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Twisting the Iran-Nuke Intelligence |
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Monday, 12 January 2015 15:55 |
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Porter writes: "For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian program hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts."
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani celebrates the completion of an interim deal on Iran's nuclear program on Nov. 24, 2013, by kissing the head of the daughter of an assassinated Iranian nuclear engineer. (photo: Iranian government photo/Consortium News)
Twisting the Iran-Nuke Intelligence
By Gareth Porter, Middle Eastern Eye
12 January 15
 or more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian program hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts.
Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem.
1. Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth
The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the U.S. trying to strangle the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.
The U.S. State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That U.S. effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.
Not surprisingly Iran responded to that U.S. denial of its nuclear rights by defying U.S. wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. U.S. aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear program had backfired.
But instead of recognizing that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all U.S. trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organized structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.”
That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the U.S. denial policy that preceded it.
2. The intelligence goes wrong
The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear program or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defense ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organization was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions.
That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear program by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the U.S. intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development program as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier.
3. Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons
The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.
That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam.
The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.
The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.
4. Refusing to acknowledge the weaponization evidence is tainted
For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years.
But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian program or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organization Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.
IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran.
Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programs indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over.
El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible.
The U.S. government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify U.S. action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth.
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FOCUS | Finally, Change We Can Believe In? |
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Monday, 12 January 2015 12:35 |
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Galindez writes: "Free college for everyone? Did I hear that right? In the United States, a nonprofit higher education? I must have just woken up from a dream."
Barack Obama announcing his free community college plan in a video released by the White House. (photo: White House/YouTube)
Finally, Change We Can Believe In?
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
12 January 15
ree college for everyone? Did I hear that right? In the United States, a nonprofit higher education? I must have just woken up from a dream.
No, it’s true, the president has proposed free community college for everyone. Oh, but wait – John Boehner called it a talking point. Many Americans won’t take it seriously, according to Boehner. How will we pay for it, they will ask.
Well, how about the same way many Europeans get a free four-year education at top universities. If you live in Sweden, you can even go to a university in Norway and not pay a dime in tuition. They even give students welfare to live on while they are in school. The result is that upon graduation they are not burdened with debt.
In a fact sheet released by the White House Thursday night, the plan was summarized like this:
Today the President is unveiling the America’s College Promise proposal to make two years of community college free for responsible students, letting students earn the first half of a bachelor’s degree and earn skills needed in the workforce at no cost. This proposal will require everyone to do their part: community colleges must strengthen their programs and increase the number of students who graduate, states must invest more in higher education and training, and students must take responsibility for their education, earn good grades, and stay on track to graduate. The program would be undertaken in partnership with states and is inspired by new programs in Tennessee and Chicago. If all states participate, an estimated 9 million students could benefit. A full-time community college student could save an average of $3,800 in tuition per year.
In addition, today the President will propose a new American Technical Training Fund to expand innovative, high-quality technical training programs similar to Tennessee Tech Centers that meet employer needs and help prepare more Americans for better paying jobs. These proposals build on a number of historic investments the President has made in college affordability and quality since taking office, including a $1,000 increase in the maximum Pell Grant award to help working and middle class families, the creation of the $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit, reforming student loans to eliminate subsidies to banks to invest in making college more affordable and keeping student debt manageable, and making available over $2 billion in grants to connect community colleges with employers to develop programs that are designed to get hard-working students good jobs.
In a video also released on Thursday night, the president announced the proposal:
If this were to be implemented, it would be a nice first step. Our young people start out shackled by debt. While a free education from pre-school to college would need to be paid for by taxes, imagine the savings for parents with more than one child who needs to go to college.
It is the same with health care: Medicare for All would mean higher taxes, but the lack of out-of-pocket spending for health care would more than make up for the additional taxes.
It is time to invest in young people. Every election, we hear about candidates’ commitment to education. Well, I haven’t noticed many major changes in my lifetime. If anything, a college education is further from reality for many young people than it was in the early eighties.
One of the reasons I believe Elizabeth Warren is the best candidate the Democrats have is her commitment to addressing student loan debt.
While Obama’s proposal is not likely to make much progress in this Congress, he deserves credit for starting the ball rolling.
We never expected legal same-sex marriages or legal marijuana 20 years ago. Maybe in 20 years our kids can have a free education, that is if it won’t give too many Republicans a stroke. I guess just in case, we should give everyone free health care first.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS | Charlie Hebdo Massacre Is One of Many Assaults on Free Expression |
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Monday, 12 January 2015 11:42 |
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Chomsky writes: "The reaction of horror and revulsion about the crime is justified, as is the search for deeper roots, as long as we keep some principles firmly in mind. The reaction should be completely independent of what thinks about this journal and what it produces. "
Prof. Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and activist. (photo: Va Shiva)
Charlie Hebdo Massacre Is One of Many Assaults on Free Expression
By Noam Chomsky, Znet
12 January 15
 he world reacted with horror to the murderous attack on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. In the New York Times, veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger graphically described the immediate aftermath, what many call France’s 9/11, as “a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.” The enormous outcry worldwide was accompanied by reflection about the deeper roots of the atrocity. “Many Perceive a Clash of Civilizations,” a New York Times headline read.
The reaction of horror and revulsion about the crime is justified, as is the search for deeper roots, as long as we keep some principles firmly in mind. The reaction should be completely independent of what one thinks about this journal and what it produces. The passionate and ubiquitous chants “I am Charlie,” and the like, should not be meant to indicate, even hint at, any association with the journal, at least in the context of defense of freedom of speech. Rather, they should express defense of the right of free expression whatever one thinks of the contents, even if they are regarded as hateful and depraved.
And the chants should also express condemnation for violence and terror. The head of Israel’s Labor Party and the main challenger for the upcoming elections in Israel, Isaac Herzog, is quite right when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” He is also right to say that “All the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge” from murderous terrorism – putting aside his predictably selective interpretation of the challenge.
Erlanger vividly describes the scene of horror. He quotes one surviving journalist as saying that “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another surviving journalist reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.” At least 10 people were reported at once to have died in the explosion, with 20 missing, “presumably buried in the rubble.”
These quotes, as the indefatigable David Peterson reminds us, are not, however, from January 2015. Rather, they are from a story of Erlanger’s on April 24 1999, which made it only to page 6 of the New York Times, not reaching the significance of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO (meaning US) “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air.”
There was an official justification. “NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reports, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.
The Yugoslavian government said that “The entire nation is with our President, Slobodan Milosevic,” Erlanger reports, adding that “How the Government knows that with such precision was not clear.”
No such sardonic comments are in order when we read that France mourns the dead and the world is outraged by the atrocity. There need also be no inquiry into the deeper roots, no profound questions about who stands for civilization, and who for barbarism.
Isaac Herzog, then, is mistaken when he says that “Terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There are quite definitely two ways about it: terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power. Similarly, there is no assault against freedom of speech when the Righteous destroy a TV channel supportive of a government that they are attacking.
By the same token, we can readily comprehend the comment in the New York Times of civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, noted for his forceful defense of freedom of expression, that the Charlie Hebdo attack is “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” He is quite correct about “living memory,” which carefully assigns assaults on journalism and acts of terror to their proper categories: Theirs, which are horrendous; and Ours, which are virtuous and easily dismissed from living memory.
We might recall as well that this is only one of many assaults by the Righteous on free expression. To mention only one example that is easily erased from “living memory,” the assault on Falluja by US forces in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the invasion of Iraq, opened with occupation of Falluja General Hospital. Military occupation of a hospital is, of course, a serious war crime in itself, even apart from the manner in which it was carried out, blandly reported in a front-page story in the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting the crime. The story reported that “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The crimes were reported as highly meritorious, and justified: “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”
Evidently such a propaganda agency cannot be permitted to spew forth its vulgar obscenities.
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We Are All Charlie, Even as Political Hacks Steal Charlie's Soul |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 12 January 2015 09:50 |
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Weissman writes: "The Islamist terrorists who killed twelve cartoonists and journalists of Charlie Hebdo took only their lives, which was more than horrific enough. But within days of the massacre, the French political elite and their international allies added to the crime, setting out to steal the soul of an incomparable group of free thinkers in an effort to sell new policing measures."
World leaders appear at Paris memorial event. (photo: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters)
We Are All Charlie, Even As Political Hacks Steal Charlie's Soul
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
12 January 15
he Islamist terrorists who killed twelve cartoonists and journalists of Charlie Hebdo took only their lives, which was more than horrific enough. But within days of the massacre, the French political elite and their international allies added to the crime, setting out to steal the soul of an incomparable group of free thinkers in an effort to sell new policing measures.
Proudly left-wing, anti-racist, and against all forms of authoritarianism, the mischievous French anarchoids at Charlie Hebdo have long embodied the real meaning of free speech – and not some abstract notion that loses all meaning when mouthed by people who hate what the satirical weekly represents. For the 12 cartoonists and journalists who gave their lives, speech had content. They used it to protest most of what the French and global elite stand for, including the economic austerity that kills jobs and hope, builds support for racist hate groups like Marine Le Pen’s Front National, and further alienates disaffected younger people from immigrant families. Count among them the three homegrown “Fools of God” who killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists and the four Jewish hostages at the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.
Go beyond the heavy politics and take Charlie Hebdo’s ridicule of the Prophet Mohammed, which their killers claimed to avenge and which those in power are doing their best to wish away. The cartoons were outrageously obscene. How much more lascivious can anyone get than to publish garishly colored cartoons of a leading religious figure getting butt-fucked? The drawings, along with sly jokes about “Charia Hebdo,” obviously offended believers. The authors intended to offend them, put them on the defensive, and have fun doing it.
This is a rough way to do politics, and the dangers are obvious, especially in a week of such cold-blooded carnage. No one with any decency wants to fuel prejudice against a minority already under attack by Islamophobes, both Christian and Jewish. Many of us share the fears Teju Cole raises in The New Yorker, that cartoon images of hook-nosed Arabs or Jews, bullet-ridden Korans, and black caricatures may be hard to differentiate from “a bullyingly racist agenda.” Most of us accept Cole’s argument that “It is possible to defend the right to obscene speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”
But, at their best, Charlie Hebdo has taken an equally principled position, and one that defends important values. The people there, past and present, see an enormous danger in a world of clerical dictatorships, religious repression, fatwas, censorship, puritanism, and the subordination of women. Attempting to offend everyone, they aim their comic barbs and investigative journalism at the Islamophobes as well, defending an Enlightenment love of skepticism and rationalism against any and all medieval mindsets. They also understand that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is far from the greatest threat to liberty in Western societies, and that (in the words of Teju Cole) “violence from ‘our’ side continues unabated.”
Now, the French and their allies will escalate the violence in the name of defending against it. Make no mistake: the terrorists are real. But they are only one side of the conflict, and they see themselves defending against violence, insults, and disrespect from “our” side, whether in their ancestral homelands or in the daily discrimination and economic helplessness they face here in France, throughout Europe, and in the United States. The politicians, media, and think tanks here are discussing little or nothing that would defuse the conflict. They seek only to strengthen their ability to wage a more effective fight in what they still insist on calling “the global War on Terror.”
Without a crystal ball or high-placed source in the Ministry of the Interior, no one can know exactly what measures to expect. But the Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls, a former Interior minister and future presidential candidate, gave a clue when he declared that there would be a “before Charlie” and an after. Valls knows that he echoes the political line of the Bush administration after 9/11, and he was signaling a massive strengthening of the French security apparatus.
Valls and President Francois Hollande will do everything they can to differentiate the measures they take from the U.S. Patriot Act, which has a very bad odor here in France. But they will almost certainly strengthen security cooperation and a greater exchange of intelligence information with Washington, London, Berlin, and the smaller European nations as well. The cooperation is widely expected to include a European database with credit card and travel information down to whether the individual ordered a special kosher or halal meal inflight. Obama’s lingering attorney general is in Paris to discuss all this with French and European officials.
Though excluded from the 5-eyes agreement among the Anglos – the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – the French have their own ability to read emails and listen to phone calls. They lack only the ability to analyze all that information. Will the NSA build up their capacity? It seems highly likely, and they will do it in return for access to whatever the French spooks discover.
Also in the works, the French will almost certainly strengthen their legal authority and human resources to monitor those they suspect of Islamist sympathies and to hold them in jail for longer periods on mere suspicion. The government will also monitor Internet usage more closely, while the Interior minister has already announced he will “work with” major companies to close down Islamist websites. All this drawing a blank check from the three million or so people marching in Paris and around the country and in the name of free speech, a free press, and the love of freedom embodied by the martyrs of Charlie Hebdo.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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hat are you,” he asked, “a leftist?”
