In two articles yesterday (1/5/12), the New York Times misled readers about the state of Iran's nuclear program.

On the front page, the Times' Steven Erlanger reported this:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign.

There is no such International Atomic Energy Agency assessment. The IAEA report the Times is mischaracterizing raised questions about the state of the Iranian program, and presented the evidence, mostly years old, that Iran's critics say points towards a weapons program. (This evidence has been challenged by outside analysts--see FAIR Media Advisory, 11/16/11.) But the IAEA report made no firm conclusion that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, and noted that its inspections of Iran's facilities continue to show no diversion of uranium for military purposes.

Elsewhere in the Times, readers saw this in a piece by Clifford Krauss about a potential conflict over the Strait of Hormuz:

Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons.

Again, Iran has said repeatedly and emphatically that they are doing no such thing.

(Interestingly, the Times has changed the Web version of the Erlanger article, removing the relevant paragraph - but without noting the error.)

Overstating the case on Iran isn't a new problem at the Times. One story last month (12/8/11) referred matter-of-factly to the "recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."

With tensions between Iran and the United States rising, and Republican presidential candidates agitating for a more confrontational stance, it is imperative that outlets like the New York Times get the story right.

If the Times wishes to do better than it did during the run-up to the Iraq War, it should be more careful.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appears on CBS' Face the Nation this morning and declared, despite enormous public rhetoric among pundits and many US government officials - not to mention GOP presidential candidates, that Iran is not currently trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Associated Press reports today:

[Panetta] says Iran is laying the groundwork for making nuclear weapons someday, but is not yet building a bomb and called for continued diplomatic and economic pressure to persuade Tehran not to take that step. 

As he has previously, Panetta cautioned against a unilateral strike by Israel against Iran's nuclear facilities, saying the action could trigger Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces in the region.

The comments suggest the White House's assessment of Iran's nuclear strategy has not changed in recent months, despite warnings from advocates of military action that time is running out to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Iran says its nuclear program is only for energy and medical research, and refuses to halt uranium enrichment

And although such comments pair with Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is strictly for domestic non-military purposes, and despite renewed warnings to US-allied Israel not to strike Iran prematurely, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, who joined Panetta on Face the Nation rattled the US saber without mistake, saying: he wanted the Iranians to believe that a U.S. military strike could wipe out their nuclear program.

"I absolutely want them to believe that's the case," he said.

Panetta did not rule out launching a pre-emptive strike.

As such threats from both Israel and the United States continue it's little wonder the Iranians would seek to put their nuclear facilities beyond the reach of incoming airstrikes. As Reuters reports:

Iran will in the "near future" start enriching uranium deep inside a mountain, a senior [Iranian] official said. 

A decision by the Islamic Republic to conduct sensitive atomic activities at an underground site - offering better protection against any enemy attacks - could complicate diplomatic efforts to resolve the long-running row peacefully.

Iran has said for months that it is preparing to move its highest-grade uranium refinement work to Fordow, a facility near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Qom in central Iran, from its main enrichment plant at Natanz.

Responding to threats by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, Panetta did not hesitate to raise the possibility of military intervention yet again. According the Agence France-Presse:

"We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz," Panetta told CBS television. "That's another red line for us and that we will respond to them."

Panetta was seconded by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Iran has the means to close the waterway, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes.

"But we would take action and reopen the Straits," the general said.

Iran Not Building A Nuclear Weapon

Such rare voices against war on mainstream US TV ….

from Antony Loewenstein …..

War Made Easy

As arguments flare in Israel and the US about a possible military strike to set back Iran's nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyber attacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to present and former US officials and specialists on Iran.

The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a nuclear scientist in Tehran.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran's halting but determined progress towards making a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be murdered since 2007. A sixth, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of the Atomic Energy Organisation in Iran.

Iran blamed Israel and the US for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base. While US officials deny a role in lethal activities, the US is believed to engage in other covert efforts against Iran.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any complicity. The US statements appeared to reflect serious concern about the attacks, which some believe could backfire by undercutting future talks and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

Like the drone strikes the Obama administration has used against al-Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran's enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon.

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia University, said he believed the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work. ''How [would] the US would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed ... I think we'd fight back, and Iran will, too.''

The New York Times

US, Israel Taking A Risky Path Over Iran

and the consequences of our terrorism ....

The method of the assassination was all too familiar. The motorcycle with the pillion passenger, the magnetic bomb and the lifeless body left in the car. Wednesday's attack in Tehran was the fifth on an Iranian nuclear scientist. In four cases, including Wednesday's assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the results have been fatal.

What is different is the level of tension surrounding the murder. Naval war games have been performed in the Gulf and more are planned. There is a war of words between Tehran and Washington over the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point in the Gulf that Iran threatens to close.

The level of stress in the West's confrontation with Tehran is about to be raised yet again with a new EU oil embargo, due to take effect in six months' time, according to an agreement in principle in Brussels.

The European embargo is due to coincide with US measures targeting the financing of the Iranian oil trade, effective in June - an attempt forced through by a combative Congress in December to strangle the Iranian economy. Even some US commentators think this could be equivalent to a declaration of war.

''The Obama administration has no intention of going to war with Iran,'' said Trita Parsi, author of a new book on Obama's policy on Iran, A Single Roll of the Dice. ''But the administration wants to create a credible threat of war, in the belief that Iran only responds to such credible threats.''

In the midst of this volatile situation, the killing of another Iranian nuclear scientist has all the potential of a struck match at an explosives dump.

And Parsi said the Israelis, well aware they cannot destroy the Iranian program on their own, have a motive for lighting the match.

Whether it is responsible or not, the Israeli military establishment has a motive to claim successes in the covert war on Iran, as General Benny Gantz did this week, because it is under political pressure to start an overt one.

The generals, however, know Israeli air strikes would unleash a war without accomplishing their goal of destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

A covert war may appear a better alternative. Individual killings may not seriously hinder a large program, but they would certainly deter young Iranians from taking that line of work.

However, such a campaign is not without huge risks for the region. Elements of the Iranian establishment seem to be lashing out in frustration. Last October's bomb plot against the Saudi ambassador and Israeli diplomats in Washington, alleged to be the work of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was amateurish and reckless.

Likewise, the storming of the British embassy appeared to have gone much further than the leadership intended, and deepened Tehran's isolation.

The fragmentation of the regime will have unpredictable, and possibly very violent, outcomes. Whoever is killing Iran's scientists is clearly willing to risk catastrophic consequences that could engulf the region.

Killing Iran's Nuclear Scientists Courts Catastrophe

Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistani terror group to carry out assassinations and attacks against the regime in Iran, Foreign Policy revealed on Friday, quoting U.S. intelligence memos.

Foreign Policy's Mark Perry reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government, and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.

Perry quotes a number of American intelligence officials and claims that the Mossad agents used American dollars and U.S. passports to pose as CIA spies to try to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization that has carried out a series of attacks in Iran and assassinations of government officials.

According to the report, Israel's recruitment attempts took place mostly in London, right under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.

"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."

According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, Perry reports, when Bush was briefed on the information he "went absolutely ballistic."

"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told Perry. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."

The intelligence officer said that the Bush administration continued to deal with the affair until the end of his term. He noted that Israel's operation jeopardized the U.S. administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was under immense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah.

According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothing.

"In the end it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat," the intelligence officer said.

Apparently, the Mossad operation caused a fiery debate among Bush's national security team and it was only resolved when U.S. President Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, Perry quotes several serving and retired officers as saying.

The U.S. State Department has vehemently denied any ties to Jundallah and many U.S. intelligence officials remained angry with Israel over the 2007-2008 operation.

"Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us," Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. "If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."

The CIA, the White House, and the Mossad failed to respond to the Foreign Policy report by the time it went to press.

Israeli Mossad Agents Posed As CIS Spies To Recruit Terrorists To Fight Against Iran

Israel’s war against Iran has been going for years. It receives backing from the Western powers and most corporate journalists. Just today Hamish McDonald, a good reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, spews Zionist propaganda about Tehran after a nice, cozy Zionist lobby trip to Israel. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, long-time friend of autocrats everywhere, writes similarly after meeting Netanyahu on the same visit organised by Australian Zionist lobbyist Albert Dadon.

Memo to the MSM; this isn’t journalism, it’s shameless stenography with no alternative voices. If another war erupts in the Middle East, these journalists will be partly to blame for creating an atmosphere of menace based on lies and distortions by a notoriously lying Israeli state (and here’s real reporting, by Max Blumenthal, if journalists need pointers).

Antony Loewenstein

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head.

Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions – like Wednesday’s assassination of yet another Iranian scientist – push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting.

Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. "The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday’s editions.

Though U.S. officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said he didn’t know who killed the scientist but added: "I am definitely not shedding a tear."

The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran’s nuclear program to be killed in the past four years, with a sixth scientist narrowly escaping death in 2010, Fereydoon Abbasi, who is now head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

As might be expected, Iran has denounced the murders as acts of terrorism. They have been accompanied by cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility late last year killing a senior general and 16 others.

While this campaign has slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, it also appears to have hardened its resolve to continue work on a nuclear capability, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only. Iranian authorities also have responded to tightening economic sanctions from Europe and the United States with threats of their own, such as warnings about closing the oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and thus damaging the West’s economies.

Target: USA

Another front in Israel’s cold war against Iran appears to be the propaganda war being fought inside the United States, where the still-influential neoconservatives are deploying their extensive political and media resources to shut off possible routes toward a peaceful settlement, while building support for future military strikes against Iran.

Fitting with that propaganda strategy, the Washington Post’s editorial page, which is essentially the neocons’ media flagship, published a lead editorial on Wednesday urging harsher and harsher sanctions against Iran and ridiculing anyone who favored reduced tensions.

Noting Iran’s announcement that it had opened a better-protected uranium enrichment plant near Qom, the Post wrote: "In short, the new Fordow operation crosses another important line in Iran’s advance toward a nuclear weapons capability.

"Was it a red line for Israel or the United States? Apparently not, for the Obama administration at least. In a television interview Sunday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: ‘Our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon.’ He asserted that Tehran was not trying to develop a weapon now, only ‘a nuclear capability.’ The Revolutionary Guard, which controls the nuclear program, might well take that as a green light for the new enrichment operation."

While portraying Panetta as an Iranian tool, the Post suggested that anyone who wanted to turn back from an Iran confrontation was an Iranian useful fool. The Post wrote:

"The recent flurry of Iranian threats has had the intended effect of prompting a new chorus of demands in Washington that the United States and its allies stop tightening sanctions and instead make another attempt at ‘engagement’ with the regime. The Ahmadinejad government itself reportedly has proposed new negotiations, and Turkey has stepped forward as a host.

"Almost certainly, any talks will reveal that Iran is unwilling to stop its nuclear activities or even to make significant concessions. But they may serve to stop or greatly delay a European oil embargo or the implementation of sanctions on the [Iranian] central bank - and buy time for the Fordow centrifuges to do their work."

The Post’s recommended instead "that every effort must be made to intensify sanctions" and to stop Iranian sale of oil anywhere in the world. In other words, continue to ratchet up the tensions and cut off hopes for genuine negotiations.

A Vulnerable Obama

The escalating neocon demands for an ever-harder U.S. line against Iran - and Israel’s apparent campaign of killings and sabotage inside Iran - come at a time when President Barack Obama and some of his inner circle appear to be looking again for ways to defuse tensions. But the Post’s editorial – and similar neocon propaganda – have made clear that any move toward reconciliation will come with a high political price tag.

Already, a recurring Republican talking point is that Obama’s earlier efforts to open channels of negotiation with Iran and other foreign adversaries proved his naivete and amounted to "apologizing" for America. Obama also has faced resistance within his own administration, especially from neocon-lites such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For instance, in spring 2010, a promising effort – led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil’s then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – got Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country’s supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research.

The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 – and the effort had the President’s private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.

At the time, Clinton’s position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."]

As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations’ sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington’s political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.

Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran’s work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.

In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex. So, if he again searches for openings to negotiate with Iran, he can expect the same kind of nasty disdain that the Washington Post heaped on Panetta on Wednesday.

The Carter-Begin Precedent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders appear to fear a second Obama term – when he’d be freed from the need to seek re-election – much as their predecessors feared a second term for President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Then, Prime Minister Menachem Begin thought that Carter in a second term would team up with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in forcing Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Begin’s alarm about that prospect was described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin’s government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinians.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington," Kimche wrote. "They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Extensive evidence now exists that Begin’s preference for Ronald Reagan led Israelis to join in a covert operation with Republicans to contact Iranian leaders behind Carter’s back and delay release of the 52 American hostages then being held in Iran until after Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s "The Back Story on Iran’s Clashes."]

Today, Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu seems as strained as Carter’s relationship with Begin was three decades ago. And already many American neocons have signed up with Obama’s Republican rivals, including with GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney whose foreign policy white paper was written by prominent neocons.

So the question now is: Will the President of the United States take his place amid the herd of cattle getting steered into the slaughterhouse of another war?

Herding Americans to War With Iran

They buried a young scientist called Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan in Tehran on Friday. And if the hazardous carousel of attacks, embargoes and official threats does not slow down soon, there could be other bodies and hopes wrapped in a sheet and put into the ground. Many more young men, peace in the Straits of Hormuz and beyond, and supplies of oil at an affordable price could all be as dead as the assassinated Roshan if the crisis over Iran's nuclear project ratchets up further.

The United States, trying to put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme, is pressing for a worldwide embargo on sales of oil from Iran, the world's second-largest supplier. Iran says it would then order its navy to close the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 per cent of global oil passes. The White House response is that this would be the "crossing of a red line", which would be met with armed response. Britain agrees and has despatched HMS Daring to the area. Yesterday, a semi-official Iranian news agency said Tehran would punish "behind-the-scene elements" involved in Roshan's death. This weekend tensions are as high as they have been in a long while.

The US and Israel are not alone in believing that Iran's nuclear work is designed not, as Tehran maintains, purely for energy supply, but so the Shia state has a weapons capacity. A week ago, the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) confirmed that Iran was now enriching uranium to 20 per cent, a level more appropriate to weapons than energy supply. And, in November, the IAEA issued a document drawing on 1,000 pages of intelligence which said for the first time that some of the alleged experiments can have no other purpose than developing nuclear weapons. On 28 January, a senior UN nuclear agency team will visit Tehran to discuss allegations that Iran is involved in secret nuclear weapons work.

President Barack Obama approved new sanctions last month that would target Iran's central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad. The US has delayed implementing the sanctions for at least six months, worried about sending the price of oil higher at a time when the global economy is struggling. The attempts to embargo Iranian oil sales have met a frosty reception in China, and a pretty cool one in Japan and India. European Union foreign ministers are expected to agree to a ban on imports of Iranian crude oil on 23 January. However, even Europe, whose governments largely share the concerns of Israel and Washington over Iran's nuclear ambitions, is looking for ways to limit the pain of an embargo. Firms in Iran's three biggest EU oil customers, Italy, Spain and Greece, all suffering economic pain, have lately extended existing purchase deals in the hope at least of delaying the impact of any embargo for months.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, the anger on show at the funeral of Mostafa Roshan, when thousands screamed "Death to Israel! Death to America!", grows. Yesterday, Iran's official news agency, IRNA, said the country was holding Britain and the US responsible for the assassination. Tehran has now sent two separate diplomatic notes to London and Washington, in which it claimed that both countries had an "obvious role" in the killing of Roshan. It has previously accused Israel's Mossad, the CIA and Britain's spy agency of engaging in an underground "terrorism" campaign against nuclear-related targets, including at least three killing since early 2010 and the release of a malicious computer virus known at Stuxnet in 2010 which temporarily disrupted controls of some centrifuges - a key component in nuclear fuel production. All three countries have denied the accusations.

Like other Iranian scientists working on Iran's nuclear programme before him, Roshan was killed by a magnetic bomb placed on his car by two men on a motorbike. Tehran swiftly said the assassins were working for Israel, with President Ahmadinejad declaring: "Once again the dirty hands of arrogance and the Zionist elements have deprived our scientific and academic community of the graceful presence of one our young intellectuals."

While assassination by opponents of the Tehran regime is the most obvious explanation, opposition groups or internal saboteurs cannot be ruled out. And the defections of at least two prominent Iranian nuclear scientists raise the question of whether some of the killings might be an inside job, aimed at those thought to be actually, or potentially, disloyal - with the added benefit of being carried out in a way that deflects blame abroad. Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible.

The Israelis, as ever, are relaxed about being blamed, as they were in the case of the other assassinated Iranian scientists. In an interview on Friday with CNN Spanish, Shimon Peres, Israel's President, said that "to the best of my knowledge" Israel was not involved in the hit on Roshan. Given the longevity of Mr Peres's intimate connection with Israel's defence establishment, his words carry some weight. But his remarks were limited to this one assassination out of several - successful and unsuccessful - attempts on the lives of scientists connected with Iran's nuclear programme.

There is little doubt that Israel has worked covertly in the past, along with the US, to perpetrate some of what the IDF Chief of Staff, Benny Ganz, making predictions about what might happen in 2012, reportedly described last week as "unnatural events". And not always in co-operation with the US. A new and apparently well-sourced report in Foreign Policy describes how, to the vexation of the Bush administration and US intelligence, Mossad agents using US passports posed as CIA operatives, mainly in London, and sought to recruit members of the Pakistani Sunni extremist organisation Jundallah during 2007-08 to carry out anti-regime operations inside Iran.

The assassination, whoever carried it out, was obviously aimed at delaying and harrying Iran's nuclear programme, but such killings certainly will not stop the programme or bring Iran to the negotiating table. And security officials think time is running out. They believe Iran will pass the technological threshold for producing nuclear weapons - the "point of no return" - later this year, and that they will be able to develop an actual weapon within two or three years.

Hence the raising of stakes by both sides. The hope is that, amid the brinkmanship, some diplomatic way through is found. In remarks made in an interview with The Weekend Australian and released on Friday night, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, broke - for him - new ground by declaring that sanctions were actually working. "For the first time, I see Iran wobble under the sanctions that have been adopted and especially under the threat of strong sanctions on their central bank," he declared. "If these sanctions are coupled with a clear statement by the international community, led by the US, to act militarily to stop Iran if sanctions fail, Iran may consider not going through the pain. There's no point gritting your teeth if you're going to be stopped anyway."

If nothing else, the interview implied that the Prime Minister believes that Israel's refusal to rule out a military strike has had, as he would see it, a positive impact on the international community's willingness to impose genuinely tough sanctions. The alternative to them working is not a good one. Sanctions, like covert operations, are not a mutually exclusive alternative to war, of course; indeed, they can exacerbate the tensions that then lead to war. But, for now, those wanting to avoid a conflagration in the Middle East have to hope that Mr Netanyahu's new, if cautious, expressions of faith in them are both genuine and sustained.

Tension at new high as Iran vows to punish West

The West is shredding its values in the name of security as nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in distant lands are killed with impunity, writes Mehdi Hasan.

On the morning of January 11, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He was not armed, nor anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage, we have been treated to undisguised glee.

''On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead,'' bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum. ''I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly.''

On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced: ''I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear.''

This sentiment was echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the London Telegraph: ''I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes.''

These ''men on motorbikes'' have been described as ''assassins''. But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.

Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance (''such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim''); moral distance (''the kind of intense belief in moral superiority''); and mechanical distance (''the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight'').

Thus Western liberals, who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers as state-sponsored murder, fall quiet as their states kill nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands with impunity. Yet a ''targeted killing'', the human rights lawyer and anti-drone activist, Clive Stafford Smith, tells me, ''is just the death penalty without due process''.

Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terrorism suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video-game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified.

Nor are we only talking about foreigners. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaeda supporter and US citizen. On September 30, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdel-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment (''No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law'').

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be ''placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the President of its decisions ... There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel ... Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.''

Should ''secret panels'' and ''kill lists'' be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner?

Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against Western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. ''Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them,'' George Orwell observed, ''and there is almost no kind of outrage ... which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side.''

But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? This is not complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and risk descending into lawless barbarism?

Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman.

State-Sponsored Killing Is Just Murder By Another Name

There is little realism behind the demand that Tehran give up its capacity to enrich uranium.

The Iranian nuclear controversy is reaching a critical juncture. On Monday, the European Union agreed on an oil embargo as part of sanctions against the country. On Sunday, Britain, the US and France sent warships through the Strait of Hormuz. Recent months have seen a big rise in the twin risks of military action and grave damage to the world economy. This is the consequence of what I believe to be a great diplomatic overbid - the West's demand that Iran surrender its capacity to enrich uranium.

Nine years have passed since I first talked to Iranian diplomats about their nuclear program. Then, I was Britain's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency and I disbelieved the reassuring words of my Iranian interlocutors about their commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. At the time, I was all for denying Iran any capacity relevant to making nuclear weapons. Now, however, I see things differently.

The treaty prohibits the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear weapons. But it permits the uranium enrichment that has been at the heart of the West's quarrel with Iran. I say ''the West's quarrel'' because more has changed since 2003 than my beliefs.

Then, almost all the states in the IAEA were angry that Iran had concealed its research into enriching uranium. They backed the West's demand that Iran account for its secret work. And they supported the West's view that Iran must suspend enrichment until that accounting was complete.

Now, the West is all but isolated. Most non-Westerners would prefer to see Iran treated like other treaty parties - allowed to enrich uranium in return for intrusive monitoring by IAEA inspectors. My sympathies lie with the non-Westerners. My hunch is this gathering crisis could be avoided by a deal along the following lines - Iran would accept top-notch IAEA safeguards in return for being allowed to continue enriching uranium. In addition, Iran would volunteer some confidence-building measures to show it has no intention of making nuclear weapons.

This, essentially, is the deal that Iran offered Britain, France and Germany in 2005. With hindsight, that offer should have been snapped up. It wasn't, because our objective was to put a stop to all enrichment in Iran.

That has remained the West's aim ever since, despite countless Iranian reminders that they are unwilling to be treated as a second-class party to the treaty and despite all the evidence that the Iranian character is more inclined to defiance than buckling under pressure.

But that missed opportunity need not prove lethal if the West can pull back now and join the rest of the world in seeing an agreement of this kind as the prudent way forward. Some might object: ''But surely the IAEA just reported that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons?'' No. The IAEA says that before 2003 Iran researched some of the know-how needed for a weapon and that further research may have taken place in the years since.

The key bits of November's IAEA report were based on material supplied by Western intelligence. For years, the Western assessment has been that Iran seeks the capability to build nuclear weapons but has not taken a decision to produce them.

Imposing sanctions or even going to war could be a proportionate - and therefore a just - reaction to any Iranian decision to acquire nuclear weapons. But these measures are a disproportionate response to a state acting on its right to enrich uranium.

At the moment, we are locked into a process of imposing ever-tighter sanctions on Iran. This economic warfare has many drawbacks. It requires an exaggeration of the Iranian ''threat'' that fuels the scaremongering of those who want this pressure to be a mere step on the way to war. It risks provoking retaliation, while hurting ordinary Iranians. And it risks higher oil prices, which the West can ill afford. Moreover, even if Iran were unexpectedly to give way, coercion rarely delivers durable solutions. Its effect on motives is unpredictable. It can breed resentment, while restrictions can be circumvented in time.

It may be asking a lot of our leaders that they swallow their words, lower their sights and focus on a realistic target. They could do it, though, and the talks to take place in Turkey could be the setting for a change of course.

What is much more likely, unhappily, is that we will continue to see a variant on the devil having the best tunes. Far too many US politicians see advantage in whipping up fear of Iran. I can almost hear them sneering that the treaty is for wimps. The odds must be that they will continue to propel the West towards yet another Gulf war. Still, nothing is inevitable.

Peter Jenkins was Britain's permanent representative to the IAEA from 2001-06. This article was first published in the London Telegraph

Europe Oil Embagro On Iran | Warships Sail Through Hormuz

From Chris Floyd..

This week, the warlords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war againt Iran. (Open war, that is; their covert war has been going on for decades -- via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein.) On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil.

The embargo bans all new oil contracts with Iran, and cuts off all existing deals after July. The embargo is accompanied by a freeze on all European assets of the Iranian central bank. In imposing these draconian measures on a country which is not at war with any nation, which has not invaded or attacked another nation in centuries, and which is developing a nuclear energy program that is not only entirely legal under international law but is also subject to the most stringent international inspection regime ever seen, the EU is "targeting the economic lifeline of the regime," as one of its diplomats put it, with admirable candor.

The embargo will have serious, perhaps disastrous effects on many of Europe's sinking economies, which are heavy users of Iranian oil. This is particularly true in Greece, the poster boy for our modern "Shock Doctrine über alles" global economic system. For even as Greece writhes beneath the blows of European bankers determined to bleed the country dry to avoid the consequences of their own knowingly corrupt loan policies, the Iranians have been giving the Greeks substantial discounts on oil, which has helped ease -- at least in some measure -- the economic ruin being imposed on the "birthplace of democracy."

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2210-pups-on-parade-eu-obediently-pushes-toward-war-with-iran.html

The head of US intelligence has warned that there is an increasing likelihood that Iran could carry out attacks in America or against US and allied targets around the world.

The warning from the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, reflects rapidly rising tensions over Iran's nuclear programme after the US and EU announced embargoes on the Iranian oil trade in the past few weeks, Israel leaked details of its preparation for a possible conflict and both the west and Iran boosted their military readiness in the Gulf.

The US plans to send a third aircraft carrier to the region in March, while Iran's military has threatened to block the entrance to the Gulf in the strait of Hormuz and is planning to hold naval exercises there in the next few weeks involving a host of new weapons.

Presenting his annual "worldwide threat assessment" to Congress, Clapper said an alleged plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington last year, which the US blamed on the Iran's Revolutionary Guard, "shows that some Iranian officials - probably including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei - have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime."

Clapper added: "Iran's willingness to sponsor future attacks in the US or against our interests abroad probably will be shaped by Tehran's evaluation of the costs it bears for the plot against the ambassador as well as Iranian leaders' perceptions of US threats against the regime."

Western officials say that in the past year there has been a notable increase in activity around the world by suspected members of Iran's Quds force, the external operations arm of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which they say could reflect positioning of units capable of carrying out reprisal attacks against western and Israeli targets if Iran was itself attacked. "There have been a lot of reports recently of IRGC activity abroad," one western official said. "There is a great deal of worry about the IRGC carrying out covert and deniable actions. But they may be overestimating how much they can hide their role. The US and others are very concerned about this.

"In this situation, there is a risk of miscalculation," the official added, "or of rogue elements operating independently."

US officials say that the alleged Washington bomb plot showed a new recklessness by an increasingly embattled Iranian regime. An Iranian-American was charged last October with planning to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the US while he ate at his favourite Washington restaurant, potentially killing many Americans at the same time.

The US has claimed authorisation for the attack came from the highest levels of the regime, but Clapper's remarks marked the first time Washington has openly blamed the supreme leader.

However, a western official cautioned that there was no evidence a final decision had been taken to go ahead with the attack. "Our understanding is that this was at the stage of operational planning. The order was for everything to be put in place. There was not, as far as I know, a green light," the official said.

In recent days, both the Thai and Azeri governments made a number of arrests of suspects allegedly linked to Iranian intelligence who are accused of planning to kill Israel diplomats and a rabbi. One possibility, western governments believe, is that the plots were intended as reprisals for a string of murders in Tehran of Iranian scientists linked to the country's nuclear programme. Iran has blamed Mossad for the killings, an accusation that many western officials think is plausible.

After an Iranian threat last month to close the strait of Hormuz in response to oil sanctions, the US has deployed two aircraft carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Carl Vinson, in the region. A thirdis scheduled to head to the Gulf in March.

John Pike, a military analyst and the head of the GlobalSecurity.org thinktank said: "That almost never happens. They seldom even have two."

He added that a fourth carrier, the USS John Stennis, was sailing away from the area but at a slow pace and could be back within a few days.

Tensions have been stoked further by leaked details of Israeli military preparations and cabinet deliberations on whether to strike Iran in the next few months, in an effort to set back its nuclear programme by a few years. Western officials confess they are unsure to what extent such reports represent an Israeli bluff to force urgent action by the US and its European allies, but say they do take the Israeli threats seriously.

One possibility is that Israel could launch air strikes at the height of the US presidential election campaign, on the grounds that the Obama administration would have to mute any politically risky criticism of a longstanding US ally.

Some observers believe the planned European and US oil embargoes, due to come into effect five months from now with potentially severe implications for the Iranian economy, along with a military build-up in the region, could themselves raise the risk of miscalculation on all sides.

"I don't think they are playing Iran anything like as well as they think they are," said Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Tehran. "The oil embargo tends to give those elements in Iran who want to have maximal defences, including nuclear defences, added weight to their arguments. Also they are poking Iran with a sharp stick but this is not accompanied by a new negotiating incentives."

In a strikingly critical report, an influential Israeli thinktank, the Institute for National Security Studies, warned that the Israeli leadership could be rushing into a decision to attack without properly thinking of the implications. The authors said that Israeli society should "not assume that decision makers will automatically make correct choices based on a rational of an attack's cost effectiveness".

"Past experience has proven that such an in-depth discussion does not always take place," the report said. It questioned whether a nuclear Iran was really an existential threat to Israel and warned that unilateral action would alienate the US and other Israeli allies.

"The image - not the first of its kind - will be of an Israel unilaterally violating the rules of the international game and launching a military campaign without legitimacy from the security council. This might increase Israel's isolation as well contribute to its delegitimisation."

Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. The west and Israel allege it is intended to give Iran at least the capacity to make a bomb, but Clapper conceded in his remarks : "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

Iranian Attack On America & Allies Increasingly Likely

45 US Bases Surround Iran

Each star on the above map is a US base.

But, just to be clear & as everyone understands, Iran is threatening US.

A perfect example of propaganda demonising Tran as the greatest threat to world peace.

More here & here.

Antony Loewenstein

The mega-leaks website, WikiLeaks, has partnered with the hackers cooperative Anonymous, to publish internal emails of the American strategic intelligence company Stratfor. In one of the hacked emails, Stratfor officials discuss information obtained from one of their sources who reports that Israeli commandos, in cooperation with Kurdish fighters, have destroyed Iranian nuclear installations.

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will hold a press conference today in London where he plans to reveal new details from the Stratfor emails, including details on the company's dealings with the American government and major corporations, and its network of paid sources.

Some of the Stratfor analysts expressed the opinion that Israel had sent commandos into Iran, perhaps with the assistance of Kurdish fighters or Iranian Jews who had immigrated to Israel, to carry out these operations.

Israel, Kurdish Fighters Destroyed Iran Nuclear Facility, Email Released By WikiLeaks Claims

more on Stratfor & also Stratcap …..

Stratfor's clients are the US Government, other countries and military organizations, as well as private companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. They have a global network of spies in governments and media companies, including "secret deals with dozens of media organizations and journalists, from Reuters to the Kiev Post." According to the emails, these spies get paid in Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards.

Wikileaks says that the emails also reveal the creation of a parallel organization called StratCap. Apparently, this organization would use Stratfor network of informants to make money in financial markets. Wikileaks claims that the emails show how then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman put StratCap in motion in 2009.

Wikileaks Reveals Privately Run CIA's Dirty Secrets

ironies of israel's new submarine (from the letters page of yesterday’s Independent)

Your report concerning the possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel (29 February) might have alluded also to Israel’s apparent attempt to obtain “second strike” facility.

Currently undergoing sea trials is a new Dolphin class submarine built for Israel by a subsidiary company of ThyssenKrupp in Kiel – one of three to be delivered. This submarine, 68 metres in length and understood to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, is the largest submarine built in Germany since the Second World War. It is claimed in the German press that these new submarines have the advantage both of being more difficult to detect, and to have less need to break surface, as they run on fuel cells. The apparent intention is to mount a permanent patrol off the coast of Iran.

Perhaps of equal interest is that one third of the purchase price of a third submarine to be built will be paid for by Germany, up to a maximum of €135m as part-reparation – this was revealed in a Wikileaks report from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The reparation element seems to relate to Israeli claims against the GDR before reunification.

The disparity between reporting of Iran’s nuclear policy and the almost total silence concerning Israel’s nuclear weapons and its refusal to either join the Non-Proliferation Treaty or even to allow international inspection must be a matter of incredulity in Middle Eastern states, if not in Europe.

And just to heap irony upon irony, according to the Jerusalem Post in 2010, the Iranian state holds a 4.5 per cent stake in ThyssenKrupp.

Wade Mansell

Professor of International Law

University of Kent Canterbury

(Courtesy of Antony Loewenstein)

Iran is developing nuclear missiles capable of hitting London, David Cameron warned yesterday.

In a chilling echo of the build-up to the war against Iraq, the Prime Minister suggested that the country's drive to develop the bomb was potentially a direct threat to the UK.

His comments appeared to move Britain a step closer to war against the hardline Islamic regime.

He told MPs the Tehran government was trying to develop 'intercontinental missiles'.

And he repeatedly stressed that 'military action' against Iran was not 'off the table'.

'I don't believe that an Iranian nuclear weapon is just a threat to Israel,' he said.

'It is also clearly very dangerous for the region because it would trigger a nuclear arms race but also it's a danger more broadly, not least because there are signs that the Iranians want to have some sort of intercontinental missile capability. So we have to be clear this is potentially a threat much more widely.' 

The Prime Minister's warning came just hours after the Cabinet was given a secret briefing by MI6 chief Sir John Sawers and the Government's national security adviser Sir Kim Darroch on the threat posed by Iran.

Tehran had previously been thought to have access only to medium-range missiles with a reach of about 1,500 miles.

Intercontinental missiles typically have a range of 3,500 miles or more - easily enough to cover the 2,740 miles from Tehran to London.

The claim led to allegations that the Government had 'sexed up' a dossier on the threat.

The Prime Minister's warning came during a briefing of senior MPs on the Commons liaison committee on the latest developments in Iran and Syria.

He said economic sanctions should be given more time but military action remained an option.

'Nothing is off the table,' he said. 'It is difficult to say that because no one wants to see conflict in any way. But I think it's very important that the world sends a message to Iran that a nuclear-armed future is not something that we want to see.

'If the sanctions don't work there will come a moment of a very difficult decision.' And the Prime Minister echoed U.S. president Barack Obama in urging Israel to show restraint.

'Today, we think that military action against Iran by Israel would not be the right approach,' he said. 'We have said that both publicly and privately to the Israelis. We think this track of sanctions and pressure has further to run.'

His comments coincided with the so-called E3+3 group - Britain, France and Germany plus the United States, Russia and China - accepting an offer from Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili to re-open discussion.

President Obama said the announcement of six-power talks offered a diplomatic opportunity to defuse the crisis.    

Amid mounting speculation that Iran's nuclear sites could be attacked in coming months, the president said that U.S. politicians 'beating the drums of war' had a responsibility to explain the costs and benefits of military action.

Iran Trying To Build Nuclear Missiles Capable Of Hitting London

You'd have thought the reality of Afghanistan and Iraq might act as a break on the instinctive lunge by hawks to compare apples with oranges as they try to gull us into a belief that war is a doddle.

Remember the neo-con parsing of the proposed invasion of Iraq as a ''cakewalk'' - to address the ''mushroom cloud'' that Condoleezza Rice saw in Iraq's non-existent nuclear arsenal and Tony Blair's wild warning that Saddam Hussein could unleash a WMD strike in just 45 minutes?

It's the same with Iran now. We are being asked to pair a best-case scenario of going to war (neat, surgical strikes; no blood on the ground; and little or no Iranian retaliation) with the worst-case scenario of allowing Tehran to go its nuclear way (become a reckless regional actor; would seek menacing alliances with the likes of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela; and would pass nuclear technology to terrorists).

Despite Barack Obama's warning weeks ago that ''now is not the time for bluster,'' the blustering continues apace - in Washington and beyond.

In The New York Times on Wednesday, the Israeli commentator Ari Shavit warns that unless there is a strike against Iran this northern summer - that is, in the next several months - ''Israel will lose the military capability to stop the Shiite bomb''. In a 30-minute lobbying video doing the rounds, the evangelical Christian leader Gary Bauer intones: ''I'll be brutally honest - I don't trust the president .... I think his record on Israel is abysmal.''

But American generals have been war-gaming too, and the results are being leaked to reporters. The Pentagon's sophisticated crisis modelling predicts that an Israeli strike on Iran would spark a wider regional war into which the US most likely would be dragged, with hundreds of Americans dead. An initial Israeli attack would slow Iran's nuclear program by maybe a year. Follow-through American strikes might add another two or more years, it concludes.

This is the context in which former Bush-era CIA analyst and author Paul Pillar urges caution, inviting serious consideration of the notion that Western acceptance of a nuclear-armed Tehran is a better deal than the aftermath of combined US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Noting that the bellicosity and political rhetoric of the pro-war lobby rested on a foundation of fear, fanciful speculation and crude stereotyping rather than on the rigorous threat analysis that might be expected when the stakes are so high, Pillar writes in the current issue of Washington Monthly: ''An Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful and far more costly than most people imagine.''

The popular denunciation of the Iranian leadership as ''religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, [who] cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred'' was at odds with more than 30 years of history that demonstrated Iran's rulers were overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their power.

''They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behaviour than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife,'' Pillar says of men who, he estimates, are constantly balancing a worldly suite of strategic interests.

''Iranian rulers may have a history of valourising martyrdom ... but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. The principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.''

Drawing out a more logical oranges-with-oranges comparison, Pillar warns that the worst-case ramifications of military force to deter Iran would be catastrophic - ''a regional conflagration involving multiple US allies, sucking in US forces far beyond the initial assault''.

He notes a Brookings Institution war games simulation, conducted two years back, in which Iranian retaliation included multiple missile strikes on Saudi Arabia and Israel and a global terrorist campaign against US interests.

The pro-war argument rests in part on the assertion that there was no massive retaliation by Saddam Hussein when Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 or by Bashar al-Assad when it bombed an installation in Syria in 2007.

This, Pillar argues, reveals the apples-and-oranges inconsistency of the argument.

''According to this optimistic view, the same regime that cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon because it is recklessly aggressive and prone to cause regional havoc would suddenly become, once attacked, a model of calm and caution, easily deterred by the threat of further attacks.

''History and human behaviour strongly suggest, however, that any change in Iranian conduct would be exactly the opposite - that as with the Iran-Iraq War, an attack on the Iranian homeland would be one scenario that would motivate Iran to respond zealously - probably [including] terrorism through its own agents as well as proxy groups, other violent reprisals against US forces in the region; and disruption of the exports of other oil producers.''

Racing through the global economic fallout of such a conflict - ''incalculable, but likely to be immense'' - Pillar arrives at his inevitable conclusion: ''In return for all these harmful effects, an attack on Iran would not even achieve the objective of ensuring a nuclear-weapons-free Iran - only a ground invasion and occupation could hope to accomplish that, and not even the most fervent anti-Iranian hawks are talking about that kind of enormous undertaking.''

And after all that, what might happen to the regional balance of power? Pillar concludes: ''Israel would retain overwhelming military superiority with its own nuclear weapons - which international think tanks estimate to number at least 100 and possibly 200.''

''A war is no picnic,'' Israel's Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said in November. But then he too offered the implicit mismatched scenarios, predicting that if Israel were to act unilaterally, any retaliation by Iran would be bearable.

''There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1000 dead - the state of Israel will not be destroyed.''

After all the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, that could be read as ''cakewalk'' talk - again.

Take a bite out of Iran at your peril

The 'option' of a military attack on Iran by Israel, the UK and the US has been increasingly discussed in the UK media since 2011.

Government threats of military action have come in various forms, with Israel warning of potential air strikes against Iran in the next few months, and Obama and Cameron stating that 'no options are off the table'.

This is combined with what could at best be described as ambiguous reporting on Iran's nuclear programme, at times baselessly claiming that Iran has nuclear weapons, and, at others, relying on repetition of snippets like 'the US and its allies believe Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons - a charge Iran denies.'

In the media, one fact is not (yet) up for debate (despite the attempts of the Telegraph’s Dan Hodges [below]): that any invasion of Iran would be a violation of international law – even if Iran was in the process of developing nuclear weapons. The United Nations Charter also outlaws the ‘threat of the use of force’, an act in which much of the media, in its uncritical stance towards government threats, has made itself complicit.

The solution to these awkward details, it seems, is to ignore them almost completely. Failure to reinforce the illegality of such an act of war has resulted in much coverage discussing the ‘inevitability’ of a war on Iran.

This study looks at the news, blogs and comment articles about Iran since October 2011 – around the time that aggressive official rhetoric towards Iran upped a notch – and seeks to answer a simple question: 

How often do the British media inform us that a military attack on Iran would be illegal?

Four online news providers were studied – BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph*. In total, there were 4 mentions of the fact that an invasion would be illegal. The results, in summary, are as follows:

BBC News

One mention of the illegality of an invasion of Iran is made on the BBC news website. In an analysis article, ‘How would Iran respond to an Israeli attack?’ (7 March 2012), Jonathan Marcus states: 

For all the uncertainties as to whether Israel would attack Iran and indeed how Iran might respond, one thing is clear - in terms of international law, such a strike would be illegal.

This article was a balance to a previous analysis article that Marcus wrote, entitled ‘How Israel might strike at Iran’ (27 February 2012). Preoccupied with presenting the reader with dotted bomber flight path lines from Israel to Iran and military hardware specification sheets, this report failed to raise the issue of legality.

In contrast, the BBC News website has run 9 articles which have relayed politician’s musings (Hague, Clegg, Hammond and US officials) which insinuated violation of international law on the part of Iran.

The Guardian

The ‘News’ section of The Guardian did not make any mention of the illegality of an attack on Iran. The ‘Comment is Free’ section ran three articles which correctly pointed out that an invasion would violate international law.

Abbas Edalat wrote on 1 December 2011: 

But Iran itself has been targeted for many years by a series of western and UK policies that are gross violations of international law. Repeatedly threatening Iran with a military attack, thinly disguised under the phrase "all options are on the table" and publicly announcing that the west must use covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme (as John Sawers, the head of MI6, demanded two years ago), are only two examples of the UK’s disrespect for the UN charter.

On 21 February 2012, Seumas Milne wrote, in an article entitled ‘An attack on Iran would be an act of criminal stupidity’: 

If an attack is launched by Israel or the US, it would not just be an act of criminal aggression, but of wanton destructive stupidity. As Michael Clarke, director of the British defence establishment’s Royal United Services Institute, points out, such an attack would be entirely illegal: "There is no basis in international law for preventative, rather than pre-emptive, war."

On 12 March 2012 in a Q&A piece, Saeed Kamali Denghan responds to a question about the threat from Iran as follows:

            Well, bombing Iran is illegal under international law in the first place. Little has been said about the legality of the issue, so one might mistake it as to be justified, where as it is not.

In contrast, The Guardian website has run 14 articles which have insinuated violation of international law on the part of Iran.

The Independent

No mention of the illegality of an attack on Iran was found in The Independent for this time period.

In contrast, The Independent website has run 6 articles which have insinuated violation of international law on the part of Iran.

The Telegraph

No mention of the illegality of an attack on Iran was found in The Telegraph for this time period.

In contrast, The Telegraph website has run 2 articles which insinuated violation of international law on the part of Iran. In addition, Dan Hodges argues in his Telegraph Blog that under international law there ‘probably is a case for’ an attack on Iran: 

There is then the question of pre-emptive action. Again, Prof Blix is a Juris Doctor in International Law, and I have two A-levels and a grade 2 CSE in French. But I would hazard a guess that under international law there probably is a case for taking some form of pre-emptive action against an aggressor who expresses a public desire to wipe you off the map. Sorry, there’s that unfortunate phrase again. It just keeps popping up, doesn’t it?

Conclusion

Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the media takes little interest in informing us that threats of war, and war itself, are illegal. This fact is only found once in a BBC analysis article, and three times in the Guardian’s Comment section. Government claims that Iran has either acted or is threatening to act outside of international law are, however, free to flourish and propagate their way through the mainstream.

Suggestions that attack on Iran would violate international law: 4

Suggestions that Iran has, could have, or might violate international law: 31

How the dataset was created:

BBC News – search results for the term ‘Iran’ from 1 Oct 2011 (534 articles)

The Guardian – articles in the ‘Iran’ category from 1 Oct 2011 (500 articles)

The Independent – search results for the term ‘Iran’ from 1 Oct 2011 (584 articles)

The Telegraph – search results for the term ‘Iran’ from 1 Oct 2011, as well as all articles from ‘Iran’ category page.

* The Telegraph website’s search engine did not pick up all articles containing the word, and the category page dated back to 9th Feb, resulting in a somewhat limited dataset (261 articles).

An Attack on Iran Would Be Illegal. What Does the Media Say?

President Obama has stepped up the rhetoric against Iran with an offer to "negotiate". His offer is no offer at all, it is a demand to surrender. There will be nothing left to "negotiate" if Iran accepts the offer. This is what Obama demands before "negotiation" begins.

·        Immediately close and dismantle a recently completed nuclear facility deep under a mountain

·        Give up and ship out of the country its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity

·        Halt all enrichment even though enrichment to 5 percent does not pose a risk

·        Allow inspectors full access to all Iranian sites

·        Allow inspectors access to key nuclear scientists even though many Iranian scientists have been killed

The New York Times reports U.S. Defines Its Demands for New Round of Talks With Iran

The Obama administration and its European allies plan to open new negotiations with Iran by demanding the immediate closing and ultimate dismantling of a recently completed nuclear facility deep under a mountain, according to American and European diplomats.

They are also calling for a halt in the production of uranium fuel that is considered just a few steps from bomb grade, and the shipment of existing stockpiles of that fuel out of the country, the diplomats said.

That negotiating position will be the opening move in what President Obama has called Iran's "last chance" to resolve its nuclear confrontation with the United Nations and the West diplomatically. The hard-line approach would require the country's military leadership to give up the Fordo enrichment plant outside the holy city of Qum, and with it a huge investment in the one facility that is most hardened against airstrikes.

There is disagreement among the Western allies about whether Iran's leaders have made a political decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. American intelligence agencies have stuck to a 2007 intelligence assessment, which found that Iran suspended research on nuclear weapons technology in 2003 and has not decided to take the final steps needed to build a bomb. But Britain and Israel in particular, looking at essentially the same evidence, say that they believe a decision has been made to move to a nuclear-weapons capability, if not to a weapon itself.

Some American officials say they have considerable confidence that if Iran moves to build a weapon, they will detect the signs in time to take military action, though others -- notably former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- have been more skeptical. American and Israeli officials say they have been more successful in the past few years in intelligence gathering in Iran, both from human sources and drone aircraft, like the stealth RQ-170 Sentinel that was lost over Iran late last year.

Iran's Right to Produce Non-Weapons Grade Nuclear Fuel

Iran has as much right as anyone else to produce non-weapons grade nuclear fuel.

Moreover, having watched the US destroy Iraq for absolutely no reason, one should put itself in Iranian shoes and understand the need for Iran to want to defend itself.

Thoughts on "Negotiation" Tactics

It is common practice in negotiation proceedings to reach for the sky with extreme positions on both sides. It is not common practice to tell the other side we will not even sit down to negotiate if you do not surrender in advance.

Cooler heads might prevail if there was actually something to "negotiate" over.

Obama Threatens War

President Obama made no offer to "negotiate" anything. Rather Obama "Last Chance" message can only be construed as a thinly veiled threat to wage war.

No doubt, the warmongers in Congress and the defense department are angling for just that. However, the US cannot afford and the world does not need another nonsensical war, one that could easily cause the price of gasoline to double or more.

Mike Shedlock / Mish - http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

The Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group despite its inclusion on the State Department's list of foreign terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: In what appears to be a first for U.S. foreign policy, new revelations have emerged that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group despite its inclusion on the State Department's list of foreign terrorists. Writing for The New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports U.S. Joint Special Operations Command trained operatives from Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, at a secret site in Nevada beginning in 2005. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. The MEK has been included on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups since 1997. It's been linked to a number of attacks, spanning from the murders of six U.S. citizens in the '70s to the recent wave of assassinations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists.

Although the revelation that the U.S. government directly trained the MEK comes as a surprise, it's no secret the group has prominent backers across the political spectrum. Despite it's designation as a "terrorist" organization by the State Department for 15 years, a number of prominent former U.S. officials have been paid to speak in support of the MEK. The bipartisan list includes two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and Porter Goss; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton; and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.

Last month, Rendell and other unnamed officials were subpoenaed by the Treasury Department over their ties to MEK. Mukasey and Freeh have retained former Clinton administration Solicitor General Seth Waxman in response to the Treasury Department probe. Rendell, meanwhile, has shrugged off the scrutiny. Speaking at a public event in support of the MEK Friday in Washington, he told the crowd, quote, "I never knew obtaining a subpoena from your own government would be so much fun."

Well, for more on the U.S. and its ties to the MEK, we're joined by Seymour Hersh in Washington, D.C. His new piece for The New Yorker is called "Our Men in Iran?"

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what you have learned. Who are, as you call it, "our men in Iran"?

SEYMOUR HERSH: They are as you said. The MEK-and by the way, once again, Amy, the piece was on The New Yorker blog, not in the magazine; it's a shorter piece. But anyway, the point is, it went through the same sort of intense checking as anything in The New Yorker, of course.

Simply, they're just the Khalq, the MEK. We began to-I learned about this many years ago. It's just one of those things that it never quite occurred to me how important it was. And what is important about also the-they did stop, there's no question, this sort of training that was going on. It was going on at a place called the Nevada Nuclear Security or National Security Test Site. It's a former site for World War-post-World War II nuclear testing of weapons, testing of nuclear weapons. And it's off-limits to people. And it's-there's an air base there. God knows what went on there. My own guess is rendition flights also flew into that air base in '02, '03. There's some evidence for it. But certainly, the groups of MEK were flown in secretly by, I presume, the Joint Special Operations Command. This is this new high-powered group that's been doing all the night raids in Afghanistan, that also came up in your news broadcast.

What's important to me about it is not only that it did end, this kind of direct training of this group that is, as you said, a terrorist group; it's also very clear that the United States is still involved, as is Israel and as was, for many years, England, in using the MEK and other dissident groups inside Iran as surrogates for the continued pressure we're putting covertly on inside of Iran. And that is, as you said, there are assassinations done by the MEK. And let me make it clear, the MEK has been in a virtual war with the mullahs in Iran since the fall of the Shah, and you don't have to-you don't have to urge them to kill anybody. They're very eager to do it themselves inside that country. But still, nonetheless, we provide intelligence. We, the Americans, have continued to provide intelligence and other kinds of material support for the MEK. Don't forget, they speak Farsi, which is a great asset to us. These are people who are able to translate intercepted communications inside Iran for us very quickly and very-with great skill. And so, we have a lot of reason to rely on them, as we rely on other dissident groups inside Iran-the Kurds, the Azeris and others-to cause-basically, to try and keep some sort of internal chaos and mayhem going inside the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it believed the MEK were involved in the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, nobody has a video of it, but that seems clear that one of their goals, obviously, is to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. And it's not clear who they're really assassinating. I wrote about this in The New Yorker many years ago, in '05 or '06. We've been actively involved, beginning in the Cheney-Bush days, of encouraging insurrection inside Iran-whether it's aimed at regime change or not isn't clear; I doubt that-but basically, blowing up things, etc. We did have a list at one time we created here in Washington of people we'd like to see gone, captured perhaps, turned over or turned into our agents, you know, double agents inside Iran. We tried to do that, too. But certainly, the Israelis are pawing the ground as if they are directly responsible or deeply involved with the MEK in the recent assassination of a 32-year-old scientist whose role in terms of-there's not much evidence he was involved in making weapons, because there's no evidence that Iranians are making weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the bombs that were used in the assassinations?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, they're most interesting bombs. They're limpet bombs, Marine limpet bombs. They're designed-they have a special charge, and they're designed to go inside. They blow inside. And they're, of course, of great use by the Navy SEALs. And the Navy SEALs, if you're going to do an underwater demolition, if you're going to blow up a ship from underwater, which as the SEALs traditionally were trained to do-most of them are involved in day-to-day combat in Afghanistan, etc., and much different from their initial role of underwater stuff. But if you want to blow up something underwater, you have to have a charge that explodes inward to cause water to rush in, etc. And these kind of very sophisticated charges have been used by the MEK in the assassinations.

And the reason we know it is that the car that was hit, for example, in January in Tehran that killed the young scientist, or the nuclear physicist or whatever he was, exploded inward. You can argue this is also good because it avoids non-combatant deaths. You know, you don't want to kill a lot of people other than the one you're trying to kill. It is also useful because you make sure anybody in that car gets it, because it does blow inside. It's a very sophisticated shape charge. And there's no question that some of the best mines in the Navy mine-making business were-some of that information was obviously passed on, whether directly to the MEKor through Israeli assets, or explicitly how. But it's not an accident that these kinds of sophisticated weapons can be traced to the Navy SEALs, who are a major element of the Joint Special Operations Command.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, you end your piece by quoting Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Fort Bliss in Texas acknowledging the U.S. has some ideas as to who might have been involved, but we don't know exactly who was involved, you know, being questioned about-this was the day after-a few days after the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientists. He said, "I can tell you one thing: the [United States] was not involved in that kind of effort. That's not what the United States does."

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I think that's technically correct. I don't think there's any other way to read that comment as-the use of that last graph as an ironic statement, perhaps. I think it's correct that-also, it's to my knowledge-this isn't in the piece, because only one particular source about it, but I do understand that we really don't know what's going to happen 'til after it happens, and then we are put on notice. We do get notice that something has happened before it's released to the public. We have that kind of communication, essentially through Israel. Israel is obviously a little closer to everything that's going on than we are. But we're certainly-we're not picking targets. I doubt that now. At least I don't have any evidence we are. But we're providing general intelligence.

And it's not an accident that the first units of the MEK to show up in Nevada, late '04, early '05-and it was months and months of training. It's not-the first word used by two different people about it was "commo," communications, and "crypto." The point is that-there was a story in the Washington Post just the other day here describing how America has been using drones to overfly Iran for at least three years. I would argue that, long before that, we've been using American satellites flying high that can't be detected. And obviously, you can uplink and downlink communications to satellites. You can-if you're on the ground and you find out something very useful tactically-by training the MEK in communications and how to use encrypt communications, you're also enabling them to become an asset on the ground for us.

There was a period, I would say, in the Bush administration-I also think it stopped under Obama-when our boys, our Joint Special Operations Command guys, were directly inside Iran. We came in through Herat in Afghanistan. We also-that was one of-what we call a rat line. There are other rat lines through Balochistan in Pakistan, and etc. There are ways to get inside Iran clandestinely that we've been using for at least since, I'd say, late '04 until probably right before Obama got in. So we were there-look, it's been a huge, big internal game designed to destabilize.

And as somebody said to me in one of the pieces, one of the quotes in the pieces, "We're not necessarily looking for Einsteins." That suggests to me that the scientists who are really the most deeply involved in the enrichment. And by the way, let me say again, there is no evidence that our intelligence community or even the Israeli intelligence community has-and I know that firsthand-suggesting that there's an ongoing bomb program. So we are now-the United States is now in the position of increasing sanctions and pressuring all sorts of economic pressure on the Iranians to stop-the whole purpose of the economic sanctions is to stop the Iranians from making a bomb that we know they're not making. Once again, I don't know how we get into this convoluted position. And then, as readers of the major newspapers know, we are now also entering new talks with Iran with new preconditions, and basically telling them that they must stop doing enriching, what they are legally entitled to do as members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran may be secretly wanting a bomb, and they may have that passion, and they maybe, you know, dream about it at night, but we haven't a shred of evidence that they've done anything, concretely, physically, to create a facility for making a weapon.

AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, why the Department of Energy? And again, this is under the Bush administration. They're labeled terrorists, but they are training them, not only in communications, you point out.

SEYMOUR HERSH: They've had-there is a secret site. It's about 60-some-odd miles out of Las Vegas, deep in no-man's land in southern Nevada, where we've been doing an awful lot of stuff for many years. It's called "Site 12." That particular site, it's-our CIA and other agencies have been training foreign troops. It's where, I would guess, when we do joint training with the special units of the Israeli army and other units that we train, we do train foreign soldiers. We can fly to this base. It's got a long landing strip, 7,500 feet, concrete landing strip. And for a long time it had yellow crosses on it, which meant, for even aircraft, commercial aircraft, in trouble, do not land here. And this is a strip that you come in and you-I presume, you come in in a military plane. You can turn off the transponder.

Nobody-no FAA is checking anything. Nobody is going to get a tail number. You can land. And there's a facility there. There's barracks and other work, other facilities, in Site 12 for-and a food hall. It's all-you could actually find it online if you go through the Department of Energy's annual-they provide annual environmental impact reports, and they describe what's going on in each site in terms of the environment. And there you get a pretty good description. In fact, they actually use the word-there's a training facility used for other government agencies. An "OGA," other government agencies, is a longstanding phrase that means the CIA, essentially-actually specifically to people on the inside. So there's been training there forever.

And it just so happens, if you take a look at northwest Iran and take a look at the topography in that part of the desert in Nevada, it's a very arid area, I think 15 inches of rain, or something like that, a year. It's got a desert. It's got valleys. It's got mountain ranges. And it really is similar. I'll tell you what the most frightening thing was. When they first began the training, one very senior four-star officer was called by somebody who knew about the training in Nevada, very worried about it, and because the Joint Special Operations Command people were training in-not only in communications and cryptography, small unit tactics, but other cute things, which, to me, of course, and to my friend, meant interrogation tactics, you know, how to-you know, I don't know this, but I presume included the standard sort of horrible stuff that we know American intelligence agencies have and CIA and other personnel have done to various prisoners of war since 9/11, waterboarding and the like. It was very troubling, that message, that this kind of training is being done on a group that's listed as a terrorist group.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, so many public officials, Bush and Republican and Democrats, are calling for them to be taken off the list. Among the U.S. officials to speak in support of MEK is former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Speaking to CNN last year, he said the U.S. should lift the terror group designation to help protect MEK members living in Iraq.

HOWARD DEAN: The FBI screened all these people. The FBIcounterterrorist folks screened all these people in 2006. Not one of them is a terrorist, according to our FBI. This is outrageous, what's going on. It's an outrageous behavior by the State Department. And frankly, the administration has direct responsibility for making sure that the promises were kept. We kept one promise. That is, we kept George Bush's promise to get out by the end of 2011. We need to keep the promise of the people at Ashraf. We ought not to be complicit in human rights massacres.

AMY GOODMAN: Among those appearing at the public event in Washington on Friday in support of the MEK was Michael-was Mitchell Reiss, a former policy-a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He acknowledged to the crowd that the Treasury Department considers MEKsupporters, quote, "potential criminals." At a campaign stop in New Hampshire last year, an audience member asked Romney about Reiss's support for the MEK.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you heard of or do you support the MEK, the People's Mujahideen of Iran?

MITT ROMNEY: I have not heard about the MEK, and I-so I can't possibly tell you whether I support the MEK. But I can-all right? But what is-what is the MEK? Why would you think that I supported it? Because you said it's a terrorist group?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: There's been-there's a terrorist group in Iran which is variably violent. It's attacked civilians before. It's called the MEK, the People's Mujahideen of Iran. And if you look into it, some of your staff members, I believe, have made statements to lobby the executive branch to remove them from the terrorist list.

MITT ROMNEY: I'll take a look at the issue. I'm not familiar with that particular group or that effort on the part of any of my team.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mitt Romney being questioned about his foreign policy adviser Mitchell Reiss's support for the MEK. Seymour Hersh, your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I would say that the Obama administration has even more trouble than Mr. Romney does. It's clear he didn't know much about it. This administration knows an awful lot about it, because they have access to what was going on in the previous administration in this area in terms of the MEK, in terms of operations inside Iran, and they're still going on. And so, the question then becomes-I'm amazed that we've had nothing from the White House about this story. And there's also been sort of a-I shouldn't complain about it, because I understand it. You know, it's "not invented here" syndrome. But I'm a little amazed that more reporters aren't asking more questions about this, because it seems to be so egregious. This is-right now, our Treasury Department is actually asking questions, because no matter how you cut it, it's a terrorist group, and if you're aiding and supporting a terrorist group, under the law of the United States-as you know, there's been some prosecutions in this area of people of Middle East descent supporting groups that we consider to be terrorists, and they get put away in jail. There certainly seems to be a double standard here at work. And yeah, Romney seems lost in space on this issue, but I can assure you right now, there are people in this White House who are not.

AMY GOODMAN: Is the Obama administration still training MEK?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't think the word is "training" anymore, because are we directly training them down in Nevada? No, I don't-there's no reason to believe that. I don't know that. I've been told that there is more stuff going on than we know of, of course, and that's also possible. You know, one of the things that I've learned-I've been doing a book about Cheney for a number of years. It's just amazing how many things we really don't know about what our government can do. There are amazing things out there that happened that we just don't know about. And so, they can keep secrets. Of course the government would like to keep pressure on Iran as much as it can. And I don't think we can totally walk away from responsibility in terms of-at the minimum, we've been providing intelligence that we know goes to the MEK and also to other dissident groups inside, inside Iran. Does that mean we're aiding and abetting in the specific killing of somebody? No, I have no reason to believe that anybody can make that case. But what the hell are we doing in there? Why are we putting so much pressure? Why do we take so much pleasure in bombings and explosions that take place inside Iran, which may be linked to us? And I just don't quite understand the policy. It's certainly not one that's conducive to having good negotiations in good faith.

AMY GOODMAN: The latest news that nuclear talks in Turkey are taking place-talk about how the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, has found-what they have found in relation to the nuclear program and also Mohamed ElBaradei. In a minute, we're going to be speaking to Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was the Nobel Prize-winning head of the IAEA, was going to run for president of Egypt, then pulled out. But what he had to do with information that came from the MEK?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, very early, the MEK was the first group to announce that the-that they had discovered-in 2002, they had a news conference. And by the way, at that point, they were considered-the MEK were always considered a cult group, very fringe, marginal, irrational group. They had been involved in the '70s, so we believe, in the killing of some Americans inside Iran. And they were a Marxist, leftist group in opposition to the Shah that couldn't connect with the mullahs, the religious mullahs that took over, Khomeini in those days. They couldn't connect with them, and they began a protracted struggle in which murder, murder, murder was all over the place, both sides killing each other, very brutal stuff. And so they were always considered to be outside the normal realm of groups.

And suddenly in 2002, they get a lot of street cred, credibility, because they announce that they, the Iranians, are building a nuclear facility. They didn't say they were enriching uranium there, but it was clear, from the import of what they said, the only reason they're getting involved in building a facility for nuclear production was for weaponization. And I learned-I was told at the time that Israel was behind that intelligence, that it really didn't come from the MEK themselves. Israel, as you know-there are what, something like a million-and-a-half Iranian Jews, many of whom fled the country when the Shah fell. And Israel still has a pretty good net of-intelligence net inside Iran, so it wasn't illogical.

And I began to see Mr. ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, pretty regularly, certainly at least once a year, and talked to a lot of people there in Vienna about what was going on in terms of nuclear development around the world. And this is a wise man. We didn't like him because he's Egyptian, but that was a big mistake. He turned out to be-he was enraged at Iran when I first began to talk to him about it. He thought they cheated. He was quite angry.

But he also told me-I told him-we talked about the fact that I had heard that the Israelis were involved in providing that intelligence, and he also had heard the same thing. And in fact, before this article was published online for The New Yorker, the fact checkers went back to his office to his secretary and once again reminded him of that conversation and got his permission to say something he wouldn't let me say earlier, which is that he had provided me with that information, too.

So Israel has had a tremendous role in supporting the MEK. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel was also deeply involved in helping us or abetting with the training inside-in Nevada. That would make a lot of sense. And Israel certainly is a key player right now in the MEK activities, along with us, and for many years along with the Brits, who were also involved in providing signals intelligence inside Iran or collecting intelligence. The good thing about having Britain around is they're actually more hated than we are in the Middle East because of their long history of exploitation. That's always a plus.

But having said that, Baradei's been-he's been a very neutral arbiter of what was going on, very critical of Iran for many years. He eventually turned-his position turned, as he learned more, as the Iranians trusted him more, began to talk more to him and his people. And what we now have is-he left a few years back-we have a new director general, a Japanese sort of center-right politician named Amano, who is different. He's much closer to us. There's been WikiLeak cables released by Julian Assange that show very clearly that we helped him get elected as director general. There was a-it's a U.N. agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, that ElBaradei headed for so many years. It's U.N. And the new leader was voted-I think there were seven ballots, and it was our ability to swing some votes that got Amano the job, and he immediately told us how he would be different about Iran, etc.

There's a whole series of WikiLeaks cables about this that Julian's group released that are pretty devastating, that aren't enough in the American currency. They're there. They were published widely in the British press, but not here. We really need to take a look at this relationship, because it raises a lot of questions just about-I'll be honest: I'm not sure we come into negotiations with very clean hands on this. And we begin negotiations really behind the eight ball with the Iranians, because they are very deeply involved. They have very good intelligence. They know what we've been doing. Despite all this talk you have about Iranians being involved inside Afghanistan right now and all this talk about Iranians being involved inside Iraq and killing Americans, there's never been much of a case for that.

And I will tell you right now, after 9/11, the Iranians were absolutely willing to work with us, particularly against al-Qaeda. Don't forget, Iran is Shia, and al-Qaeda are mostly Sunni, Sunni fanatics, and there was no love lost. And they actually, in the first few-six months or so after 9/11, they closed their borders and captured a lot of al-Qaeda that were being driven out of the country by us, and they were looking for refuge in Iran, and they've been jailed. I think they're still there in jail, over a hundred of them. And so, we really blew a chance by putting them on the Axis of Evil. I'd sure like to do a takeover of American history after 9/11. I think the history books are going to be-as bad as we think it is, it's worse.

Seymour Hersh - US Is Training Iranian Terrorists In Nevada

Was it a momentary lapse of concentration or an honest admission?

Last week, in an interview with Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in Jerusalem, I heard something I have not heard before.

Let's start with the background.

With the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) talks on Iran's nuclear programme about to kick off, and the air thick with talk of a military attack on Iran, it seemed appropriate to try to gain some perspective from the Israeli establishment.

As Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy with a background in Iran issues, Meridor was the perfect man to talk to to.

An able and experienced politician, Meridor was mostly happy to skirt the direct questions and recite approved talking points.

It's when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran's supposed determination to "wipe Israel off the face of the map," that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.

Meridor: [Iran's leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn't say 'we'll wipe it out', you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;

Nabili: Well, I am glad you acknowledged they didn't say they will wipe it out, because certainly Israeli politicians…

Meridor: … they say it will be removed, needs to be removed.

The minister spent much of the ensuing conversation arguing that for Iran to simply question Israel's long term future amounts to an existential threat; there are many who agree with him.

But it's his acknowledgement that there's nuance in Iran's position that's so significant, and so rare.

Politicans from Binyamin Netanyahu through Britain's William Hague and most of the US congress won't do it; they have invested a great deal of political capital in arguing just the opposite, claiming incessantly that Iran will launch a nuclear weapon on Israel because, in their minds, Iran's president has more or less said so.

As Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University in the US points out, this position has remained unmoved by contradictory facts:

Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. In January 2006, complaining about the 'hue and cry' over his statement, he said: 'Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.' In July 2008, he told a meeting of the D-8 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) that his country would never initiate military action but that the Israeli regime would eventually collapse on its own.

But there's little doubt which opinion is most heard, and most listened to.

The Guardian of April 13, 2012, contained a remarkable example of this.

This article, questioning the legality of an attack on Iran, is unusual anyway, simply because it addresses the issue of international law at all.

But more surprising are the statements in it, made by some fairly learned lawyers, which are not so much legal analysis as verbal callisthenics.

That Alan Dershowitz gives Israel the legal green light to bomb Iran is to be expected, but here's Anthony D'Amato, a professor of international law at Northwestern University:

Iran says it wants to push the Israelis into the sea and that they are constructing nuclear weapons. That's enough for me to say that cannot be allowed. If the US or Israel takes the initiative to block that action, it can hardly be said to be violating international law. It can only be preserving international law for future generations.

The combination of factual error and partisan analysis here is remarkable.

Firstly, his characterisation of Tehran's policies is almost unique.

If "Iran" (and he doesn't actually clarify who he means here) has ever actually said that it wants to "push Israelis into the sea" he doesn't point us to the source.

Secondly, he doesn't explain why such comments from Iran should cause more existential anguish than similarly belligerent comments made by Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in reference to Palestinians, or by Hillary Clinton in reference to Iran. 

As for the concept of "preserving international law for future generations," he does not clarify his thoughts on whether Russia and China might also be justified in unilaterally attempting such a feat, or in deciding what can and cannot be allowed in international politics.

But what's most bizarre is his completely erroneous belief that Iran itself has said it's constructing nuclear weapons.

It hasn't

There's no reason to believe that a man of D'Amato's standing should lie, bare-faced, to an internationally respected newspaper; therefore it's more likely that he's simply accepted what someone with an anti-Iran agenda has told him.

So if a man who "has argued cases before the European Court of Human Rights" can fall prey to hearsay and mis-information, can we be surprised that the average consumer of mainstream media can buy into this "big lie"?

Let's hope, as the latest round of nuclear talks gets under way, the people around the table will, like Meridor, admit the existence of nuance and allow for alternate opinions.

Because if Harvard's Stephen Walt is right, and the P5+1 is intent on sabotaging the negotiations before they start ... well ...

Let's just hope.

This article was first published at Al- Jazeera

It is disappointing but not surprising that two days of negotiations this week failed to produce any real progress toward curbing Iran's nuclear program. Iran, always playing the angles, is still trying to figure out how much economic pain it is willing to accept to maintain its nuclear ambitions and what, if anything, it is willing to give up.

It is in the interest of the United States and its allies to keep talking, especially since a new round of sanctions is scheduled to go into effect. On June 28, the United States can start barring foreign banks doing oil-related business with the Central Bank of Iran from access to the American financial market. Starting on July 1, all members of the European Union will be prohibited from buying oil from Iran and insurance for ships that carry Iranian oil.

The meetings in Moscow were the third in a series involving Iran and the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany. To avoid a collapse in talks, they agreed that lower-level experts will meet on July 3.

The goal has to be to shut down all of the program that gives Iran the capability to build a bomb. The United Nations Security Council ordered that all enrichment should be ended six years ago, but the major powers were right to start the talks with a more short-term goal: to stop the most dangerous kind of enrichment.

Negotiators offered fuel for a medical reactor and aircraft replacement parts if Iran agreed to stop enriching uranium to 20% purity - near bomb grade - send its stockpile out of the country for fabrication into fuel rods and shut the underground facility at Fordo where the 20% enrichment is taking place.

Iran hinted in Moscow that it might limit enrichment to below that level but wanted more relief from sanctions and for the major powers to declare that it has a right to enrich uranium. The major powers say Iran will have that right if it proves it is not building a weapon.

We don't know if any mix of diplomacy and sanctions will persuade Iran to give up its ambitions. But there is no quick military fix. Even a sustained air campaign would likely set Iran's nuclear program back only by a few years and would rally huge sympathy for Tehran both at home and abroad. The current international consensus for sanctions, and the punishments, would evaporate.

That hasn't stopped American politicians from both parties from posturing on the issue. Before the Moscow talks, 44 Republican and Democratic senators sent President Obama a letter demanding that he abandon negotiations if there were no Iranian concessions.

The critics neglect to mention that Iran's program grew significantly when George W. Bush was president and opportunities were lost to constrain it at a much lower level. No president has been as successful as Mr Obama in rallying the major powers to impose sanctions with bite. These are the first serious nuclear talks in years, and there is still time to let them run.

Sanctions Against Iran

from a man on the ground .....

When I decided to bring two of my kids with me on a reporting trip to Iran, the consensus was that I must be insane. And that someone should call Child Protective Services!

That anxiety reflects a view that Iran is the 21st century's Crazy Country, a menace to civilization. That view also animates the hawks who believe that only a military option can stop Iran.

Look, I have no illusions about Iran. On my last trip here, in 2004, I was detained and accused of being a spy for Mossad or the C.I.A. I've talked to people who have been brutally tortured. I think that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity and that, if it were to deploy those weapons, this would be a huge and possibly fatal blow to global anti-proliferation efforts.

But we need a dollop of humility and nuance, for Iran is a complex country where we've repeatedly stumbled badly. For starters, consider for a moment which nation assisted Iran the most in the last dozen years. Not Russia, not China, not India. No, it was the United States under President George W. Bush. First, we upended the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran's enemy to the east, and then removed the Saddam Hussein government from Iraq, Iran's even deadlier threat to the west. Look at the Iraq-Iran relationship today, and it seems we fought a wrenching war in Iraq - and Iran won.

Now we may be heading for another war - perhaps triggered by Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites - and this might well help the ayatollahs as well by igniting a nationalist backlash that would bolster their rule.

On my road trip across Iran, the regime seemed on the defensive, its base corroding. In Mashhad, I interviewed a grand ayatollah, Sayid Muhammad Baqer Shirazi, and he didn't want to talk about politics at all. That seemed to me an acknowledgment that the regime now sometimes embarrasses even the mullahs who created it.

Americans think of Iran as a police state, but that overstates its control: Iranians are irrepressible. While interviewing people on a lovely Caspian Sea beach, a plainclothes policeman bustled forward. At first, I thought that the young woman I was interviewing was in trouble for criticizing the regime - but no, her sin was rolling up her sleeves.

The policeman shouted at her. She shouted at him. Neither was intimidated. Finally, she covered her forearms a bit more, and he accepted a truce.

The confrontation was a reminder that Iran is a complex and contradictory country, in ways that don't register at a distance. Iran imprisons more journalists than any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, yet it has a vigorous Parliament and news media with clashing views (within a narrow range). Some ethnic Turks seek to secede and join Azerbaijan, but the country's supreme leader is an ethnic Turk. Iran's regime sometimes embraces anti-Semitism, yet Parliament has a Jewish member.

Iranians gripe about their government without worrying about being overheard, yet participants in protests are tortured, gays can be executed and the Bahai religious minority endures mind-boggling repression. Iranian women constitute almost 60 percent of university students and hold important positions in the country, yet, under a new law, a woman can't even go skiing without a male guardian.

My daughter dressed primly in a head scarf and manteau because the police sometimes haul off women who are insufficiently covered (not foreigners, usually, but still). Iranian women we met spent their time helpfully rearranging her scarf.

"She has much better hijab than most girls these days," one matron told us approvingly, even as she tugged it over a few escapee strands of hair.

Elsewhere, young women told my daughter to be more revealing. "Come on, you're young," declared one young woman, and she pulled the head scarf back so that it covered almost nothing. "Show it!"

We sometimes think that Iran's leaders are impervious to public opinion, but women's clothing reflects social pressures that have led them to back off in some areas. Women are still required to cover themselves, but many women in Tehran do so with gauzy, come-hither scarfs rigged to blow off in the slightest breeze.

Hard-liners shudder, but they have long since given up flogging women for bad hijab. In some areas, the regime can evolve.

We can't do much to nurture progress in Iran, but promoting Internet freedom, shortwave news broadcasts and satellite television all would help. A war would hurt.

Our long-term aim should be the kind of "grand bargain," however unlikely, that some Iranian officials floated in 2003 to resolve all issues between our countries.

Iran looks childish when it calls America the "Great Satan" or blusters "Death to America." Let's not bluster back or operate on caricatures. And let's not choose bombs over sanctions and undercut the many Iranians who are chipping away at hard-line rule in tiny ways - even by flashing their hair.

Not-So-Crazy in Tehran

For many months, the most dramatic media storyline on Iran's nuclear program has been an explosives containment cylinder that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says was installed at Iran's Parchin military base a decade ago to test nuclear weapons. The coverage of the initial IAEA account of the cylinder in its report last November has been followed by a steady drip of reports about Iran refusing to allow the agency's inspectors to visit the site at Parchin and satellite photos showing what are said to be Iranian efforts to "sanitize" the site.

But unknown to consumers of corporate news, the story of the Parchin bomb test cylinder has been quietly unraveling. A former IAEA expert on nuclear weapons has criticized the story as technically implausible; the account itself turns out to be marked by a central internal contradiction, and even satellite images published to the IAEA account have been found by experts to contradict it.

The evidence detailed below leaves little room for doubt that the whole story of an explosives cylinder designed with the help a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist was a falsehood, foisted on the world by a state that is never named, but with an obvious political interest in promoting the idea of a covert Iranian nuclear arms program.  However, the IAEA, which is supposed to be a politically neutral organization, appears to be committed to the storyline as part of the political commitment to the anti-Iran coalition that was pledged by its Director General Yukiya Amano. The tale of the bomb test cylinder is an essential backdrop for the coming confrontation with Iran.

An Implausible Account and Some Telling Admissions

In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had been given "information from Member States" that in 2000, Iran had built a "large explosive containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments." That is the term generally understood in the context of the Iranian nuclear program to mean simulations of the initial phase of a nuclear explosion using substitutes for fissile material. The agency claimed it had "confirmed" that the cylinder had the capacity to contain up to 70 kilograms (kg) of high explosives, based in part on a publication by a former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist who had allegedly helped Iran build the chamber. And it seemed to suggest that there was satellite evidence to support the story, claiming that a building had been "constructed at that time around a large cylindrical object" at Parchin.

But those details of the alleged bomb test chamber immediately struck former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley as implausible from a strictly technical point of view. Kelley's credentials for challenging the IAEA were second to none. He had been project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory before becoming the Director of IAEA's Action Team for Iraq in 1992-93. He then served as director of the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Remove Sensing Laboratory from 1996 to 1998, rejoining the IAEA to head its Iraq Action Team again from 2001 to 2005.

Kelley told an interviewer with the Real News Network only a few days after the report: "You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container. There's no reason to do it. They're done outdoors on firing tables." Any test of a nuclear weapon design would have involved "far more explosives" than the 70 kg capacity claimed for the cylinder at Parchin, said Kelley. The Bush administration had accused Iran of carrying out hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons at Parchin as early as 2004, but on the assumption that the tests had been done outdoors, on such a firing table - not inside an explosive chamber.

The "foreign expert" whose publication was said to have provided data on the containment chamber's dimensions was identified in leaks to the news media as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian who had worked in a Soviet nuclear weapons facility for most of his career, but who is known to have specialized from the beginning in the nascent field of nanodiamonds. Leaving the Soviet Union before it collapsed, he sought to make a living based on his patented design for an explosive chamber in which to produce those microscopic industrial diamonds. In 1992, Danilenko joined the private company ALIT in Kiev, Ukraine, which adopted his design for nanodiamond production.

The dimensions of the alleged bomb test chamber said to have been built with Danilenko's help and installed in Parchin were leaked to journalists Michael Adler and the Associated Press's George Jahn In April and May. It is said to have been about 62 feet long and 14 feet tall, except for a reinforced midsection that is 25 feet tall.

Those dimensions, which would make the bomb cylinder roughly 1,000 cubic feet in volume, were obviously based on Danilenko's patented explosives chamber shown on a Power Point slide presentation prepared by the Philadelphia-based NanoBlox corporation, which works on explosive production of nanodiamonds. But that same Power Point shows that the Danilenko cylinder was designed to contain only 10 kg of explosive - one-seventh as much as the 70 kg of explosives that the Parchin chamber is said to have been capable of containing.

When he read that Iran had produced a containment chamber that big and with such a large capability for explosives containment, nuclear weapons specialist Kelley was incredulous. "It's bigger than any bomb containment vessel the United States has ever built," he told this writer. Kelley also noted that the biggest explosive chamber at the purportedly"world class" weapons labs at Los Alamos National Lab can only handle 10 kg of explosives.

A close reading of the IAEA November report suggests that its authors were aware of the problems Kelley had identified. The paragraph on the Parchin chamber says the 70 kg capacity of the alleged cylinder at Parchin "would be suitable for carrying out the type of experiments described in paragraph 43 above." But that paragraph was not about hydrodynamic testing.  It was about what it called a "multipoint initiation concept." A "multipoint initiation" system could be used for initiating an explosion related to either a nuclear weapon or for a conventional explosive application.

As Kelley pointed out in an interview with this writer, moreover, a "multipoint initiation" experiment "doesn't use uranium, so there's no need for a bomb test chamber." And the chamber described in the IAEA report is far too big for such an experiment, Kelley explained. For both reasons, it would be done outside.

The report says Iran carried out "at least one large-scale experiment in 2003" on a multipoint initiation technology. But rather than supporting the IAEA's case, that piece of information makes it even murkier, because the report states that those experiments were conducted "in the region of Marivan" - a location close to the Iranian border with Iraqi Kurdistan and very far from Parchin.

The report makes no effort to claim that there was any such bomb containment chamber in Marivan.

So, what the report actually tells us, by implication, is that the cylinder supposedly installed for "hydrodynamic tests" was not really appropriate for those tests at all.

An article by David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) on the organization's web site on April 10 argued that the reason for doing a test on the "multipoint initiation concept" inside the alleged bomb container "would likely have been to hide its activities from overhead observation." But that doesn't solve the IAEA's problem either, because, as Kelley pointed out in an interview, such an experiment could simply be covered by a tent to hide it from satellite surveillance.

What the Satellite Images Really Tell Us

Albright and Brannan cited two satellite images of the site at Parchin published in the same article as evidence supporting the IAEA's claim that a building at the site had been constructed "around a large cylindrical object." The co-authors said one satellite image of the site where the nuclear test vessel was allegedly located, dated March 14, 2000, "shows the foundation of the building that would contain the explosive test," but was "not yet placed on the foundation in this image."

But Kelley and three former US intelligence officers with long experience in image interpretation consulted for this story all conclude from an examination of the March 2000 image that it does not show a foundation for a building that would eventually be built around the bomb chamber as ISIS claimed. And Kelley and three other experts on image interpretation expressed serious doubts that the Parchin site shown in the images has characteristics that would be associated with any high explosives testing site, let alone a nuclear weapons testing site.

Kelley, who obtained the March 2000 image last January, told this writer, "You can see the roof is already on."

Retired Col. Pat Lang, who had been defense intelligence officer for Middle East, South Asia and counterterrorism at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1985 to 1992, also said that the image did not show a foundation. "The 'foundation' casts a large shadow in the direction of the top of the picture as do other structures," he said in an email to this writer. "Foundations do not normally cast shadows."

Another former intelligence officer with extensive experience in photographic interpretation, who asked not to be named, told this writer, "The object looks elevated, like a roof."

A third former intelligence officer, who also has many years of experience in image interpretation and who requested anonymity, said the March 2000 image shows neither a foundation for an eventual building, nor a roof, but simply a concrete slab. He said he found "no evidence of trenching or refilling which is necessary for a foundation footing."

The same officer said the structure shown in images from 2004 and later years published by ISIS does not appear to have been built on the same foundation as depicted in the 2000 image, as claimed by Albright and Brannan.  He said the structure was "much larger than the slab imaged in 2001." But the same officer said it was "not a substantial structure, like others at Parchin," suggesting it was more like "a shed."

Further damaging the credibility of the Parchin bomb chamber story, Kelley and the three former intelligence officers consulted for this story said the 2004 image and later images of the site at Parchin suggest that it has not been used for high explosives testing at all.  "The building in question is not a classical HE [high explosives] building, that is for sure," Kelley told this writer. And he noted that Parchin has many other buildings that do have "classical high explosive signatures."

Two of the former intelligence officers also said the site does not display any of the other characteristics associated with high explosives testing, much less testing involving nuclear weapons. Both officers said the building in question is far too close to a major divided highway to be involved in such sensitive testing activity. They also said there are no special security features as would be expected of a top secret facility.

Former defense intelligence officer Lang disagreed with the other former analysts on that point, suggesting that normal security practices were not necessarily followed in the Middle East. But Kelley pointed out that Iraq's Al Qaqaa facility, where high explosives had been stored and tested, did have security features that were missing at the site in question.

Brannan, who had directed a project at ISIS using commercial satellite imagery to analyze nuclear sites in Iran and elsewhere, left the organization in mid-May to work at the DOE. He did not respond to a query to his personal email asking for further explanation for the claim that the photograph shows a foundation rather than a building with a roof already on it.

The Iranian "Clean-Up" at Parchin"

The tale of the Parchin bomb test chamber has been made even more believable to the average newspaper reader or television news viewer by persistent press reports claiming evidence of Iranian efforts to "clean up" the site at Parchin.  The stories all reinforced one another and fit together with the basic narrative of an Iranian cover-up of nuclear- weapons-related testing.

The first such story appeared on November 22, just two weeks after the IAEA report was published. Associated Press Vienna correspondent Jahn, who was the conduit for later leaks on the same theme, reported that an official of an unidentified state had "cited intelligence from his home country, saying it appears that Tehran is trying to cover its tracks by sanitizing the site and removing any evidence of nuclear research and development."

Albright and Brannan published a satellite image dated April 9 which appears to show a stream of water from one end of the building along its side. They wrote that the image "raises concerns that Iran may have been washing inside the building, or perhaps washing the items outside the building." The implication was that this could be an effort to wash away traces of radioactive material used in tests.

But again Kelley explained why that makes no sense. "The Uranium signatures are very persistent in the environment," he wrote in an article for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in May. "If Iran is using hoses to wash contamination across a parking lot into a ditch, there will be enhanced opportunities for uranium collection if teams are allowed access."

Albright was back again in June with a new satellite image taken May 25 showing that soil had been moved from two areas north and south of the building said to have held the explosive chamber and showing that two much smaller buildings nearby had been demolished. But it also showed that the same soil was dumped only a few hundred feet farther north of the building, making environmental sampling quite simple. The fragments of the two small buildings demolished at the site appear to have been left intact on the ground, and the building where the chamber had allegedly been located and the soil closest to it remained undisturbed.

In the context of obvious Iranian knowledge that satellites are taking images of the site regularly and that news headlines based on those images would certainly follow, the images in question suggest something quite different from the "clean up" of the site reported in global news media: an Iranian effort to increase the value to the IAEA of visiting the site, so the agency would be more open to compromise on its demand to be able to continue investigating allegations of Iranian covert nuclear weapons work indefinitely, regardless of the information provided by Iran in response to its questions.

That Iranian strategy is unlikely to work, however. The clean-up stories - obviously coming from the same sources that provided the original information on the Parchin bomb test chamber - appear to be efforts to prepare public opinion for the inevitable IAEA finding after a visit to Parchin that there was no evidence of any such bomb test chamber. The same diplomats will be quoted in the stories on the IAEA visit explaining how the Iranians had merely washed or hauled away the evidence of hydrodynamic testing at the site.

At a deeper level, the negotiations between Iran and the IAEA over the terms of the investigation of the alleged "military dimensions" of Iran's nuclear program are hostage to the higher level negotiations between Iran and the P5+1. Amano was elected director general in 2009 thanks to US diplomatic support, and, as an October 2009 WikiLeaks cable revealed, Amano reminded the US ambassador to the agency more than once that he was "solidly in the US court" on handling the Iranian file. Clearly, the United States and its allies want Amano to keep Iran in the position of being accused of such covert nuclear weapons work in order to maximize the political-diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

The political interests of the key players and the complicity of corporate news media appear to guarantee that the Parchin explosives cylinder will continue to dominate public consciousness, despite the fact that the storyline around it has been thoroughly debunked. The persistent narrative serves as yet another chilling indicator of just how far the mass communications system in the United States and elsewhere has tilted toward the Orwellian model.

How a Nonexistent Bomb Cylinder Distorts the Iran Nuclear Issue

On July 11, The Huffington Post published a post by Hossein Abedini, who was identified in the byline as a “Member of Parliament in exile of Iranian Resistance.” His extended HuffPost bio says that he “belongs to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran” (NCRI). The NCRI is the political arm of the Mujahideen-e Khalq, (MeK), the Iranian dissident group (and longtime Saddam ally) that has been formally designated  by the U.S. State Department since 1997 as a Terrorist organization, yet has been paying large sums of money to a bipartisan cast of former U.S. officials to advocate on its behalf (the in-hiding President of the NCRI, Massoud Rajavi, is, along with his wife Maryam Rajavi, MeK’s leader). Abedini, the HuffPost poster, has been identified as a MeK spokesman in news reports, and has identified himself the same way when, for instance, writing letters to NBC News objecting to negative reports about the group.

Yesterday’s HuffPost piece by Abedini touted a recent rally, held on June 23 in Paris, which, he claimed, was attended by “over 100,000 Iranian exiles and supporters of the Iranian resistance from five continents.” The news report cited by Abedini actually says that “tens of thousands” of Iranians participated, and — reflecting what seems to be MeK’s bizarrely unlimited budget — they were transported by “more than a thousand buses . . . from all over Europe.” Abedini boasted that the rally’s keynote speaker was MeK leader Rajavi (whom he calls “the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance”) — it was a MeK rally — and quotes her at length demanding the removal of MeK from the list of Terror organizations.

As usual for a MeK event, Abedini was able to tout more than a dozen former high-level U.S. political officials from both parties who spoke to the rally, many of whom (if not all) have been repeatedly paid large sums of money for their MeK speeches. According to Abedini, this latest rally included many of the usual MeK shills: former GOP New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell, former Democratic New Mexico Governor and U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, former GOP U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former GOP Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Democratic State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, and several retired U.S. Generals.

Shortly after the HuffPost piece appeared, several people on Twitter, the first of which (I believe) was the Iranian journalist Hooman Majd, noted that The Huffington Post had published a propaganda piece from a designated Terror group and wondered whether they would do so for all such Terror groups such as Al Qaeda. After several others, including The New York Times‘ Robert Mackey and myself, noted the oddity that HuffPost was publishing pieces from a designated Terrorist group, HuffPost deleted the piece. If one goes now to the URL where the post first appeared, one finds this: “Editor’s Note: This post is no longer available on the Huffington Post” (the post can still be read in its cached version). No explanation is given for the deletion, but a HuffPost spokesperson, Rhoades Alderson, last night responded to my inquiry about it as follows:

It was published by mistake. By policy, we don’t publish blog posts by people affiliated with designated terrorist organizations. The blog editor who published it was unaware that NCRI is MEK’s political arm. When the mistake was discovered the post was removed.

Despite this “policy,” the same post by Abedini remains on the HuffPost’s UK site. Moreover, HuffPost has previously published numerous pieces from Abedini including one linking the Syrian and Iranian “resistance” and demanding Western support for both, another branding Iran the “epicenter of terrorism,” and other posts spouting the MeK line. All of those posts by Abedini remain on the HuffPost site.

To be clear, I don’t find HuffPost’s conduct — either in publishing posts from MeK spokespeople or removing them — to be objectionable. That’s not the point here. I personally believe it’s better to hear from all groups and to have all viewpoints aired rather than trying with inevitable futility to suppress them, but if HuffPost really does have a policy against publication of “people affliated with designated terrorist organizations,” then — just like laws criminalizing the providing of “material support to Terrorist organizations” — it should apply equally to MeK and those who work with it (including MeK’s list of paid D.C. political celebrities).

[In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. Government instructed American media outlets not to broadcast any statements from Osama bin Laden on the ground that he might embed in his statements coded signals to his followers to activate sleeper cells on American soil -- perhaps he would use the nose wiggle employed by Bewitched's Samantha Stevens to unleash her magic powers -- and many American media outlets (needless to say) dutifully complied. It seems clear that the real reason for suppression of those Al Qaeda statements was to ensure that Americans, who were understandably asking "Why Do They Hate Us"? in the wake of 9/11, would be prevented from hearing Al Qaeda's actual grievances about U.S. aggression so that they could instead be told that They Hate Us for Our Freedom; George Bush on September 21, 2001: "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?' . . . They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other". It's far preferable, in my view, to allow all views to be aired, but a ban on Terror groups and their supporters should be equally applied.]

What makes this HuffPost event notable is that it is inconceivable that they would publish posts from spokespeople or paid advocates for other designated Terrorist groups which do not command widespread support among Washington’s elites — such as, say, Al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Hezbollah. MeK is treated differently because they are Our Terrorists. NBC News reported that “deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group [MeK] that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service,” while The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh detailed in April that the U.S. has provided extensive training to MeK operatives, on U.S. soil. This entire MeK controversy has, as vividly as any event in a long time, illustrated the core truth of Terrorism and the laws against it: the entire concept has no purpose in American political discourse and law other than to delegitimize and criminalize support for groups which use violence in opposition to American violence and aggression, while sanctioning and enabling those groups which use such violence to advance America’s interests.

MeK used to work in close cooperation with Saddam (during the time Saddam was America’s decreed Enemy, rather than Ally), so they were therefore Bad: Terrorists. Indeed, in 2003, when the Bush administration was advocating an attack on Iraq, one of the prime reasons it cited was “Saddam Hussein’s Support for International Terrorism,” and it circulated a document purporting to prove that assertion, in which one of the first specific accusations listed was this:

Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians.

So just nine years ago, Saddam’s links to MeK were cited by the U.S. Government as proof that he sheltered Terrorist groups. Now, the MeK works for the interests of (and in cooperation with) Israel and the U.S., so suddenly, they are now Good, and the most Serious Beltway officials are free to openly take money from and advocate for this Terror group (as a result, the MeK is, predictably, highly likely to be rewarded by being removed by the Obama administration from the Terrorist list). They are basically the Ahmad Chalabis of Iran: despite being widely despised in Iran for their support for Iraq in its war against Iran, they are being deceitfully held out as the True Pro-American, Pro-Israel, Pro-Western-Intervention Voice of the Iranian People (paid MeK shill Howard Dean actually argued that the U.S. should recognize MeK’s leader as the legitimate President of Iran).

That HuffPost responded to yesterday’s pressure by removing the MeK post and citing its policy against publishing those “affliated with designated terrorist organizations” is valuable in the sense that it highlights the absurd travesty of “Terrorism” in U.S. politics. For legal purposes, at least, MeK is every bit the Terrorist organization that Al Qaeda is, yet they are now Our Terrorists, and are thus heralded and rewarded rather than scorned.

* * *

It was recently revealed that Clarence Page, the long-time Chicago Tribune columnist, was paid $20,000 to speak at this same MeK rally in Paris, along with travel expenses; once that was revealed, The Chicago Tribune reprimanded him and he announced that he would return the fee. It’s just extraordinary how much cash is flying around and ending up in the pockets of prominent and influential Americans in order to shill for this Terror group.

On a different note, The Guardian’s Iranian columnist, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, today details how sanctions against Iran are severely harming ordinary Iranians while doing little to undermine the government or its nuclear research program. The foreign policy analyst Reza H. Akbari points out the same thing here.

Finally, a new Pentagon report to Congress stresses, as the Federation of American Scientists put it, that “that while developing offensive capabilities, Iran’s military posture is essentially defensive in character” – specifically, “Iran’s military doctrine remains designed to slow an invasion; target its adversaries’ economic, political, and military interests; and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities while avoiding any concessions that challenge its core interests.” Let’s repeat that: quite understandably, “Iran’s military posture is essentially defensive in character.”

UPDATE: In addition to Abedini, The Huffington Post has also repeatedly published Ali Safavi, who is also identified as “a member of Iran’s Parliament in Exile, National Council of Resistance of Iran.” Safavi has also used his HuffPost platform to propagate standard MeK propaganda, such as this piece entitled “Time to Act on Iran Regime” which demands that “the US must immediately delist the MEK” and argues that “delisting the MEK will strengthen the entire opposition in Iran, serving to suffocate Tehran’s nuclear drive and expansionist agenda,” and this one, entitled “Reality Check: Understanding the Mujahedin-e Khalq,” that reads like a MeK press release. He appeared on CNN in 2003 as a NCRI representative and said that the MeK “of course is one of the five member organizations of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.” Safavi formerly lived in London where he led the movement to have the MeK unbanned, and often appears at Congressional hearings advising pro-MeK members of Congress. He now heads a “think tank” in D.C., the Near East Policy Research, which is overtly pro-MeK.

America's Own Pet Terror Organization Gets a Very Special Treatment

An Indian fisherman aboard a boat shot at by the U.S. Navy off Dubai's coast has told officials the crew received no warning before being fired upon, India's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates said Tuesday.

One Indian was killed in the incident, and three of his countrymen were seriously wounded.

The account differs from that provided by the Navy, which said it resorted to lethal force only after issuing a series of warnings.

The shooting happened Monday afternoon when a small boat rapidly approached the refueling ship USNS Rappahannock about 10 miles (16 kilometers) off Dubai's Jebel Ali port, according to the Navy.

The Navy said the boat's crew disregarded warnings from the U.S. vessel, and only then did gunners fire on it with a .50-caliber machine gun.

The white-hulled boat appeared to be a civilian vessel about 30 feet (9 meters) long and powered by three outboard motors. It had no obvious military markings. Similar boats are used for fishing in the region, though Iran's Revolutionary Guard also employs relatively small, fast-moving craft in the Gulf.

Indian consular officials have met with the wounded fishermen. Indian Ambassador M.K. Lokesh told The Associated Press on Tuesday that one of the survivors reported that the men were returning from fishing when they encountered the American ship.

"He says there was no warning" before the shooting occurred, Lokesh said, though he noted that authorities are still working to determine what happened. "We are waiting for the investigation to be complete. We are waiting to see what happened."

Dubai's police chief, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, said an initial investigation suggests "the boat was in its right course and did not pose any danger," according to comments published by Abu Dhabi-based daily The National. He told the government-backed newspaper that the shooting appeared to be a mistake.

The U.S. ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, has expressed regret for the loss of life and assured Indian officials that the U.S. government will conduct a full investigation.

India has separately asked the United Arab Emirates to investigate the incident, Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna said Tuesday.

Tariq Ahmed al-Haidan, political affairs assistant to the UAE Foreign Minister, has said relevant UAE authorities are working to determine what happened.

The incident comes during a period of heightened tensions in the Gulf between the United States and Iran, which lies just across the Gulf from the UAE.

Tensions are high in the Gulf after Iran last week renewed threats to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz - the route for one-fifth of the world's oil - in retaliation for tighter sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.

India Wants UAE To Probe Shooting By US Naval Ship That Killed Indian Fisherman Off Dubai

a full investigation"?

What about the four Honduran civilians - including two pregnant women - killed in a DEA raid in Ahuas on May 11? The US has neither "expressed regret for the loss of life" nor "assured Honduran officials" (or Members of Congress) that the US will "conduct a full investigation".

Where's the great Christopher Walken when we need him? "I've got a fever! [1] And the only prescription is … Bomb Iran!" That's the story, at least in Israel. Fever pitch will rule at least for the next six months.

This past weekend, the Israel Hayom newspaper - financed by casino mogul and Mitt Romney groupie Sheldon Adelson - dedicated a whole supplement to the fever. Lead articles had titles such as "Bomb or Bombing: Poker with the Cards Close to the Vest."

Yet earlier last week, a leak to the Yediot Ahronot daily [2] revealed that the cream of Israel's military leaders are against war on Iran - known in its aseptic version as "pre-emptive strike".

It's an impressive cast of characters. Here we have chief of the general staff Benny Gantz; the chief of operations of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Ya'akov Ayash; Tamir Pardo, the head of Mossad; Aviv Kochavi, in charge of Aman, the military intelligence directorate; the department heads of Mossad; the head of the Israeli Air Force Amir Eshel; not to mention at least four ministers of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's eight-man "kitchen cabinet".

There are qualifiers. Some admit they would only support an attack on Iran if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei - or International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors - announced a major weaponization game changer. Some others admit they will only support an attack if the US is on board; that's the case of retired Mossad heads Meir Dagan and Efraim Halevy and former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

The key player here is of course Gantz. He's always kept the attack option on the table. But he has also leaked that he knows any attack, even successful, won't smash Iran's nuclear program; besides, he also fears the geopolitical repercussions. When Gantz admitted a tiny sliver of all this on an Israeli TV channel, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the report to "disappear". [3]

So it boils down essentially to Bibi and Barak against all the above. This poses at least two key questions. How could Bibi possibly order an attack when the best Israeli informed minds know that would inflict a maximum six-month delay on Iran's nuclear program, according to extensive American calculations? And that a strike would definitely lead Tehran to abandon its current, prudent, "latency period" and go for broke on the weaponization front?

Murphy, take my call

Non-denial denials will spring up from all corners, but only people tripping on Alice in Wonderland believe Israel would attack Iran without an absolute green light from Washington. Russia, China, Pakistan, everyone knows about the US-Israel game of rearranging musical chairs preceding a possible attack on Iran. [4]

Hebrew University Political Science professor Ira Sharkansky, blogging at the Jerusalem Post, mentions yet another former Mossad head saying that Israel should not - and most likely will not - act without US consent.

This new collective foreign policy blog tried to answer some of the imponderables. But it still boils down to that old Hollywood maxim; no one knows anything.

No one knows whether the Israeli military may have come up with some magic, aerial attack route (without, for instance, overflying Iraq; forget about a ground attack and forget about nuking Iran); whether it has the means to launch a mini-Shock and Awe against Hezbollah positions in Lebanon; whether it has enough last-generation bunker busters to penetrate Iranian installations deep underground; whether it has just-in-time intel, for that matter.

Murphy's Law applies here. Even the Pentagon knows that everything that may go wrong may actually go wrong. [5]

And even if it doesn't, the trillion-dollar question still remains; what kind of game is US President Barack Obama actually playing?

All would be excused if this were just sunburn caused by prolonged summer beach exposure. But we're talking about war, pre-emptive war, bypassing international law - and based on a concentric set of hypotheticals, not to mention lies.

The IAEA, US National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and even Israeli intelligence know there is no Iran nuclear weapons program. Russia - which has thousands of technicians in Iran - also knows it.

The notion that Iran is a threat to Israel springs up from a Dadaist manifesto. Israel is an actual - undeclared - nuclear power (it never subscribed to the NPT); Iran (which subscribes to the NPT) is not.

As John Glaser at Antiwar.com succinctly summarized, "the US has Iran militarily surrounded, has conducted covert ops along with Israel, constantly threatens Iran with pre-emptive military strike, and is heaping harsh economic sanctions." [6] Threat? Who's threatening who here?

Yet what is extraordinary is how Tel Aviv manages to strike one fabulous PR coup after another - at least in terms of brainwashing American public opinion - by just changing the red line. [7]

Just read carefully this Barak interview with CNN. [8]

It's all here. There is no Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran is not a threat - immediate or otherwise. What we have here is the defense minister of a country saying that another country should not be allowed to enter a "zone of immunity" beyond which it cannot be harassed, attacked, bombed, invaded.

Imagine if this was a Chinese or Russian defense minister nonchalantly proclaiming it out loud on American TV.

Back to the Great Game

The whole convoluted premise for an Israeli attack on Iran turns out to be bogus.

A number of countries - such as Japan, South Korea and Brazil - have the breakout capability in terms of assembling a nuclear weapon; the technology is decades old. This does not mean that they will do it.

The fact that Tehran allows immensely intrusive IAEA inspections and has offered concessions over the years that go way beyond its obligations under the NPT proves it does not want to build a bomb tomorrow (or yesterday, according to Israel). And even if it did, that would be detected just-in-time.

As it stands, Obama seems to bet that poker player Bibi won't have the guts to order an attack on Iran while he's in the Oval office. This is a plausible enough argument for why Obama might be tempted to launch an October surprise; but ultra-cautious, pragmatist Obama might only go for it in absolute desperation. As for Bibi, he would love Washington to do the dirty work for him (Israel, technically, can't do it, and Benny Gantz knows it). So Bibi is already on "Waiting for Mitt" mode.

In terms of the Big Picture - the New Great Game in Eurasia - the Iranian nuclear program is just an excuse; the only one in the market, actually. This goes way beyond Israel and its own regional fever.

Cutting through the fog enveloping the 33-year-long wall of mistrust between Washington and Tehran, Washington's fever remains the same, from Clinton I and II to Bush I and II to Obama and beyond; we need regime change, we need a Persian satrapy like we had before, we need all that oil and gas in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea for the West, and not for the East, we need to control this vital strategic node in Eurasia. For this fever, there seems to be no cure.

Notes:

1. See here

2. 'Bibi Can't OK Iran Strike As Defense Chiefs Demur', Jewish Daily Forward, July

31, 2012

3. See here

4. US, Israel arranging roles in Iran war theater?, Russia Today, August 6, 2012

5. U.S. War Game Sees Perils of Israeli Strike Against Iran, New York Times, March 16, 2012

6. Ehud Barak Admits Iran Has Defensive Posture, No Weapons Program, Antiwar.blog, August 03, 2012

7. Can We Still Tell if Iran Decides to Build a Nuclear Bomb?, The Atlantic, Aug 6
ml

8. CNN THE SITUATION ROOM, July 30, 2012

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at [email protected]

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd

Britain has rebuffed US pleas to use military bases in the UK to support the build-up of forces in the Gulf, citing secret legal advice which states that any pre-emptive strike on Iran could be in breach of international law.

The Guardian has been told that US diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from US bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories.

The US approaches are part of contingency planning over the nuclear standoff with Tehran, but British ministers have so far reacted coolly. They have pointed US officials to legal advice drafted by the attorney general's office which has been circulated to Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

This makes clear that Iran, which has consistently denied it has plans to develop a nuclear weapon, does not currently represent "a clear and present threat". Providing assistance to forces that could be involved in a pre-emptive strike would be a clear breach of international law, it states.

"The UK would be in breach of international law if it facilitated what amounted to a pre-emptive strike on Iran," said a senior Whitehall source. "It is explicit. The government has been using this to push back against the Americans."

Sources said the US had yet to make a formal request to the British government, and that they did not believe an acceleration towards conflict was imminent or more likely. The discussions so far had been to scope out the British position, they said.

"But I think the US has been surprised that ministers have been reluctant to provide assurances about this kind of upfront assistance," said one source. "They'd expect resistance from senior Liberal Democrats, but it's Tories as well. That has come as a bit of a surprise."

The situation reflects the lack of appetite within Whitehall for the UK to be drawn into any conflict, though the Royal Navy has a large presence in the Gulf in case the ongoing diplomatic efforts fail.

The navy has up to 10 ships in the region, including a nuclear-powered submarine. Its counter-mine vessels are on permanent rotation to help ensure that the strategically important shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz remain open.

The Guardian has been told that a British military delegation with a strong navy contingent flew to US Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, earlier this summer to run through a range of contingency plans with US planners.

The UK, however, has assumed that it would only become involved once a conflict had already begun, and has been reluctant to commit overt support to Washington in the buildup to any military action.

"It is quite likely that if the Israelis decided to attack Iran, or the Americans felt they had to do it for the Israelis or in support of them, the UK would not be told beforehand," said the source. "In some respects, the UK government would prefer it that way."

British and US diplomats insisted that the two countries regarded a diplomatic solution as the priority. But this depends on the White House being able to restrain Israel, which is nervous that Iran's underground uranium enrichment plant will soon make its nuclear programme immune to any outside attempts to stop it.

Israel has a less developed strike capability and its window for action against Iran will close much more quickly than that of the US, explained another official. "The key to holding back Israel is Israeli confidence that the US will deal with Iran when the moment is right."

With diplomatic efforts stalled by the US presidential election campaign, a new push to resolve the crisis will begin in late November or December.

Six global powers will spearhead a drive which is likely to involve an offer to lift some of the sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy in return for Tehran limiting its stockpile of enriched uranium.

The countries involved are the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China. Iran will be represented by its chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "As we continue to make clear, the government does not believe military action against Iran is the right course of action at this time, although no option is off the table. We believe that the twin-track approach of pressure through sanctions, which are having an impact, and engagement with Iran is the best way to resolve the nuclear issue. We are not going to speculate about scenarios in which military action would be legal. That would depend on the circumstances at the time."

The Foreign Office said it would not disclose whether the attorney general's advice has been sought on any specific issue.

A US state department official said: "The US and the UK co-ordinate on all kinds of subjects all the time, on a huge range of issues. We never speak on the record about these types of conversations."

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, warned at the UN general assembly last month that Iran's nuclear programme would reach Israel's "red line" by "next spring, at most by next summer", implying that Israel might then take military action in an attempt to destroy nuclear sites and set back the programme.

That red line, which Netanyahu illustrated at the UN with a marker pen on a picture of a bomb, is defined by Iranian progress in making uranium enriched to 20%, which would be much easier than uranium enriched to 5% to turn into weapons-grade material, should Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, take the strategic decision to abandon Iran's observance of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and try to make a weapon. Tehran insists it has no such intention.

In August, the most senior US military officer, General Martin Dempsey, distanced himself from any Israeli plan to bomb Iran. He said such an attack would "clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran's nuclear programme".

He added: "I don't want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it."

Britain Rejects US Request To Use UK Bases In Nuclear Stand-Off With Iran

Sanctions- More Deadly Than The Atomic Bomb?

Which would you prefer?

Look at the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima vs the 1990's Iraq sanctions & let that instruct your view of the Iran sanctions.

www.inceptionhouse.com

Israel is suspected of carrying out a series of leaks implicating Iran in nuclear weapons experiments in an attempt to raise international pressure on Tehran and halt its programme.

Western diplomats believe the leaks may have backfired, compromising a UN-sanctioned investigation into Iran's past nuclear activities and current aspirations.

The latest leak, published by the Associated Press (AP), purported to be an Iranian diagram showing the physics of a nuclear blast, but scientists quickly pointed out an elementary mistake that cast doubt on its significance and authenticity. An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared: "This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax."

The leaked diagram raised questions about an investigation being carried out by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors after it emerged that it formed part of a file of intelligence on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work held by the agency.

The IAEA's publication of a summary of the file in November 2011 helped trigger a new round of punitive EU and US sanctions.

Western officials say they have reasons to suspect Israel of being behind the most recent leak and a series of previous disclosures from the IAEA investigation, pointing to Israel's impatience at what it sees as international complacency over Iranian nuclear activity.

The leaks are part of an intensifying shadow war over Iran's atomic programme being played out in Vienna, home to the IAEA's headquarters.

The Israeli spy agency, the Mossad, is highly active in the Austrian capital, as is Iran and most of the world's major intelligence agencies, leading to frequent comparisons with its earlier incarnation as a battleground for spies in the early years of the cold war.

The Israeli government did not reply to a request for comment and AP described the source of the latest leak only as "officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic programme".

An "intelligence summary" provided to AP with the graph appeared to go out of its way to implicate two men in nuclear weapons testing who had been targeted for assassination two years ago. One of them, Majid Shahriari, was killed on his way to work in Tehran in November 2010 after a motorcyclist fixed a bomb to the door of his car. The other, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, was wounded in a near identical attack the same day.

A book published earlier this year by veteran Israeli and American writers on intelligence, called Spies Against Armageddon, said the attacks were carried out by an assassination unit known as Kidon, or Bayonet – part of the Mossad.

One western source said the "intelligence summary" supplied with the leaked diagram "reads like an attempt to justify the assassinations".

According to one European diplomat, however, the principal impact of the leak would be to compromise the ongoing IAEA investigation into whether Iran has tried to develop a nuclear weapon at any point. "This is just one small snapshot of what the IAEA is working on, and part of a much broader collection of data from multiple sources," the diplomat said.

"The particular document turns out to have a huge error but the IAEA was aware of it and saw it in the context of everything it has. It paints a convincing case."

Sources who have seen the documents said the graph was based on a spreadsheet of data in the IAEA's possession which appears to analyse the energy released by a nuclear blast. The mistake was made when that data was transposed on to a graph, on which the wrong units were used on one of the axes.

There is widespread belief among western governments, Russia, China and most independent experts that evidence is substantial for an Iranian nuclear weapons programme until 2003. There is far less consensus on what activities, if any, have been carried out since. The IAEA inquiry has so far not found a "smoking gun".

Analysts say that the recent leaks may have shown the IAEA's hand, revealing what it knows and does not know, and therefore undermined the position of its inspectors in tense and so far fruitless talks with Iranian officials about the country's past nuclear activities.

Iran rejects the evidence against it as forged and has not granted access to its nuclear scientists or to a site known as Parchin where IAEA inspectors believe the high-explosive components for a nuclear warhead may have been tested.

The IAEA says it has evidence that the site is being sanitised to remove any incriminating traces of past experiments.

David Albright, a nuclear expert at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said he had no knowledge of who was behind the leak but added: "Whoever did this has undermined the IAEA's credibility and made it harder for it to do its work."

The next round of IAEA talks with Iran will take place on Saturday in Tehran. The US has said that if Iran does not co-operate with the IAEA investigation by March, the matter should be referred to the UN security council.

The security council has repeatedly demanded that Iran suspend enrichment of uranium until it has satisfied the international community that it is not pursuing a covert weapons programme. Iran has rejected the demand, insisting its programme is entirely peaceful, and has intensified its enrichment effort, triggering Israeli threats of military action.

A new round of negotiations between Iran and six world powers, aimed at trading curbs on enrichment for sanctions relief, is due to begin in the next few weeks but no date has been set.

Israel Suspected - Iran Nuclear Programme Leaks