Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand

by Jeff Huber

Mitt Romney and 51 percent
of his constituency.

The best political joke of the election season so far has been Mitt Romney’s assertion that we should let Israel dictate our Middle East Policy.  Jesus at the temple, Mitt; catch up.  Israel has had undue influence on our policies in that part of the world since its inception in 1948.  Since the neocon/Likudnik cabal came into power with the pseudo-election of young Mr. Bush in 2002, Israel has been leading our Middle East policy around the potty wand. 

The latest evidence of our abject obedience to Israel's interests was the latest two-prong offensive against Iran, the most recent operation in a long propaganda campaign aimed at turning the Persian state into a post-modern incarnation of the Evil Soviet Empire. 

Phase one of Operation Persian Poppycock was a Keystone Kop caper cooked up by the DEA and the FBI that took a drug dealer looking to ditch hard jail time and an alcoholic wife-abusing dead beat and framed them as key conspirators in a Iranian Quds Force scheme to blow a big shot Saudi and an Israeli Embassy to smithereens.  Even though the warmonger friendly New York Times and Washington Post did their very best to peddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed by the cognizant majority as bunker mentality bunkum. 

The IAEA Report on Iraq

Less probal to thinking was the grand scale deception the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentions centered on the release of the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  This canard too was supported by the warmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E. Sanger of the New York Times and the irredeemable Job Warwick of the Washington Post, both of whom tumbled tokeses over teakettles to cite the most irresponsible and incendiary sources available on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, including fake nuclear weapons shaman and prominent AIPAC prostitute David Albright. 

Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu, who French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently had the moral spine to call a liar in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, took advantage of the mainstream bullhorn to criticize the IAEA report because “only things that could be proven were written” in it, but, “in reality there are many other things that we see."  In reality one needs a microscope and a fertile imagination to see anything provable whatsoever in the IAEA report.   

I cannot tell a lie.  Know what
I mean?  Eh?  Know what I mean?
Wink, wink.   Nudge, nudge.
Say no more.

The crux of the report’s allegations that Iran may yet be working toward building a nuclear weapon rest on its claim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.  But as my colleague Gareth Porter quickly pointed out, the scientist, identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist at all.  Danilenko, as research of open source documents revealed, has specialized for his entire career in the production of detonation nanodiamonds, which are diamond particles used for industrial and medical purposes including the treatment of cancer.  Iran, coincidentally, has been endeavoring to establish a nanodiamond industry.  Maybe that's the next plank in our Iran policy: they can have a nanodiamond industry as long as they buy their nanodiamonds from us.  

The IAEA could easily have researched the materials that Porter researched and arrived at the same conclusions that he reached.  Considering the report’s predictably profound impact on international relations, one might think that the IAEA would have to taken as much trouble as Porter took to get its facts straight.  But one would be sadly mistaken, and one should be furious to find that the IAEA chose instead to use unchallenged information fed to it by an undisclosed “member nation,” much in the same manner that the New York Times and Washington Post repeat pro-war propaganda channeled though it by unnamed “senior officials.”  I can’t say for sure what that member nation’s identity might be, but I’d bet a dollar of my own money that its first initial stands for “Israel.”  You never know, though.  The member nation’s first initial might also stand for “United.”

Not shockingly, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor any of the rest of the mainstream news foppery has bothered to take the trouble to break the news that their breaking news about the IAEA report was pure unadulterated bull roar. 

This monkey business of accusing Iran of everything from killing our soldiers in Iraq to building nukes to getting dairy goats pregnant without providing a scrap of credible evidence to back the accusations up has been going on since at least 2007 when Mr. Bush’s bunch was looking for excuses to extend the War on Evil in Iraq indefinitely with a “surge” escalation.  If a tenth of shenanigans the Pentarchy has charged Iran with being up to were true, there would be no excuse on earth for not having bombed the entire Persian race into the carrier pigeon mode by now.  

Yet Minister of Peace Leon Panetta wasted little time in calling a news conference and cautioning, oh, no, no, we don’t want to bomb Iran, that might bring on “unintended consequences,” yepper, yup, yup, yo!  It must be that Uncle Leo has reached the age where he's worried about the destination of his immortal soul.  

Iran is not a military threat to anyone—except possibly to itself if it ever were to acquire nuclear weapons.  Nukes in the hands of Iran would be the third-world equivalent of a doomsday machine, and as Doctor Strangelove admonished the Soviet Ambassador in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, a doomsday machine doesn’t serve its purpose unless you tell everyone that you have it.  Once Iran were to announce its possession of a nuclear arsenal, Fork-Tongued Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq and the Bananastans.

Despite plain evidence that our Iran policy is the epitome of rogue hegemony, we continue to demonize Iran in accordance with the dictates of the Israelis, who could populate the world’s museums with the galleries' worth of U.S. politicians it has purchased over the years.  I have suggested that if we really want to vouchsafe Israel’s security we should make it the 51^st state.  But Israel isn’t likely to go along with that.  As I mentioned a moment ago, they don’t need formal legislative representation here because they already own our Congress, and if they become a state they’ll have to pay our taxes and obey our laws.

Israel has a much better deal the way things are now.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

...And Keep Lying Some More...

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Let's Keep Lying!

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and side boy William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter rumps when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy* and hence put their careers with the phony-baloney Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.

8 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Iran despite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun. 

In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Research and Information Project titled “Debunking the Iran ‘Terror Plot,’” my colleague Gareth Porter knocked the bottom out of what little credibility was left of assertions that elements of Iran’s QODs force were behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador and commit other tawdry terrorisms.

Hey, Abbott!  

A still image from Abbot and Costello
Meet the FBI.

The FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper from creation to conclusion.  A narcotics seller turned DEA informant was dope-dealing his way out of a long prison sentence by dangling a hook in front an Iranian-American named Mansour J. “Scarface” Arbabsiar, a middle-aged alcoholic shipwreck best known for his unreliability, his slovenliness, his business and relationship failures and his limited ability to discriminate between perception and reality. 

A brigade of Jack Bauer wannabes in DEA, the FBI and other Justice Department booby hatcheries decided to make their careers by trumping up a fairy tale of evil deeds and the evil doers who do them for their equally career-minded bosses.  The next thing you knew we had a Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana scenario where a head of state, in this case young Mr. Obama, made a draconian foreign policy commitment based on the fabrications of subordinates who were blindingly over-ambitious and dazzlingly under-competent. 

The Scarface farce may has dipped back beneath the radar for now, the companion piece of the latest Iran scare stratagem has roared to the forefront.  While Mr. Obama was telling us that he knew for sure the Iranian government was up to infamous infamies because a dope dealer said that an aging drunk said so (and that was good enough for him), he also sprang the news that UN inspectors had new proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, though he didn’t say what that proof was, just like he doesn’t elaborate on the legal arguments he says support his unitary decisions to suspend the Constitution.

Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup

Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?

Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlains launched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclear intentions.  Ghoulish Condi Rice, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us by the Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s This Week to blab about how Team Obama is undoing all the beautiful wickedness she helped Dark Lord Cheney accomplish during the two-term Bush disaster.  As ever, Condi’s eyes stubbornly focused on a point somewhere above the camera and far, far away, as if somewhere in the sub-language labyrinth of her cognizance she realizes just how full of used horse lunch she is. 

On the subject of Iran, Condi quacked her standard loco litany of invective, stating that, “It’s trying to get a nuclear weapon.”  Condi didn’t offer any proof of her statement, and This Week host Christiane Amanpour, a once credible Middle East correspondent, didn’t push her for any.  It was Amanpour, in fact, who fed Condi her Iran-bash straight line by saying that this week the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is "about to reveal, apparently, more details showing, apparently, that Iran is trying to weaponize.” (My italics).  Christiane had apparently been reading the apparently unrevised anti-Iran propaganda her print colleagues had polluted the information environment with. 

Fredrick Dahl of Reuters filed a Sunday piece that leads with “The U.N. nuclear watchdog is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet on research in Iran seen as geared to developing atomic bombs.”  Only near the end of the story does Dahl admit that the report "is not believed to contain an explicit assessment that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability” and that a reliable source says the report is unlikely to contain any "smoking guns."   

Dahl notes that although U.S. intelligence agencies stated outright in a 2007 intelligence assessment that Iran had stopped whatever nuclear weapons program it may have had in 2003, “Many conservative experts criticized the 2007 findings as inaccurate and naïve.”  Dahl doesn't mention that those “conservative experts” are the very same ones who cooked the intelligence on Iraq.  Dahl also states that, “U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iranian leaders have resumed closed-door debates over the last four years about whether to build a nuclear bomb.”  Not until his next paragraph do we learn that “U.S. intelligence agencies” consist of Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, a subsidiary of the ASAN Institute for Policy Studies, a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our Era of Persistent Conflict. 

But the unlimited weight class winner of the Thomas E. Ricks Journalistic Warmongering Award in last Sunday’s round of Iran-related media mendacity was Joby Warwich of the Washington Post.  His headline proclaimed “IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability,”  and his first sentence warned, “Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

Self-designated UN weapons inspector
David Albright. 

You have to actually read the whole story carefully to glean that nobody actually knows what the IAEA report actually says, and that Warwick’s only actual knowledge of the report’s content actually comes from a PowerPoint presentation on it given by David Albright, who Warwick describes as “a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files” but who is actually a posturing AIPAC propaganda peddler who likely had nothing at all to do with the IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.

R.I.P. Shame  

You hear plenty of talk these days about the decline in American morality, and you mostly hear it from the kind of people who chug the Kool-Aid and snort the glue they get from rabid radio and FOX News.  At blame for the decline of our national virtue, according to the self-appointed keepers of our national ethos, are the standard scapegoats: MTV, web porn, liberal judges, Rachel Maddow and so on.  

What nobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed in the New American Century have been the lies that the hegemon’s leaders told that world that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the abject suffering of untold millions more.  That the lies that support unjust wars keep getting told, and that so many people in our leading institutions continue to help spread them, is the utterly condemning fact of contemporary American culture. 

We haven’t had a firm foothold on the moral high ground since Pearl Harbor.  We started slipping down the slope around the time of the Dresden massacre.  At this point we’re so from being Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” that I doubt we’ll ever gain the wisdom and enlightenment that we should have possessed before we ascended to the role of sole global superpower.

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and sidekick William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter bottoms when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy and hence put their careers with the Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

Quadruple Shame!


By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of. 

More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.  Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

The Persian Paranoia Ploy

18 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms.  It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra. 

The Iranians vant to
drink your blood!

This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism.  An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington.  Scary, huh kids?

The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the Dirty Bomber who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the Panty Bomber whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his getaway car andhis apartment. 

Scarface, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of Waco, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh.  Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him.  His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.”  His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone.  A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”

Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks.    

Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff

At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General Eric Holder, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what Ford Sterling was to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops: the chief buffoon.  It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.”  In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of. 

I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF.  When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things.  Petraeus gave away 190,000 of the things, more than enough to arm 10 United States Army infantry divisions.  Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened.  It must have been an oversight on their part (heh).  

It's the old "They can't
be that stupid so they
must be that stupid" ploy.

According to the Runyonesque scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas.  Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled stunts that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.”  “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism.  According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed. 

But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon.  State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?”  Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary.  Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that you voted for?  Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur.  If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules.     

Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than Scientology dogma.  But that’s okay because young Mr. Obama said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them.     

When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry.  Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain David E. Sanger of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.”  If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “smoking laptop” documents that were proven to be forgeries five freaking years ago. 

But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him.    

Where do we find such candidates?

Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land?  Oh, that’s right.  The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie.  The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it?  This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy.    

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. 

Iran Ate My Homework. Again.

26 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

“Uncle Leo” Panetta, our newly coroneted Secretary of Defense, wasted little time in leaping face-first onto the blame Iraq bandwagon.  On 9 July he stated that weapons supplied by Iran had become a “tremendous concern” in Iraq in recent weeks.  “We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta puled. 

Panetta, Mullen and Jeffrey agree
on the threat from Iran.

Panetta wasn’t flying solo on this propaganda raid; he had two loyal echo chamberlains on his wing.  As New York Times Pentagon camp follower Elisabeth Bumbler dutifully relayed from her uniformed handlers, “Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days.”  The other two top officials were Joint Chiefs potentate Mike Mullen and ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey.  Mutt and Jeff say they have “forensic evidence” to back their claims, though neither they nor Uncle Leo mentioned what that forensic evidence might be.  Whatever they’re referring to, historical evidence indicates we’ll never see it. 

The Pentarchy’s bull feather merchant marines have been shooting poisoned information arrows at Iran at regular intervals since around the time young Mr. Bush stiff armed that Iraq Study Group surrender stuff and went instead with the neocons’ surge strategy.  Freddie Kagan, The American Enterprise Institute’s warlord Fauntleroy, published the surge manifesto Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq in January 2007. 

Within a month Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.”  Gordon had made his bones with the Bush/Cheney regime when he and Judith Miller helped them execute the Nigergate hoax that duped the nation into nodding along with their pet invasion of Iraq.  In their 8 Sept. 2002 article “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” Gordon and Miller supported their assertion that Hussein was seeking yellowcake from Niger by citing anonymous “officials” a jaw-dislocating 30 times.  The documents that comprised the “smoking gun” were later proven to be poorly fabricated forgeries. 

In making the case that Iran was producing the roadside bombs that were killing so many Americans in Iraq in his 2007 story, Gordon referenced “interviews” with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies” who “provided specific details to support” a claim that Iran was providing “’lethal support’ to Shiite militants in Iraq.”  Gordon didn’t name any of these officials, or quote them directly or, for that matter, relay any of those specific details they provided other than to state that said details were likely to be revealed later. 

Looks Iranian to me.

Then-ambassador to Iraq and charter New American Centurion Zalmay Khalilzad promised to pony up proof of the allegations outlined by Gordon.  The military trotted out some of its very best PowerPoint palaver for a select audience of embedded media trustees, in which some sad sack major looking to become a sad sack light colonel said the shaped roadside bomb charges being discussed could only have come from Iran.  After the brief the major allowed as how, well, yeah, um, actually, the stuff in the bombs could have been bought at any Radio Shack.  (But Iran people still suck, okay?)

My colleague Gareth Porter correctly noted in Sept. 2007 that the Bush/Cheney administration “has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.”  To this day, the only existing evidence of an outside party supplying weapons to Shiite militias points directly at “King David” Petraeus who, as commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, handed out 190,000 (that’s right, one hundred and ninety thousand) AK-47s that vanished like cookies at an AA meeting.   

Porter has also exposed allegations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as fatuous.  In early 2010 he published a numbers of articles that revealed the files contained on the “smoking laptop” computer that described Iran’s work on a “nuclear trigger” were as blatantly bogus as the blue-dollar-bill forgeries that “proved” Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium powder from Niger.  But thanks to neocon-backed brainwash breweries like United Against Nuclear Iran (aka UANI), lysergic visions of an Iranian made mushroom cloud over Jerusalem persist. 

An article in last Thursday’s New York Times by Michael Gordon soul mate David E. Sanger badgered us with bull roar about how some development or other means Iran is getting closer to having bomb-grade material because the “United Nations Security Council” has “evidence” of something completely unrelated, and “international nuclear inspectors and American officials” say “evidence” points to something else entirely, and an “Iran expert” at a right-wing think tank says “The evidence is there that they are accelerating” but he doesn’t say what the evidence is or what exactly it says "they" are accelerating. 

Trying to reverse engineer the thought process behind the latest manifestations of the warmongery is always perilous work.  The main assumption involved—i.e., that there is a thought process of any kind behind anything those yahooligans do—is manifestly flawed.  Strategies crafted by neocon tank thinkers resemble model airplanes assembled with sledgehammers.  More than anything, war wonk schemes remind one of ice hockey’s bullyboy dump-and-chase tactic.  Such methods are unsightly and uncreative and brutish, but if you simply keep pounding away at the opposition with them you’ll eventually prevail over things like art and science and reason and, most of all, humanity. 

Why fling the puck into Iran’s end again now?  Partly because that’s how dump-and-chase works; you keep doing it.  Partly because the neocon men need somebody to blame for the recent uptick in U.S. casualties in Iraq, somebody for Americans to get mad at so they don’t stop and think things like Hey, didn’t we end combat operations there a while back?  The war mongrels also need to keep Iran good and boog-ified to justify the coming atomization of our withdrawal timelines from Iraq and the Bananastans.  (Gotta keep the Persian Peril isolated!)  

Iranian Air Force C-22 flying carpet bomber.

The threat Iran poses to the Centurions’ agenda has little to do with that country’s military power or warlike intentions.  Iran can’t project enough conventional force to pout about beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and for Iran to strike another country, especially Israel, with a nuclear weapon would be like the entire Persian race mumbling into the barrel of a .44 Magnum.  Iran only becomes a problem when it develops a truly self-sustaining nuclear energy program and it, along with its big buddies Russian and China, wrestles control of the global energy strategy away from Dick Cheney’s pals.  But even control of our most precious commodity is a mere chip, something to contend for that will sustain the great game that has been played by the powerful and corrupt since Winston Churchill molested Muslim geography after World War I. 

In a kinder, gentler, saner America the body politic would have dismissed all this boo noise about Iran a long time ago.  Lamentably, we live in an age when anything Bill O’Reilly says, no matter how asinine or bizarre it is, becomes incontrovertible fact if Sean Hannity says it too. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.  

Bash, Bash, Bash--Bash, Bash Iran

Iran has agreed to a draft agreement to send reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium to Russia for further refining in order to produce medical isotopes. That’s good news, a major step in Iran’s willingness to make its nuclear program wholly transparent and assure the world it has no interest in making nuclear weapons. You wouldn’t think that, though, to look at a New York Times article on the story by David E. Sanger.

“Iran Deal Would Slow Making of Nuclear Bombs” blares the headline. According to Sanger, the draft deal “would delay the country’s ability to build a nuclear weapon for about a year.” That’s blatantly contrary to what our intelligence sources have said; if Iran wanted to, and that’s a gigantic if, it couldn’t build a bomb before 2015. And, of course, both our intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency tell us they see no sign of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

It doesn’t take a professor of literature to figure out that you can’t “slow” the making of nuclear bombs if you’re not making any. But journalism, at least the kind being practiced by Sanger in this article, isn’t exactly literature. His “delay for about a year” line should have read, “delay for another year, pushing the earliest possible date Tehran could build a bomb to 2016.”

But that would be getting the facts straight.

Israel’s ynet news takes things a step further: “Israel Official: Bomb Threat Still Alive.” An unnamed official said, "The expected deal takes care of Iran's openly available uranium which it enriches for seemingly civilian aims, while it continues to secretly enrich uranium for military aims.” No proof was given and none, apparently, was asked for.

It seems that all journalism is tabloid journalism now. Everyone has been access poisoned. Anyone will print anything their unnamed, official sources tell them. Misinformation, disinformation, covert propaganda, it all gets poured into our mainstream media under the guise of “news.”

I get a kick out of looking through archives of the claptrap that has been published about Iran. A January 2007 story in the New York Sun by notorious right-leaning journo Eli Lake titled “Iran’s Secret Plan for Mayhem” repeated claims that Iran was supporting both Shiite and Sunni sides in Iraq’s civil war. This was all based on knowledge gained from ubiquitous “officials.” The only person cited by name said he didn’t really know anything.

January 2007 was when the Iran bashing campaign began in earnest, likely fueled by Dick Cheney’s Iranian directorate. No claims made about Iran’s activities in Iraq or its ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons have been proven, yet the accusations persist and make into the news, and tend to be accepted as fact.

I’m not willing to paint the Iranians as Clintonian Democrats. Their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could stand to tape his lips together, and the recent furor over his re-election makes one wonder if his country is any less corrupt than Ohio or Florida. Still, the evidence to support the accusations of all the horrible things they have supposedly been up to just isn’t there.

Eileen McGann of the conservative CNS News wrote an Oct. 22 piece called “Iran Cons Hillary.” McGann says, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has fallen for Iran's line that it is not developing nuclear weapons, but only wants the ability to develop one to achieve its place in the sun among the great nations of the earth.”

Iran has never said anything like that. Iran has consistently denied that it wants any part of nuclear weapons. That makes a certain amount of sense. Owning a nuke paints a bull’s eye on Iran’s back, and they’d never be able to use a nuke without suffering retaliation massive enough to end the Persian race.

McGann also commits numerous inaccuracies about levels of uranium enrichment, and she makes wild interrogative accusations: “Why does Iran want enriched fuel?” She asks. Nobody on the bash-Iran team wants to admit that a self-sufficient nuclear-power industry is the only strategic advantage Iran will have in the post-peak oil age. But McGann and her like insist there’s only one reason to enrich uranium, and that’s to have a bomb.

McGann paints a worst-case scenario where Iran pretends to go along with inspections until it gets its uranium back from the Russians, then kicks everybody out and builds a bomb. That gets us back to the bull’s eye counterpoint. If they kick out inspectors again, they are cooked.

There’s one bright note: the BBC notes that senior Israeli and Iranian officials met during the non-proliferation talks in Sept. in Cairo, Egypt. Well, both sides attended panel discussions. I guess that’s almost like talking together, but if you’ve ever been in a panel discussion, you know it’s not really a discussion.

Then again, we’re not really having a discussion about Iran. It’s all scare talk that makes very little sense, and next to none of it is true. I just read an Oct. 21 article in the far-right Family Security Matters that’s so crazy I won’t insert a text link to it. It’s only worth mentioning because it cites a book by some nut bar that says Iran’s plan for the United States includes “nuclear devastation, followed by the establishment of Islamic sharia law.”

To think that some people shovel down this horse plop like it’s chocolate ice cream. Iran could no sooner pull a stunt like that than they could colonize Saturn.

Uh, oh. I can see the next headline: Officials say Iran Will Bomb American and Israel with Nuclear Weapons Based on Saturn!

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The Persian Ploy

A 5 July story by David Sanger of the New York Times typifies how completely our mainstream media have been bulldozed by the warmongery’s propaganda machine. “Despite Crisis, Policy on Iran Is Engagement” states that “the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran” will not deter the Obama administration from “seeking to engage the country’s top leadership in direct negotiations.”

We don’t have a clue what’s actually going on in Iran. Is there a crackdown on opposition leaders, or merely a major operation underway to quell extreme civil unrest? A 6 July Los Angeles Times headline declared, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard takes command.” (LAT later changed the web headline to “Iran's Revolutionary Guard acknowledges taking a bigger role in nation's security.”)

The first paragraph explains that the Revolutionary Guard has taken over its nation’s security, which is its job, which is the reason it was formed in the first place. The twelfth paragraph of the story reads, “The Basiji militia…is also said to be mobilizing to crack down on the demonstrators.” The NYT normally sources this kind of inflammatory, irresponsible statement to unnamed “officials.” The LAT didn’t bother to source this story to anybody; it even used passive voice.

Very little of the media’s reporting on Iran is fact based. As journalist Gareth Porter recently noted, both the Bush and Obama administrations have charged Iran with giving aid to the Taliban but neither have offered no evidence to support their allegations.

The Pentagon’s top weasel wordsmiths have led the misinformation parade.

In an April press conference, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen said, in reference to Iranian authorities, "We’re seeing some evidence that they’re supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan." When pressed to explain what “some evidence” consisted of, Mullen backed down and admitted there was no "constant stream of arms supply at this point," and he was basing his charge on evidence from “some time ago.”

In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, General David Petraeus said, "In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban." Appears to have hedged? Providing opportunistic support? Ooh, that sounds bad, but what in the wide world of sports and leisure does it mean?

That’s the same kind of unsupported innuendo Petraeus used to accuse Iran of funneling weapons into Iraq. Accusing Iran of stepping up the flow of weapons into Iraq in September 2007, he said, "It appears that that is increasing and we do not see a sign of that abating." You can’t see a sign of something abating if it was never happening in the first place. The only party ever proven to have provided weapons to insurgents in Iraq is Petraeus himself. In August 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols distributed to Iraqi security force trainees vanished in 2004 and 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces.

Petraeus is the most shameless, self-serving general we’ve had since “Dugout Doug” MacArthur. Petraeus’s worst piece of Socratic skullduggery regarding Iran also came in September 2007. Just after the GAO had fingered him as the individual most responsible for arming the insurgency, Petraeus accused the Iranians of everything from arming Iraqi militants to assassinating Iraqi politicians. He challenged the Iranians to “show me” his charges were false. That was a Machiavellian ploy worthy of the first bona fide arch villain of the third millennium, Dick Cheney. The young Mr. Bush administration promised to prove its allegations of Iran’s support of the Iraq insurgency in January 2007, when it also announced the surge strategy. It never did, and most of those allegations have been discredited.

Cheney’s Iranian Directorate manufactured intelligence on Iran in much the same way that his Office of Special Plans cooked the intelligence that “justified” the invasion of Iraq. Cheney was, and still is, on the leading edge of the long war oligarchy’s effort to convince the world that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Cheney attempted to alter the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran to reflect his hard line stance on Iran’s nuclear program. He howled like the Wolf Man when the report was published stating that Iran had halted its nuclear program in the fall of 2003. He and his allies continue to tout the “Iran’s relentless drive for a nuclear weapon” mantra, and the media continue to echo it for them.

Having a fistful of nuclear weapons would paint a Bullseye on Iran’s back. Nukes are a deterrence weapon. The problem with deterrent weapons is that by the time you use them, they’ve already failed to stop whatever they were supposed to deter. The second Iran used a nuke on one of its neighbors, the U.S. or Israel would virtually obliterate the entire Persian race in retaliation. Possessing nuclear weapons would actually destroy Iran’s national security, as they would justify a massive preemptive strike by vastly superior powers.

Cheney’s disinformation machine has created almost universal belief that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that he would use nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” but as Professor Juan Cole has pointed out, Ahmadinejad said nothing of the kind. Ahmadinejad's exact quote was, "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Cole explains that Ahmadinejad simply expressed the desire that the Israeli government would disappear as the Shah of Iran’s regime collapsed in 1979.

Iran has never attacked another country in its 74-year existence. It is incapable of projecting conventional land power more than a few miles from its borders; its air and naval power cannot operate significantly beyond the Persian Gulf. Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent the size of ours.

After the electoral shenanigans in Ohio and Florida that led to two ruinous terms for the Bush/Cheney regime, what business do we have condemning the results of any election held in another country?

The only thing we know Iran to be “guilty” of is its ambition to develop a nuclear energy industry and become a major political and economic force in the Gulf region.

Could someone explain to me again why the Obama administration shouldn’t engage Iran’s top leadership in direct negotiations, or why it would possibly need an excuse for doing so?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.