A Shocking Video of Clinton saying the exact same things Bush would later say. The Democrats and the media are full of crap when it comes to Bush Lied, but Clinton didn't?
This is Clinton's address to the nation annoucing his airstrikes against Iraq during Operation Desert Fox on December 16th 1998.
Clinton mentions the dangers Saddam Poses, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and even mentioning a NEW IRAQI GOVERNMENT! In Part II.
Some images courtesy of Protest Warrior but I do not work for them.
Music: Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
http://husseinandterror.com
http://www.protestwarrior.com
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotT...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/wor.
- They are all a bunch of lieing scumbags -
Today, in hearings on Capitol Hill, I confronted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her role in the lies, exaggerations, and misdirection that led us into the Iraq war.
During my questioning, Secretary Rice falsely stated that she never saw intelligence casting doubt on the Bush Administration claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This unbelievable statement is flatly contradicted by numerous government reports and CIA testimonials. (To watch the video of my exchange with Secretary Rice, click here.)
Secretary Rice's responses demonstrate once and for all that we need aggressive oversight over this out of control Administration. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has ignored the constitutional right of Congress to provide such oversight.
It is time Congress took aggressive action to assert our rights on behalf of the American people.
The House of Representatives must immediately hold former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in contempt of Congress for their failure to respond to congressional subpoenas.
I have been aggressively lobbying Members of Congress to support a vote on contempt, and I am thrilled to report that Speaker Pelosi told me directly that she agrees it is well past time to vote on contempt. I am anticipating that the House will shortly vote on resolutions of both civil and criminal contempt for both Miers and Bolten.
No one should be immune from accountability and the rule of law.
Not Harriet Miers or Josh Bolten.
And especially not Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.
It is time to defend the Constitution and our rights as a co-equal branch of government.
I will continue to take on the Bush Administration for their outrageous abuses just as I confronted Condoleezza Rice today and Attorney General Mukasey last week. (Click here to see my questioning of Mukasey.)
With your help we will hold these top Bush officials in contempt and continue our efforts to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Thank you, as always, for your great support.
Yours truly,
Congressman Robert Wexler
Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts
February 13, 2008
WHO IS LIEING?? Does anyone care any more???
January 24, 2008
Foreign Office told to give up WMD draft
Richard Norton-TaylorThursday January 24, 2008
The Guardian
An early draft of the government's discredited Iraq weapons dossier written by John Williams, a former journalist and head of the Foreign Office news department, must be released, the Information Tribunal ordered yesterday.
The government has said the dossier was entirely the work of the intelligence agencies. Williams' role in the affair was not disclosed to the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, the government weapons expert who questioned the way the dossier was drawn up.
The tribunal dismissed FCO claims that the release of the draft was not in the public interest. It said: "We do not accept that we should, in effect, treat the Hutton Report as the final word on the subject ...
"Information has been placed before us, which was not before Lord Hutton, which may lead to questions as to whether the Williams' draft in fact played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than has previously been supposed. We make no comment on whether it did so in fact."
The Hutton inquiry, which cleared the government of conspiring to "sex up" the dossier, was not handed the Williams contribution or address the questions which it might raise, the tribunal said.
It has been suggested that the draft might contain the first mention of the notorious and ill-founded claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a WMD strike within 45 minutes. Williams has denied the claim.
Carne Ross, a high-flying diplomat who resigned in protest at the way the Blair government led to the country to war, told the Guardian last night that the decision should pave the way to the publication of the later dossier drafts drawn up inside Whitehall. The FCO said it would be "studying the tribunal's decision".
December 12, 2007
Operation Mockingbird in FULL EFFECT on torture - prisonplanet analysis
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
By Mary Louise
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.
The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram, Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working together in unison or feigned division. This would include The Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html, www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html. Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).
"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com.
David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html.
CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html.
Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies.
One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55.
There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.
The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram, Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working together in unison or feigned division. This would include The Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html, www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html. Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).
"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com.
David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html.
CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html.
Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies.
One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55.
There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations.
The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck!
September 08, 2007
THE ROVING EYE
From al-Qaeda to al-Quds
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS –In 2002, in the runup to the war against Iraq, the George W Bush administration changed the subject from its failure to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
In 2007, in the run-up to the coming war against Iran, the administration has changed the subject from its abject failure in Iraq to Iran's also non-existent nuclear weapons. The manufacture-of-consent techniques are exactly the same - the apocalyptic 2007 Bush forecast of an Iranian-orchestrated "nuclear holocaust", echoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's apocalyptic 2002 prediction of a Saddam Hussein-orchestrated "mushroom cloud".
Vastly experienced European diplomats, from Paris to the European Union headquarters in Brussels, confess their helplessness and impotence. They also confirm off the record that Bush's brand-new European poodle, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is convinced the US president will order the bombing of Iran's nuclear sites –not to mention general infrastructure. A number of chancelleries are already working under this premise.
The Democrat-controlled US Congress, for its part, has elevated its irrevocable irrelevance to the starry skies by virtually - and ignominiously - playing itself out of the Bush administration's decision to attack Iran. In the unlikely event Congress would object, Rice already has the anti-virus vaccine: the stamping out of the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami - known in the West as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - as a "terrorist organization".
It doesn't even matter - from the point of view of the Bush administration - if the whole 125,000-strong IRGC or just its elite Quds Force is branded as terrorists. The transition will be covered by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force issued on September 18, 2001. Moreover, the US Senate has already approved - by a Stalinist 97 votes to 0 - an amendment accusing Iran of committing acts of war against the US.
It also doesn't matter that Gabriel Kolko - arguably the best historian of the Vietnam War - keeps stressing that since 1950, the US has never lost a battle; but it has never won a war either.
And now for the laundry list
Every serious observer of the hysterical manufacture-of-consent rampage is now aware of Vice President Dick Cheney's mandate for US corporate media and selected think-tanks to declare war on Iran - that is, the Office of the Vice President telling the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and assorted usual suspects what to do, all under the aegis of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the de facto policy think-tank of the Bush administration. AEI's stalwart Michael Ledeen's new book - a prodigy of subtlety titled Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealot's Quest for Destruction - is a key part of this package.
Everyone is aware of the shrill Pentagon-concocted blitzkrieg about made-in-Iran explosive devices and roadside bombs penetrating Bradleys and Abrams tanks and killing scores of US soldiers in Iraq - with no proof being volunteered to, or asked for, by cowed mainstream media.
Many are now aware of the report by Daniel Plesch and Martin Butcher summarized last month by the Raw Story website [1], according to which the Pentagon, in the impossibility of a land invasion, plans a "massive, multi-front, full-spectrum" new "shock and awe" against Iran, destroying not only the Quds force and the IRGC but all nuclear energy sites and the country's whole economic infrastructure. The objective is clearly "regime change" - or at least to reduce Iran to Iraq status, that is, a feeble, failed state.
The paper was written by British scholar and arms expert Dan Plesch, director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former director of the British American Security Information Council and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.
The neo-conservatives for their part are plugging a new "shock and awe" in a slightly watered down version - the destruction of no less than 1,200 Iranian military/nuclear targets in a mere three days (no attacks on civilian infrastructure are mentioned).
The to-be-destroyed list certainly includes the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant; the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz; a heavy-water and radioisotope plant in Arak; the nuclear fuel unit in Ardekan; the uranium conversion and nuclear technology center in Isfahan; the Tehran Nuclear Research Center; the Tehran molybdenum, iodine and xenon radioisotope production plant; and the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories. No one of course is talking about "collateral damage", or the fact that hundreds of Russian experts may be obliterated in Bushehr (how about that as a declaration of war?), or the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilian residents of fabled Isfahan may become victims of radiation provoked by US mini-nukes.
Meanwhile, Bush and "new Adolf Hitler" Mahmud Ahmadinejad keep feeding on each other. The Iranian president has dismissed a US attack ("they cannot implement it") as well as the new, Sarkozy-coined ("he's inexperienced") Western choice: "The Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." As far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, "Iran's nuclear case is closed. Iran is a nuclear nation and has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle."
Cleverly diverting attention from gargantuan US problems - from the economy to energy dependence to the emergence of multilateral powers - the Bush administration nevertheless seems to be winning the propaganda war as well, at least in the US, Western Europe and great swaths of the Arab world. Iran, internationally, looks very much isolated.
Asymmetrical war ahead
The Iranian regime anyway is clearly getting ready to face the coming attack.
Kazemi Qomi, the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, hails from the IRGC. Speaking this week to official news agency IRNA, he has indirectly warned the US in no uncertain terms "any change in [Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-] Maliki's government will lead to the outbreak of a security crisis in Iraq". This could be code, for instance, for the IRGC-trained Badr Corps giving to the Iranians the precise coordinates of American forces to be targeted inside Iraq.
This past Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei named the vastly experienced General Mohammad Ali Jafari as the new leader of the IRGC. The former leader for the past 10 years, Yahya Rahim Safavi, has been catapulted upwards and is now the "military advisor" for the supreme leader. Sources in Tehran say this move was not a reaction to the US threat. Both commanders told the Iranian press the decision had been made in early July.
US neo-cons may be oblivious to it, but it's always crucial to remember that in Iran the IRGC as well as the regular army are under the control of a civilian cleric, the supreme leader. New commander Jafari himself, in a press conference in Tehran, defined the IRGC as "a precautionary force at the service of the commander-in-chief in order to rush to the help of other organizations wherever help is necessary".
The IRGC, a former popular army that blossomed out of the 1979 Islamic Revolution must, according to the country's constitution "guard the revolution and its achievements". The regular army for its part "guards the independence, territorial integrity, and political order of the Islamic Republic".
During the revolution, Jafari was a student at the elite architecture school at the University of Tehran. According to his own biography he "was active in the takeover" of the American Embassy. He went to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s as a member of the Basij militia, and then joined the IRGC when he was 25 (he's 50 today), and soon became a commander. After the war he was a commander of the IRGC' ground forces. In 2005, the supreme leader put him in charge of the IRGC's Strategic Center, developing a new Iranian military strategy.
This fine strategist identifies the IRGC's role as mostly "deterrence and defense". More importantly, he characterizes the IRGC as a popular organization excelling in asymmetrical war - "similar to the one Hezbollah fought against Israel" in his own words - and, one might add, similar to what Iran will fight against the US. His message to the US after his appointment was clear: "I suggest that they end their presence and interact with Islam and countries of the region from afar. This will surely be to their benefit and I suggest that they leave the region as soon as possible."
The eternal Rafsanjani
This past Tuesday, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became the head of the Council of Experts - the supreme, secretive body of 86 clerics that chooses the supreme leader's successor. He won by 41 to 33 votes, with 11 abstentions and one spoiled ballot.
Rafsanjani had already been the most voted in the December 2006 elections for the council, but he was still number two to Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, who died at the end of June. A key "spoiler" figure - ultra-hardliner Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's mentor - did not even contest this latest election; it was Ayatollah Janati, a protege of Yazdi, who lost to Rafsanjani.
First of all, this means a new, although narrow, defeat of the ultra-hardliners. It also shows how fierce is the competition among at least four factions at the top of the Iranian system. But most of all it fully restores Rafsanjani - a pragmatist very much in favor of an accommodation with the US - to the limelight. He is now the head of both the Expediency Council (for which he was nominated by Khamenei) and the Council of Experts. He now even has the power to depose the supreme leader if he sees fit. US conservatives would be certainly thrilled with the prospect.
Rafsanjani's perception in Iran is mixed. He's very popular among Tehran's middle classes. The faraway provinces mostly support populist Ahmadinejad. Arguably the richest man in the whole country, he may also be one of the most corrupt. His presidency (1989-1997), according to reformists in Tehran, was a disaster. The justice system in Argentina has issued an international warrant for his arrest, related to an anti-Israeli bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people.
Rafsanjani would use all his privileged back channels in Washington to avoid war. He is very much aware of the stakes, declaring after his election, "The United States plan for the Great Middle East, which was drawn up after September 11 [2001] seriously threatens our region." But he may be as helpless to defuse the situation as dejected European diplomats.
The only guiding logic of the US far right in power is permanent war. The hellish mechanism is already in place. Any pretext will do for Bush to order an attack on the Quds force inside Iran. The IRGC will retaliate. And there it is, the precious casus belli for "shock and awe" remixed. First the bombing of Quds; then the bombing of Bushehr, Natanz and Isfahan. The whole of Iran, out of Persian national pride, will rally behind Ahmadinejad, the supreme leader, the IRGC and the theocratic police state. So much for regime change.
Note
1. Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
From al-Qaeda to al-Quds
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS –In 2002, in the runup to the war against Iraq, the George W Bush administration changed the subject from its failure to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
In 2007, in the run-up to the coming war against Iran, the administration has changed the subject from its abject failure in Iraq to Iran's also non-existent nuclear weapons. The manufacture-of-consent techniques are exactly the same - the apocalyptic 2007 Bush forecast of an Iranian-orchestrated "nuclear holocaust", echoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's apocalyptic 2002 prediction of a Saddam Hussein-orchestrated "mushroom cloud".
Vastly experienced European diplomats, from Paris to the European Union headquarters in Brussels, confess their helplessness and impotence. They also confirm off the record that Bush's brand-new European poodle, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is convinced the US president will order the bombing of Iran's nuclear sites –not to mention general infrastructure. A number of chancelleries are already working under this premise.
The Democrat-controlled US Congress, for its part, has elevated its irrevocable irrelevance to the starry skies by virtually - and ignominiously - playing itself out of the Bush administration's decision to attack Iran. In the unlikely event Congress would object, Rice already has the anti-virus vaccine: the stamping out of the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami - known in the West as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - as a "terrorist organization".
It doesn't even matter - from the point of view of the Bush administration - if the whole 125,000-strong IRGC or just its elite Quds Force is branded as terrorists. The transition will be covered by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force issued on September 18, 2001. Moreover, the US Senate has already approved - by a Stalinist 97 votes to 0 - an amendment accusing Iran of committing acts of war against the US.
It also doesn't matter that Gabriel Kolko - arguably the best historian of the Vietnam War - keeps stressing that since 1950, the US has never lost a battle; but it has never won a war either.
And now for the laundry list
Every serious observer of the hysterical manufacture-of-consent rampage is now aware of Vice President Dick Cheney's mandate for US corporate media and selected think-tanks to declare war on Iran - that is, the Office of the Vice President telling the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and assorted usual suspects what to do, all under the aegis of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the de facto policy think-tank of the Bush administration. AEI's stalwart Michael Ledeen's new book - a prodigy of subtlety titled Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealot's Quest for Destruction - is a key part of this package.
Everyone is aware of the shrill Pentagon-concocted blitzkrieg about made-in-Iran explosive devices and roadside bombs penetrating Bradleys and Abrams tanks and killing scores of US soldiers in Iraq - with no proof being volunteered to, or asked for, by cowed mainstream media.
Many are now aware of the report by Daniel Plesch and Martin Butcher summarized last month by the Raw Story website [1], according to which the Pentagon, in the impossibility of a land invasion, plans a "massive, multi-front, full-spectrum" new "shock and awe" against Iran, destroying not only the Quds force and the IRGC but all nuclear energy sites and the country's whole economic infrastructure. The objective is clearly "regime change" - or at least to reduce Iran to Iraq status, that is, a feeble, failed state.
The paper was written by British scholar and arms expert Dan Plesch, director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former director of the British American Security Information Council and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament.
The neo-conservatives for their part are plugging a new "shock and awe" in a slightly watered down version - the destruction of no less than 1,200 Iranian military/nuclear targets in a mere three days (no attacks on civilian infrastructure are mentioned).
The to-be-destroyed list certainly includes the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant; the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz; a heavy-water and radioisotope plant in Arak; the nuclear fuel unit in Ardekan; the uranium conversion and nuclear technology center in Isfahan; the Tehran Nuclear Research Center; the Tehran molybdenum, iodine and xenon radioisotope production plant; and the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories. No one of course is talking about "collateral damage", or the fact that hundreds of Russian experts may be obliterated in Bushehr (how about that as a declaration of war?), or the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilian residents of fabled Isfahan may become victims of radiation provoked by US mini-nukes.
Meanwhile, Bush and "new Adolf Hitler" Mahmud Ahmadinejad keep feeding on each other. The Iranian president has dismissed a US attack ("they cannot implement it") as well as the new, Sarkozy-coined ("he's inexperienced") Western choice: "The Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." As far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, "Iran's nuclear case is closed. Iran is a nuclear nation and has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle."
Cleverly diverting attention from gargantuan US problems - from the economy to energy dependence to the emergence of multilateral powers - the Bush administration nevertheless seems to be winning the propaganda war as well, at least in the US, Western Europe and great swaths of the Arab world. Iran, internationally, looks very much isolated.
Asymmetrical war ahead
The Iranian regime anyway is clearly getting ready to face the coming attack.
Kazemi Qomi, the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, hails from the IRGC. Speaking this week to official news agency IRNA, he has indirectly warned the US in no uncertain terms "any change in [Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-] Maliki's government will lead to the outbreak of a security crisis in Iraq". This could be code, for instance, for the IRGC-trained Badr Corps giving to the Iranians the precise coordinates of American forces to be targeted inside Iraq.
This past Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei named the vastly experienced General Mohammad Ali Jafari as the new leader of the IRGC. The former leader for the past 10 years, Yahya Rahim Safavi, has been catapulted upwards and is now the "military advisor" for the supreme leader. Sources in Tehran say this move was not a reaction to the US threat. Both commanders told the Iranian press the decision had been made in early July.
US neo-cons may be oblivious to it, but it's always crucial to remember that in Iran the IRGC as well as the regular army are under the control of a civilian cleric, the supreme leader. New commander Jafari himself, in a press conference in Tehran, defined the IRGC as "a precautionary force at the service of the commander-in-chief in order to rush to the help of other organizations wherever help is necessary".
The IRGC, a former popular army that blossomed out of the 1979 Islamic Revolution must, according to the country's constitution "guard the revolution and its achievements". The regular army for its part "guards the independence, territorial integrity, and political order of the Islamic Republic".
During the revolution, Jafari was a student at the elite architecture school at the University of Tehran. According to his own biography he "was active in the takeover" of the American Embassy. He went to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s as a member of the Basij militia, and then joined the IRGC when he was 25 (he's 50 today), and soon became a commander. After the war he was a commander of the IRGC' ground forces. In 2005, the supreme leader put him in charge of the IRGC's Strategic Center, developing a new Iranian military strategy.
This fine strategist identifies the IRGC's role as mostly "deterrence and defense". More importantly, he characterizes the IRGC as a popular organization excelling in asymmetrical war - "similar to the one Hezbollah fought against Israel" in his own words - and, one might add, similar to what Iran will fight against the US. His message to the US after his appointment was clear: "I suggest that they end their presence and interact with Islam and countries of the region from afar. This will surely be to their benefit and I suggest that they leave the region as soon as possible."
The eternal Rafsanjani
This past Tuesday, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became the head of the Council of Experts - the supreme, secretive body of 86 clerics that chooses the supreme leader's successor. He won by 41 to 33 votes, with 11 abstentions and one spoiled ballot.
Rafsanjani had already been the most voted in the December 2006 elections for the council, but he was still number two to Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, who died at the end of June. A key "spoiler" figure - ultra-hardliner Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's mentor - did not even contest this latest election; it was Ayatollah Janati, a protege of Yazdi, who lost to Rafsanjani.
First of all, this means a new, although narrow, defeat of the ultra-hardliners. It also shows how fierce is the competition among at least four factions at the top of the Iranian system. But most of all it fully restores Rafsanjani - a pragmatist very much in favor of an accommodation with the US - to the limelight. He is now the head of both the Expediency Council (for which he was nominated by Khamenei) and the Council of Experts. He now even has the power to depose the supreme leader if he sees fit. US conservatives would be certainly thrilled with the prospect.
Rafsanjani's perception in Iran is mixed. He's very popular among Tehran's middle classes. The faraway provinces mostly support populist Ahmadinejad. Arguably the richest man in the whole country, he may also be one of the most corrupt. His presidency (1989-1997), according to reformists in Tehran, was a disaster. The justice system in Argentina has issued an international warrant for his arrest, related to an anti-Israeli bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people.
Rafsanjani would use all his privileged back channels in Washington to avoid war. He is very much aware of the stakes, declaring after his election, "The United States plan for the Great Middle East, which was drawn up after September 11 [2001] seriously threatens our region." But he may be as helpless to defuse the situation as dejected European diplomats.
The only guiding logic of the US far right in power is permanent war. The hellish mechanism is already in place. Any pretext will do for Bush to order an attack on the Quds force inside Iran. The IRGC will retaliate. And there it is, the precious casus belli for "shock and awe" remixed. First the bombing of Quds; then the bombing of Bushehr, Natanz and Isfahan. The whole of Iran, out of Persian national pride, will rally behind Ahmadinejad, the supreme leader, the IRGC and the theocratic police state. So much for regime change.
Note
1. Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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