Iran

"Every citizen is a media outlet" | The Economist

Excerpt: ...In the Green Movement, however, the dynamics of organisation are yet more diffuse, hard to pin down and, thus, harder for the regime to break. Mr Mousavi has been criticised by many, most of them outside Iran, for excessive caution in his rhetoric. But it appears there was no need for him to be any more radical than he has been. Why should he risk arrest by trying to radicalise the masses with fiery rhetoric? Through Facebook, sms and Twitter, his movement has radicalised itself. Read more.

Hillary Clinton's Prescription: Make The World A NATO Protectorate
Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO | Blog site

"European security is, not only to the individual nations, but to the world. It is, after all, more than a collection of countries linked by history and geography. It is a model for the transformative power of reconciliation, cooperation, and community"....However, "much important work remains unfinished. The transition to democracy is incomplete in parts of Europe and Eurasia."...

To elite trans-Atlantic policy makers the above paragraphs' meaning is indisputable: The use of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military bloc - the true foundation of the "transatlantic partnership" - in waging war in and effectively colonizing the Balkans and in expanding into Eastern Europe, incorporating twelve new nations including former Warsaw Pact members and Soviet republics, is the worldwide paradigm for the West in the 21st century.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was busy in London and Paris last week advancing the new Euro-Atlantic agenda for the world.

As the top foreign policy official of what her commander-in-chief Barack Obama touted as being the world's sole military superpower on December 10, she is no ordinary foreign minister. Her position is rather some composite of several ones from previous historical epochs: Viceroy, proconsul, imperial nuncio.

When a U.S. secretary of state speaks the world pays heed. Any nation that doesn't will suffer the consequences of that inattention, that disrespect toward the imperatrix mundi.

On January 27 she was in London for a conference on Yemen and the following day she attended the International Conference on Afghanistan in the same city.

Also on the 28th she and two-thirds of her NATO quad counterparts, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (along with EU High Representative Catherine Ashton), pronounced a joint verdict on the state of democracy in Nigeria, Britain's former colonial possession.

Afterwards she crossed the English channel and delivered an address called Remarks on the Future of European Security at L'Ecole Militaire in Paris on January 29. That presentation was the most substantive component of her three-day European junket and the only one that dealt mainly with the continent itself, her previous comments relating to what are viewed by the United States and its Western European NATO partners as backwards, "ungovernable" international badlands. That is, the rest of the world.

Clinton Threatens China With Isolation Over Iran Sanctions
China's Latest Call for Talks Enrages US
by Jason Ditz | AntiWar

Chinese officials again stressed their support for additional talks with Iran and objection to sanctions, sparking a surprising condemnation from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In a long diatribe against both Iran and China, Clinton declared that it was time to “move away from the engagement track” and apply more sanctions against Iran. She warned that China would face diplomatic isolation and disruptions to its energy supply. Read more.

Petraeus: Missile-Shooting Ships on Station in the Gulf
By Nathan Hodge | Wired

The U.S. military is keeping at least two Navy ships on station in the Persian Gulf, ready to track and possibly intercept missiles, according to the top U.S. general in the region.

Speaking today at the Institute for the Study of War, Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said two cruisers equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System “are in the Gulf at all times now.”

That statement — along with the stationing of other U.S. air defense assets in the region — sends a strong signal to Iran, which has been investing in both ballistic missile technology and a highly suspect nuclear program. Iran’s military ambitions — and its drive to master nuclear enrichment — has unsettled its neighbors, and sparked concerns about a regional arms buildup. Read more.

Iran vs. China in Cyber War
By Adam Gonn | Media Line
Chinese hackers incapacitate Iranian government websites in retaliation for Iranian attacks.

Several Iranian state websites have been taken down by Chinese hackers in retaliation for Iranian attacks on China’s biggest search engine.

The websites of Iran’s supreme leader and president along with those of the ministries of defense and foreign affairs were all brought down by Chinese hackers, referring to themselves as the Honker Union, in revenge for an attack on China’s Baidu site earlier this week.

An Iranian group, the Iranian Cyber Army, claimed responsibility for the sabotage of Baidu in response to Chinese web users’ support for Iran’s opposition movement.

“The solidarity and support for the people in Iran has been limited to statements,” Iranian opposition blogger Potkin Azarmehr told The Media Line. “But this is the first cyberspace help from outside Iran on behalf of those who support the green movement.”

“It’s just more evidence to show how important cyberspace is to what’s going on in Iran,” he said. “This is probably the first revolution where it’s not just a struggle on the streets but also across cyberspace.” Read more.

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Iran, 1979 and 2010

The Obama administration’s Iran policy is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum folded into a pickle.  So many signals are being sent in so many directions that it’s a wonder the Iranians (or other involved parties) have any idea what’s going on.  Barack Obama came into office pledging to reach out diplomatically to Iran.  In fact, the administration did so in only a half-hearted way, even as the president quickly began setting deadlines for the Iranians to respond (on their nuclear program) in a way Washington considered satisfactory -- or face further “crippling” sanctions.  Now, the latest of these deadlines, January 1, 2010, has passed and a move towards new sanctions, especially against companies associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls significant parts of the country's economy, is evidently being prepared.  But China, which holds the presidency of the Security Council for the month of January, recently rejected even a debate on the subject.  Like the Russians, the Chinese are deeply involved in developing long-term energy relations with Iran, which means that no sanctions which might “cripple” that country’s economy are likely to make it through the Security Council, no matter which country has the presidency....

Two Movements, Two Moments
Don’t Bet on It...Yet
By Dilip Hiro

A short review of Iran’s 31-year-old revolution is in order. In February 1979, the autocratic monarchy of the Shah collapsed when the country’s economy ground to a halt due to strikes not only by the religiously observant merchants of the bazaar, but also by civil servants, factory employees, and (crucially) leftist oil workers. At the same time, the foundations of the modern state -- the armed forces, special forces, armed police, and intelligence agencies, as well as the state-controlled media -- cracked. 

The street demonstrations, launched in October 1977 by Iranian intellectuals and professionals to protest human rights violations by SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, lacked both focus and an overarching set of coherent demands articulated by a towering personality. That changed when Khomeini, a virulently anti-Shah ayatollah exiled to neighboring Iraq for 14 years, was drawn into the process in January 1978. From then on, the ranks of the protestors swelled exponentially.

An Iranian nuclear physicist is murdered
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon

Back in February, 2007, a controversy erupted when University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds advocated that, in response to Iran's nuclear activities, the U.S. should be "killing radical mullahs and iranian [sic] atomic scientists" -- in other words, have the U.S. Government select religious leaders and scientists it dislikes in Iran and just murder them, despite long-standing domestic and international legal prohibitions on exactly such programs.  Today, an Iranian nuclear scientist and professor at Tehran University, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was killed when "when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle was triggered by remote control outside his home in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Qeytariyeh."  Mohammadi taught neutron physics and "was the author of several articles on quantum and theoretical physics in scientific journals," though the extent of his involvement in Iran's nuclear program is unclear.

Although the Iranian government has issued a statement blaming the U.S. and Israel for this rather sophisticated and well-executed assassination, there is no actual evidence yet of who is responsible.  It's possible that the killing is related to Iran's complex internal conflicts rather than its nuclear program.  There is, however, ample evidence that the U.S. covertly provides various means of support to extremist groups which have previously carried out violent terrorist attacks inside Iran -- which, in other contexts, is called being a "state sponsor of terror."  In the very recent past, other Iranian nuclear scientists and officials have disappeared and ended up in the custody of the U.S. and its allies -- either abducted or defected, depending on who you believe.

Whatever else is true, this murder of Professor Mohammadi is rather clearly an act of pure terrorism.  As Kevin Drum wrote of Reynolds' proposal: Read more.

Iran Uses Fear of Covert Nuclear Sites to Deter Attack
Analysis by Gareth Porter | IPS

WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (IPS) - The New York Times reported Tuesday that Iran had "quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex" in a vast network of tunnels and bunkers buried in mountainsides.

The story continued a narrative begun last September, when a second Iranian uranium enrichment facility near Qom was reported to have been discovered by U.S. and Western intelligence. The premise of that narrative is that Iran wanted secret nuclear facilities in order to be able to make a nuclear weapon without being detected by the international community.

But all the evidence indicates that the real story is exactly the opposite: far from wanting to hide the existence of nuclear facilities from the outside world, Iran has wanted Western intelligence to conclude that it was putting some of its key nuclear facilities deep underground for more than three years.

The reason for that surprising conclusion is simple: Iran’s primary problem in regard to its nuclear programme has been how to deter a U.S. or Israeli attack on its nuclear sites. To do that, Iranian officials believed they needed to convince U.S. and Israeli military planners that they wouldn't be able to destroy some of Iran's nuclear sites and couldn't identify others. Read more.

New Revelations Tear Holes in Iran Nuclear Trigger Story
Analysis by Gareth Porter | IPS

WASHINGTON, Jan 5 (IPS) - New revelations about two documents leaked to The Times of London to show that Iran is working on a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have further undermined the credibility of the document the newspaper had presented as evidence of a continuing Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

A columnist for the Times has acknowledged that the two-page Persian language document published by The Times last month was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original.

A translation of a second Persian language document also published by The Times, moreover, contradicts the claim by The Times that it shows the "nuclear trigger" document was written within an organisation run by an Iranian military scientist.

Former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi has said U.S. intelligence judges the "nuclear trigger" document to be a forgery, as IPS reported last week. The IPS story also pointed out that the document lacked both security markings and identification of either the issuing organisation or the recipient.

The new revelations point to additional reasons why intelligence analysts would have been suspicious of the "nuclear trigger" document. Read more.

An American World of War
What to Watch for in 2010
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse | Tom Dispatch

According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin.

We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war” came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very symbols of our economic, military, and -- had Flight 93 not gone down in a field in Pennsylvania -- political power.

Since that day, however, war has been a stranger in our land. With the rarest of exceptions, like Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, this country has remained a world without war or any kind of mobilization for war. No other major terrorist attacks, not even victory gardens, scrap-metal collecting, or rationing. And certainly no war tax to pay for our post-9/11 trillion-dollar “expeditionary forces” sent into battle abroad. Had we the foresight to name them, the last few years domestically might have reflected a different kind of carnage -- 2006, the Year of the Subprime Mortgage; 2007, the Year of the Bonus; 2008, the Year of the Meltdown; 2009, the Year of the Bailout. And perhaps some would want to label 2010, prematurely or not, the Year of Recovery.

Although our country delivers war regularly to distant lands in the name of our “safety,” we don’t really consider ourselves at war (despite the endless talk of “supporting our troops”), and the money that has simply poured into Pentagon coffers, and then into weaponry and conflicts is, with rare exceptions, never linked to economic distress in this country. And yet, if we are no nation of warriors, from the point of view of the rest of the world we are certainly the planet’s foremost war-makers. If money talks, then war may be what we care most about as a society and fund above all else, with the least possible discussion or debate.

In fact, according to military expert William Hartung, the Pentagon budget has risen in every year of the new century, an unprecedented run in our history. We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces, and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that’s without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs). We garrison the planet in a way no empire or nation in history has ever done. And we plan for the future, for “the next war” -- on the ground, on the seas, and in space -- in a way that is surely unique. If our two major wars of the twenty-first century in Iraq and Afghanistan are any measure, we also get less bang for our buck than any nation in recent history. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

You know, the year 2009 started out kind of nicely. We watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, serenaded by the awesome Aretha Franklin (wearing her awesome hat), after first hearing Pete Seeger sing the real Woody Guthrie verses to "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.

And we saw Congress pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to correct a scum-sucking decision by the US Supreme Court's conservative woman-hating, corporation-loving majority that said women (and minorities and the elderly) couldn't sue for pay discrimination unless they acted within six months of the initiation of the violation, even if they didn't learn about it until years later.

Great stuff.

NYT gives space to dangerous hawk Kuperman
By Helena Cobban | Fair Policy, Fair Discussion

In today’s Christmas Eve edition, the New York Times’s editors have given nearly half a page to nuclear hawk Alan J. Kuperman to make a lengthy (and extremely misleading) argument that the U.S. should bomb nuclear facilities in Iran.

Is this our Happy Christmas gift from the NYT?

Kuperman writes,

We have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.

Kuperman takes for granted that Iran is pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons, though this claim has never been made by the responsible authorities at the International Atomic Energy Agency. But that is not the only way in which his article is misleading, inaccurate, and/or grossly irresponsible. Read more.

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

By David Swanson

Let's face it, if James Cameron had made a movie with the Iraqi resistance as the heroes and the U.S. military as the enemies, and had set it in Iraq or anywhere else on planet earth, the packed theaters viewing "Avatar" would have been replaced by a screening in a living room for eight people and a dog.

Nineteen years ago, Americans packed theaters for "Dances with Wolves" in which Native Americans became the heroes, but the story was set in a previous century and the message understated.

The Na'vi people of "Avatar" are very explicitly Iraqis facing "shock and awe," as well as Native Americans with bows and arrows on horseback. The "bad guys" in the battle scenes are U.S. mercenaries, essentially the U.S. military, and the movie allows us to see them, very much as they are right now in 177 real nations around the world, through the eyes of their victims.

Mir Hossein Mousavi's nephew 'killed' in Tehran clashes
By Martin Fletcher | Times Online

At least eight Iranian protesters were reported to have been shot dead in Tehran today — including a nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi — during the fiercest protests in the capital since the immediate aftermath of June’s hotly disputed presidential election.

The shootings mean that the confrontation between the so-called Green movement and the regime has entered a dangerous and volatile new stage, with the security forces prepared to use lethal force in an increasingly desperate effort to crush a resurgent and emboldened opposition.

A close aide to Mr Mousavi, the former Prime Minister defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the June election, said that his 35-year-old nephew, Ali Mousavi, died in a Tehran hospital after being shot in the chest near Enghelab Square. A reliable opposition website, Parlemannews, also reported his death.

Details of the shootings were sparse, but one of the dead was said to be an elderly man and another a young woman, both killed when the security forces opened fire on the huge crowds of protesters that had gathered in central Tehran for the emotionally charged Shia festival of Ashura. Read more.

Reuters footage.