← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 15725 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2004-11-22
2004-11-22 04:51 | User Profile
[url]http://www.vdare.com/roberts/041121_iran.htm[/url]
Wonââ¬â¢t Get Fooled Again? By Paul Craig Roberts
It is not yet Bushââ¬â¢s second term. All available US troops are tied down in Iraq by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents. Go-it-alone Bush has isolated America from her allies. And the neocons want to spread their war to Iran.
The Bush administration is recycling the lies that it used to invade Iraq: Iran is acquiring nuclear weapons that will be given to terrorists. In a display of loyalty to a ruthless neocon administration calculated to win him appointments to corporate boards, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that Iran was working on nuclear missiles.
The source for this effort to spread hysteria? One "walk-in" source with unverified documents. Most likely, the source is a member of an Iranian exile group given the assignment by neocons Richard Perle and John Bolton.
One might think that Powell would be suffering shame enough for lying to the UN about Iraq. Apparently not, as his last act against world peace is to spread neocon propaganda that Iran is going nuke.
The US media, now a tamed propaganda organ for the White House, dutifully repeated Powellââ¬â¢s unverified claims, thus providing "reports" for Bush to cite as evidence that Iran was rushing ahead with the development of nuclear weapons.
The International Atomic Energy Agency conducts regular inspections in Iran. The IAEA recently issued a report stating that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Real evidence, however, is no match for neocon propaganda.
And the propaganda is pouring out of the well-oiled neocon machine. French, German and British agreements that confine Iran to the peaceful use of nuclear energy are in the way of the neoconservativesââ¬â¢ intention to spread the war to Iran and must be discredited.
On November 20, Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post hysterically accused Europe of defending "Iranââ¬â¢s ability to attain the wherewithal to destroy the Jewish state." Glick "exposes" Franceââ¬â¢s efforts to prevent the outbreak of wider war in the Middle East as a trick: "France wishes only to box in the US to the point that the Americans will not be able to continue to fight the war against terrorism." [H-hour has arrived, Caroline B. Glick November 20, 2004]
The neoconservative Heritage Foundation promptly broadcast Glickââ¬â¢s hysterical rants into the Republican noise machine, reviving talk radio calls for nuking France, "Americaââ¬â¢s oldest enemy."
Three years ago Ann Coulter was fired by National Review, a neocon publication, when she declared: "We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Today such violent words are common parlance.
There is no evidence whatsoever in behalf of the claims the Bush administration is making about Iranian nukes. The purpose of these false claims is to create fear that will breach the publicââ¬â¢s opposition to a draft. The neocons are desperate for troops for their Middle Eastern War.
For a decade or longer, the neocons who control the Bush administrationââ¬â¢s foreign and military policies have been writing papers advocating a US-Israeli conquest of the Middle East. A moronic president has given them their chance.
Anxious to get their war underway, the neocons launched their invasion before they had the necessary manpower for the task. Bogged down in Iraq, the neocons are desperate to widen the war before the American public has enough of the pointless carnage and forces a withdrawal.
Thus, before the Iraqi war is finished, the neocon propaganda machine is at work creating fear that the US is in danger from Iranian nukes unless America preemptively attacks Iran.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But Americans are perfectly set up to be fooled twice. Right-wing talk radio has conservative patriots absolutely demanding to be fooled. Christian rapture propagandists have conservative congregations waiting to be wafted up to heaven. The Republican, corporate, Jewish owned media is with President Bush. Military types are determined to avenge the Vietnam loss by winning the war against Islam into which they have been conned.
Critics are dismissed as "enemies" who are "against us." Reason and common sense are not features of the Bush administration. It is all blind emotion, a replay of The Triumph of the Will.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice
2004-11-22 05:05 | User Profile
Really nice tone in this article, I really like it.
Did PCR just say what I think he said about the real owners and operators of the US Media?!
2004-11-22 05:32 | User Profile
Xmetal,
Indeed he did. There is more here in this radio interview. See the 13 November program.
[url]http://www.americafirstradio.com/broadcasts.html[/url]
2004-11-22 05:48 | User Profile
townhall.com
H-hour has arrived Caroline B. Glick
November 20, 2004
The agreement that France, Germany and Britain reached with Iran this week signals that the diplomatic option of dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program no longer exists. To understand why this is the case, we must look into the agreement and understand what is motivating the various parties to accede to its conditions.
The agreement stipulates that the European-3 will provide Iran with light water reactor fuel, enhanced trade relations and more nuclear reactors. In exchange, the Iranians agree that for the duration of the negotiations toward implementing the agreement ââ¬â including a European push for Iranian ascension to the World Trade Organization ââ¬â it will not develop centrifuges and will not enrich uranium. At the same time, the Europeans accepted Iran's claim that it has the legal right to complete the entire nuclear fuel cycle ââ¬â meaning, it has the legal right to enrich uranium. Strangely, in a separate Iranian agreement with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranians announced that they would cease enriching uranium effective Monday, November 22, rather than immediately. This apparently annoyed the Europeans, but it wasn't a deal breaker.
The Weekly Standard this week explained that light water reactor fuel of the type that the Europeans have agreed to give Iran can be used to produce bomb material within nine weeks. Since the IAEA inspectors only visit Iran every three months, it would be a simple matter to divert enough light water fuel to produce a bomb between inspections. And so, the agreement itself holds the promise of direct European assistance to Iran's nuclear weapons program.
While the Europeans were congratulating themselves for their feckless diplomacy, the Iranians were taking to the airwaves and arguing that they gave up nothing in the deal and received everything. Hamid Reza Asefi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the suspension of nuclear activities would last only until Iran and the Europeans reached a long-term agreement. For his part, Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani said that enriching uranium is "Iran's right, and Iran will never give up its right to enrich uranium."
Iran's interest in making the deal is clear. The IAEA governing board is set to meet next week to discuss Iran's nuclear program. By agreeing to the deal with the Europeans, Iran has effectively foreclosed the option, favored by the US, of transferring Iran's nuclear program to the UN Security Council for discussions that could lead to sanctions on Iran.
Aside from that, all along, Iran has been gaming the system. It has pushed to the limits all feasible interpretation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, of which it is a signatory, to enable it to reach the cusp of nuclear weapons development without breaking its ties or diminishing its leverage over the Europeans as well as the Russians and Chinese. In so doing, it has isolated the US and Israel ââ¬â which have both gone on record that Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons ââ¬â from the rest of the international community, which is ready to enable Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capabilities.
In the meantime, as Iran has negotiated the deal with the Europeans, it has moved quickly to develop its nuclear weapons delivery systems. Its recent Shihab-3 ballistic missiles tests seem to have demonstrated that Iran can now launch missiles to as far away as Europe. In addition, last week's launching of an Iranian drone, as well as this week's Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel, have shown that Iran has developed a panoply of delivery options for using its nuclear (as well as chemical and biological) arsenals to physically destroy Israel.
For their part, the European powers must know that this deal is a lie. The ink had not dried on their signatures when Iran announced that it wasn't obligated by the agreement to end its uranium enrichment. As well, on Wednesday, just two days after the deal was announced formally, the Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance ââ¬â the political front for the People's Mujahedeen (which the deal stipulates must be treated as a terrorist organization comparable to al-Qaida) ââ¬â held press conferences in Paris and Vienna where its representatives stated that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium at a Defense Ministry facility in Teheran and that it bought blueprints for nuclear bombs three years ago from Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear bomb store. The Council of Resistance is the same organization that blew the whistle on Iran's nuclear program in 2002, when it exposed satellite imagery of Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz.
Aside from this, European leaders themselves have said that in their view there is no military option for taking out Iran's nuclear facilities. In an interview with the BBC this week, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, "I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop." Straw made this statement the same week that French President Jacques Chirac made an all-out diplomatic assault against British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his alliance with US President George W. Bush. Speaking to British reporters on Monday, Chirac said, "Britain gave its support [to the US in Iraq] but I did not see much in return. I am not sure that it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favors." Chirac added that he had told Blair that his friendship with Bush could be of use if the US adopted the EU position on Israel and the Palestinians. Since Bush has refused to do so, Chirac argued, Bush has played Blair for a fool.
From these statements, two things about the European agenda become clear. First, by bringing Britain into the talks with Iran, the French have managed to ensure that the Americans, if they decide to do something about Iran's nuclear weapons programs, will be forced to act without British backing and at the expense of the British government, thus causing a serious fissure in the Anglo-American alliance. Straw's statement is breathtaking in that it shows that on the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons, the British prefer to see Iran gain nuclear weapons to having anyone act to prevent them from doing so.
Chirac's statement exposes, once again, France's main interest in international affairs today. To wit: France wishes only to box in the US to the point that the Americans will not be able to continue to fight the war against terrorism. The French do this not because they necessarily like terrorists. They do this because as Chirac has said many times, he views the central challenge of our time as developing a "multipolar" world. France's obsession with multipolarity stems from Chirac's perception that his country's primary aim is not to free the world from Islamic terror, but to weaken the US.
Given this state of affairs, it is clear that the newest deal with the mullahs has removed diplomacy from the box of tools that can be used against Iran. In the unlikely event that the issue is ever turned over to the Security Council, France will veto sanctions even if Russia and China could be bought off to abstain. As the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has shown, even if sanctions were to be levied, there is no credible way to enforce them.
So where does this leave the Jews who, in the event that Iran goes nuclear, will face the threat of annihilation? Crunch time has arrived. It is time for Israel's leaders to go to Washington and ask the Americans point blank if they plan to defend Europe as Europe defends Iran's ability to attain the wherewithal to destroy the Jewish state. It must be made very clear to the White House that the hour of diplomacy faded away with the European Trio's latest ridiculous agreement with the mullahs. There is no UN option. Europe has cast its lot with the enemy of civilization itself.
The prevailing wisdom in Washington these days seems to be that the US is waiting for an Israeli attack on Iran. There is some logic to such a policy. No doubt, the Arabs and the Iranians will all blame America anyway, but they are not America's chief concern here. Britain and Germany are.
What the US needs is plausible deniability regarding an Israeli strike vis- -vis Britain and Germany, in order to get itself out of the trap that Paris has set for it. An Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program will leave Germany in an uncomfortable public position. Berlin cannot condemn the Jews for doing what we can to prevent another Holocaust without losing whatever crumbs of moral credibility it has built up over the past 50 years.
As for Britain, if Israel were to conduct the attack on its own, the British would be hard-pressed to abandon the Americans; thus, the danger that British involvement with the Paris-based multipolarists on Iran will breach the Anglo-American alliance could be somewhat mitigated.
On the other hand, if the Bush administration does not accept Israeli reasoning, the fact will still remain: Israel cannot accept a nuclear Iran.
Caroline B. Glick is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where this article first appeared.
é2004 Caroline B. Glick
townhall.com
[url]http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Glick20041120.shtml[/url]
2004-11-22 05:55 | User Profile
November 20, 2004 Uranium-Enrichment Myths Busted
by Gordon Prather
To get your support for the application of the Bush Doctrine to Iraq last year, the neo-crazies claimed to have slam-dunk intelligence that Saddam had secretly reconstituted his uranium-enrichment program and would, therefore, soon have nukes to give to terrorists.
But Mohamed ElBaradei ââ¬â Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ââ¬â had told the UN Security Council that "after three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
To get your support for the application of the Bush Doctrine to Iran next year, the neo-crazies are now claiming to have slam-dunk intelligence that the mullahs have secretly been enriching uranium for years and, therefore, will soon have nukes to give to terrorists.
Well, Iran will soon have a uranium-enrichment capability.
But IAEA experts have just spent two years developing a comprehensive picture of Iran's nuclear and nuclear-related activities, including all nuclear-related imports. They have found no evidence that Iran has yet enriched uranium. Much less did they find any evidence that Iran has nukes or a nuke development program.
Do the neo-crazies and their media sycophants really believe that having a uranium-enrichment capability is tantamount to having nukes? And if so, where did they ever get such a crazy idea?
Currently, the world's leader in gas-centrifuge development and the world's largest single provider of enriched-uranium is the Urenco Group, a private-sector consortium with plants in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.
The Urenco Enrichment Company produces and markets enriched uranium for use in the manufacture of fuel for nuclear power plants, while the Enrichment Technology Company develops and deploys gas centrifuges.
The current generation of Urenco centrifuges comprise an ultra-light, thin-walled tube made from specialty metals and composite materials, containing a cylindrical rotor ââ¬â also made from composite materials ââ¬â which spins at an incredibly high velocity in a vacuum, on almost frictionless (magnetic) bearings.
In order to obtain the desired enrichment of the U-235 isotope, it is necessary to connect a large number of centrifuges together in series and in parallel. This arrangement of centrifuges is known as a cascade.
Passing through the cascade, U-238 isotopic atoms in the uranium hexafluoride gas are progressively removed, resulting in a gradual "enrichment" of the U-235 isotope.
Nuclear power plant fuel is typically 3 to 5 percent U-235. Weapons-grade HEU is typically 90 percent U-235 or greater.
In first-generation centrifuges, the rotors were made of aluminum and the bearings were not frictionless. Hence they were relatively low-efficiency machines ââ¬â incapable of operating at high velocities ââ¬â which translates into many more centrifuges being required in the cascade. Thousands of them.
Last year, the Iranians invited ElBaradei to inspect a gas-centrifuge cascade they were constructing. The facility ââ¬â once operation begins ââ¬â will be subject to an IAEA Safeguards Agreement, which would prohibit the production of weapons-grade HEU.
According to the IAEA, the Iranian centrifuges appear to be based upon first-generation Urenco designs.
That figures. A Pakistani metallurgist named A.Q. Kahn stole blueprints for a first generation centrifuge from Urenco in 1975, and by the late 1980s, Khan was publicly offering uranium-enrichment services ââ¬â in competition to Urenco ââ¬â using "indigenously" designed and produced gas-centrifuges.
Now, as best the IAEA can determine, Urenco doesn't have nukes, even though there are probably lots of scientists and engineers employed by Urenco who could make a gun-type nuke if you gave them two 75-pound pieces of weapons-grade HEU to bang together.
Khan probably also had similarly capable scientists and engineers.
But, in 1998, Pakistan tested several nukes, each far more sophisticated than the gun-type nuke we dropped on Hiroshima. Even more sophisticated than the implosion-type nuke we dropped on Nagasaki.
You see, the Pakistani nukes were apparently "boosted" with tritium ââ¬â which is the secret of making them small and lightweight.
So, whether it's Urenco or Pakistan or Iran, having a uranium-enrichment capability is not tantamount to having nukes. It's certainly not tantamount to having nukes that are small enough to be delivered by ballistic missiles.
If the Iranians wanted to design and engineer a missile-deliverable nuke, they'd need the equivalent of Los Alamos National Laboratory andSandia National Laboratory.
If the Iranians wanted weapons-grade enriched uranium for their engineered design, they'd have to get it from A.Q. Khan. Unlike Iran's, Khan's uranium-enrichment facilities are not subject to the IAEA-NPT regime.
Meanwhile, some media type ought to visit Urenco and put to rest the neo-crazy idea that having a uranium-enrichment capability is tantamount to having nukes.
Dr. Prather used to design nuclear weapons for the U.S. Army -S.
2004-11-22 06:21 | User Profile
Iran Is Not a Nuclear Threat!!!
by Jude Wanniski
Memo To: Editors and reporters From: Jude Wanniski Re: Please get off your behinds
Now that most of you have apologized for sitting on your duffs while the neo-cons planned and executed the totally unnecessary war against a toothless regime in Baghdad, I suggest you get off your duffs in regard to the neo-con plot to war against Iran. I've been posting memos here for months pointing out that Iran has not done anything to warrant the propaganda directed at it from the Perle Cabal, i.e., Richard Perle's network that is laced through both political parties, Congress and the White House. Iran is in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has a hundred times publicly pledged to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect any gol-durned site inside its borders if someone has reason to believe it has a secret nuclear program underway. Iranian exile groups pop up from time to time with press conferences about some diabolical site they have discovered, but Iran ALWAYS allows the inspectors to go in, and they find nothing.
Now I know it is impossible to get the Wall Street Journal editorial page to take a good look at the dopey charges being leveled against Tehran. It has been intellectually corrupted by the Perle Cabal and robotically publishes anything the Cabal asks it to. Today it runs a long op-ed by Henry Sikolski, a Perle stooge, who warns that Iran is not only deceiving all of us, but that it could soon be weeks or months away from having a nuke to rain down upon its adversaries in the region, i.e., Israel. Can this be possible? Not on your life. Not on your life.
But for goodness sakes, the New York Times has been pulled into the same orbit, a recent editorial wringing its hands over Iran and the possibility that it could have a nuke to threaten the region, i.e. Israel. The Times editors are well-meaning, but they do not seem to check anything out with independent sources. Here is what I wrote the Times editors after reading their editorial:
My longtime friend Gordon Prather, a nuclear physicist who actually designed nukes (when we were still designing new nukes) tells me your editorial today is factually incorrect in a very basic way and that you would do well not to accept the material being presented to reporters by the Boltons and Sikolskis of the world. That is, the edit says: "The centrifuges at [Natanz] can just as easily be used to make bomb-grade enriched uranium as to prepare lower-grade fuel for reactors. Any country that builds and operates such a plant has taken the most crucial step down the road toward building nuclear weapons."
Dr. Prather says your editorial writer seems to think it would be easy to make a nuke once you have a uranium enrichment plant. He points out that Iran could not take the first step unless it first completed the plant at Bushehr and ran it for a year, then announced its withdrawal from the NPT, which requires six months lead time, and then spends several YEARS taking the fuel out of Bushehr, allowing it to cool down for a few years so it could be handled, then reprocessed, and eventually turned into one nuke device.... probably not one small enough to be able to be carried by a missile.
His recommendation is that you send your editorial writer to one of the URENCO plants in Europe, where he/she can ask the people who run their uranium enrichment plants what it would take for Iran to go from A to Z with what they have now. Prather believes the protocols Iran would sign in order to proceed with a low-enrichment plant would make it absolutely impossible for them to take steps two or three or eight hundred, etc., to make a nuke, without being detected.
Because Iran has the right to enrich uranium under the supervision of the IAEA in order to have a complete nuclear fuel cycle you are really asking the Iranian government to give up that right if it wishes to produce nuclear power.
Please editors and reporters, I hate to challenge your collective intelligence, but I must do so. In 2002ââ¬â2003, the whole world demanded through the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein open up his whole country to prove to us that he had no weapons of mass destruction. And HE DID SO!!!! He invited inspectors from the U.N., from the IAEA, and from the US Congress, and from the CIA to come to Iraq and look into every nook and cranny. We did, found nothing, and still invaded. Now, dear editors and reporters, please take note that the neo-cons have been insisting Iran has all kinds of WMD programs underway and Tehran says it does not... and says we can send inspectors into any nook and cranny of Iran to check that out. Doesn't it ever occur to you, dear journalists of the Fourth Estate, that you are not doing the MINIMUM to prevent a second or a third unnecessary war? Huh?
November 22, 2004
Jude Wanniski runs the financial/political advisory service Wanniski.com. (If you subscribe, and check LewRockwell.com in the referring website pull-down, LRC gets 10%.)
Copyright é 2004 Jude Wanniski
[url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski35.html[/url]
2004-11-22 17:24 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Xmetal,
Indeed he did. There is more here in this radio interview. See the 13 November program.
[url]http://www.americafirstradio.com/broadcasts.html[/url][/QUOTE]
Thanks for the head's up on this show, Sert. It was very good and informative.
2004-11-22 18:01 | User Profile
It sure looks to me that the neokhans have their minds made up about launching some sort of attack on Iran.
And that in turn would seem to entail a new draft.
It's all shaping up very nicely for us "worse is better" crazies.
We'll get a patently unjust war with lots of pain spread throughout sheepleland with nobody to blame but the Izzies.
It's all good.
My prediction: legislation to resume the draft introduced in Congress shortly after Shrub's sworn in for a second term, with war with Iran launched before end of 2005.
2004-11-22 21:07 | User Profile
I credit my brother for a formative experience only a few years ago. When "Saving Private Ryan" came out, around the time of Brokaw's "Greatest Generation", he became convinced that the industrial-media-defense complex was conspiring to put us on a war-footing. I thought the trend was just the usual Hollywood cycle of milking mawkish sentimentality, which of course it was in some small part. After all, those WWII vets are starting to disappear rapidly, and the Hollywood Pharisees would never pass up an opportunity to cash in on death and sacrifice- whether it's actual deeds such as those performed by my Army Air Force vet father or imaginary deaths of millions and billions of their own kin folk.
September 11 pretty much proved my brother right, along with the reports before and after that event about corporate/government designs on the oil reserves and pipeline routes around the Caspian Sea. We were set up, and were steamrolled into the clash of civilizations needed by the corporate elite and their chosen masters.
Won't get fooled again, as the 60's corpses used to say. We're being set up to enter the next phase of world-wide conquest, and it is all in the service of the tikkunites. Buckle up, and don't forget to watch Private Ryan next Veteran's Day. Might be some good tips in there on how to survive all-out war.