was the work of a highly-professional hacker team, which was probably provided with know-how by US or Israeli governments.

Western countries and Israel suspect Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb and are pressuring it to stop enrichment of uranium. Tehran insists it is pursuing a civilian nuclear power program only, which it is entitled to do as a sovereign state.

The row has escalated last year after the publication of a controversial report by UN’s nuclear watchdog, which Iran’s opponents used to justify issuing more sanctions.

Source

“He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It’s a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing.”

And all the while his father talks, five-year-old Sayef Ala’a sits obediently on the sofa beside us, doing as his father tells him, moving his head to show us the scrappy bit of flesh that constitutes his left ear, tipping his head to one side so we can take pictures of it. Compared to other children with birth deformities, Sayef Ala’a is lucky. He can see, breathe, walk, run, play and listen to his father and friends with his right ear. And he is a little boy of much courage.

Rates of cancer, leukaemia and congenital deformities higher in Fallujah than those reported in the aftermath of nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Click to enlarge

“He hasn’t learnt much yet – that’s because he hasn’t been to school,” his father says. “I’m worried he would be bullied at school. He’s a child, but sometimes he comes to me and says he knows he has a deformed ear; but it doesn’t matter, he says, because he has no other problems. He is shy but he doesn’t mind seeing you.” And here the father points at us as we sit beside his son on the sofa. “But no other foreigners come to see him.”

Like others in Fallujah, Sayef Ala’a's father, who is a businessman, hopes that NGO officials will turn up at his door one day and offer the boy a foreign visa, medical treatment abroad, education. It is a dream that will never be realised – not so long as even the Iraqi government takes no interest in the deformed children of Fallujah.

Sayef Ala’a has a three-year-old brother who has no health problems – but then Sayef Ala’a was conceived in 2006, two years after the battles of Fallujah, his brother two years after that. Sayef Ala’a's mother is his father’s first cousin but the families had no history of congenital anomalies. “It’s the result of chemical weapons used by the Americans in Fallujah,” the father says. He has seen other, much worse abnormalities than that from which his son suffers. All the other families say the same thing.

“Yes, my son’s case is a bit trivial compared to the rest. But he only has half his hearing. I have got myself and my son a passport” – and here Sayef Ala’a's father produces the documents for our inspection – “because some day a charity organisation will knock on my door and take him outside Iraq.”

Yet, remarkably, when I ask him who is to blame, Sayef Ala’a's father says almost exactly the same words uttered by the father of 14-month-old Sayef Mohamed, who has an outsize head and is blind and paralysed. He replies at once. “I do believe in God, so I leave things to God – I don’t believe any human being is going to help. Yes, I was concerned before we had our second child in case he had similar problems, but I decided to leave things to God because I wanted this second child.”

The family have consulted two Baghdad professors – one of them with a diploma of medicine from Glasgow University – and they have a sense of perspective that others may lack in Fallujah.

Sayef Ala’a's grandfather claims that the RAF dropped mustard gas on their distant relatives, in the town of Diyala, in 1917, during the First World War – and that there were deformities even then. Of course, it may be easy for a family – fearful of shaming their “honour” by admitting their child suffers birth anomalies – to blame the weapons of Fallujah’s American enemies for their misfortunes.

But in that case, why did the US first deny using phosphorus in built-up areas of the city in 2004 – and admit the truth only when a video-tape clearly showed phosphorous being fired into housing concentrations? And why does no one from outside come to examine Sayef Ala’a's scratch of an ear?

Back story: The evidence was clear, but no one cared – except you

It’s the same old story. Know nothing. See nothing. Say nothing. When children died in a plague of cancers in southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans and the Brits didn’t want to know about it. Nor, of course, did Saddam Hussein. If children had been poisoned by our depleted uranium munitions, then Saddam would lose face, wouldn’t he? Independent readers contributed $250,000 for medicines for the children we met in Iraq who were suffering from cancers and leukaemia after that war.

Margaret Hassan of Care – later murdered by unknown killers months after her kidnapping, following the “liberation” of Iraq – helped us distribute the medicines from our readers across the country. No thanks from Saddam, of course. And all the children died. And not a word from our masters, armaments manufacturers and jolly generals.

It’s the same again in Fallujah today. The doctors talk of a massive increase in child birth deformities. The Americans used phosphorous munitions – possibly also depleted uranium (DU) – in the 2004 battles of Fallujah. Everyone in Fallujah knows about these deformities. Reporters have seen these children and reported on them. But it’s know nothing, see nothing, say nothing. Neither the Iraqi government nor the US government nor the British will utter a squeak about Fallujah. Even when I found in the Balkans a 12-year-old Serb girl with internal bleeding, constant vomiting and nails that repeatedly fell out of her hands and feet – she had handled the shrapnel of depleted uranium munitions after a Nato air strike near Sarajevo in 1995 – Nato refused to respond to my offer to take a military doctor to see her.

Already, I had discovered that up to 300 Serb men, women and children who had lived close to the Nato target in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici, had died of cancers and leukaemias over the five years that followed the bombing. As for southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the less said, the better.

I met Ali Hillal in 1998, when he was just eight, in Baghdad’s Mansour hospital. He lived next to factories and a television station in Diyala, the repeated targets of US and British aircraft in 1991, the fifth child in a family with no history of cancer. Now he had a brain tumour. Latif Abdul Sattar had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Youssef Abdul Raouf Mohamed from Kerbala had gastro-intestinal bleeding. There was Cherou Jassem in her party dress – she wanted her picture taken – who had acute myloblastic leukaemia.

And so it went on as I met each child 14 years ago. Dhamia Qassem, 13, suffered heart failure during treatment for acute leukaemia. Ahmed Walid, a baby during the 1991 Iraq bombings, developed chronic myeloid leukaemia in 1995. Many of the parents were with their children during the raids and some spoke of strange smells, of insecticide and flowers. Western diplomats – who otherwise chose to remain silent – wondered if the children might have been stricken by the smoke from Saddam’s bombed chemical warfare factories.

In Basra, I found Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali who had drawn maps of the clusters of the new child and adult cancer cases across southern Iraq, some of the children from the very battlefields in which US tanks fired DU munitions at Saddam’s armoured forces. Even when I visited these sites I found farming families with new cancers. This, the doctors attributed to DU, of course, not phosphorous, although some researchers have suggested DU was also used at Fallujah in 2004.

What was astonishing, however, was the response. While The Independent’s readers gave generously for medicines for the children, the British government’s reaction was pitiful. Lord Gilbert at the Ministry of Defence, in a letter dripping with sarcasm, said that my account of a possible link between DU ammunition and children’s cancer – “coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk” – would be “a wilful perversion of reality”. Particles from DU warheads became difficult to detect, he wrote, “even with the most sophisticated monitoring equipment”.

Yet when an Atomic Energy Agency official wrote to the Royal Ordnance in London in 1998, he said that the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination would be “a risk to both the military and the civilian population” if not dealt with in peacetime.

In December 1998, Doug Henderson, then the British minister for the armed forces, wrote – in a letter that may soon have to be repeated over Fallujah – that while the government was aware of reports linking DU with “alleged [sic] deformities, cancers and birth defects, the government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter”.

And so it went on. The authorities had nothing to say since there had been no “peer-reviewed epidemiological data” – which there would not be, because no such research would be carried out. Now, too, the same is happening in Fallujah where DU ammunition may also have been used in 2004, and where white phosphorous certainly was used. But there has been no “peer-reviewed epidemiological data”. So goodbye to the children of Fallujah, their brave parents and any chance of finding out the truth.

Unless, of course, some worthy NGO steps forward with the money and resources and training to do what neither the Iraqi government nor the Americans have shown any interest in doing: cataloguing the increase in birth deformities in a city where US forces fought their toughest battles since the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Phosphorous can be used to identify targets – but if used as a weapon in civilian areas, it would breach the 1980 Convention on conventional weapons. Which is probably why no one outside Iraq wants to hear the name of Fallujah.

Source

Also see:

The Children of Fallujah – Sayef’s story

The Children of Fallujah – the hospital of horrors

For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.

It’s as difficult to write this kind of report as it is to understand the courage of his family. Many of the Fallujah families whose children have been born with what doctors call “congenital birth anomalies” prefer to keep their doors closed to strangers, regarding their children as a mark of personal shame rather than possible proof that something terrible took place here after the two great American battles against insurgents in the city in 2004, and another conflict in 2007.

After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah’s children.

Sayef lives – the word is used advisedly, perhaps – in the al-Shahada district of Fallujah, in one of the more dangerous streets in the city. The cops – like the citizens of Fallujah, they are all Sunni Muslims – stand with their automatic weapons at the door of Sayef’s home when we visit, but two of these armed, blue-unformed men come inside with us and are visibly moved by the helpless baby on the floor, shaking their heads in disbelief and with a hopelessness which his father, Mohamed, refuses to betray.

“I think all this is because of the use by the Americans of phosphorous in the two big battles,” he says. “I have heard of so many cases of congenital birth defects in children. There has to be a reason. When my child first went to the hospital, I saw families there with exactly the same problems.”

Studies since the 2004 Fallujah battles have recorded profound increases in infant mortality and cancer in Fallujah; the latest report, whose authors include a doctor at Fallujah General Hospital, says that congenital malformations account for 15 per cent of all births in Fallujah.

“My son cannot support himself,” Mohamed says, fondling his son’s enlarged head. “He can move only his hands. We have to bottle-feed him. He can’t swallow. Sometimes he can’t take even the milk, so we have to take him to hospital to be given fluids. He was blind when he was born. In addition, my poor little man’s kidney has shut down. He got paralysed. His legs don’t move. His blindness is due to hydrocephalus.”

Mohamed holds Sayef’s useless legs and moves them gently up and down. “After he was born, I got Sayef to Baghdad and I had the most important neurosurgeons check him. They said they could do nothing. He had a hole in his back that was closed and then a hole in his head. The first operation did not succeed. He had meningitis.”

Both Mohamed and his wife are in their mid-thirties. Unlike many tribal families in the area, neither are related and their two daughters, born before the battles of Fallujah, are in perfect health. Sayef was born on 27 January, 2011. “My two daughters like their brother very much,” Mohamed adds, “and even the doctors like him. They all take part in the care of the child. Dr Abdul-Wahab Saleh has done some amazing work on him – Sayef would not be alive without him.”

Mohamed works for an irrigation mechanics company but admits that, with a salary of only $100 a month, he receives financial help from relatives. He was outside Fallujah during the conflict but returned two months after the second battle only to find his house mined; he received funding to rebuild his home in 2006. He watches Sayef for a long time during our conversation and then lifts him in his arms.

“Every time I watch my son, I’m dying inside,” he says, tears running down his face. “I think about his destiny. He is getting heavier all the time. It’s more difficult to carry him.” So I ask whom he blames for Sayef’s little calvary. I expect a tirade of abuse against the Americans, the Iraqi government, the Health Ministry. The people of Fallujah have long been portrayed as “pro-terrorist” and “anti-Western” in the world’s press, ever since the murder and cremation of the four American mercenaries in the city in 2004 – the event which started the battles for Fallujah in which up to 2,000 Iraqis, civilians and insurgents, died, along with almost 100 US troops.

But Mohamed is silent for a few moments. He is not the only father to show his deformed child to us. “I am only asking for help from God,” he says. “I don’t expect help from any other human being.” Which proves, I guess, that Fallujah – far from being a city of terror – includes some very brave men.

Fallujah: A history

The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, was a month-long siege, during which US forces failed to take the city, said to be an insurgent stronghold. The second battle, in November, flattened the city. Controversy raged over claims US troops had deployed white phosphorus shells. A 2010 study said increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah exceeded those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Source

Also see:

The Children of Fallujah – the hospital of horrors

The Children of Fallujah – families fight back

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

“We see this all the time now,” Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as this in all my service,” she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There’s always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word “propaganda” under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby’s head. A doctor beside me speaks of “Tetralogy of Fallot”, a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – “all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body.”

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published.

There is a no-nonsense attitude from the doctors in Fallujah. They know that we know about this tragedy. Indeed, there is nothing undiscovered about the child deformities of Fallujah. Other correspondents – including my colleague Patrick Cockburn – have visited Fallujah to report on them. What is so shameful is that these deformities continue unmonitored. One Fallujah doctor, an obstetrician trained in Britain – she left only five months ago – who has purchased from her own sources for her private clinic a £79,000 scanning machine for prenatal detection of congenital abnormalities, gives me her name and asks why the Ministry of Health in Baghdad will not hold a full official investigation into the deformed babies of Fallujah.

“I have been to see the ministry,” she says. “They said they would have a committee. I went to the committee. And they have done nothing. I just can’t get them to respond.” Then, 24 hours later, the same woman sends a message to a friend of mine, another Iraqi doctor, asking me not to use her name.

If the number of stillborn children of Fallujah is a disgrace, the medical staff at the Fallujah General Hospital prove their honesty by repeatedly warning of the danger of reaching conclusions too soon.

“I delivered that baby,” the obstetrician says as one more picture flashes on the screen. “I don’t think this has anything to do with American weapons. The parents were close relatives. Tribal marriages here involve a lot of families who are close by blood. But you have to remember, too, that if women have stillborn children with abnormalities at home, they will not report this to us, and the baby will be buried without any record reaching us.”

The photographs continue on the screen. January 19, 2010: a baby with tiny limbs, stillborn. A baby born on 30 October, 2010, with a cleft lip and cleft palette, still alive, a hole in the heart, a defect in its face, in need of echocardiography treatment. “A cleft lip and palate are common congenital anomalies,” Dr Samira Allani says quietly. “But it’s the increased frequency that is alarming.” Dr Allani has documented a research paper into “the increased prevalence of birth defects” in Fallujah, a study of four fathers “with two lineages of progeny”. Congenital heart defects, the paper says, reached “unprecedented numbers” in 2010.

The numbers continue to rise. Even while we are speaking, a nurse brings a message to Dr Allani. We go at once to an incubator next to the hospital delivery room. In the incubator is a little baby just 24 days old. Zeid Mohamed is almost too young to smile but he lies sleeping, his mother watching through the glass. She has given her permission for me to see her baby. His father is a security guard, the couple married three years ago. There is no family record of birth defects. But Zeid has only four fingers on each of his little hands.

Dr Allani’s computer files contain a hundred Zeids. She asks another doctor to call some parents. Will they talk to a journalist? “They want to know what happened to their children,” she says. “They deserve an answer.” She is right. But neither the Iraqi authorities, nor the Americans, nor the British – who were peripherally involved in the second battle of Fallujah and lost four men – nor any major NGO, appears willing or able to help.

When doctors can obtain funding for an investigation, they sometimes turn to organisations which clearly have their own political predetermination. Dr Allani’s paper, for example, acknowledges funding from the “Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War” – hardly a group seeking to exonerate the use of US weaponry in Fallujah. This, too, I fear, is part of the tragedy of Fallujah.

The obstetrician who asked to be anonymous talks bleakly of the lack of equipment and training. “Chromosome defects – like Down’s Syndrome – cannot be corrected prenatally. But a foetal infection we can deal with, and we can sort out this problem by drawing a sample of blood from the baby and mother. But no laboratory here has this equipment. One blood transfer is all it needs to prevent such a condition. Of course, it will not answer our questions: why the increased miscarriages here, why the increased stillbirths, why the increased premature births?”

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster who has surveyed almost 5,000 people in Fallujah, agrees it is impossible to be specific about the cause of birth defects as well as cancers. “Some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened,” he wrote two years ago. Dr Busby’s report, compiled with Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, says that infant mortality in Fallujah was found in 80 out of every 1,000 births, compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and only 9.7 in Kuwait.

Another of the Fallujah doctors tells me that the only UK assistance they have received comes from Dr Kypros Nicolaides, the head of Foetal Medicine at King’s College Hospital. He runs a charity, the Foetal Medicine Foundation, which has already trained one doctor from Fallujah. I call him up. He is bursting with anger.

“To me, the criminal aspect of all this – during the war – was that the British and the American governments could not go to Woolworths and buy some computers to even document the deaths in Iraq. So we have a Lancet publication that estimates 600,000 deaths in the war. Yet the occupying power did not have the decency to have a computer worth only £500 that would enable them to say “this body was brought in today and this was its name”.

Now you have an Arab country which has a higher number of deformities or cancers than Europe and you need a proper epidemiological study. I’m sure the Americans used weapons that caused these deformities. But now you have a goodness-knows-what government in Iraq and no study. It’s very easy to avoid to doing anything – except for some sympathetic crazy professor like me in London to try and achieve something.”

In al-Hadidi’s office, there are now photographs which defy words. How can you even begin to describe a dead baby with just one leg and a head four times the size of its body?

Source

Also see:

The Children of Fallujah – Sayef’s story

The Children of Fallujah – families fight back

Many in the media have long since repudiated their failures in the lead-up to the Iraq War, acknowledging that they were too quick to accept the false notion that Iraq possessed a sizable and dangerous cache of weapons of mass destruction. The question today is whether they have learned from those mistakes.

The media’s self-reflection began as early as May of 2004, little more than a year after the conflict began, when The New York Times editorial board reflected on the paper’s coverage of the war and stated that they “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.” Top editors at the Times and The Washington Post  subsequently acknowledged they had failed to push for front-page articles on “the flimsiness of the intelligence on W.M.D.” The media’s poor coverage has been noted by the Post‘s Walter Pincus, CNN’s Howard Kurtz, CBS’ Katie Couric, and many more.  

But fast forward to today, and the media’s coverage of Iran’s nuclear program suggests that some outlets have not learned from Iraq reporting failures and risk repeating history. Media Matters reviewed transcripts of ABC’s World News, CBS’ Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News between November 8, 2011 and March 31, 2012. The examination reveals that once again the media is frequently misrepresenting the expert opinion of the intelligence community.

Two egregious misrepresentations in particular repeatedly came up in news reports on the Iranian nuclear program: suggesting that Iran will imminently obtain the bomb and suggesting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has major influence over the country’s nuclear program.

Key Findings

• 31 percent of stories on ABC’s World News, CBS’ Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News suggested or left unchallenged suggestions that nuclear weaponization in Iran is imminent.
• 24 percent of stories misleadingly brought up Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during discussion of the country’s nuclear program.
• World News most often suggested imminent nuclear weaponization in Iran (45 percent of its stories).
• Nightly News most often invoked Ahmadinejad during segments on Iranian nuclear issues (33 percent of its reports).

Problematic coverage

The graphic teasing a NBC Nightly News story November 8 of last year read: “Nuclear Threat?” Underneath the ominous words sat clashing American and Iranian flags. Anchor Brian Williams began, “There’s also news tonight about Iran and the threat of nuclear weapons. There’s a new U.N. report out. It says the threat has grown more real.”

Amid images of Iranian President Ahmadinejad touring nuclear facilities and ballistic missiles launching into the air, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported: “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad today called the head of the U.N. agency a puppet of the U.S. But the U.N. agency, the IAEA, reports new evidence that Iran is on the verge of a major nuclear breakthrough to know how to build a nuclear bomb.”

The report is illustrative of the two aforementioned misrepresentations: that nuclear weaponization in Iran is imminent and that Ahmadinejad holds any major influence over the direction of the country’s nuclear program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) November 8 report referenced by Mitchell paints a different picture. According to Greg Thielmann, former State Department intelligence analyst and former Senate Intelligence Committee senior staffer, and Benjamin Loehrke, senior policy analyst at Ploughshares Fund (a global security foundation), the November IAEA report is consistent with the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2007 and 2011 National Intelligence Estimates, which found no conclusive proof that Iran has attempted to build the bomb since 2003, when the country halted its nuclear weapons program. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, further stated in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last January that U.S. intelligence has no evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon.

When Defense Secretary Leon Panetta addressed the hypothetical scenario of Iran deciding to pursue nuclear weapons, he still estimated that it would take the country a considerable about of time to build a weapon following the decision to initiate such a program. In the interview, Panetta said, “The consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb and then possibly another one to two years in order to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort in order to deliver that weapon.”

Invoking Ahmadinejad or his rhetoric, including the famously mistranslated “Israel must be wiped off the map,” similarly misleads. Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, explains that inserting Ahmadinejad into the discussion is problematic because the Iranian president “has little or no influence over Iran’s national security policy, his power has been declining sharply in recent months, and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini — who does make the key decisions — has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam.”

However, even Ahmadinejad himself claims that Iran “does not need atomic bombs.” The Iranian president has also previously said, “If any country tries to build a nuclear bomb, they waste their money and their resources.”

Conservative media like Fox News have unsurprisingly reiterated these misconceptions. Going back as far as 2005, conservative media reports on the Iranian nuclear program consistently peg the country as almost always about a year or less away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And Fox News hosts Greta Van Susteren and Sean Hannity repeatedly focus on the Iranian president.

But these reporting failures also pervade more traditional outlets: the evening broadcasts of network news.

Results

Out of 51 total segments (11 for World News, 22 for Evening News, and 18 for Nightly News), 31 percent gave the false impression that Iran either currently has a nuclear weapons program or will soon have the bomb.

For example, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer introduced a November 8, 2011 story on this topic with this: “And now, a long-dreaded headline about Iran and nuclear weapons. After a decade of debating whether Iran would build one, a U.N. report says tonight they will, and it has begun.”

On December 5, 2011, CBS anchor Scott Pelley said during a broadcast of the Evening News that “U.S. intelligence is spying intensely on Iranian sites believed to be developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.” He continued, “There’s concern that Iran is developing missiles to carry a future nuclear weapon.”

And Nightly News correspondent Ali Arouzi reported on January 8, 2012: “Iran announced today that it had begun to enrich uranium at a second underground facility well protected from possible airstrikes. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the West suspects Iran of developing a nuclear weapons program.”

The three network news shows invoked Ahmadinejad to a lesser extent, but these insertions were no less problematic. Twenty-four percent of all segments made the Iranian president a part of their stories on this topic.

For example, all three networks reported stories that covered Ahmadinejad’s showboating over nuclear achievements in the middle of February. Nightly News‘ Williams began a story on February 15, 2012 with this: “Tonight, tensions over Iran’s nuclear program are running hot after the Iranian President Ahmadinejad made a big show at a Tehran nuclear site showing off his country’s new hardware, claiming other advances at a second nuclear facility. Further proof that Iran wants to join the club of nuclear nations despite global pressure and tough sanctions intended to stop it.”

In a February 11, 2012 story, CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano similarly ran with a tease from the Iranian president, reporting that “President Ahmadinejad promised there would be word of major nuclear achievements within the next few days.” ABC went with a similar story that day. Anchor David Muir reported: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telling the Iranians that Iran will soon make a major nuclear announcement, unveiling, in his words, a big new nuclear achievement.”

Methodology

Media Matters reviewed Nexis transcripts between November 8, 2011 (the day that coverage picked up after the IAEA issued its report) and March 31, 2012 for segments on ABC’s World News, CBS’ Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News about Iran and its nuclear program. All applicable segments were reviewed for discussion of weaponization and mentions of Ahmadinejad.

Segments that assumed Iran had an active nuclear weapons program or stated that the country would obtain the bomb in less than a year were coded as misrepresenting the facts. Segments that speculated on the consequences if Iran were to develop nuclear weapons were also included because such speculation ignores that no evidence has surfaced to suggest that Iran intends to build nukes.

Any segment that mentioned Ahmadinejad in any capacity was coded as unnecessarily connecting the Iranian president to the country’s nuclear program.

Source

Although we have no wish to defend Guenter Grass, Goldberg’s final sentence says all there is to say about his attack on the man.

As this website has pointed out regularly, Ahmadinejad’s alleged remarks about “wiping Israel off the map” were a deliberate mistranslation used to promote support for Israel: through the depiction of Iran as the anti-Semitic tormentor and Israel as its hapless victim.

Goldberg conveniently ignores this fact. Just as he forgets to mention that he was one of the chief advocates of the Iraq invasion.

In “The Great Terror“, an article that appeared in the New Yorker in 2002 during the run-up to the Iraq war, Goldberg argued that Saddam Hussein posed a significant threat to the United States. He was of course wrong. Nonetheless his arguments paved the way for the Iraq invasion and as we now know the only real beneficiary from that military endeavor was Israel.

All of which clearly illustrates that Goldberg is a covert Zionist operative working in the U.S. media to promote Israel’s interests, not America’s.

Israel-Iran History, Holocaust Perverted in Grass’s Poem

Jeffrey Goldberg – Bloomberg April 10, 2012

Guenter Grass, the German writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, brought forth last week an odious little poem that focuses on the threat to world peace posed by the Jewish state, and congratulates its author for the courage to point out this truth.

The poem, published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and elsewhere, was titled “What Must Be Said,” which is quite a vainglorious title. There is very little in the world that is safer (or less novel) than criticizing Israel in a European newspaper.

In this poem, Grass suggests that Germans haven’t been saying “what must be said” about the various sins of the Jews. Of course, many post-Nazi German intellectuals, and intellectuals across Europe, have been saying quite nasty things about Jews and the Jewish state for some time, without noticeable consequence. (No fatwas have been issued against European critics of Jews, and no opponent of Israel has been murdered for his criticism.)

The German historian Ernst Nolte argued in a 2004 speech that “the only difference between Israel and the Third Reich is Auschwitz,” a statement exceeded in intemperance by Grass’s fellow Nobel Prize recipient, the late Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who once compared Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian West Bank, to Auschwitz, and who accused Jews of worshipping a “spiteful” god.

Waffen SS

Grass, in his writing, shows himself to be a man tired of hearing about the Holocaust, tired of thinking about the Holocaust, tired of carrying around the moral burden of the Holocaust. This is in some ways an understandable feeling for young Germans, at least, to hold. They didn’t commit the deeds, and would like the world to judge them for their actions, not those of their parents and grandparents.

Grass, however, is a former member of the Waffen SS, and being a former member of the Waffen SS means having to say you’re sorry. Unfortunately, all the harshness directed against Grass after he revealed this fact in 2006 — six decades afterward — seems to have made him angry at the SS’s victims. Thus, our poem.

“What Must Be Said” is interesting for what it says about the mind of Guenter Grass, but it is more interesting for what it says about the manner in which some intellectuals think about Israel and Iran. By extracting the self-pity, self-aggrandizement and guilt-expiation from “What Must Be Said” and leaving only the politics, Grass’s thinking is clear. The short version of his message: Israel may one day soon commit nuclear genocide against the people of Iran.

“It is the alleged right to the first strike / That could annihilate the Iranian people/ Subjugated by a loud-mouth / And guided to organized jubilation / Because in their sphere of power / It is suspected, a nuclear bomb is being built.”

Perhaps it reads better in the German, or perhaps Grass is simply T.S. Eliot’s inferior in anti-Semitic poetry, but put aside the poem’s aesthetic shortcomings and consider the idea advanced in the first two lines: That Israel, which in reality is contemplating targeting six to eight nuclear sites in Iran for conventional aerial bombardment, in fact wants to annihilate the Iranian people in a “first strike.”

This is, of course, delusional. Not even the Iranian regime seems to believe this. To make yourself believe that Israel is seeking to murder the 74 million people of Iran, you must make yourself believe that the leaders of the Jewish state outstrip Adolf Hitler in genocidal intent.

Holocaust Guilt

Grass goes on to suggest that Holocaust guilt is making Germany complicit in a crime not yet committed by Israel. He writes of the German government:

“With nimble lips calling it a reparation, it declares / A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel / Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence / Of a single atomic bomb is unproven.”

He is referring to several submarines provided to Israel by Germany. These submarines, which can be armed with nuclear-tipped missiles, are a component of Israel’s second-strike deterrent capability. The German government has provided them to Israel to discourage a second Holocaust from taking place. Unlike Grass and his fellow- travelers, German leaders still seem to understand that it isn’t Israel that threatens Iran’s existence, but Iran that threatens Israel’s.

Grass isn’t the only prominent European to perform a complete inversion of cause-and-effect in his attempt to demonize Israel. So let’s be clear: Israel is contemplating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities because the Iranian regime openly labels Israel a cancer that must be eradicated and because Iran is the prime sponsor of Muslim terrorists who seek Israel’s physical elimination. The goal of an Israeli attack would be to deny the Ayatollahs the means of bringing that about. (Whether this is a wise course of action, for Israel or for the U.S., which is also contemplating an attack, is another matter.)

On Iran’s threats to end the Jewish state – which was built on the ashes of the German Holocaust – Grass is tellingly silent.

Source