Iran Nuke Propaganda Debunked, NPR on Iran, and The Greek Experiment

In this Edition:
- Iran Nuke Propaganda Debunked (Video, my comments on NPR & other coverage, several articles & PEW Poll)
- The Greek Experiment (Videos & Article)

[In my now deleted 2/15/12 post on these subjects, I had forgotten about some comments from a few weeks back on Iran press coverage that I had not yet posted, so I have added them and some articles to fill out the portion on Iran's nuclear program for this new post.]
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Iran Propaganda debunked in less than 6 minutes

See Also:
Scott Horton Interviews Flynt Leverett
Scott Horton Interviews Flynt Leverett-- December 30, 2011
Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter
Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter--January 19, 2012
Scott Horton Interviews Philip Giraldi
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NPR's Navarro lies on Iran Nuke

I like some of the programming on Oregon Public Broadcasting, but I always let out a very loud grumpy groan, which is not unlike the sound of a large tree falling down in a forest far away from any human ear, when during an NPR/PBS/OPB funding drive, I hear the words of some obsequious, allegedly well informed individual say, like many others before them, something to the effect that if it were not for NPR, they would not know what really is going on in the world.

I'm thinking "Really? How unfortunate that you are apparently unplugged from so many alternative news sources on the internet." Sources, I might add, that value truth over the views of administrative overseers, advertisers, or subscriber donations.

Remembering back to the run-up to the Iraq war, NPR was among the others in the mainstream media, like the New York Times, NBC, and the like, that in some cases produced, and at least eagerly repeated, the lies coming out from the Bush administration and the Neocon think tanks. NPR programs, like Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation, even called some of the discredited "experts," or their sponsoring think tanks, back to comment on newer developments years after their previous reports had been show to be utterly baseless and false.

NPR, and even Democracy Now!, to some extent, have given much air time to reporters who told us with righteous glee how Gadaffi was being defeated, but you don't hear many reports now that the country is in a shambles, and the people they supported have turned on each other, and have committed barbarous acts against imprisoned Libyan blacks and others thought to have supported Gaddafi. The corporate media in general behaves the same, and now they all report alleged war crimes and civilian casualties in Syria on the flimsiest of evidence. NPR entertains "experts" who urge US intervention, as they did in Iraq and Libya, without providing much analysis of what the real results of intervention will be. We know what a disaster the wars have become in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Libya and others not far behind.

So now we have had a near constant drumbeat in recent weeks, years really, from that same media, concerning the imminent nuclear threat posed to Israel and the US by Iran.

Without getting in to Iran's actual treaty rights to develop the same nuclear energy for peaceful purposes that the US and Europe have enjoyed for decades, and without bringing into the discussion the fact that the US, some European nations, and Israel, already threaten the world with nuclear weapons, it is important to focus on the lies that NPR (and other media sources) tell us about Iran's nuclear capability.

Here is a recentt lie from NPR:
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, 12 Noon, 2/3/12, from her base in Jerusalem:

"Most intelligence suggests Iran could have the bomb within a year."

Most intelligence suggests Iran could have the bomb within a year? Who's intelligence? Here are recent statements and articles about US intelligence sources:

Graham Doesn’t Believe Clapper: ‘I’m Very Convinced’ Iran Is Building Nuclear Weapons

By Eli Clifton

February 16, 2012 "Think Progress" - -

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee today, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, repeated his position that Iran has not yet decided whether to develop a nuclear weapon. Clapper, both in his prepared remarks [PDF] and in an exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), emphasized that sanctions and diplomacy were the best option for stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s decision making is guided by a a rational “cost-benefit approach.”

Graham — who is currently spearheading a resolution limiting President Obama’s policy options on Iran — tried to push Clapper into acknowledging that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, but the top U.S. intelligence failed to agree, leading Graham to disagree with the U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions:

LINDSEY GRAHAM: You have doubt about the Iranian’s intention when it comes to making a nuclear weapon?

JAMES CLAPPER: I do.

GRAHAM: So you’re not sure they’re trying to make a bomb? [...]

CLAPPER: I think they’re keeping themselves in a position to make that decision but there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time. [...]

GRAHAM: I guess my point is that I take a different view. I’m very convinced they’re going down the road of developing a nuclear weapon.

Watch it:

James Clapper Discusses Iran's Nuclear Intentions

Read Rest of article at Think Progress.
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich:
Fact Checking the Media
http://youtu.be/o6k1VTmOPyE

"The media coverage on Iran is mirroring the coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war: grand claims about a smoking gun that doesn't exist. For example, The New York Times incorrectly reported last month that the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran concluded that their nuclear program had a military objective. The paper's public editor, Arthur Brisbane, was forced to acknowledge their mistake and wrote: "Some readers, mindful of the faulty intelligence and reporting about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, are watching the Iran nuclear coverage very closely." Other media outlets such as National Public Radio, PBS and The Washington Post have been challenged on their coverage too. 

A recent publication from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled "The IAEA's Iran Report and Misplaced Paranoia," noted that "With few exceptions, these revelations are not exactly new. More importantly, neither is the thrust of the report: that Iran is developing some capabilities that can only be understood as preliminaries to the development of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, early coverage of the report's release gives the opposite impression."


Many have recognized that the media failed to do its job in the lead-up to the Iraq war. The potential consequences of treading on that same path with Iran are grave. The U.S. has thus far spent over $1.2 trillion of borrowed money on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military action against Iran would be disastrous for the region and for U.S. moral standing. A serious diplomatic track based on mutual trust and respect is the only way to achieve increased transparency."

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Face The Nation, CBS News, January 8, 2012

Defense Secretary, Recently CIA Chief, Leon Panetta:

"Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

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Israel: No Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program; Barak: Any decision to Strike Iran “Far off.”
Haaretz, via Juan Cole (no peacenik) January,2012:

“The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.”

This is the same conclusion to which the 16 US intelligence agencies have come in 2007 and 2010. It is also consistent with what the Iranian government itself says, which is that the Iranian nuclear enrichment program is a civilian one and that Iran is not trying to construct a nuclear weapon. Likewise, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which continues to inspect Iranian nuclear facilities, has repeatedly and consistently stated that no nuclear material has been diverted from the civilian program.
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Divining the Truth about Iran
February 1, 2012

Exclusive: Like before the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. news media is flooding Americans with alarmist accounts about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even when U.S. officials suggest nuance and caution, the media ignores the signals, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reports.
By Ray McGovern

Watching top U.S. intelligence officials present the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I found myself wondering if they would depart from the key (if politically delicate) consensus judgment that Iran is NOT working on a nuclear weapon.

In last year’s briefing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had stood firm on this key point, despite severe pressure to paint Iran in more pernicious terms. On Tuesday, I was relieved to see in Clapper’s testimony a reiteration of the conclusions of a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007, issued unanimously by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, including judgments like this:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; … Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.”
Sadly, this judgment still comes as news to many of those Americans who are malnourished on the low-protein gruel of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) – even though the NIE was immediately declassified in 2007 and has been in the public domain for more than four years.

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In Iran Dispute, Who’s at Fault?
February 3, 2012

The Israeli government and the major U.S. news media are escalating their rhetoric in support of a new “preemptive” war, this time against Iran. Yet, as with the Iraq invasion, little attention is focusing on the rules of international law and which side is in the wrong, as Nat Parry describes.
By Nat Parry
. . . .
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern recently wrote an article for Consortiumnews.com, reminding readers of a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from November 2007.
The NIE was issued unanimously by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and included the following conclusion: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; … Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.”
This 2007 joint assessment of the U.S. intelligence community was essentially restated by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month, who stated frankly on national television that Iran is not currently attempting to develop nuclear weapons.
“Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us,” Panetta told “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer. “And our red line to Iran is to not develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

For its part, Iran has consistently said its nuclear program is peaceful, for electricity and medical purposes. If the Iranian government decides it is in its security interests to attain nuclear weapons, however, it has the legal right under Article 10 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to withdraw:

“Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”
But Iran has not chosen to withdraw, and in accordance with its obligations under the NPT, is continuing to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has the sole authority under the treaty to ascertain states parties’ commitments on non-acquisition of nuclear weapons.. . . .

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Despite the facts cited in the Scott Horton video and articles above, the PEW Research Center tells us 39% of the American People, mostly Republicans, would support Israel if it were to attack Iran over Iran's nuclear program, 51% would stay neutral, and only 5% would oppose. Go figure! The constant barrage of anti-Iranian propaganda from the corporate press seems to have had its predicted effect.

PEW RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE PEOPLE & THE PRESS
Public Takes Tough Line on Iran’s Nuclear Program

February 15, 2012

Nearly six-in-ten (58%) of Americans say it is important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action. Just 30% say it is more important to avoid a military conflict with Iran.

When it comes to the possibility that Israel may soon attack Iran's nuclear facilities, as has been reported in news stories, 51% say the U.S. should remain neutral. But for those saying the U.S. should take a position, 39% believe it should support an Israeli attack compared to 5% who say it should oppose such action.

Read the summary of the report for a partisan and demographic breakdown of U.S. public opinion on dealing with Iran. The survey also includes findings on overall public opinion about President Obama's plans for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as well as an analysis of partisan divisions over his plan.

Read Full Report Here
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The Greek Experiment

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Greek Unrest the Result of Suppressed Democracy

By William Pfaff
[Added 2/16/12]

When the first international effort to impose an economic austerity regime upon Greece was completed, George Papandreou, the prime minister, surprised and infuriated the negotiators from the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank by proposing that the draft agreement be submitted to a popular referendum in Greece. The negotiators and their governments knew very well that the Greek people would reject it.

Mr. Papandreou was hustled out of the limelight, and foreign leaders, the EU, international financial officials, and right-thinking commentators in Europe and the United States all deplored his proposal, since democracy was not part of the deal. . . . .

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Greece riots: Athens burns, police fire tear gas as violence flares up

Occupy Wall Street, Herman Cain, Iran "Terror Plot" & Media Complicity in Libya

Just a few articles to consider:

- Occupy Wall Street: Hit Bankers Where it Hurts--Taibbi

- Herman Cain Hoping for Big Financial Campaign Stimulus from the Rich

- More on Iran "Terror Plot"

- Media Bias in Libya Reporting: "media’s complicity in the human rights violations"

- Extras
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Occupy Wall Street: Hit Bankers Where it Hurts--Taibbi

My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters: 
Hit Bankers Where it Hurts


By Matt Taibbi 


October 13, 2011

"Rolling Stone" - - I've been down to "Occupy Wall Street" twice now, and I love it. The protests building at Liberty Square and spreading over Lower Manhattan are a great thing, the logical answer to the Tea Party and a long-overdue middle finger to the financial elite. The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic, showing the public at large that the movement against Wall Street has stamina, resolve and growing popular appeal.

But... there's a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it's hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I'm guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they'd won round one of the messaging war.

Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.

That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.

No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.

5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

To quote the immortal political philosopher Matt Damon from Rounders, "The key to No Limit poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips." The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they're never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table. If Occupy Wall Street can do that – if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness – it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement. All it has to do is light a match in the right place, and the overwhelming public support for real reform – not later, but right now – will be there in an instant.

© 2011 Rolling Stone
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Herman Cain Hoping for Big Financial Campaign Stimulus from the Rich

[Cain recently blamed the jobless and the poor for their problems]

Why Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan Is a Disaster for the Middle Class

RS Politics Daily
by: Tim Dickinson

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain wants to increase your taxes so that the very rich pay less.

If you were trying to formulate a tax proposal to enrage and energize the Occupy Wall Street movement, it would be hard to improve on Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan.

The Republican frontrunner is proposing a 9 percent tax on wages, a 9 percent tax on business income and a new 9 percent federal sales tax. This cleverly marketed flat-tax plan would "drastically increase taxes on the working poor and middle class, and reduce taxes going forward on the rich, " Edward Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at USC, writes for Tax Notes.

Kleinbard estimates that 90 percent of tax payers would end up with a "vastly increased tax bill," under the 9-9-9 plan. That's because the "business flat tax" is effectively structured as a payroll tax, so with each 9 in Cain's plan, workers take the hit. "The combination of the three actually operates as the economic equivalent of a 27 percent uncapped payroll tax," writes Kleinbard. A middle class family of four with an income of $50,000, he tells Rolling Stone, would see its tax burden soar by nearly $5,000 a year to $13,500. "Its staggering!" For a family just to break even under Cain's scheme, it would need to take home in excess of $120,000 a year.

If Cain were being honest, he would sell his tax scheme as the 9-0-9-0-9 plan. That's because two taxes vital to the fairness of the current tax code simply disappear: Taxes on capital gains and inheritance. That is to say, taxes on the rich.

Who earns capital gains? The top 0.3 percent of tax payers take home more than 60 percent of America's investment income. Perversely, the Cain plan would liberate more than 23,000 millionaires from federal income taxes altogether. Those who make money soley from investing wouldn't pay nine percent – they'd pay a zero percent. That's an average annual tax cut of nearly half a million dollars for some of the fattest cats in the land.

Repealing the estate tax, currently up to 35 percent for estates in excess of $5 million, would create another trillion-dollar windfall for the richest of the rich. The two tax breaks dovetail nicely. Under Cain's plan, a billionaire hedge fund manager could pay nothing in income tax and then pass that wealth on to his heirs completely tax free. 

The net effect of the Cain plan, says Kleinbard, would be to shift the tax burden from capital to labor, and — within labor income — to shift the burden of taxes down the ladder from the CEO class to workers struggling to make ends meet. 
Worse, Cain's plan would not raise any more revenue than the current system. Cain would destroy the fairness of the tax code and still leave America's fiscal house, Kleinbard says, "in exactly the same mess we're in now." 

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More on Iran "Terror Plot"
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FBI Account of "Terror Plot" Suggests Sting Operation

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Oct 13 (IPS) - While the administration of Barack Obama vows to hold the Iranian government "accountable" for the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, the legal document describing evidence in the case provides multiple indications that it was mainly the result of an FBI "sting" operation.

Although the legal document, called an amended criminal complaint, implicates Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and his cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Quds Force, in a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, it also suggests that the idea originated with and was strongly pushed by a undercover DEA informant, at the direction of the FBI.

On May 24, when Arbabsiar first met with the DEA informant he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel, it was not to hire a hit squad to kill the ambassador. Rather, there is reason to believe that the main purpose was to arrange a deal to sell large amounts of opium from Afghanistan.

In the complaint, the closest to a semblance of evidence that Arbabsiar sought help during that first meeting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador is the allegation, attributed to the DEA informant, that Arbabsiar said he was "interested in, among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia".

Among the "other things" was almost certainly a deal on heroin controlled by officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Three Bloomberg reporters, citing a "federal law enforcement official", wrote that Arbabsiar told the DEA informant he represented Iranians who "controlled drug smuggling and could provide tons of opium".

Because of opium entering Iran from Afghanistan, Iranian authorities hold 85 percent of the world's opium seizures, according to Iran's Fars News Agency. Iranian security personnel, including those in the IRGC and its Quds Force, then have the opportunity to sell the opium to traffickers in the Middle East, Europe and now Mexico.

Mexican drug cartels have begun connecting with Middle Eastern drug traffickers, in many cases stationing operatives in Middle East locations to facilitate heroin production and sales, according to a report last January in Borderland Beat.

But the FBI account of the contacts between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant does not reference any discussions of drugs.
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[More]
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Petraeus’s CIA Fuels Iran Murder Plot

Ray McGovern
October 13, 2011

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, in his accustomed role as unofficial surrogate CIA spokesman, has thrown light on how the CIA under its new director, David Petraeus, helped craft the screenplay for this week’s White House spy feature: the Iranian-American-used-car-salesman-Mexican-drug-cartel plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

In Thursday’s column, Ignatius notes that, initially, White House and Justice Department officials found the story "implausible." It was. But the Petraeus team soon leapt to the rescue, reflecting the four-star-general-turned-intelligence-chief’s deep-seated animus toward Iran.

Before Ignatius’s article, I had seen no one allude to the fact that much about this crime-stopper tale had come from the CIA. In public, the FBI had taken the lead role, presumably because the key informant inside a Mexican drug cartel worked for U.S. law enforcement via the Drug Enforcement Administration.

However, according to Ignatius, "One big reason [top U.S. officials became convinced the plot was real] is that CIA and other intelligence agencies gathered information corroborating the informant’s juicy allegations and showing that the plot had support from the top leadership of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the covert action arm of the Iranian government."

Ignatius adds that, "It was this intelligence collected in Iran" that swung the balance, but he offers no example of what that intelligence was. He only mentions a recorded telephone call on Oct. 4 between Iranian-American cars salesman Mansour Arbabsiar and his supposed contact in Iran, Gholam Shakuri, allegedly an official in Iran’s Quds spy agency.

The call is recounted in the FBI affidavit submitted in support of the criminal charges against Arbabsiar, who is now in U.S. custody, and Shakuri, who is not. But the snippets of that conversation are unclear, discussing what on the surface appears to be a "Chevrolet" car purchase, but which the FBI asserts is code for killing the Saudi ambassador.

Without explaining what other evidence the CIA might have, Ignatius tries to further strengthen the case by knocking down some of the obvious problems with the allegations, such as "why the Iranians would undertake such a risky operation, and with such embarrassingly poor tradecraft."

"But why the use of Mexican drug cartels?" asks Ignatius rhetorically, before adding dutifully: "U.S. officials say that isn’t as implausible as it sounds."

But it IS as implausible as it sounds, says every professional intelligence officer I have talked with since the "plot" was somberly announced on Tuesday.

The Old CIA Pros . . . .

[More]
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Media Bias in Libya Reporting: "media’s complicity in the human rights violations"

Mainstream Media’s Coverage of Libya Disturbing

INSTITUTE FOR SECURITY STUDIES
Published 14 Oct 2011

The mainstream media’s conspicuous silence about the racially motivated human rights abuses perpetrated against black Libyans and immigrants, by the NATO-backed Transitional National Council (TNC) forces in Libya, is disturbing. Similarly, the high civilian casualties of the current intense fighting in the city of Sirte seems, to a large extent, to be underplayed. Yet organisations such as Human Rights Watch have acknowledged that civilian abuses have continued and called on forces on both sides that are fighting in Sirte to minimize harm to civilians and treat all prisoners humanely.

This biased media coverage raises questions about the credibility of media organisations and their agenda. Is it because the presence of widespread evidence of racially motivated human rights abuses committed by the TNC forces raises moral and ethical questions that challenge the validity of the notion of a “humanitarian war”? The responsibility assumed by NATO and the TNC forces to protect civilian lives from abuse by Gaddafi forces is also questionable, as it appears this mandate does not seem to extend to the protection of black Libyans and African immigrants.
. . . .
It in interesting to note that despite widespread evidence of such racial abuses perpetrated by the TNC forces, it appears mainstream media organisations have not been willing to represent a narrative that does not conform to its set ideological position and agenda. What has become evident where the reports of racial abuses have reached mainstream media is the framing of a narrative that portrays the victims as “African mercenaries,” despite the availability of adequate evidence to prove that many of the victims were not mercenaries. Amnesty International reports that, “the allegations about the use of mercenaries proved to be largely unfounded” but this has remained an unknown fact to the public. This revelation demonstrates the media’s complicity in the human rights violations. Therefore, mainstream media organisations have concealed gross abuses that could have been exposed and stopped by not representing and speaking against such human rights violations.

The lack of adequate exposure and coverage of the rebels’ racial violations by mainstream media corroborate the assertion that the media is not serving the public but it is serving power and in the process it has abandoned professional media ethics and standards.

ISS Pretoria Office

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Extra-

Patty Griffin-Cold As It Gets

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Jim Rogers- Let the Banks Fail!!- CNBC

It Must Be Presidential Campaign Season: Obama Produces "Terror" Plot By Iran

Taking a page from the G.W. Bush playbook, Obama has put "Terror" front and center in the minds of Americans, a little over a year before the next Presidential election.

A month or so ago, he ordered the killling of bin Laden, when he could have been captured and brought to a trial. Then he tosses his body into the sea before anyone else could identify him. A week or so ago he had two American citizens in Yemen, supposed terrorists, killed without trial.

This week, the Obama administration, through Attorney General Eric Holder (under scrutiny for lying to Congress about "Fast and Furious," which sold guns to very unsavory characters in Mexico) and FBI Director Robert Mueller (Appointed by G.W. Bush a few days prior to the 9/11 attacks), unveiled an allegedly planned, but foiled, "terrorist attack" on the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Mainstream media outlets, from NPR to the Washington Post, repeated the story while presumably trying to keep a straight face.

Is an election year attack on Iran in the making? Thinking it might be a bit too obvious a ploy at this late date, but who knows? A few years back I predicted either Obama or Israel would do so before Obama leaves office. Maybe Obama is just trying to distract folks from their dire economic straits and a floundering empire. (But on the other hand, he did deliver 55 bunker buster bombs to Israel in 2009.)

Here are a few articles from the alternative press that raise the obvious and not so obvious questions about the "plot." [See the links provided for each article to access important links included within it.]
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FAKE TERROR - FBI Entrapment Plot Involving Iran Assassinating Saudi Ambassador Act Of War?

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The Fast and Furious Plot to Occupy Iran

Tehran would have to be terminally foolish to try to snuff out an ambassador on US soil, author says.

By Pepe Escobar

October 13, 2011 "Al-Jazeera" - - No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum - piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism - Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot "reads like the pages of a Hollywood script". It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn't be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered "a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives".

Holder added that the bombing of the Saudi embassy in Washington was also part of the plan. Subsequent spinning amplified that to planned bombings of the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.

The Justice Department has peddled quite a murky story - Operation Red Coalition (no, you can’t make that stuff up) - centred on one Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old holding both Iranian and US passports and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force.

Arbabsiar allegedly had a series of encounters in Mexico with a DEA mole posing as a Mexican drug cartel heavy weight. The Iranian-American seems to have been convinced that the mole was a member of the hardcore Zetas Mexican cartel, and reportedly bragged he was being "directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government", including a cousin who was "a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform".

On top of it, he told the DEA mole that his Iranian government buddies could come up with "tons of opium" for the Mexican cartel (an Afghan connection, perhaps). Then they discussed a "number of violent missions" complete with Arbabsiar bragging about bombing a packed Washington restaurant used by the Saudi ambassador.

Holder characterised the whole thing as a $1.5m "murder-for-hire" plan. Arbabsiar was arrested only a few days ago, on September 29, at JFK airport in New York. He allegedly confessed, according to the Justice Department. Shakuri for his part is still at large.

Holder was adamant: "The United States is committed to hold Iran accountable for its actions." Yet he stopped short of stating the plot was approved by the highest levels of the Iranian government. So what next? War? Hold your horses; Washington should first think about asking the Chinese if they’re willing to foot the bill (the answer will be no).

Predictably, the proverbial torrent of US "officials" came out with guns blazing, spinning everything in sight. An alarmed Pentagon will be increasing surveillance over the Quds Force and "Iran’s actions" in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Former US ambassadors stated that, "it's an attack on the United States to attack this ambassador". Washington is about to impose even more sanctions against Iran; and Washington is urgently taking the matter to the UN Security Council.

What next? An R2P ("responsibility to protect") resolution ordering NATO to protect every House of Saud minion across the world by bombing Iran into regime change?

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least introduced a little bit of common sense. "I think the US government is busy fabricating a new scenario and history has shown both the US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in fabricating these scenarios ... I think their goal is to reach the American public. They want to take the public's mind off the serious domestic problems they're facing these days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country." Iran has not even established yet that these two characters are actually Iranian citizens.

The Iranian government - which prides itself on a logical approach to diplomacy - would have to have been inoculated with a terminal Stuxnet-style foolishness virus to behave in such a counterproductive manner, by targeting a high-profile foreign policy adviser to King Abdullah on American soil. The official Iranian news agency IRNA described the plot as "America's new propaganda scenario" against Iran.

As for the Washington mantra that "Iran has been insinuating itself into many of the struggles in the Middle East", that's undiluted Saudi propaganda. In fact it's the House of Saud who's been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has smashed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf - from the invasion and repression of Bahrain to the rash pre-emption of protests inside Saudi Arabia's Shia-dominated eastern provinces.

The whole thing smells like a flimsy pretext for a casus belli. The timing of the announcement couldn't be more suspicious. White House national security advisor Thomas E. Donilon briefed King Abdullah of the plot no less than two weeks ago, in a three-hour meeting in Riyadh. Meanwhile the US government has been carrying not plots, but targeted assassinations of US citizens, as in the Anwar al-Awlaki case.

So why now? Holder is caught in yet another scandal - on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can't make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which scores of US weapons ended up in the hands of - here they come again - Mexican drug cartels.

So how to bury Fast and Furious, the economic abyss, the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the increasing allure of Occupy Wall Street - not to mention the Saudi role in smashing the spirit of the Arab Spring? By uncovering a good ol' al-Qaeda style plot on US soil, on top of it conducted by "evil" Iran. Al-Qaeda and Tehran sharing top billing; not even Cheney and Rumsfeld in their heyday could come up with something like this. Long live GWOT (the global war on terror). And long live the neo-con spirit; remember, real men go to Tehran - and the road starts now.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

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From Phillip Giraldi: One Step Closer to War
October 12th, 2011

. . . .
And if the Persian/Arab Gulf problems erupting aren’t enough to worry about, the Israelis had previously developed plans for an attack on Iran. However, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta carried a U.S. message to Tel Aviv last week that President Barack Obama would not support a military strike. Israeli plans for an attack had alarmed the National Security Council and the Senate foreign affairs committee when briefed on Tel Aviv’s proposal. However, the Iranian terrorist operation just revealed could lend support to long-time American hard liners as well as Israel’s supporters for bombing Iran. The Israeli position will be strengthened by the Saudis telling President Barack Obama that they will strongly support a military option directed against Iran. The Saudis are believed to be in direct contact with the Israelis, telling them that King Abd’allah is in favor of a strike on Iran, and proposing that the two countries coordinate their activities to get Washington fully on board.

[Emphasis Added]
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'No way Iran devised assassination plot'

Iran could not have been behind the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US in any imaginable way, a former CIA officer tells Press TV.

Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer from Washington, said in an interview with Press TV that all the details that have surfaced about the attempt are “ridiculous.”

The following is a transcript of the interview:

Press TV: Let us assume that Iranians were really plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador on the American soil. Would they contract it out to the Mexican mafia, send traceable money, wires from Iran to the US and not care if they killed 100 Americans in the process of achieving this goal? Please give us your impression as a former CIA officer about the circumstances that have arisen.

Giraldi: Iran had absolutely no motive for carrying this out. Then I would add as a former professional intelligence officer that all the details that have surfaced about this operation are ridiculous. No professional intelligence service, whether from Iran or anywhere else, would ever have run anything like this, which is not to say that there is not a kernel of truth in this story that maybe somebody was plotting to do something and was doing it in a very stupid way and came to the attention of the Drug Enforcement Agency and eventually to the FBI.

We have a missing chapter here, which is the past nine months, during which period the DEA informant was in contact with one of these gentlemen and we do not know to what extent the situation was manipulated by him to turn what may have started out as nothing and turn it into a case that could be exported by the government to make its case that is being tough on terrorism.

There are a lot of little stories here, a lot of things we do not know yet, but I would absolutely agree that I cannot imagine there is any way that the Iranian government could have been behind this.

Press TV: After the news of the alleged assassination plot broke out, the Pentagon said this needs a diplomatic and not a military response and on the other hand, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iran needs to be more isolated. In particular, what do you think of chances of US attacking Iran?

Giraldi: I think they are very low if the United States is the one making the decision, but if Israel orders to stage an attack, I think it is inevitable the United States would get drawn in.

But I think there is something everybody is missing here. Leon Panetta was in Israel last week and I think it is generally accepted that Panetta warned the Israelis that the Obama administration does not want Israel to unilaterally attack Iran. Every time the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense goes to Israel and gives them a warning about something, you usually see within a few days something happening to basically tell the Israelis, “But we are still on your side.”

I would rather suspect the timing of this whole thing is going back to the Israelis to make a case to put more pressure on Iran. I think that is the quid pro quo that we are seeing here, “Do not attack Iran, but we are going to put more pressure on them and we have this story in the pipeline that will enable us to do that.”

I am just speculating on that. I have no specific information but I think it is something worth thinking about, because you see this pattern repeated over and over again. Certainly the Israelis, of all the players in this thing that we are talking about, are the only ones that really have a strong desire to go to war with Iran. I do not think anyone else, even the United States, has any serious desire in that direction. So I think this is something we should be thinking about.

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Scott Horton Interviews Philip Giraldi

Scott Horton, October 13, 2011

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses the inside information on the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US; indications that the plot was legitimate but an amateurish rogue operation – not the work of Iran’s government; escalating talk of “all options on the table” for military retaliation against Iran; and why it’s never a good sign when Saudi Arabia and Israel agree on a common regional enemy.

MP3 here. (18:30)

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of the Council for the National Interest. He writes regularly for Antiwar.com.
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The “Very Scary” Iranian Terror Plot

By Glenn Greenwald

October 13, 2011

"Salon" -- The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it. But since the U.S. Government rolled out its Most Serious Officials with Very Serious Faces to make these accusations, many people (therefore) do believe it; after all, U.S. government accusations = Truth. All Serious people know that. And in the ensuing reaction one finds virtually every dynamic typically shaping discussions of Terrorism and U.S. foreign policy.

To begin with, this episode continues the FBI’s record-setting undefeated streak of heroically saving us from the plots they enable. From all appearances, this is, at best, yet another spectacular “plot” hatched by some hapless loser with delusions of grandeur but without any means to put it into action except with the able assistance of the FBI, which yet again provided it through its own (paid, criminal) sources posing as Terrorist enablers. The Terrorist Mastermind at the center of the plot is a failed used car salesman in Texas with a history of pedestrian money problems. Dive under your bed. “For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents,” explained U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and “no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere and no one was actually ever in any danger.’”

But no matter. The U.S. Government and its mindless followers in the pundit and think-tank “expert” class have seized on this ludicrous plot with astonishing speed to all but turn it into a hysterical declaration of war against Evil, Hitlerian Iran. “The US attorney-general Eric Holder said Iran would be ‘held to account’ over what he described as a flagrant abuse of international law,” and “the US says military action remains on the table,” though “it is at present seeking instead to work through diplomatic and financial means to further isolate Iran.” Hillary Clinton thundered that this “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.”
Hillary Clinton [added by Chris]

The CIA’s spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, quoted an anonymous White House official as saying the plot “appeared to have been authorized by senior levels of the Quds Force.” Meanwhile, the State Department has issued a Travel Alert which warns American citizens that this plot “may indicate a more aggressive focus by the Iranian Government on terrorist activity against diplomats from certain countries, to include possible attacks in the United States.”

In case that’s not enough to frighten you — and, really, how could it not be? — some Very Serious Experts are very, very afraid and want you to know how Serious this all is. Within moments of Holder’s news conference, National Security Expert Robert Chesney – without a molecule of critical thought in his brain — announced that this “remarkable development” was “very scary.” Very, very scary. Chesney then printed large blocks of the DOJ’s Press Release to prove it. Self-proclaimed “counter-terrorism expert” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross tapped into his vast expertise to explain: ”Holder weighing in on the plot’s connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it.” Progressive think-tank expert and Atlantic writer Steve Clemons decreed that if the DOJ’s accusations are true, then ”the US has reached a point where it must take action” and “this is time for a significant strategic response to the Iran challenge in the Middle East and globally,” which “could involve military.”

The ironies here are so self-evident it’s hard to work up the energy to point them out. Outside of Pentagon reporters, Washington Post Editorial Page Editors, and Brookings “scholars,” is there a person on the planet anywhere who can listen with a straight face as drone-addicted U.S. Government officials righteously condemn the evil, illegal act of entering another country to commit an assassination? Does anyone, for instance, have any interest in finding out who is responsible for the spate of serial murders aimed at Iran’s nuclear scientists? Wouldn’t people professing to be so outraged by the idea of entering another country to engage in assassination be eager to get to the bottom of that?

. . . .

The United States does not have solid information about “exactly how high it goes,” one official said. . . .The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their confidence that at least some Iranian leaders were aware of the alleged plot was based largely on analyses and their understanding of how the Quds Force operates.

I wouldn’t exactly call that — what was the phrase Biden used? — “compelling evidence for the assertions being made.” In fact, it reminds me of the language anonymous government officials began using to describe their “knowledge” of Anwar Awlaki’s alleged operational role in plots against the U.S. once they killed him: “patchy”; “partial”; “suspicion.” But what we learned with Awlaki is likely what we’ll see here: many people reflexively believe government accusations even when unaccompanied by evidence, and that belief is not diluted even when government officials began acknowledging (albeit anonymously) that they do not possess and never did possess any conclusive evidence to support their accusations.

[Entire article]

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

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Iranian Terror Plot: Fake, Fake, Fake
Not even good propaganda

by Justin Raimondo, October 12, 2011

Fake, fake, fake – I’m talking about the latest anti-Iranian propaganda coming out of Washington, which claims the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved in a “plot” to take out the Saudi ambassador to the US and blow up both the Saudi and Israeli embassies. The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment [.pdf], it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”

The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:

“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”

Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end.

This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with. This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning – because finding and catching real terrorists is much too hard, at least for our Keystone Kops. Instead of going out and actually, you know, looking for the Bad Guys, and then apprehending them, they lure some unsuspecting Muslim immigrant into a trap, and spring it when the time is right.

The long narrative spun by the indictment tells us everything but what we really need to know, which is: how is it that these two Iranian “terrorists” just happened to meet up with a Mexican drug cartel assassin who just happened to be a longtime DEA informant? I guess that would be giving too much away: far better to spice up the story with scary details, such as the conversation between one of the alleged plotters and the informant, in the course of which the former says “If you have to blow up the restaurant and kill a hundred Americans, well then f*ck ‘em!”

The credibility rating of this story, taken on its face, is close to zero. . . . .

[More]
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The ‘Terrorist’ Who Couldn’t Think Straight
Iranian 'terrorist' plot unravels

by Justin Raimondo, October 14, 2011

Would Iran recruit a used car salesman with a memory problem to conduct assassinations in the US?

This is a question you have to ask yourself when evaluating the alleged Iranian "terrorist" plot supposedly uncovered by Attorney General Eric Holder the other day. The arrest of Mansour Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old Iranian immigrant who came to this country as a college student, was the occasion for a trumpet blast of anti-Iranian propaganda and belligerent declarations by US officials, who vowed to "hold Iran accountable" for purportedly mounting a plot [.pdf] to kill the Saudi ambassador, bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, and strike at the Jewish community in Argentina.

The alleged plot was supposed to have been carried out by a member of the Zetas drug cartel, who was to be paid up to $1.5 million to implement the plan. US officials, even while acknowledging the "B-movie" aspect of the story, reportedly "fanned out" to convince our allies the plot was real and – with Congress already demanding new sanctions on Iran – that the economic vise be tightened. Not only are the more hysterical neocons calling for military action against Iran – no surprise there — but the headlines had the normally staid and relatively reserved Steve Clemons, a prominent Obama shill, babbling that "this is a serious situation" and "the U.S. has reached a point where it must take action," and Sen. Carl Levin calling the plot "an act of war."
Less than 24 hours after Holder’s press conference, the whole fantasy began to unravel under closer scrutiny. Gary Sick, of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, averred that the alleged plot "departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures," and went on to write:

"It is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and U.S. intelligence agents.

"Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the U.S. Yet that is what happened here."
. . . .

[More]
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No Direct Evidence of Iranian Government Complicity in Plot
Posted By John Glaser On October 12, 2011 @ 6:13 pm
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Iranian Terror Plot: Fake, Fake, Fake 
(But Who Faked It?)
By Maidhc Ó Cathail

October 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- In his latest Antiwar.com piece, Justin Raimondo asks some of the questions that mainstream reporters never seem to think of asking (or if they do, these doubts don’t ever make it past their more credulous editors):

The long narrative spun by the indictment tells us everything but what we really need to know, which is: how is it that these two Iranian “terrorists” just happened to meet up with a Mexican drug cartel assassin who just happened to be a longtime DEA informant? I guess that would be giving too much away: far better to spice up the story with scary details, such as the conversation between one of the alleged plotters and the informant, in the course of which the former says “If you have to blow up the restaurant and kill a hundred Americans, well then f*ck ‘em!”

But Raimondo then gets a bit distracted in looking for the source of plot:

This story is very scary – not because it’s credible, or believable, because it is neither. However, it’s the most frightening story I’ve heard in quite a while because it shows that the US government is bound and determined to go to war with Iran, no matter what the consequences. Throwing caution to the winds, our rulers have decided to go all out against Tehran – all the better to mask our current economic malaise under the damage done by the tripling and quadrupling of oil prices. This way, Obama can blame our crashing economy on Tehran, rather than his own discredited policies – and sideline the Republicans, who have been criticizing him for being “soft” on Iran.

In passing, however, he does locate the more obvious source of any anti-Iranian propaganda:

The making of American foreign policy is all about domestic politics. By preparing the country for war with Iran, Obama will not only defang the GOP, but also appease the all-important Israel lobby, which has been beating the war drums for years.

In contrast, Raimondo’s readers have a more clear-eyed view of the affair. One comments:

I don’t believe a word of it. The Zionists who control the State, Justice and Homeland Security Departments have fabricated this event to egg the USA on to invade Iran for the sake of Israel security. And the typical Zionist media, CNN, Fox and others, will play it for all its worth. Unfortunately most Americans just don’t understand how manipulated this “greatest government on the earth” is and will likely believe it at face value. Schumer and Kantor will step right up to the plate. In 30 years, when our ties to Israel have bankrupted the nation (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, who knows where), we will look back and see just how we have been used by our best friends in the Middle East. With friends like that, who needs enemies.

Another is even more perceptive:

The script for this “plot” was probably hand-delivered direct from AIPAC to Holder. As soon as I heard that, btw, the Israeli embassy was targeted for bombing also, I knew the whole thing was bogus – not that the other inconsistencies and absurdities weren’t enough but this was the giveaway line. Israel must be getting really desperate to think that something as badly concocted as this was going to pass the smell test.

As FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III so aptly put it, the whole thing “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.”

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. http://maidhcocathail.wordpress.com/

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Obama condemns Ahmadinejad's UN speech

[Edited and better videos added, 9/25/10]
Obama condemns Ahmadinejad's UN speech about 9/11 attack - 24 Sept. 2010
Video Below

"Iran's president sparked a mass walk-out by US delegates yesterday after telling a UN summit that most people believe the American government was behind the 9/11 attacks." 9/11 Was An Inside Job?

In his speech to the UN, Obama states:

“It was offensive, it was hateful—and particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhattan, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones… people of all faiths, all ethnicities who see this as the seminal tragedy of this generation. . . . which is frankly disgusting to make in a place like New York … you can understand why we’re so mistrustful, so wary of having dealings with the Iranian government.”

Say what??? This is reminiscent of the line offered by some, which Obama rejected, that a Muslim community center near "Ground Zero" is an affront to the victims of 9/11. More importantly, it is illogical (which suggests it is political), given that at least "40 family members of those killed on 9/11," while not going to far as to suggest who was responsible, have also called for an inquiry into what actually happened (see: Respected Leaders and Families Launch 9/11 Truth Statement Demanding Deeper Investigation into the Events of 9/11

There is absolutely nothing inappropriate for any American, or any person from another country, to ask for an inquiry of the questionable findings of the 9/11 Commission report or to suggest other alternative narratives. Many have done so, for good reasons, including:

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Pilots for 9/11 Truth

Firefighters for 9/11 Truth

Veterans for 9/11 Truth

Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth

Lawyers for 9/11 Truth

To paraphrase/quote Shakespeare, the President "doth protest too much, methinks." His speeches increasingly reveal a Bush in sheep's clothing. Nothing more than a puppet, looking more everyday like a wind-up doll, for the powers that be behind the scenes.

See also:
Dark Suspicions About 9/11
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First, a 7 minute 15 second clip from Amadinejad's UN speech:

Ahmadinejad on 9/11 at UN General Assembly 2010


Obama's Response:

Obama condemns Ahmadinejad's UN speech about 9/11 attack - 24 Sept. 2010


President Obama United Nations Speech (Israelis Are A NO SHOW!) pt.1


Obama UN Speech on Mideast Talks "Filled with Empty Words"

"Diana Buttu, Palestinian Canadian lawyer, former adviser to Palestinian negotiators, . . . policy adviser to the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka. . .[from] the Harvard Kennedy School of Government" said:
"The sad part of the speech is that it was filled with empty words. He didn’t say anything new. He didn’t press Israel to stop its violations of international law. And he simply made it seem as though the Israelis and Palestinians are to equal parties who should just come together and shake hands and the world will be a better place. It’s ignoring reality.
. . . .
We’ve had this peace process go on now for seventeen years, and it’s failed for seventeen years. And the reason that it’s failed for seventeen years is because there’s been no focus on international law and on international human rights. Instead, it’s been just an attempt to try to get the parties together in the same room, hoping that somehow having the parties in the same room will make all of the ills go away. But what Obama seemed to ignore in this speech, and other presidents have ignored, is that there have been now over four decades of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, and in particular this year, as well. While he spoke of a moratorium, there hasn’t been a moratorium on the ground. The situation hasn’t approved for Palestinians. We’ve seen more and more Israeli settlers moving into the West Bank and more human rights violations going on.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, he seemed, on one hand, to urge a continuation of the moratorium, but not to link that continuation to continuation of the peace talks.

DIANA BUTTU: Yes, and this is precisely the problem. Yeah, as a Palestinian, how am I going to have any faith that this process is going to lead to any result, that it’s going to lead to Israelis actually evacuating the West Bank, when at the same time they’re not even willing to halt the construction of settlements while the negotiations are taking place? So, it just doesn’t make any sense, and it’s become—rather than focusing and demanding that international law be applied, he’s instead changing international law and saying to the Palestinians, "Simply accept what Israel is doing, and we hope that things will get better in the end." But they won’t.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the role, Diana Buttu, of the United Nations? President Obama is calling for support for the US-sponsored peace talks. Where does the UN fit in?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, the United Nations is one member of a four-member quartet, but its role has been very heavily curtailed and diminished. And the reason is because the United States has seized the reins, so to speak, when it comes to the peace process. And it has—rather than adopting a position that is principled and on the basis of law, it’s adopting a position that’s on the basis of power, on the basis of its relations with Israel. So the United Nations does play a role, but that role has now been subsumed and overshadowed by that of the United States.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But Obama has now at least staked out sort of his reputation on getting this resolved and getting some kind of a peace deal within the next year, hasn’t he? And that’s going to, to some degree, I would assume, exert pressure on Israel to come up with some kind of concessions in terms of the negotiations.

DIANA BUTTU: I am not so hopeful. If you read what the Israeli government has said, they’ve said that Jerusalem talks are off the table. Talk of refugees, who haven’t been able to return to their homes for six decades because they’re not Jewish, is off the table. Talk of a settlement freeze is off the table. The only thing that appears to be on the table at this point is more and more demands for security. So they may be able to come up with an agreement that focuses on security, but it’s certainly not going to address the core issue, which is the denial of Palestinian freedom."
See the link above for more.
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Iranian President Ahmadinejad in His Own Words

In This Issue:

- Ahmadinejad on Palestine & Holocaust
-Transcript of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's U.N. Speech
- Glenn Greenwald on Iran, Tea Party, Jon Stewart and Obama’s Assassination Policy
[Edited 9/24/10]
_____________

No comments on Iranian President Ahmadinejad's words from me--they speak for themselves to those who are willing to listen and learn the history. Ahmadinejad is the new Saddam to the mindless masses who believe their masters in the corporate mainstream media, Congress, AIPAC, and elsewhere. My bad memory still recalls the weapons of mass destruction that weren't, and the invasion and never-ending occupation of Iraq, not to mention nearly 5,000 American soldiers killed, thousands more seriously wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars spent (perhaps you can think of other American needs to spend the money on?), and more than a million dead Iraqis. Do you want hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians and another destroyed country on your conscience? Why not at least acquaint yourself with the man (not to mention his country) before committing support to another illegal atrocity?

Blatant self-interest and ignorance of voters aside, an interesting thing about "democracy" is that we all get to vote and have our opinion, whether we know the facts, have any actual intellectual ability, or have even tried to to understand events. Listening and believing in the "authoritative" demagogues on Fox news and the mainstream media is quite enough. Right? That is why we believed the lies of George W. Bush and now, at least some, of the lies by Barack Obama.
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Iran's Ahmadinejad on Palestine & Holocaust
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is asked by MSNBC anchor Brian Williams to clarify his statements about the Holocaust. (September 2006)


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Transcript of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's U.N. Speech


The following is a transcript of remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. September 19, 2010

Madam President, Distinguished Heads of State and Government, Distinguished Heads of Delegation, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I praise the Merciful, All-Knowing and Almighty God for blessing me with another opportunity to address this Assembly on behalf of the great nation of Iran and to bring a number of issues to the attention of the international community.

I also praise the Almighty for the increasing vigilance of peoples across the globe, their courageous presence in different international settings, and the brave expression of their views and aspirations regarding global issues.

Today, humanity passionately craves commitment to the Truth, devotion to God, quest for Justice and respect for the dignity of human beings. Rejection of domination and aggression, defense of the oppressed, and longing for peace constitute the legitimate demand of the peoples of the world, particularly the new generations and the spirited youth, who aspire a world free from decadence, aggression and injustice, and replete with love and compassion. The youth have a right to seek justice and the Truth; and they have a right to build their own future on the foundations of love, compassion and tranquility. And, I praise the Almighty for this immense blessing.

Madame President, Excellencies,

What afflicts humanity today is certainly not compatible with human dignity; the Almighty has not created human beings so that they could transgress against others and oppress them.

By causing war and conflict, some are fast expanding their domination, accumulating greater wealth and usurping all the resources, while others endure the resulting poverty, suffering and misery.

Some seek to rule the world relying on weapons and threats, while others live in perpetual insecurity and danger.

Some occupy the homeland of others, thousands of kilometers away from their borders, interfere in their affairs and control their oil and other resources and strategic routes, while others are bombarded daily in their own homes; their children murdered in the streets and alleys of their own country and their homes reduced to rubble.

Such behavior is not worthy of human beings and runs counter to the Truth, to justice and to human dignity. The fundamental question is that under such conditions, where should the oppressed seek justice? Who, or what organization defends the rights of the oppressed, and suppresses acts of aggression and oppression? Where is the seat of global justice?

A brief glance at a few examples of the most pressing global issues can further illustrate the problem.

A. The unbridled expansion of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons

Some powers proudly announce their production of second and third generations of nuclear weapons. What do they need these weapons for? Is the development and stockpiling of these deadly weapons designed to promote peace and democracy? Or, are these weapons, in fact, instruments of coercion and threat against other peoples and governments? How long should the people of the world live with the nightmare of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons? What bounds the powers producing and possessing these weapons? How can they be held accountable before the international community? And, are the inhabitants of these countries content with the waste of their wealth and resources for the production of such destructive arsenals? Is it not possible to rely on justice, ethics and wisdom instead of these instruments of death? Aren't wisdom and justice more compatible with peace and tranquility than nuclear, chemical and biological weapons? If wisdom, ethics and justice prevail, then oppression and aggression will be uprooted, threats will wither away and no reason will remain for conflict. This is a solid proposition because most global conflicts emanate from injustice, and from the powerful, not being contented with their own rights, striving to devour the rights of others.

People across the globe embrace justice and are willing to sacrifice for its sake.

Would it not be easier for global powers to ensure their longevity and win hearts and minds through the championing of real promotion of justice, compassion and peace, than through continuing the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and the threat of their use?

The experience of the threat and the use of nuclear weapons is before us. Has it achieved anything for the perpetrators other than exacerbation of tension, hatred and animosity among nations?

B. Occupation of countries and exacerbation of hostilities

Occupation of countries, including Iraq, has continued for the last three years. Not a day goes by without hundreds of people getting killed in cold blood. The occupiers are incapable of establishing security in Iraq. Despite the establishment of the lawful Government and National Assembly of Iraq, there are covert and overt efforts to heighten insecurity, magnify and aggravate differences within Iraqi society, and instigate civil strife.

There is no indication that the occupiers have the necessary political will to eliminate the sources of instability. Numerous terrorists were apprehended by the Government of Iraq, only to be let loose under various pretexts by the occupiers.

It seems that intensification of hostilities and terrorism serves as a pretext for the continued presence of foreign forces in Iraq.

Where can the people of Iraq seek refuge, and from whom should the Government of Iraq seek justice?

Who can ensure Iraq's security? Insecurity in Iraq affects the entire region. Can the Security Council play a role in restoring peace and security in Iraq, while the occupiers are themselves permanent members of the Council? Can the Security Council adopt a fair decision in this regard?

Consider the situation in Palestine:

The roots of the Palestinian problem go back to the Second World War. Under the pretext of protecting some of the survivors of that War, the land of Palestine was occupied through war, aggression and the displacement of millions of its inhabitants; it was placed under the control of some of the War survivors, bringing even larger population groups from elsewhere in the world, who had not been even affected by the Second World War; and a government was established in the territory of others with a population collected from across the world at the expense of driving millions of the rightful inhabitants of the land into a diaspora and homelessness. This is a great tragedy with hardly a precedent in history. Refugees continue to live in temporary refugee camps, and many have died still hoping to one day return to their land. Can any logic, law or legal reasoning justify this tragedy? Can any member of the United Nations accept such a tragedy occurring in their own homeland?

The pretexts for the creation of the regime occupying Al-Qods Al-Sharif are so weak that its proponents want to silence any voice trying to merely speak about them, as they are concerned that shedding light on the facts would undermine the raison d'être of this regime, as it has. The tragedy does not end with the establishment of a regime in the territory of others. Regrettably, from its inception, that regime has been a constant source of threat and insecurity in the Middle East region, waging war and spilling blood and impeding the progress of regional countries, and has also been used by some powers as an instrument of division, coercion, and pressure on the people of the region. Reference to these historical realities may cause some disquiet among supporters of this regime. But these are sheer facts and not myth. History has unfolded before our eyes.

Worst yet, is the blanket and unwarranted support provided to this regime.

Just watch what is happening in the Palestinian land. People are being bombarded in their own homes and their children murdered in their own streets and alleys. But no authority, not even the Security Council, can afford them any support or protection. Why?

At the same time, a Government is formed democratically and through the free choice of the electorate in a part of the Palestinian territory. But instead of receiving the support of the so-called champions of democracy, its Ministers and Members of Parliament are illegally abducted and incarcerated in full view of the international community.

Which council or international organization stands up to protect this brutally besieged Government? And why can't the Security Council take any steps?

Let me here address Lebanon:

For thirty-three long days, the Lebanese lived under the barrage of fire and bombs and close to 1.5 million of them were displaced; meanwhile some members of the Security Council practically chose a path that provided ample opportunity for the aggressor to achieve its objectives militarily. We witnessed that the Security Council of the United Nations was practically incapacitated by certain powers to even call for a ceasefire. The Security Council sat idly by for so many days, witnessing the cruel scenes of atrocities against the Lebanese while tragedies such as Qana were persistently repeated. Why?

In all these cases, the answer is self-evident. When the power behind the hostilities is itself a permanent member of the Security Council, how then can this Council fulfill its responsibilities?

C. Lack of respect for the rights of members of the international community

Excellencies,

I now wish to refer to some of the grievances of the Iranian people and speak to the injustices against them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a member of the IAEA and is committed to the NPT. All our nuclear activities are transparent, peaceful and under the watchful eyes of IAEA inspectors. Why then are there objections to our legally recognized rights? Which governments object to these rights? Governments that themselves benefit from nuclear energy and the fuel cycle. Some of them have abused nuclear technology for non-peaceful ends including the production of nuclear bombs, and some even have a bleak record of using them against humanity.

Which organization or Council should address these injustices? Is the Security Council in a position to address them? Can it stop violations of the inalienable rights of countries? Can it prevent certain powers from impeding scientific progress of other countries?

The abuse of the Security Council, as an instrument of threat and coercion, is indeed a source of grave concern.

Some permanent members of the Security Council, even when they are themselves parties to international disputes, conveniently threaten others with the Security Council and declare, even before any decision by the Council, the condemnation of their opponents by the Council. The question is: what can justify such exploitation of the Security Council, and doesn't it erode the credibility and effectiveness of the Council? Can such behavior contribute to the ability of the Council to maintain security?

Excellencies,

A review of the preceding historical realities would lead to the conclusion that regrettably, justice has become a victim of force and aggression. Many global arrangements have become unjust, discriminatory and irresponsible as a result of undue pressure from some of the powerful; Threats with nuclear weapons and other instruments of war by some powers have taken the place of respect for the rights of nations and the maintenance and promotion of peace and tranquility;

For some powers, claims of promotion of human rights and democracy can only last as long as they can be used as instruments of pressure and intimidation against other nations. But when it comes to the interests of the claimants, concepts such as democracy, the right of self-determination of nations, respect for the rights and intelligence of peoples, international law and justice have no place or value. This is blatantly manifested in the way the elected Government of the Palestinian people is treated as well as in the support extended to the Zionist regime. It does not matter if people are murdered in Palestine, turned into refugees, captured, imprisoned or besieged; that must not violate human rights.

- Nations are not equal in exercising their rights recognized by international law. Enjoying these rights is dependent on the whim of certain major powers.

- Apparently the Security Council can only be used to ensure the security and the rights of some big powers. But when the oppressed are decimated under bombardment, the Security Council must remain aloof and not even call for a ceasefire. Is this not a tragedy of historic proportions for the Security Council, which is charged with maintaining the security of countries?

- The prevailing order of contemporary global interactions is such that certain powers equate themselves with the international community, and consider their decisions superseding that of over 180 countries. They consider themselves the masters and rulers of the entire world and other nations as only second class in the world order.

Excellencies,

The question needs to be asked: if the Governments of the United States or the United Kingdom who are permanent members of the Security Council, commit aggression, occupation and violation of international law, which of the organs of the UN can take them to account? Can a Council in which they are privileged members address their violations? Has this ever happened? In fact, we have repeatedly seen the reverse. If they have differences with a nation or state, they drag it to the Security Council and as claimants, arrogate to themselves simultaneously the roles of prosecutor, judge and executioner. Is this a just order? Can there be a more vivid case of discrimination and more clear evidence of injustice?

Regrettably, the persistence of some hegemonic powers in imposing their exclusionist policies on international decision making mechanisms, including the Security Council, has resulted in a growing mistrust in global public opinion, undermining the credibility and effectiveness of this most universal system of collective security.

Excellencies,

How long can such a situation last in the world? It is evident that the behavior of some powers constitutes the greatest challenge before the Security Council, the entire organization and its affiliated agencies.

The present structure and working methods of the Security Council, which are legacies of the Second World War, are not responsive to the expectations of the current generation and the contemporary needs of humanity.

Today, it is undeniable that the Security Council, most critically and urgently, needs legitimacy and effectiveness. It must be acknowledged that as long as the Council is unable to act on behalf of the entire international community in a transparent, just and democratic manner, it will neither be legitimate nor effective. Furthermore, the direct relation between the abuse of veto and the erosion of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Council has now been clearly and undeniably established. We cannot, and should not, expect the eradication, or even containment, of injustice, imposition and oppression without reforming the structure and working methods of the Council.

Is it appropriate to expect this generation to submit to the decisions and arrangements established over half a century ago? Doesn't this generation or future generations have the right to decide themselves about the world in which they want to live?

Today, serious reform in the structure and working methods of the Security Council is, more than ever before, necessary. Justice and democracy dictate that the role of the General Assembly, as the highest organ of the United Nations, must be respected. The General Assembly can then, through appropriate mechanisms, take on the task of reforming the Organization and particularly rescue the Security Council from its current state. In the interim, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the African continent should each have a representative as a permanent member of the Security Council, with veto privilege. The resulting balance would hopefully prevent further trampling of the rights of nations.

Madame President,

Excellencies,

It is essential that spirituality and ethics find their rightful place in international relations. Without ethics and spirituality, attained in light of the teachings of Divine prophets, justice, freedom and human rights cannot be guaranteed.

Resolution of contemporary human crises lies in observing ethics and spirituality and the governance of righteous people of high competence and piety.

Should respect for the rights of human beings become the predominant objective, then injustice, ill-temperament, aggression and war will fade away.

Human beings are all God's creatures and are all endowed with dignity and respect.

No one has superiority over others. No individual or states can arrogate to themselves special privileges, nor can they disregard the rights of others and, through influence and pressure, position themselves as the "international community".

Citizens of Asia, Africa, Europe and America are all equal. Over 6 billion inhabitants of the earth are all equal and worthy of respect. Justice and protection of human dignity are the two pillars in maintaining sustainable peace, security and tranquility in the world.

It is for this reason that we state:

Sustainable peace and tranquility in the world can only be attained through justice, spirituality, ethics, compassion and respect for human dignity.

All nations and states are entitled to peace, progress and security.

We are all members of the international community and we are all entitled to insist on the creation of a climate of compassion, love and justice.

All members of the United Nations are affected by both the bitter and the sweet events and developments in today's world.

We can adopt firm and logical decisions, thereby improving the prospects of a better life for current and future generations.

Together, we can eradicate the roots of bitter maladies and afflictions, and instead, through the promotion of universal and lasting values such as ethics, spirituality and justice, allow our nations to taste the sweetness of a better future.

Peoples, driven by their divine nature, intrinsically seek Good, Virtue, Perfection and Beauty. Relying on our peoples, we can take giant steps towards reform and pave the road for human perfection. Whether we like it or not, justice, peace and virtue will sooner or later prevail in the world with the will of Almighty God. It is imperative, and also desirable, that we too contribute to the promotion of justice and virtue.

The Almighty and Merciful God, who is the Creator of the Universe, is also its Lord and Ruler. Justice is His command. He commands His creatures to support one another in Good, virtue and piety, and not in decadence and corruption.

He commands His creatures to enjoin one another to righteousness and virtue and not to sin and transgression. All Divine prophets from the Prophet Adam (peace be upon him) to the Prophet Moses (peace be upon him), to the Prophet Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), to the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him), have all called humanity to monotheism, justice, brotherhood, love and compassion. Is it not possible to build a better world based on monotheism, justice, love and respect for the rights of human beings, and thereby transform animosities into friendship?

I emphatically declare that today's world, more than ever before, longs for just and righteous people with love for all humanity; and above all longs for the perfect righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet.

0h, Almighty God, all men and women are Your creatures and You have ordained their guidance and salvation. Bestow upon humanity that thirsts for justice, the perfect human being promised to all by You, and make us among his followers and among those who strive for his return and his cause.
_____

Glenn Greenwald on Iran, Tea Party Candidates, Jon Stewart and Obama’s Assassination Policy

We speak with Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and the political and legal blogger for Salon.com. Greenwald discusses White House rhetoric toward Iran; Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s planned rallies in Washington, DC; the Obama administration’s assassination policy that includes targeting US citizens; tea party candidates in the November midterm elections; and much more. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political/legal blogger at Salon.com.

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AMY GOODMAN: World leaders have gathered in New York this week for a series of high-level meetings at the United Nations. Among them, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s already attracted a range of critics protesting his presence outside the UN building.

On Monday, President Obama told a town hall meeting a military attack on Iran would not be the ideal solution to the "serious problem" of Iran’s nuclear program, he said, but that he’s not taking that option off the table.

For more on how the Obama administration is handling Iran, as well as other matters—for example, here at home, particularly looking at the tea party—we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald. He’s a constitutional law attorney and political/legal blogger for Salon.com.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s start with Iran, and then we’ll move here to domestic politics. What about what President Obama said about Ahmadinejad and the nuclear program?

GLENN GREENWALD: There’s a great irony, because every time President Ahmadinejad comes to the United States, the same media commentary decrees him as some kind of crazy, threatening figure. The same set of two or three comments that he made that are of dubious translation are continuously repeated, much the way that Saddam Hussein, the fear mongering around him, was based on two or three assertions repeated over and over. And yet, what you have is evidence about what real aggression is, which is the President of the United States is always insinuating that we reserve the right, at any moment, at any time, at our will, to go on to military attack on Iran, even if they don’t attack us. Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham was at a luncheon at the American Enterprise Institute and said that we need to start finalizing plans for an attack on Iran that would not just be about striking at their nuclear facilities, but removing the regime, as well, though he said we shouldn’t do that with ground troops, but only with air and sea strikes, which would entail massive devastation of that country, huge numbers of civilian deaths. The very idea is monstrous. And you see these proposals talked about on an almost daily basis in leading American, and obviously Israeli, journals, as well. So when it comes to who threatens whom and crazy and deranged ideas, it is true that parties to this dispute are engaging in those kinds of actions, and sometimes Iran does, but far more often it’s not Iran who’s doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s look here at home at this election year, the midterm elections, and the significance of the tea party.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the significance, principally, of the tea party for the Democrat Party is that they don’t really have much to talk about in terms of why voters and supporters ought to go out and keep the Democrats in power. And so, what you see from the Democratic Party is this fixation on the tea party as a means of ratcheting up fear levels among Democrats and others, in order to encourage them to go to the polls. I mean, every pollster has said that the huge threat to the Democratic—the Democrats maintaining their power is this enthusiasm gap, the fact that Democratic supporters don’t perceive any reason to go to the polls. And so, in the absence of any reason to give them, all that you hear is a lot of focus on individual candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, these tea party candidates, to try and highlight their extremism, make people afraid of who they are, all as a means of encouraging people who don’t see any reason to go vote for the Democrats to do so. And I think that’s extremely telling, that two years into this administration, that that’s all the Democrats have is a fear campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Sharron Angle and Harry Reid’s chances. He was just here in New York last night at a Democratic fundraiser.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, I mean, there was an incident yesterday that really illustrates why anyone has a very difficult time supporting Harry Reid. He was at a fundraiser on the Upper West Side for very wealthy Democratic Party donors, which is where these candidates spend most of their time. And the New York—New York’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, was present, and he was talking about her and introducing her, and he said, "And Kirsten Gillibrand is here, or, as we refer to her in the Senate, the hottest member of the United States Senate"—you know, an absolutely revolting remark, sexist in every single possible way and offensive. And so, when you hear things like that—and Harry Reid has been, you know, saying things like this. He came out and said that the Park51 community center ought to move. He said, "We don’t want any people in Guantánamo anywhere near the United States." And so, when you hear this series of remarks from the most powerful Democrat in the Senate, you can show people all you want the craziness of Sharron Angle, but it’s very difficult to get people to be motivated to go out and care whether or not Harry Reid, someone like Harry Reid, remains in the Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: At the same time, he’s battling to overturn "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." At the Netroots Nation conference, he hugged Dan Choi and said he, you know, promised to give him his ring back when they overturned "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," though it’s not clear he will beat McCain on this.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it’s incredibly cynical. I mean, you see this flurry of activity over the last four weeks from President Obama and from Democratic leaders suddenly trying to don once again their progressive masks to convince people that they ought to go to the polls. And they know that "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" won’t be repealed. They know the DREAM Act is not actually going to be enacted. All of these measures that they’re talking about to stimulate the economy and create jobs are things that they know won’t happen, and that’s why they’re able to advocate them. You even saw, with the cynical appointment of Elizabeth Warren, who probably will do some good being able to create this agency to police Wall Street abuses, nonetheless they stayed away from the fight to actually appoint her as the director of this agency, so that once the election is over, they can find somebody more pleasing to Wall Street. So you—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that, what they actually did.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there’s this—one of the best parts about the financial regulation bill, maybe the only truly meaningful part, is the creation of this agency, which is the idea of Professor Elizabeth Warren at Harvard to essentially police the ability of Wall Street to put fine print into mortgage and credit applications that lure the consumer into extremely one-sided and imbalanced transactions that they don’t know about, because they lack the sophistication, they don’t have lawyers to do it. And the idea of the progressive base was that she is the person who ought to be heading this agency, because she is genuinely committed to the idea of limiting Wall Street abuses. She’s a crusader for economic justice and for protection of consumers, exactly the kind of person that this administration needs but doesn’t have in important financial positions.

And the problem was, progressives were demanding it, but their real constituency, which is Wall Street and business, are horrified by the idea of Elizabeth Warren, and they needed to find some solution, because if they didn’t nominate her, progressives would be in revolt before the election. And so, what they did was they created this hybrid solution, where they pretended that they were going to appoint her, even though she has no real authority—she’s just an adviser to the President—to set up the agency, but not to run it, and meanwhile they’re telling Wall Street, "Oh, don’t worry, she’s not really going to have any authority. She’s not going to be the person who’s running it." And it’s these kind of symbolic gestures in the last several weeks that I think are almost more offensive, as they try and pretend that they are something that for the last two years they haven’t been.

AMY GOODMAN: And Christine O’Donnell, her significance?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, if you were a Martian who came down from—to Planet Earth in the last week and just turned on television news and watched, you would think that Christine O’Donnell was by far the most powerful person in the world, because, especially on stations devoted to maintaining Democratic power, like MSNBC and other cable shows, it’s twenty-four hours nonstop about Christine O’Donnell, because that way, if you’re on one of these stations, you don’t have to talk about the things that Tariq Ali was here just talking about, about what we’re doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the continuation of Bush-Cheney terrorism policies. You get to talk about Christine O’Donnell and comments she made fifteen years ago on some late night television show as a way of mocking her and deriding her and distracting people’s attention from what a failure this administration has been. That’s why she serves such an important role. It’s a way of manipulating and distracting the voting base.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to another subject you’ve taken on, and that is Jon Stewart making his announcement that he’s going to be holding a protest in Washington to—what was it?—counter what he identified as extremists on both sides. Let’s go to a clip.

JON STEWART: I see you’re intrigued, but there’s something still bothering you. "As a reasonable, busy person, I’d love to come, Jon. But I really don’t have time to handcraft a message or some signage." Not to worry. That’s where we come in. We’re going to have signs for you down there, if you don’t have time. Of course, you can bring your own, but here’s a quick one: "I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler."

You may be asking yourself right now, sitting at home, "But am I the right type of person to go to this rally?" The fact that you would even stop to ask yourself that question, as opposed to just, let’s say, jumping up, grabbing the nearest stack of burnable holy books, strapping on a diaper, and just pointing your car towards DC, that means, I think, you just might be right for it.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. You wrote a piece about this called "The Perils of False Equivalencies and Self-Proclaimed Centrism." Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, I was somewhat ambivalent about this rally, because, on the one hand, I think everybody agrees that we need more rationality and substantive examination in our political discourse, and so, to the extent that he’s calling for that, that’s a perfectly fine and uncontroversial idea. And, as well, he reaches a demographic group, young people, who tend to be politically disengaged, and he draws them into the political process, which I think is a very commendable thing to do.

The problem that I had with how it was structured and what it is that he’s saying—and he’s far more than a comedian; I mean, he’s a very influential voice among progressives and in the media narratives—is that, for one thing, I don’t think the problem with our politics is tone. I think the problem is content. There are all kinds of people who advocate extremely heinous ideas, but do so in a very soft-spoken and civil manner. Bill Kristol comes to mind, John Yoo, as well. These are people who can go on and be extremely polite in conversation and have done that on his show. So I think the problem, in terms of extremism, is not about tone, but about content, and to talk about tone, I think, distracts from the issue.

I also think that we don’t really have a problem with excess activism in the United States, as he seems to suggest—we need to stand up for the virtuous people who don’t go to rallies. I think going to rallies and being politically engaged and even passionate is actually a virtue and something that ought to be encouraged.

But the real problem I had with it is that, in order to appear as though he was being more evenhanded, he didn’t depict the extremism as being a problem on the right, which is the reality. These extremist ideas are really quite pervasive on the right. And so, what he did was he tried to create an equivalency by saying, well, it’s—the problem is on the left, as well. And he picked out 9/11 Truthers and a CodePink rally and suggested that people who call Bush a war criminal are every bit as inflammatory and extremist and to be condemned as, say, people who say the President was not born in the United States. And that’s an extraordinary false equivalency, because these extremist ideas are pervasive on the right. People who go to CodePink rallies are a tiny minority, for better or for worse, among Democrats. But more so, the fact that Bush is a war criminal happens to be true, and there’s ample evidence for it, including, as I cited, the report by the four-star general, Antonio Taguba, who is in charge of investigating detainee abuse, who concluded that George Bush and top administration officials committed war crimes. And so, I think what he was trying to do was to show how fair-minded he was by condemning both the left and the right. This is a common disease in our media, even though left and right are not equal.

AMY GOODMAN: And the competing rally of Stephen Colbert?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, that, I think, is actually something that I found incredibly encouraging, because the rally there is “to keep fear alive.” And, of course, the American right is dependent, more than anything else, on fear. And as we talked about earlier, Democrats use fear, as well, to motive their base. And so, the role that fear plays in our political culture and the way in which politicians exploit that, I think, is one of the most central issues. And to the extent this rally is designed to mock that, I think that’s a good thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your post, "Obama in Wonderland," at Salon.com, where you talk about assassinations.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there’s this scene in Alice in Wonderland in which the Red Queen is sitting with the King, and Alice is in front of them, and they are condemning one convict after the next. And the King keeps saying, “Call in the accused. Let’s have the verdict and then the sentence.” And then, at one point, the Red Queen says, “No! I don’t want it that way. I want first the sentence and then the verdict.” And Alice objects, and the Queen threatens to execute her.

Well, if you look at what the President is doing with presidential assassinations, it’s almost exactly the same thing. Eight months ago, we learned that there’s a list that President Obama maintains with at least four Americans on it, one of whom is Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen, of individuals who President Obama, with no criminal charges, no trial, no due process, has ordered assassinated, to be killed anywhere they’re found, far away from a battlefield, no matter what they’re doing at the time, on the grounds—the accusation, unproven accusation—that they’re involved in terrorism. Well, that’s the sentence. The President has imposed the death penalty on these individuals. But two weeks ago, it was reported in the New York Times that the administration is now considering bringing an indictment against Awlaki in response to a lawsuit brought on his behalf and other—for other considerations, in order to bring him into a court and charge him with a crime, finally, in order to prove that he’s guilty—not in lieu of trying to kill him. They’re still trying to kill him, but just in case we don’t find him to kill him, at least we want to indict him. And the equivalence, how identical that was, was so striking. This was essentially Obama saying, “I, the President, hereby impose the death penalty on this American citizen with no trial,” and then eight months later he says, “Well, now it’s time to get around to charging him with a crime.” It’s sentence first, verdict after, just like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland decreed.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, the racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think, you know, one of the real dangers in terms of political extremism is when there are people who are suffering economically. And we have pervasive economic suffering in the United States. And one of the problems has been is that the Democratic Party has offered people who are truly angry and scared about their futures very few solutions, because they’ve been perceived accurately as standing for public—for corporate interests and lobbyists. And so, the void that has been left has been filled by these extremists on the right who use, traditionally and right now, economic, racial and other forms of culturally divisive tactics in order to exploit this economic anxiety. You see that with Islamophobia. You see that with fear mongering over immigration. And I think that’s when it becomes quite dangerous, when you combine that kind of demagoguery with economic exploitation, like the right is doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you’re here in New York to participate in an event sponsored by Brooklyn Law School on the Mavi Marmara, on the Gaza aid flotilla. It’s an issue that you have taken on in a big way.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it’s Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. It’s at Brooklyn Law School. It’s open to the public. There’s a dinner served with it. And I think, you know, one of the real challenges that we have is to go back and look at how the American media depicted that incident, because the level of propaganda that shaped American discourse around that event, I think, was unlike any other. And it’s very—

AMY GOODMAN: This was the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, but it was when the Israeli commandos opened up fire on the Mavi Marvara and killed nine—eight Turks, one American citizen—onboard.

GLENN GREENWALD: Precisely. And if you go back and do a dissection, you know, kind of a post-mortem, about how the American media behaved and how the American people were misled about that incident, while it took place and in the weeks after, I think it’s incredibly instructive. And that’s what this event is intended to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Glenn Greenwald.