From Saturday through Thursday Saturday? I will be on the road driving from North Carolina to Illinois and back. I will be updating the site as circumstances allow. During this period, I will be posting fewer news items and more of the free-ranging items that I’m now clustering under my catchall — attention to the unseen. This brief message will remain at the top of the page throughout this period. PW
Exceptionalism takes many forms but perhaps its most universal expression can be found among politicians and petty criminals. When contemplating doing something really stupid, they have an unusual capacity to become convinced that nothing can go wrong.
When it comes to Israel’s view of Iran, the contradictions seem boundless. The Islamic republic is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany, Netanyahu and others like to say. But as for the risks involved in attacking Iran, the same fear-mongers claim that these risks have all been wildly overstated.
The lesson of the Holocaust, Netanyahu says, is: “We can only rely on ourselves.” So why does Israel still accept massive amounts of U.S. military aid and the support of such a powerful lobby in Washington?
The New York Times reports: Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.
The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.
“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”
The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.
But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.
The Israel-firster grumble rumbles on. I have no idea what round we’re in but here’s a snippet from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest attack on Glenn Greenwald. Some of Goldberg’s readers are apparently upset with him for not attacking Greenwald with enough vigor and for that reason suggest that Goldberg himself is at risk of defining himself as a self-hating Jew. His response to one such challenge:
Self-hatred is a deeply-inexact description of the people this reader is trying to describe. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an excess of self-regard, rather than self-loathing.
Which is to say, if someone is Jewish and lacks the fondness for Israel that Goldberg and others would expect from a Jew, then this person must suffer from a character flaw.
The smear always conforms to the same structure: attack the person instead of the idea.
There is a transparent intellectual cowardice in this approach. If Israel’s defenders can only mount a defense by suggesting that Israel’s critics are all flawed human beings, what does this say about Israel?
It should be possible, for instance, to have an argument about Israeli democracy — for one person to say why they believe that Israel fails to uphold democratic values and another to say why they believe it succeeds in doing so. But what is much more likely to happen is that the defender of Israeli democracy will start demonizing, marginalizing, and belittling Israel’s critics.
Is this simply a sad commentary on Zionism, or does it reflect a form of realism — an implicit acknowledgment that the best the Zionists can do at this point is to close their ranks since long ago they gave up on the idea of winning anyone over to their side?
When anyone gets rescued — whether they be the victim of a disaster or they were being held hostage — there is reason to celebrate. Even so, the story of the Navy Seals operation that resulted in the release of Jessica Buchanan resonates in other ways as well.
I imagine the Danish aid worker, Poul Hagen Thisted, realized that the odds of him being rescued in a dramatic military operation were boosted by the fact that he was being held alongside a blond young American woman. And it’s hard to imagine that the White House and the Pentagon did not take into consideration any applicable lessons learned from the Jessica Lynch episode. And it’s hard not to think that in an election year President Obama has a political investment in burnishing his image as a president who more than any other has championed the use of special operations forces around the globe.
What the celebrations obscure is that the United States has had an instrumental role in allowing Somalia to fester as an ungoverned state and U.S. counter-terrorism and counter-piracy operations will do little to aid that abandoned country’s political recovery. Neither will one rescue operation do anything to improve the chances for other hostages being released. Indeed, their chances may have significantly turned worse.
Around 2 a.m. Wednesday, elders in the Somali village of Galkayo said they began hearing an unusual sound: the whir of helicopters.
It was the culmination of a daring and risky mission by about two dozen members of the Navy Seals to rescue two hostages — an American aid worker and her Danish colleague — held by Somali pirates since October. The commandos had dropped down in parachutes under a cloak of darkness while 8,000 miles away President Obama was preparing to deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. The commandos hiked two miles from where they landed, grabbed the hostages and flew them to safety.
For the American military, the mission was characterized by the same ruthless efficiency — and possibly good luck — as the raid on Osama bin Laden in May, which was carried out by commandos from the same elite unit. Nine Somali gunmen were killed; not a single member of the Seals was hurt.
One pirate from the area who seemed to have especially detailed information about the Seal raid said it involved “an electrical net-trap, flattened into the land,” which presumably was the parachute. “Then they started launching missiles,” said the pirate, who spoke by telephone and asked not to be identified.
Pirates operate with total impunity in many parts of lawless Somalia, which has languished without a functioning government for more than 20 years. As naval efforts have intensified on the high seas, stymieing hijackings, Somali pirates seem to be increasingly snatching foreigners on land. Just last week, pirates grabbed another American hostage not far from where the Seal raid took place.
American officials said they were moved to strike in this case because they had received “actionable intelligence” that the health of Jessica Buchanan, the American aid worker, was rapidly deteriorating. The gunmen had just refused $1.5 million to let the two hostages go, Somali elders said, and ransom negotiations had ground to a halt.
Somali pirates have held hostages for months, often in punishing conditions with little food, water or shelter, and past ransoms have topped more than $10 million. One British couple sailing around the world on a little sailboat was kidnapped by pirates from this same patch of central Somalia and held in captivity for more than a year.
President Obama, who Pentagon officials said personally approved the rescue plan and raid, had called several high-level meetings on the case since the two aid workers were kidnapped by gunmen who Somali elders said were part of a well-established pirate gang. “As commander in chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Wednesday. “The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people.”
What does Twitter call restrictions on free speech? They are “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”
And what about censorship? It’s “the ability to reactively withhold content.”
Although I imagine George Orwell would have been adept at using this character-restricted medium, I also imagine he would have viewed it with contempt — and now even more so, as Twitter like every other corporate entity puts its commercial interests in front of everything else.
Mark Gibbs writes: In what can only have been a fit corporate insanity, Twitter announced that they have the ability to filter tweets to conform to the demands of various countries.
Thus, in France and Germany it is illegal to broadcast pro-Nazi sentiments and Twitter will presumably be able to block such content and inform the poster why it was blocked.
Quite obviously, Twitter’s management believe that there’s some kind of value in being able to filter in this way but given that over the course of 2011 the number of tweets per second (tps) ranged from a high of almost 9,000 tps down to just under 4,000 tps, any filtering has got to be computer-driven.
So, consider this tweet:
@FactsorDie Nazi Germany led the first public anti-smoking campaign.
Could that be considered to be pro-Nazi? How will a program accurately make that determination?
What concerns me is that if the algorithm Twitter uses registers a false positive (i.e. determines that the tweet is pro-Nazi when it isn’t) and the tweet has any time sensitivity to it then that attribute will be completely nullified by the time the tweet makes it out of tweet-jail if it ever does.
On the other hand if the software makes a false negative (i.e. determines that the tweet is NOT pro-Nazi when it is) then the filtering is useless and Twitter will be held accountable by every political group with an axe to grind.
In May 1967, Israel was itching to launch a preemptive attack on Egypt. The director of Mossad at that time, Meir Amit, had a meeting with John Hadden, the CIA chief in Tel Aviv. Hadden warned Amit that if Israel attacked Egypt, the United States would send in troops to defend Egypt. Hadden advised his counterpart that if Israel wanted the U.S. on its side, it would need a suitable pretext.
“Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example,” Hadden told Amit.
This exchange is revealed by the Israeli journalist, Ronen Bergman, in the cover story for this weekend’s New York Times magazine.
Bergman writes: “Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.”
The telling of the Amit-Hadden exchange, seems like a way of signalling that as far as Israel is concerned, come the time that it decides to launch an attack on Iran, the United States has no choice but to “agree.” Indeed, Israel is happy to point to the history of U.S. complicity in Israel’s acts of war, including the willingness of an American official to invite an Israeli instigated attack on a U.S. ship in order to fabricate a justification for entering a war.
In other words, transposing the 1967 incident to the current context, the Israelis want to insinuate that if the U.S. Fifth Fleet is attacked by “Iran” in the coming months and Israel covertly has a hand in this attack, then in truth Israel will merely be “helping” the United States to do what it wants to do at a time when domestic political considerations prevent Washington from being open about its intentions.
The irony about Hadden’s invitation in 1967 is that in some sense the Israelis did pick it up two weeks later. But rather than engineer an “Egyptian” attack on a U.S. ship, the Israelis attacked the U.S.S. Liberty claiming they thought it was an Egyptian ship.
Was Israel punishing the U.S. for its neutrality in the Six-Day War — knowing that it could do so with impunity because the U.S. could not suffer the embarrassment that would have been caused by revealing the CIA’s willingness to sacrifice Americans?
Bergman writes:
In June 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped, “Top secret, for your eyes only.” Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.
Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.
In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:
Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”
Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”
Amit: “You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”
Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”
Amit: “That is not the point.”
Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”
Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”
Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”
Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”
Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”
Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”
That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”
From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us.” The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.
Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute “Tehran” for “Cairo” and “Strait of Hormuz” for “Straits of Tiran,” and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.
During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”
That characterization of U.S.-Israeli relations certainly jives with President Obama’s description of an unbreakable bond between the two nations. At the same time, Mark Perry’s recent report on an Israeli false flag operation in which Mossad agents posed as CIA officers suggests that those who think they are protecting a nation facing an existential threat tend to believe that anything goes.
For a while now an argument has been rumbling along about the expression “Israel-firster” — a term that some people regard as bordering on anti-Semitic. Prime culprit — in the eyes of those making the charge — is M.J. Rosenberg at Media Matters.
James Kirchik at The New Republic says use of the term “largely amounts to name-calling.” What he and others who find the term offensive have no intention of doing is actually addressing the question of whether any/many/most of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in the U.S. place their allegiance to Israel ahead of their loyalty to the United States. In other words, whether they do indeed put Israel first.
To treat Israel-firster as a simple pejorative is to imply that its literal meaning can be dismissed. It is to suggest that the accusation that an American would put Israel first is so outrageous and inflammatory that it can simply be rejected as a baseless attack.
If one accepts that position, then there can of course be no debate. But like many other people these days, I don’t approach this on the basis of a suspicion. This has nothing to do with what it means to be Jewish. On the contrary, I see an abundance of evidence that there are Americans who put Israel first and yet — and this is really the curious part — do so while categorically denying that they put Israel first. Israelis might have reason to wonder why the Jewish state has supporters who are so unwilling to express their loyalty without simultaneously disowning it.
A graphic example of the verbal contortions that Israel firsters are prone to is presented in Yoav Shamir’s film, Defamation. He follows a group of Americans on a trip led by the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman. They are visiting Babi Yar, outside Kiev, where the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jews in just two days in 1941.
An American woman in Foxman’s group says she would join the Israeli army if Israel’s existence was under threat. The Israeli filmmaker asks her whether that means she is more loyal to Israel.
Woman: No, of course not.
Shamir: How do these two notions [loyalty to the United States and to Israel] co-exist?
Woman: Easy — you love your children; you love your husband; you love your friends, equally.
Man: You love your children more than you love your husband?
Woman: Of course not. But you might die for your children but you wouldn’t die for your husband.
Shamir: Israel is the husband or the kids?
Woman and others: The kids.
Before Shamir can press his questioning to its logical conclusion the group is whisked away.
These and other American Jews who express a paternal drive to protect Israel are either being disingenuous about their affection for Israel, or about their unwillingness to put Israel first.
I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that when they say they love Israel like their kids, they are like most parents committed to putting their kids first.
Andrew B Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, suggested in a column published a week ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should consider ordering U.S.-based Mossad agents to assassinate President Obama.
Netanyahu should then “forcefully dictate” to then-President Biden that the United States must help Israel “obliterate its enemies.”
Adler, concerned that some of his readers might find the scenario he was portraying implausible, wrote: “Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”
John Cook at Gawker called Adler to inquire about his column:
A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.
But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”
But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”
Yes. “Oh, boy.”
When I asked Adler why, if he didn’t advocate assassination and didn’t believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was “on the table,” he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.”
And what was the reaction? “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails.”
A Secret Service spokesman, George Ogilvie, told Fox News that the agency is aware of the incident and is “conducting the appropriate investigative steps.”
Predictably, American Jewish community leaders have been quick to condemn Adler, but as Chemi Shalev notes in Haaretz, it is a mistake to dismiss Adler’s ideas as simply the ranting of a crazed individual.
There is something eerily familiar in all this, of course, for anyone who was present 16 years ago at Tel Aviv’s Kikar Malchei Yisrael, as it was then known, on the night that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. One can already envisage how Adler will be disowned, described as a “wild weed,” depicted as a lone wolf who does not represent anyone in his or in anyone else’s community and used as a springboard for a righteously indignant, preemptive counteroffensive that will show how his solitary case is being exploited to score points against anyone who legitimately criticizes Obama.
And while we might all stipulate that there is no Jew anywhere in the world who is currently contemplating any act of violence against President Obama, I know, and most of you know, that Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual and were not taken out of thin air – but are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews included, have been spewing for the last three years.
Anyone who has spent any time talking to some of the more vociferous detractors of Obama, Jewish or otherwise, has inevitably encountered those nasty nutters, and they are many, who still believe he is a Muslim, who are utterly convinced that he wants to destroy Israel, and who seriously debate whether he is more like Ahmadinejad than Arafat or – and I heard this one with my own ears – more like Hitler than Haman.
Anyone who reads some of the opinion articles and blogs posted on the Internet by the more extreme Obama-hating writers and pundits – again, many of them Jews – cannot deny the wanton and inflammatory nature of much of their anti-Obama invective.
And anyone who lived through the Israeli right-wing’s days of rage against Rabin and the Oslo Accords can never forget that this deluge of deadly toxins need trigger just one homicidal chemical reaction in just one fanatic brain for history to be changed forever.
Adler has now made a verbal apology, but suppose his links had been to Iran rather than Israel. Would the Secret Service now be conducting a low-key investigation or would the director of the FBI be holding a major news conference to announce Adler’s arrest?
Never forget, has been the admonition from those who rightly insist that the world should never forget the horror of the Holocaust. Strange then that the term which describes the hatred that gave rise to the Holocaust should have been turned into a cheap political weapon whose primary purpose is to stifle criticism of Israel. It seems that those who say we should never forget, have themselves forgotten the meaning of anti-Semitism.
One of the most compelling illustrations of this fact is Yoav Shamir’s brilliant documentary, Defamation, currently viewable on YouTube (though it has a habit of periodically getting pulled down) and if not watched there, also now available for instant viewing at Netflix.
Glenn Greenwald writes about the latest ruckus kicked up by the Israel lobby and the efforts of former AIPAC spokesmen Josh Block, to silence those who dare criticize Israel or even question the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. (And note, as I pointed out earlier, Block — like many others — treats “nuclear program” and “nuclear weapons program” as synonyms.
Look at what Josh Block told Politico about what makes someone an anti-Semite:
As a progressive Democrat, I am convinced that on issues as important as the US-Israel alliance and the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, there is no room for uncivil discourse or name calling, like ‘Israel Firster or ‘Likudnik’, and policy or political rhetoric that is hostile to Israel, or suggests that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, has no place in the mainstream Democratic party discourse. I also believe that when it occurs, progressive institutions, have a responsibility not to tolerate such speech or arguments.
So according to Block, you are not allowed (unless you want to be found guilty of anti-Semitism) to use “policy rhetoric that is hostile to Israel” or — more amazingly — even to “suggest that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.” Those ideas are strictly off limits, declares the former AIPAC spokesman. Apparently, then, America’s National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 and 2010 are both anti-Semitic, since they both concluded that Iran ceased work on developing a nuclear weapon back in 2003 and that there is no conclusive evidence demonstrating it resumed; to cite those reports and to embrace their conclusions makes you an anti-Semite, since you’re not allowed to “suggest that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.” Israel’s government is also evidently suffused with anti-Semites, given that Haaretz reported this week that “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.” Make certain, though, not to mention that because, according to Block, that expression of anti-semitism “has no place in the mainstream Democratic party discourse.” To avoid being an anti-Semite, you must quietly and gratefully accept the most extreme claims about the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program: it is not permissible to debate it.
Then there’s Jason Issacson of the American Jewish Congress, who told The Jerusalem Post that “references to Israeli ‘apartheid’ . . . are so false and hateful they reveal an ugly bias no serious policy center can countenance.” Make sure to write that down: unless you want to stand revealed as an anti-Semite, you’re not allowed to point out the stark and tragic similarities between South African bantustans and the way in which residents of the West Bank are walled off into tiny enclaves and Gazans are forcibly confined to ghettos. Those guilty of anti-Semitism on this ground not only include the President of Turkey, the Foreign Minister of Finland, and a former American President – all of whom have made that comparison – but also the publisher of Haaretz, who last year repeatedly compared Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to South African apartheid; the Israeli writer Yitzhak Loar, who has argued that the situation in the occupied territories is actually worse than South African apartheid in material ways; and also, once again, Israel’s own Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister), who last year warned that the only alternative to peace is apartheid: “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
But the most revealing decree comes from Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League, which said this when arguing that these anti-Semitism smears against CAP and MM are warranted:
Most of their blogs come from a perspective of blaming Israel for the lack of progress in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.
So Israel has been brutally occupying Palestinian land for 45 years, and continues to aggressively expand settlements that all but foreclose any possibility of a two-state resolution. But as an American taxpayer — contributing to the billions of dollars of annual aid sent to Israel and affected in all sorts of ways by this conflict — you are not allowed to opine that Israel is primarily at fault for the lack of a peace agreement. If you do so opine, you’re not merely wrong, but you’ve exposed yourself as an anti-Semite. That opinion regarding the assignment of fault in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is strictly off limits.
Ali Gharib reports: A consensus seems to be developing on Iran’s nuclear program among those hired by major news organizations to keep an eye on their own reporting. Much of the discussion so far has focused on the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear program, the most comprehensive publicly-available evidence on the issue. In the document, the IAEA expressed “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” As a White House official said at the time, the IAEA report neither indicated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program nor that Tehran has made a decision to build a bomb.
A spate of ombudsmen and public editors of major news organizations have come out and bolstered the more accurate reading of the IAEA report — one that raises worries but does not conclude that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. First Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton said so, urging extra caution because overstating evidence about the program can “play into the hands of those who are seeking further confrontation with Iran.” He was followed by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, who wrote that hewing closely to available facts matters “because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli.” Now, they’re both being joined by Edward Schumacher-Matos, National Public Radio’s ombudsman, and Public Broadcasting System (PBS) ombudsman Michael Getler.
The Organization of News Ombudsman declares in its mission statement: “The ombudsman refrains from engaging in any activity that could create a conflict of interest.” It also says: “The ombudsman is an independent officer acting in the best interests of news consumers.”
If that was really true then news ombudsmen would neither be appointed by nor paid by the news organizations whose output they monitor. In reality, their function is more a kind of refined public relations — they simply provide newspaper editors, journalists, and the companies inside which they operate, an additional layer of protection.
If NPR and others now studiously try to avoid blurring the distinction between Iran’s nuclear program and a nuclear weapons program whose existence has yet to be established, the most likely effect of doing so will be to provide these news organizations with an extra piece of cover in the event that the media once again comes under scrutiny for the role it might have played in starting a war.
The semantic distinction between “nuclear program” and “nuclear weapons program” is significant, but since these terms have already frequently been used as interchangeable and since in wording they are so similar, it is debatable how much will be gained at this point if some journalists diligently avoid substituting one for the other. Too many news consumers will fail to notice the difference and when hearing “nuclear program” will still think “nuclear weapons program” — the former sounds too much like an abbreviation of the latter.
A more neutral and less ambiguous alternative to “nuclear program” would be “nuclear activities.”
In a magazine feature for the New York Times, NPR’s Adam Davidson explains that credit cards are among the many amazing ways through which in America, thanks to Wall Street, the rich share their wealth with the poor!
Elsewhere, the Times offers a more “nuanced” picture of the one percent — heaven forbid that the wealthy might fall victim of crude stereotypes unfairly foisted upon them during cruel class warfare.
To my mind, both these institutions — NPR and the NYT — represent the most disgusting feature of America’s liberal elite: that it can profess an interest in the welfare of every American and at the same time defend the status quo.
Doug Henwood writes: For a while, I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its “liberal” reputation makes palatable a deeply orthodox message for a demographic that could be open to a more critical message.
The full critique will take some time. But a nice warm-up opportunity has just presented itself: a truly wretched piece of apologetic hackery by Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money economics reporting team, that appears in today’s New York Times magazine.
In the print edition, the thing is called “A World Without Wall Street.” For some reason, the paper’s web editors decided to call it “What Does Wall Street Do For You?” Maybe they thought that the question would draw in readers, who might find the declarative title of the print edition an appealing little fantasy and just turn the page.
Davidson concedes, with a mocking tone (that’s part of his straining at cool), that Americans have long hated Wall Street. But he rejects the usual complaints—that financiers are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites who periodically drive the real economy into a ditch—with the disclosure that finance is “a fundamentally beneficial business.” It brings together borrowers and lenders, a task that it does “extremely well”—“most of the time.”
Now I will be the first to argue that critiques of finance that let the “real” sector off the hook are incomplete, and even dangerous. (For more: “How to misunderstand money.”) The world of production can be a very nasty place. Corporations make money by paying workers less than the value of what they produce. They’re constantly maneuvering to cut costs, which means cutting pay, speeding up the line, dumping toxic waste in rivers, and a host of other familiar misdeeds. Like financiers, they’re in business to make money, and they’ll do nothing that doesn’t make money unless they’re forced to. Yes, they often provide useful products in the course of their pursuit of money. But it’s wrong to get carried away in painting them as the Good Guys, by contrast with the moneychanging Bad Guys.
But Davidson’s defense brief is incredibly wrong. I’d say “dishonest,” but I suspect he really doesn’t know better. [Continue reading…]
War in Context will be going dark on January 18 (8AM till 8PM US Eastern Standard Time) to protest the SOPA and PIPA, two bills promoted by the American entertainment and publishing industries currently making their way through Congress.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides more information on how PIPA and SOPA violate White House principles supporting free speech and innovation:
Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
Yet, the fight is still far from over. Even though the New York Times reported that the White House statement “all but kill[s] current versions of the legislation,” the Senate is still poised to bring PIPA to the floor next week, and we can expect SOPA proponents in the House to try to revive the legislation—unless they get the message that these initiatives must stop, now. So let’s take a look at the dangerous provisions in the blacklist bills that would violate the White House’s own principles by damaging free speech, Internet security, and online innovation:
The Anti-Circumvention Provision
In addition to going after websites allegedly directly involved in copyright infringement, a proposal in SOPA will allow the government to target sites that simply provide information that could help users get around the bills’ censorship mechanisms. Such a provision would not only amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint against protected speech, but would severely damage online innovation. And contrary to claims by SOPA’s supporters, this provision—at least what’s been proposed so far—applies to all websites, even those in the U.S.
As First Amendment expert Marvin Ammori points out, “The language is pretty vague, but it appears all these companies must monitor their sites for anti-circumvention so they are not subject to court actions ‘enjoining’ them from continuing to provide ‘such product or service.’” That means social media sites like Facebook or YouTube—bascailly any site with user generated content—would have to police their own sites, forcing huge liability costs onto countless Internet companies. This is exactly why venture capitalists have said en masse they won’t invest in online startups if PIPA and SOPA pass. Websites would be forced to block anything from a user post about browser add-ons like DeSopa, to a simple list of IP addresses of already-blocked sites.
Perhaps worse, EFF has detailed how this provision would also decimate the open source software community. Anyone who writes or distributes Virtual Private Network, proxy, privacy or anonymization software would be negatively affected. This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around authoritarian regimes’ online censorship mechanisms. Ironically, SOPA would not only institute the same practices as these regimes, but would essentially outlaw the tools used by activists to circumvent censorship in countries like Iran and China as well.
The “Vigilante” Provision
Another dangerous provision in PIPA and SOPA that hasn’t received a lot of attention is the “vigilante” provision, which would grant broad immunity to all service providers if they overblock innocent users or block sites voluntarily with no judicial oversight at all. The standard for immunity is incredibly low and the potential for abuse is off the charts. Intermediaries only need to act “in good faith” and base their decision “on credible evidence” to receive immunity.
As we noted months ago, this provision would allow the MPAA and RIAA to create literal blacklists of sites they want censored. Intermediaries will find themselves under pressure to act to avoid court orders, creating a vehicle for corporations to censor sites—even those in the U.S.—without any legal oversight. And as Public Knowledge has pointed out, not only can this provision be used for bogus copyright claims that are protected by fair use, but large corporations can take advantage of it to stamp out emerging competitors and skirt anti-trust laws:
For instance, an Internet service provider could block DNS requests for a website offering online video that competed with its cable television offerings, based upon “credible evidence” that the site was, in its own estimation, promoting its use for infringement….While the amendment requires that the action be taken in good faith, the blocked site now bears the burden of proving either its innocence or the bad faith of its accuser in order to be unblocked.
Corporate Right of Action
PIPA and SOPA also still allow copyright holders to get an unopposed court order to cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers. As we have continually highlighted, copyright holders already can remove infringing material from the web under the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that power abused time and again. Yet the proponents of PIPA and SOPA want to give rightsholders even more power, allowing them to essentially shut down full sites instead of removing the specific infringing content.
While this provision only affects foreign sites, it still affects Americans’ free speech rights. As Marvin Ammori explained, “The seminal case of Lamont v. Postmaster makes it clear that Americans have the First Amendment right to read and listen to foreign speech, even if the foreigners lack a First Amendment speech right.” If history is any guide—and we’re afraid it is—we will see specious claims to wholesale take downs of legitimate and protected speech.
Expanded Attorney General Powers
PIPA and SOPA would also give the Attorney General new authority to block domain name services, a provision that has been universally criticized by both Internet security experts and First Amendment scholars. Even the blacklist bills’ authors are now publicly second-guessing that scary provision. But even without it, this section would still force many intermediaries to become the Internet police by putting the responsibility of censorship enforcement on those intermediaries, who are usually innocent third parties.
The Attorney General would also be empowered to de-list websites from search engines, which, as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt noted, would still “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself.” The same applies to payment processors and advertisers.
These are just some of the egregious provisions in PIPA and SOPA that would drastically change the way we use the Internet (for the worse), and punish millions of innocent users who have never even thought about copyright infringement. As Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian explained, PIPA and SOPA are “the equivalent of being angry and trying to take action against Ford just because a Mustang was used in a bank robbery.” These bills must be stopped if we want to protect free speech and innovation on the web.
Please take action now and tell your Congressional representatives you oppose the blacklist bills.
In a column that appeared in the Jerusalem Post a few days ago, Avi Perry made this prediction about “The looming war with Iran”:
Iran, just like Nazi Germany in the 1940s, will take the initiative and “help” the US president and the American public make up their mind by making the first move, by attacking a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
The Iranian attack on an American military vessel will serve as a justification and a pretext for a retaliatory move by the US military against the Iranian regime. The target would not be Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US would retaliate by attacking Iran’s navy, their military installations, missile silos, airfields. The US would target Iran’s ability to retaliate, to close down the Strait of Hormuz. The US would then follow by targeting the regime itself.
Elimination of Iran’s nuclear facilities? Yes. This part would turn out to be the final act, the grand finale. It might have been the major target, had the US initiated the attack. However, under this “Pearl Harbor” scenario, in which Iran had launched a “surprise” attack on the US navy, the US would have the perfect rationalization to finish them off, to put an end to this ugly game.
Unlike the latest attempt at an Iranian revolution, this time the US would not shy away, rather, it would go public, openly calling for the Iranian people to join in with the US in working to overthrow the corrupt Islamic fundamentalist regime. The Iranian people would respond in numbers.
Spring would reemerge, and the Iranian people would join the rest of the Middle East – this time with the direct support of the US.
The greatest irony behind this most significant episode in 2012 is that the Iranian regime would affect their own demise. Attacking the US navy in the open seas is equivalent to carrying out a suicide bombing.
Is there any reason to take Perry’s prediction seriously?
He is described by the Jerusalem Post as having “served as an intelligence expert for the Israeli government.” Keep in mind though that in Israel, intelligence experts come a dime a dozen.
In Perry’s case his intelligence expertise does not seem to extend further than the experience he gained as a youngster serving in the IDF during the 1967 Six-Day War. Perhaps it’s of just as much relevance that he also served as an accordionist and comedian in an army troupe that entertained the soldiers. And probably even more telling is the fact that he is now a novelist who enjoys fiction because it allows him to “play god.”
So why would I bother quoting from Perry’s column?
Firstly, because some readers who have looked no further than the biographical information the Jerusalem Post provided, believe that his prediction provides confirmation that some kind of Gulf of Tonkin Incident is about to trigger a war with Iran.
But whether Perry has any credibility is besides the point — the risk’s of such an event are very real. Unlike Vietnam, where Washington was looking for a pretext to escalate the war, this time it looks much more likely that Israel will try and drag the U.S. into a war — a war which Israel is incapable of fighting on its own.
Perry implausibly conjures up a Pearl Harbor-like trigger for war. More likely might be a USS Cole-type attack. Were such an attack to take place, given Israel’s willingness to recruit members of the terrorist group Jundallah to conduct attacks in Tehran, might it not also be willing to instigate a war-triggering incident in the Strait of Hormuz?
Secondly, the fact that a column such as this would garner any attention is in some measure a reflection of a wider problem: that few if any of the statements currently coming out of Washington can be taken at face value.
Following the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: “We were not involved in any way — in any way — with regards to the assassination that took place there…. that’s not what the United States does.”
In the Foreign Policy report, “False Flag,” an American intelligence officer is quoted saying: “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.” And a recently retired intelligence officer says: “And we don’t do political assassinations.”
The United States does not conduct assassinations.
Really?
Why exactly should the Iranian government take Clinton and Panetta at their word when it is common knowledge that President Obama has authorized multiple assassinations?
Does anyone believe that the Navy SEALs operation that resulted in Osama bin Laden being shot in the head and his body dumped in the ocean, might instead have resulted in him being arrested and put on trial? “This was a kill operation,” a U.S. national security official told Reuters.
And in Yemen in September the killing of the U.S. citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, both of whom operated as al Qaeda propagandists — was this not the definition of a political assassination?
The official line is that Awlaki had an operational role in planning terrorist attacks and that he could therefore be killed as an “enemy combatant” on the “battlefield,” but these are merely terms of political and legal convenience. It remains a matter of debate whether Awlaki did much more than preach — as unpalatable to American ears as much of his preaching might have been. As for Khan, when he was investigated by the FBI they couldn’t gather sufficient evidence to indict him. Neither was he on the hit list of individuals that Obama claims a right to execute.
It isn’t — as leading members of the current administration now claim — that the United States doesn’t do assassinations, but rather that it generally follows guidelines dictating who can or cannot be assassinated. Iranian nuclear scientists are currently not deemed suitable targets — at least that’s the administration’s stated position, but there are others with a more expansive view.
Even before the terrorist attack that resulted in the latest death of an Iranian nuclear scientist, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum declared in November that he favored “sending out a very clear message to nuclear scientists who work on that program that they are enemy combatants similar to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
In the latest development, Iran says that it sent Washington evidence of the CIA’s role in this week’s assassination. Even so, given the sanctions strategy Obama is pursuing, the method of the attack, and the indications that Israel wants to provoke Iran in order to create a pretext for war, there seems to be much more reason to assume that Mossad, rather than the CIA, was behind Roshan’s killing.
But rather than implausibly assert that the U.S. is not in the assassination business, perhaps all that Obama can honestly say is that it is not currently the policy of his administration to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists.
At the same time, anyone who wants to try and probe that policy a bit more deeply should request some amplification on a phrase that officials never hesitate to repeat: “all options are open.”
Since it’s generally understood the “all options” includes the option to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, why exactly would we infer that it precludes assassinating nuclear scientists? Are we to understand that the bombing would only take place outside office hours?
A U.S. president, however inspiring his rhetoric might sometimes be, should be in no doubt that at the most critical moment the power of his word hinges on its truthfulness. The president who promised hope, dialogue, transparency and an end to the mindset that took us to war, has a serious credibility problem. Since he’s willing to joke about his ability to assassinate people, why should his administration’s denials now be taken seriously?
Mark Perry’s explosive report on Israel intelligence agents posing as CIA agents, recruiting terrorists to strike Iran, is headline news — at least in Israel.
In the United States the mainstream media has so far remained mute. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, though yet again it reflects the sickeningly servile relationship between the U.S. establishment and Israel’s supporters.
Imagine if the story in Foreign Policy had been that the CIA was recruiting terrorists. There would have been wall-to-wall coverage in print and on the cable networks. But since this is a story about the duplicity of Mossad there remains a hushed silence among those who dread the thought of upsetting the Israel lobby.
“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” a U.S. intelligence officer told Perry, but maybe it really isn’t so amazing. After all, Israel’s political leaders, knowing that they essentially own the U.S. Congress and will never be severely challenged in the U.S. media, regard Washington as a malleable tool. Why would Mossad agents view their American counterparts any differently?
That the CIA does not regard Mossad as a stalwart friend, was made perfectly clear in a report by Jeff Stein a year and a half ago.
The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies.
The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends?
“Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day.
Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.
Israel’s undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets.
At Gawker, John Cook notes:
Spies are horrible and lie all the time and we do the same thing to other countries and down is up and up is down. But just remember next time you hear someone talking about our special relationship with Israel: They are taking some of the $3 billion a year we give them in military aid and using it to fund a program where they pay terrorists to kill Iranians and blame it on us.
And blame it on us so that when Israel’s covert war turns into full-scale war it will become our war.
Paul Pillar writes: The killing of an individual foreigner overseas, if carried out for a political or policy purpose by either a nonstate actor or clandestine agents of a state, is an act of international terrorism. At least that is how U.S. law defines it, for purposes such as the State Department’s annual reports on terrorism. This form of terrorism is part of what put Iran on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Iranian regime perpetrated numerous assassinations of exiled Iranian political dissidents, in Europe as well as in other countries of southwest Asia. The Iranians effectively ended this assassination campaign about a decade and a half ago, largely to improve relations with the European countries on whose soil many of the assassinations occurred and perhaps also because by then Iran had bumped off nearly all of the people on its hit list. We should assume, however, that Iran retains the capability to assassinate far-flung targets again, and that it would consider doing so if searching for ways to strike back at adversaries that are striking it.
Iran itself has been a victim of this form of terrorist violence. This has included some instances, such as the killing of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan, in which Iranian interests have paralleled those of the United States. It has included during the past two years the killing in Iran of several nuclear scientists, the most recent of whom died this week from an explosive placed on his vehicle. Actions are more important than nomenclature, so if you prefer not to apply the T-word to these killings then just imagine what the reaction would be if something similar were occurring in the United States. Imagine the response if even just one scientist (let alone four or five) who was employed, say, at one of the U.S. national laboratories had been been similarly assassinated and a foreign hand was suspected. There would be screams of “act of war” and the U.S. president would be hard-pressed to hold back impulses to strike back forcefully. Now put yourselves in the Iranians’ place. Not only do they face the serial assassination of their scientists, but they face it amid an environment filled with numerous other indications of foreign hostility, including the economic warfare, the saber rattling and the contest among American politicians to see who can shoot the most rhetorical venom at Iran. From this perspective, aptly described by Vali Nasr, it should hardly be surprising if Iran strikes back while it sees more reason than ever before to develop a nuclear weapon in the hope of deterring U.S.-led aggressiveness.
A former senior Israeli security official tells the New York Times that uncertainty about who was responsible for the latest assassination is useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he says. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.”
How true that might be really depends on the form of retaliation. As Nasr and Pillar note, the rationale for Iran to want nuclear weapons in order to deter foreign aggression, has never been more compelling. So why should Tehran slow itself down in pursuit of that goal by allowing itself to rise to an Israeli bait?
Indeed, the longer Iran exercises restraint and the more reckless Israeli antagonism becomes, the more reason there is to ask: whose nuclear weapons in the Middle East should we fear the most?
Israel maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, which is to say that although it has a nuclear arsenal estimated to include as many as 400 weapons, it refuses to accept the international treaty obligations imposed on most other nuclear powers. Moreover, according to some observers it has its own version of “mutually assured destruction”. Unlike the original MAD doctrine which constrained the Soviet Union and the United States, Israel has the “Samson Option,” which is to say Israel won’t allow itself to go down without destroying human civilization in the process.
This is how Professor David Perlmutter articulated this apocalyptic vision ten years ago:
Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow — it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Sampson in Gaza? With an H-bomb? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens?
For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away — unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans — have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?
That might be the ultimate justice if everyone on the planet posed a threat to Israel, but Israel’s enemies are in truth far less numerous. So really, the image being evoked here is not one of justice but of the ultimate form of vengeance.
Individuals and nations can be at their most dangerous when cornered. As Israel continues its slide away from democratic principles and becomes increasingly strident in asserting itself as a Jewish theocratic state, the world has more reason to fear a nuclear threat in the Middle East that does not lurk somewhere over the horizon but is already a clear and present danger.
Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, is the foremost scholar on the subject of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, and as he notes, Israel’s nuclear arsenal is only of value if Israel can remain the sole nuclear power in the Middle East.
On the one hand, the bomb’s purpose was clear: Ben-Gurion, who remained so helpless throughout the Holocaust period, wanted an ‘insurance policy’ to protect against a recurrence of such a tragedy. If you have the capability of threatening Hiroshima, you stave off Auschwitz. On the other hand, the other side could try to attain the same status. And if it were to succeed, then, suddenly, all of the calculations would be altered, moving from one extreme to the other. This was not like the Americans and the Russians, who found themselves more or less in a situation of parity. When both sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute have the bomb, Israel is trapped in an awful situation, worse than at the starting point. Thus, Israel’s real interest is for nobody to have the bomb.
Yet rather than pursue that goal of regional disarmament and the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East, those who are gunning for a war against Iran only have one ambition: that Israel must retain its regional military dominance.
Here is Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson‘s campaign to support Occupy Wall Street! Well, not really. Ostensibly it’s a 30-minute attack ad on Mitt Romney. Beyond needing to know that this as a production by Gingrich’s super PAC, “Winning Our Future,” this video speaks for itself.
More than anything, this is a demonstration of the degree to which the OWS anti-corporate narrative is now at the core of American political discourse.
Do any of the GOP candidates truly believe they can credibly co-opt this message? This seems like a spectacular collision between rampant hubris and profound contempt for the average American.
In the war of nerves between Washington and Tehran, the U.S. enjoyed a couple of moves this week that reinforced America’s preferred image as homeland of the good guys. The U.S. Navy rescued Iranian fisherman not once but twice, while Iran sentenced an American to death.
Is it likely that anyone in Washington would want to spoil this good guys/bad guys story by exploding a bomb in its midst?
An Associated Press report suggests that when it comes to Iran the U.S. now prefers to outsource the dirty work to “proxies like Israel.”
Since when did Israel serve as a proxy for the United States?
When the Obama administration meekly requested the Israelis to promise that they would not unilaterally launch an attack on Iran, the Israelis declined. That’s not how a proxy operates.
Indeed, since the threat that Iran supposedly poses is much more to Israel than the United States, it’s pretty clear that it is the U.S. that serves as a proxy for Israel — not the other way around.
With that in mind, this passage from the AP report is worth noting:
Current and former U.S. officials say Washington prefers proxies like Israel to carry out operations inside Iran, and that up until two years ago, the U.S. and Israel coordinated actions against Iran closely. But the officials say the White House halted such cooperation after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took power.
The officials, past and present, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic negotiations.
In the event that a military intervention might be needed to halt Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability, they said counterterrorist officials had considered allowing Israel to use the U.S.-Afghan Shindand Airbase, in western Afghanistan, to launch an air strike against Iranian weapons facilities.
The White House won’t cooperate with Netanyahu — now there’s a story ready-made for GOP presidential candidates to jump all over.
Officials considered (note the past tense) allowing Israeli jets to operate out of Afghanistan — however implausible that might be, it’s certainly an idea the Israelis would welcome getting spread around.
Again, enter Republican candidates solemnly pledging that under their administration, Israel will have the right to use U.S. military bases in Afghanistan (or probably anywhere else on the planet for that matter).
There’s a theme here and it’s about who controls the narrative.
Perhaps the clearest indication of who is not in control of the narrative came out of the State Department this morning.
Spokesperson Victoria Nuland responded to questions:
QUESTION: You probably have seen the news that an Iranian nuclear scientist was killed. I wonder what your reaction is. Would you condemn this killing?
MS. NULAND: We’ve seen the reports of the death of the Iranian scientist as a result of an apparent bombing. We condemn any assassination or attack on an innocent person, and we express our sympathies to the family.
QUESTION: The Iranians have accused Israel and the United States of carrying out this killing. Any truth to that?
MS. NULAND: I don’t have any information to share one way or the other on that.
QUESTION: You don’t want to deny killing him?
MS. NULAND: Obviously, we – as I said, we condemn the loss of innocent life.
QUESTION: That’s not a denial as such.
MS. NULAND: I’m not prepared to speak one way or the other. I, frankly —
QUESTION: You didn’t want to deny it.
QUESTION: Would the scientist come under innocent life?
MS. NULAND: Say again?
QUESTION: Would the scientist come under your definition of innocent life?
MS. NULAND: Again, I don’t think I have anything further to say on this, that we condemn violence of any kind.
QUESTION: Don’t you think he’d be a logical target, given the pressure from Israel and the U.S. against —
MS. NULAND: I’m not going to speak to who may or may not have done this, one way or the other.
QUESTION: Why are you not willing to rule out that the United – I mean, the United States did not – they’ve alleged this. Why are you unwilling to say, “Of course we didn’t do this. We don’t —
MS. NULAND: Well, first of all, I don’t think this Department has any information further to what I’ve already said, which we condemn the loss of innocent life.
At this point a footnote has been added to the transcript: “The United States strongly condemns this act of violence and categorically denies any involvement in the killing.” No attribution is given for this sentence, though it echoes Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton who told reporters today: “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”
Assuming that Clinton’s denial was not a bald-faced lie, it seems reasonable to infer that as is widely believed, this assassination (and previous ones) have been conducted under Israeli direction. Nuland’s unwillingness to say anything probably reflects a number of things:
Israel on the other hand, enjoys the fact that even while its international image whithers, it has no shortage of proxies available in the U.S. to help push its own narrative on Iran — through the press and through the presidential election.
Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan
Some guy says this was a joint operation carried out by Mossad and the Iranian terrorist group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) — though when I say “some guy,” if that’s taken to imply that the source of this information is a man, I am perhaps being too specific.
Richard Silverstein heard about the Mossad-MEK connection from his “own confidential Israeli source.” This attribution of responsibility for the attack may indeed be accurate, but to describe a source no more specifically than to say that this source is an “Israeli” tells us next to nothing. It does however allow newspaper journalists to repeat this “information” as though it was news. Hence the Fars News Agency itself repeats Silverstein’s claim and tries to boost his credibility by describing him as “a senior Jewish American journalist.” Israel’s Ynet plays the same game, though with the embellishment that Silverstein’s source has been elevated to a “senior Israeli source.”
Having said all that, it seems reasonable to assume that this attack — an attack that were it to take place anywhere outside Iran would widely be described as a terrorist attack — was conducted with the direct or indirect involvement of the Israeli and/or United States governments.
One of the strange ethical anomalies of the era in which we live is that an American president willingly accepts responsibility for authorizing assassinations conducted by special forces or drone-launched Hellfire missiles, even though in both types of operation the target may be mistaken and innocent bystanders frequently get killed, yet no government official is willing to claim responsibility for a cold-blooded murder. For the killing to be legitimized it has to given the legal pretext that it is being conducted on a “battlefield” during a “war.”
For as long as the streets of Tehran are not regarded as a battlefield and neither the United States nor Israel is officially at war with Iran, no one will acknowledge that a campaign of state terrorism is indeed being waged, since to do so would be offer an open invitation for Iran to respond in kind.
Bloomberg reports:
Today’s attack “comes in the middle of heightened tensions and it helps Iran to play on a sense of threat that it is under a lot of pressure,” Gala Riani, a Middle East analyst at London-based forecaster IHS Global Insight, said by telephone. “It can also be beneficial to more extremist elements in the government who are supporting further military drills in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Iran conducted naval exercises near the Strait of Hormuz for 10 days that ended early this month.
Previous attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists include the assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, killed by a bomb outside his Tehran home in January 2010, and an explosion in November of that year that took the life of Majid Shahriari and wounded Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
Oil pared losses of as much as 0.6 percent after the report on Roshan’s death. Crude for February delivery was at $102.25 a barrel, up 1 cent, in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 4:06 p.m. Singapore time.
“While it is difficult to gauge the impact of the scientists’ deaths on the country’s nuclear development, Iranian officials have already acknowledged they have a human-resources problem in the program largely because of the sharp political differences within the country,” Meir Javedanfar, lecturer on Iranian politics at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, said in a telephone interview.
The explosion follows an Iranian court’s Jan. 9 decision to sentence an American of Iranian descent, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, to death for spying. U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said allegations that Hekmati worked for the CIA were “simply untrue.”
