What’s Behind Lower Gas-Prices and the Bombings of Syria and of Southeastern Ukraine

Source: beforeitsnews

Why is the Ukrainian Government, which the U.S. supports, bombing the pro-Russian residents who live in Ukraine’s own southeast?

Why is the American Government, which aims to oust Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, bombing his main enemy, ISIS?

This report will document that both bombings are different parts of the same Obama-initiated business-operation, in which the American aristocracy, Saudi aristocracy, and Qatari aristocracy, work together, to grab dominance over supplying energy to the world’s biggest energy-market, Europe, away from Russia, which currently is by far Europe’s largest energy-supplier.

Here are the actual percentage-figures on that: Russia supplies 38% of it, #2 Norway (the only European nation among the top 15) supplies 18%, and all other countries collectively supply a grand total of 44%.That’s it; that’s all — in the world’s largest energy-market, Russia is the lone giant. But U.S. President Obama’s team are working hard to change that, to do a huge favor for the royals of Saudi Arabia and of Qatar, and yank that business for them. (Unfortunately, the residents in southeastern Ukraine are being bombed and driven out to become refugees in Russia, as an essential part of this operation to choke off Russia’s gas-supply into Europe and transfer that business mainly to those royals. This objective against Russia and for those royals is considered to be far more important than its many thousands of victims are, and no one in the Obama Administration has provided any indication — at least publicly — that tears have been shed there for the residents in southeast Ukraine who have been mass-murdered and for the roughly million of them who have fled to refuge and safety in Russia to escape being bombed by the America’s new client-state, the Ukrainian Government.)

Obama has initiated, and is leading, this international aristocratic team, consisting of the U.S. aristocracy and mainly two Sunni Moslem aristocracies — the Saudi and the Qatari royal families — to choke off Russia’s economic lifeblood from those European energy sales, and to transfer lots of this business, via new oil and gas pipeline contracts and new international trade-deals, over to the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those royals, in turn, are assisting Obama in the overthrow of the key Russia-allied leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, who has performed an indispensable role for Russia in blocking any such massive expansion of Saudi and Qatari energy-traffic into Europe, and who has thus been a vital protector of Russia’s dominance in the European energy-market.

America’s aristocracy would be benefited in many ways from this changeover to Europe’s increasing dependence upon those Sunni Moslem nations, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have long been allied with U.S. oil companies, and away from the Shiite Moslem nation of Iran, and from Iran’s key backer, Russia.

The most important way that America’s aristocrats would benefit from the deal would be the continuance, for the indefinite future, of the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency, in which energy and energy-futures are traded. The Sunni nations are committed to continued dominance of the dollar, and Wall Street depends on that continuance. It’s also one of the reasons the U.S. Treasury’s sales of U.S. Federal debt around the world have been as successful as they have been. This also provides essential support to the U.S. Federal Reserve, and especially to the six Wall Street banks that do virtually all of the derivatives trading.

Furthermore, Obama’s effort to force the European Union to weaken their anti-global-warming standards so as to allow European imports of oil from the exceptionally carbon-gas-generating Athabasca Canada tar sands — which are approximately 40% owned by America’s Koch brothers, the rest owned by other U.S. and allied oil companies — would likewise reduce Europe’s current dependency upon Russian energy sources, at the same time as it would directly benefit U.S. energy-producers.Obama has been working hard for those oil companies to become enabled to sell such oil into Europe, turning the screws on Europe to weaken those standards.

And, finally, the extension of U.S. fracking technology into Ukraine, and perhaps ultimately even into some EU nations, where it has been strongly resisted by the residents, might likewise boost American oil firms and reduce the enormous flow of European cash into Russian Government coffers to pay for Russian gas (which doesn’t even require fracking).

In other words, the wars in both Syria and Ukraine are being fought basically in order to grab the European energy market, away from Russia, somewhat in the same way (though far more violently) as Iran’s share of that market was previously grabbed away by means of the U.S.-led sanctions against Iran. The current bombing campaigns in both Syria and Ukraine are directed specifically against Iran’s chief ally, Russia.

Cleansing The Stock’ And Other Ways Governments Talk About Human Beings

Source: informationclearinghouse

October 23, 2014 "ICH" - "The Guardian" -   To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind. Then you can persuade yourself that what you are doing is moral and necessary. Today this isn’t difficult. Those who act without compassion can draw upon a system of thought and language whose purpose is to shield them – and blind us – to the consequences.

The contention by Lord Freud, a minister in the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, that disabled people are “not worth the full wage” isn’t the worst thing he’s alleged to have said. I say “alleged” because what my ears tell me is contested by Hansard, the official parliamentary record. During a debate in the House of Lords, he appeared to describe the changing number of disabled people likely to receive the employment and support allowance as a “bulge of, effectively, stock”. After a furious response by the people he was talking about, this was transcribed by Hansard as “stopped”, rendering the sentence meaningless. I’ve listened to the word several times on the parliamentary video. Like others, I struggle to hear it as anything but “stock”.

If we’re right, he is not the only person at his department who uses this term. Its website describes disabled people entering the government’s work programme for between three and six months as “3/6Mth stock”. Perhaps this makes sense when you remember that they are a source of profit for the companies running the programme. The department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”. To cleanse the stock: remember that.

Human beings – by which I mean those anthropoid creatures who do not necessarily receive social security – often live in families. But benefit claimants live in “benefit units”, defined by the government as “an adult plus their spouse (if applicable) plus any dependent children living in the household”. On the bright side, if you die while on a government work programme, you’ll be officially declared a “completer”. Which must be a relief.

A dehumanising system requires a dehumanising language. So familiar and pervasive has this language become that it has soaked almost unnoticed into our lives. Those who do have jobs are also described by the function they deliver to capital. These days they are widely known as “human resources”.

The living world is discussed in similar terms. Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as “green infrastructure”. Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”. Fish populations are invariably described as “stocks”, as if they exist only as movable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security. The linguistic downgrading of human life and the natural world fuses in a word a Norwegian health trust used to characterise the patients on its waiting list: biomass.

Those who kill for a living employ similar terms. Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”. It’s not original. Seeking to justify Barack Obama’s drone war in Pakistan (which has so far killed 2,300 people, only 4% of whom have since been named as members of al-Qaida), Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The director of the CIA, John Brennan, claimed that with “surgical precision” his drones “eliminate the cancerous tumour called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it”. Those who operate the drones describe their victims as bug splats.

During its attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja in November 2004, the US army used white phosphorus to kill or maim people taking shelter in houses or trenches. White phosphorus is fat-soluble. Even small crumbs of it bore through living tissue on contact. It destroys mucous membranes, blinding people and ripping up their lungs. Its use as a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, as the US army knows:one of its battle books observes that “it is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets” (personnel targets, by the way, are human beings). But never mind all that. The army has developed a technique it calls Shake ‘n Bake: flush people out with phosphorus, then kill them with high explosives. Shake ‘n Bake is a product made by Kraft Foods for coating meat with breadcrumbs before cooking it.

Terms such as these are designed to replace mental images of death and mutilation with images of something else. Others, such as “collateral damage” (dead or wounded civilians), “kinetic activity” (shooting and bombing), “compounds” (homes) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping and torture by states), are intended to prevent the formation of any mental pictures at all. If you can’t see what is being discussed, you will struggle to grasp the implications. The clearest example is “neutralising”, which neutralises the act of killing it describes.

I doubt many people could kill and wound if their language accurately represented what they were doing. It is notable that those who are most enthusiastic about waging war are the least able to describe what they are talking about without resorting to metaphor and euphemism. Few people have nightmares about squashing insects or mowing the lawn.

The media, instead of challenging public figures to say kill when they mean kill, and people when they mean people, repeats these evasions. Uncontested, their sanitised, trivialised, belittling terms seep into our own mouths, until we also talk about “operatives” or “human capital” or “illegal aliens” without stopping to consider how those words resonate and what they permit us not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dehumanising metaphors in this article that I have failed to spot.

If we wish to reclaim public life from the small number of people who have captured it, we must also reclaim the language in which it is expressed. To know what we are talking about: this, in more than one sense, is the task of those who want a better world.

The Forgotten Coup How America and Britain Crushed the Government of Their 'Ally', Australia

Source: informationclearinghouse

October 23, 2014 "ICH" - Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had "reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution". Whitlam ended his nation's colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported "zones of peace" and opposed nuclear weapons testing.

Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the farm". In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history, Britain's colonisation of Australia, and the question of who owned the island-continent's vast natural wealth.

Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this "breaking free" in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the Boxer rebellion was crushed in China. In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided "black teams" to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington's informants during the Whitlam years.

Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be "vetted or harassed" by the Australian security organisation, ASIO - then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as "corrupt and barbaric", a CIA station officer in Saigon said: "We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."

Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. "Try to screw us or bounce us," the prime minister warned the US ambassador, "[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention".

Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, "This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House... a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion."

Pine Gap's top-secret messages were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the de-coders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the "deception and betrayal of an ally". Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as "our man Kerr".

Kerr was not only the Queen's man, he had long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, 'The Crimes of Patriots', as, "an elite, invitation-only group... exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA". The CIA "paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money".

When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America's "deep state". Known as the "coupmaster", he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia - which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors - described by an alarmed member of the audience as "an incitement to the country's business leaders to rise against the government".

The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain's MI6 was operating against his government. "The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office," he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, "We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans." In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the "Whitlam problem" had been discussed "with urgency" by the CIA's director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A deputy director of the CIA said: "Kerr did what he was told to do."

On 10 November, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA's East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier.

Shackley's message was read to Whitlam. It said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia's NSA where he was briefed on the "security crisis".

On 11 November - the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia - he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal "reserve powers", Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The "Whitlam problem" was solved, and Australian politics never recovered, nor the nation its true independence.

Bribes

"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe.  If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. "But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe." : Janice Fine - Dollars and Sense magazine

Land of the Free – 1 in 3 Americans Are on File with the FBI in the U.S. Police State

Source: libertyblitzkrieg.com

The sickening transformation of these United States into an authoritarian police state with an incarceration rate that would make Joseph Stalin blush, has been a key theme of my writing since well before the launch of Liberty Blitzkrieg. One of the posts that shocked and disturbed readers most, was published a little over a year ago titled: American Police Make an Arrest Every 2 Seconds in 2012. In the event you never read it, I suggest taking a look before tackling the rest of this piece.

Fast forward to fall 2014, and the Wall Street Journal has a powerful article about how children in schools systems across the U.S. are being arrested or turned over to police custody for doing things that children have always done since the beginning of time. Things such as wearing too much perfume, sharing a classmates’ chicken nuggets, throwing an eraser or chewing gum.

As a result of our insane societal obsession with authority and disproportionate punishment, the WSJ reports that “nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.” 

USA! USA!

From the Wall Street Journal:

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody.

In Texas, a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume. In Wisconsin, a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law, authorities said. In Florida, a student conducted a science experiment before the authorization of her teacher; when it went awry she received a felony weapons charge.

Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

Did you catch that too? “Zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes.” Indeed, the big criminals go to Wall Street, crash the economy and then receive trillions in taxpayer bailouts. Or they get a top job in the Obama Administration, such as Jedi-master of cronyism, Tim Geithner, being chosen as Treasury Secretary.

Back to the WSJ…

At school, talking back or disrupting class can be called disorderly conduct, and a fight can lead to assault and battery charges, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a national civil-rights group examining discipline procedures around the country. 

If these rules were in place in my day, I would have been arrested about 150 times.

“We’re not talking about criminal behavior,” said Texas State Sen. John Whitmire, the Democratic chair of the senate’s Criminal Justice Committee, who helped pass a new law last year that limits how police officers can ticket students. “I’m talking about school disciplinary issues, throwing an eraser, chewing gum, too much perfume, unbelievable violations” that were resulting in misdemeanor charges.

According to the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, 260,000 students were reported, or “referred” in the official language, to law enforcement by schools in 2012, the most-recent available data. 

The number of school police officers rose 55% to about 19,000 in the 10 years to 2007, the last year for which numbers were available, according to a 2013 study from the Congressional Research Service.

The schools crackdown has had its intended effect. Victims’ surveys compiled by the Education Department show that there is a lower rate of violent crime committed in schools, falling to 52 incidents per 100,000 students in 2012 from 181 incidents per 100,000 in 1992.Supporters say that alone proves the worth of aggressive policing.

Well yeah, and pigs in a pen are easily controlled too, but are these the types of children we want to raise?

And what about the downside, such as:

Brushes with the criminal justice system go hand in hand with other negative factors. A study last year of Chicago public schools by a University of Texas and a Harvard researcher found the high-school graduation rate for children with arrest records was 26%, compared with 64% for those without. The study estimated about one-quarter of the juveniles arrested in Chicago annually were arrested in school.

A science experiment that went awry turned into a 17-month battle for Kiera Wilmot and her mother as they tried to clear the honor student’s arrest record. According to the police report, she was on school grounds outside the classroom trying out an experiment that hadn’t been authorized by her teacher. Ms. Wilmot, now 18, said she put a piece of aluminum inside a bottle with two ounces of toilet cleaner to see what would happen. The teen’s mother said she was trying to simulate a volcanic eruption.

“It popped,” blowing the top off the bottle, she said. She was handcuffed by the school-resource office, escorted out of the Bartow, Fla., school and taken to a juvenile facility where she was charged with possessing or discharging firearms or weapons at school and making, throwing, possessing, projecting, placing or discharging a destructive device.

Think about what sorts of lessons we are teaching talented students about experimenting and being creative. A modern Benjamin Franklin would most likely be rotting away in solitary right now.

So as we militarize the police, we police the schools. See the direction this is all headed in?

Keep chanting muppets.

How a US and International Atomic Energy Agency Deception Haunts the Nuclear Talks

Source: truth-out.org

In 2008, the Bush administration and a key IAEA official agreed on a strategy of misrepresenting Iran's position on the authenticity of intelligence documents, which they used to establish an official narrative of Iran "stonewalling" the IAEA investigation. That narrative continues to shape Obama administration policy in the nuclear talks.

The accusation by US and other Western diplomats that Iran has been "stonewalling" the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) investigation of alleged past nuclear weapons work has been a familiar theme in mainstream media coverage of Iran's relations with the IAEA for years.

What remains virtually unknown, however, is how a brazen deception by the George W. Bush administration and a key official within the IAEA created the false narrative of Iranian refusal to cooperate with the IAEA and was used to justify harsh international sanctions.

The initial deception was the suggestion by the IAEA that Iran had acknowledged that the activities portrayed in controversial intelligence documents purportedly from an Iranian nuclear weapons project were real, but had claimed they were for non-nuclear purposes. The IAEA then used that brazen falsehood as a pretext to demand that Iran provide sensitive military information on its missile program - a demand that the US officials behind the scheme knew would be rejected. That ploy thus offered the Bush administration a crucial rationale for pushing for new international economic sanctions against Iran.

The story of that highly successful deception, assembled from the public record, interviews with former IAEA officials and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, shows the conscious misleading of the public was central to US policy at a crucial turning point in the nuclear issue. It has contributed to the general consensus that Iran must be hiding past work on nuclear weapons that has led the Obama administration to insist that unless Iran satisfies the IAEA on that issue there can be no final agreement to remove the sanctions against Iran.

The origins of the IAEA deception lie in the Bush administration's determination to force Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment, which required the IAEA to maintain the image of Iran as hiding an alleged past nuclear weapons program. When then IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei negotiated a "work plan" with Iran in August 2007 to resolve a series of six issues the IAEA Safeguards Department had raised in previous years, the Bush administration was furious. Along with its key European allies, the United States warned ElBaradei when he negotiated the plan that clearing Iran of suspicion on the six issues would be unacceptable, according to a January 2008 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

After ElBaradei proceeded to clear away the six issues, the United States became even more aggressive toward ElBaradei. Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte sent a cable to the State Department written in early February focusing on the question of ElBaradei's handling of the intelligence documents purporting to show a covert Iranian weapons program that the Bush administration had been urging the IAEA to use to confront Iran. The United States and its allies would have to "warn the DG [director general] in very stark terms," Schulte wrote, "that . . . any hint of whitewash of Iran's weapons activities would cause irreparable harm to the Agency's relationship with major donors."

In other words, Schulte was saying Washington would have to threaten to severely reduce or even cut off its funding for the IAEA if ElBaradei refused to cooperate.

But US officials had an equally important source of leverage on IAEA policy in the person of Olli Heinonen, the Finnish head of the Safeguards Department.

Heinonen had acquired a reputation in the agency for working closely with the most powerful patron available. When he was responsible for the Middle East region in Safeguards from 2002 to 2005, he went around his boss, Deputy Director General for Safeguards Pierre Goldschmidt, and dealt directly with Director General ElBaradei, according to a former IAEA official. But after ElBaradei named Heinonen head of the Safeguards Department in 2005, the official recalled, he immediately began going around ElBaradei and dealing directly with the Americans.

In late 2007 and early 2008, as US anger toward ElBaradei peaked over his closure of the files on the six issues, Heinonen privately assured US diplomats that he was not happy with ElBaradei's decision, according to a January 2008 diplomatic cable. Another cable from Schulte in March reveals that Heinonen had assured US officials that he wanted to "press ahead" on the investigation of the intelligence documents, despite ElBaradei's reluctance to do so.

Heinonen met with Iranian officials in late January and early February 2008 to show them copies of the intelligence documents and discuss their response to them. In one of those meetings, Heinonen asked Iran's Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, whether various names of people, organizations and addresses found in the documents were correct. Soltanieh confirmed that the people, organizations and addresses did exist, but added, "So what?" as he recalled to this writer in an interview in Vienna in 2009.

Soltanieh's point was that any competent fabricator of documents tries to include some details that are accurate, such as the ones in those documents shown to Iran in order to convince the targets of the fraud that they are genuine. Iran pointed out in a letter to the IAEA secretariat a few months later that it was standard procedure. The letter denied that Iran had ever acknowledged the accuracy of anything in the intelligence documents except for those incidental details.

Only after Heinonen had left the agency for a position at Harvard University did the IAEA acknowledge in its September 2011 report that the only thing Iran had "confirmed" about the documents had been the "names of people, places and organizations."

Heinonen clearly had intensive discussions with Schulte and other Western officials about the Iranian response to the documents and what to do about it. Two diplomatic cables indicate that Heinonen agreed as a result of those discussions that the IAEA would take the position that Iran had admitted that the documents were authentic, but claimed that the activities described were not for nuclear weapons.

In the first diplomatic cable, sent in mid-February, Schulte wrote that the next phase of the IAEA's should be to force Iran to "fully disclose" its past alleged nuclear weapons program and make a "confession." That cable apparently reflected agreement with Heinonen on the strategy to be pursued.

A second cable dated March 27, 2008, quoted French Ambassador Francois-Xavier Deniau as declaring at a meeting of P5+1 ambassadors, "Iran has acknowledged some of the studies, while claiming they were for non-nuclear purposes."

Deniau's statement strongly suggests that Heinonen and the Americans had already adopted a very concrete formula to be used publicly to manage the issue several weeks before the drafting of the next IAEA report had begun in May. That statement accurately anticipated the wording of the Iranian position that would be used in the May 2008 IAEA report.

The language in the report was carefully chosen to mislead the reader without technically telling an outright lie. The report said Iran "did not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was factually accurate, but said the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications."

That tortured wording avoided saying directly that the "information" that Iran had not disputed involved "events and activities" portrayed in the documents. But it was clearly intended to lead readers to that conclusion. Elsewhere, the report made it clear that the activities shown in the documents on the redesign of the reentry vehicle Shahab-3 ballistic missile and on exploding bridge wire detonators could only have been for a nuclear weapon.

Heinonen and his American handlers exploited the fact that Iran had publicly acknowledged redesigning the Shahab-3 missile and development of an exploding bridge wire (EBW).

The wording on the EBW program issue was further reinforced to drive home the deception. "Iran acknowledged that it had conducted simultaneous testing with two to three EBW detonators with a time precision of about one microsecond," the report said, adding, "Iran said, however, that this was intended for civil and conventional military applications."

Those two sentences were bound to be interpreted by the unwary reader as indicating that Iran had admitted to having done experiments involving the firing rate shown in the documents. In fact, however, as Heinonen had revealed in a briefing for member states on February 25, 2008, the document in question portrayed experiments in which EBW detonators fired at a rate of 130 nanoseconds - nearly eight times faster than the firing rate in the experiments that the report was saying that Iran had acknowledged carrying out.

In meetings of the IAEA Iran report drafting group, Heinonen made no secret that he intended to show that Iran was lying. "He revealed to the Iran report drafting group a strategy to trap the Iranians into some small lies leading to being caught up in a major contradiction," a former IAEA official familiar with those meetings, who asked to remain anonymous because of fear of retaliation by the agency, told Truthout.

IAEA officials in the drafting group who were aligned with ElBaradei were not happy with his proposed wording, according to the former official. "There were a lot of differences over what Iran had admitted," he recalled. "We had to agree with language we weren't entirely comfortable with."

As the text of the May 2008 report shows, the IAEA drafting group also insisted on juxtaposing those misleading sentences on which Heinonen was insisting with US support, with Iran's denial that the documents were genuine and its assertions that the documents "contained numerous inconsistencies" and that "many were based on publicly available information."

The report thus represented a compromise between the positions of Heinonen and ElBaradei, reflecting the political pressure that the United States and its allies was then putting on ElBaradei to go along with its hardline strategy.

The former IAEA official described the US political pressure on ElBaradei at that point as "intense." The US threat of a funding cutoff was only part of it. ElBaradei also knew that his enemies in Washington and Tel Aviv were prepared to use police tactics to destroy him politically. Under Secretary of State John Bolton had tapped ElBaradei's phone in 2004 in the hope of getting information that could be used to prevent ElBaradei from running for a third term in 2005.

Bolton failed to find anything he could use to promote that scheme, but ElBaradei's enemies in Washington and Tel Aviv also spread rumors aimed at smearing him as an Iranian agent. One such story, which ElBaradei recalled in his memoirs, had Iran depositing $600,000 in a bank account under ElBaradei's wife's name in Switzerland. Yet another such rumor was that his wife, Aida, an Egyptian, was actually Iranian.

ElBaradei was also following events in Egypt, where opposition newspapers were being harassed and hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members were being jailed by the Mubarak regime. He knew he would one day want to return to Egypt and he did not want to be viewed by the US government as anti-American.

But the US-Heinonen strategy had an even bigger objective in mind - to use the insinuation that Iran had admitted to the activities that the documents portrayed as a pretext to demand that Iran provide the IAEA with highly sensitive information on both its missile and conventional weapons programs. At two meetings with Iranian officials in August 2008, Heinonen insisted that Iran share with IAEA experts the details of its work on exploding bridge wire technology as well as on the redesign of the Shahab-3 missile in order to prove its innocence.

The September 2008 IAEA report revealed the demand: "The Agency proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the re-entry body from time of launch of the missile to payload detonation." It explained that the discussions would be "aimed at ascertaining whether these studies were associated with nuclear related activities or, as Iran has asserted, related only to conventional military activities."

Heinonen later denied publicly that he had ever demanded the transfer of classified conventional Iranian military data to the IAEA. But a senior IAEA official acknowledged to me in a September 2009 interview that the agency was indeed demanding that Iran turn over such information.

Predictably, Iran objected, in a letter to the IAEA secretariat on September 5, 2008, that the IAEA demand represented an unwarranted intrusion on its conventional military security, as well as a blatant violation of the agency's statute. Iran informed ElBaradei that it was refusing to participate in future meetings on the subject of "possible military dimensions" as long as that demand was on the table.

That was exactly what the Bush administration and Heinonen were hoping for.

US Ambassador Schulte drafted a set of talking points he proposed to be used by the entire P5+1 for all interactions with the IAEA secretariat. As revealed in a diplomatic cable in January 2009, the key points expressed concern that Iran had "refused to cooperate with the IAEA's investigation in a full and substantive manner" and declared, "We do not accept Iran's blockage of the IAEA investigation."

The Obama administration continued the Bush administration's policy of protesting Iran's alleged refusal to cooperate with the IAEA as a means of building support for its real objective - to pressure Iran to suspend enrichment indefinitely. On March 3, 2009, a statement on behalf of all six powers to the IAEA board called on Iran to "cooperate fully with the IAEA by providing the Agency such access and information that it requests" to resolve the "possible military dimensions" issue.

The demand that Iran "cooperate fully with the IAEA" on the "possible military dimensions" became part of the Obama administration's official mantra on Iran, along with the charge that Iran had failed to do so. That charge was even included in UN Security Council Resolution 1929 in June 2010. The administration repeated it in the meetings of the IAEA Board of Governors.

Senior administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry have said that Iran must "come clean" about its past nuclear weapons work as part of the comprehensive settlement that is now being negotiated. Israel and its supporters in Congress have pressed that demand on the Obama administration vehemently. The clever dissimulation by the Bush administration and Heinonen continues to cast a long shadow over the talks.

Better A Hundred Palestinians Killed Than One Israeli Soldier

Source: informationclearinghouse

October 21, 2014 "ICH" -  If the British parliament had adopted a resolution in favor of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the reaction of our media would have been like this:

"In an atmosphere of great enthusiasm, the British parliament adopted with a huge majority (274 for, a mere 12 against) a pro-Israeli motion…Over half the seats were occupied, more than usual…the opponents of Israel were in hiding and did not dare to vote against…"

Unfortunately, the British parliament voted this week on a pro-Palestinian resolution, and our media reacted almost unanimously like this:

"The hall was half empty…there was no enthusiasm…a meaningless exercise…Only 274 Members voted for the resolution, which is not binding…Many Members stayed away altogether…"

Yet all our media reported on the proceedings at length, many related articles appeared in the newspapers. Quite a feat for such a negligible, unimportant, insignificant, inconsequential, trivial, petty act.

A day before, 363 Jewish Israeli citizens called upon the British Parliament to adopt the resolution, which calls for the British government to recognize the State of Palestine. The signatories included a Nobel Prize laureate, several winners of the highest Israeli civilian award, two former cabinet ministers and four former members of the Knesset (including myself), diplomats and a general.

The official propaganda machine did not go into action. Knowing that the resolution would be adopted anyhow, it tried to downplay the event as far as possible. The Israeli ambassador in London could not be reached.

Was it a negligible event? In a strictly procedural sense it was. In a broader sense, far from it. For the Israeli leadership, it is the harbinger of very bad news.

A few days before, a similar news item came from Sweden. The newly elected leftist prime minister announced that his government was considering the recognition of the State of Palestine in the near future.

Sweden, like Britain, was always considered a "pro-Israeli" country, loyally voting against "anti-Israel" resolutions in the UN. If such important Western nations are reconsidering their attitudes towards the policy of Israel, what does it mean?

Another unexpected blow came from the South. The Egyptian dictator, Muhammad Abd-al-Fatah al-Sisi, disabused the Israeli leadership of the notion that the "moderate" Arab states would fill the ranks of our allies against the Palestinians. In a sharp speech, he warned his new-found soul-mate, Binyamin Netanyahu, that the Arab states would not cooperate with Israel before we make peace with a Palestinian state.

Thus he punctured the newly inflated balloon floated by Netanyahu – that pro-American Arab states, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, would become open allies of Israel.

In South America, public opinion has already shifted markedly against Israel. The recognition of Palestine is gaining ground in official circles, too. Even in the US, unconditional support for the Israeli government seems to be wavering.
What the hell is going on?

What is going on is a profound, perhaps tectonic change in the public attitude towards Israel.

For years now, Israel has been appearing in world media mainly as a country that occupies the Palestinian lands. Press photos of Israelis almost always show heavily armed and armored soldiers confronting protesting Palestinians, often children. Few of these pictures have had an immediate dramatic impact, but the cumulative, incremental effect should not have been underestimated.

A truly alert diplomatic service would have alerted its government long ago. But our foreign service is thoroughly demoralized. Headed by Avigdor Lieberman, a brutal heavyweight bully considered by many of his colleagues around the world as a semi-fascist, the diplomatic corps is terrorized. They prefer to keep quiet.

This ongoing process reached a higher pitch with the recent Gaza war. It was not basically different from the two Gaza wars that preceded it not so long ago, but for some unfathomable reason it had a much stronger impact.

For a month and a half, day after day, people around the world were bombarded with pictures of killed human beings, maimed children, crying mothers, destroyed apartment buildings, damaged hospitals and schools, masses of homeless refugees. Thanks to Iron Dome, no destroyed Israeli buildings could be seen, nor hardly any dead Israeli civilians.

An ordinary decent person, whether in Stockholm or Seattle or Singapore, cannot be exposed to such a steady stream of horrible images without being affected – first unconsciously, then consciously. The picture of "The Israeli" in the mind’s eye changes slowly, almost imperceptibly. The brave pioneer standing up to the savages around him mutates into an ugly bully terrorizing a helpless population.

Why do Israelis not realize this? Because We Are Always Right.

It has often been said before: the main danger of propaganda, any propaganda, is that its first victim is the propagandist himself. It convinces him, rather than his audience. If you twist a fact and repeat it a hundred times, you are bound to believe it.

Take the assertion that we were compelled to bomb UN installations in the Gaza Strip because Hamas was using them to launch rockets at our towns and villages. Kindergartens, schools, hospitals and mosques were targeted by our artillery, planes, drones and warships. 99% of Israelis believe that this was necessary. They were shocked when the UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Gaza this week, claimed that this was totally inadmissible.

Doesn’t the General Secretary know that ours is the Most Moral Army in the World?

Another assertion is that these buildings were used by Hamas to hide their arms. A person of my age reminded us this week in Haaretz that we did exactly the same during our fight against the British government of Palestine and Arab attackers: our arms were hidden in kindergartens, schools, hospitals and synagogues. In many places there are now proud memorial plaques as a reminder.

In the eyes of the average Israeli, the extensive killing and destruction during the recent campaign was completely justified. He is quite incapable of understanding the worldwide outrage. For lack of another reason, he attributes it to anti-Semitism.

After one of the Lebanon wars (I forget which) I received an unusual message: an army general invited me to give a lecture to his assembled officer corps about the impact of the war on the world media. (He probably wanted to impress his officers with his enlightened attitude.)

I told the officers that the modern battlefield has changed, that modern wars are fought in the full glare of the world media, that today’s soldiers have to take this into account while planning and fighting. They listened respectfully and asked relevant questions, but I wondered if they were really absorbing the lesson.

Soldiering is a profession like any other. Any professional person, be he (or she) a lawyer or a street-cleaner, adopts a set of attitudes suitable to it.

A general thinks in real terms: how many troops for the job, how many cannons. What is necessary to break the enemy’s resistance? How to reduce his own casualties?

He does not think about photos in the New York Times.

In the Gaza campaign, children were not killed nor houses destroyed arbitrarily. Everything had a military reason. People had to be killed in order to reduce the risk to the lives of our soldiers. (Better a hundred Palestinians killed than one Israeli soldier.) People had to be terrorized to make them turn against Hamas. Neighborhoods had to be destroyed to allow our troops to advance, and also to teach the population a lesson they will remember for years, thus postponing the next war.

All this makes military sense to a general. He is fighting a war, for God’s sake, and cannot be bothered with nonmilitary considerations. Such as the impact on world public opinion. And anyway, after the Holocaust…

What the general thinks, Israel thinks.

Israel is not a military dictatorship. General al-Sisi may be Netanyahu’s best friend, but Netanyahu is not a general. Israel likes doing business, especially arms business, with military dictators all around the world, but in Israel itself the military obeys the elected civilian government.

True, but…

But the State of Israel was born in the middle of a hard-fought war, the outcome of which was by no means assured at that moment. The army was then, and is now, the center of Israel’s national life. It may be said that the army is the only truly unifying element in Israeli society. It is where males and females, Ashkenazi and Oriental, secular and religious (except the orthodox), wealthy and poor, old-timer and new immigrant meet and are indoctrinated in the same spirit.

Most Jewish Israelis are former soldiers. Most officers, who leave the army in their mid-40s, spread out in the administrative, economic, political and academic elite. The result is that the military mindset is dominant in Israel.

This being so, Israelis are quite unable to comprehend the turn of world public opinion. What do they want from us, these Swedes and Britons and Japanese? Do they believe that we enjoy killing children, destroying homes? (As Golda Meir memorably once declared: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we shall never forgive them for compelling us to kill their children!")

The founders of Israel were very conscious of world public opinion. True, David Ben-Gurion once declared that "it is not important what the goyim are saying, what is important is what the Jews are doing!" but in real life Ben-Gurion was very conscious of the need to win over world opinion. So was his adversary, the right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who once told Menachem Begin that if he despairs of the conscience of the world, he should "jump into the Vistula".

World public opinion is important. More than that, it is vital. The British Parliament’s resolution may be non-binding, but it expresses public opinion, which will sooner or later decide government action on arms sales, Security Council resolutions, European Union decisions and what not. As Thomas Jefferson said: "If the people lead, then eventually the leaders will follow."
The same Jefferson recommended "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind."