Will Potter - Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.

This new information comes as the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as unconstitutional because its vague wording has had a chilling effect on political activism. This document adds to the evidence demonstrating that the AETA goes far beyond property destruction, as its supporters claim.

The 2003 FBI file details the work of several animal rights activists who used undercover investigation to document repeated animal welfare violations. The FBI special agent who authored the report said they “illegally entered buildings owned by [redacted] Farm… and videotaped conditions of animals.”

Read More:

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-undercover-investigators-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act/5440/

Stephen Zunes - Iraq: Remembering Those Responsible

The formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month has led to a whole series of retrospectives on the invasion and the eight and a half years of occupation that followed as well as a host of unanswered questions, including - given the tens of thousands of Americans and others on the US government payroll, many of whom are armed, who are remaining in Iraq - just how total the withdrawal might actually be.  

In any case, of critical importance at this juncture is that we not allow the narratives on the war to understate its tragic consequences or those responsible for the war - both Republicans and Democrats -to escape their responsibility.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600,000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. 

http://www.truth-out.org/iraq-remember-those-responsible/1325433300

Ray McGovern - Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth

December 21, 2011

Exclusive: The prosecution of Pvt. Bradley Manning for inconvenient truth-telling is more proof of how hypocritical Official Washington is, especially when Manning’s case is compared to how Bush administration officials walked despite clear evidence that they sanctioned torture and other war crimes, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/21/pvt-manning-and-the-imperative-of-truth/

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

Click to read more ...

Anonymous - Night Raid Equipment-Maker Lobbied for NDAA, Singles Out Sen. Rob Portman.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Anonymous-Night-Raid-Equi-by-Ralph-Lopez-111220-589.html

December 20, 2011 By Ralph Lopez If we are pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, what is all this stuff for? Night-raid gear? These are basically made to blind people as they awake from you busting down their door, not for open combat. In a night firefight you don't want any lights near you whatsoever. That gives the other guy an easy target. A $23 million contract would buy enough of these things to outfit maybe 50,000 soldiers. The geeks at Anonymous probably think they are having more fun publishing the Twitter handles of the 83 senators who approved the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, last Thursday, on Bill of Rights Day, which okays indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial.  But buried in the information dump is truly amazing information, which could have been put together from public records, but which Anonymous actually brought to the fore. First, Anonymous singles out Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) for receiving a particularly large sum from companies and PACs lobbying for the NDAA.  From the RT report: Robert J. Portman...we are truly disturbed by the ludicrous $272,853 he received from special interest groups supporting the NDAA bill that authorizes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Click to read more ...

Mike Lofgren - Propagandizing for Perpetual War

Published on Tuesday, December 20, 2011 by CounterPunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/20/propagandizing-for-perpetual-war/

Are Our Rulers Stupid, or Do They Think We’re Stupid?

by Mike Lofgren

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.

In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:

As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.

Click to read more ...

Lauren Unger-Geoffroy - Dispatches From Cairo: The Worst So Far

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dispatches_from_cairo_the_worst_so_far_20111220/

Posted on Dec 20, 2011

By Lauren Unger-Geoffroy

We asked Lauren Unger-Geoffroy, an Arabic-speaking American who lives in Cairo, to share her perspective of life in Egypt after the revolution. In this entry, she writes about a new surge in army brutality in suppressing protest.

CAIRO—Foreboding and warning. Egypt should have felt it coming. This was the worst so far. Hope is gone. The people are in despair. As our imam shouted Friday at noon prayer: Will it get worse before we have cleansed the land of Satan?

Authorities are now accusing 164 people of being involved in the new violence and interrogations have begun, with even injured people being questioned in hospitals. Many of the suspects are under 19 years old. Some are children, street kids accused of throwing Molotov cocktails. Some of the doctors at Omar Makram field hospital are being detained. At least one of the detainees has died from his injuries; activists accuse the army and security forces of torturing him in the headquarters of the national Cabinet.

Yet in my neighborhood Thursday night, a time when most Egyptians still were unaware of the beginning of this catastrophe, there was a hopeful festiveness stemming from the opening of a restaurant by a famous takeout food company. Blasting Egyptian dance music through the mosque speakers till midnight, the event was like a wedding celebration, full of lights and decorations.

Click to read more ...

Rodrigue Tremblay - The "Official End" of the Bush-Cheney Disaster in Iraq?

By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

Global Research, December 20, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28289

"Just think of what happened after 9/11. Immediately before there was any assessment there was glee in the [Bush-Cheney] administration because now we can invade Iraq." Ron Paul, U.S. Congressman (R-Tex.) and 2012 Republican presidential candidate

“After the war [against Iraq] has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.” Sen. Robert Byrd, (D-W.Va), March 19, 2003

“Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end... Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.” President Barack Obama, Friday, February 27, 2009

The Obama administration officially put an end to the Iraq war  on Thursday December 15, 2011, close to nine years after the March 20, 2003 military invasion of Iraq, dubbed “shock-and-awe.”

I had not intend to comment on the end of this most unnecessary war, but since I wrote a book to explain how it all came about, I feel that I must say something.

Click to read more ...

Brian Becker - Colonial Iraq: The Reality behind "the End of the Iraq War"

U.S. retains thousands of troops

By Brian Becker

December 19, 2011

pslweb.org

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28283

“Our war there will be over. All of our troops will be out of Iraq,” President Barack Obama said in his Dec. 17 weekly radio address.

But while combat troops are leaving, for now at least, the U.S. government is creating a staff of 16,000 for its newly constructed embassy in the heart of Baghdad. Although Iraq has only 28 million people, the new U.S. embassy is the largest in the world. It is a massive compound that is one and a half square miles-—an enormous complex of 22 buildings and the size of 94 football fields. Half of the 16,000-person staff will consist of a private military army made up of mercenaries under the control of the State Department. The State Department budget for the embassy is estimated at $25-30 billion over the next five years.

In addition, the Pentagon retains a vast network of bases, sea and air power surrounding Iraq. Washington’s intention clearly is to dominate Iraq for many years to come in a colonial-type relationship. Iraq possesses the second largest oil reserves in the world.

Click to read more ...

Gary Younge - The US is Blind to the Price of War That is Still Being Borne by the Iraqi People

Published on Monday, December 19, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/us-blind-price-paid-iraqis

by Gary Younge

On 19 November 2005 a US marine squad was struck by a roadside bomb in Haditha, in Iraq's Anbar province, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others. According to civilians they then went on the rampage, slaughtering 24 people. They included a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and a three-year-old child. It was a massacre. "I think they were just blinded by hate … and they just lost control," said James Crossan, one of the injured marines.

When he heard the news, Major General Steve Johnson, the American commander in Anbar province at the time, saw no cause for further examination. "It happened all the time … throughout the whole country. So you know, maybe, if I was sitting here [in Virginia] and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and done more to look into it. But at that point in time I felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement."

Click to read more ...

Robert Perry - Is Iraq War End a New Day?

December 19, 2011

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/19/is-iraq-war-end-a-new-day/

Exclusive: The departure of the last 500 U.S. combat troops from Iraq in the predawn hours on Sunday marked an anti-climatic end to a near-nine-year war that began with “shock and awe” and “embedded” journalists joining the invasion force. But Robert Parry wonders if any lessons were learned — and what lies ahead.

By Robert Parry

Under the cover of darkness early Sunday morning, the last 500 U.S. combat troops sped out of Iraq in a 110-vehicle convoy to Kuwait, a departure kept secret even from Iraqi allies to avoid possible leaks to militants who might have inflicted one more ambush.

It was an ignominious end to an imperial adventure that cost around $1 trillion and left nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers dead, along with uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention many thousands more injured and maimed.

Iraq’s infrastructure also remains devastated by the war, and there is the strong possibility that sectarian tensions will again erupt into violence. With a new round of political arrests just this weekend, many Iraqis fear they may have traded one dictator, secular Sunni Saddam Hussein, for another tyrant, Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, today’s strongman prime minister.

Click to read more ...

Ray McGovern - Battlefield America -- Is Gitmo in Your Future?

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News
Posted on December 4, 2011, Printed on December 18, 2011
http://consortiumnews.com

Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”

The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.”

“The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.

The Senate bill, in effect, revokes an 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, which banned the Army from domestic law enforcement after the military had been used —and often abused — in that role during Reconstruction. Ever since then, that law has been taken very seriously — until now. Military officers have had their careers brought to an abrupt halt by involving federal military assets in purely civilian criminal matters.

But that was before 9/11 and the mantra, “9/11 changed everything.” In this case of the Senate-passed NDAA – more than a decade after the terror attacks and even as U.S. intelligence agencies say al-Qaeda is on the brink of defeat – Congress continues to carve away constitutional and legal protections in the name of fighting “terrorism.”

Click to read more ...

Global Research - The Real Dangers of War: New Russian Strategic Missiles Can Penetrate U.S. Missile Shield

The Real Dangers of War: New Russian Strategic Missiles Can Penetrate U.S. Missile Shield

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28234

Stop NATO

December 16, 2011 New Russian strategic missiles invulnerable - RVSN commander  -"It seems to me that as long as a stable mechanism of nuclear deterrence based on a threat to use nuclear weapons exists in the world, it should not be undermined, provoking a strategic offensive arms race. Should it happen, any strategic stability would be out of the question. I do not think that such a situation will benefit anyone." MOSCOW: Nearly all of the silo-based and mobile missile systems belonging to the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN) are equipped with warheads capable of overpowering missile defense shields, RVSN Commander Lt. Gen. Sergei Karakayev said. "The capabilities of such combat means were demonstrated to U.S. technical control means during the trials of the Yars ground-based mobile missile system and the Bulava sea-based missile system. It also concerns hypersonic warheads capable of performing altitude and trajectory maneuvers," he told journalists. "The new missiles have characteristics that allow them to stay invulnerable at all sections of their flight," Karakayev said. "Today we have to vigorously respond to America's missile defense build-up because the U.S. has chosen to ignore Russia's concerns over it," the commander said. "New missile systems of RVSN will be equipped with highly effective maneuverable and guided warheads and more advanced means able to overpower missile defense shields. All this allows us to confidently forecast the Russian strategic nuclear forces' ability to maintain the country's security no matter what scenario the international situation follows," Karakayev said.

Click to read more ...

Gareth Porter - How Maliki and Iran Outsmarted the U.S. on Troop Withdrawal

Published on Saturday, December 17, 2011 by Inter Press Service

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmanoeuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues.

Maliki needed Sadr's support, which was initially based on Maliki's commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops' withdrawal from Iraq.

Click to read more ...

Christopher Hinton - Iraq War "ends" with a $4 trillion IOU

Veterans’ health care costs to rise sharply over the next 40 years By Christopher Hinton
Global Research, December 15, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28232
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion. Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually. Ceremony marks end of Iraq war The flag is lowered Thursday in Baghdad at a ceremony to mark the closure of U.S. military headquarters and the end of the war in Iraq. Although that only represents about 1% of nation’s gross domestic product, it’s more than half of the national budget deficit. It’s also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year. Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion. “The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. Those costs include interest payments on the billions borrowed to fund the war; the cost of maintaining military bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to defend Iraq or reoccupy the country if the Baghdad government unravels; and the expense of using private security contractors to protect U.S. property in the country and to train Iraqi forces.

Click to read more ...

Martin Chulov - US Exit from Iraq: 'This is Not a Withdrawal, This is an Act on a Stage'

Published on Thursday, December 15, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/us-exit-iraq-withdrawal-ambivalence

Iraqi people greet pullout ceremony with ambivalence mixed with concern over an uncertain future

by Martin Chulov

There was no triumphalism and certainly no shock or awe. The end of the war in Iraq was subdued and simple: a small band playing as the US forces flag was furled with 200 troops watching on quietly.

In a makeshift parade ground in a corner of Baghdad airport, time was called on the war just after 1pm on Thursday, eight years, eight months and 26 days after its far more dramatic opening in March 2003. Nearby a plane was waiting to take home the US high command. And in southern Iraq, the 4,000 US troops who remain were steadily streaming towards Kuwait.

By Sunday all the troops will be gone, called home for Christmas by an administration that decided there was little point sticking to the original end date of 31 December. The Iraqi government had made clear that it no longer wanted a US presence here and any soldier who stayed behind would not be granted legal immunity.

To the end, the relationship between Iraq and the departing US commanders remained difficult to gauge. The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the president, Jalal Talabani, did not turn up to the ceremony, with uniformed US soldiers belatedly moved into seats carrying the two Iraqi leaders' names.

Click to read more ...

Bill van Auken - The Iraq Withdrawal and the Continuing Eruption of US Militarism

By Bill Van Auken

Global Research, December 14, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28213

The White House has used the imminent withdrawal of all but a handful of US troops from Iraq to promote Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. The president’s strategists are conducting a cynical propaganda operation aimed at simultaneously identifying him with the military and pushing the claim that the pullout is a fulfillment of his 2008 campaign promises.

The president used the visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to the White House Monday to proclaim, “After nearly nine years, our war in Iraq ends this month.” Today, he and his wife Michelle fly to Fort Bragg, North Carolina to deliver an address to a captive audience of American soldiers.

Recent polls have shown that three out of four Americans support the complete withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq. At the same time, they indicate that two-thirds of the population believes the war was not worth fighting, given its terrible costs.

Nearly 4,500 American soldiers and Marines were killed in the nearly nine years of war, while tens of thousands returned home severely wounded and many more suffered psychological and emotional trauma that will last a lifetime.

According to conservative estimates, the war’s costs will amount to over $3.5 trillion, a vast expenditure that is being paid for through unending cutbacks in public sector jobs and social programs upon which millions depend.

For the people of Iraq, the costs were far steeper, with an estimated one million lives lost and many millions more wounded or driven from their homes and turned into refugees. The war will forever be associated with horrific crimes such as the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad, the siege of Fallujah and the mass torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, deeds that horrified and repulsed people all over the world, including in the US itself.

Click to read more ...

Robert Perry - Is Iraq War End a New Day?

Robert Perry will be a guest this evening on The Progressive Commentary Hour with Gary Null, Monday December 19, at 7 pm ET / 4 PT, speaking with John Feffer and Dr. Null about the consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq, the cost to human life, infrastructure and the environment, and the role the war has played in raising Iran as a major power in the Middle East.

Robert (Bob) Parry is one of our leading progressive investigative journalists best known for his uncovering Iran-Contra story and Oliver North’s involvement which earned him the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984.  He current writes for Consortium News, and has covered many important stories on domestic and foreign affairs issues including right wing terrorism, the Bush and Obama presidencies, the rise and influence of the Neocons and our wars overseas.  He has worked as a journalist for the Associated Press, Newsweek and PBS Frontline.

December 19, 2011

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/19/is-iraq-war-end-a-new-day/

Exclusive: The departure of the last 500 U.S. combat troops from Iraq in the predawn hours on Sunday marked an anti-climatic end to a near-nine-year war that began with “shock and awe” and “embedded” journalists joining the invasion force. But Robert Parry wonders if any lessons were learned — and what lies ahead.

By Robert Parry

Under the cover of darkness early Sunday morning, the last 500 U.S. combat troops sped out of Iraq in a 110-vehicle convoy to Kuwait, a departure kept secret even from Iraqi allies to avoid possible leaks to militants who might have inflicted one more ambush.

It was an ignominious end to an imperial adventure that cost around $1 trillion and left nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers dead, along with uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention many thousands more injured and maimed.

Iraq’s infrastructure also remains devastated by the war, and there is the strong possibility that sectarian tensions will again erupt into violence. With a new round of political arrests just this weekend, many Iraqis fear they may have traded one dictator, secular Sunni Saddam Hussein, for another tyrant, Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, today’s strongman prime minister.

Click to read more ...

Joanne Mariner - An Endless War on Terror?

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 9-11, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/09/AN-ENDLESS-WAR-ON-TERROR/

by JOANNE MARINER

It might seem an odd moment for the War on Terror to expand.  The 9/11 terrorist attacks are now ten years in the past; Osama bin Laden is sleeping with the fishes; and all of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators who are not dead are in custody awaiting trial.

President Obama—the man who ran for president promising to end the Bush Administration’s signature methods of fighting terrorism—is still in office.

Ten years after America’s entry into World War II, to make an imperfect but still telling analogy, the country had moved on to other global conflicts.  The Japanese and Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps had been released, albeit without an apology, and Germany was an ally, not an enemy.

But the War on Terror has not only stayed with us, it’s growing.  Bills currently in Congress go well beyond the already broad bounds of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror policies.

Yes, the timing is odd, but only if one cares about evidence, logic, cause-and-effect relationships, and other possibly outmoded concepts.  Seen through the lens of politics, fear-mongering, and the election cycle, the timing of these bills is understandable.  Call it election fever.

Click to read more ...

David Enders - Huge numbers of Iraqis still adrift within the country

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2011

David Enders | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: December 11, 2011 

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/11/132550/huge-numbers-of-iraqis-still-adrift.html

MOSUL, Iraq — Of all the problems that the U.S. troop withdrawal won't affect in Iraq, what to do about the number of internally displaced people looms the largest.

As many as 2 million Iraqis — nearly 6 percent of the country's estimated more than 31 million population — are thought to have been forced from the cities and towns where they once lived and are housed in circumstances that feel temporary and makeshift.

More than 500,000 of those are "squatters in slum areas with no assistance or legal right to the properties they occupy," according to Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group. Most can't go home: Either their homes have been destroyed or hostile ethnic and sectarian groups now control their neighborhoods.

Those who are displaced internally say the Iraqi government has done little or nothing to help them, and in some cases has even prevented them from returning to their homes.

Iraqi officials concede that the problem is formidable but they challenge the numbers, saying that the issue is getting better.

Click to read more ...

Chris Marsden - US Covert Operations Threaten War with Iran

Redrawing the Political Map of the entire Middle East. By Chris Marsden

Global Research, December 10, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28137

The United States is waging a sustained covert campaign of destabilisation against Iran, focusing on efforts to disrupt its nuclear program. Among a growing list of incidents are: • Two nuclear physicists were killed by bombs and the head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, was wounded after bombs were attached to their cars or detonated near them in 2010. • The Stuxnet computer worm infected Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010, damaging computers used in industrial machinery; numerous reports suggest this was a US-Israeli attack to cripple Iranian nuclear centrifuges. • On November 12 this year, an explosion destroyed the Revolutionary Guard base at Bid Kaneh, killing 17, including a founder of Iran's missile programme. • On November 28, an explosion in the western Iranian city of Isfahan badly damaged a uranium enrichment facility. • On December 4, Iran shot down a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone after it illegally crossed the eastern border. The “Beast of Kandahar,” which has a wingspan of about 65 feet and can fly at around 50,000 feet, was, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, part of an increased US surveillance effort monitoring suspect nuclear sites. The Wall Street Journal stated that the US had considered sending in covert missions to Iran to recover a drone or to blow it up with an air strike, but decided that this would be considered an act of war. • On December 5, the State Department’s arms adviser Robert Einhorn said: “Iran is violating international obligations and norms. It is becoming a pariah state… The timeline for its nuclear programme is beginning to get shorter, so it is important we take these strong steps on an urgent basis.”

Click to read more ...