Tag Archives: Iran

US Tells Israel: Iran Has Eight Weeks

“Robert Gates, Jim Jones, and other US officials traipsing in and out of Israel this week have told Israeli officials to stop “ranting and raving” about Iran for, oh, about eight more weeks.

Eight weeks! According to Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily, that’s how much time they’re willing to give Iran to start talking. Let’s hope that Iran does start talking by then, but if they don’t, well, then it’ll take longer. But the Obama administration seems set on tougher sanctions after that.

Perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious part of the Haaretz report is that Jones and Co. told the Israelis about the progress of Joe Liberman-sponsored sanctions legislation in the US Senate. Said the paper:

‘Jones and his team reported that a bill by Senator Joe Lieberman to curb sales of refined oil products to Iran is almost complete, and 67 senators have already signed it.’

Just a guess, but I think top Israeli officials are well aware of what the vaunted minions of the Israel lobby are doing in Washington. In fact, yesterday the Senate passed a bill that gets that sanctions ball rolling, according to Reuters:

‘To pressure Tehran to give up its nuclear program, the U.S. Senate has voted to ban companies that sell gasoline and other refined oil products to Iran from also receiving Energy Department contracts to deliver crude to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.’

According to Haaretz, the new sanctions under consideration by the administration include a ban gasoline and refined petroleum imports by Iran:

‘New sanctions would mainly aim to significantly curb Tehran’s ability to import refined petroleum products. Despite its huge crude oil reserves, Iran has only limited refining capacity, so it imports large quantities of refined products such as gasoline.'” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

Hypocritical NYT calls Iranian interrogation tactics “torture”

All of this is from salon.com:

Clark Hoyt, New York Times Public Editor, April 26, 2009:

A LINGUISTIC shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal” . . . .

Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods”

. . . .

he said: “I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court.

. . . .

The New York Times today:

FLASHBACK: Congress Is Funding Major Escalation in Secret Operations Against Iran

“Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership. This according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.

The operations were set out in a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which, by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Hersh, US Special Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq since last year. These have included seizing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of so-called ‘high-value targets’ who may be captured or killed.

While covert operations against Iran are not new, Hersh writes that the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, have now been significantly expanded.” (Read more from alternet.org)

On Iran

Remember, when ABCNNBBCBS speaks unanimously, and says the same thing over and over and over, they are lying.

“We all know that the CIA has been involved in several coup d’etats ever since President Harry S. Truman spawned this creature. Hell, they’ve even done it once before in Iran, in 1953. And I think we also know that Iran has been in the crosshair’s of the neocons, neoliberals and other policy makers for quite a while. Even the RAND Corporation has been lobbying for another world war to “save the U.S. economy”.

And that, I think is reason enough to concider the possibility that the spooks might have their dirty little hands in this one aswell. It is of course their modus operandi.

Editor’s Note: For those of you who think this is pure speculation, I direct you to these following articles Bolton Says We Must Attack Iran and Bush sanctions “black ops” against Iran in 2007.” (Read more from kopyme.com)

Britain freezes $1.6 billion of Iranian assets

“The British government says it has frozen an unprecedented total of one billion pounds (1.64 billion US dollars) worth of Iranian assets. ‘The total assets frozen in the UK under the EU (European Union) and UN sanctions against Iran are approximately 976,110,000 pounds,’ Ian Pearson, Britain’s Economic Secretary to the Treasury said in a written statement to parliament on Thursday.” (Read more from campaigniran.org)

Israeli diplomats told to take offensive in PR war against Iran

“Organizing demonstrations in front of Iranian consulates worldwide, staging mock stonings and hangings in public, and launching a massive media campaign against Iran – these are just some of the steps Israeli diplomats have been told to take in the coming weeks. The goal, according to a senior Foreign Ministry official, is ‘to show the world that Iran is not a Western democracy’ in the run-up to the country’s presidential election on June 12.

About a week ago, the head of the ministry’s Task Force on Isolating Iran sent a classified telegram to all Israeli embassies and consulates, titled ‘Activities in the Run-up to Iran’s Presidential Election.’ It detailed things Israeli representatives should do before, during and after the election.” (Read more from Haaretz.com)

Report: Iran could have enough material for nuke in months

“The report says ‘… A foreign intelligence agency and some U.N. officials estimated that Iran could reconfigure its centrifuge cascades and produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months.'” (From cnn.com)

Hmmm. I wonder what foreign intelligence agency they’re talking about. Could it be this one?

Also, see this headline from 2005: Iran can build nuclear bombs in six months: Israel.

Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

“On August 4, 2005 American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operatives Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman were arrested on charges relating to espionage on behalf of Israel.

This had a lot to do with Iran. It followed the arrest in May 2004 of Larry Franklin, the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst by the FBI after he had been caught turning over secret documents (including ones pertaining to Iran) to Israeli Embassy staffers including Mossad Station Chief Naor Gilon. . . .

You might suppose that Israeli intelligence officers would have intimate access to U.S. intelligence without resorting to espionage. According to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Israeli officials didn’t even need to sign in when visiting Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon when she worked there in 2002.This whole affair is testimony to the extraordinary concern of the Jewish state with Iran, with knowing whatever the U.S. knows about Iran’s nuclear program, and with influencing U.S. plans to ‘deal with’ Iran.” (Read more from counterpunch.org)

Chickenhawks: Israel will DIE if you talk to Iran

Trauma drives West’s denial of Iran’s genocidal anti-Semitism “The West is ignoring Iranian genocidal anti-Semitism due to a psychological ‘trauma model,’ according to an Israeli professor. . . . There is an ‘identification with the aggressor out of fear’ that the perpetrator will cause further harm, Lubin told The Jerusalem Post. This helps to explain why the Iranian ‘threat to annihilate Israel, which is very straightforward, very alarming, is ignored by the West,’ she said.” (Read more from jpost.com)

I wonder how this propagandist reconciles Iran’s “genocidal anti-Semitism” with the peaceful co-existence of 30,000 Jews in Iran.

Gingrich: Obama endangering the Jewish state “Former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday blasted the Obama administration for setting itself on a collision course with Israel and endangering the Jewish state, ahead of his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” (Read more from jpost.com)