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It is with great disappointment that I receive the news from foreign media publications and Libyan sources that our President now has 12,000 U.S. troops stationed in Malta and they are about to make their descent into Libya.

For those of you who have not followed closely the situation in Libya, the resistance to the rule of the National Transitional Council is strong. The National Transitional Council (NTC) cast of characters has about as much support on the ground as did Mahmoud Abbas before the United Nations request for Palestinian statehood or Afghanistan’s regal-looking but politically impotent Hamid Karzai or for that matter, George W Bush after eight years.

The NTC not only has to contend with a vibrant, well-financed, grassroots-supported resistance, but the various militias of the NTC are now also fighting each other. I believe this “sociocide” of Libyan society, as we previously witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan before it, is part of a carefully crafted plan of destabilization that ultimately serves U.S. imperial interests and those of a Zionist state and its US agents who are bent on Greater Israel’s suzerainty over huge swaths of Arabic-speaking populations. Pakistan is also on the list for neutering in Muslim and world affairs, saddled with its own unpopular civilian leadership that finds itself in the hip pocket of the United States for survival, often getting sat upon by its fiscal guarantor.

The “Arab Spring” has sprung and the indelible fingerprints of malignant foreign financed operations must be erased if the people are to have a chance to truly govern themselves. Unfortunately, these foreign-inspired organizations are present and operating in just about every country in the world. The threat is ever-present like sleeping cells–all that is needed is that the right word to “activate” be given. Both Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez can write tomes on the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy in the political life of their countries.

In other words, those who create the chaos have a plan and in the midst of chaos, they usually are the ones who will win. Those who wrote the plan of this chaos were affiliated with the Project for a New American Century–read “A Clean Break” if you already haven’t. General Wesley Clark told us of the plan to invade and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. “These people took control of the policy in the United States,” Clark continues. He concludes, “This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and … collaborators from the Project for a New American Century: they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East.” Richard Perle, Bill Kristol publicize these plans and “could hardly wait to finish Iraq so they could go into Syria,” Clark goes on. “The root of the problem is the strategy of the United States in this region. Why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue,” he finishes.

Now, from Libya, reports are that even while the Misrata rebels (NATO allies responsible for the murder of hundreds of Libyans, including Moatessem Gaddafi) attempted to scale the petroleum platforms in Brega (an important oil town in Libya), they were annihilated by the Apache helicopters of their own NATO allies. A resistance Libyan doctor-become-journalist reported yesterday that all of the petroleum platforms are occupied by NATO and that warships occupy Libya’s ports. Photographs show Italian encampments in the desert with an announcement that the French are to follow.

Another news outlet reports that Qataris and Emiratees are the engineers now at the oil plants, turning away desperate Libyan workers. While long lines exist for Libyan drivers to get their gas, foreign troops ensure the black gold’s export. Libyans lack enough food and the basics, the country has been turned upside down, and contaminated with uranium while the true number of dead and unaccounted for remains high and unknown. Thousands of young Libyans, supporters of the Jahamiriya, languish under torture and assassination in a Misrata prison where a humanitarian disaster is about to unfold because Misrata rebels want to kill them all and have already attacked the prison once to do so. An urgent appeal to contact the International Red Cross was issued yesterday to help save the lives of the prisoners. And finally, Black Libyans continue to be targeted for harassment and murder in Libya by US/NATO allies on the ground. Teaching hate, given the images of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan released yesterday, urinating on Afghani dead bodies, is not a difficult thing to do, it would seem. Videos are posted of Black Libyans being beaten, whipped, threatened, harassed, and humiliated. These videos remind me of the antebellum South–reminiscent of the days of slavery and The Confederacy. So, when I use the word “descend” to describe U.S. anticipated actions, I mean just that: U.S. troops are about to descend into the hell on Earth created by their President and the leaders of other countries who approved of, aided, or participated in the death of Libyan-owned society. A report from last night indicates that one militia, fearing other militias, even invited foreigners in to protect them.

I hope the report that I’m reading from 12 January 2012 is not true. I hope our President has not sent 12,000 troops of occupation to Malta destined for Libya. Lucy Grider-Bradley (of our DIGNITY Delegation) just yesterday reminded me of the words of a high-ranking Libyan Jahamiriya Foreign Ministry representative who just happened to be at the Tunisia/Libya border office at the same time we were waiting there. He said, “Let the Americans come. We want them to taste our sandwiches. We will give them the same serving they got in Vietnam.”

Please write to our President (at www.whitehouse.gov) and ask him not to send troops of occupation (or whatever “euphemism de jour” this Administration chooses to use) to Libya.

To save the lives of the young men in prison, please e-mail the International Red Cross at any or all of the e-mail addresses given below:

in Tripoli 218213409262 / Croix rouge

218919418066 / 218925236582

والبريد اللاكتروني : gro.crci@ilopirt_irt

هذا اراقام المكتب الرئيسي للصليب الاحمرLe président de la croix rouge

في جنيفا 41227346001/ فاكس 41227332057

gro.crci@retsambew

منظمة حقوق الانسان: Organisation de protection des droits de l’homme

في مقره لندن : à London

David Mepham

UK Director

Eleanor Blatchley

Associate

Tel: +44 (0) 20-7713-2788

gro.wrh@ehctalb

او مقره في سويسرا : En Suisse

Geneva

Switzerland

Tel: +41-22-738-0481

fax: +41-22-738-1791

الهلال الاحمر الليبي: http://www.lrc.org.ly/contactus.html

And then, please view the most recent addition to the extremely valuable work of a young documentarian, Julien Teil, who caught Amnesty International red-handed in proselytizing the lies in the lead-up to this Libya debacle that they tried to take back. In short, Amnesty admits that the “African mercenaries” was just a rumor from the start. How many Black Libyans are suffering and have died because this woman and others like her safely ensconced in their seats of authority used them to proffer lies instead of protect the truth? The video is in both French and English and can be viewed here.

Lastly, there is one thing you can do: refuse to vote for war. Your vote is your most precious political asset. When you vote for Congressional representatives who, in turn, vote for war, you allow the people who made the coup–the people that General Wesley Clark talked about–you allow them to win. Overturn the coup by voting for peace. Cast your vote for peace. Ignore the pundits on the Sunday morning talk shows and vote for peace. Turn off the crap TV and vote for peace. Don’t even listen to your friends who think you’ve gone crazy, just vote for peace.

Cindy Piester, a documentarian who hosted the last event that I attended with my aunt in Ventura, California, just finished a film, “On the Dark Side in Al Doura – A Soldier in the Shadows” in which Dick Cheney says that the United States has to “work toward the dark side, spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world.” He goes on to say, “A lot of what needs to be done will have to be done quietly without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” View her extremely well-done and sad film here, and please, don’t let this gang of coup plotters take you and this country into the shadows where we don’t need or want to be.

Vote peace.

By Cynthia McKinney

14 January 2012

@ Countercurrent

Genocide is always ignored until the genocide is over. After its completion, eloquent and hypocritical words appear in defense of the murdered and departed. Genocide makes headlines, and people know how to use them for their own advantage.

France ‘s President Nicholas Sarkozy gains headlines, and mostly for appropriate reasons. He is in the news almost every day – marriage to a celebrity model, leading the charge against dispatched Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, whom he befriended months earlier, scuffling with Germany’s Prime Minister Angela Merkel over how to save the Euro and French banks, camera shots with the new baby, and at an October 7, 2011 meeting in Armenia stating that “Turkey’s refusal to recognize the [Armenian] genocide would force France to make such denials a criminal offense.”

Peoples who suffered genocide have the right to solicit compensation for displaced survivors from the guilty government and to seek means to correct the wrong. Others have an obligation to help. Nevertheless, knowing that President Sarkozy ‘s statement would irritate Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and force him to reject the bill, there must be more to the French President’s actions and to the French National Assembly Dec 20, 2011 vote that proposed a year in jail and a fine of $58,000 to those publicly denying the alleged genocide.

What does the bill accomplish for France ?

Is denial of an Armenian genocide a polarizing issue in France ? Do citizens of La Patria openly debate Ottoman Empire responsibility for an alleged genocide that happened one hundred years ago? Does French jurisprudence need this bill to prevent a significant offense? The necessity to pass a law that makes it a crime to deny the alleged Armenian genocide is baffling. To whom is it directed and what is its purpose?

The bill will not help the victims; after all, they are gone. What happened in the Armenian part of Turkey almost a century ago is not a French issue, and therefore will neither resolve a present or future French problem nor change French life. It is doubtful that many citizens thought about the issue and argued a need for the bill.

The bill will create problems.

Old wounds are opened, and with them renewed hatreds will occur. As the western world starts to overcome its prejudices and learns to appreciate the Turkish nation, Sarkozy shakes the world with accusations of criminal behavior by the almost ancient Ottoman government.

Just when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on reconciliation with Armenia and his own Armenian citizens, a challenge interrupts the peace-minded progress. After decades of hostility, Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement in October 2009 to establish diplomatic relations and open their borders. Unfortunately, neither government has ratified the agreement due to the lack of settlement of a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that was formally inside Azerbaijan and, since a 1990s war, is occupied by ethnic Armenians.

The bill, written one hundred years after an event, makes it illegal for people to rebut accusations that their ancestors initiated genocide and considers them complicit in the atrocities if they defend their elders. The Turks are probably asking themselves: “If this bill is necessary, why aren’t there bills concerning complicity of many western powers in the mass killings of Indian populations in the Western Hemisphere, African populations throughout Africa, which includes slavery in the United States, Asians, most prominently in China, India, and the Philippines, and their own populations in Europe?”

Not stopping atrocities, and then criminalizing words that question the extent of the atrocities, smacks of duplicity; an attempt to hide failures by achieving political correctness. Isn’t there something wrong in a democratic nation when opinions can be made illegal and illegal deeds are not prevented?

Why aren’t remaining effects of previous genocides not directly countered?

Existing effects of previous genocides require more attention than bills that punish people for denying genocide. In North, Central and South America , indigenous peoples who suffered genocide continue to struggle for cultural survival and to maintain their dignity. Inca and Mapuche from South America , Maya from Central America , and Indian tribes in North America remain helpless in trying to regain the land and resources stolen from them and find themselves slowly decimated and slipping into obscurity. Grief still inhabits their faces and squalor directs their lives.

Disadvantages arising from past actions have been, and always will, impede descendants of American slaves in their progress. While severe disadvantage is not easily overcome, advantage is capitalized and adds to advantage. African Americans deserve a compensation that enables them to overcome the disadvantages in order to achieve an equal status with White America.

Why are these victims of genocide not being properly helped? The answer is simple: the economic capital (a huge amount to right the wrongs done to the African Americans) will not return a positive political benefit. Note that these genocides are often denied with one statement – a natural course of history – and the detractors are not punished.

What motivated a bill that criminalizes denial of an alleged genocide?

Proving hidden motivations for passage of the bill cannot be easily justified or demonstrated. Frame the question in another context: Knowing that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan would disregard President Sarkozy ‘s statement and vehemently reject the bill, how will others benefit from a bill that criminalizes denial of an alleged Armenian genocide?

Prime Minister Erdogan has taken independent stances that lead many to regard him his courage. His stances and moral attitude have generated opposition and disturbed those who envy his popularity. The French bill shifts the moral compass from Erdogan to Sarkozy and reduces the impact from Erdogan’s independent positions.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has steered Turkey away from the severe nationalist polices of its militarist predecessors. The bill places Erdogan and his AKP Party in a difficult position. Accept the bill and lose favor with a great majority of the Turkish electorate. Reject the bill and give the appearance of following a renewed nationalist policy.

Those who view turkey as too independent, too large and too Muslim seek any excuse to keep Turkey out of the European Union. Add to the list Turkey ‘s unwillingness to recognize the Ottoman Empire ‘s culpability in the alleged Armenian genocide.

When friendly with Turkey , Israel rejected recognition of the alleged Armenian genocide. Now that the two nations are declared antagonists, is it possible that Israel , whose Knesset held a renewed discussion on recognizing the Armenian genocide, played a role in promoting the bill in order to embarrass Erdogan?

Armenia has an unresolved situation with Azerbaijan over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian lobby consistently works to keep the atrocity alive and direct sympathy to Armenia .

France has a law that calls genocide denial a criminal offense. People are questioning why the law is applied to the World War II holocaust and not to other genocides.

An Armenian lobby and contributors can play a significant role in the coming French presidential election.

The bill might backfire on President Sarkozy and damage French interests .

An injured Turkey , that has become dubious of a wounded European Union, might shift its allegiance and interchange from the western world to Russia , China and India . If that happens, NATO, who relies greatly on Turkey ‘s geo-strategic position, will find itself engaging a more difficult partner.

Preventing genocide and assisting its remaining victims has highest priority. However, perpetually aggravating hatred rather than pursuing reconciliation and using a genocide for enhancing a personal or national agenda create suspicion. Making criminals of those who recognize atrocities but deny that ancestors deserve to be included as purveyors of genocide is a controversial afterthought and an arm twister: “Say uncle or go to jail.”

By Dan Lieberman

5 January 2012

@ Alternative Insight

Dan Lieberman is the editor of Alternative Insight , a web based opinion magazine.

Note: The expression ‘alleged genocide’ is used for impartiality. There is neither intention to deny genocide nor assent to a thesis that it did not occur.

A little over a year ago on 1st November 2010 I wrote what I called “…a little bit of scurrilous speculation.” In it I speculated that an unintended consequence of QE had been to spur several countries to think very seriously of how they could replace the dollar as their settlement currency for international deals. The Settlement Currency just means the currency both parties agree is stable, internationally trusted and accepted, and in plentiful supply. Which may not be the case for their own currencies . I wondered if doubts about the longer term stability of the dollar and of US debt levels, was combining with a political desire in China and perhaps other countries as well to challenge the US via the dollar with the eventual goal of creating an alternative reserve currency backed by gold rather than, as the dollar now is, by debt.

Various countries have been buying gold. Russia, China, India have all bought a lot….Which brings me to my speculation. The list of countries accumulating gold is similar to the list of countries that were reported to be talking about the need for a new reserve currency to replace the dollar.

I wonder if those who are seriously thinking of trying to unseat the dollar and create a currency which is backed by something other than debt and is not under the control of America’s corrupt banks and even more corrupt government, are investing in gold as a precursor to making a real bid for a new currency.

Later, in Making the New Sub Prime Part 2 I looked at the growing network of bilateral agreements in major trade deals gradually replacing the dollar as a settlement currency.

Being a ‘Settlement’ currency is not quite the same as being a ‘Reserve Currency’ like the dollar, but it a major step in that direction. It is, in fact, a very large step. Which currency large international trades are done in matters. It is a fact that in 2000, Iraq signed an agreement to sell its oil, all its oil, in Euros. Iran was contemplating doing the same at around the same time. The Iraq decision involved the large French bank PNB-Paribas. France was not one of those who supported the war and Washington led a hate campaign vilifying the French. The worry was that a switch from dollar to Euro settlement might gain momentum. Any major move away from dollar settlement would cripple the US.

In January of this year the India Times reported that India was talking to Iran about moving out of dollar settlements so as to be able to buy Iranian oil despite a US embargo. India said it was discussing settling in Gold. Remember, India has just signed a settlement agreement with China to use the Yuan.

A very good summary of recent news by ZeroHedge suggests I may have been on the right track. And recently the pace has picked up.

China and Russia have been trading directly in their own currencies and using them both interchangeably for settlement for over a year. As the The China Daily article reports,

China is allowing greater use of its currency for cross-border transactions to reduce reliance on the US dollar, after Premier Wen Jiabao said in March he was “worried” about holdings of assets denominated in the greenback.

Then on 26th December 2011 Bloomberg reported,

Japan and China will promote direct trading of the yen and yuan without using dollars and will encourage the development of a market for companies involved in the exchanges, the Japanese government said.

China is Japan’s largest trading partner. Japan will also start in 2012 buying Chinese debts. How much Dollar debt will either of them buy? They have both already been buying less.

Two days later (Dec.28th) the Iranain news service reported,

Iran and China on Wednesday signed two agreements on expansion of trade ties and joint investments.

These trades too will not be settled in Dollars or in Euros.

Three days after that The China Post reported that on the last day of 2011, US President Obama had signed a new law in which

U.S. imposes sanctions on banks dealing with Iran….Sanctioned institutions would be frozen out of U.S. financial markets.

Sounds tough. A bit like sending an aircraft carrier to the Straits of Hormuz. But as the article went on to report, with only barely concealed delight, the threat may be as hollow as the dollar itself. The law comes with exemptions which may eventually highlight America’s plight rather than its might.

The sanctions target both private and government-controlled banks – including central banks – and would take hold after a two- to six-month warning period, depending on the transactions, a senior Obama administration official said.

Under the law, the president can move to exempt institutions in a country that has significantly reduced its dealings with Iran and in situations where a waiver is in the U.S. national security interest or otherwise necessary for energy market stability. He would need to notify Congress and waivers would be temporary, but could be extended.

And as if to make the point, only a couple of days after this on Jan 7th, came the news that,

Iran and Russia replaced the U.S. dollar with their national currencies in bilateral trade, Iran’s state-run Fars news agency reported, citing Seyed Reza Sajjadi, the Iranian ambassador in Moscow.

So now almost none of Iran’s oil will be traded in Dollars.

India and Japan have also recently agreed a 15 billion dollar currency exchange. This will tie their two currencies closer together.

The list of countries and trades no longer using the dollar for settlement for their trade is now considerable. How close are we to reaching the tipping-point where it no longer makes sense for nations to use dollars and makes more sense for them, both economically and politically, to use the network of currencies tied to the Yuan? When we reach that point the Yuan becomes in reserve currency in all but name.

China, India, Russia and Iran are all large holders of physical gold and most of them are also large producers of it. None of them are firm allies of the US. They all have long term relations with each other. All of them have expressed oncercern over US debts and printing. None of them will like QE3, nor Euro printing, when they both arrive later this year.

I think the stand-off with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz over sanctions is as much to do with the moves to replace the dollar as anything else. The stand off is as much with China and its allies as it is specifically with Iran. The US is testing China’s nerve and the solidity of its network of bilateral currency settlement agreements. We are seeing military power deployed to counter economic power. I think the US will lose. Depending on the nature of its loss we could see a precipitate decline in the standing of the dollar as global reserve currency.

2012 could see the beginning of large scale defections from the dollar settlement currency. Which would in turn have massive, perhaps even catastrophic consequences for how the world perceives what is an acceptable level of debt for the US. What is acceptable when you have the global reserve currency is quite different from what is acceptable when you don’t.

And the reverse is also true. If China can transform the netwrok of bilateral agreements which centre upon China and the Yuan, in to becoming accepted as a de facto reserve currency, then for those, like me, who wonder how China can possibly avoid a hard landing as its bad bank and property bubble deflates faster and faster, look no further.

There is no denying China has an absolutely massive bad debt crisis fermenting. Every one of its banks is gagging on bad loans made to every one of China’s regional governments. Trillions of Yuan worth of loans which will not be repaid, on property and land valued at hugely inflated but now defaulting prices. But if China can become a rival and rising reserve currency at the centre of a new and growing collection of trading partners then China can and will bury the debts in a a mass unmarked grave somewhere in its hinterland.

At the moment when America is seen as being no longer the pre-eminant reserve currency and its debt load is re-considered accordingly, China and its debt load will go the other way. America and its currency risk being seen as too rotted by debt to be trusted and it’s claims of economic growth seen as fake, empty, paper-based, accountancy-conjured growth. The Dollar and America itself risk being seen as the fiat currency and fiat nation par excellence .While China and the Yuan will be seen as backed by sold gold and real growth.

One more question to ask in all this is – how far have the big banks and brokerages managed to turn even gold and silver (at least gold and silver held in the West) in to another fiat currency? Gold and bullion bugs amoung you might argue the question makes no sense. But consider re-hypothecation. How much gold and silver has been pledged and re-pledged, hypothecated and re-hypothecated? How many more paper contracts for and claims upon gold and silver exist above and beyond the amount of actual physical gold and silver? After all gold and silver are the ultimate in ‘good’ assets which counterparties will happily accept. So it seems likely to me that gold and silver (or contracts for them) will have been in demand in those repo and hypothecation markets. If so then I wonder how many conflicting and contesting claims will surround every ounce of gold and silver in the West when investors start demanding to see their ‘investment’.

I think the big old sterling silver coin may already have dropped for some investors. That is why prices for physical silver are surging above the price for paper claims on silver. I think some traders are getting nervous about buying paper claims on silver and now want only the metal itself. They suspect that in the end, if you have only a paper claim or contract for, silver that is exaclty all you will ever have – the paper. Only those with the actual metal in their hands, will get what they paid for. I think there is a fiat, paper currency version of gold and silver floating around and parasitising the metals themselves. Those who own that paper stuff may get…well … stuffed.

Where Europe goes in all this is another story which I will try to say something about when I get back from filming. I am away for this week, back on Saturday and away again filming till the 20th.

By David Malone

10 January 2012

@ Golem XIV

David Malone is author of the “The Debt Generation”. David has a career spanning nearly twenty years producing and directing documentaries for both the BBC and Channel4. His series Testing God was shortlisted for the Royal Television Society best documentary series and was described by The Times as “moving and startling – as close to poetry as television gets.” For the last three years David has focused considerable attention on the financial system. His BBC documentary High Anxieties- The Mathematics of Chaos, first broadcast in September 2008, was one of the first films to be made about the financial crisis accurately anticipating the problems that were to unfold in the economy. The Debt Generation was published in November 2010.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in their inspection role for compliance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has their November 2011 report in similar misleading language as their February 2010 report.

IAEA appears to be under the same political pressure to make a case for war on Iran that we witnessed before US armed attack of Iraq. US corporate media and US political “leadership” will not remind Americans that the US eliminated the UN agency director who would have resolved concerns of alleged Iraq weapons:

“…the conservative first option should have been the UN Security Council voting for the UN WMD agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to directly request Saddam to submit to OPCW’s authority. The Director-general of OPCW, Jose Bustani, was in talks with Saddam to do so. Instead of supporting this reasonable alternative to war, the US promised to withhold its funding of the UN (22% of the UN’s budget) until Bustani was fired. The US called Bustani’s talks with Saddam an “ill-considered initiative.” The US request was honored; the US then paid its 2002 UN dues in April 2002; less than one year before the US invasion of Iraq. This was the first time in UN history where the Director of an international program was fired.[13] By the way, the US does not cooperate with the OPCW to ensure US compliance with International Laws of chemical and biological WMD.”

Consider an etymology of the word, war: to confuse, to perplex.

Comparing the last two IAEA report conclusions in the historical context of propaganda leading to war on Iraq:

2010:

“46. While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

2011:

“52. While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement, as Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation, including by not implementing its Additional Protocol, the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Let’s unpack this:

IAEA confirms zero evidence of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. This conforms to the agreement of all 16 US intelligence agencies in their December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and Seymour Hersh’s report on the classified but leaked 2011 NIE.

IAEA continues obfuscating language Iran’s Additional Protocol, a voluntary set of additional safeguards Iran temporarily administratively approved, but kept open to withdraw by not ratifying the treaty by their legislature. Iran withdrew after two years of US non-compliance of NPT (history here). IAEA’s language states they can’t prove there isn’t nuclear material they don’t know about. This is similar to propaganda to damage your family: “While the Agency continues to verify the non-terrorism of your family, your family isn’t providing the necessary cooperation for the Agency to provide credible assurance about the absence of your family’s terrorist activities.”

Additional propaganda for war on Iran comes in this part of IAEA’s 2010 and 2011 reports:

2010:

“The information available to the Agency in connection with these outstanding issues is extensive and has been collected from a variety of sources over time. It is also broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved. Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

2011:

“After assessing carefully and critically the extensive information available to it, the Agency finds the information to be, overall, credible. The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information also indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme, and that some activities may still be ongoing.”

This propaganda of “gathering concern” is similar to what preceded war with Iraq; the admission of zero evidence of unlawful activity framed in a cheap rhetorical trick of possible “secret crimes.” IAEA also lies in omission that previous “sources” concerning Iran nuclear weapon development are now confirmed as planted evidence (here, here and here).

US corporate media propagandizes for war: US corporate media is concentrated in six corporations, with previous CIA disclosure of “influencing” content. The biggest context of lies of omission are the damning disclosures by our own government that all “reasons” for war with Iraq are now known to be lies as they were told, and in direct violation of war law.

Examples of obvious lies of commission and omission:

New York Times 1/5/2012 front page article lying that IAEA reported “Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective.”

Current political “leadership” and Republican presidential candidates fomenting fear and war threat over Iran’s “nuclear program” and lies about Iran’s president insisting lawful behavior by Israel with Palestine.

CNN’s 2010 screaming headline: Watchdog: Iran may be working on nuclear warhead leads the glaring lie of omission that all nuclear material is accounted for lawful use. The “reporting” includes the White House lie that Iran’s disclosed Qom nuclear facility can’t be used for peaceful nuclear use, despite independent analysis that its specifications are precisely for that purpose, and IAEA would know immediately if enrichment went beyond the facility’s limits. They lie again by reporting the facility as “secret” despite the fact it was reported by Iran to IAEA ahead of their NPT requirement to do so. They continue on their roll of lies by not reporting Iran’s several offers to accept medical isotopes as imports provided they had a guaranteed timeline.

CNN’s 2010 video report has this banner at the bottom: “Iranian nuclear warhead?” with the glaring lie of commission that a 20% enrichment is a “magic number” that shows enrichment for a nuclear weapon despite it being exactly what’s needed for lawful nuclear medicine. IAEA has constant video and chemical monitoring for enrichment to never exceed 20%; weapons-grade requires 85%+ with different physical equipment requirements.

Among many of Israel’s headlines, this is typical: IAEA report: Iran may be developing atom bomb

So understand: this whole “issue” could be averted if the US merely agreed for a simultaneous swap of fuel. But the US wants the problem unsolved, and US corporate media won’t report this solution anymore than they reported that the US got rid of the UN Director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons who was working with Saddam to resolve any concern over alleged weapons.

Except for Pulitzer-winner Seymour Hersh, you have to go outside corporate media to find exposure of this propaganda, such as Global Research, Activist Post, Washington’s Blog, Want to Know, Prison Planet, What Really Happened.

The following additional resources document further US “leadership” and corporate media lies of commission and omission:

US overthrew Iran’s democracy 1953-1979, helped Iraq invade 1980-1988, now lies for more war (and an analogy if the US were the victim of empire)

What Iran’s president said about Israel, and how US War Criminal 1% lie for war

US constantly violates war law: arrest Obama before ‘false flag’ war on Iran

Analogy: US wars on Iraq, Iran as US criminal gangster “business”

9/11 killed 1, injured 2 if US was a city of 100,000. US wars: CRIMINAL response

Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now (6-part series)

By Carl Herman

15 January 2012

@ Washington’s blog

Ken Ford, Jr. wrote an intelligence report on the Iraq War which contradicted the Administration’s reason for going to war against Iraq.

By all accounts, Ken Ford, Jr. reputed to be a computer whiz, was an upwardly mobile, trusted, young African American man who was so trusted that he worked his way into a security clearance that fewer than 150 people have in the entire United States.  His work reports were good.  And Ken considered himself lucky.  He was a homeowner and as a single young man, he sought to climb the professional ladder.  Ken started out at the United States Secret Service.  He received good reports there and moved over to cybersecurity and monitoring at the National Security Agency (NSA).  He moved around in the Agency to advance up the bureaucratic ladder.  He served one stint in the Iraq Office lasting about 6 months. When he decided to leave the secretive National Security Agency and work for one of the government’s national security “private contractors” whose work would boost his pay, that’s when Ken’s life began to turn upside down.  It started when a young African American lady entered his life–well, I’m being generous.  According to Ken, what happened between him and this woman, it’s clear that she’s no lady!  Ken states that she was “planted in my life” and issues this warning that he, himself, received later in this episode:  “Be aware because they are looking at you.  I did receive a message that the FBI does run sting operations using these social networks.”

Imagine his shock when his girlfriend turned out to be a witness for the prosecution!  Ken was charged with espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917, and the proof of his perfidy was found in the briefcase of what he thought was his girlfriend!  Quick perusal of this Act reveals that the Rosenbergs were charged under this Act and so was Daniel Ellsberg.  Ken maintains his innocence, but does reveal an important aspect of his work assignment at NSA in an interview with Dr. Randy Short and Joshalyn Lawrence, members of DIGNITY who took the time to interview Ken on the day after Christmas, 26 December 2011.

Ken Ford, Jr. wrote an intelligence report on his findings on the Iraq War, his findings contradicted the Administration’s premise at the time to validate their reason for going to war against Iraq.  Ford’s work was to research whether or not there were WMD in Iraq.  The results of his research were that there were no WMD in Iraq.  He says that when he went to the next shop, he was assigned an entirely different subject matter, he went from a job with a specific task, to a job with undefined tasks.

Everyone knows the name of Valery Plame.  The media did not pay attention to Ken Ford’s plight at all.  The only person who did pay attention to Ken’s situation was DIGNITY Delegation member Wayne Madsen of WayneMadsenReport.com and who wrote extensively about Ken’s case and where those original stories still can be found by searching on Ken Ford’s name.  Ken says that during his trial, Wayne was the only journalist in the courtroom.

Where were all of the journalists who get paid to tell us what they determine is the news?  Poor Ken Ford, one of only ten Black employees that he ever saw during his entire time at the NSA was taken from his home in handcuffs after approximately eight hours of questioning by 25 flack-jacketed government agents.

On 26 December 2011, Dr. Randy Short and Ms. Joshalyn Lawrence, both DIGNITY Delegation members, interviewed Ken Ford, Jr. to allow him to tell his story.  Incidentally, his father worked at the Brentwood Post Office that was stricken by anthrax.

View these videos of this sincere young man and his mother as he relates his personal ordeal of character assassination in an effort to shut him up.  Ken Ford told the truth about WMD in Iraq and paid a heavy personal price.

I would like to thank Wayne, Randy, and Joshalyn for giving this family the opportunity to tell their story.  Ken Ford was sentenced to 6 years in prisonIn light of the President signing the most recent Pentagon authorization bill that allows for indefinite detention for U.S. citizens, in combination with the Patriot Act, the Secret Evidence Act, the Funding the War Against Terrorism Act, and more, Ken Ford’s story could easily be you!

Support Ken Ford, Jr. and his family’s attempt to clear their only child’s name.  They have reams of documents proving Ken’s innocence, prosecutorial misconduct, and fraud on the Court, but need an attorney willing to sue for justice on Ken’s behalf.  Are there any civil rights organizations out there willing to help Ken?  Any appellate level lawyers willing to help this traumatized family and young man?  Ken’s mother has now been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy treatment.

According to Mrs. Ford, “We have solid proof of the illegality of this situation from the day it started to today.”

Here is one of Wayne’s stories on the strange and unfair treatment of Ken Ford, Jr.:

September 26-27, 2011 — A tale of two cases

On June 15, U.S. federal judge Richard B. Bennett sharply rebuked federal prosecutors for pursuing a four-year Espionage Act violation investigation and case against former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake. At Drake’s sentencing hearing in Baltimore, Bennett called the four-year long case against Drake and the prosecutors’ ultimate dropping of multiple espionage charges to a single misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a government computer “unconscionable.”

Drake had been charged with providing classified information to the Baltimore Sun in 2006 and 2007. He was specifically charged with violation of sub-paragraphs (d) and (e) of the Espionage Act, which covers “transmittal” of classified information to unauthorized parties. Charges under the 1917 Espionage Act have rarely been brought by the Justice Department. The law was used against American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials Steve Rosen and Kenneth Weissman for receiving highly-classified information, including Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), from a Pentagon official. Charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped by Eric Holder’s Justice Department on May 1, 2009.

However, the “classified material” cited by prosecutors was not originally classified and it pertained to NSA officials, particuarly then-NSA director General Michael Hayden, defrauding the government for well over a billion dollars. Hayden and his advisers awarded a failed program called Project TRAILBLAZER to a group of contractors led by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

The prosecutors, acting as virtual criminal racket protection agents for Hayden and his advisers, decided to retroactively classify the unclassified whistleblowing information in order to justify the Espionage Act charges against Drake. Hayden’s pet project also assisted in the program to conduct warrantless wiretapping of communications of U.S. citizens, a super-classified operation known by the code name STELLAR WIND.

Drake avoided prison and Bennett ruled against federal prosecutor’s wish to have a $50,000 fine imposed on Drake. In sentencing Drake to 240 hours of community service, Bennett said “There has been financial devastation wrought upon this defendant that far exceeds any fine that can be imposed by me. And I’m not going to add to that in any way.”

Drake was represented by two federal public defenders, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman. Drake’s case began to fall party after it was featured on CBS “60 Minutes.” Retired NSA officials, interviewed on camera, defended Drake and his whistleblowing actions. After the bad publicity for NSA and Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the espionage charges against Drake were dropped.

Five years earlier, in another federal court room in Greenbelt, Maryland, and in a case even more egregious than the one involving Drake, federal judge Peter J. Messitte sentenced former NSA “Iraqi shop” signals intelligence analyst Ken Ford Jr., to six years in prison and no fine as a result of his politically-motivated conviction for allegedly removing two boxes of classified materials from NSA during broad daylight without detection. In fact, the documents were planted in Ford’s Waldorf, Maryland home in retaliation for his signals intelligence analysis report casting doubt on the White House contention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That report, which contained Ford’s name as the preparer, eventually ended up on the desk of Vice President Dick Cheney. As a result, Ford became a target of the neo-con cell operating from within Cheney’s office and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), the same cabal that compromised Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert identity and mission.

The team of Assistant U.S. Attorney David Salem; federal public defenders John Chamble, Andrea Callaman, and Susan Bauer; and even the private lawyer eventually retained by Ford, conspired to ensure that Messitte was successfully “judge shopped” as the trial attorney, that at least one dubious pro-NSA jury member was selected for the trial jury, and that Ford would receive anything but a fair trial. Unlike Drake, Ford served in a lower-level analyst position. However, Ford, an African-American who previously served as a uniformed U.S. Secret Service officer at the White House, was on a fast-track for an executive position at NSA.

“60 Minutes” never covered the Ford case, even though it was as, if not more, outrageous as the case brought against Drake. The Washington Post , rather than assign one of its national security correspondents to the case, handed it to a Metro desk reporter, who parroted in his articles what was given to him by the prosecution team.

Prosecutors never cited any classified document that was said to be in Ford’s possession at the time of his arrest. Prosecutors relied on the testimony of a confidential informant named Tonya Tucker, who had several other aliases and a long criminal record, who said she saw a document labeled “classified” in Ford’s home. Of course, “classified” is not a national security label or designator for any documents. Salem also charged that Ford was planning on meeting a foreign agent at Dulles International Airport to transmit documents. However, Salem could not identify the foreign country involved, a flight number, a rendezvous point, or any details of what amounted to a “pre-crime” allegation. In fact, Salem made up the entire Dulles story as a way to ensure a guilty verdict, especially considering that the jury was never shown any of the alleged classified documents that were said to be in Ford’s possession. In the Drake case, the jury was shown copies of “retroactively” classified documents, which were originally unclassified.

Ford is now out of prison and serving three-years of restricted travel probation in Maryland. He maintains his innocence and intends to appeal his case. However, Ford’s attempt to enlist the assistance of the parties who came to the defense of Drake have been unsuccessful. There is another problem with the Ford case. The Ford case files, including those maintained by the PACER system and the federal public defenders office in Washington, DC, have all disappeared. Even Ford’s original birth certificate in the District of Columbia Vital Records Office has disappeared. The only information available on the Ford case from the Justice Department are the press releases issued on the case.

The federal public defenders office in Washington is clearly nervous about the double standard applied to Ford and Drake. Moreover, the supervisor of Ford’s tainted public defenders in 2004 was Wyda, the same public defender who successfully argued Drake’s case.

Former Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm, under a long investigation for revealing the nature of NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times , eventually saw his investigation by the FBI suspended. However, WMR has learned that the STELLAR WIND program was routinely violated by NSA employees. Hayden, who came up with the program and sold it to then-CIA director George Tenet and Vice President Cheney, essentially canceled the provisions of U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID) 18, which governed the application of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) at NSA. NSA was prohibited from eavesdropping on “U.S. persons” without a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Under Hayden’s tenure, some NSA analysts were conducting e-mail surveillance of their current and former girl friends, prompting Hayden to cover his tracks by implementing a procedure that saw database security officers, including those with oversight over the PINWALE e-mail interception database, conducting after-the-fact audit trail analysis for internal abuse of the new NSA powers.

Ford’s case, which involved pressure from the Bush-Cheney White House, has also met with indifference from the Obama White House and the Congressional Black Caucus. Groups like the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which assisted with Drake’s defense, did not raise a finger in the Ford case.

During his incarceration at Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania, Ford received rank-and-file support from some current and former NSA employees. However, unlike Drake, not one high-level NSA official, current or retired, came to Ford’s defense, even though his innocence was as provable as that of Drake. It is, indeed, a “tale of two cases,” one with a relatively happy outcome, the other singed with racism.

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Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.

” The biggest weapon in the hands of the oppressors is the minds of the oppressed.” Steve Biko

“Any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations is both arbitrary and subjective.”  American Anthropological Association 1999

By Cynthia McKinney

15 January 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Cynthia McKinney is a former US Congresswoman and a member of the Green Party since 2007. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2008, the Green Party nominated McKinney for President of the United States. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.

Iraq plans to increase its oil production capacity up to 12 million barrels per day by 2017 [Al Jazeera]

Baghdad, Iraq – While the US military has formally ended its occupation of Iraq, some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain.

On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal.

Three days later, the US-based energy firm Emerson submitted a bid for a contract to operate at Iraq’s giant Zubair oil field, which reportedly holds some eight million barrels of oil.

Earlier this year, Emerson was awarded a contract to provide crude oil metering systems and other technology for a new oil terminal in Basra, currently under construction in the Persian Gulf, and the company is installing control systems in the power stations in Hilla and Kerbala.

Iraq’s supergiant Rumaila oil field is already being developed by BP, and the other supergiant reserve, Majnoon oil field, is being developed by Royal Dutch Shell. Both fields are in southern Iraq.

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Iraq’s oil reserves of 112 billion barrels ranks second in the world, only behind Saudi Arabia. The EIA also estimates that up to 90 per cent of the country remains unexplored, due to decades of US-led wars and economic sanctions.

“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil market,” oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. “But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.”

Juhasz, author of the books The Tyranny of Oil and The Bush Agenda, said that while US and other western oil companies have not yet received all they had hoped the US-led invasion of Iraq would bring them, “They’ve certainly done quite well for themselves, landing production contracts for some of the world’s largest remaining oil fields under some of the world’s most lucrative terms.”

Dr Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum, an international oil consultant and economist who has spent nearly 50 years in the oil business in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, agrees that western oil companies have “obtained concessions in Iraq’s major [oil] fields”, despite “there being a lack of transparency and clarity of vision regarding the legal issues”.

Dr Zalloum added that he believes western oil companies have successfully acquired the lions’ share of Iraq’s oil, “but they gave a little piece of the cake for China and some of the other countries and companies to keep them silent”.

In a speech at Fort Bragg in the wake of the US military withdrawal, US President Barack Obama said the US was leaving behind “a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people”.

Of this prospect, Dr Zalloum was blunt.

“The last thing the US cares about in the Middle East is democracy. It is about oil, full stop.”

A strong partnership?

A White House press release dated November 30 titled, “Joint Statement by the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq Higher Coordinating Committee”, said this about “energy co-operation” between the two countries:

“The United States is committed to supporting the Republic of Iraq in its efforts to develop the energy sector. Together, we are exploring ways to help boost Iraq’s oil production, including through better protection for critical infrastructure.”

Iraq is one of the largest oil exporters to the US, and has plans to raise its overall crude oil exports to 3.3m barrels per day (bpd) next year, compared with their target of 3m bpd this year, according to Assim Jihad, spokesman for Iraq’s ministry of oil.

Jihad told Al Jazeera that Iraq has a goal of raising its oil production capacity to 12m bpd by 2017, which would place it in the top echelon of global producers.

According to Jihad, Iraq’s 2013 production goal is 4.5m bpd, and in 2014 it is 5m bpd. The 2017 goal is ambitious, given that Iraq did not meet its 2011 goal, and many officials say 8m bpd capacity is more realistic for 2017.

Unexplored regions of Iraq could yield an additional 100bn barrels, and Iraq’s production costs are among the lowest in the world.

To date, only about 2,000 wells have been drilled in Iraq, compared with roughly one million wells in Texas alone.

Globally, current oil usage is approximately 88m bpd. By 2030, global petroleum demand will grow by 27m bpd, and many energy experts see Iraq as being a key player in meeting this demand.

It is widely understood that Iraq will require at least $200bn in physical and human investments to bring its production capacity up to 12m bpd, from its current production levels.

Juhasz explained that ExxonMobil, BP and Shell were among the oil companies that “played the most aggressive roles in lobbying their governments to ensure that the invasion would result in an Iraq open to foreign oil companies”.

“They succeeded,” she added. “They are all back in. BP and CNPC [China National Petroleum Corporation] finalised the first new oil contract issued by Baghdad for the largest oil field in the country, the 17 billion barrel super giant Rumaila field. ExxonMobil, with junior partner Royal Dutch Shell, won a bidding war against Russia’s Lukoil (and junior partner ConocoPhillips) for the 8.7 billion barrel West Qurna Phase 1 project. Italy’s Eni SpA, with California’s Occidental Petroleum and the Korea Gas Corp, was awarded Iraq’s Zubair oil field with estimated reserves of 4.4 billion barrels. Shell was the lead partner with Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, winning a contract for the super-giant Majnoon field, one of the largest in the world, with estimated reserves of up to 25 billion.”

Zalloum says there is a two-fold interest for the western oil companies.

“There is development of the existing fields, but also for the explored but not-yet-produced fields,” he said. “For the old fields, there are two types of development. One is to renovate the infrastructure, since for most of the past 25 years it has depreciated due to the sanctions and turmoil. Also, some of these fields have different stratum, so once they use innovative techniques like horizontal drilling, there is a huge potential in the fields they have explored.”

But there are complicating factors. As a spasm of violence wracked Baghdad in the wake of the US military withdrawal and political rifts widen, Iraq’s instability is evident.

“Iraq has lots of cheap-to-get oil, but it also has a multitude of problems – political, ethnic, tribal, religious etc – that have prevented them from exploiting it as well or as quickly as the Saudis,” says Tom Whipple, an energy scholar who was a CIA analyst for 30 years. “Someday it may turn out that Iraq has more oil underground than Saudi Arabia. The big question is how stable it will be after the US leaves? So far it is not looking all that good.”

Jihad, Iraq’s ministry of oil spokesman, however, said attacks against Iraq’s oil pipelines have minimal effect on production capabilities, and claimed “sabotage will not affect our oil production and exports because we can fix these damages within days, or even hours”.

Whipple, a fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, says Baghdad had driven a hard bargain with western oil companies.

“The only reason they are participating is because everybody else is and they hope to get a foot in the door in case some new government in Iraq changes its policies to let other outsiders make more money. Remember it is not all the traditional western oil companies that are in there; the Chinese, Russians and Singapore all want a piece of the action.”

Wrong idea?

Spokesman Jihad told Al Jazeera that the reason many Iraqis think western oil companies are operating in Iraq is simply to steal Iraq’s oil.

“These ideas were obtained during the regime of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, and these are the wrong ideas,” he said. “The future will help Iraqis understand these companies have come to work here to help Iraq sell its oil to help the people, and they work to serve the country.”

Jihad admitted that his media office works “to help Iraqis understand the nature of the work of these companies and their investing in Iraq”.

Despite the efforts of Jihad’s office to prove otherwise, Iraqis Al Jazeera spoke with disagree.

“Only a naïve child could believe the Americans came here for something besides our oil,” Ahmed Ali, an unemployed engineer, told Al Jazeera. “Nor can we believe their being here has anything to do with helping the Iraqi people.”

Basim al-Khalili, a restaurant owner in Baghdad’s Karada district, agrees.

“If Iraq had no oil, would America have sacrificed thousands of its soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars to come here?”

Oil analyst Juhasz also agrees.

“The US and other western oil companies and their governments had been lobbying for passage of a new national law in Iraq, the Iraq Oil Law, which would move Iraq from a nationalised to a largely privatised oil market using Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs), a type of contract model used in just approximately 12 per cent of the world’s oil market.”

She explained that this agreement has been summarily rejected by most countries, including all of Iraq’s neighbours, “because it provides far more benefits to the foreign corporation than to the domestic government”.

But it has not been an easy road for the western oil companies in Iraq.

“Major western companies, such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, that had hoped to sign contracts were unable to do so. A third round [of contracts] took place in December 2010 and saw no major western oil companies (except Shell) win contracts. I believe that there was an Iraqi backlash against the awarding of contracts to the large western major oil companies. Thus, in December 2010, fields went to Russian oil companies Lukoil and Gazprom, Norway’s Statoil, and the Angolan company Sonangol, among others.”

Unlike under Iraq’s Oil Law, these contracts do not need to go through parliament, according to the central government. This means the contracts are being signed without public discourse.

“The public is against privatisation, which is one reason why the law has not passed,” added Juhasz. “The contracts are enacting a form of privatisation without public discourse and essentially at the butt of a gun – these contracts have all been awarded during a foreign military occupation with the largest contracts going to companies from the foreign occupiers’ countries. It seems that democracy and equity are the two largest losers in this oil battle.”

Iraq’s oil future

Under the current circumstances, the possibility of a withdrawal of western oil companies from Iraq appears remote, and the Obama administration continues to pressure Baghdad to pass the Iraq Oil Law.

Nevertheless, resistance to the western presence continues.

“The bottom line is that it seems clear that the majority of Iraqis want their oil and its operations to remain in Iraqi hands,” said Juhasz. “Thus far, it has required a massive foreign military invasion and occupation to grant the foreign oil companies the access they have thus far garnered.”

While Iraq’s security remains as volatile as ever, as does the political landscape – which can change dramatically at any moment – there is one thing we can always count on as being at the heart of these conflicts, and that is Iraq’s oil.

By Dahr Jamail

8 January 2012

@ Al Jazeera

Dahr Jamail is an American journalist who is best known as one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 Iraq invasion. He spent eight months in Iraq, between 2003 to 2005, and presented his stories on his website, entitled Dahr Jamail’s MidEast Dispatches. Jamail writes for the Inter Press Service news agency, among other outlets. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now!. Jamail is the recipient of the 2008 The Martha Gellhorn Prize for JournalismFollow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail

The Obama administration dispatched Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, to Cairo yesterday for talks with the Arab League about Syria. His mission is to ensure that a negative verdict is rendered on the Arab League observers’ mission to Syria—paving the way for a push for a United Nations Security Council resolution legitimising military intervention to depose Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.

Feltman’s visit was preceded by multiple statements from the White House, insisting that the Syrian regime had failed to meet the demands for a withdrawal of troops from the cities and an end to repression.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “as sniper fire, torture, and murder in Syria continue, it is clear that the requirements of the Arab League protocol have not been met… We believe it’s past time for the Security Council to act.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, “the violence hasn’t stopped; far from it.”

“The United States is one of the parties which is seeking to rekindle violence by its mobilisation and incitement”, Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdisi responded. “The US … statements are a gross interference in the work of the Arab League”, and “an attempt toward deliberate unjustified internationalization of the situation in Syria”.

The US stepped up its anti-Assad rhetoric after the League’s 100 or so monitors gave indications that they were considering a favourable verdict on the regime’s honouring of the terms of the agreement. A spokesman for the Arab League said the Syrian military has now withdrawn from major cities and moved to the outskirts. Arab League official Adnan al-Khudeir said, “There is noticeable progress”.

Arab League ministers meet this weekend and the monitoring team’s preliminary report will be ready by Sunday, delayed by a day—probably due to US pressure to beef up its criticisms before recommendations are sent to a high-level ministerial meeting that has not yet been timetabled.

On Monday, Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby said the monitors had achieved the release of 3,484 prisoners and that heavy weapons have been removed from cities, but also stated, “Yes, there is still shooting and yes there are still snipers. Yes, killings continue.”

The US is most likely confident that it will get what it wants from the Arab League, but it has made clear that anything less will be denounced as capitulation by the Arab League to Syrian deception.

On Wednesday, it appeared that the Arab League has been called to heel. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, the head of the League’s task force on Syria, was in discussions with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York—seeking “technical help and to see the experience the UN has, because this is the first time the Arab League is involved in sending monitors, and there are some mistakes”.

Behind the scenes, Washington is working with the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) and various regional powers, including Qatar, to get a military campaign in place, either through the Security Council or through various proxy forces, as it did in Libya.

The SNC, based in and sponsored by Turkey, is made up of CIA assets, defectors from the Assad regime and Islamists, chiefly the Muslim Brotherhood. It operates as a front for the US, Turkey and the Gulf States led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are united in seeking regime change in Syria as part of ongoing efforts to isolate Iran.

On Wednesday, the SNC announced that an agreement with the National Co-ordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria (NCB)—a Syrian-based umbrella group of Arab nationalists, and pseudo-socialist groups—had fallen apart. This was due specifically to the SNC’s support for imperialist military intervention. SNC member Khalid Kamal said the two sides disagreed over the percentage of NCB representation and the NCB’s failure to call for the UN Security Council to protect civilians.

“There’s only a handful left in the SNC that don’t want to move toward armed intervention”, said one anonymous SNC member. In a wide-ranging interview with The Majalla magazine, SNC President Burhan Ghalioun made clear that the major powers are utilising the Arab League as a portal through which they can intervene in Syria. “No one, not even the Arab League, has confidence in this regime”, he said. “I think the majority of Arab League ministers who supported the initiative anticipate its abortion by the regime, and intend to refer the issue to the UN Security Council.”

This was, he acknowledged, an effort to get around the veto of previous efforts to secure a UN resolution by Russia and China and give the impression that military intervention was an Arab initiative. “There is no alternative to the Arab initiative”, he said but, “the Arab League has to direct all its efforts to move from simply an Arab initiative, to an Arab initiative adopted by the UN Security Council”.

Ghalioun was forced to deny the accusations, posed by The Majalla, from “opposition figures” who have “described the council as an Islamic structure standing in for the Muslim Brotherhood with a secularist spokesperson represented by you”.

He described the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as the main pillar of the protection system, proof that “We will not wait for foreigners to protect civilians but we will develop means to protect civilians from inside Syria …”.

He then praised the “Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia”, for “taking the most powerful position in supporting the Syrian people politically as well as backing the Arab initiative. The Arab League initiative was initially a Gulf initiative …”.

The FSA, made up of Sunni military defectors and armed by Turkey and the Gulf States, has announced this week that it will mount “huge operations” against “vital interests” of Assad’s regime.

FSA commander Colonel Riad al-Asaad said, “We can’t force him off with peaceful demonstrations, so we are going to force him by arms to leave”.

“We are preparing for big operations and have no faith in Arab League monitors or their useless mission”, he added.

The FSA and other militias have been waging a military campaign that has led to the deaths of 2,000 security personnel, which has been concealed by the media in order to portray events as Assad’s forces targeting purely peaceful protests. The FSA has ambushed military convoys and attacked an airbase and a Ba’ath party office in Damascus. On December 23, Islamist suicide bombers targeted two security bases killing 44 people.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Israel’s foreign affairs and defence committee this week that Assad had only “a few weeks” before he would be toppled. Referring to Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said the collapse of the Ba’athist regime would be “a severe blow to the radical ax

By Chris Marsden

6 January, 2012

WSWS.org

This spring, Israel and US will showcase the largest ever missile defense exercise and establish US command posts in Israel and Israeli Forces will occupy EUCOM headquarters in Germany.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lt.Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel and finalized the plans for “Austere Challenge 12”.

This misguided action will deploy several thousand American soldiers in Israel and establish joint task forces that further entwine US-Israeli policies that favor military muscle over diplomacy, equal human rights and justice.

Presidential candidates pontificate over the dangers of nuclear weapons in Iran and are oblivious to the danger to the American people because of US support of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and collusion in Israel’s nuclear ambiguity/deceptions.

As the West was adopting more sanctions against Tehran claiming Iran is manufacturing WMD, Iran responded in a 10-day war game naval exercise near the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

All of the oil output of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq and Iran run through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is well equipped with missile boats and land-based missiles. It doesn’t require much intelligence to comprehend that Iran would close off the Strait of Hormuz as soon as the first plane from Israel or US entered Iranian airspace. The blowback to the world’s economy with the elimination of nearly a fifth of the industrial nations’ supply of oil would lead to the end of the world as we all now know it.

What we all need to know is what Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s nuclear whistle-blower said just prior to Israel sending him back to solitary confinement for 78 days in 2010-the outcome of his historic freedom of speech trial and punishment for speaking to foreign media in 2004:

“Everyone knows Israel has 200 bombs-hydrogen, nitrogen…No one wants atomic weapons in the Middle East….No one wants Israel or the Middle East to have atomic weapons, because if Israel has the bomb Iran will have the bomb.”

What Americans desperately need to know is what Vanunu told me in 2005:

“President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’

“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then,the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.

“Kennedy demanded inspections. When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.

“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.” [1]

On 2 October 2009, The Washington Times reported that Obama agreed to keep Israel’s nukes ‘secret’ and reaffirmed a 4-decade-old understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.” [2]

Three officials spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, but all said Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May 2009.

Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.

This nuclear deception was reached at a summit between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on 25 September 1969, with “the United States passively accepting Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel does not unveil publicly its capability or test a weapon.”[Ibid]

In 2007, the Nixon library declassified a 19 July 1969, memo from Henry Kissinger, the then national security adviser stating: “While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

The “established international facts” were exposed in 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu told the truth and provided the photographic proof of Israel’s seven story underground WMD Facility that can be viewed on You Tube:

Another established international fact occurred on 17 April 2010, when Iran hosted a conference in Tehran on nuclear disarmament with sixty countries represented.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a statement delivered at the conference stating that nuclear weaponry was “haram” meaning prohibited under Islam and he also blew the doors off Israel’s and America’s nuclear deceptions:

“If America’s claims of fighting the proliferation of nuclear weapons were not false, would the Zionist regime be able to turn the occupied Palestinian lands into an arsenal where a huge number of nuclear weapons are stored while refusing to respect international regulations in this regard, especially the NPT?

“There is only one government that has committed a nuclear crime so far. Only the government of the United States of America has attacked the oppressed people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in an unfair and inhumane war…using or even threatening to use such weapons is a serious violation of the most basic rules of philanthropy and is a clear manifestation of war crimes.

“The greatest violators of the NPT are the powers who have reneged on their obligation to dispose of nuclear weapons mentioned in Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. These powers have even surpassed other countries with respect to promoting nuclear weapons in the world. By providing the Zionist regime with nuclear weapons and supporting its policies, these powers play a direct role in promoting nuclear weapons which is against the obligations they have undertaken according to Article 1 of the NPT.

“We believe that besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation, which is itself a victim of chemical weapons, feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats. We consider the use of such weapons as haram (religiously forbidden) and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.”[3]

In 1987, from Ashkelon prison, Vanunu wrote:

“The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today.

“This struggle is not only a legitimate one – it is a moral, inescapable struggle.

“Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over [and] this issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy.

“Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?” [4]

In 1961, John F. Kennedy warned:

“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

The ties that bind US-Israeli policies are not in the best interests of Americans-or anyone else in the world.

1. BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010

2.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/02/president-obama-has-reaffirmed-a-4-decade-old-secr/

3. http://www.juancole.com/2010/04/khamenei-us-only-nuclear-criminal-for-hiroshima.html

4. BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010

By Eileen Fleming

6 January 2012

Wearewideawake.org

Eileen Fleming, Citizen of CONSCIENCE for House of Representatives 2012, Founder off WeAreWideAwake.org, Staff Member of Salem-news.com , A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com and Columnist for Veteranstoday.com, Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”, Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory” and BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010, http://www.youtube.com/user/eileenfleming

The US administration responded to Iran’s announcement last weekend that its Fordo uranium enrichment plant was operational with renewed threats of military action. The sharp rise in tensions in the Persian Gulf follows steps by the US and Europe to impose an embargo on Iranian oil exports that would ruin the country’s economy.

Speaking on the CBS “Face the Nation” last Sunday, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb at present. But he added, Iran was “developing a nuclear capability” and “that’s what concerns us.”

He warned: “Our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.” Panetta is threatening a devastating US military attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, under the pretext that Tehran is developing nuclear arms.

While insisting that the current US focus was economic and diplomatic pressure, he repeated the mantra that the US was not “taking any option off the table.”

General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked on the same program how difficult it would be for the US to “take out their [Iran’s] nuclear facilities.” He did not address the question directly, but indicated that he was ensuring the “right degree of planning” and positioning of assets “to provide those [military] options in a timely fashion.”

Asked about any attempt by Iran to block the strategic Strait of Hormuz, Panetta declared that the US would not tolerate such action. “That’s another red line for us, and we will respond to them,” he said. Dempsey confirmed that the US “had invested in capabilities to ensure that if that happens, we can defeat that… We would take action and reopen the Straits.”

The US threats are being accompanied by a relentless campaign in the US and international media to demonise Iran as a rogue state bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The opening of a second enrichment plant at Fordo near the city of Qom is portrayed as another step in that direction. Like the Natanz enrichment plant, the second is buried deep underground and heavily guarded—which is hardly surprising, given repeated US and Israeli threats to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Iranian regime has repeatedly insisted that it has no plans to build a nuclear weapon. Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Soltanieh, described the US reaction as “exaggerated and politically motivated.”

According to Iran, the Fordo plant will enrich uranium to the 20 percent level required to produce medical isotopes. Soltanieh pointed out that the IAEA has installed cameras in the plant to monitor operations and carries out regular inspections to ensure enriched uranium is not diverted to military purposes.

The Iranian regime has also signalled a harder line, by imposing a death sentence on Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a US citizen and former Marine convicted of spying. The US has denied that Hekmati was a spy.

These allegations come amid a series of assassinations and a program of sabotage directed against Iran’s nuclear and military programs over the past two years, indicating that Israel is waging a covert war inside Iran, with US support.

The European Union is stepping up pressure on Iran, announcing that a meeting of foreign ministers would be held on January 23—a week earlier than previously proposed—to finalise an oil embargo already agreed in principle. Divisions still exist among EU members, some of which like Greece are heavily dependent on Iranian oil and are seeking a lengthy “grace period” to find alternate supplies. Europe accounts for about 20 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is currently visiting China and Japan, both of which are large importers of Iranian oil, to press them to wind back their purchases from Iran. US President Obama has signed a measure into law that would exclude corporations doing business with Iran’s central bank from the American financial system. Most of Iran’s oil transactions involve the central bank.

Japan, a close American ally, has already taken steps to reduce its oil imports from Iran. Japan’s state-owned exploration company Impex has already bowed to US pressure to abandon its joint development of the Azadegan natural gas field. Japan’s Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba told the media yesterday that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been approached to supply more oil as Japan wound back its imports from Iran. Japan and South Korea buy about 25 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

China, which is confronting US demands on multiple fronts, has so far resisted US bullying. Last week, President Obama released a key strategic review that made Asia the top priority for the US military and singled out China as the chief threat to American economic and strategic interests in the region.

In Beijing, Geithner will repeat US demands that China revalue its currency. Trade relations are already tense after China imposed tariffs on imported American automobiles in November and began an inquiry into US government subsidies for renewable energy industries. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration is setting up a new task force to investigate alleged unfair trade and business practices by China.

The US demand that China fall into line with unilateral American sanctions on Iran is another device designed to undermine Chinese economic and strategic interests. China has developed close economic relations with Iran and purchases large quantities of Iranian oil, in part to avoid being dependent on close American allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

China has publicly opposed the imposition of further penalties on Iran via the UN Security Council and has so far refused to back Washington’s sanctions. China’s vice foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, declared on Monday: “Regular economic and trade relations between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue.”

Washington’s attempts to strong-arm Beijing underscore the fact that the sharpening US confrontation with Iran is part of a global imperialist strategy that goes far beyond concerns with Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Rather, US imperialism is seeking to establish its untrammelled hegemony over the key energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, as a means of undermining its European and Asian rivals.

Geithner’s visit to Beijing contains the implicit threat that the US could punish Chinese corporations for trading with Iran—a move that would dramatically heighten economic tensions between the US and China.

By Peter Symonds

11 January 2012

@ WSWS.org

It may come as a surprise to Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum but the U.S. is obligated under international law to the peaceful resolution of its grievance against Iran.

Santorum has criticized President Obama’s attempt to negotiate withIran and, according to The Christian Science Monitor, “called for increased covert sabotage, bombings, and even arresting foreign scientists” working in Iran. Romney has called Iran “the greatest threat we face” and for pulverizing its nuclear facilities “through airstrikes and (to) make it very public we are doing just that.”

If the U.S. sought to prevail by military force, however, it would be in contravention of at least three historic treaties the U.S. has signed pledging itself to the peaceful resolution of disputes. As war fever sweeps Washington and the Republican candidates, save for Rep. Ron Paul, cry for war, it behooves Iran to initiate legal action.

In this age of instantaneous communications, the whole world is watching to see if either nation will seize the diplomatic initiative, to see which truly prefers conversation to conflict. As members of the United Nations, both Iran and the U.S. are obligated to go to arbitration, not to come out shooting, a fact lost on the hawkish GOP politicians who seem unaware the American people have had a bellyful of war and want to prioritize a domestic agenda.

According to Francis Boyle, a world renowned international law professor, both Iran and the U.S. are signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 which states, “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

To the contrary, “The United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran going back to the Bush Jr. Administration,” says international law authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign, and author of “Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11”(Clarity Press).

Boyle reminds, “Article 2 of the United Nations Charter requires the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran.” The UN Charter, he adds, “sets up numerous procedures” for the U.S.-Iranian dispute while prohibiting “both the threat and use of force by the United States against Iran.”

Ditto for the Hague Convention of 1899, to which both nations are a party. That pact set up the Permanent Court of Arbitration(PCA) in The Hague and made it the duty of other signatories of that treaty to remind the aggrieved parties the Court is there for them.

The reason given by the U.S. for threatening Iran is alleged to be that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon in secret. This charge is made with a straight face even as the U.S. lavishes military aid on its ally Israel. Israel is said to have an arsenal of 200-300 nuclear bombs it refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect.

The spurious U.S. pretext for war flies in the face of U.S. aggression against Iran long before Iran began building the nuclear facilities it says are needed to expand electrical output. Past U.S. aggression had everything to do with Iran’s oil and nothing else.

It is indisputable that the CIA in 1953 overthrew by force and violence Iran’s democratic government, causing Iranians years of suffering under a savage, despotic regime. The CIA overthrow was prompted by Great Britain, peeved when Iran took over management of its own oil fields after years of being cheated by the British corporation to whom they were entrusted. That firm today is known as BP.

The U.S. also backed Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran and supplied him with conventional weapons as well as illegal chemical and biological warfare agents responsible for the horrible killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Iranian troops. This was, in fact, by any reasoning, an act of war by the U.S. against Iran.

As peace activist David Swanson writes on OpEdNews January 6th: “For the past decade, the United States has labeled Iran an evil nation, attacked and destroyed the other non-nuclear nation on the list of evil nations, designated part of Iran’s military a terrorist organization, falsely accused Iran of crimes including the attacks of 9-11, murdered Iranian scientists, funded opposition groups in Iran (including some the U.S. also designates as terrorist), flown drones over Iran, openly and illegally threatened to attack Iran, and built up military forces all around Iran’s borders, while imposing cruel sanctions on the country.”

This same U.S. that is threatening to Iran today has a long history of lying in order to justify its wars of aggression. It lied to invade Iraq by charging Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, when he did not. It lied in 1964 to justify its war in Viet Nam when it claimed the Vietnamese attacked a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, when they did not. And much of the U.S. public believes Washington lied about those responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington to justify the start of the war against Afghanistan. Aggressive nations relish a fight and the U.S. presently is doing just that in a half dozen countries in the Middle East and Africa.

This history is important because, by contrast, Iran has not started a war in approximately 300 years. Its defense budget of less than $8 billion a year is a tiny fraction of the U.S. warfare budget of nearly $1 trillion annually. (Describing Iran as America’s “gravest threat” reflects poorly on Romney’s foreign affairs smarts.) In fact, Iran would commit national suicide if it launched an attack upon the U.S. or Israel. The Pentagon’s annual budget is the largest in the world and, in fact, greater than the next 20 military powers combined.

Yet another measure of Iran’s peaceful intent and America’s warlike posture is that Iran has no military bases outside of its own borders while the U.S. has over 800 bases around the world from Okinawa to Diego Garcia, frequently established against the will of the local inhabitants. More than 40 U.S. bases are located in six nations that encircle Iran, from which the Pentagon is poised to attack.

Betraying America’s aggressive intent is that none of its military response has been to defend its own borders from attack. Its troops are always waging war halfway around the world in Asia and the Middle East, bombing the other guy’s yard. Given the foregoing facts, which nation does Gov. Romney conclude poses the greater menace to world peace and security? Iran, of course.

While Iran’s military in recent days says it will give a good account of itself if attacked, there is every prospect Iran would suffer the terrible punishments the U.S. inflicted on Viet Nam and Iraq, among others, if war broke out.

An imaginative leadership in Iran likely would be better off to announce in advance a course of non-violent resistance to any aggressive move by the U.S. and/or Israel. And it needs to immediately present its case to the International Court of Justice at the Peace Palace in The Hague.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here Is The Legal Opinion by Francis A. Boyle

Article 2 (3) of the United Nations Charter requires the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. To the same effect is article 33 and the entirety of Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter that mandate and set up numerous procedures for the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. And of course Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits both the threat and use of force by the United States against Iran.

Furthermore, both Iran and the United States are parties to the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, upon which legal basis the Nazi Leaders were prosecuted by the United States, inter alia, at Nuremberg for Crimes against Peace, sentenced to death, and executed. In Article I thereof the States Parties “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” The United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran going back to the Bush Jr. Administration. Article II requires the United States only to pursue a pacific settlement of its international dispute with Iran: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

Finally, both the United States and Iran are parties to the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. This seminal Hague Peace Convention establishes numerous mechanisms for the pacific settlement of international disputes between contracting parties that are too numerous to analyze here. But they are discussed in detail in my book Foundations of World Order (Duke University Press: 1999). According to article 27 thereof, if a serious dispute threatens to break out between contracting powers, it was the DUTY of the other contracting powers to remind them that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is open to them, and such reminder could not be treated as an unfriendly act of intervention by the disputants. Today the world needs one State party to either the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes or the 1907 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes to publicly remind both the United States and Iran that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, together with its International Bureau and the entirety of the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes , are available to the two States in order to resolve their dispute in a peaceful manner.

After the terrorist assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June of 1914, Serbia made an offer to Austria to submit the entire dispute to “the International Tribunal of The Hague”—i.e.,to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Austria did not accept the offer, the First World War broke out, and about 10 Million Human Beings were needlessly slaughtered. The death toll from World War III will be incalculable. Humanity must not allow our history to repeat itself! Otherwise, that could be the end of our Humanity.

By Sherwood Ross

8 January 2012

Countercurrents.org

(Sherwood Ross is an American public relations consultant who formerly reported for major dailies and wire services and was active in the civil rights movement. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail. com).