Tag Archives: Iran

Freedom Rider: The U.S. can’t control the world

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

Slow-witted Joe Biden appears to think that we’re still in the age of the sole superpower, when in fact that era has come and gone.

As this columnist has pointed out, Joe Biden’s foreign policy differs little from that of his predecessor Donald Trump. The imperatives of the United States hegemon require treating the rest of the world as either willing vassals or as sworn enemies. Any nation that threatens economic supremacy or the ability to thwart foreign policy directives is labeled an adversary and faces an onslaught of governmental and corporate media attacks. This dynamic remains unchanged and the Biden administration has only worsened an already bad situation.

The troubles start at the top with the president himself. When asked by George Stephanopoulos in an ABC news interview if Vladimir Putin is “a killer” Biden answered in the affirmative. The president was never known for his intellect and thought that repeating Russiagate tropes would play well. It didn’t play well with the Russians who immediately recalled their U.S. ambassador back home to Moscow.

While Biden was dealing with foot in mouth disease regarding Russia, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was making a mess of relations with China. He invited his Chinese counterparts to a meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, and proceeded to offend them by scolding them in front of the press and repeating unfounded charges about human rights abuses against the Uyghurs.

“Well, I think we thought too well of the United States.  We thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols,” said Yang Jiechie , director of the Central Commission of Foreign Affairs. It all went downhill quickly with very public bad behavior on the part of the amateurish and arrogant Americans.

It isn’t clear what Blinken hoped to achieve, but almost immediately after that debacle the Chinese began their own initiative with their partner nations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was given a warm welcome on his trip to China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi then departed for Iran where the two countries announced a 25-year, $400 billion partnership. Among other things China committed itself to buying Iranian oil, an agreement which diminishes the impact of U.S. sanctions.

Having squandered opportunity and lost leverage, the hapless Americans have been pressured by the Europeans to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Talks will resume in Vienna but the Iranians are neither impressed nor intimidated. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif stated in a Twitter post that the U.S. must remove all sanctions in order for the talks to move forward. He added for emphasis, “No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary.”

The ongoing impacts of U.S. meddling are coming to fruition all over the world. Even U.S. ally Germany is moving ahead with the Nord Stream II gas pipeline with Russia, making a lie out of claims that Russia is a threat to Europe. Despite all of its schemes to dominate, nothing is working in this country’s favor on the diplomatic front.

The United States is still the most powerful country militarily, and can do great damage should it choose. It can sanction weaker nations, but that of course drives them closer to others. China and Russia supply Venezuela with medical equipment that would otherwise be impossible to obtain under U.S. sanctions. China also purchases Venezuelan oil and along with Russia, supplies that country with Covid vaccines.

Biden is dealing with the results of decades of the United States behaving as if its brief unipolar moment would last forever. China will soon surpass the United States economically and it is using that power to its advantage. Its Belt and Road Initiative involves countries on every continent and provides opportunity where the western nations offer only debt and subjugation.

The United States believes its own hype and thinks that its relatively brief period of domination would last forever. Instead the new president is rightly viewed as a paper tiger after just a few months in office.

Only propagandized and uninformed Americans believe that Russian meddled in not one, but two elections. They have no idea that their leaders are losing influence and making enemies. They don’t know that every act of aggression brings the targeted nations closer together.

Russia’s foreign minister recently said that relations with the United States had “hit bottom” and that there were no plans to send their ambassador back to Washington. The idea that Joe Biden is the most powerful man in the world is a fantasy accepted only because of endless indoctrination.

No one else lives in this dream land. Even dim-witted Joe Biden has to learn that he can’t call other presidents killers and have any expectation of good relations. Of course his definition of good relations means other countries obeying U.S. dictates. But that isn’t how the world works any more. He and his handlers must quickly disabuse themselves of any notion that the U.S. can continue to get away with these debacles of their own making. These “grownups” in the room had better grow up fast.

West’s Information War Continues

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By Gunnar Ulson

Source: Land Destroyer

YouTube has recently deleted the latest channel used by Iranian state media’s PressTV. The move follows attacks on the Iranian media outlet by US-based social media giant Facebook earlier this year. 

PressTV’s own take on the deletion in its article, “Google renews attack on YouTube account of Iran’s Press TV,” would note: 

Google has for the seventh time targeted Iranian broadcaster Press TV, blocking the English-language news network’s access to its official YouTube account without any prior notice.

The US tech giant shut YouTube accounts of Press TV late on Tuesday, citing “violations of community guidelines.”

Iranian state media is only the most recent target of US censorship and information warfare, with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter having also recently de-platformed government accounts in Myanmar as well as a concerted effort by these same networks to either de-platform or undermine the credibility of Russian and Chinese state media.  

The use of ambiguous justifications like “violations of community guidelines” which themselves can be ambiguous and open to interpretation, helps demonstrate the political nature of what is clearly a campaign of censorship. 

YouTube and other US-based social media platforms, still dominating the global social media industry, attempt to portray targets of what is clearly politically-motivated censorship as “fake news” or somehow engaged in dangerous “disinformation,” while the accounts of Western-based media organizations actually involved in very real disinformation, often times in promotion of sanctions and warfare having a direct impact on millions of lives, remain online and in good standing. 

Western Monopoly Challenged 

Beyond social media, the UK had recently ousted Chinese state media, CGTN, which was met by Beijing in turn shutting down BBC broadcasts in China. 

More recently, China-based BBC reporter John Sudworth would flee to Taiwan, fearing legal actions for his outrageous, one-sided propaganda regarding Xinjiang.

The BBC’s own article, “BBC China correspondent John Sudworth moves to Taiwan after threats,” deliberately attempts to portray Sudworth as a victim of “threats” rather than a foreign agent involved in political interference under the guise of journalism finally facing legitimate legal actions. The BBC article laments: 

The number of international media organisations reporting from China is shrinking. Last year China expelled correspondents for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

And in September 2020, the last two reporters working in China for Australian media flew home after a five-day diplomatic standoff.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) of China says foreign journalists are “being caught up in diplomatic rows out of their control”.

In reality, these foreign “journalists” aren’t being “caught up in diplomatic rows,” they are the primary actors helping drive these rows. 

It’s worth mentioning leaked documents revealing the BBC, among others including Reuters, signing secret contracts with the British Foreign Office to carry out influence operations both inside Russia and along Russia’s peripheries in Eastern Europe. 

It is without doubt that the BBC engages in similar activities inside and along China’s borders as well, with Sudworth’s own work clearly aimed at advancing Western foreign policy, not investigating or reporting actual news. 

Years ago, the notion of Western nations fearing alternative media enough to engage in sweeping, transparent censorship against outlets like PressTV or CGTN, or the Western media fleeing or backpedalling in countries they’ve maintained offices in for years, would seem unthinkable. 

The information war waged by Western nations is indeed heating up, but it is not the one-sided exercise of monopoly it used to be. 

Today, alternative media, both state-sponsored and independent, poses a serious challenge to the West’s monopoly over the creation and flow of global information. Only through the West’s control over a relatively new form of media, social media, is the West’s edge maintained. 

For Iranian, Chinese, Russian and the media of many other nations seeking to introduce balance to the global conversation, the West’s hitherto control over social media remains a serious hurdle. 

US-based social media networks have been key to advancing Western foreign policy objectives, and perhaps especially in the realm of promoting and executing so-called “color revolutions.” 

Russia and China’s recent pledge to work closer together to counter Western-sponsored “color revolution” and “disinformation” might benefit from a multipolar alternative to US-based social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

While Russia and China both have their own domestic alternatives which have proved an effective measure to protect their own respective information space, the creation of a wider-appealing platform for nations along their peripheries, targeted by Western disinformation, could help give state-sponsored and independent alternative media the space it needs to finally balance out the lopsided advantage the West artificially maintains through censorship across its own networks.

The creation of both sovereign information space within nations and shared space between nations but outside of the control of Western censorship would be infinitely useful. When long-standing media organizations like PressTV struggle to reach audiences for a lack of alternatives to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the utility of such space becomes clearer still. 

The American Terror State

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By Donald Monaco

Source: Global Research

On February 26, 2021, imperial President Joe Biden ordered the bombing of “Iranian backed militias” in Syria. Biden’s action was rationalized as “retaliation” for rocket attacks on American troops in Iraq that killed a mercenary contractor and injured a U.S. soldier.  

Missing from coverage in the corporate media was any mention of the illegal U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Syria.  The occupation was simply airbrushed from discussion.  By so doing, reality is inverted.  Victim is portrayed as aggressor and aggressor as victim.

From the standpoint of international law, aggressive military action taken by occupation forces cannot be termed self-defense.  Yet political elites and media propagandists finesse basic truths by detaching U.S. forces from the context of illegal invasion and occupation.  They assume the military has a ‘right’ to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Paradoxically, the militias assaulted by the United States have been fighting ISIS, once again exposing the ‘war on terror’ as a massive lie.  The same militia forces Biden attacked were once led by Iranian General Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump, further demonstrating the genuine purpose of military deployment which is to destabilize regimes targeted as unfriendly, meaning not subservient to the Washington.

Almost simultaneously, the Biden administration signaled that there would be no punishment of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was identified by the CIA as having given the order to assassinate Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Also, unsurprisingly, the Biden administration announced that it would appeal a British magistrate’s decision not to extradite Julian Assange to the United States for prosecution under the espionage act.  Assange languishes in a British prison pending the appeal.  His transgression? Exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

The pattern is clear.  Any action that supports U.S. global hegemony is justified, while any opposition is criminalized and repressed.

The core mission of the American terror state is to make the world safe for U.S. corporate profiteering.  A corollary imperative is to prevent any challenge to U.S. global domination.

First, the United States is a permanent warfare state that fights perpetual wars for perpetual profits.  The profits accrue to the “merchants of death” who sell their wares within the iron triangle of a military-industrial-complex that guarantees a massive return on capital investments.  The process is known as “military Keynesianism.”  Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing provide the arms for a global military empire to defend the global corporate empire.  Profits also flow to members of congress who own stock in the defense industry.

The permanent warfare state also allows profits to accumulate for corporations that exploit the world’s land, labor, and resources by protecting their access to foreign markets.  Corporations such as World Mineral Inc, Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto, General Motors, Lithium Americas, AES, and Blackberry Ltd in the mineral extraction industry, Exxon Mobile, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron in the energy industry, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft in the technology industry, General Motors, Ford, and Tesla in the automotive industry, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer in the pharmaceutical industry, and Walmart, Amazon, and Costco in the retail industry all operate in the global market.

Commercial banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America in the banking industry, Wall Street investment firms led by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley in the financial industry, and private equity firms such as The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Co, and TPG Capital in the investment management industry finance global corporate transactions.

U.S. Fortune 500 companies made $14.2 trillion in revenues during 2020 and held an estimated $2.6 trillion offshore to avoid paying taxes.  The largest American corporations made billions of dollars in profits while laying off thousands of workers during the coronavirus lockdown.  Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and their cohorts increased their net worth by half a trillion dollars during a pandemic that saw 8 million people join the ranks of 38.1 million poor Americans.  Another 93.6 million live close to the poverty level in the richest nation on earth.

Second, any country that wants to control its own land, labor, and resources by implementing an agenda of economic nationalism becomes a barrier to free trade, globalization, and the neoliberal economic paradigm that emphasizes privatization and deregulation of economies for the benefit of private capital.  Countries that do not throw themselves open to foreign investment are punished by crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Third, the neoliberal economic agenda of free market privatization drives the neoconservative political agenda of American global hegemony as justified by Bush Jr.’s “Preemptive War on Terror,” Obama’s “Humanitarian Intervention,” Trump’s “America First,” and Biden’s “Advancement of Democracy” ideologies.

Neoconservatives dominate the foreign policy establishment.  Besides protecting U.S. empire, they are rabidly pro-Israel.  The neocons conflate the interests of the United States with the interests of Israel, ignoring George Washington’s admonition to avoid “foreign entanglements.”  They want the United States to go to war with Iran, as they understand that the destruction of resistance to Zionist colonization in Palestine can only be accomplished by defeating Tehran.

Other Middle Eastern and North African countries that supported the Palestinian cause and had large reserves of oil coveted by empire, were decimated by implementation of a neoconservative plan to attack seven Muslim countries in five years, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran.

George W. Bush, the Texas oil man, Dick Cheney, former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, and a rat’s nest of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and I. Lewis Libby decimated Iraq.

Barack Obama, the University of Chicago law professor and Nobel Peace Prize winner and neoconservative Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, destroyed Syria and turned Libya into a failed state that resulted in the enslavement of Black Africans.

Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and celebrity show host and Mike Pompeo, neoconservative war hawk and Secretary of State, continued the occupations of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, moved the U.S. embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem and offered the Palestinians the “Deal of the Century” that was promptly rejected.

Despite his rhetoric, Trump failed to stand-up to the military-industrial-complex by ending ongoing U.S. wars.

Finally, Joe Biden, a self-professed Zionist, supported every U.S. war to come down the pike during his tenure as U.S. senator and vice-president, making him a warmonger.

The policies of empire are planned in the corridors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage Foundation, Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute and a myriad array of pro-war institutes that function within the policy formulation network financed by the corporate rich.

The matrix of power in the United States is strikingly transparent.  The corporate rich own the country.  The political class protects their property and their empire by pursuing the interests of oligarchic masters as defined by ‘experts’ in the policy formulation network.  Academic and media elites rationalize the need for an empire that is never called by its proper name.

The costs of empire paid by the American people are staggering.

A study conducted by the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University concluded that the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on war since 9/11.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 allocated $740 Billion for the military and prohibited President Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.  Joseph Biden works within in the same institutional framework that enmeshed his predecessor.  The Biden administration is considering troop re-deployment to confront Russia and China.  But no return of troops to the United States is contemplated.

The United States currently has over 1.3 million active-duty troops, with 450,000 stationed on over 800 military bases in 70 countries around the world. Special military operations are being conducted in 141 countries.  U.S. global military presence escalated under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

As U.S. military presence increases around the world, so do the crimes of empire.  Obama prosecuted drone warfare that killed approximately 5,000 innocent civilians.  Trump escalated drone strikes.   Obama launched 1,878 attacks during his eight years in office.  Trump ordered 2,243 strikes during his four-year tenure in the White House while concealing deaths that occurred as the result of attacks.

Since 9/11 the U.S. has killed an estimated 6 million people in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.  At least 37 million people have been displaced by U.S. wars.  The U.S. has bombed 9 countries since 9/11 adding to the list of 24 other nations it bombed after World War II.  Exactly 80 countries have been subjected to U.S. counter-terrorism operations during the “war on terror.”  Behind the statistics lies an ocean of human suffering.

The monumental questions of peace and war in the United States will not be decided by an election.  They will ultimately be decided by a revolt.  The shell-game of American politics wherein populist rhetoric is used to conceal plutocratic governance is bankrupt.

The United States is a militarized terror state.  The magnitude of violence perpetrated by the U.S. government has become so routine that perpetual war is normalized.  The question remains, how long will the American people continue to be slaves of a terror state?

The Native Land of the Hypocrite

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By M. Reza Behnam

Source: Information Clearing House

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” ~ Oscar Wilde

In a recent TV interview, President Joseph Biden was asked if he believed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a killer. In a display of foreign policy bravado and with little hesitation he replied, “yes.” It is telling that commentators rarely question the violent behavior of America’s presidents.

The United States has assumed the role of arbiter of good and evil, casting itself inevitably as a most decent nation with the right to condemn and punish others.

History has demonstrated that America’s belief in exceptionalism has bred an arrogance that has accustomed its leaders to believe they have the right to use their political and military power destructively around the world.

Before condemning the behavior of other nations, America needs a national truth and reconciliation reckoning with its own violent past and present. For a country to chart a new course it must make its injustices visible.

Putin is undoubtedly a ruthless autocrat, but he is not the only member of the “killer’s club.” One has only to consider the recent murders ordered by a U.S. president, former president, Donald Trump.

In violation of international law and existing U.S. executive orders, Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. In addition to Soleimani, nine others died in the attack at the Baghdad International Airport. And in November 2020, Trump, with Israel as the conduit, assassinated Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

America’s pattern of violence was ramped up with President George W. Bush’s war on terror – military assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, rendition, CIA black sites (secret prisons), Guantanamo and the use of torture.

When President Barack Obama took office he expanded Bush’s use of “kill lists” – lists of human targets. Obama authorized hundreds of military drone strikes, which killed countless non-combatant civilians, including children. Without trial, he imposed the death sentence on alleged terror suspects. Trump continued his predecessors’ practices, with even fewer safeguards. The Biden administration is currently reviewing whether it wants to continue the policy of secretly killing people in countries around the world.

American presidents have ordered coups, invasions and wars in which millions have died. Some of the most obvious cases include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq (1991and 2003), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and U.S. support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs civilians in Yemen.

Murder is not the only form of violence the United States has used to get its way.

Economic sanctions that deprive people of food, medicine and the ability to make a living have become the primary weapon of U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died as a result of U.S. embargoes and economic sanctions on countries such as Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, countries that have refused to acquiesce to U.S. demands.

The United States has been playing the role of global policeman since the Second World War. The people of one region in particular, the Middle East, have suffered immensely from Washington’s bluster, bullying, military aggression and financial pressures.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the Middle East has overwhelmingly come under U.S. control. American warships, bombers, drones and missile batteries and over 100,000 American troops blanket the region. Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen are among the regional holdouts. Because of their refusal to bow to U.S.-Israeli pressure, they have faced devastating economic and military assaults.

To cement its hegemony, Washington has enlisted despotic Arab regimes and apartheid Israel as regional satraps. Despite the abysmal human rights records of its Arab Gulf allies, the United States provides them with access to the most lethal weapons to crush internal dissent. To maintain its imperial partnership with Israel,

America’s leaders have acquiesced to the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, and they have made certain that the Palestinians will continue to suffer and die in their own country.

Quite a record.

Do U.S. and UK Have the World’s Most-Censored Press?

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

How can democracy exist in a nation where none of the mainstream media, and few even of the non-mainstream media, are reporting the realities that all of the controlling billionaires want the public not to know?

On February 12th, the top UN official who monitors nations’ compliance with international human rights laws in the application of international sanctions, Alena Douhan, reported that the U.S.-and-allied sanctions against Venezuela violate a number of international laws and have greatly worsened the conditions, and even the maintenance of life, in Venezuela, and have caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country so that they and their children can survive. Dr. Douhan is an internationally respected specialist in international human rights laws, and the website of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that she is “an author of more than 120 books and articles on various aspects of international law. She has more than 40 publications (including four books) related to human rights covering inter alia issues of targeted and comprehensive sanctions; unilateral coercive measures, freedom of opinion, privacy, counter terrorism, right to development, right to education,” and other matters. The U.S. and its allies profess to endorse and embody, not to oppose and ignore, the values that the UN hired her to represent, but they do oppose and ignore them.

Her February 12th report, titled “Preliminary findings of the visit to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela by the Special Rapporteur”, stated that:

The Special Rapporteur considers that the state of national emergency announced by the U.S. Government on 8 March 2015 as the ground for introducing sanctions against Venezuela, and repeatedly extended, does not correspond to the requirements of art. 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, such as the existence of a threat to the life of the nation, the limiting of measures to the exigencies of the situation, a limited duration, the absence of discrimination, the prohibition to derogate from the right to life and the prohibition of punishment of activity that does not constitute a criminal offence, as referred to in the communication of human rights experts of 29 January 2021.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that unilateral sanctions against the oil, gold, mining and other economic sectors, the state-owned airline and the TV industry constitute a violation of international law, and their wrongfulness is not excluded with reference to countermeasures. The announced purpose of the “maximum pressure” campaign – to change the Government of Venezuela – violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations.

Referring to customary norms on the immunity of state property, the Special Rapporteur reminds that assets of the Central Bank and property used for public functions belong to the state of Venezuela rather than to its Government or any individual. Therefore, freezing assets of the Central Bank of Venezuela on the ground of non-recognition of its Government as well as the adoption of relevant sanctions violates the sovereign rights of the country and impedes its effective government to exercise its duty to guarantee the needs of the population.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that the listing of state officials ex officio contradicts the prohibition on punishment for activity which does not constitute a criminal offence, prevents the officials from the possibility to represent the interests of Venezuela in international courts and other international institutions, and undermines the principle of sovereign equality of states. She also notes that repeated refusals of banks in the United States, the United Kingdom and Portugal to release Venezuelan assets even for buying medicine, vaccines and protective kits, under the control of international organizations, violates the above principle and impedes the ability of Venezuela to respond to the COVID-19 emergency.

The Special Rapporteur is concerned that unilateral targeted sanctions in their existing form violate at the very least obligations emerging from universal and regional instruments in the sphere of human rights, many of which are of a peremptory character – procedural guarantees and presumption of innocence with a view that the grounds for their introduction do not constitute for the most part international crimes or comply with the grounds for universal criminal jurisdiction, while noting the fact of the submission to the International Criminal Court by a group of states of a referral against Venezuela on 27 September 2018.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that applying extraterritorial jurisdiction to nationals and companies of third states for cooperation with public authorities, nationals and companies in Venezuela, and alleged threats to such third-state parties, is not justified under international law and increases the risks of over-compliance with sanctions. The Special Rapporteur notes with concern the reported threats to private business and third-country donors, partners and humanitarian organizations, and the introduction of secrecy clauses in the Venezuela Anti-Blockade Constitutional Law as concerns the identity of corresponding partners.

Impact on enjoyment of human rights:

The Special Rapporteur notes with concern that sectoral sanctions on the oil, gold and mining industries, the economic blockade of Venezuela and the freezing of Central Bank assets have exacerbated pre-existing economic and humanitarian situation by preventing the earning of revenues and the use of resources to develop and maintain infrastructure and for social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that existing humanitarian exemptions are ineffective and insufficient, subject to lengthy and costly procedures, and do not cover the delivery of spare parts, equipment and machinery necessary for maintenance and restoration of the economy and public services. …

The Special Rapporteur underlines that the blocking of property, assets and bank accounts of citizens of Venezuela by foreign and correspondent banks, quite often because of over-compliance, results in the violation of the right to property. She also notes with concern that the application of unilateral sanctions against Venezuela affects the rights of third-country nationals, in particular, the termination of contracts with third-country companies has the potential risk of affecting economic and property rights of their owners and employees; and the absence of contributions from Venezuela, which used to donate to regional assistance projects (e.g. ALBA), is negatively affecting the right to humanitarian aid of its beneficiaries beyond Venezuela’s borders.

The Special Rapporteur recognises that targeted and secondary sanctions violate rights to a fair trial, procedural guarantees, freedom of movement, property rights and the right to reputation. Sanctions against representatives of opposition groups for participation in elections violate their right to hold and express opinions, and to participate in public affairs.

In short, the U.S. regime has blocked even the possibility of democracy in Venezuela, and has done this by itself violating international laws. The U.S. Government is behaving as an international thug, and it lies to say that it supports the rule of law in international affairs; it is supporting, instead, the rule of force in international affairs; it is today’s Nazi regime, attacking and destroying countries that had posed no danger whatsoever to itself, and trying to control every nation for the benefit of America’s aristocracy. Yet, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, with only one exception, hid instead of reported what she had said. Consequently, the U.S., and its allies, have the world’s most untrustworthy ‘news’-media, which systematically hide (instead of report) this ugly reality to their public. Obviously, such a regime cannot possibly be a democracy, because their public are being lied-to by the regime. That’s how America and its allies came to invade and destroy Iraq, and that’s the way things clearly are today. The U.S. regime is voracious; it is imperialistic; and it is psychopathic.

In fact, Dr. Douhan greatly understated how much the U.S.-and-allied regimes have been and are perpetrating international-law violations against Venezuela, because nothing in her report even so much as mentioned the biggest of all violations of international law, which was the violation for which the Nazis were prosecuted and executed at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II, which was “Aggressive War” — the perpetration of attacking against a nation that has not attacked one’s own nation.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting headlined on March 10th, “UN Rebuke of U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela Met With Stunning Silence” (from U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media) and closed by saying that,

Keeping with tradition, Douhan’s damning report has been met with stunning silence by establishment media outlets. Neither the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post nor BBC reported on Douhan’s findings, leaving the task primarily to alternative media (Venezuelanalysis, 2/15/21; Canary, 2/13/21). (CNN—2/13/21—had an exceptional report focused on the UN report, which noted Douhan’s statement that sanctions “constitute violations of international law.”)

The issue is not that Western media are uninterested in Venezuela. In February 2019, the month after Juan Guaidó declared himself president, the Guardian published 67 separate articles about Venezuela, regularly citing the UN on Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian conditions—signaling Maduro’s sole responsibility for a crisis about which something must surely be done.

For example, the Guardian (2/27/19) reported in 2019, “The UN’s political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, depicted a devastating collapse in Venezuela’s health system”—while making no reference to sanctions.

Similarly, the New York Times, whose editorial board had supported 10 out of 12 U.S.-backed coups in Latin America since 1954, has regularly covered the deteriorating economic situation in Venezuela with—at best—only fleeting reference to U.S. and European sanctions.

The New York Times (12/5/20), for instance, described how “Yajaira Paz, 35, has lost nearly everything” to the Venezuelan economic crisis: “her mother, dead from a heart problem she could not afford to treat; her brothers, to migration; her faith in democracy, to the nation’s crippled institutions” — omitting any mention of sanctions.

The Washington Post Magazine (3/3/21) reports that “most Venezuelans eat fewer than two meals a day”–but doesn’t mention that it’s U.S. government policy to make their lives worse.

The Washington Post Magazine’s emotive article also noted how “the pandemic wore away even more access to basic necessities in a country racked by deepening poverty and crisis,” blaming “the national mismanagement of resources” and, again, ignoring the existence of sanctions.

Corporate media thus consistently emphasizes the gravity of Venezuela’s humanitarian situation while overlooking crucial evidence on the catastrophic impact of sanctions, fortifying the very narratives deployed to justify the economic siege against Venezuela.

The collective silence over Douhan’s report is only the most recent case of propaganda by omission on Venezuela. By refusing to acknowledge Washington and London’s fundamental role in making Venezuela’s “economy scream,” corporate media play a key part in manufacturing consent for regime change.

I looked to find whether the London Times or Telegraph — UK’s equivalents to America’s Washington Post and New York Times — had reported on Douhan’s report, and I found that they had not. Then I searched to find whether Reuters had, and found that they had published, on February 12th, not a news-report about the matter, but instead a brazen propaganda-report about it, headlining “UN envoy urges U.S. to relax Venezuela sanctions, drawing opposition rebuke”, which propaganda failed so much as even to mention the Special Rapporteur’s central allegation, of rampant international-law violations by the U.S. and its allies against Venezuela in these sanctions. The Reuters ’news’ came entirely from enemies of Venezuela’s Government, and closed with

“We regret the rapporteur’s imprecisions and the lack of mention of subjects like corruption, inefficiency, political violence and the use of hunger as a tool of social and political control,” Miguel Pizarro, opposition leader Juan Guaido’s envoy to the United Nations, wrote on Twitter.

“That is allowing oneself to be used for regime’s propaganda.”

U.S. Ambassador for Venezuela James Story – who is based in neighboring Colombia, as the two countries cut off diplomatic ties in 2019 – wrote on Twitter on Thursday that Venezuela’s crisis was due to “the regime’s corruption,” noting that the sanctions exempted humanitarian goods.

The Special Rapporteur’s report had made mention of those very same allegations by the U.S.-and-allied team, and noted that such non-adjudicated allegations have no legal standing whatsoever, and that

The Special Rapporteur underlines that existing humanitarian exemptions are ineffective and insufficient, subject to lengthy and costly procedures, and do not cover the delivery of spare parts, equipment and machinery necessary for maintenance and restoration of the economy and public services.

The Special Rapporteur is concerned that the application of extraterritorial secondary sanctions [punishments against countries and companies that refuse to comply with the U.S. regime’s sanctions against Venezuela] as well as the reported threats of sanctions, result in over-compliance with existing sanctions regimes, preventing the Government of Venezuela, its public sector and private companies from purchasing machinery, spare parts, medicine, food, agricultural supplies and other essential goods even within the licenses issues by the U.S. Government, and also result in a growing number of bank transfer refusals, the extension of bank transfer periods (from 2 to 45 days), higher delivery, insurance and bank transfer costs, as well as reported price rises for all (especially imported) goods.

The Special Rapporteur notes with concern that the absence of resources and reluctance of foreign partners, banks and delivery companies to deal with Venezuelan partners results in the impossibility to buy necessary medical and technological equipment, reagents and spare parts for the repair and maintenance of electricity, gas, water, public transport, telephone and communication systems, schools, hospitals, houses and other public institutions, thus undermining the enjoyment of many human rights, including the right to a decent life.

In other words: reading the Reuters ’news’-report is merely reading lies, instead of news.

Not only do the U.S. and its allies have ’news’-media that aren’t more reliable than those in other dictatorial regimes, but the U.S. itself has the world’s highest percentage of its people living in prisons, and if that doesn’t indicate a police-state, then nothing does. America is a one-dollar-one-vote country, an aristocracy, not a democracy, and any nation that’s internationally allied to it is only another of its vassal nations, no democracy itself. Imperialism is international dictatorship, and that’s what the U.S. now is. All of its alliances need to be terminated — especially NATO. Either the UN will continue to be just an international talking-forum, having no actual power over or to impose international law, or else NATO will be ended, because only the international thugs have power in the international realm, at present. Any nation that remains in NATO is vassalizing itself to the world’s most aggressive nation, America. It’s in the spirit of Hitler, not in the spirit of FDR.

Any country which remains allied with the U.S. regime is plain evil. How can the American people tolerate such a dictatorship? On March 11th, a Democratic Party website, Political Wire, headlined “Impasse Over Iran Nuclear Talks Sets Off Scramble”, and virtually all of the reader-comments were blaming only the Republican Trump for this situation, not the Democrat Biden, for it, though this is Biden’s action, not Trump’s. The partisanship isn’t really about good versus bad, but about Democrat versus Republican. Thus, a brainwashed public is easy for the billionaires to control, so that both Parties represent, actually, only the billionaires’ interests, not the public’s interests. Just as the Nazi regime played the German people for suckers, today’s American regime plays the American people for suckers.

Here’s how evil the U.S. is, and how tolerant of it the American people are: the only good thing that President Barack Obama did was the Iran nuclear deal, to end the punishing sanctions against Iran if Iran would allow in IAEA inspectors and not move toward developing nuclear warheads; but Obama’s successor Donald Trump tore it up; and now Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, is demanding that Iran — which hadn’t broken the deal, the U.S. did — must make additional concessions first, weaken its missile-delivery systems, before the U.S. regime will even consider to negotiate with Iran to restore the Iran nuclear deal. In other words: Biden is effectively continuing Trump, by demanding Iran to make concessions even before negotiations start — a nonstarter, which Iran cannot accept, and no sovereign nation could accept. This behavior by the U.S. regime continues decades of U.S. imperialism against Iran. America stole Iran from the people of Iran, in a 1953 CIA coup, and after the Iranian people grabbed their country back in 1979, America’s aristocracy have been ceaselessly trying to steal it from them yet again. And yet the U.S. regime has the gall to blame Iran, not blame America’s own billionaires (the beneficiaries of U.S. imperialism and wars); and, so, Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats, instead of Americans blaming their own actual dictators (the billionaires who fund both of the dictatorship’s Parties).

Will Europeans continue being allied with today’s Nazi regime? What news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal nations report these realities? Is that not a total blockade against truth?

Furthermore, on March 13th, the brilliant geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris headlined an 18-minute video report, “Israel v. Iran in Syria: Israel’s Covert War on Iran’s tankers” and penetrated behind the surface U.S.-and-allied reporting on the publicly unannounced change by the U.S. regime and its allies, to replace the U.S. gang’s prior hiring of jihadist mercenaries to bring down Syria’s Government, to instead impose a blockade against Syria so as to starve-out the Syrian people, as the new way to conquer Syria. Of course, what he reports there is not reported in U.S.-and-allied media.

How can democracy exist in a nation where none of the mainstream media, and few even of the non-mainstream media, are reporting the realities that all of the controlling billionaires want the public not to know? How can that be a democracy? It can’t.

The American Exceptionalism of Secretary of State Antony Blinken

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By Kevin Gosztola

Source: Shadowproof

“American leadership still matters. The reality is the world simply does not organize itself,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed at his confirmation hearing. “When we are not engaged, when we are not leading, then one of two things is likely to happen. Either some other country tries to take our place but not in a way that is likely to advance our interests and values, or maybe, just as bad, no one does and then you have chaos.”

Much like President Joe Biden, Blinken is a neoliberal Democrat who believes in the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He thinks if the United States does not impose its will and shape the world then there will be no law and order. He cannot fathom how countries could survive on their own. At least, that is how he argues for greater American intervention in global regions.

Blinken was confirmed as secretary of state in a vote on January 26. Not a single Democrat in the Senate voted against Blinken.

He is a longtime ally of Biden, and during Biden’s first term as vice president, he was his national security adviser.

During President Barack Obama’s second term, Blinken was deputy secretary of state. He was also a part of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1994 to 2001.

Making Venezuela’s ‘Regime Enablers’ Finally Feel The Pain Of Sanctions

Blinken’s predecessor Mike Pompeo, a right-wing Christian reconstructionist, was involved in President Donald Trump administration’s failed regime change operation against Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela. Yet, despite its failure, Blinken told Republican Senator Marco Rubio he thought the Biden administration should keep recognizing Juan Guaido as the one and only true “leader.”

“We need an effective policy that can restore democracy to Venezuela, free and fair elections,” Blinken declared. He even embraced sanctions, despite the fact that they have hampered the country’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.

“Maybe we need to look at how we more effectively target the sanctions that we have so that regime enablers finally feel the pain of those sanctions,” Blinken added.

However, a report [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) dated January 22, 2021, indicates the sanctions by both the Obama and Trump administrations were targeted pretty well and imposed to inflict “pain” against 113 Venezuelans and 13 entities.

…President Maduro, his wife, Cecilia Flores, and son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra; Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez; Diosdado Cabello (Socialist party president); eight supreme court judges; the leaders of Venezuela’s army, national guard, and national police; governors; the director of the central bank; and the foreign minister…

Trump imposed sanctions to prohibit Venezuela from participating in U.S. financial markets and block the government’s ability to issue digital currency. Treasury Department officials prohibited corporations from purchasing Venezuelan debt. Venezuela’s state oil company, PdVSA, was aggressively targeted for seeking to evade U.S. sanctions and Venezuela’s central bank was sanctioned too.

Blinken Defends Being Wrong On War In Libya

Obama flouted the War Powers Act and launched a war in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime without the approval of Congress. It created a power vacuum filled by extremist militia groups and transformed the country into a failed state. Migrants are captured and sold in what the United Nations has referred to as “open slave markets.”

Despite the catastrophe sparked by war, Blinken defended his support for a regime change war. “I think it’s been written about. I — I was the president-elect’s national security adviser at the time. And he did not agree with that course of action.”

Biden was opposed to war in Libya. “My question was, okay, tell me what happens? [Gaddafi’s] gone. What happens? Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a petri dish for the growth of extremism? Tell me. Tell me what we’re gonna do.”

Rather than concede President Biden was right and he was wrong, Blinken signaled to Senate Republicans that he would be their hawk when Biden was too dovish.

Blinken bafflingly blamed Gaddafi, who was summarily executed, for what happened in Libya after his death.

“We didn’t fully appreciate the fact that one of the things Gaddafi had done over the years was to make sure that there was no possible rival to his power. And as a result, there was no effective bureaucracy, no effective administration in Libya with which to work when he was gone,” Blinken argued.

The Bothsidesism Of Blinken’s View Toward War In Yemen

Sarah Lazare recalled for In These Times the horrors unleashed on the people of Yemen, as a result of the Obama administration’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis.

“The coalition bombed a center for the blind, a funeral, a wedding, a factory and countless homes and residential areas, and blockaded Yemen’s ports, cutting off vital food and medical shipments — all while the Obama-Biden administration was in power,” Lazare wrote.

“Indeed, the Obama White House was so complicit in war crimes in Yemen in that its own State Department internally warned key U.S. military personnel could be subject to war crimes prosecution, according to a Reuters investigation published in October 2016. By July 2015, a United Nations official was already warning that Yemen was on the verge of a famine, a premonition that horrifically came true.”

One of Pompeo’s final actions was to sanction Houthis, which caused a disruption to aid groups delivering humanitarian assistance. Biden froze the sanctions for one month the same day the Senate confirmed Blinken.

Asked about the intense humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Blinken drew a false equivalency between the actions of the Houthis and the Saudis.

“We need to be clear-eyed about the Houthis. They overthrew a government in Yemen. They engaged in a path of aggression through the country. They directed aggression toward Saudi Arabia,” Blinken contended. “They’ve committed atrocities and human rights abuses and that is a fact. What’s also a fact though is that the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen to push back against

the Houthi aggression has contributed to what is, by most accounts, the worst humanitarian situation that we face anywhere in the world.”

The Houthis were part of the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen against the corrupt government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. State Department officials generally backed these rebellions against autocratic rulers.

According to a 2017 post from Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, “American intelligence officials said that Iran was actually trying to discourage the Houthis from seizing Sanaa and openly toppling Hadi. Iran preferred a less radical course, but the Houthi leadership was drunk with success. Moreover, Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers said on the record in January that Washington had a productive informal intelligence relationship with the Houthis against al-Qaida. He suggested that the cooperation could continue.”

The Obama administration, which included Blinken, did not want to jeopardize a 70-year-plus alliance with Saudi Arabia and backed the monarchy’s intervention.

‘Very Much’ Supporting U.S. Arms Shipments To Ukraine

Blinken expressed his support for arming Ukrainian groups a total of three times. He even reminded Republican Senator Ron Johnson he had the opportunity in 2018 to write an op-ed for the New York Times promoting what senators euphemistically describe as “lethal defensive assistance.”

He told Republican Senator Rob Portman, “I very much support the continued provision to Ukraine of lethal defensive assistance and, and indeed, of the training program as well.”

“To the extent that across a couple of administrations, we’ve been able to effectively train and as well as assist in different ways the Ukrainians, that has made a material difference in their ability to withstand the aggression they’ve been on the receiving end of from Russia,” Blinken asserted.

It is difficult to gauge whether the policy has been effective or helped Ukrainians withstand battles with pro-Russian separatist groups. There is not a whole lot of reporting.

But Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who was the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, stated in 2015, “If the U.S. policy changed to provide, say, Javelins, for example, that would probably lead to increased lethality on the battlefield for the Ukrainians. It would not change the situation strategically in a positive way, because the Russians would double down. They would dramatically increase more violence, more death, more destruction.”

“The conflict in Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east, called Donbass, erupted in April 2014, weeks after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula,” according to the Associated Press. “More than 14,000 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists.”

Professor Stephen Cohen called attention to the role of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine. The overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych was a “violent coup” led by fascist conspirators opposed to Russia. They conducted exterminations of ethnic Russians. The Azov Battalion, part of Kiev’s armed forces, is pro-Nazi and was banned from receiving U.S. military aid, but it almost certainly obtained weapons shipped by the Trump administration from the black market.

“We are left then not with Putin’s responsibility for the resurgence of fascism in a major European country but with America’s shame, and possible indelible stain, on its historical reputation for tolerating it, even if only through silence,” Cohen concluded.

US Return To Iran Nuclear Deal Not Happening Soon

It was the United States under Trump that ditched the Iran nuclear deal, not Iran. Still, it is the Biden’s administration position that Iran should first “comply” with U.S. demands before the U.S. rejoins the deal.

“If Iran returns to compliance with the JCPOA [nuclear deal], we would do the same thing and then use that as a platform working with our allies and partners to build longer and stronger agreements — also capture some of the other issues that need to be dealt with, with regard to missiles, with regard to Iran’s activities and destabilizing activities in the region,” Blinken said.

“There is a lot that Iran will need to do to come back into compliance. We would then have to evaluate whether it actually [did] so. So, I don’t think that’s anything that’s happening tomorrow or the next day.”

Meanwhile, as CBS News described in November, Iran has endured a “harrowing, sanctions-fueled coronavirus catastrophe.”

Doctors experience shortages of every supply necessary for fighting the pandemic. “U.S.-led sanctions have choked off Iran’s access to foreign-made chemicals and equipment.”

Iran has begged Biden to lift sanctions that prevent Iran from accessing COVID-19 vaccines.

***

Melodramatically, Senator Marco Rubio feverishly asked Blinken has any doubt that the Chinese Communist Party’s goal is to be the “world’s predominant political, geopolitical, military, and economic power and for the United States to decline in relation.”

“I do not,” Blinken replied.

“You have no doubt?” Rubio chimed.

“I have no doubt,” Blinken restated.

From Obama to Trump, U.S. empire has prepared its forces for what it calls “great power competition” between China and Russia. It fears China will take the place of the U.S., leading to one of Blinken’s nightmare futures.

Much of the public is wary over military interventions in the Middle East. The threat of terrorism is no longer enough to justify expenditures toward an ever-gargantuan military-industrial complex. Countering China, however, is an easier sell.

“Forcing men, women, and children into concentration camps, trying to, in effect, reeducate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide,” Blinken remarked.

Human rights abuses under Biden will increasingly be weaponized to defend policies and operations that ramp up tensions with China. Whether descriptions of China’s acts are accurate or not, the point will be to silence anyone who questions whether the violations are enough to warrant increased conflict. (Of course, how dare anyone raise the matter of U.S. deportation camps and their horrors or America’s mass incarceration of 1–2 million people to point out any sort of hypocrisy.)

After the House of Representatives voted to arm so-called rebel groups in Syria in 2014, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked Blinken about concerns that arms “could end up in wrong hands.” Blinken brushed aside concerns and maintained the U.S. would vet and give arms to “the right people.”

In March 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported “CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed [militias had] repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo” in Syria.

Blinken may not be rapture ready like his predecessor, Mike Pompeo. He may be more willing to wave the LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag when arming proxy forces or backing regime change operations. However, they are both devout believers in American exceptionalism.

He views Biden as a president who will put the “globe back on its axis” after Trump. He will spend his time at the State Department working to “restore democracy” and “renew” America’s “leadership” in the world. Which means Blinken will continue the many callous, cold, and calculating traditions of U.S. imperialism, promote hubris over humility, and commit himself to cloaking ignoble acts in the rhetoric of human rights.

How Israel deployed an intelligence deception to justify killing scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

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By Gareth Porter

Source: The Grayzone

Israel’s Mossad has spent years on a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the world Iran possessed a nuclear weapons program – and legitimizing its assassinations of Iranian academics.

The Israeli assassination of Iranian defense official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is being treated as a triumph of Israeli intelligence, with ubiquitous references in the New York Times and other major media outlets to the killing of “Iran’s top nuclear scientist”. In fact, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency eliminated Fakhrizadeh, a defense official, despite the knowledge that its public depiction of him as the key architect of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was a deception.

For years, US media outlets have portrayed Fakhrizadeh as Iran’s equivalent to J. Robert Oppenheimer, marketing him to the public as the mastermind behind an Iranian version of the Manhattan Project. This image was developed primarily through a carefully constructed Israeli disinformation operation based on documents that displayed signs of fabrication.

Birth of a Mossad propaganda operation

The origin of the Mossad propaganda operation on Fakhrizadeh lies in the early 1990’s, when the US and Israel first developed suspicions of Iranian ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. U.S., British, German and Israeli intelligence analysts had intercepted telexes from Sharif University about various “dual use” technologies — those that could be exploited in a nuclear program but also be applied for non-nuclear use.

Many of the telexes contained the number of an organization called Physics Research Center that operated under the watch of Iran’s Defense Ministry. The CIA and its allied intelligence agencies interpreted those intercepts as evidence that the Iranian military was running its own nuclear program, and thus that Iran was covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability.

During the first term of the George W. Bush administration, the notorious militarist and Likud ally John Bolton took charge of Iran policy, prompting the CIA to issue an estimate concluding for the first time that Iran had initiated a nuclear weapons program. Israel’s Mossad apparently saw Washington’s new posture as a green light to set into motion a black propaganda campaign to dramatize and personalize the secret Iranian nuclear weapons program that was presumed to exist.

Between 2003 and 2004, Mossad produced a large cache of alleged Iranian documents depicting efforts to mate a nuclear weapon with Iran’s Shahab-3 missile and a bench system to convert uranium.

The Mossad files contained multiple tell-tale signs of forgery. For example, the reentry vehicle depicted in the drawings had already been abandoned by 2002 – before these drawings were supposedly created, according to the documents themselves – in favor of a design that looked entirely different and which was first shown in an August 2004 test. So whoever was responsible for the drawings was clearly unaware of the single most important Defense Ministry decision affecting the future of Iran’s missile deterrent.

The CIA never revealed who spirited the documents out of Iran or how. However, former senior German Foreign Office official Karsten Voigt explained to this reporter in 2013 that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had been furnished with the collection by an occasional source whom the intel chiefs considered less than credible.

And who was this source? According to Voigt, he belonged to the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), the exile Iranian cult which had fought for Saddam’s Iraqi forces against Iran during the eight-year war and by the early 1990s was passing information and propaganda that Mossad did not want to have attributed to itself.

Painting Fakrhizadeh as nuclear mastermind

Those Mossad documents identified Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the manager of a supposedly top-secret Iranian project called the “AMAD Plan.” In reality, Fakhrizadeh was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer and official in the Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), who also taught Physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran.

To implicate him as a nuclear project mastermind, the collection of Mossad documents featured a directive supposedly signed by Fakhrizadeh. But since no one outside Iran had ever seen the previously obscure official’s signature, and given the lack of effort to show any official government markings on the documents, there was little to prevent Mossad from forging it.

In their 2012 history of Israel’s intelligence service, “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service”, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nisham Mishal pointed to Mossad as the culprit behind the appearance of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents. The writers recounted how Mossad gathered the personal information on Fakhrizadeh that was later released to the public through the MEK, including his passport number and his home telephone number.

“This abundance of detail and means of transmission,” Bar-Zohar and Mishal wrote, “leads one to believe that… ‘a certain secret service’ ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them on to the Iranian resistance [MEK].”

The documents also fingered Fakhrizadeh as the former head of the Physics Research Centre, thus deceptively linking him to the procurement efforts for “dual use” nuclear items in 1990-91 that were well known to CIA and other intelligence agencies. That accusation was reflected in the 2006 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 listing Iranian officials responsible for nuclear and missile proliferation in Iran. In the UN resolution, Fakhrizadeh was identified as a “[s]enior MODAFL scientist and former head of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC).”

But the Israeli identification of Fakhrizadeh as the head of the PHRC was proven to be a lie. Iran turned over extensive documentation to the IAEA in late 2004 or early 2005 on the PHRC and the procurement telexes, and the documents — which the IAEA did not challenge — showing that a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran named Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavari had headed the PHRC from its inception in 1989 until it closed in 1998.

Further, the documents provided to the IAEA revealed that the dual-use technology that Shahmoradi-Zavari helped the university procure through his PHRC connections was actually intended for the university faculty’s own teaching and research. In at least one case, the IAEA personnel found one “dual-use” item had been procured by the university.

These facts should have put an end to the Mossad-created myth of Fakrizadeh as the head of a vast underground nuclear weapons program. But the IAEA never revealed Shamoradi-Zavari’s name, and therefore avoided having to acknowledge that the documents the agency had embraced as genuine had misled the world about Fakhrizadeh.

It was not until 2012 that David Albright, the director of Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, acknowledged that Shahmoradi-Zavari — not Fakhrizadeh — had been the head of the Physics Research Center – although he avoided admitting that the IAEA had relied on documents that turned out be false.

Revving up the propaganda 

The Mossad got busy again after the CIA’s November 2007 assessment that Iran had ceased work on nuclear weapons. Determined to neutralize the political impact of that finding, the Israelis apparently began work on a new batch of Iranian top secret documents. This time, however, the Israelis provided the documents directly to the IAEA in late 2009, as then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs.

The documents supposedly revealed Iranian defense ministry activities related to nuclear weapons after the cessation of such work that the CIA. One of those documents, leaked to the London Times in December 2009, purported to be a 2007 letter from Fakhrizadeh as the chairman of an organization presiding over nuclear weapons work. But as ElBaradei recalled, the IAEA’s technical experts “raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity….”

Even the CIA and some European intelligence analysts were skeptical about the authenticity of the Fakhrizadeh document. Although it had been circulating among the intelligence agencies for months, even the normally unquestioning New York Times reported that the CIA had not authenticated it.  Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, who had maintained contacts with active agency personnel, told this reporter CIA analysts regarded the document as a forgery.

A pattern of assassinations justified by disinformation

The killing of Fakhrizadeh was not the first time Mossad bumped off an Iranian it had baselessly accused of playing a leading role in a weapons program. In July 2011, someone working for Mossad — apparently an MEK member — gunned down a 35-year old engineering student named Darioush Rezaeinejad and wounded his wife in front of a kindergarten in Tehran.

The young man was targeted on the basis of nothing more than the research he had conducted on high-voltage switches and his publication of a scholarly paper about his scholarship. The abstract of the professional paper Rezaienejad had published made it clear that his work involved what is called “explosive pulsed power” involved in high-power lasers, high-power microwave sources and other commercial applications.

A few days after the assassination of Rezaienejad, however, an official of an unnamed “member state” provided Associated Press reporter George Jahn the abstract of Rezaienejad’s paper, successfully persuading Jahn that it “appeared to back” the claim that he had been “working on a key component in setting off the explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.”

Then, in September 2011, the Israelis provided Jahn with an “intelligence summary” advancing the ludicrous claim that Rezaeinejad was not an electrical engineering specialist at all, but rather a “physicist” who had worked for the Ministry of Defense on various aspects of nuclear weapons.

The deployment of absurd assertions backed by paper-thin evidence to justify the cold-blooded murder of a young electrical engineer with no record of nuclear weapons involvement illuminated a Mossad modus operandi that has reappeared in the case of Fakhrizadeh: Israeli intelligence simply gins up a narrative centered around fictional ties to a nonexistent nuclear weapons program. It then watches as the Western press uncritically disseminates the propaganda to the public, establishing the political space for cold-blooded assassinations in broad daylight.

A Killing in Iran: Who Gains From Yet Another Assassination?

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

It is not often that one can agree with the pronouncements made by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, but his tweeted comment on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suggesting that the incident “…was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits” was both restrained and reasonable. Or it was at least so until sentence two, which was clearly intended to attack Donald Trump and praise the incoming Joe Biden administration, which Brennan just might be seeking to join.

Bearing in mind that John Brennan was the guiding hand behind President Barack Obama’s kill lists of Americans who were marked for death by drone it is difficult to understand what moral high ground he seeks to occupy in the slaying of Fakhrizadeh. Brennan, who was a leading critic of Trump and who may have led the clandestine effort to undermine his election and term in office, subsequently found himself in an exchange of tweets with Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz which degenerated into a trading of insults. Cruz responded “It’s bizarre to see a former head of the CIA consistently side with Iranian zealots who chant ‘Death to America.’ And reflexively condemn Israel. Does Joe Biden agree?” This produced a riposte by Brennan that “It is typical for you to mischaracterize my comment. Your lawless attitude & simple-minded approach to serious national security matters demonstrate that you are unworthy to represent the good people of Texas.”

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh, the “father of Iran’s nuclear program,” took place on a road near the town of Absard to the east of Tehran. According to initial accounts, the Iranian scientist, who has long been targeted by name and in public fora by Israel, was traveling in an SUV together with his wife plus bodyguards and a driver. Initial reports suggested that there was a Nissan truck parked on the opposite side of the road loaded with what appeared to be wood, though it may have turned out that the wood was concealing a bomb which may have been triggered by a signal from a surveillance satellite. The bomb was detonated to disable Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle before an attack on the car by five or six gunmen with automatic weapons who had emerged from a vehicle following the SUV began, again according to initial reports, including reporting by eye witnesses. The Iranian official news agency FARS is now claiming, however, that the attack was carried out by a remote controlled machine gun concealed on the truck, which subsequently exploded, and no human attackers were involved. It is presumed that the bodyguards and driver were killed in the exchange. Fakhrizadeh was badly wounded and died in hospital shortly thereafter. Photos of the SUV reveal shattered windows, blood streaks, and numerous bullet holes as well as other damage from what may have been the bomb.

Iranian news agencies are now reporting that at least one of the attackers has been arrested, and if that is true he will surely be made to talk regarding what he knows. They are also reporting that two of the assailants were killed in the exchange with the bodyguards, which, if true, means they will possibly be identified. Clearly, the attack was well planned, was able to employ considerable resources, and was based on intelligence that would be very hard to obtain, particularly as the Iranian government was taking steps to protect Fakhrizadeh, to include details of his travels.

The killing comes just two weeks after intelligence officials confirmed that Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah was shot dead together with his daughter by alleged Israeli supplied assassins on a motorcycle on August 7th. The hit was reportedly carried out at the request of the United States based on Abdullah’s claimed involvement in the 1998 deadly attacks on two U.S. Embassies in East Africa. The claim that Iran has been harboring al-Qaeda is already being used by the Trump White House to justify increased pressure on Iran and it might possibly even serve as part of a casus belli.

The two assassinations are not linked except perhaps in terms of sending a message to high level Iranians that they are not safe even in their own country even when they are given bodyguards. The claim that Fakhrizadeh was in charge of a secret Iranian weapons program, made regularly by Israel and the U.S., is not generally believed by most authorities. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which nuclear armed Israel is not, and its facilities are subject to regular unannounced inspections.

Likewise, the killing of Qods Force commander General Qassem Soleimani in January in a U.S. drone attack was intended more regarding sending a message concerning possible consequences of reckless behavior than it was about actually killing one man. Whatever programs Fakrizadeh and Soleimani were involved in will continue without them. Nevertheless, assassination of Iranians linked to the country’s former and current nuclear program has been Israeli policy since 2010. As many as a dozen Iranian scientists and technicians reportedly have been killed. So-called “targeted killings” have been a regular feature of Israel’s “national defense” strategy. In addition to the Iranians, at least seventy Palestinians have been assassinated.

Though Israel has clearly ordered the assassinations, it is generally believed that the actual preparation for the attacks have been carried out by Mojahedin e Khalq or MEK, a Marxist cult that came into prominence at the time of the Iranian revolution against the Shah. It is generally regarded as a terrorist group that once was virulently anti-American and killed a number of U.S. officials. MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. At the same time, it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to western and Israeli worldviews.

MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84-acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

MEK, which is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, stages events in the United States in Europe where it generously pays politicians like John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and Elaine Chao to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s paying of inside the Beltway power brokers proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s. MEK also finds favor in Washington because it is used by Israel as a resource for anti-Iranian terrorism acts currently, including assassinations carried out in Tehran. Israel, in fact, directs most terrorist acts carried out by MEK inside Iran.

So those are the players and, at first glance, one might reasonably come to the Ockham’s razor conclusion, i.e. that Israel ordered MEK to kill Fakhrizadeh, an order which was then executed. But that would be to ignore some of the politics currently playing out in Washington. First of all, Israel would not have carried out the high-level assassination without the consent of the White House. Indeed, U.S. intelligence resources might well have played a key role in locating the Iranian scientist. Second, the Trump Administration has clearly adopted a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, which has included strangling the country’s economy through sanctions, condoning Israeli attacks in Syria and elsewhere, and destabilizing moves, to include assassinations, designed to make the nation’s leadership both vulnerable and nervous. It is the application of an Israeli strategic doctrine referred to as “Campaigns Between Wars,” meaning constant aggression to erode an enemy’s ability to fight without actually crossing a line that would start a shooting war.

A direct role by the Trump Administration in the assassination should not be ruled out as it is clearly seeking to harden Iranian antipathy towards any new comprehensive arms control or nuclear agreement with the incoming Biden team. Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of bombing Iran earlier this month, though he was talked out of it by his national security team, but the Israeli Army meanwhile is on alert in case of an American attack. There are confirmed reports that B-52 bombers, capable of deploying the 30,000 pound penetrator bombs that can destroy targets deep underground, have been sent to the Middle East, presumably to Qatar where the U.S. has its principal airbase in the region. They would presumably be used against Iran’s main nuclear development site at Natanz.

Israel is in a strong position right now. Iran has significant military resources to respond to the killing, including the drones and missiles it developed and used in September 2019 to devastate the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia. But if it does react robustly to the assassination and sparks a conflict that inevitably would include the United States, it would be a war that Bibi Netanyahu has long sought, destroying Iran at what he hopes would be minimal cost to Israel. If Iran does not respond, Israel will no doubt push the White House to be even more aggressive in its remaining time in office while hardliners within Iran will also demand an end to any agreements with western powers. Taken together, that would make sure that any attempt by the Biden administration to engage diplomatically with Iran would fail. The ultimate provocation by the United States would, of course, be to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Unthinkable? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is already reporting that “U.S. President Donald Trump has more than a month before he leaves the White House, and on his way out he could set the world on fire. In starting this conflagration, it seems as though he plans to strike every match in the box. Standing beside him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be more than happy to lend him a lighter.”