US presidential hopeful Barack Obama said on Wednesday that a nuclear Iran would pose a “grave threat” and that the world must prevent it from obtaining the atomic bomb.
“A nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said.
“A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation, not just in the Middle East but around the world,” Obama said on the latest leg of talks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Read the rest of this entry »
Ray McGovern’s statement on the Alex Jones show (6/24) never got the attention it deserved. For those who never caught the show or listened to the MP3, here is what McGovern said;
“I’d be more interested in exploring how this thing could get underway. Now, the Iranians are no dopes. They’re not gonna be provoked into doing the kind of attack on Israel or US forces that would give us an excuse, and the Israelis an excuse to really zap ‘em, and what I mean by really zap them is; go after the lion’s share of their nuclear-related activities in Iran.
And so what’s likely to happen? Well, I think more likely than anything would be a kind of, what we call in the trade here, in the intelligence trade, a False Flag attack. Ok? You get a boat all painted up with Iranian colors, and you sink a US destroyer escort in the gulf… wow! You kill a bunch of Americans… that could set things off.
Now who would do that? Who has an interest? Cui bono? We used to say. Who would have an interest, who would profit from that kind of thing? It’s very clear that the state of Israel would, because many of those extreme leaders think that they have to move against Iran before Bush leaves office.“
Presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ‘em.”
McCain, known for acerbic comments and for sometimes firing verbally from the hip, was responding to a report that U.S. exports to Iran rose tenfold during President George W. Bush’s term in office despite hostility between the two states.
A rise in cigarette sales was a big part of that, according to an Associated Press analysis of seven years of U.S. trade figures.
“Maybe that’s a way of killing ‘em,” McCain said to reporters during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “I meant that as a joke, as a person who hasn’t had a cigarette in 28 years, 29 years,” he added, laughing.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Wednesday said Iran is a “great threat” and called for tighter sanctions after it test-fired nine missiles.
“Iran is a great threat. We have to make sure we are working with our allies to apply tightened pressure on Iran,” the Illinois senator, who will face Republican John McCain in the November election, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Iran said it fired the missiles as a warning to the United States and Israel that it was ready to retaliate if they attacked over its disputed nuclear projects.
Obama said that if he were president, he would combine more direct diplomacy with the threat of much tougher economic sanctions.
“I think what this underscores is the need for us to create a kind of policy that is putting the burden on Iran to change behavior, and frankly we just have not been able to do that over the last several years,” Obama said on the CBS “Early Show.”
Obama cited reports that U.S. exports to Iran have increased under President George W. Bush even as the administration has toughened its rhetoric.
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Vicki Allen)
(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters “Tales from the Trail: 2008″ online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
This morning on Fox News, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton continued his drumbeat for war against Iran. Adopting Bill Kristol’s argument, Bolton suggested that an attack on Iran depends on who Americans elect as the next President:
“As you know the decrease in the dollar’s value and the increase in energy prices are two sides of the same coin which are being introduced as factors behind the recent instability,”
Iran’s President has blamed a weak US dollar for the soaring fuel prices that have sparked protests across the world. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad told leaders from the OPEC oil-exporting countries that the record-high costs were fake and imposed. He said that supply of oil was plentiful.
Iranian President said, “At a time when the growth of consumption is lower than the growth of production and the market is full of oil, prices are rising and this trend is completely fake and imposed.” Oil recently touched a record 140 dollars a barrel, sparking global strikes and protests led by by truckers, fishermen and labour groups. Read the rest of this entry »
Reuters.com
Iran has withdrawn around $75 billion from Europe to prevent the assets from being blocked under threatened new sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions, an Iranian weekly said.
Western powers are warning the Islamic Republic of more punitive measures if it rejects an incentives offer and presses on with sensitive nuclear work, but the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter is showing no sign of backing down.
“Part of Iran’s assets in European banks have been converted to gold and shares and another part has been transferred to Asian banks,” Mohsen Talaie, deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, was quoted as saying.
Iranian officials were not immediately available to comment on the report in Shahrvand-e Emrouz, a moderate weekly, which did not specify the time period for the withdrawals which it said were ordered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“About $75 billion of Iran’s foreign assets which were under threat of being blocked were wired back to Iran based on Ahmadinejad’s order,” the weekly said.
Iran’s Etemad-e Melli newspaper, also quoting Talai, last week also reported the country was withdrawing assets from European banks but did not give any figures. Read the rest of this entry »
How to explain the oil price? Why is it so high? Are we running out? Are supplies disrupted, or is the high price a reflection of oil company greed or OPEC greed. Are Chavez and the Saudis conspiring against us?
In my opinion, the two biggest factors in oil’s high price are the weakness in the US dollar’s exchange value and the liquidity that the Federal Reserve is pumping out.
The dollar is weak because of large trade and budget deficits, the closing of which is beyond American political will. As abuse wears out the US dollar’s reserve currency role, sellers demand more dollars as a hedge against its declining exchange value and ultimate loss of reserve currency status.
In an effort to forestall a serious recession and further crises in derivative instruments, the Federal Reserve is pouring out liquidity that is financing speculation in oil futures contracts. Hedge funds and investment banks are restoring their impaired capital structures with profits made by speculating in highly leveraged oil future contracts, just as real estate speculators flipping contracts pushed up home prices. The oil futures bubble, too, will pop, hopefully before new derivatives are created on the basis of high oil prices. Read the rest of this entry »
Key war on terror architect Douglas Feith has now confirmed Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Wesley Clark in admitting that the so-called War on Terror is a hoax.
In fact, starting right after 9/11 — at the latest — the goal has always been to create “regime change” and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon so as to protect Israel. And the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda.
Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.
Al-CIAda sock puppet Ayman al-Zawahiri was quoted in an audiotape released today accusing Iran of behind behind 9/11 conspiracy theories, in another crude public relations stunt designed to generate hostile opinion towards the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The tape had been promised three weeks ago by monitoring group IntelCenter, who have been caught in the past putting out fake and misleading “Al-Qaeda” material via the alleged media arm of the terrorist organization As-Sahab, and was finally released today.
The set-up revolved around Al-Zawahiri’s responding to questions submitted by the public via the Internet.
One of the questioners asked about the theory that has circulated in the Middle East and elsewhere that Israel was behind the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” reports the Associated Press.
Al-Zawahiri accused Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television of starting the rumor.
“The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.
As anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the 9/11 truth movement can attest to, the sock puppet Zawahiri’s claim that Iran were the first to question the official 9/11 story is completely ludicrous.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent bumbling comments about 9/11, the date of which he cannot even accurately remember, were music to the ears of Neo-Cons who seized upon the statements as fodder to debunk the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Paul Craig Roberts | InformationClearingHouse.com
Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”
The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”
Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”
The commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East is resigning. Adm. William Fallon’s decision to step down follows an Esquire magazine article suggesting he opposes President Bush’s policy on Iran. Falon has also differed with the administration by calling for more troops in Afghanistan and pulling some forces out of Iraq
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.
Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.
But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”
The Valerie Plame case is, by journalistic standards, ancient history, and naturally any follow-up on a once-important story is considered bad form. Yet there is an interesting – and rather scary – new twist to the narrative. It turns out that Scooter Libby and friends weren’t the first to “out” CIA agent Plame, whose alleged employer, a company known as Brewster Jennings, was really a cover for a CIA unit investigating nuclear proliferation issues.
The London Timesreveals that a former top U.S. State Department official tipped off Turkish agents about Brewster Jennings’ CIA connection, according to Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator assigned to produce English-language transcripts of intercepted conversations of Turkish targets – in this case recordings of Turkish embassy officials and a top State Department official discussing, among otherthings, Brewster Jennings’ relationship to the CIA.
As the Times reports, the recordings were made “between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West’s nuclear secrets and technology. Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father of the Islamic bomb,’ who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.”
ipsnews.net Analysis by Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (IPS) - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.
Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would “explode” in “a few seconds”. Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defence Department.
The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.
The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are “just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination”. Read the rest of this entry »
“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.”
–Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic
Science usually saves the day, not from a technological standpoint but a sociological one. The military-industrial complex may avoid the laws of man (for now), but it can’t possibly evade the laws of physics. Therefore, since physics dictate bullets can’t zig zag in mid air, the Warren Commission’s “magic bullet” theory was completely discredited. As a result, it’s known, though still not admitted, that the C.I.A. was the only force on Earth powerful enough to both kill J.F.K. and get away with it.
Likewise, science – this time, the twin fields of archeology and anthropology – ensures that my black ass will NEVER AGAIN be equated with an animal by white supremacists (of course, anal retentive animal rights activists equate all Humans with animals, but fuck them). Now science comes to the rescue once again, this time in the form of groups such as WeAreChangeSeattle.org. They have dedicated themselves to pointing out how, scientifically speaking, a plane crashing into a skyscraper is not always enough to bring down said skyscraper. In other words, in order for those New York towers to have fallen the way they did on 9-11, some kind of demolition had to have simultaneously occurred at their foundations. That’s right, 9-11 was an inside job, science says so. Read the rest of this entry »
David Edwards and Jason Rhyne Raw Story Wednesday, December 5, 2007
When the Bush administration began enforcing a controversial policy banning photographs of military caskets returning from Iraq, the move provoked outrage — and now, a film — from actor John Cusack, who calls the media ban “one of the most cowardly political acts” of his lifetime.
Appearing on PBS with host Tavis Smiley, Cusack explained that his new movie, Grace is Gone, is the result of a storytelling interest largely inspired by the Bush photo policy.
“The screenwriter, James Strouse, had approached my company and I had been looking for a story, a human drama to tell about the Iraq conflict,” said Cusack. “It stemmed from a place of outrage for me when the Bush administration banned the photos of the dead coming home.” That directive, ordered in 2003 at Dover Air Force Base, was technically on the books prior to Bush’s presidency, but was seldom enforced. Read the rest of this entry »
Open letter to congress from Ken at WeAreChangeSeattle.org:
Since the recently released, but long supressed, NIE Report stating the opposite of what the executive branch has been stating for months while trying to lead us to war with Iran reveals that the dangers posed by Iran are completely hyped lies. Does this mean the irrational and lemming-like supposed fear of at least some in congress that if they moved on impeachment that this would lead to an attack on Iran can now subside? Does this mean that impeachment CAN be not only on the table but can be moved upon aggressively?
Thanks. I’d greatly appreciate it, as would most of our citizens.
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