One gets the impression that there are some people in Washington who believe that Israel or the U.S. can bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, fly home, and it will be mission complete.
It makes you wonder if perhaps there is a virus going around that is gradually making people stupid. If we or Israel attack Iran, we will have a new war on our hands. The Iranians are not going to shrug off an attack and say, “You naughty boys, you.”
Consider how much trouble Iraq has given us. Some 4,000 dead and 29,000 wounded, a half a trillion dollars in cost and still climbing, and five years later, we cannot say that the country is pacified.
Iraq is a small country compared with Iran. Iran has about 70 million people. Its western mountains border the Persian Gulf. In other words, its missiles and guns look down on the U.S. ships below it. And it has lots of missiles, from short-range to intermediate-range (around 2,200 kilometers).
More to the point, it has been equipped by Russia with the fastest anti-ship missile on the planet. The SS-N-22 Sunburn can travel at Mach 3 at high altitude and at Mach 2.2 at low altitude. That is faster than anything in our arsenal.
Iran’s conventional forces include an army of 540,000 men and 300,000 reserves, including 120,000 Iranian Guards especially trained in unconventional warfare. It has more than 1,600 main battle tanks and 21,000 other armored combat vehicles. It has 3,200 artillery pieces, three submarines, 59 surface warships and 10 amphibious ships.
It’s been receiving help in arming itself from China, North Korea and Russia. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s forces have not been worn down with bombing, wars and sanctions. It also has a new anti-aircraft defense system from Russia that I’ve heard is pretty snazzy.
So, if you think we or Israel can attack Iran and not expect retaliation, I’d have to say with regret that you are a moron. If you think we could easily handle Iran in an all-out war, I’d have to promote you to idiot.
Attacking Iran would be folly, but we seem to be living in the Age of Folly. Morons and idiots took us into an unjustified war against Iraq before we had finished the job in Afghanistan. Now we have troops tied down in both countries.
For some years now, I’ve worried that we seem to be more and more like Colonial England – arrogant, racist, overestimating our own capacity and underestimating that of our enemies. As the fate of the British Empire demonstrates, that is a fatal flaw.
The British never dreamed that the “little yellow people” could come ashore by land and take Singapore from the rear or that they would sink the pride of the British fleet, but they did both.
I suppose no one in Washington can imagine the Iranians sinking one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf. How’d you like to be the president who has to tell the American people that we’ve lost a carrier for the first time since World War II?
Exactly how the Iranians will respond to an attack, I don’t know, but they will respond. In keeping with our present policy, our attack on Iran would be illegal, since under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
Who would have thought that we would become the rogue nation committing acts of aggression around the globe?
She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency’s spies in Iran probably didn’t think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.
But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.
Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to “roll up” the CIA’s network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.
This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.
In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration’s public arguments. On the heels of the CIA’s failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA’s Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn’t know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.
But it’s worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: “Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?”
The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna’s winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.
To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a “firing set”, for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.
The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn’t believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian - the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict the spread of nuclear technology.
The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few strings attached.
Until now. The CIA was placing him on the front line of a plan that seemed to be completely at odds with the interests of the US, and it had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince him to go through with what appeared to be a rogue operation.
The case officer worked hard to convince him - even though he had doubts about the plan as well. As he was sweet-talking the Russian into flying to Vienna, the case officer wondered whether he was involved in an illegal covert action. Should he expect to be hauled before a congressional committee and grilled because he was the officer who helped give nuclear blueprints to Iran? The code name for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared to be. He did his best to hide his concerns from his Russian agent.
The Russian’s assignment from the CIA was to pose as an unemployed and greedy scientist who was willing to sell his soul - and the secrets of the atomic bomb - to the highest bidder. By hook or by crook, the CIA told him, he was to get the nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. They would quickly recognise their value and rush them back to their superiors in Tehran.
The plan had been laid out for the defector during a CIA-financed trip to San Francisco, where he had meetings with CIA officers and nuclear experts mixed in with leisurely wine-tasting trips to Sonoma County. In a luxurious San Francisco hotel room, a senior CIA official involved in the operation talked the Russian through the details of the plan. He brought in experts from one of the national laboratories to go over the blueprints that he was supposed to give the Iranians.
The senior CIA officer could see that the Russian was nervous, and so he tried to downplay the significance of what they were asking him to do. He said the CIA was mounting the operation simply to find out where the Iranians were with their nuclear programme. This was just an intelligence-gathering effort, the CIA officer said, not an illegal attempt to give Iran the bomb. He suggested that the Iranians already had the technology he was going to hand over to them. It was all a game. Nothing too serious.
On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran’s nuclear programme by sending Iran’s weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran’s goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran’s reaction to the blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the status of Iran’s weapons programme, which has been shrouded in secrecy.
The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. “This isn’t right,” he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. “There is something wrong.” His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting seemed surprised by the Russian’s assertion that the blueprints didn’t look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either.
In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian’s personal handler had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. “He wasn’t supposed to know that,” the CIA case officer told his superior. “He wasn’t supposed to find a flaw.”
“Don’t worry,” the senior CIA officer calmly replied. “It doesn’t matter.”
The CIA case officer couldn’t believe the senior CIA officer’s answer, but he managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and continued to train him for his mission.
After their trip to San Francisco, the case officer handed the Russian a sealed envelope with the nuclear blueprints inside. He was told not to open the envelope under any circumstances. He was to follow the CIA’s instructions to find the Iranians and give them the envelope with the documents inside. Keep it simple, and get out of Vienna safe and alive, the Russian was told. But the defector had his own ideas about how he might play that game.
The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would be travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the IAEA, and so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at the same time. It was hoped that he could make contact with either the Iranian representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran.
In Vienna, however, the Russian unsealed the envelope with the nuclear blueprints and included a personal letter of his own to the Iranians. No matter what the CIA told him, he was going to hedge his bets. There was obviously something wrong with the blueprints - so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter. They would certainly find flaws for themselves, and if he didn’t tell them first, they would never want to deal with him again.
The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could that there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he could help them find it. At the same time, he was still going through with the CIA’s operation in the only way he thought would work.
The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a quiet, slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna’s north end. Amid the list of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line: “PM/Iran.” The Iranians clearly didn’t want publicity. An Austrian postman helped him. As the Russian stood by, the postman opened the building door and dropped off the mail. The Russian followed suit; he realised that he could leave his package without actually having to talk to anyone. He slipped through the front door, and hurriedly shoved his envelope through the inner-door slot at the Iranian office.
The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply relieved that he had made the hand-off without having to come face to face with a real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without being detected by either Austrian security or, more importantly, Iranian intelligence.
Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian official in Vienna abruptly changed his schedule, making airline reservations to fly home to Iran. The odds were that the nuclear blueprints were now in Tehran.
The Russian scientist’s fears about the operation seemed well founded. He was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President George W Bush has called the “axis of evil”.
Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It’s not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist’s fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states.
Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin - handing over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America’s adversaries - is a trick that has been used many times in past operations, stretching back to the cold war. But in previous cases, such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear bomb. The former officials also said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development. That may be what happened with Merlin.
Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints. Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.
“If [the flaw] is bad enough,” warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, “they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear”
WASHINGTON, Jun 2 (IPS) - For many months, the propaganda line that explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that could penetrate U.S. armoured vehicles were coming straight from Iran has been embraced publicly by the entire George W. Bush administration. But when that argument was proposed internally by military officials in January 2007, it was attacked by key administration officials as unsupported by the facts.
Vice President Dick Cheney was able to get around those objections and get his Iranian EFP line accepted only because of arrangements he and Bush made with Gen. David Petraeus before he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The initial draft of the proposed military briefing on the issue of EFPs, which asserted flatly that EFPs were being manufactured and smuggled to Iraqi Shiite groups directly by the Iranian regime, was met with unanimous objection from the State Department, Defence Department and National Security Council staff, as administration officials themselves stated publicly.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tried to push back against Cheney’s proposed line because they recognised it as an effort to go well beyond the compromise policy toward Iran that had been worked out in December and early January. The compromise policy had been to focus on networks working on procuring EFPs within Iraq and not to target Iran as directly responsible.
At his regular press briefing on Jan. 24, 2007, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Department spokesman Sean McCormack revealed the primary basis for the State, Defence and NSC opposition to the Cheney line on EFPs.
Asked whether the U.S. government had any evidence that EFPs were manufactured in Iran, McCormack did not answer directly but said, “You don’t necessarily have to construct something in Iran in order for it to be a threat to the U.S. or British troops from the Iranian regime. There are lots of different ways you can do that. You can bring the know-how. You can train other people in Iraq to do that.”
McCormack thus revealed that the State Department wasn’t buying the accusation that Iran was manufacturing EFPs and sending them to the Shiite forces of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army fighting against U.S. forces.
On Feb. 2, while briefing the news media on the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, Hadley asserted bluntly that the draft military briefing that had been circulated in Washington had not been based on evidence.
“The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing was overstated,” said Hadley. “We sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts.”
Hadley did not tell reporters which points in the draft briefing paper had not been based on the evidence, but the remarks by McCormack and Gates were clear indications that the briefing had made claims of Iranian manufacturing of weapons and smuggling them into Iraq that could not be supported.
Hadley further revealed that he, Gates and Rice had tried to use the imminence of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to force the issue of the briefing’s exaggerated claims. The briefing, he said was “an attempt to…address some of the issues in the NIE in a briefing on intelligence of Iranian activity in Iraq. And we thought, hey, why are we doing this?”
He said he and his associates wanted a briefing that “we’re confident everyone can stand behind”. The national security adviser was implying that the proposed briefing was not supported by the NIE on Iraq, and that the drafters would therefore have to redraft it so that the intelligence community could support it.
Hadley didn’t say who he meant by “we”, but Gates told reporters the same day that he and Rice had joined Hadley in ensuring that the planned briefing “is dominated by facts”.
The declassified version of the NIE’s main conclusions indicated that it did not support the claim that Iran was exporting EFPs to the Mahdi Army. The only sentence that related to the issue was, “Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq.” But in the absence of any language alleging Iranian EFP manufacture and export to Iraq, that phrase appears to be a reference to training of Mahdi Army officers.
Hadley, Rice and Gates thus appeared to believe that the briefing would have to reflect the NIE, and that they would be able to review the revised version before it was presented to the press. On Feb. 9, State Department spokesman McCormack said, “[W]hen the working-level folks at the deputies level…produce a presentation that they are comfortable with, I am sure that they’ll share it with Secretary Rice, Secretary Gates and Steve Hadley over at the NSC just for review.”
But Cheney had a surprise for the opponents of his hard line on Iran. When White House spokeswoman Dana Perino was asked on Feb. 9 about when the briefing would be held, she replied, “Decisions on that are being made out in Baghdad.”
That announcement came just as Gen. George W. Casey was to be replaced by Gen. Petraeus as the new commander. Petraeus had only arrived in Iraq the day before and the changeover ceremony came on Feb. 10.
The day after the ceremony, three military officers presented a briefing to the press which not only asserted that the EFPs could only have been manufactured in Iran but that Iran’s Qods Force was behind the smuggling of those weapons into Iraq. They strongly suggested, moreover, that the Iranian government knew about the smuggling.
Cheney had used the compliant Petraeus to do an end-run around the national security bureaucracy. Petraeus had already reached agreement with the White House to take Cheney’s line on the EFPs issue and to present the briefing immediately without consulting State or Defence.
State and Defence tried to counter this manoeuvre. McCormack argued, rather lamely, that the briefing had really been about “a threat to our troops from these devices and from the networks that supply them”. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, responded by saying that he could not “from his own knowledge” confirm the assertion that the Qods Force was providing bomb-making kits to Shiite insurgents.
The U.S. command in Baghdad temporarily backed away from the briefers’ charge against Iran. The command spokesman, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, who had been one of the three military briefers, was forced to tell reporters on Feb. 14 that the purpose of the briefing had been to talk only about the threat to U.S. troops, implying that briefers had gone beyond their brief in making statements about Iranian complicity.
But the hardline position on EFP was the one that dominated press coverage. Instead of the more cautious line focusing on the EFP networks inside Iraq, which was what State, Defence and NSC and agreed to in January, Cheney now had a potential casus belli against Iran.
And Cheney would continue to use his alliance with Petraeus to advance his proposal for an attack on Qods Force bases in Iran. The very first episode in the Cheney-Petraeus alliance sheds additional light on the nomination of Petraeus to become the new CENTCOM commander later this year.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Today, Friday, May 30, 2008, I sat in Courtroom 13 on the 5th floor of the federal courthouse in San Diego and watched in horror as a white male former Marine general, acting as attorney for Blackwater International, a private Christian evangelical mercenary (death squad) corporation, told a sweet-looking blonde female federal judge, Marilyn Huff, that they were being discriminated against, and the judge not only agreed with their argument and confronted the city attorney with it, but also added a charge of diversity. Diversity? San Diego has too few murderers and killers to meet federal diversity standards?
The story behind this is that Blackwater intends to have a large presence in San Diego, and everywhere else in the U.S. possible, so that it will be in a position to quell any civil unrest that may happen after the next stolen Presidential election in November. In the meantime it will compete for work training U.S. military troops and guarding the border against Mexican invaders. Blackwater tried to open a training facility in Potrero, but seeing that they were likely to be unsuccessful due to public outrage, they quietly began seeking permits for another facility in Otay Mesa under the names of front companies like Raven (raven means black). But their purpose in Otay Mesa was also disguised. They said at different times that it would be a law enforcement training facility, a vocational school, or just a warehouse. Once all the permits had been granted, it became clear to the city that this was to be a mercenary training facility and the city exercised its discretion to stop them from opening before there was further review. Blackwater then went to federal court seeking a temporary restraining order on the grounds of irreparable injury, and the judge will grant their order on Monday.
Obviously Judge Huff does not understand what discrimination is. If people disliked Blackwater because of a historically suspect category, such as age, race, sex, disability, etc., that would be discrimination. But to dislike a company because they are known for shooting civilians indiscriminately and with impunity is not discrimination, it is fear.
In order to get a temporary restraining order in federal court, Blackwater had to show that otherwise they would suffer irreparable injury. The San Diego attorney cited rulings stating that loss of income is not an irreparable injury and the judge asked the Blackwater attorney to state what the injury was. Instead he began talking about our brave fighting men and women defending our country. Believe me, you’ve never seen a Marine speak so respectfully of the Navy before, because it is a contract with the Navy that begins on Monday that Blackwater stood to lose, at least temporarily, if the order was not granted. Since a temporary loss of income is not irreparable, he never did answer the judge’s question, but sought shelter behind false patriotism and phony national security. Mexico is not invading the U.S. and has no intentions of doing so, and our efforts to deport undocumented workers have been so successful that several U.S. farms and factories have had to move to Mexico in order to be able to rehire their deported workers when they could find no adequate replacements for them here. We are not only not under attack, we are waging wars of aggression, so self-defense is not an argument. To hear this mouthpiece say it, you’d think that if the restraining order was not granted, Osama bin Laden and five million crazed terrorists would cross the Mexican border and conquer the United States.
This remarkable proceeding is the final proof, if any more were needed, that the fascist takeover of America is complete. A federal court has no business intervening in a city’s business, not even if the company’s owner is a friend of Bush and Cheney. This means that we no longer have any local or states’ rights whatsoever, as the federal counts, stacked with judges appointed by the fascist regime in Washington, will always intervene on behalf of facism whenever states or municipalities attempt to assert their rights.
The city may appeal the ruling, but the Blackwater presence in San Diego is now a fait accompli and cannot be undone. Even if the city were to win on appeal, which it should because the laws are definitely on the side of the city, the case would just be appealed by Blackwater until it reached the Supreme Court, where the partisan thugs who installed Bush against the will of the people, including some who were appointed by that unelected President, would rule for Blackwater. No matter how illegal or unconstitutional a Supreme Court ruling, there is no possible appeal from that unelected body. A democracy is a form of government in which the ultimate power belongs to the people, not to unelected fascist thugs and their cronies.
An hour before the court hearing began, we held a protest in front of the courthouse. We had “Stop Blackwater” t-shirts, signs, and banners. A woman standing near me was talking about the election, so I asked what has become my standard question these days, “Would you still vote if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet?” She said that she would. She is one of millions of people concerned about their right to vote, but who don’t actually care whether or not their vote is really counted or if it gives them a voice in government. As long as they can vote, they’re happy. The man standing next to her said, “Well, if a lot of people didn’t vote, maybe it would make a difference.” I said, “How’s fifty percent?” He said, “But they’re apathetic.” I said, “You don’t care if your vote is counted or not, and you call them apathetic?”
One of the protest organizers asked afterwards if anything like this had happened in Nazi Germany. I explained that it had. That many people had trusted the courts to uphold what laws remained, but the courts were just as fascist as the Nazis. Judges who weren’t, were forced off the bench. Fascist dictators appoint judges on the basis of blind loyalty, and their lapdog legislators confirm them to show their collegial support for and complicity in fascism.
Blackwater has been getting a lot of publicity. As private contractors they consider themselves exempt from all laws, domestic, foreign, and international. But they went running to the law for help when they feared a possible temporary setback to their plans. In truth the city of San Diego might be able to delay their operations, but probably couldn’t keep them out. We have a “strong mayor” system, so the mayor, who only became mayor after not one, not two, but three rigged elections, is the decider, and he said on the radio the night before the hearing that he believed that Blackwater’s permits were in order. We the people don’t get to actually vote on issues of concern to us, we can only vote for “representatives” but our votes are counted secretly by easily and undetectably hackable central tabulators and our elections officials in San Diego are a former voting machine salesperson and a guy who stated publicly that he didn’t think that manipulating a recount so that the ballots would match a fraudulent machine count was wrong. So good luck with those elections.
Author Jeremy Scahill, who has written extensively about Blackwater, will be in San Diego on June 10th. Although they didn’t say so, it is his scheduled book signing at the Unitarian/Universalist church that Blackwater feared might cause them irreparable injury, as Scahill has documented who the owners of Blackwater are, what sort of murderers and terrorists they hire, and why a company like that has no place in a democracy.
This was a sad day for America and a sad day for democracy. The poor itty bitty multi-billion dollar death squad terrorist mercenary corporation told a federal judge that they felt discriminated against, and the judge bought it. Actually, it seemed like the judge had made up her mind before hand, as she was arguing on behalf of Blackwater, handing them citations, and belittling the city and the relevant laws. On the question of jurisdiction, the right of the federal courts to preempt a city’s discretion, she did say that she didn’t think that an ordinary citizen could run to federal court if a city denied a building or business permit, but she obviously doesn’t consider Bush cronies like Blackwater to be ordinary citizens. Fascists get special treatment and favors in fascist courts.
And so, having witnessed it, I am already in a state of shock. But this shock may not reach the average San Diegan or the average American until another catastrophe like 9/11 or hurricane Katrina hits, and that will be much too late as Blackwater mercenaries will be in our streets and in helicopters overhead with automatic weapons to prevent us from getting food or medical help or escaping death. If we had a voice in the matter, we might say no. But we have no voice. Our elections aren’t about giving us a voice, they’re about legitimizing elite rule and depriving us of any voice. Instead we are told that our vote is our voice, and then our votes aren’t counted. Too bad, nothing to see here, move along.
“My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”
Ralph Nader, the consumer activist and independent presidential candidate, seems to think that the report of the commission assigned to investigate the events of 9-11 should not be the last word.
“There are unanswered questions in the 9-11 investigation, and they should be answered,” Nader said at a recent address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “How do you go from plausibility to evidence? You have a more independent inquiry.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, airliners collided with each of the twin towers of New York City�s World Trade Center, after which they and a third nearby office building mysteriously collapsed. Other incidents on the same day at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania were also attributed to aircraft collisions. �All were pitched by the government as the result of a terrorist conspiracy, although it is widely believed that the government may have played a direct role in orchestrating the events.
After public cries for an investigation, President George Bush and Congress deputized the 9-11 Commission, which issued its report in 2004. While the report was praised by some, critics contended that it was not much more than a government whitewash.
On another topic, Nader had kind words to say for presidential candidate, Ron Paul.
“Ron Paul is very good on foreign policy,” he said. “He’s a refreshing voice.”
Nader also praised Paul for his outspoken opposition to the aggressive U.S. stance against Iran and the so-called �war-on-drugs.�
Paul is vying with John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination.
Nader’s remarks were made on April 4, and aired on C-SPAN today.
March 20, 2008, destined to be another day of infamy. On this date the US officially declared war on Iran. But it’s not going to be the kind of war many have been expecting.
No, there was no dramatic televised announcement by President George W. Bush from the White House oval office. In fact on this day, reports the Washington Post, Bush spent some time communicating directly with Iranians, telling them via Radio Farda (the US-financed broadcaster that transmits to Iran in Farsi, Iran’s native language) that their government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” But not to worry, he told his listeners in Farsi-translated Bushspeak: Tehran would not get the bomb because the US would be “firm.”
Over at the US Congress, no war resolution was passed, no debate transpired, no last-minute hearing on the Iran “threat” was held. The Pentagon did not put its forces on red alert and cancel all leave. The top story on the Pentagon’s website (on March 20) was: “Bush Lauds Military’s Performance in Terror War,” a feel-good piece about the president’s appearance on the US military’s TV channel to praise “the performance and courage of U.S. troops engaged in the global war on terrorism.” Bush discussed Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa but not Iran.
But make no mistake. As of Thursday, March 20 the US is at war with Iran.
