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Who’s behind the Gates memo leak?

By Paul Woodward on April 18, 2010

The New York Times reports on a “secret three-page memorandum” that Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent to National Security Adviser Gen James Jones in January, warning that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability,” according to unnamed officials who leaked the information.

The narrative line here which is presumably the line which was being fed to the New York Times‘ ever-obliging reporters, was that the there are gaps in the US strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s far from clear that this was actually the thrust of Gates’ memo.

[I]n his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

To say that the US lacks a strategy here, is itself a statement so vague as to be meaningless. It lacks a strategy to prevent Iran becoming a virtual nuclear state? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with Iran in such an eventuality? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with the fact that it may not actually know whether Iran has acquired this form of nuclear capability?

There is no indication in this account that the New York Times reporters saw the memo (and it seems reasonable to infer that they did not), so as is so often the case, it’s likely that the most significant detail in this story is the one that will not be revealed: the identity of the senior official who is the primary source of the narrative.

Was it Dennis Ross? He’d certainly fit the profile of someone in the administration who probably feels like it’s time to change the subject and shift attention away from Israel and back to Iran. As another US official recently told Laura Rozen, “He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.”

Background:

Who Is Dennis Ross? – Aletho News | March 8, 2009

April 19, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Venezuelan Consulate in Puerto Rico accused of financing political group

El Universal | April 16, 2010

Roberto Arango, a Senator for the New Progressive Party, accused on Thursday night the Venezuelan Consulate in San Juan of financing left-wing groups in Puerto Rico, specifically the Caribbean Bolivarian Coordinating Committee.

The conservative Senator told Efe that he has denounced the “irregular activities” of the Venezuelan diplomatic mission through letters sent to the US State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

Arango stressed that he addressed a letter to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to inform him of the activities which, in his view, the Venezuelan diplomats are carrying out in the Puerto Rican capital.

The leader of the party that favors Puerto Rico’s integration to the US as the 51st state said that Chavez did not answer to his letter.

April 19, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Gen McChrystal: No Proof Iran Sending Fighters or Weapons to Afghanistan

By Jason Ditz, April 16, 2010

Despite several claims made to the contrary over the past several months, US commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal today conceded that there was no proof that the Iranian government has been sending fighters or weapons to Afghanistan.

At the same time McChrystal did note that some weapons and ammunition have crossed the border from Iran to Afghanistan and that some Taliban may have even trained inside Iran, but that they were not “operationally significant” amounts.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had last month accused Iran of supporting the Taliban behind the scenes, despite Iran’s formal ties with the Karzai government and long history of animosity [toward the Taliban].

Though the flow of arms back and forth across the long, largely unguarded border is perhaps unsurprising, the claims of training camps operating in the area around Zahedan suggest that the more reasonable explanation is that Taliban receiving training there could well be forging ties with the Sunni insurgency in the Sistan-Balochistan region as opposed to the Iranian government.

April 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

China Reiterates Opposition to Iran Sanctions… Again

By Jason Ditz, April 13, 2010

The eternal push for additional sanctions against Iran never changes too much.

Earlier today, President Barack Obama declared that he was “confident” China would back the sanctions, a confidence expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton several times over the past few weeks.

But as has happened every other time this confidence was expressed, China was quick to dismiss the idea and reiterate its opposition to sanctions.

China always believes that dialogue and negotiation are the best way out for the issue. Pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve it,” insisted China’s Foreign Ministry.

Despite this opposition, the US is still hoping to push forward sanctions against Iran in the next few weeks to punish it over its refusal to accept a third party enrichment deal. Iran has actually agreed to that deal in principle, and reiterated their support again today.

Iran’s willingness to accept a deal and its repeated calls for dialogue do not appear to be stopping the US push for sanctions, ostensibly to punish it for not accepting a deal and not accepting dialogue. This is perhaps unsurprising, however, as the fact that the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran is not enriching uranium to anywhere near weapons grade and is not diverting it to any non-civilian use has likewise done little to dissuade the US from sanctions on the completely false basis of Iran enriching uranium for military purposes.

April 14, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Hot, Flat, And Paved Over By Tom Friedman’s Family?

By Tom Nelson | April 8, 2010

Thomas Friedman’s World Is Flat Broke | VF Daily | Vanity Fair

[Nov ’08] …based on the bad news coming out of shopping-mall owner General Growth Properties [GGP], it is no wonder Friedman is feeling crankier than usual. That’s because the author’s wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is an heir to the General Growth fortune. In the past year, the couple—who live in an 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda, Maryland—have watched helplessly as General Growth stock has fallen 99 percent, from a high of $51 to a recent 35 cents a share. The assorted Bucksbaum family trusts, once worth a combined $3.6 billion, are now worth less than $25 million.

Flat N All That

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherf*cking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

GGP files for bankruptcy
So we have a self-proclaimed progressive lecturing us on our profligate ways and hectoring us about climate change, who lives in a house 6 times bigger than mine, and whose outsized wealth is [was?] largely based on paving over thousands and thousands of acres of land.

Talk about not walking the talk.

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

‘NYT’ distorts history of nonviolent resistance

By Alex Kane on April 7, 2010

On the front page of the New York Times today, there is a large photo of West Bank Palestinians planting trees, “part of a new, nonviolent approach to assert their land claims,” as Times correspondent Ethan Bronner says. While it’s good that the Times is covering nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, it’s an article rife with omissions, mischaracterizations and distortions, all par for the course from the Times when it comes to Israel/Palestine. Let’s take this opportunity to remind people about the history of nonviolence in the Palestinian movement, a history that has been systematically shut out of mainstream discourse.

The photo caption, and the title of the piece, which is “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” give a preview of the direction the article heads in. In Bronner’s reporting, we’re told that the Palestinians are simply “trying” this “new” way to resist, when in fact Palestinians have been nonviolently resisting Zionist colonization even before the State of Israel was founded, and well after. The 1936-1939 revolt against British colonial rule and Zionist colonization began with a “six-month general strike” that involved “work-stoppages and boycotts of the British-and Zionist-controlled parts of the economy” and was the “largest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps the longest ever,” as Rashid Khalidi writes on page 106 in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. The revolt did have an armed component, though, that followed the general strike.

The 1st Intifada was largely nonviolent. And Neve Gordon, in his book Israel’s Occupation, tells us that the 2nd Intifada began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.

Bronner’s reporting states that the nonviolent resistance being carried out all over Palestine is being “forged” by Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and the business community, ignoring the popular, grassroots resistance committees that have led the way. He also omits the anti-“buffer zone” marches that the Palestinians of Gaza have been undertaking.

We learn that “Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march.” Bronner apparently doesn’t think it’s newsworthy enough to include that “local sources in Hebron reported that as Gandhi and his wife tried to visit an illegal settlement outpost installed near the Ibrahimi Mosque, Israeli soldiers tried to prevent them from crossing and installed additional roadblocks,” according to the International Middle East Media Center.

Here’s Bronner on the Israeli military’s response to the nonviolent resistance movement:

“They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.”

As Norman Finkelstein said in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, “damaging” the separation barrier is actually following the law, since in 2004 the International Court of Justice handed down a landmark ruling stating the wall was illegal and should be dismantled.

And although Bronner gives room to Israel to claim that the demonstrations aren’t nonviolent, he omits the fact that Palestinians and internationals participating in nonviolent demonstrations are routinely hurt and have been killed with impunity by Israeli forces. According to this article in the Guardian, Bassem Abu Rahmeh was the 18th person to die in protests against the illegal seperation barrier. Recently, it was reported that the Israeli military had decided to not investigate Rahmeh’s death.

So, Ethan Bronner, who really perpetrates violence?

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Iran rejects US claim of arms aid to Afghan militants

Press TV – April 5, 2010

Iran has rejected accusations by the top US military commander that it is providing weapons to the militants in Afghanistan.

The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen claimed in a Kabul news conference that Iran has shipped arms to Taliban militants in Kandahar.

In a statement released on Monday, the Iranian Embassy in Kabul rejected the charges as “recurring allegations” and a sort of “fabrication” by the US in order to justify its defeat in Afghanistan.

The statement added that Washington is attempting to “deceive the public opinion” by accusing other countries of sending weapons to militants in the war-torn country.

It urged the US to “find more logical ways to fight terrorism rather than accusing others” of providing arms to the militants.

“Iran always supports the nation and the government of Afghanistan,” the embassy statement added.

The United States has frequently accused Iran of supplying aid to the Taliban militants in Afghanistan. Such claims come in face of the fact that the Taliban, which follow the radical Wahhabi sect, have opposed Iran since long ago and have murdered eight Iranian diplomats when they took over most of Afghanistan in the 1990’s.

“Iran is working to increase its influence in the area. On the one hand, that’s not surprising; she is a neighbor state, a neighbor country. On the other hand, the influence I see is all too often negative,” Mullen told a news conference during a visit to Kabul on Wednesday.

“I was advised last night about a significant shipment of weapons from Iran into Kandahar, for example,” Reuters quoted Mullen as saying.

April 6, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan

By Glenn Greenwald | April 5, 2010

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).  The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions.  But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim).  The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”

What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact.  Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was “reported” by CNN on February 12:

Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an “honor killing.”  The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an “unnamed senior military official said” about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:

An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.

The U.S. official said it isn’t clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.

“It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .

The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity.  A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.

Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were “varying accounts of what happened” among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon’s false version of events with no questioning.  Here’s the NYT‘s February 12 article in its entirety:

Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed,” the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said the dead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.

CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYT simply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village — notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning.  Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon’s claims were true before “reporting” them as fact; this is what Shah found:

However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.

A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as “U.S. special forces” surrounded the compound.

When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.

“Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him,” he said.

Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.

A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.

“Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry,” he said.

The Pentagon’s version of events was vehemently disputed from the start.  But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT “reporting,” which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces.  That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that “a combined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province’s Gardez district,” and “members of the combined force found the bodies inside.”  Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way:  “‘ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,’ ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said.”  On March 16 — more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London — the NYT ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media’s original claims about what took place.

Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting  by Afghans.  Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):

US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official’s residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney’s office, and three women. . . .

But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night.  “The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed,” the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .

When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.  “The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room.”

Note the crucial difference:   the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon’s version of events.   Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

* * * * *

All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically.  Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad.  The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers’ claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity:  until a video emerged proving the villagers’ claims were true and the Pentagon’s false.  Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points:  “to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”  And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.

At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this.  Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail:  (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war.  Starkey wrote under this headline:

In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO’s claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:

The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.

NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .

It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.

There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.

Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims:  resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the “embed culture.”  But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims.  Illustratively, in response to Starkey’s March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was “categorically false.” As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming — falsely — that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise.

There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets.  It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative report by the NYT‘s Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon’s false claims.  But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American “journalism.”  And no matter how many times this process is exposed — from Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight to Pat Tillman’s death by Al Qeada — this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.

April 5, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

The Bomb-Bomb-Iran ‘Parlor Game’

Robert Parry | Consortium News | April 2, 2010

Normally, if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we’d tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression.

You might think that – unless you were told that the two nuclear-armed countries are Israel and the United States and the non-nuclear country is Iran. Then, different rules apply, especially it seems in leading American news outlets like the New York Times.

In what reads like a replay of the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Times and other major U.S. news media appear onboard for war, again happy to make the likely aggressors the “victims,” and to turn the prospect of a bloody conflict in a Muslim country into a parlor game.

Indeed, the New York Times on March 28 presented the idea of “imagining a strike on Iran” as “Washington’s grimmest but most urgent parlor game,” assessing how a military strike by Israel, “acting on its fears that Iran threatens its existence,” would play out.

That same day, the Times also led its front page with an alarmist story about Iranian atomic energy official Ali Akbar Salehi saying Iran might soon begin work on two new nuclear enrichment sites built into mountains to protect against bombings.

The article by reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad repeated a recurring falsehood in the Times, that it was President Barack Obama who “publicly revealed the evidence of a [previous] hidden site,” a hardened facility near Qum.

The actual chronology was that Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency about the non-operational Qum site on Sept. 21, four days before Obama joined with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in highlighting its existence.

At the time, the Obama administration spun Iran’s earlier disclosure of the Qum facility as having been prompted by Tehran’s awareness that the United States was onto the plant’s existence, but there was no independent evidence of that and the undisputed fact is that Iran disclosed the facility’s existence before Obama’s revelation.

Yet, the Times has now altered the chronology to put Obama’s announcement first, and thus cast Iran into a more sinister light.

Who’s the Victim?

The Times’ biased approach toward the Iranian nuclear issue is underscored further by the Times’ refusal to mention that the presumed “victim” in this story, Israel, possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated nuclear arsenals yet has neither publicly admitted that it has nukes nor signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Indeed, it is the fact that Iran is a treaty signatory — and renounces any interest in building a nuclear bomb — that is the basis for IAEA inspections of its facilities and for the legal requirement that it disclose new facilities, such as the one at Qum.

But the through-the-looking-glass quality of the Times coverage is that it portrays Israel as the “victim,” although it is a rogue nuclear-weapons state and refuses to abide by international inspections or other safeguards, restrictions that Iran accepts.

Even more remarkable, Israel is openly contemplating bombing Iran, an act that supposedly would be justified by Israel’s assertion that a possible Iranian nuclear bomb would represent “an existential threat” to Israel.

It is true that some Iranian leaders favor a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse, i.e. making the territory of Israel and the West Bank into a non-religious state where both Jews and Arabs would live as equals. Israel also has cited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s wish that the “Jewish state” would disappear.

This claim of an “existential threat,” in turn, has become the rationale for Israel openly plotting to bomb Iran and its nuclear facilities.

On March 28, David Sanger wrote a “Week in Review” story about the unabashed discussions underway in Tel Aviv and Washington about the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran, doing what Sen. John McCain once playfully sang about as “bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”

Sanger’s article noted that in 2008, “the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran’s … nuclear sites. They were turned down, but the request added urgency to the question: Would Israel take the risk of a strike? And if so, what would follow?

“Now that parlor game question has turned into more formal war games simulations. The [U.S.] government’s own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy [a neoconservative adjunct] at the Brookings Institution created its own in December.”

The war game, directed by Kenneth M. Pollack, assumed that Israel would attack Iran without notifying the Obama administration, which would then demand that Israel halt the bombing even as Washington beefed up its own military forces in the Persian Gulf.

As the war game played out, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli targets and Saudi oil fields, spiking oil prices and pushing the United States toward the brink of its own attacks to destroy Iran’s military capability to disrupt oil supplies. At that point – a hypothetical eight days into the conflict – the war game ended.

It would seem that if the Times truly wanted to provide an objective assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue – including Tehran’s possible motives for wanting a nuclear bomb – the Times would routinely make reference to the region’s rogue nuclear states of Israel, India and Pakistan.

That the Times typically ignores that key fact suggests the Times sees its journalism on Iran as similar to its credulous reporting about Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, more as propaganda than as a fair-minded presentation of the relevant facts.

April 3, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment