Territory of Lies
The Israeli-Occupied Hearing on Alleged Iranian Terror
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | November 4, 2011
In the wake of the much-heralded FBI sting that supposedly foiled a dastardly plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard elite Qods Force – involving a bumbling, failed used-car salesman’s botched attempt to hire a reportedly Mossad-trained Mexican drug cartel – to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a crowded but fictitious Washington D.C. restaurant, a duly alarmed U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security convened an urgent hearing on “Iranian Terror Operations on American Soil.” As evidence of Tehran’s supposed threat to the Homeland, the Committee heard testimony from “expert witnesses” who could best be described as propagandists for Israel. Commenting on the partisan line-up, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations remarked, “If it wasn’t so serious, it would be satire.”
Among the five witnesses, two were from “conservative” think tanks closely aligned with the Israel lobby, while a third represented a supposedly more “progressive” pro-Israeli position. The first think-tanker to speak was Reuel Marc Gerecht, who cited his authority on the subject to explain away the Hollywood B-movie nature of the ludicrous murder-for-hire plot. “I might make a slight digression and just say all intelligence services aren’t as good as you think they are. And the Iranians are no exception. They make a lot of mistakes,” claimed the former Middle East specialist in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. “So do not, for a moment, buy the argument from those who said it cannot be because this is too sloppy. This is the nature of the game. This is how it is done.” Gerecht, currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, went on to advocate an escalation of “the war and terror” [sic] against a supposedly emboldened Iran. “If they think they can get away with it, they will push forward, and they did get away with it,” he asserted. “Now, the only way that I would argue that you are going to stop that type of mentality and attitude is that you have to convince them that you will escalate. You don’t want to run away from that word, you want to run towards it.” In a July 19 report on the funding of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eli Clifton observed that “its hawkish stance against Iran … is consistent with its donors’ interests in ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy.”
Next up was Dr. Matthew Levitt. “It is too early to tell what the consequences of Iran’s assassination plot may be,” he told the hearing, “but there should be no doubt the plot lays bare the myth that sufficient carrots – from offers of dialogue to requests for an emergency hotline to reduce naval tensions in the Gulf – can induce the regime in Tehran to abandon its support for terrorism, part with its nuclear weapons program, or respect human rights.” Instead, Dr. Levitt recommended applying the sticks of diplomatic pressure, pressing regional bodies to expel Iranian diplomats, building an international consensus against Tehran, military pressure, customs controls, financial pressure, and coordination with European and other allies “to allay their fears over the possible unintended consequences” of the latter. Levitt is the director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank created by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to “do AIPAC’s work but appear independent.”
In his testimony, Dr. Lawrence J. Korb counselled against military action, recommending instead that “[t]he Obama administration should use the Iranian plot to convince our allies to recommit themselves to enforcing the current sanctions on Iran.” Concluding by saying that “Iranian aggression toward the United States cannot be tolerated,” the Center for American Progress senior fellow advised the hearing that “it is important that the U.S. response to the Iranian plot furthers our long-term goals: deterring Iranian aggression and protecting U.S. national security.” Dr. Korb’s stated concern for American national security, however, has to be weighed against the two decades the former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration has devoted to working for the release of Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli agent who “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history.”
Sandwiching the testimony by the three think tank fellows were two former U.S. military officers known to be supportive of the hawkish Israeli line on the Middle East. Hyping Iran as “our number one strategic enemy in the world,” retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane suggested “we put our hand around their throat right now.” In 2007, Keane co-authored with Frederick Kagan the American Enterprise Institute-sponsored policy paper entitled “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” which proposed the so-called “surge” beloved of America’s Israel partisans. Retired Marine Corps Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, who has been echoing all the standard Israeli propaganda against Tehran ever since the 1983 attack on the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut under his allegedly negligent command, didn’t hesitate to blame Iranian-backed Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. The U.S. ambassador to Argentina at the time, however, has said, “To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything.”
During the hearing, the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Peter King, called for all Iranian diplomats at the UN to be “kicked out” of the United States for spying. That evening, his provocative statement was given traction through a live interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who apparently just wanted to know “what’s goin’ on here?” The sincerity of Blitzer’s seemingly ingenuous concern about Iranian espionage on American soil is undermined somewhat by the fact that he was once editor of Near East Report, AIPAC’s bi-weekly newsletter, before serving 17 years with the Jerusalem Post, during which time he authored a sympathetic book on Jonathan Pollard. The title of that “slick piece of damage control” – Territory of Lies – would be a fitting description for the Israeli-occupied hearing on alleged Iranian terror.
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Maidhc Ó Cathail is a political analyst and editor of The Passionate Attachment.
BBC Shame
By Craig Murray on October 31, 2011
BBC journalism hit a new low today. The BBC News channel devoted only a single sentence to Palestine’s diplomatic coup in gaining full membership of Unesco. It used that single sentence once at 18.23 and once during the following hour. And this is that single sentence:
“Israel says that Unesco’s decision to admit Palestine to full membership will damage the prospects for peace in the Middle East.”
No other view was given, We did not hear what Palestine says, or what Unesco says, or what any of the huge majority of 107 countries which voted for Palestine say. The only view we were given was the Israeli view, and there was no questioning or discussion of that view.
“Israel says” – what an astonishing opening two words to a report on a great day for Palestinian diplomacy. Everyone connected with BBC News should be utterly ashamed. Why don’t we just save the license fee and let Netanyahu’s office broadcast the news instead?
The vote incidentally was 107 to 14. It was a humiliating defeat for US diplomacy. Latvia, Tuvalu and Uzbekistan are among the states which did not follow the US lead against Palestine but which always have done in the past. The USA was also unable to coerce a single African state – I am proud of Africa, and Ghana in particluar.
Here is the list of the pathetic 14, the overwhelmingly defeated states which tried to block Palestine and which either have extreme neo-con governments or are completely susceptible to US aid blackmail – you can decide which are which:
Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America, Vanuatu.
US apology demanded for anti-Iran ploy
Press TV – October 31, 2011
Iran has demanded an official apology from the US over its recent anti-Iran allegations and media hype, falsely claiming that Tehran plotted to assassinate the Saudi Arabian envoy to Washington, Press TV reports.
In a recent letter to the US government, Iran has insisted that American authorities must publicly apologize to the Iranian government and its citizens for the false accusations they publicized against Tehran in violation of international norms and regulations.
In the letter, the Iranian government also demanded compensation for material and moral damages caused by the American anti-Iran publicity campaign.
The letter has been handed over to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran which represents US interests in Iran since Tehran and Washington severed diplomatic relations in 1980.
According to the letter, the manufacture of such deceitful scenarios [against Iran] has become a permanent component of US policies against Iran.
The letter further cited the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 as another clear instance of US warmongering based on the dissemination of entirely false allegations.
After killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and US soldiers and wasting billions of dollars out of the pockets of American citizens, said the letter, the US has no other way out except to withdraw its military forces from Iraq.
On October 11, the US Justice Department accused Iran of plotting to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir, with help from a man suspected of being a member of a Mexican drug cartel.
‘NYT”s Gordon (who gave us Saddam’s ‘mushroom cloud’) relies on Israeli expert to interpret Saddam
By Philip Weiss on October 28, 2011
Call me conspiratorial, but here’s a story about the Israeli presence in our discourse that makes me want to take a bath. Wednesday’s New York Times ran a story about a collection of Saddam Hussein’s confidential documents that show him to have a conspiratorial turn of mind regarding Israel’s machinations in the Middle East.
But deep in that very story, the reporter, Michael Gordon, says that he relied on an Israeli expert who has access to the archive.
And–surprise—the article is highly favorable to Israel. It paints Saddam Hussein as an anti-semite who routinely misread other leaders and mistakenly saw an American-Israeli conspiracy in several actions of western governments in the 1980s and 90s, and particularly during the Iran-Iraq war.
I know: those Arab conspiracy theorists! But why is the New York Times turning to an Israeli expert? And doing so with so little transparency.
Near the top, the article says that the “voluminous” archive, seized by the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003, landed at the National Defense University, that some “outside researchers” examined a “small portion” of the documents, and that 20 documents were made public Tuesday in conjunction with a conference of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
It is not till the tenth paragraph that reporter Michael Gordon states his reliance on an Israeli expert to interpret the documents. Gordon writes that Saddam grievously miscalculated Iranian intentions in 1980, “according to Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who has studied the documents.” (The article later identifies Hal Brands, an assistant professor at Duke, as another expert who has seen them.)
Here are those 20 documents that the Wilson Center released, on line. I’m guessing it’s a few hundred pages. A lot for a busy reporter to go through.
It is not clear from the article how much of the archive Gordon has gone through himself. It’s not clear how many nuggets Baram found for him. Call me conspiratorial, but I’d like to know.
Just who sent Michael Gordon to Saddam Hussein’s description of New York as a “Jewish city” that brainwashes UN officials? Who sent him to Saddam’s boast from 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war, “Once Iraq emerges victorious, there will not be any Israel… Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq”?
Who is Amatzia Baram? He gave a couple of interviews in the AIPAC newsletter Near East Report in 2002, making the case for ousting Saddam. Look at The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer (pp. 259-260); Baram recanted in 2007, saying “If I knew then what I know today, I would not have recommend going to war, because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought.”
And who is Michael Gordon? A guy with a famous episode of piping bad information about Saddam. In 2002 he paved the way to the Iraq war with an article saying that Saddam was getting nukes– the famous “aluminum tubes… mushroom cloud” piece in 2002, based on brilliant inside sources that proved to be hogwash.
Read Michael Massing’s devastating piece on Gordon’s reporting in the New York Review of Books.
Administration “hard-liners,” Gordon and [Judith] Miller added, worried that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’… may be a mushroom cloud.” The piece concluded with a section on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, relying heavily on the information supplied by Ahmed al-Shemri. “All of Iraq is one large storage facility,” he was quoted as saying…
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not a leak. “The administration wasn’t really ready to make its case publicly at the time,” Gordon told me. “Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out.” Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with the story.
Occupy Wall Street, Palestine solidarity movements smeared as “anti-Semitic”
Maureen Clare Murphy – The Electronic Intifada – 10/28/2011
In a news segment broadcast Wednesday night by ABC 7 News in Chicago, reporter Chuck Goudie claims that there is “a vein of anti-Semitism flowing through the movement that has Jewish leaders concerned.”
I and other activists have responded to this vile smear attack on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement more generally.
In his report, Goudie purports to expose the “ugly underbelly of Occupy Wall Street” and cherry-picks unrepresentative, isolated cases of anti-Semitic speech to make it seem that anti-Jewish sentiment is a pervasive problem in the OWS movement.
Goudie also attempts to prove his point by saying that Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian-American community leader in Chicago, gave a speech at an Occupy Chicago rally in which Goudie claims Abudayyeh “spoke about destroying Israel.”
The short broadcast includes a seconds-long clip from a YouTube video of Abudayyeh’s speech — which was actually given at a rally held on the anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, not at an OWS rally. Abudayyeh states in the clip “they [the Palestinians] will win their freedom and independence from Israel and from the United States” — a far cry from calling for the destruction of Israel, as Goudie states in his ad hominem attack.
Palestine solidarity conflated with anti-Semitism
Goudie also dangerously conflates Palestine solidarity with anti-Semitism by reporting that demonstrators brought a large Palestinian flag to a protest outside of Chicago City Hall on Wednesday. According to Goudie’s warped logic, a Palestinian flag is somehow a symbol of anti-Semitism because Rahm Emanuel is Chicago’s first Jewish mayor.
In a text report on ABC 7’s website accompanying the video of Wednesday night’s broadcast, Goudie writes, “The I-Team asked a spokesperson for the Occupy Chicago group why they displayed a Palestinian flag outside Mayor Emanuel’s office and why a Palestinian activist would speak about Israel at one of their events. They did not provide a response.”
To Goudie, it can be inferred, any Palestinian symbol of national liberation is inherently anti-Semitic and any Palestinian speaking about Israel an automatic offense.
Goudie also neglects to mention that he only asked Occupy Chicago for a comment less than two hours before his report was broadcast. He does not mention whether he made any attempt to interview Palestine solidarity groups or community organizations in Chicago.
Goudie finds “vein of anti-Semitism” where Jewish organizations don’t
Goudie claims that anti-Semitism in the OWS movement has “Jewish leaders concerned,” but the single representative of a Jewish organization interviewed by Goudie didn’t seem as concerned by the “vein of anti-Semitism” that is keeping Goudie up at night.
“There have been some isolated incidents throughout the country that have clearly alarmed us,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Chicago director Lonnie Nasatir tells Goudie in a tone best described as less than urgent.
No other Jewish community or organizational representatives are interviewed in the story; Goudie only references a Republication National Committee internal memo and Committee for Israel video which attempt to smear the OWS movement as anti-Semitic.
Indeed, major American Jewish organizations and Israel lobby groups are so far not terribly concerned by the OWS movement.
For example, in a press release for the American Jewish Committee entitled “Is ‘Occupy Wall Street’ anti-Semitic?” the group’s “specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism” Kenneth Stern addresses concerns that some anti-Semitic slogans have been spotted on OWS protesters’ posters.
Though he treats the presence of so-called “anti-Israel groups” who talk about “the issue of US aid to Israel” and advocate for boycott, divestment and sanctions as a potential problem, Stern takes to task fear-mongering reporting such as Goudie’s:
some recent complaints from partisan quarters and in the media alleging widespread anti-Semitism are unfair. They attempt to paint the episodic incident as routine and ignore both the repudiation in instances of anti-Semitism, as well as the hospitable environment for Jews. Yom Kippur and Sukkot were both celebrated at OWS.
Stern adds:
Still, one anti-Semitic sign is too many. We live in a world where an image or moment can be captured by a cell phone camera and put on the Internet within minutes. A picture may be the equivalent of a thousand words, but it should not be taken as reflecting the ideas of thousands of participants.
It seems that the “vein of anti-Semitism spreading to Chicago” is only in Goudie’s wild imagination.
Series of attacks on Abudayyeh
This is not Chuck Goudie’s first scare-mongering report on Hatem Abudayyeh — he has produced three such segments in approximately one year focusing on the Palestinian community organizer in Chicago.
Shortly after the FBI raided Abudayyeh’s home in September 2010 as part of a coordinated raid in multiple cities targeting anti-war and Palestine and Colombia solidarity activists, Goudie attempted to make shadowy connections between the raids and city grants received by the community organization Abudayyeh directs.
And in December 2010, Goudie and ABC 7 produced a similarly shallow report, repeating the non-story that Abudayyeh’s Arab American Action Network has received city funding, and “revealing” that White House visitor records show that Abudayyeh attended an event there described as “a large Arab briefing.”
In the same report, Goudie makes several lazy errors that are indicative of the quality of his work.
Abudayyeh is repeatedly described as a “Muslim community leader,” which while certainly not offensive, is not an accurate characterization of Abudayyeh’s work, which is community- rather than faith-based. Goudie also claims that individuals subpoenaed as part of the same federal grand jury investigation targeting Abudayyeh include a pair of women who traveled to the “West Bank of Israel” over the summer and their grand jury subpoenas compel them to testify on 5 January 2011 when in fact the grand jury summons was for 25 January 2011.
(Full disclosure: I am one of the now 24 activists whose homes have been raided and/or who have been served grand jury subpoenas — for more information, see stopfbi.net. I also have organized with Abudayyeh in Chicago for several years, and yes that’s me sitting next to him at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee panel in the ABC 7 December 2010 report. I have also interviewed Abudayyeh twice for EI — after his family’s bank accounts were inexplicably closed by TCF Bank and for this special report I co-authored with my colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman on the criminalization of the Palestinian national movement in the United States.)
Avoiding talking about the real issues
As a statement put out by me and several others yesterday makes clear:
By smearing the OWS movement and Palestinian community and solidarity activists, Goudie blatantly avoids discussing the real issues that are bringing tens of thousands of Americans to the streets in cities and towns across the country.
True journalism is about holding those in power accountable, not drawing grotesque charicactures of those speaking truth to power, as Goudie did in his report.
The following call to action was released on 27 October 2011: Full call to action at source
Maureen Clare Murphy is the managing editor of The Electronic Intifada and an activist based in Chicago.
NYT Bureau Chief To Appear On Panel For Islamophobic Organization’s Film
By Eli Clifton | Think Progress | October 26, 2011
The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, has stirred up controversy over recent speaking engagements. But an announcement on the 92nd St. Y’s website shows that Bronner is now scheduled to appear on a panel hosted by the Clarion Fund, an Islamophobic organization, to discuss the “threat of a nuclear Iran.”
The invitation, as it appears on the Clarion Fund’s website, reads:
On Monday, November 7, 2011, at 7:30 PM, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, NY will host a panel discussion about the threat of a nuclear Iran, interspersed with clips from the award-winning documentary Iranium. The panel will be moderated by the film’s director, Alex Traiman, and will be simultaneously broadcasted in over 20 communities throughout the U.S. (details below).
Panelists include:
John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Nazie Eftekhari, Director, Iran Democratic Union
Richard Green, Executive Director, Clarion Fund
Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Bush administrationClick HERE for details and to order tickets.
Bronner and the 92nd Street Y are free to associate themselves with whatever organizations they choose. But the fact that the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief is lending his name to a Clarion Fund event, and the promotion of a film which advocates for military action against Iran, raises further questions about Bronner’s growing record of engaging in activities which could produce the appearance of a conflict of interest or undermine the impartiality of his reporting.
The Clarion Fund, which was profiled in the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” distributed the inflammatory anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West to 28 million swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election. Clarion is closely tied to Aish Hatorah, an evangelist, far-right, Israeli ultra-orthodox organization. Traiman, Iranium’s director and the moderator of the panel on which Bronner will appear, has close ties the Israeli far-right and lives in an ideological West Bank settlement.
Iranium, makes the case for attacking Iran and promotes an official U.S. policy of regime change. The film, much like the other documentaries produced by Clarion, portrays a clash of civilizations, promotes the view that Muslims value death over life and suggests that irrational hatred of Israeli and anti-Semitism is the only explanation for the frustration expressed by Muslim countries against the U.S.
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Max Blumenthal adds:
By agreeing to speak at the Islamophobic Clarion Fund’s 92nd Street Y event on November 7 beside neoconservative Richard Perle and uber-hawk John Bolton, Ethan Bronner is explicitly violating New York Times ethical guidelines. After I published my report about Bronner’s unethical business arrangement with a right-wing Israeli public relations firm, the Times‘ Standards Editor Phil Corbett sent out a memo to the entire Times staff reminding them about the paper’s guidelines for speaking engagements. A staffer leaked the memo to Gawker. It included the following stipulations, which Bronner is clearly violating:
Speaking fees are generally not allowed from companies, lobbying groups or other sources that might raise questions about our impartiality.
— Even if an engagement does not involve a fee, we should avoid situations that would create an appearance of favoritism or suggest too close a relationship between a Times journalist and the people or institutions we cover.
Libya Asks NATO To Keep Them In Or Out?
Moon of Alabama | October 27, 2011
The Libyan regime is requesting further NATO help. (One wonders who gave it the idea.) But is not clear what the purpose of further NATO support should be.
According to AlJazeera the purpose is to keep Gaddhafi supporters from fleeing to neighbor countries:
NATO should stay involved in Libya until the end of this year to help prevent loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi from leaving the country, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the interim leader, has said.
…
“We look forward to NATO continuing its operations until the end of the year,” Jalil said at a conference in Doha, the Qatari capital, on Wednesday.Stating that stopping the flight of Gaddafi supporters to other countries was a priority, he said: “We seek technical and logistics help from neighbouring and friendly countries.”
According to the New York Times the purpose is to keep Gaddhafi supporters from invading from neighbor countries:
“We have asked NATO to stay until the end of the year, and it certainly has the international legitimacy to remain in Libya to protect the civilians from Qaddafi loyalists,” the interim leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, chairman of the Transitional National Council, said in an interview with the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera.“Qaddafi still has supporters in neighboring countries, and we fear those loyalists could be launching attacks against us and infiltrating our borders,” he said. “We need technical support and training for our troops on the ground. We also need communications equipment, and we need aerial intelligence to monitor our borders.”
To keep them in or to keep them out? Which is it?
Libya’s desert borders are too long to be controllable by any force. People will always be able to come in or leave the country without anyone noticing. Even if one could control the borders how is one supposed to differentiate between a coming or leaving Gaddhafi supporter versus the coming or leaving anti-Gaddhafi Libyan?
The situation on the ground is, as Tony Karon points out, comparable to Afghanistan in 2002 or maybe even 1992. There is no central power accepted by all parts of the country and the new government has no real power over the various militia.
To put NATO boots on Libyan ground would be the repeat of the NATO adventure in Afghanistan with, ten years later, a likely comparable outcome.
Radiation Reporting
By JOHN LaFORGE | CounterPunch | October 26, 2011
The ongoing radiation catastrophe stemming from three out-of-control nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan has taken a back seat to far graver news events of late: Michael Jackson’s doctor, fund-raising by presidential hopefuls, the World Series, and Netflix stock.
Meanwhile, reporting about the on-going disaster relentlessly repeats the minimization and trivialization of radiation risk that began March 11, with the largest earthquake in Japanese history and the unprecedented tsunami that left over 26,000 people dead or missing and 80,000 still living in shelters.
Radioactive contamination of soil, tap water, rain water, groundwater, beef, fish, vegetables, animal feed and incinerator ash are almost always said to be of little or “no immediate” danger, which helps explain why Fukushima has faded from public consciousness.
“An exposure of 100 millisieverts per year is considered the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is evident,” the French Press Agency reported Oct. 6. But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s official published position on radiation risk is that, “any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, [and] … any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.”
Contaminated spinach and milk “do not pose an immediate health threat,” reported Giles Snyder of NPR’s Weekend Edition, April 19. Yet the National Council on Radiation Protection declares that “every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.”
“The nuclear crisis caused the worst radiation leak since Chernobyl,” the AP said Oct. 7, as if the accident were over. The same news agency said Sept. 22 that “radiation leaks continue.”
An April 11 Forbes news report grossly misstated the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) official public warning about radiation. Noting that a Phoenix, Arizona drinking water sample contained 3.2 pico-curies-per-liter of radioactive iodine-131 from Fukushima, and that the EPA’s maximum contaminant level is 3.0, the writer concluded: “EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat.” In fact, the EPA officially warns that “there is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk.”
In spite of evidence of far flung and ominous levels of contamination, the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, had the nerve to tell Japan to be less conservative in its cleanup program planning. The removal of layers of topsoil is being considered by the government, but an IAEA team this month said that would be impractical. About 29 million cubic meters of surface soil, an area the size of Luxemburg, may need to be removed but, “We want the Japanese government to avoid becoming too conservative” in its cleanup plans,” IAEA inspectors said. The IAEA is chartered to work worldwide “to promote nuclear technologies,” while finding a disposal location for its mountains of radioactive waste is Japan’s problem. The government recently approved “temporary” storage of millions of tons of contaminated soil and rice straw in state-owned forests.
Japan’s health minister declared Sept. 20 that the beef supply was safe and claimed that the government had improved its testing of food for radioactive contamination. In August the minister, Yoko Komiyama, lifted a ban on shipments of beef contaminated with radioactive cesium.
“The government was saying everything sold in the market was safe before the beef incident, then it turned out to be untrue,” Mariko Sano, secretary of the Tokyo-based consumer group Shufuren told the Wall St. Journal. “It’s hard to believe that now.”
Iran and the Hollywood Script: A Collaborative Effort
By Daniel McAdams on October 16, 2011
According to FBI director Robert Muller, the latest FBI-created-and-miraculously-defeated terror threat — this time straight out of Iran and straight from the top — was something “straight out of a Hollywood script.” Well, he should know so we’ll take him at his word.
Although the same neocons who are probably writing these Hollywood scripts are screaming “this means war!!”, we cannot help but wonder just how deep is the manipulation of our media and our government by shadow forces both foreign and domestic pushing us covertly toward another war.
Considering the latest news out of the UK, where the male partner of recently-departed-in-scandal Defense Secretary Liam Fox is revealed to have been working covertly with the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government, these speculations should no longer be written off as the conspiratorial thinking of feverish minds.
Disgraced Secretary Fox had been jet-setting all over the world with his “best man,” Adam Werritty, in tow; Werrittty passed himself off as Fox’s de facto chief of staff, and it is in this capacity that he has been engaged over the past several years covertly bumping up the Iranian “opposition” — the same Green Movement that some of us were attacked for suggesting had a very, umm, Western flavor — and attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime.
Just the outlandish suggestion that a booze-addled Iranian immigrant used car salesman was plotting to have the Saudi ambassador assassinated was enough to have the media, ThinkTankistan, and the Left/Right interventionists screaming that an “act of war” had been committed by Iran and demanding an invasion. Yet why is it never an act of war when Western spooks go into Iran in a blatant attempt to overthrow its government and foment phony “Green Revolutions” where scores are killed?
With the Fox scandal breaking big in the UK, it is increasingly obvious that these scripts written to bring the US and its allies to a disastrous war on Iran are more of a collaborative effort, perhaps Hollywood, Langley, and Tel Aviv.
U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | October 17, 2011
Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.
The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.
But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.
The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.
The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian- American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.
U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.
In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.
Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.
But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.
There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.
The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.
Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.
But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon”.
Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.
On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.
Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.
Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.
In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.
Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”
In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.
Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.
Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.
“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.
But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.
“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.
Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”
That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”
~
GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
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Book Review
Why the War on Conspiracy Theories Is Bad Public Policy
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • February 1, 2019
A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying “we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.
But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying. … continue
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