For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war
against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support
for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of
Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile
installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.
The attacks are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by
intelligence-steered nods and winks as the media are fed a stream of hostile
tales - the most outlandish so far being an alleged Iranian plot to kill the
Saudi ambassador to the US - and the western powers ratchet up pressure for
yet more sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme.
The British government's decision to take the lead in imposing sanctions on
all Iranian banks and pressing for an EU boycott of Iranian oil triggered
the trashing of its embassy in Tehran by demonstrators last week . . .
[The U.S. is already cooperating with Israel on the development of a new
version of the Stuxnet computer virus, which crippled the Iranian nuclear
program's computers in 2010.--Philip Giraldi, "Proxy
War With Iran," atimes.com, December 1, 2011]
[The 1996 Israeli document,
which included prominent U.S. policy figures as authors, calls for "rolling
back Syria" in 2000 or afterward. . . .
As a first step towards all this the 1996 document even calls for the
removal of President Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdadand even alludes to
the balkanization of Iraq and forging a strategic regional alliance against
Damascus that includes a Sunni Muslim Arab "Central Iraq." The sectarian
nature of this project is very obvious as are its ties to opposing a
so-called "Shiite Crescent." The roadmap seeks to foment sectarian divisions
as a means of conquering Syria and creating a Shiite-Sunni rift that will
oppose Iran and keep the Arab monarchs in power.--Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya,
"Iran and the Strategic
Encirclement of Syria and Lebanon," strategic-culture.org, December 2,
2011]
[And the build-up of hostilities has unnerving parallels with the case
for war conjured by Blair and George Bush against Iraq. And the build-up
of hostilities has unnerving parallels with the case for war conjured by
Blair and George Bush against Iraq. We have another dodgy dossier, in the
shape of the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which claims
Iran is developing nuclear weapons but says so largely on the basis of
intelligence which ends in 2003. It relies on documents on a laptop, found
in 2004 by the Israelis, whose reliability prompted deep scepticism among
Western intelligence at the time. The foreign scientist said to have worked
on a bomb with the Iranians turned out to be a nanotechnologist. And a
former IAEA chief inspector has said the type of explosion chamber referred
to in the report could not be used in a nuclear test. . . .
And make no mistake, the war has begun. Virulent computer viruses
disabled Iran's nuclear centrifuges last year. Two of the nation's leading
nuclear physicists have been assassinated, and a third was wounded by
assassins on motorbikes. The UK's decision to freeze $1.6bn of Iranian
assets - which is what provoked the violence at the British embassy - was
the fourth round of sanctions. Hawks like my military namesake talk openly
of deploying unmanned drones against nuclear power stations and provoking an
uprising against the government in Tehran.--Paul Vallely, "War on Iran has begun. And
it is madness," Independent, December 4, 2011]
[The administration's evolving strategy includes expanded use of
remote-controlled stealth aircraft, such as the one that came down in
eastern Iran last week, as well as other covert efforts targeting Iran's
nuclear program--Joby Warrick and Greg Miller, "Stealth
drone highlights tougher U.S. strategy on Iran," Guardian, December 7, 2011]
[ . . . the US intends to use the military bases in Afghanistan as a
springboard to invade eastern Iran if conflict erupts, . . . NATO is
considering a "joint center" in the Persian Gulf region with the Gulf
Cooperation Council countries.--M K Bhadrakumar, "US outed,
and far from drawn down," atimes.com, December 13, 2011]
George Galloway, December 9, 2011: "Iran hasn't invaded another country in 300 years."
John Pilger, December 14, 2011: What Obama "didn't say is that since 1945 the US military has been directly responsible for the deaths of over 10 million people and that America has in that time overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and intervened in at least 30 more."
[In 2007, President Bush signed a separate finding on Iran's alleged
nuclear-weapons program, authorizing covert attacks on facilities as well as
the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. These killings were carried
out by members of the Iranian Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the separatist
Jundallah, and the Kurdish PJAK, all acting on instructions from the CIA and
the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. The finding also reportedly
directed U.S. intelligence agencies to work with the Israelis to develop a
computer virus to disrupt Iran's UN-approved civilian nuclear program.--Tim
Kelly, "Secret Wars and
the Rule of Law," fff.org, December 21, 2011
[The new diplomacy has prompted new conversations between the United States
and Israel over what the triggers - called "red lines" in diplomatic
parlance - would be to justify a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities.--Eli Lake, "U.S., Israel
Discuss Triggers for Bombing Iran's Nuclear Infrastructure,"
thedailybeast.com, December 28, 2011]
[The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case
except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian
defectors provided testimony. What it didn't say was that at least two of
the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by US intelligence as
"fabricators" and that the two "expert witnesses" who were supposed to
determine the credibility of those defectors' claims are both avowed
advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who
believe the United States is at war with Islam.--Gareth Porter, "Crackpot Anti-Islam
Activists, 'Serial Fabricators,' and the Tale of Iran and 9/11,"
truth-out.org, December 31, 2011]
[The group, the People's Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a
terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen
and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy
in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.--Richard Engel
and Robert Windrem, "Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists,
U.S. officials tell NBC News," The NBC News, February 8, 2012]
[U.S. officials recently told NBC News that Israel has financed, trained,
and armed MeK terrorists to carry out unprovoked attacks on Iranian nuclear
scientists inside Iran.--John Glaser, "MeK Status on US Terror List Hinges on
Relocation," antiwar.com, February 29, 2012]
["You can download the actual source code of Stuxnet now and you can
repackage it...point it back to wherever it came from."--"Fmr. CIA head calls Stuxnet virus 'good
idea," cbsnews.com, March 1, 2012]
[From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy's Nevada National
Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the
look of northwest Iran. . . .
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted
training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a
dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K.
spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month
NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that
the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained
by Mossad, the Israeli secret service.--Seymour M. Hersh, "Our
Men In Iran?," newyorker.com, April 6, 2012]
[Overall, the attack destroyed nearly 1,000 of Iran's 6,000 centrifuges --
fast-spinning machines that enrich uranium, an essential step toward
building an atomic bomb. The National Security Agency developed the
cyberweapon with help of Israel. . . .
"Effectively the United States has gone to war with Iran and has chosen to
do so in this manner because the effects can justify this means," said Rafal
Rohozinski, a cyber-expert and principal of the SecDev Group--Ellen
Nakashima and Joby Warrick, "Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say,"
washingtonpost.com, June 2, 2012]
[The code could activate computer microphones and cameras, log keyboard
strokes, take screen shots, extract geolocation data from images, and send
and receive commands and data through Bluetooth wireless technology.--Ellen
Nakashima, Greg Miller and Julie Tate, "U.S., Israel developed Flame computer virus
to slow Iranian nuclear efforts, officials say," washingtonpost.com,
June 19, 2012]
[The campaign to bury the MEK's bloody history of bombings and
assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and
thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the
Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three
principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and
influential former officials.--Chris McGreal, "MEK Decision: Multimillion-dollar Campaign
Led to Removal from Terror List," guardian.co.uk, September 24, 2012]
[Menendez's advocacy for the Mojahedin at the October hearing wasn't new, but it
signaled that by 2013 the group had come full circle: from an outlaw terrorist outfit to
a player on Capitol Hill. How that happened is a classic story of money, politics and
the enduring appeal of exile groups promising regime change.--Ali Gharib and Eli
Clifton, "Long
March of the Yellow Jackets: How a One-Time Terrorist Group Prevailed on Capitol
Hill," firstlook.org, February 26, 2015]