ElBaradei Foes Leak Stories to Force His Hand on Iran

Analysis by Gareth Porter | IPS News

Western officials leaked stories to the Associated Press and Reuters last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was "incorrect".

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear programme in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. Read more.

Jerusalem families waiting for US action

by Marcey Gayer, The Electronic Intifada, 14 August 2009

In the early morning hours of Sunday, 2 August, a force of hundreds of police and border guards invaded the quiet East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and systematically evicted the sleeping Hanoun and Gawi families from their homes. The sun dawned upon a new reality: chaos in the streets, children crying and elders in anguish. The police blocked every entrance to the area, preventing friends from coming to the aid of the distressed families or even helping them to remove their belongings from their homes. Revealing prior coordination with the authorities, the homes were quickly occupied by ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers.

The Hanoun and Gawi families, consisting of 16 and 38 members, respectively, lived in their homes for 53 years. Built in 1956 by the UN and the Jordanian government (who had sovereignty over East Jerusalem at the time) as part of a temporary housing complex for refugees of the 1948 war, these were homes for those who already knew eviction and ethnic cleansing. However, this time the dispossession was accomplished "legally."

Since the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been building settlements along the eastern flank of Jerusalem to prevent expansion of its Arab neighborhoods. Moreover, within the past 20 years, the Israeli settlement project has begun encroaching upon the Arab neighborhoods themselves, installing nationalist Jewish families within their perimeters by force. Slowly but relentlessly, Israel is attempting to Judaize these neighborhoods in a manner designed not to attract international scrutiny and criticism.

Thus Maher Hanoun, the head of the Hanoun family, was ordered by Israeli courts to hand over the keys to his home to the Association of Sephardic Jewry on 19 July. Rather than comply with the court order, he held a press conference outside his house accompanied by several top officials, including Nils Eliasson of the Swedish Consulate representing the European Union, Robert Serry representing the UN, and Dr. Rafik Husseini of the Palestinian Authority. They all condemned the proposed eviction, calling it an affront to norms of international justice. In spite of US President Barack Obama's call to freeze Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, no representative from the US was present.

Hanoun, a 51-year-old salesman for the Nestle Corporation whose sales territory includes Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, and Tel Aviv, is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English. He is a man of culture and conscience, a believer in peaceful co-existence. He is soft-spoken, dignified and humorous, a devoted husband and the father of three wonderful children. He is the global everyman -- simple, honest, hard-working -- hardly deserving to be evicted from his home. But he and his family were evicted, simply because they are Palestinian.

Where does this all leave us? Maher Hanoun, his two brothers and their wives and children and the Gawis, 54 persons all together, are now sleeping under trees 50 feet from their former homes. Menacing armored vehicles are parked in front of each house and the neighborhood is overrun with police, border guards and stone-throwing settlers.

The dispossession of the Hanoun and Gawi families is a clear act of defiance directed at the Obama administration's call to freeze settlements. If it succeeds, this will be a green light for Israel to continue with its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Already five additional Sheikh Jarrah families have received court summonses and they are fated to join the Hanouns and the Gawis in the street if this supposedly "legal" land grab isn't stopped. If the new US president is to have any credibility on the international stage, he must keep faith with Maher Hanoun. Outside his home, Hanoun hung a big banner bearing President Obama's picture and the slogan "OBAMA,YES YOU CAN stop housing evictions in Sheikh Jarrah."

He and the world are still waiting.

Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv.

Watch also the clip - Homeless in Jerusalem.

War on Terror - Pathways to Peace

Zionism - Ruin of the Soul

Role of US Militarism in Ahmadinejad’s Rise

Many Americans have played important roles in Iran’s contemporary history, from Howard Baskerville (1885-1909), Iran’s "first American martyr" who, while helping the revolutionaries defend the city of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) against the forces of Iran’s dictator of the time, Mohammad Ali Shah, was killed in 1909 in Tabriz, to Joseph Cochran (1855-1905) who was the founding father of Iran’s first modern medical school, Samuel M. Jordan (1871-1952) who is sometimes referred to as the father of modern education in Iran and founded the American College of Tehran (later renamed the Alborz high school), and others.

The United States also played a crucial role in forcing the Soviet Union’s forces evacuate Iran in 1946, after World War II had ended. In the Tehran Conference of 1943, Joseph Stalin promised Harry Truman and Winston Churchill that his forces will leave Iran after WW II ends, but he did not deliver on his promise until he was pressured by the U.S. But, since then, the history of the U.S. intervention in Iran’s internal affairs has been depressing, resulting in tyranny, bloodshed, and revolution.

It all began with the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and started the era of the U.S. influence in Iran. In addition to its great political influence over the Shah of Iran, the U.S. helped establish and train the SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded security services. These events ultimately led to the 1979 Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed regime of the Shah. For decades the U.S. would not even admit its role in the 1953 coup. When Madeleine Albright did finally acknowledge it in 2000, she explained it based on the supposed Soviet military threat to Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic leftist students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 53 American diplomats and staff hostage. The event should be viewed in light of Iran’s bitter experience of the 1953 CIA coup. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981. Then, in 1983, against the Algiers Agreement of January 1981 that freed the hostages, President Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Iran, most of which have remained in effect. Ever since, the U.S. goal has always been to hamper Iran’s economic development and to contain it militarily, which in turn have helped the radicals and hardliners to prevent the Iranian people from advancing their country on a democratic path.

Iran’s reform movement was born in the early 1990s. But, at every stage of its development, instead of being helped by the U.S. and its allies, it has been hurt by them.

On May 23, 1997, the Iranian people elected Mohammad Khatami, a moderate and progressive cleric, as their next president by a landslide. But, instead of helping Khatami by lifting at least a part of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, the Clinton administration continued to pursue its dual-containment policy, whereby both Iran and Iraq were to be contained by the U.S. military and economic might.

Even when Khatami called for a dialogue among civilizations, the U.S. did not respond favorably. The hard-liners pointed to the U.S. non-responsiveness as yet another sign that it was only interested in hampering Iran’s developments, and rebuked Khatami and his supporters for wanting to resolved the differences between the two nations.

Only in April 2000, after the reformists had swept the elections for the Iranian parliament, did President Clinton make a minor gesture toward Iran by lifting sanctions on the imports of Iranian rugs, pistachios, and caviar. But, it was too little too late. The Clinton administration was on its way out.

Then, came the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. The Khatami administration provided crucial help to the U.S. in Afghanistan by opening Iran’s airspace to the U.S. aircrafts, and providing crucial intelligence on the Taliban. Iran’s Afghan ally, the Northern Alliance that it had supported and trained for years, was the first force that entered Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and overthrew the Taliban. Iran also played a crucial role in the formation of Afghanistan’s national unity government in December 2001.

But, the Bush administration rewarded the Khatami administration by making Iran a charter member of the "axis of evil" in February 2002, and began threatening it with military attacks. This further hurt the credibility of the Iranian reformists who were advocating a rapprochement with the U.S.

The U.S. then invaded and occupied Iraq in the spring of 2003. The Shiite groups that had spent their exile years in Iran, and had been supported, trained, and funded by it, were put in power in Iraq, and were considered allies of the U.S., but the George W. Bush administration accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, and continued to threaten it with military attacks. The threats helped Iran’s hardliners to further suppress dissent in Iran.

In late April 2003 the Khatami administration presented a comprehensive proposal to the U.S., whereby it agreed to recognize Israel, help transform the Lebanese Hezbollah to a purely political group, and limit its nuclear program. Not only was the proposal spurned by the U.S., but it also admonished the Swiss ambassador to Iran for delivering the proposal to it (Switzerland represents the U.S. interests in Iran). Instead, the U.S. continued to threaten Iran militarily. Once again, Iran’s reformists were sacrificed by the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran and the Middle East.

Almost at the same time, the confrontation between Washington and Tehran began over Iran’s nuclear program. Although every report by the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that, aside from some minor non-compliance cases, Iran had abided by its obligations towards Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and its Safeguards Agreement; the Bush administration threatened Iran with military attacks more strongly than ever.

The U.S. threats greatly helped Iran’s hardliners to crackdown on the reformists. First, the press that had enjoyed relative freedom during the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, was suppressed, partly because the hardliners accused it of being an agent of foreign powers. The reformists were then purged from the Iranian parliament during the 2004 elections. Then, on the eve of Iran’s 2005 presidential election, George W. Bush basically said that the Iranian people should not vote, which actually provoked the conservatives and even some nationalists to vote in large numbers and help elect Ahmadinejad.

Once Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, and began using harsh, but inconsequential, rhetoric against Israel, the U.S. ratcheted up its military threats against Iran. In a show of force, and in addition to surrounding Iran with the U.S. forces on three sides, the Bush administration dispatched two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf in May 2007, in order to frighten Iran. Dick Cheney used the deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis to threaten Iran, "We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats."

All such threats were used by Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters to further suppress dissent in Iran, shut down independent and reformist newspapers and other publications, and accuse the reformist and democratic groups of being agents of the U.S. and other foreign powers. The constant pressure on the reformists and their oppression by the hardliners prevented them from organizing and confronting Ahmadinejad and his supporters more effectively.

Even after the supposedly realist Obama administration took over in January just a few months before Iran’s presidential election, and the President began looking for Iran’s unclenched fist, the threats against Iran did not stop, nor did their nature change. Asked if the military option was still on the table with regard to Iran, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday January 28 that, "The President hasn’t changed his viewpoint that he should preserve all his options. We must use all elements of our national power to protect our interests as it relates to Iran."

Thus, decades of U.S. hostility toward Iran, and sanctions and military threats and attacks have had a net result: the efforts by the courageous people of Iran in establishing a democratic political system has been thwarted by undemocratic and even neo-fascist groups, who have used the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran as their excuse to suppress freedom.

Text taken from here.

Is justice right side up?

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones—the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes the five nations with veto power in the United Nations inviolable? Is it of a divine origin that veto power of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to guard the peace? Is it fair that world peace is in the hands of the very five nations who are also the world’s main producers of weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet another example of organized crime?

Those who clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding murderers yet say nothing about missile-wielding arch-murderers.

And one asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they try to aim their murderous proclivities at social injustice? Is it a just world when, every minute, three million dollars are wasted on the military while at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or curable disease? Against whom is the so-called international community armed to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?

text taken from here.

Torture Logic

Recent reports that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate illegal torture carried out during the Bush administration is a positive sign, especially given President Obama’s desire to avoid what he has called "a backward-looking" inquiry. When Holder began studying the brutal acts carried out in America’s name, some of them even exceeding the horrors authorized in the infamous Justice Department torture memos, he reportedly said it "turned my stomach." In "Tortured Logic," a video released by the ACLU today, you’ll hear well-known people like Oliver Stone, Rosie Perez and Philip Glass, among others, read from those chilling memos, which were disclosed as part of ACLU litigation:

Text taken from here.

Read the torture memos here.

Former FBI Translator: Bin Laden Worked for U.S. Right Up Until 9/11

Before you hear what Sibel Edmonds has to say, you should know a little about her background.

Edmonds is a former FBI translator, who the Department of Justice's Inspector General and several senators have called extremely credible (free subscription required).

And some of Edmonds allegations' have already been confirmed by the British press.

Now, Edmonds is saying that Osama Bin Laden worked for the U.S. right up until 9/11,and that that fact is being covered up because the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years.

Outrageous claim, right?

Actually, there are several lines of confirmation of Edmonds' claim.

• According to one of the most reputable French papers, CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

• Two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later told CNN that “in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

In other words, American forces had many opportunities to capture Bin Laden, and yet failed to do so.

Indeed, even after 9/11, the U.S. military intentionally let Bin Laden evade capture. Outrageous? Don't believe it?

See for yourself:

• The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan

• A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:

  "We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ....Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden."

• French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them

This is how a government treats its own agents, not foreign terrorists.

For background, you may wish to note that the government not only listened in on Bin Laden's calls, they also heard the hijackers' plans from their own mouths.

And the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And the CIA may have helped many of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation" (the audio is here).

And, as documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950's posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay).

Moreover, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. If you view no other links in this article, please read the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

And Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the Bush administration funded terrorist groups (see confirming articles here and here).

What does all this mean about Bin Laden? Make up your own mind.

Text taken from here.

Parroting the Two-State Solution

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana surprised observers on 11 July when he called, during a speech in London, for the UN Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state by a certain date even if no agreement had been reached between Israelis and Palestinians.

On its face, this proposal sounds dramatic. There must be some who still believe that a Security Council decision would result in real and drastic action. The reality, however, is that the Security Council is not the powerful executive organ it was created to be.

Yet Solana clearly angered Israel by daring to make such a proposal. Israel is not used to being surprised, and normally the big powers consult it before making any major statements about the Middle East situation. This time it seems Solana did not seek the proper Israeli permission. Yet the Israeli anger itself seemed to give added credence to the idea that Solana must have said something significant.

Solana praised the new peace initiative of US President Barack Obama and suggested that if that fails to bring about a binding agreement between the parties, then the "international community" should intervene through the Security Council. Specifically, Solana proposed:

"After a fixed deadline, a UN Security Council resolution should proclaim the adoption of the two-state solution. This should include all the parameters of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and security arrangements. It would accept the Palestinian state as a full member of the UN, and set a calendar for implementation. It would mandate the resolution of other remaining territorial disputes and legitimize the end of claims."

What this seemingly bold statement boils down to is that Solana wants the Security Council to join the chorus of those who have been singing the two-state solution song for decades. Instead of suggesting concrete measures to enforce previous and long-ignored UN resolutions, or to check Israel's violations which made a Palestinian state impossible, Solana simply wants the UN to recognize an imaginary Palestinian state as a full member of the UN.

If we try to put a positive spin on it, we could say that the "two-state solution" is already half way to being achieved. After all, one of the two states -- Israel -- has been in existence for more than 60 years, and moreover has been expanding its territory for all that time.

The problem, however, is that this "success" means that there is nowhere left for a second state. Solana, like many others, finds it easy to parrot the two-state solution, but does not have the courage to demand a complete end even to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which began on 4 June 1967.

Text taken from here.

Israel’s Discriminatory Land Policies

In 1973, former Israeli scholar, critic, and lifelong human rights activist, Israel Shahak (1933-2001), wrote a paper titled, “What is the Meaning of the Jewish State” in which he said:

“The real situation in Israel is really very simple: Israel is not an ‘Israeli’ state, or a state of its citizens but it is a ‘Jewish state.’” With regard to land, “More than 90% of the inhabited areas of the State of Israel are under the rule of the Jewish National Fund regulations, under which non-Jews cannot rent or buy a house or flat, open a business, in short cannot live. This land is called in Hebrew ‘the land’ saved. The land which belongs to non-Jews is called unsaved not national (meaning Jewish) and by buying or confiscating it from a non-Jew by a Jew, the land is supposed to be ’saved.’ ”

It’s only the beginning. Numerous privileges are afforded Jews alone that include:

• not only the right to the land but to a mortgage or loan to finance it;
• on confiscated West Bank land, “Jewish inhabitants enter into prepared houses, with water and electricity;” unconnected Arab villages are forbidden to use either; and
• “A building project for the newly-married applies only for the Jewish newly-married and so forth; to be a Jew in a Jewish state is to be both a privileged being, and to be able to receive a lot of ‘easy’ money a non-Jew can not ever get.”

Read further here.