NeoCons Acting Out Badly This Weekend

These bastards are going to continue to run their mouths in very dangerous ways until someone shuts them up. Bolton pretends to be guessing that Israel may bomb Iran between the election ans the Inauguration and that Arab States will be delighted. Of course, the bombing of Iran will all depend on people who vote for Obama.

How about this, Mr Bolton? If McCain is elected, Neocons will be bombed. I'm sure Arab States and the rest of the world will be delighted.

Bolton: Israel Will Attack Iran After U.S. Election But Before Inauguration, Arab States Will Be ‘Delighted’»

This morning on Fox News, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton continued his drumbeat for war against Iran. Adopting Bill Kristol’s argument, Bolton suggested that an attack on Iran depends on who Americans elect as the next President:

I think if they [Israel] are to do anything, the most likely period is after our elections and before the inauguration of the next President. I don’t think they will do anything before our election because they don’t want to affect it. And they’d have to make a judgment whether to go during the remainder of President Bush’s term in office or wait for his successor.

Bolton gamed out the fallout from an attack on Iran. He claimed that Iran’s options to retaliate after being attacked are actually “less broad than people think.” He suggested that Iran would not want to escalate a conflict because 1) it still needs to export oil, 2) it would worry about “an even greater response” from Israel, 3) and it would worry about the U.S.’s response.

Bolton then concluded that Arab states would be excited if the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran:

I don’t think you’d hear the Arab states say this publicly, but they would be delighted if the United States or Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

Yeah....and the NeoCons (Cons being the operative four letters), have been oh so very right, so far, right? It is past time that Americans start seeing the NeoCons for what they are. Nerdy little fascists, the real American Nazis.

Bolton has said he is backing John McCain because he would handle the Iranian nuclear program in a “stronger” way than the Bush administration.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A Secret Israel Must Face

Published on Monday, April 28, 2008 by The Independent/UK

Israel Is Suppressing a Secret It Must Face

How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?

by Johann Hari

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think — I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions”.

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”. I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was — as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it — “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres”. In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal — even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders — tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem — until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only 10 per cent — around 300,000 people — want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

–Johann Hari

©independent.co.uk

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

NIE, 1974: Israel Has Nukes

This has always amazed me...that Israel has had Nukes for over 30 years and yet they have never admitted it. It is never mentioned by the U.S., while our government has apoplexy about any other nation having them.

I, personally, wish every nuclear weapon could be loaded aboard a rocket and launched to the far reaches of the universe. But how likely is that?

CIA Reveals: We Said In 1974 That Israel Had Nuclear Weapons

By Amir Oren

11/01/08 "Haaretz" -- -- The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by bodies including the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined in August 1974 that Israel had nuclear "weapons in being," a "small number" of which it "produced and stockpiled."

Israel was also suspected of providing nuclear materials, equipment or technology to Iran, South Africa and other then-friendly countries.

This top secret document, consigned to the CIA's vaults for almost 32 years, was suddenly released to the public this week, during U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to Israel and on the eve of his trip to the Persian Gulf.

A small part of the document was released in early 2006 under a Freedom of Information Request placed by scholars Avner Cohen and William Burr, but only as an attachment to a 1975 State Department paper ostensibly disputing the the portrayal of Israel's nuclear weapons as a fact.

This served the Department of State's effort to avoid addressing Israel's nuclear status in response to a query by Congressman Alan Steelman.

The Department of State, led in this exercise by officials Joseph Sisco, Alfred (Roy) Atherton and Harold Saunders, tried to depict the 1974 Special National Intelligence Assesment, "Prospects for further proliferation of nuclear weapons," as a CIA project, while in fact it was an agency-wide effort that included its own intelligence chief, William Hyland, as a senior member of the board that agreed to the conclusions.

The CIA was asked yesterday via e-mail about the strange coincidence of the document's release a mere month after the publication of its awkwardly worded NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program. It did not respond by deadline.

The issue of an American double standard regarding the nuclear activities of Israel and Iran often comes up when senior American officials visit the Gulf, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did last month.

In both the original 1974 document and the 1975 State Department paper (in which it was retyped), the entire intelligence community determined, "Israel already has produced nuclear weapons." This analysis was based on "Israeli acquisition of large quantities of uranium," in part covertly; on Israel's ambiguous efforts to enrich uranium; and on the huge investment in the "Jericho" surface-to-surface missile "designed to accommodate nuclear warheads." Short of a grave threat to the nation's existence, Israel was not expected to confirm its suspected capability "by nuclear testing or by threats of use."

While Israel's nuclear weapons "cannot be proven beyond a shadow of doubt," several bodies of information point strongly toward a program stretching back over a number of years, the document states.

The 1974 document describes the Jericho project, from its inception in France through its migration to Israel to the replacement of the original inertial guidance system by an Israeli design "based on components produced in Israel under licenses from U.S. companies."

Israel Aircraft Industries is responsible for the development of the missile and has constructed a number of facilities for production and testing north of Tel Aviv, near Haifa, at Ramle and nearby it "a missile assembly and checkout plant."

On Iran, the 1974 NIE said, "there is no doubt of the Shah's ambition to make Iran a power to reckon with. If he is alive in the mid-80's, if Iran has a full-fledged nuclear power industry and all the facilities necessary for nuclear weapons, and if other countries have proceeded with weapons development, we have no doubt that Iran will follow suit."

The Shah's ouster in 1979 (and death a year later) apparently slowed down Iran's nuclear project.

The authors of the NIE wrote that the U.S. helped France expedite its nuclear program, France in turn helped Israel, and much like France and India, Israel, "while unlikely to foster proliferation as a matter of national policy, probably will prove susceptible to the hue of economic and political advantages to be gained from exporting materials, technology and equipment relevant to nuclear weapons programs."

© Copyright 2008 Haaretz. All rights reserved

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Is Iran Off The Hook?

Well, of course it isn't! Only our corporate news-media numb-skulls would be idiotic enough to believe that.

Why is Iran not of the hook? The NeoCons and their counterparts in Israel say so, that's why.

These nerdly warmongers appear to feel way too safe, spouting off at the mouth, not representing anybody, really, for our own good.

Perhaps it is time for them to understand a few things; the first being that they are no safer than the rest of us and they could be much less safe if they continue to make the rest of us even less safe with their brain-dead ideologies.

If Israel is not happy with the NIE, it does not matter who else is.

By Anwaar Hussain

The bolt from the blue called the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which was released on Monday the 3rd of December, reported “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program ‘because of international pressure’.”

The NIE, in reality, is a final acknowledgement, and a sort of culmination, of a long trail of track-2 diplomacy and intel gathering that the US State department and intelligence agencies have been conducting, and misconducting, with their Iranian counterparts for some time now.

The report is almost a complete U-turn of the community’s 2005 judgment that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons”. Apart from being a supposed damper on the war lust of the Neocons, the report is a grudging acknowledgement by the West’s intelligence agencies of the rationality of the mad Mullahs.

Now that it is proven that the mad Mullahs were not so mad after all, is Iran off the hook? To answer this question let us go back in time to the immediate post 9/11 period.

In a very recent article written by John H. Richardson in the Esquire magazine, two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush administration have, in some startling disclosures, enumerated several Iranian overtures to resolve their issues with the United States and the Americans’ arrogant rejection of the same.

In this revealing Esquire report, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, who worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council, disclosed that whatever little overt U.S.-Iran engagement the world did see was ‘never serious and designed to fail’. They cite, as an example, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker’s much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad. Crocker didn’t even have permission from the White House to schedule a second meeting.

Earlier too, according to the duo, the Iranians had been offering to provide many significant concessions in the war against the Taliban. They agreed to provide assistance if any American was shot down near their territory, consented to let the U.S. send food in through their border, and even agreed to restrain some “really bad Afghans,” like an extremely anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, by quietly putting him under house arrest in Tehran. But the most important thing, according to Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, was that the Iranians agreed to talk unconditionally. Mann says, “They specifically told me time and again that they were doing this because they understood the impact of this attack on the U.S., and they thought that if they helped us unconditionally, that would be the way to change the dynamic for the first time in twenty-five years.”

The American response came in President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. In that speech Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea in a portentous phrase, “the axis of evil”. By then the Iranians had been trying to engage American government in high-level diplomacy for more than a year. The shock for them was profound.

Despite the rude ‘axis of evil’ jolt, according to the illuminating Esquire article, the Iranians continued to walk the extra mile in their efforts to normalize their relations with United States. In a fax to the State Department from the Swiss ambassador to Iran, who represented American interests in that country, the ambassador reported to have met with Sadeq Kharrazi, a well-connected Iranian who was the nephew of the then foreign minister and son-in-law to the supreme leader. Kharazzi presented to the Swiss ambassador a stunning proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved at the highest levels in Tehran. In the two-page summary of the proposal, the Iranians gave some spectacular allowances to the United States. Among other things, they promised to take “decisive action” against all terrorists in Iran, an end of support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, a promise to cease its nuclear program and, above all, also an agreement to recognize Israel.

The White House not only ignored the offer, it lodged a formal complaint with the Swiss government about their ambassador’s meddling. What’s more, a little while later, America sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf, its troops began to arrest Iranians living in Baghdad, blaming them for meddling in Iraq and openly started accusing Iran of “providing material support” for attacks on U.S. forces, with undertones of a legal justification for a preemptive attack.

According to the op-ed, the situation, in fact, became so alarming that Colin Powell had to warn, “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start’.” Even Henry Kissinger, the chief author of the Cambodian Bombing campaign, urged the need to “exhaust every possibility to come to an understanding with Iran.”

The overtures of the protagonists in the events, from immediately post 9/11 period right up to the 2007 NIE, show pretty unambiguously who had whom fixed in their sights and to what end. So much for the madness of the mad Mullahs.

That was then.

Since the report has been released, in the past few days, the war mongers within the US establishment, and their sympathizers all around, have left no stone unturned in disparaging the NIE to make sure that the US war machine stays on course i.e. on an inexorable path of slamming into Iran.

It has come to light that at the time of his infamous World War-3 statement in the month of October, President George Bush was already aware of the contents of the yet to be released NIE report. Despite the knowledge, he went ahead and proclaimed, “I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,”. His administration, resultantly, remains unyielding in its position that policy toward Iran shouldn’t change.

What people has he said this to, I wonder.

Generally speaking, nearly all the U.S. hardliners on Iran are saying the intelligence document is too ridden with internal political bickerings to be credible. In a Washington Post Op-ed, one John R. Bolton, a fanatical Neocon, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” and currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, observes;

“That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were.”

Fox News reports Rush Limbaugh, a rabid Neocon mouthpiece, as blasting the testimony in the Conservative talk radio. He called it a “sabotage of the Bush administration,”. The Wall Street Journal editorial, yet another conservative periodical, shreds the credibility of the NIE by proclaiming some of its authors as ‘hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.’

Above all Israel, the chief beneficiary of America’s foreign policy largesse, doesn’t seem too happy with the NIE. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is said to have observed, “We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.” If Israel is not happy with the NIE, it does not matter who else is.

If Israel is not happy with the NIE, let them deal with Iran, but without us.

So in conclusion, none of the original members of the war party seem to be much impressed by the NIE. Moreover, little things like a NIE cannot be allowed to stand in the way of ideologies needing solid military muscle for a springboard. Iran, therefore, stays on the hook. The American military juggernaut, for the same reason, stays on course. Only the countdown may be delayed a wee bit.

In an inadvertently honest observation, the NIE categorically states that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to weapons irrespective of the political, economic and military costs”. Wish the same could be said of the country in whose service the spy masters have compiled the report.

Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Israel Knew About NIE Before Bush Says He Was Informed

What a total crock! How can anyone possibly believe this?

Of course, let's take a stroll in Bushland for a moment and pretend that it is true. What does it say about this administration? The N.I.E on Iran was known to Israel before our own president knew about it? Who gave it to them? Why isn't the government looking for the person who gave Israel this information. Seems, does it not, that that would be a treasonous act? If the president didn't even know about it, he could not have ordered the NIE released to Israel?

Who gave the NIE to Israel?

Report: Israeli Defense Officials Knew At Least a Month Ago About NIE Findings, Weeks Before Bush Claims He Was Informed

Submitted by mark karlin
Thu, 12/06/2007 - 7:22am. EditorBlog

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

December 6, 2007

According to the authoritative Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, "Israel has known about the report for more than a month. The first information on it was passed on to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and to Shaul Mofaz, who is the minister responsible for the strategic dialog with the Americans. The issue was also discussed at the Annapolis summit by Barak and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and it seems also between Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert."

To say the least, this would put Bush in the unexplainable position of claiming he just found out about the NIE, while his administration had told the Israelis weeks ago that the Iranian nuclear bomb program was stopped in 2003. In short, Bush is basically wanting us to believe that he was the last to know about this "bombshell" intelligence finding.

Furthermore, the one mainstream media company that regularly seeks out the story behind the story (McClatchy Newspapers), reported this story on Nov. 4: "Experts: No firm evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons."

Yet, Bush would have us believe a diligent newspaper reporter knew about the NIE findings before he did.

This is just one in a long series of lies and deceptions that the Bush Administration has inflicted on the American people.

Let's just take three examples that had disastrous consequences.

1) Bush originally claimed that he had received no warning about a potential 9/11, but it turned out later that he and Condoleezza Rice were briefed about the determination of Osama bin Laden to strike in the United States and to use hijackings. That was in the summer just before the fateful day of September 11th. Bush and Rice did nothing to put airports on heightened security. When a reporter actually pressed Bush on the summer warning, Bush claimed, as did Rice, that if they had been specifically warned that planes were going to be specifically flown into the World Trade Center Towers that they would have done something. Reporters didn't manage to summon the common sense to challenge him that the 9/11 tragedy was a result of hijackings, and that they had been warned about likely hijackings by Al-Qaeda and did nothing to heighten security at airports. In fact, Bush reportedly dismissed a CIA briefer from his Crawford Ranch, telling him derisively that now that he [the briefer] had covered his ass by warning Bush he could leave.

2) In the fall before the infamous and false Niger statement in Bush's State of the Union that tried to tie Saddam Hussein to the acquisition of uranium to make a nuclear bomb, George Tenet and the CIA warned the White House that the claim was dubious at best. It was removed, as a result, from an October speech Bush was going to make. But seeking to ratchet up fear among Americans about a potential Iraqi nuclear bomb, the White House knowingly reinserted the claim several months later in the State of the Union address. Rice, Bush and Cheney claimed that they had never been told that it was an unfounded assertion.

3) Bush claimed, earlier this week, that he was just given the findings of the NIE document a few days ago. HE may be parsing words here by sticking to a technical truth: he was just given the final NIE document, as a document, last week. But he was briefed in August about what would be in the report, including the "bombshell" finding that Iran was not now developing a nuclear weapon.

Once again, Bush plays fast and loose with the truth, in order to ensure that the facts will never get in the way of his and Cheney's "Masters of the Universe" agenda.

Israeli officials knew that the combined American intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago, while Bush and Cheney continued to push for an attack that would probably ignite the Middle East.

Americans have once again been played for fools by the Bush Administration on matters of utmost importance to our national security.

The question remains that since the Director of Homeland Security had vowed not to release the NIE (obviously because it made Bush and Cheney out to be liars and undercut their exhortation to stop World War III by starting it with a limited air nuke attack on Iran), why was it suddenly released without explanation?

In an interview, Cheney hinted that the fear that it might be imminently leaked was behind the startling public appearance of the document and its damning [to the Bush Administration] findings: "Cheney said the assessment was released because “there was a general belief that we all shared that it was important to put it out — that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway." [BuzzFlash italics]

One can speculate that the intelligence community or Pentagon brass had had enough of catastrophic decision making by Bush, Cheney and their extremist aides -- almost all personally blinded by their zealotry in military and intelligence matters.

We can only hope that this is the real explanation, because that would mean that there is a real mutiny taking place and that the military and the spooks are determined not to allow the worst to happen. Nevertheless, all it would take is an attack that could be blamed on Iran and the Joint Chiefs and all the Intel. agencies would be helpless to stop the madmen in the White House.

Perhaps the Bush Administration, faced with a simmering rebellion or an imminent leak, had to fire the smoking gun themselves, in order to spin it the best that they could.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

WTF? There was no attack on Syria?

October 11, 2007

Syria Tells Journalists Israeli Raid Did Not Occur

By HUGH NAYLOR

DEIR EZ ZOR, Syria, Oct. 9 — Foreign journalists perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms pregnant with low-hanging fruit here this week, while agents of Syria’s ever present security services stood in the background, watching closely, almost nervously.

“You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else,” said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir ez Zor director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.

It was here at this research center in this sleepy Bedouin city in eastern Syria that an Israeli journalist reported that Israel had conducted an air raid in early September.

Ron Ben-Yishai, a writer for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, grabbed headlines when he suggested that the government facility here was attacked during the raid, snapping photos of himself for his article in front of a sign for the agricultural center.

He said he was denied access to the research center, which sits on the outskirts of the city, and he did not show any photos of the aftermath of the raid, though he said he saw some pits that looked like part of a mine or quarry, implying that they could also be sites where bombs fell.

His claims have compelled the Syrian government, already anxious over the rising tensions with Israel and the United States, to try to vindicate itself after a recent flurry of news reports that it may have ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.

President Bashar al-Assad, in a BBC interview, played down the Israeli raid, saying that Israeli jets took aim at empty military buildings, but he did not give a specific location. His statement differed from the initial Syrian claim that it had repulsed the air raid before an attack occurred.

Israel has been unusually quiet about the attack on Sept. 6 and has effectively imposed a news blackout about it. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli opposition leader, on Sept. 19 became the first public figure in Israel to acknowledge that an attack had even taken place. Some Israeli officials have said, though not publicly, that the raid hit a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, but they have not specified where.

On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

“There was no raid here — we heard nothing,“ he added.

An entourage of the center’s employees lined up with him to greet the journalists. In a seemingly choreographed display, they nodded in agreement and offered their guests recently picked dates as tokens of hospitality.

They showed off a drab-colored laboratory that they said was used to conduct experiments on drought-resistant crops and recently plowed fields where vegetables and fruits are grown.

Mr. Ben-Yishai’s news report rattled Syrians for another reason: he apparently was able to slip into Syria, which bars Israelis from entering, and travel throughout the country.

“I think he came in on a European passport,” said Ghazi Bilto, who said he was a graphic designer for the agricultural center.

Burhan Okko, who also said he was a graphic designer for the center, interrupted, saying, “It was definitely on a German passport.” The international news media have speculated that the Israeli attack was aimed at a Syrian effort to acquire nuclear weapons materials, possibly with the aid of North Korea. Syria rejects these claims.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

So, What's Up With This Anyhow?

Israel admits air strike on Syria

It is still not known why Israel carried out the strike or what was hit

Israel has confirmed that it carried out a strike on a Syrian military installation last month.

Syria accused Israel at the time but Israeli officials refused to comment, and the Israeli military censor imposed a strict blackout on information.

The censor's office has now allowed some details to be released.

On Monday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the BBC that a Syrian military construction site was hit in the Israeli air strike on 6 September.

President Assad said the raid demonstrated Israel's "visceral antipathy towards peace" - and that Syria would retaliate.

Syria and Israel are formally at war. Israel has occupied the Golan Heights since 1967. Peace talks between them collapsed in 2000.

Mystery remains

In the early hours of 6 September a number of Israeli jets appeared to enter Syrian airspace from the Mediterranean Sea.

Later, unidentified drop tanks, which may have contained fuel from the planes, were found on Turkish soil near the Syrian border, indicating a possible exit route.

Analysis: Is N Korea linked?

Witnesses said the Israeli jets had been engaged by Syrian air defences in Tall al-Abyad, north of Raqqa and near the border with Turkey.

It is still not known why Israel carried out the strike or what exactly was hit.

On Tuesday, Israeli Army radio reported that Israeli planes had attacked a military target "deep inside Syria", quoting the military censor. No further details were given.

Some US officials have linked the raid to suspicions of secret nuclear co-operation between Damascus and North Korea, suggesting a fledgling research centre may have been the target.

Damascus and North Korea have denied any nuclear ties.

Other reports suggested that the raid may have targeted Iranian arms bound for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, or materials going in the other direction, to Iran.

Another theory is that it was simply an Israeli test of Syria's improving air defences.

Correspondents say there has been some suggestive leaking from Washington, but that the usual diplomatic sources have been uncharacteristically quiet over the incident.

Syria 'may retaliate'

The incident is still shrouded in mystery, says the BBC's world affairs correspondent, Nick Childs.

Was Israel just sending a message, he wonders, and if so, to whom?

Mr Assad talks to BBC

And are others now exploiting the ambiguities in all this to peddle their own political agendas - for example, to unnerve Syria or Iran, or to discredit North Korea?

If nothing else, it is all a reminder of what a volatile mixture of interrelated tensions is present in the region, our correspondent says.

Syria's president told the BBC that Syria reserved the right to respond to the attack - but he did not say how.

"Retaliate doesn't mean missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways. But we have the right to retaliate," Mr Assad said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Unholy Trinity: U.S. Israel, Iran

September 28, 2007

Treacherous Alliance Readings in the Age of Empire

Doug Bandow

Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 361 pp. by Doug Bandow Communist dictators and apparatchiks have routinely visited the U.S., with nary an eyebrow raised in polite society. Third World dictators have traipsed through Washington with only an occasional protest. But the recent visit by Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New York City caused endless caterwauling. He's a nasty piece of work, of course, but the U.S. has worked with worse – such as Saddam Hussein, when, two decades ago, the U.S. backed Iraq in its aggressive war against Iran. The refusal to deal with Tehran represents the triumph of hope over experience, the idea that refusing to acknowledge an adversary will make him go away. This strategy didn't work with the Bolsheviks in Russia. It didn't work with Maoist China. It didn't work with the people's paradise in North Korea. It didn't work with Gadhafi's Libya. It hasn't worked with the Iranian mullocracy. Particularly disturbing is the enthusiasm for war evident in some precincts of the Bush administration, among the neoconservative faux warriors, and in the Israeli government. Indeed, enthusiasm is an understatement for many members of the war lobby. Notes Parsi, "prominent neoconservatives, who for years had urged the Bush administration to take on Iran, were ecstatic" over Israel's attack on Lebanon, and Iran's ally, Hezbollah. Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute even "called for the United States to expand the fighting into a regional war." It seems that everyone who was so wrong about Iraq wants to go double or nothing – attack a nation which is larger, more populous, possesses a more serious military, and has far more ability to retaliate against the U.S. (particularly in Iraq) and American allies. The operation codename should be Cakewalk II. The criminal irresponsibility of this position is evident after reading Trita Parsi's excellent Treacherous Alliance, which details the complex relationship among America, Iran, and Israel. Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (Johns Hopkins University), has woven a fascinating history filled with policy complications. Today Iran and Israel are perceived as blood enemies. But their relationship actually is far more complex. Indeed, there's good reason to doubt that Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel rhetoric is intended for practical application. Explains Parsi: "Blinded by the condemnatory rhetoric, most observers have failed to notice a critical common interest shared by these two non-Arab powerhouses in the Middle East: the need to portray their fundamentally strategic conflict as an ideological clash." Although Iran is an Islamic state, it is not an Arab country. As such, Tehran has more in common with Israel than commonly supposed. The relationship between the two was always complicated, often strained, and rarely public, but the two nations cooperated until the fall of the Shah in 1979. The Iranian revolution disrupted relations, but did not end contact. Radical was the rhetoric of the Ayatollah Khomeini, but practical were his policies. Notes Parsi: "In early 1980s, only months after the eruption of the hostage crisis, Ahmed Kashani, the youngest son of Grand Ayatollah Abol Qassem Kashani, who had played a key role in the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in 1951, visited Israel – most likely the first Iranian to do so after the revolution – to discuss arms sales and military cooperation against Iraq's nuclear program at Osirak." Tehran was particularly interested in using Israel as a go-between with the U.S. in an attempt to get spare parts for its military arsenal during the lengthy and bloody war with Iraq. Iran's relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a secular movement, were always tense. Throughout everything, including the Iran-Contra scandal, writes Parsi, "Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric remained intact though Tehran took no practical steps to act on it." Unfortunately, Washington lost no opportunity to miss an opportunity to open a dialogue with Tehran. The U.S. refused to invite Iran to the Madrid summit on Israel's relations with Arab states and the Palestinians. This act of hubris, by which, in Parsi's words, "Washington failed to appreciate Iran's pragmatism, in particular Tehran's new position on Israel, in which [Iranian President Hashemi] Rafsanjani had declared that Iran would agree to any solution acceptable to the Palestinians," cost America greatly. It "strengthened the hands of Iranian rejectionists" and led Tehran "to seriously reach out to rejectionist Palestinian groups, in spite of the Shia-Sunni divide and their enmity dating back to the Iraq-Iran war." As Israeli policy shifted, so did Israel's view of U.S.-Iranian relations. It's an astonishing tale, and one that raises as many questions about Washington's relations with Israel as with Iran. Explains Parsi: "The Israeli-U.S.-Iranian triangle had shifted remarkably in just a few years. In the 1980s, Israel was the unlikely defender of and apologist for Iran in Washington, taking great risks to pressure the Reagan administration to open up channels of communication with Iran. Now, Israel did the opposite. Israel wanted the United States to put Iran under economic and political siege." Israel was particularly alarmed at the thought that the election of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami as Iran's president in 1997 would lead to détente between Washington and Tehran. Unfortunately for America, the moment passed. Although success from opening contact was never guaranteed, today's crisis might have been avoided. Explains Parsi: "Ironically, the economic sanctions and the heightened rhetoric that the Clinton White House had put in place during its first term turned out to be the most difficult stumbling block to a rapprochement. While Tehran and Washington's failure lay primarily in miscommunication, missed signals, and Iranian overconfidence, at every step Israel and the pro-Israeli lobby continued to put political obstacles in the path of Iran and the United States." This special pleading has left both America and Israel far worse off. The Bush administration's lost opportunities have been even worse. After 9/11 Tehran was helpful, in part because it had long opposed Afghanistan's Taliban regime. President George W. Bush's illogical "Axis of Evil" linking Iraq, North Korea, and Iran killed any chance of rapprochement. Washington had another chance after its easy ouster of Saddam Hussein. In a proposal that "stunned the Americans," reports Parsi: "The Iranians offered to end their support to Hamas and Islamic Jihad – Iran's ideological brethren in the struggle against the Jewish State – and pressure them to cease attacks on Israel. On Hezbollah, Iran's own brainchild and its most reliable partner in the Arab world, the clerics offered to support the disarmament of the Lebanese militia and transform it into a purely political party. On the nuclear issue, intrusive international inspections in order to alleviate any fears of Iranian weaponization. The Iranians would sign the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and they also offered extensive American involvement in the program as a further guarantee and goodwill gesture. On terrorism, Tehran offered full cooperation against all terrorist organizations – above all, al-Qaeda. On Iraq, Iran would work actively with the United states to support political stabilization and establishment of democratic institutions and – most importantly – a nonreligious government." Tehran even accepted the 2002 Beirut Declaration. That is, the Saudi proposal advanced by the Arab League to recognize Israel in return for agreeing to a Palestinian state, withdrawal from the occupied territories, and a resolution of the problem of Palestinian refugees. The Bush administration, enjoying a victory high and convinced regime change was but a finger flick away, said no. Washington even denounced the Swiss government for passing along the Iranian offer. The U.S. government didn't want to talk to Iran. And the Bush administration didn't want anyone to help Iran talk to America. Four years have passed, and the administration's Mideast policy is in ruins. Iraq is racked by sectarian war. Israel blundered into a lost war against Hezbollah. Dreams of democracy across the Mideast have gone aglimmering. Iran's chief enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, have been defeated, and a friendly regime is in power in Baghdad. Iran, not the U.S., now is riding high. Iran's Deputy Oil Minister told Parsi: "Iraq couldn't have turned out better for us." Heck'uva job, Georgie. What to do now? Washington's options are limited. "One fantasy in which the Bush White House has invested much energy and hope is regime-change in Iran," writes Parsi. It would be great, of course, but Washington hopes do not create Iranian realities. And even democracy in Iran might not end Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons. The worst option, of course, is military action. True, all of the analysts, politicians, pundits, and ivory tower analysts who were wrong about Iraq believe that this time war would be easy. But no serious person should take them seriously. An attack "would be extremely risky, and even if it were to succeed the costs would be staggering," explains Parsi. The mind boggles at the potential consequences, especially since even successful airstrikes might only delay Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Parsi advocates "regional integration and collective security." He is optimistic, though there's obviously no guarantee of success. But Parsi surely is correct that the only hope of resolving the variety of conflicts between Washington and Tehran is for the U.S. to accommodate "legitimate Iranian security objectives in return for Iranian concessions on various regional and international issues." We have moved well beyond the time when Washington could attempt to dictate an outcome. That dream died as the consequences of the administration's incompetent arrogance in Iraq became evident to all the world. Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance is valuable as a historical reference, detailing a fascinating relationship between Iran and Israel that is not widely known. But his analysis is even more important as a tool to inform policymakers attempting to fashion Mideast policy. No where has the Bush administration failed more dramatically and disastrously. No where is sound thinking more desperately needed. We can only hope, and pray, that someone in Washington listens before it is too late.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.