Wednesday, June 26, 2019

The US war threats against Iran


-- Nasir Khan, June 26, 2019

In his article, American investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter has outlined the precarious America policy towards Iran under the Trump administration, in which two main warmongers, Bolton and Pompeo, play a vital role in the ongoing conflict with Iran.
In fact, the present military threats of war and the annihilation of Iran by the only domineering superpower in the world, the United States of America, are extremely dangerous after the US had unilaterally withdrawn from a nuclear deal with Iran. The nuclear deal was a result of many years' work, supervised by an eight-member committee, consisting of the representatives of Iran, the United States of America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union.
Le me remind our readers and peace activists that an internationally binding agreement which the previous US administration of Obama had entered into cannot be flouted in this manner merely because America had a new administration under Mr. Trump! This uncalled for shift in the US policy was also a dangerous precedent in international law to disregard the legally binding agreements between states. The American action was and is a heavy blow to the rule of law in the world.
Of course, the Israeli PM Netanyahu's unrelenting efforts to embroil the US in a war with Iran is a major factor; a criminal war of aggression against Iran will serve the interests of the Zionist power in the Middle East and far beyond.
It is obvious to many of us that Netanyahu has strong pro-war supporters in Bolton and Pompeo. But we should not forget that the Zionist machinations to crush Iran are also a threat to the world peace and to millions of innocent Iranians. The pro-war Pompeo-Bolton team and its Zionist mentors should be exposed and resisted. Political differences, real or contrived, should be solved by political negotiations in a peaceful and conciliatory way, not by war and violence. 
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No war with Iran, for now — but Mike Pompeo and John Bolton still really, really want one

Trump's "war hawks" have been cooking up war with Iran for at least a year. But much of their evidence is nonsense



571
11


Gareth Porter
June 24, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
After a week of high drama in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated  the Trump administration was preparing for war with Iran, President Trump sought to end the war crisis, at least for now, by declining to retaliate against Iran over what he called “very minor” attacks.
Trump canceled a retaliatory strike on Iran in the early hours on Friday, at least in part because he was not certain that the drone or a Navy spy plane following it had not strayed into Iran’s airspace in Strait of Hormuz, according to the New York Times. 
But the evident determination of Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton to get Trump to carry out a military strike against Iran — combined with Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy, which has already prompted Iranian pushback — mean that such crises are bound to continue until either war comes or U.S. policy fundamentally changes. 
Pompeo and Bolton are said by Washington insiders to have personal differences, but they combined to create a virtual crisis machine, as the crisis over the June 13 mine attacks on two freighters in the Sea of Oman shows. Within a few hours after the attacks, Pompeo declared that Iran was responsible, referring to “the assessment of the U.S. government” — a term of art that has come to mean the judgment of senior administration officials, ever since the White House issued its cherry-picked intelligence summary on the August 2013 Syria chemical weapons attack.
Pompeo presented no specific evidence, instead reciting a litany of alleged Iranian attacks in May that included limpet mine attacks on four ships, a rocket that fell in the Green Zone in Baghdad and even a car bomb in Afghanistan. The latter turned out to be a reference to a Taliban suicide bomb attack on. May 29, which Pompeo insisted on "Face the Nation” that Iran had somehow “instigated.” He claimed to have “intelligence" to support that far-fetched idea, but refused to reveal anything about it.
The main exhibit that was produced to support the case Iran was responsible for the new tanker attacks revolved around a blurry surveillance video that appears to show Iranians in a boat next to the Japanese freighter Kokuka Courageous removing something from the ship’s hull. Other information appears to confirm that the object was an unexploded limpet mine. But the video evidence left key questions unanswered, and the German and Japanese foreign ministers both declared that it was not sufficient proof of Iranian responsibility.
Pompeo nevertheless implied during the next week that the administration was preparing for war with Iran over the issue.  In a closed meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee, he argued that the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, could be used to carry out a strike against Iran. Last Sunday, Pompeo said on “Face the Nation” that he and other national security officials had "briefed the president a couple of times” and that the administration was “considering a full range of options” to respond to the attacks, including the use of military force.
Someone familiar with the briefings told an unidentified diplomat at the United Nations — who was evidently in touch with the Bolton-Pompeo team and had ties to conservative media in Israel — that one of the briefings  had included a discussion of a strike against targets related to Iran's nuclear program.
But in an interview with TIME magazine published the next day, on Trump renounced the option of a military attack on Iran in response to the mine attacks on shipping. Asked whether he was considering military action against Iran, Trump responded, “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t say that at all.” He minimized the threat represented by limpet bomb attacks as “very minor” and contradicted Pompeo’s argument that an attack on ships in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz was a dire threat to U.S. interests. 
Even after the publication of that Trump interview, however, Pompeo did not back down. He characterized the Iranian threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf region as an existential issue for the United States and the rest of the world, in remarks to the press at Central Command headquarters in Tampa that afternoon. By then it was clear that the administration would continue to speak with different voices on Iran.
Pompeo and Bolton build a war crisis strategy
Ever since taking over their preset positions, Pompeo and Bolton have been developing a strategy to draw the Trump administration into a war by claiming that Iran is bent on attacking the U.S. and its allies. A key influence on this strategy has been a still secret U.S.-Israeli agreement in December 2017 to develop a common approach to Iran, as revealed by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid.
The Bolton-Pompeo strategy began to unfold last September when they both claimed that rockets that had been fired in the vicinity of U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq were aimed at threatening U.S. diplomats. Bolton sought and obtained military options for retaliation against Iran if any Americans were harmed by any action of an Iranian “proxy,” and Pompeo issued a public threat to Iran to avoid any attack on U.S. “interests.”
In fact, the claimed threat was demonstrably false. The rockets in question were not launched by Iranian “proxy” militias as Pompeo suggested.  They were fired during violent protests in Basra by anti-Iran protesters who burned down the Iranian consulate as well as the offices of pro-Iranian political parties and militias. And the rocket that fell in the Green Zone of Baghdad that same night was undoubtedly launched by sympathizers with the Basra protesters in Baghdad who were protesting against corruption.
After the United States designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization” and removed all sanctions waivers for nations purchasing oil from Iran, the Iranians undoubtedly responded by moving to a higher state of military readiness. That in turn presented Bolton and Pompeo with new opportunities for generating a war crisis.
Bolton kicked off the next step with a statement on May 5, referring darkly to “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” and threatening that “any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” He announced the dispatch of a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East.
Those moves toward higher tensions with Iran have been based all along on nothing more than a highly convenient interpretation of Iranian moves — much of that interpretation was influenced by the Israelis. The day after Bolton’s declaration, Israeli journalist Ravid reported that a “senior Israeli official” had told him Israel had passed information to Bolton and other senior U.S. officials at a White House meeting on April 15, concerning a U.S. or allied target in the Gulf and "mentioning either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.”
On a sudden trip to Iraq on May 8, Pompeo told officials there about intelligence that Iran-backed Shiite militias were “positioning rockets hear bases housing U.S. forces,” according to a Reuters story. He ordered the withdrawal of nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy by helicopter, ostensibly because of concerns about a possible threat of attack.
Information on that alleged threat came from the Israelis. Senior U.S. officials in Amman, Jordan, told former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that Israeli intelligence had given the United States photos showing  a stockpile of Iranian missiles in Iraq. And an article published by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), co-authored by a former senior IDF official, pushed the idea that “concern” was “mounting in Iraqi, U.S. and Israeli intelligence circles” that Iran was “covertly supplying long-range artillery rockets to proxy militias inside Iraq.” 
Those Iranian rockets in Iraq were neither covert nor new.  Western intelligence had reported that Iran had distributed some two dozen such rockets to Iraqi militias beginning in late spring or early summer of 2018. Iranian officials not only acknowledged their deployment to Reuters in August 2018 but explained that they were aimed at strengthening Iran’s deterrent to an attack.
Another key story line peddled by Bolton and Pompeo was about Iranians posing a new offensive threat to U.S. ships by putting missiles on relatively small boats called dhows, which was said to be a key justification for the escalation of U.S. military presence in the region. This narrative exploited the fact that U.S. had photographs of the missiles being loaded onto such boats, but it made no sense, as a specialist on missile proliferation pointed out, because Iran had land-based anti-ship missiles that were far more secure, and there was no known way of launching from the boats. 
From May 5 to June 5, the atmosphere of U.S.-Iran tension continued to grow, but Trump became wary of his advisers' tone of his advisers and made it clear he wanted an end to signs of escalating conflict. crisis. On June 5, according to a former U.S. official, the Pentagon shut down the “crisis center” it had set up on May 5.  It was Trump's first significant pushback against his warhawk advisers, but evidently not his last.


Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian, who was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”
MORE FROM Gareth Porter


571
11


Gareth Porter
June 24, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
After a week of high drama in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated  the Trump administration was preparing for war with Iran, President Trump sought to end the war crisis, at least for now, by declining to retaliate against Iran over what he called “very minor” attacks.
Trump canceled a retaliatory strike on Iran in the early hours on Friday, at least in part because he was not certain that the drone or a Navy spy plane following it had not strayed into Iran’s airspace in Strait of Hormuz, according to the New York Times. 
But the evident determination of Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton to get Trump to carry out a military strike against Iran — combined with Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy, which has already prompted Iranian pushback — mean that such crises are bound to continue until either war comes or U.S. policy fundamentally changes. 
Pompeo and Bolton are said by Washington insiders to have personal differences, but they combined to create a virtual crisis machine, as the crisis over the June 13 mine attacks on two freighters in the Sea of Oman shows. Within a few hours after the attacks, Pompeo declared that Iran was responsible, referring to “the assessment of the U.S. government” — a term of art that has come to mean the judgment of senior administration officials, ever since the White House issued its cherry-picked intelligence summary on the August 2013 Syria chemical weapons attack.
Pompeo presented no specific evidence, instead reciting a litany of alleged Iranian attacks in May that included limpet mine attacks on four ships, a rocket that fell in the Green Zone in Baghdad and even a car bomb in Afghanistan. The latter turned out to be a reference to a Taliban suicide bomb attack on. May 29, which Pompeo insisted on "Face the Nation” that Iran had somehow “instigated.” He claimed to have “intelligence" to support that far-fetched idea, but refused to reveal anything about it.
The main exhibit that was produced to support the case Iran was responsible for the new tanker attacks revolved around a blurry surveillance video that appears to show Iranians in a boat next to the Japanese freighter Kokuka Courageous removing something from the ship’s hull. Other information appears to confirm that the object was an unexploded limpet mine. But the video evidence left key questions unanswered, and the German and Japanese foreign ministers both declared that it was not sufficient proof of Iranian responsibility.
Pompeo nevertheless implied during the next week that the administration was preparing for war with Iran over the issue.  In a closed meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee, he argued that the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, could be used to carry out a strike against Iran. Last Sunday, Pompeo said on “Face the Nation” that he and other national security officials had "briefed the president a couple of times” and that the administration was “considering a full range of options” to respond to the attacks, including the use of military force.
Someone familiar with the briefings told an unidentified diplomat at the United Nations — who was evidently in touch with the Bolton-Pompeo team and had ties to conservative media in Israel — that one of the briefings  had included a discussion of a strike against targets related to Iran's nuclear program.
But in an interview with TIME magazine published the next day, on Trump renounced the option of a military attack on Iran in response to the mine attacks on shipping. Asked whether he was considering military action against Iran, Trump responded, “I wouldn’t say that. I can’t say that at all.” He minimized the threat represented by limpet bomb attacks as “very minor” and contradicted Pompeo’s argument that an attack on ships in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz was a dire threat to U.S. interests. 
Even after the publication of that Trump interview, however, Pompeo did not back down. He characterized the Iranian threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf region as an existential issue for the United States and the rest of the world, in remarks to the press at Central Command headquarters in Tampa that afternoon. By then it was clear that the administration would continue to speak with different voices on Iran.
Pompeo and Bolton build a war crisis strategy
Ever since taking over their preset positions, Pompeo and Bolton have been developing a strategy to draw the Trump administration into a war by claiming that Iran is bent on attacking the U.S. and its allies. A key influence on this strategy has been a still secret U.S.-Israeli agreement in December 2017 to develop a common approach to Iran, as revealed by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid.
The Bolton-Pompeo strategy began to unfold last September when they both claimed that rockets that had been fired in the vicinity of U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq were aimed at threatening U.S. diplomats. Bolton sought and obtained military options for retaliation against Iran if any Americans were harmed by any action of an Iranian “proxy,” and Pompeo issued a public threat to Iran to avoid any attack on U.S. “interests.”
In fact, the claimed threat was demonstrably false. The rockets in question were not launched by Iranian “proxy” militias as Pompeo suggested.  They were fired during violent protests in Basra by anti-Iran protesters who burned down the Iranian consulate as well as the offices of pro-Iranian political parties and militias. And the rocket that fell in the Green Zone of Baghdad that same night was undoubtedly launched by sympathizers with the Basra protesters in Baghdad who were protesting against corruption.
After the United States designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization” and removed all sanctions waivers for nations purchasing oil from Iran, the Iranians undoubtedly responded by moving to a higher state of military readiness. That in turn presented Bolton and Pompeo with new opportunities for generating a war crisis.
Bolton kicked off the next step with a statement on May 5, referring darkly to “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” and threatening that “any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” He announced the dispatch of a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East.
Those moves toward higher tensions with Iran have been based all along on nothing more than a highly convenient interpretation of Iranian moves — much of that interpretation was influenced by the Israelis. The day after Bolton’s declaration, Israeli journalist Ravid reported that a “senior Israeli official” had told him Israel had passed information to Bolton and other senior U.S. officials at a White House meeting on April 15, concerning a U.S. or allied target in the Gulf and "mentioning either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.”
On a sudden trip to Iraq on May 8, Pompeo told officials there about intelligence that Iran-backed Shiite militias were “positioning rockets hear bases housing U.S. forces,” according to a Reuters story. He ordered the withdrawal of nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy by helicopter, ostensibly because of concerns about a possible threat of attack.
Information on that alleged threat came from the Israelis. Senior U.S. officials in Amman, Jordan, told former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that Israeli intelligence had given the United States photos showing  a stockpile of Iranian missiles in Iraq. And an article published by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), co-authored by a former senior IDF official, pushed the idea that “concern” was “mounting in Iraqi, U.S. and Israeli intelligence circles” that Iran was “covertly supplying long-range artillery rockets to proxy militias inside Iraq.” 
Those Iranian rockets in Iraq were neither covert nor new.  Western intelligence had reported that Iran had distributed some two dozen such rockets to Iraqi militias beginning in late spring or early summer of 2018. Iranian officials not only acknowledged their deployment to Reuters in August 2018 but explained that they were aimed at strengthening Iran’s deterrent to an attack.
Another key story line peddled by Bolton and Pompeo was about Iranians posing a new offensive threat to U.S. ships by putting missiles on relatively small boats called dhows, which was said to be a key justification for the escalation of U.S. military presence in the region. This narrative exploited the fact that U.S. had photographs of the missiles being loaded onto such boats, but it made no sense, as a specialist on missile proliferation pointed out, because Iran had land-based anti-ship missiles that were far more secure, and there was no known way of launching from the boats. 
From May 5 to June 5, the atmosphere of U.S.-Iran tension continued to grow, but Trump became wary of his advisers' tone of his advisers and made it clear he wanted an end to signs of escalating conflict. crisis. On June 5, according to a former U.S. official, the Pentagon shut down the “crisis center” it had set up on May 5.  It was Trump's first significant pushback against his warhawk advisers, but evidently not his last.


Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian, who was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”
MORE FROM Gareth Porter

Thursday, June 20, 2019

Totally baseless charges against Richard Falk


-- Nasir Khan, June 20, 2019

What this article says is an utter fabrication and distortion of the truth about the American Jewish academic Prof Richard Falk.

We all know quite well that he has never said anything against any ethnic group or the followers of any religion, including the followers of Judaism. But the absurd and odious propaganda against this honorable human being, who has stood for peace and justice in Palestine, is a pathetic attempt by this news-site to mislead the people and to falsify the facts about the work of this brave and noble man.


Over the years, he has been a victim of the Zionists' attacks and calumnies, but he has never compromised his principles or stopped his work to appease the Israeli lobby or its global agents. He has valiantly upheld the cause of the people of Palestine, who since 1948 have been ethnically cleansed and marginalized by the colonial-settler state of the Zionist terrorists. He stands on the side of a people who have been the victims of a brutal colonial power, Israel. All those people who stand for peace and justice in Palestine are proud to have Richard Falk as a clear voice of reason and truth.

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https://www.marxists.org/archive/lunachar/works/silhouet/plek.htm

 Furore over Falk visit
Richard Falk is set to speak in Sydney next month. Photo: Peter Haskin
JEWISH communal leaders are concerned about plans for Richard Falk, a US academic who has endorsed conspiracy theories and who is widely accused of antisemitism, to visit Australia to speak at the NSW Parliament and at the University of Sydney.
Falk, who for six years was UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, has consistently maligned Israel with anti-Jewish tropes. 
Invited this year to address NSW Parliament by Greens MP David Shoebridge, co-convenor of NSW Parliament’s Friends of Palestine group, Falk’s July 4 speech will be on A Future for Palestine: BDS, International Law and Beyond. 
During his visit, organised by BDS Australia, he was also scheduled to speak on “Israeli apartheid, international law and the academic boycott” at a talk sponsored by the Sydney Staff for BDS group at the University of Sydney. The Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) has written to the university’s vice-chancellor Michael Spence to protest.
Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) chair Dvir Abramovich, meanwhile, has written to Immigration Minister David Coleman asking him to refuse or revoke Falk’s visa.
In a 2007 article titled “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust”, Falk drew parallels between Israel’s conflict with Gaza and the Holocaust, and has stated, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with the criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk, who previously visited Australia in 2013, has drawn flak from the British and Canadian governments, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, former US ambassador Susan Rice, anti-racist organisations, and parliamentarians around the world.
Former British PM David Cameron denounced Falk for publishing an antisemitic cartoon purportedly about Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which showed a dog wearing a Jewish head-covering urinating on a depiction of justice, and devouring a bloody skeleton. 
Falk was panned for claiming a link between the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and US support for Israel. He endorsed a book alleging the US connived in the 9/11 attacks. 
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president Lesli Berger saw Falk’s visit to Parliament as “problematic on so many levels. Richard Falk is infamous for blaming Israel and the US for the Boston Marathon bombing and other equally outrageous remarks; BDS is an antisemitic policy; and it is entirely unacceptable that David Shoebridge has helped to facilitate the event by booking the venue. All of which make this function offensive in the extreme”.
Calling on the NSW Parliament to reconsider his invitation, Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler asked, “Where is the public interest test for the NSW Parliament to host a character like Falk?” 
He said Falk “is on the record openly expressing antisemitic tropes. He has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, praised terrorist group Hamas and supported the bigoted BDS movement. Falk’s speaking tour will do nothing to promote meaningful discourse and dialogue nor objectively and rationally discuss the Israeli–Palestinian conflict”.
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein said, “It is clear no public good can be served by someone with his record coming here to spread divisive and ugly rhetoric. 
“We call upon Immigration Minister David Coleman to assess whether Mr Falk meets the good character test to visit Australia. 
“If he does enter Australia, we trust and expect that Australians will reflect on Falk’s record and treat his words with appropriate scepticism and disdain.”
ADC’s Abramovich stated, “Anyone who glorifies Hamas and supports violence against Israelis, and who peddles hateful slurs and theories should not be welcomed here. Mr Falk has used antisemitic imagery in the past, and has repeatedly refused to remove repulsive anti-Jewish rants from his personal blog.”
Stating that his organisation “is deeply concerned” that Falk is being hosted at the University of Sydney, AUJS chair Josef Wilkinson said, “Universities should not be welcoming people who hold ‘Tel Aviv’ responsible for the Boston marathon bombings.”
Insisting “This isn’t a political issue,” he added that when people with such views are allowed to spread their agenda in lecture theatres, “Jewish students are sent a very clear message.”

PETER KOHN