War With Iran

War With Iran: Has It Already Begun? Obama talks peace with Iran, but what's he doing under the radar? by Justin Raimondo, June 03, 2009 Email This | Print This | Share This

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In public, when it comes to the Iranian question, President Obama is all sweet reason and kissy-face. His recent video message to the Iranian people was just what the doctor ordered. However, this public performance is severely undercut by an ongoing covert program aimed at regime-change in Tehran – or, at least, at undermining the Iranian regime to such an extent that it must respond in some way. This covert action program, reported by Seymour Hersh last year, was started by the Bush administration and funded to the tune of $400 million. The U.S. is, in effect, conducting a secret war against Tehran, a covert campaign aimed at recruiting Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities – who make up the majority of the population in certain regions, such as in the southeast borderlands near Pakistan – into a movement to topple the government in Tehran, or, at least, to create so much instability that U.S. intervention to "keep order" in the region is justified. Given recent events in Iran – a suicide bombing in the southeast province of SistanBaluchistan and at least two other incidents – the effort is apparently ongoing. A suicide-bomber blast, which occurred inside a mosque in the city of Zahedan, killed at least 30 people: a rebel Sunni group with reported links to the U.S. claimed responsibility. The Iranian government immediately accused the U.S. and Israel of being behind the attack. The violence was very shortly followed up by attacks on banks, water-treatment facilities, and other key installations in and around Zahedan, including a strike against the local campaign headquarters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Add to this an attempted bombing of an Iranian airliner, which took off from the southwestern city of Ahvaz, and you have a small-scale insurgency arising on Iran’s eastern frontier. The Iranians, confronted with peace overtures from Washington, can be blamed for wondering if the war against them has already begun. A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett opines that President Obama’s "Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed" due to America’s covert actions in Iran. In the current debate within the administration over what course to take with Iran, hard-liners like Dennis Ross – special envoy for the region – argue that Iran’s lack of a positive response to Obama’s overtures are evidence the whole effort is futile, and that it’s time to start thinking about harsh sanctions and military action. The Leveretts, however, have a different take: "But this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded to the new president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush’s second

term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian government – regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June 12 – will continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile." Last year, the same terrorist group behind the Zahedan suicide bomb blast kidnapped 16 Iranian policemen and videotaped their execution. The video was played on al-Arabiya television. Imagine if, say, the governments of Mexico and the U.S. were engaged in talks aimed at improving relations between the two countries and all the while the former was funding and arming terrorist groups that were sowing death and destruction in America’s southwestern cities. Imagine if these terrorists seized 16 American cops and, when the U.S. refused to negotiate with the hostage-takers, murdered them and posted the grisly proceedings on YouTube. The reaction would be so swift and deadly that the Mexicans wouldn’t know what hit them. Little wonder, then, that there hasn’t been much of a response to Obama’s peace feelers. In this context, it’s only a matter of time before hard-liners in Tehran gain the upper hand and launch a provocation – aimed, perhaps, at U.S. forces in Iraq – that precludes any negotiating process and sets us on a course for war. In mounting a campaign to destabilize Iran, the U.S. is allying itself with some pretty loathsome elements. Jundallah, for example, is a Sunni militant organization, created to establish a Baluchi Islamic state in southeastern Iran and parts of Pakistan. One of the founding members of Jundallah was allegedly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander of 9/11 attacks, who was arrested in 2003 in Pakistan and is now in U.S. custody. The current leader of Jundallah, Abdolmalek Rigi, is a bloodthirsty maniac even by the standards of the region. In an interview with Dan Rather, Rigi showed a video in which he personally beheaded his own brother-in-law, al-Qaeda-style. Rigi denies having a separatist agenda and claims he wants to establish a "United States of Iran," presumably with more autonomy for Iranian Baluchistan. He also denies links to alQaeda and the Taliban, and he characterizes Jundallah – which has since changed its name to the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement – as an Islamic "awakening" movement. This "awakening" parlance should be all too familiar to Middle East observers: it is the same sort of "awakening" that energized the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq, made possible by an American alliance with Sunni tribes who claimed to have been awakened to the danger posed by al-Qaeda. Substitute Iran for al-Qaeda, and you have the echoes of the Sunni-card strategy being played by the U.S. and Israel throughout the region. Support for Jundallah fits in nicely with the effort to forge an anti-Iranian united front, bringing together the U.S. and its Sunni allies in the region, with the Israelis providing backup and (largely covert) support. Obama, with his peace overtures, serves as the smiley-face mask for some pretty loathsome activities. The U.S. government claims to be fighting terrorism, yet is sponsoring groups that plant bombs in mosques, kidnap tourists as well as Iranian policemen, and fund their activities with drug-running in addition to covert subsidies courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.

The recent suicide bombing in Zahedan was the work of Jundallah. These are war crimes, carried out with the full knowledge of the leaders of both parties in Congress, paid for by you and me, and conducted in our name. What’s even more outrageous is that the Obama administration, far from decrying or even trying to distance itself from such activities, is endorsing and expanding this style of warfare by appointing Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to head up U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. McChrystal was formerly commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a secret army of special-ops commandos who murdered, tortured, and kidnapped suspected terrorists throughout the world. McChrystal’s appointment is part of the "new thinking" in the Pentagon that goes under the general rubric of COIN [.pdf], which emphasizes the political alongside the military as an essential element of successful counterinsurgency operations. The Jundallah operation reeks of this new counterinsurgency doctrine – championed by Democratic think-tanks and Iraq commander David Petraeus – that’s all the rage in the Obama administration. I’m thinking, in particular, of Jundallah’s recent name-change: I wonder what Pentagon contractor came up with "Iranian People’s Resistance Movement." What’s going on in Iran today – a sustained campaign of terrorism directed against civilians and government installations alike – is proof positive that nothing has really changed much in Washington, as far as U.S. policy toward Iran is concerned. We are on a collision course with Tehran, and both sides know it. Obama’s public "reaching out" to the Iranians is a fraud of epic proportions. While it’s true that our covert terrorist attacks on Iran were initiated under the Bush regime, under Obama we’re seeing no letup in these sorts of incidents; if anything, they’ve increased in frequency and severity. Of course, we hear nothing about this from the U.S. media, Seymour Hersh excepted. All we get from them, and from the "progressive" community, for that matter, is cheerleading for the administration. Every time he betrays them, the limousine liberals and their media amen corner blame it on bad advisers, the Republicans, or the iron necessity of "moderating" his liberal politics in the name of "pragmatism." Yet in a situation such as this, when the first shots of a war against Iran are being fired, one has to ask: doesn’t the president know about this – and, if so, does he approve? Well, of course he knows, you dummy – it wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t give the green light, now would it? Those who dread the prospect of war with Iran and hope to avoid it are a bit tardy in their concerns. I have news for these people: we’re already at war with Iran, and have been for quite a while. It’s only a matter of time, and circumstance, before it becomes official. Email This | Print This |

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Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuclear Docs to Israel by Gareth Porter, June 04, 2009 Email This | Print This | Share This

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A report on Iran’s nuclear program issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated news stories publicizing an incendiary charge that U.S. intelligence is underestimating Iran’s progress in designing a "nuclear warhead" before the halt in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003. That false and misleading charge from an intelligence official of a foreign country, who was not identified but was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israel’s key propaganda themes on Iran – that the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong, and that Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible. But it also provides new evidence that Israeli intelligence was the source of the collection of intelligence documents which have been used to accuse Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research. The Committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed "foreign analysts" as claiming intelligence that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because it had mastered the design and tested components of a nuclear weapon and thus didn’t need to work on it further until it had produced enough sufficient material. That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and current intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of increased international scrutiny, and that it was "less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." The report included what appears to be a spectacular revelation from "a senior allied intelligence official" that a collection of intelligence documents supposedly obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from an Iranian laptop computer includes "blueprints for a nuclear warhead." It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the blueprints "precisely matched" similar blueprints the official’s own agency "had obtained from other sources inside Iran." No U.S. or IAEA official has ever claimed that the so-called laptop documents included designs for a "nuclear warhead." The detailed list in a May 26, 2008 IAEA report of the contents of what have been called the "alleged studies" – intelligence documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work — made no mention of any such blueprints. In using the phrase "blueprints for a nuclear warhead," the unnamed official was evidently

seeking to conflate blueprints for the reentry vehicle of the Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons. When New York Times reporters William J. Broad and David E. Sanger used the term "nuclear warhead" to refer to a reentry vehicle in a Nov. 13, 2005 story on the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear program, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "This distinction is not minor," Albright observed, "and Broad should understand the differences between the two objects, particularly when the information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead." The Senate report does not identify the country for which the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions about the report from IPS, including the reason why the report concealed the identity of the country for which the unidentified "senior allied intelligence official" works. Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas Frantz, told IPS he is under strict instructions not to speak with the news media. After a briefing on the report for selected news media immediately after its release, however, the Associated Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli officials from revealing their national affiliation as a condition for the interviews. Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, had extensive contacts with highranking Israeli military, intelligence and foreign ministry officials before joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with those Israeli officials for The Nuclear Jihadist, published in 2007. The interviews were all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their identities, according to the book. The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer’s statement that the "blueprints for a nuclear warhead" — meaning specifications for a missile reentry vehicle - were identical to "designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran" suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called "alleged studies" actually originated in Israel. A U.S.-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the "alleged studies" intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by U.S. intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as U.S. officials have claimed to U.S. journalists. The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop. The anonymous Israeli intelligence official’s claim, cited in the Committee report, that the "blueprints" in the "alleged studies" collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst’s finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.

German officials have said that the Mujahedin-e-Khalq or MEK, the Iranian resistance organization, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of U.S. intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organization in broadcasting into Iran from Paris. The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that "Western" intelligence was "laundered" to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA. They cite U.S., British and Israeli officials as sources for the revelation. New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006 article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that Israel had found the MEK "useful" but declined to elaborate. Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program just at the time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced in 2004 would have been put together. The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such documents to influence international opinion on Iran’s nuclear program comes from the book by Frantz and Collins. They report that Israel’s international intelligence agency Mossad created a special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian nuclear program, which sometimes included "documents from inside Iran and elsewhere." The "alleged studies" collection of documents has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior United Nations officials and foreign intelligence officials who had seen "many of the documents" in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents had told committee staff "it is impossible to rule out an elaborate intelligence ruse." (Inter Press Service)

Iran wages lonely war on terror By M K Bhadrakumar The timing of the attack on the Ali ibn Abi Talib mosque in the eastern Iranian city of Zahedan in the SistanBalochistan province bordering Pakistan was by no means casual. Zahedan is a Sunni city. And Shi'ites were mourning the anniversary of Hazrat Zahra, granddaughter of Prophet Mohammad. Over 25 worshippers were killed in last Thursday's attack on the Shi'ite mosque, and 125 injured. But there are three other reasons why a high-profile, crossborder terrorist attack on Iran from Pakistan took place. One, Iran-Pakistan relations are passing through a period of cordiality and warmth and a cross-border strike was just the right thing to do to dissipate the newfound bonhomie. Two, US President Barack Obama's much-awaited address to the Muslim world on June 4 raises expectations in the region that a momentous period is at hand in which Iran could be the focal point. Three, the most crucial presidential election, arguably, in Iran's post-revolution 30-year history will be held on June 12, and marring it will be sweet revenge against the government headed by the "Holocaust-denying", "Israelhating", "America-bashing" Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Plot to disrupt Sunni-Shi'ite amity Tehran would have a watch list of "naughty powers" with stakes in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Yet, as indignation boiled over regarding the Zahedan attack, it took exceptional care while articulating its feelings. We have not heard an explicit word so far about an American or British intelligence hand behind the Zahedan attack. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei referred to "certain expansionist superpowers and their spying organizations" and warned the people against "opponents of the country's independence and progress" and against "certain people trying to harm national unity". Again, in a demarche with the Pakistani ambassador in Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Ministry vaguely mentioned that "certain people" oppose any expansion of the Iran-Pakistan relationship and "whenever they observe any improvement of ties, they try to tarnish it". It almost appears the Obama-driven detente is gaining traction.