Kerry, Iran, Sheeple

and here ya have it... (thx to tyler durden at zero hedge....)

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Headline of the day from Germany: 'Romney Has Already Disqualified Himself'

ya gotta love it...


from a round-up of german views on romney's big european adventure 

from spiegel online international...

'Romney Has Already Disqualified Himself'

Center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Travel educates. As a result one should assume that Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger of Barack Obama, wants to learn something during his visit to Israel. Wrong! Almost everything that the candidate organized in Jerusalem fuels the impression that he doesn't want to try understanding how complicated the Middle East situation is. Instead, Romney paints the crisis region in black and white: Israel is good and the rest -- the Palestinians and the mullahs in Iran -- are lumped together."

"This one-sided world view is less dumb than it is coldly calculated. Romney is soliciting campaign donations in Jerusalem (the minimum price for two plates at breakfast is $50,000.) And he is ensnaring Jewish voters at home."

"The trip to Israel may help Romney in the short-term. But in the long-term the Republican has done damage. The Middle East needs the US as a mediator. As such, the presidential hopeful has already disqualified himself."

how wonderful that we can send a candidate for arguably the most powerful office in the world to represent us in europe and display his masterful command of foreign affairs and diplomacy... it certainly makes ME lean toward supporting the guy, doesn't it do the same for you...?

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Defining "terrorism" and deciding who's behind a "terrorist" attack prematurely as a form of propaganda

of course i've been following the situation in syria and the damascus suicide bombing without the slightest notion of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (although i am strongly leaning toward the belief that both sides are pretty bad)... i also have no firm idea of who is propping up the assad regime and who is giving support to the rebels... that both the u.s. and israel have their hands in the matter up to their elbows i think is almost a given and that both of them would certainly like to see a regime emerge, no matter how brutal or totalitarian, that would befriend the u.s., tolerate israel and serve as a buffer to iran as well as turn a cold shoulder to russia and china, is hardly in doubt... it's also very interesting to note, as glenn points out, that news reports on the damascus bombing have pointedly avoided labeling it as a "terrorist" attack...

so, how utterly convenient to have the "terrorist" bulgarian bus bombing suddenly occur that, without preamble or investigation, israel can blame first on iran and, on further consideration, iran via hezbollah... israel and the israel-besotted neo-cons steering u.s. foreign policy would like nothing better than to turn loose the dogs of war in the region and will go to any lengths to make it happen... this is just another thing they can point to but, cynic that i am, would not put it out of the realm of possibility that mossad is behind it... true, it's hard to conceive of israel killing its own citizens but, given the total nutcases in charge, it's not out of the question...

glenn, as always, does a masterful job of dissecting the meaning and justifiability of terrorism in the bulgarian bus bombing in similar fashion to the job he did a few days ago with the damascus suicide bombing which, added to the analysis of "terrorism" he has been doing all along, provides a much-needed perspective on the reality of events...

meanwhile, cnn reports this...

In a televised statement Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was "perpetrated by Hezbollah, Iran's leading terrorist proxy," as part of a global campaign that has reached a dozen countries on five continents.

But he offered no evidence. Israel's U.S. Embassy said Wednesday that it had no proof that Iran was the instigator of the attack.

mmm-hmmm...

oh, and btw, will the colorado movie theater massacre be labeled "terrorism"...? somehow, i don't think so...

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Glenn: The U.S. is the leading developer and perpetrator of cyberwarfare, not the leading target

i've posted extensively on the mutual back-scratching between the u.s. government, michael mcconnell and booz allen hamilton (see here)... this tawdry relationship pumps millions of dollars into the booz coffers as well as mcconnell's pocket and has made cyber-security technology one of the biggest profit contributors in the booz portfolio of taxpayer fleecing projects... mcconnell has appeared repeatedly on news segments decrying the imminent danger posed by cyber attacks and making the case for massively increased government attention spending focused on mitigating such threats...

glenn greenwald, always vigilant about spotting hypocrisy, immediately seized on today's nyt story glorifying obama's role in instigating cyber attacks on iran to make the point that, far from being the potential victim of cyber attacks, the u.s. is very likely the principal perpetrator, adding yet another chapter to the lengthy chronicle of u.s.-sponsored terrorism...

The primary fear-mongering agenda item for the National Security and Surveillance State industry is now cyberwarfare. The Washington cadre of former military officials who seek to personally profit by exploiting national security issues — represented by Adm. Michael McConnell and Gen. Michael Hayden — has been running around for several years shrilly warning that cyberwarfare is the greatest threat posed by Terrorists and other of America’s enemies (and, just coincidentally, they also argue that it’s urgent that the U.S. Government purchase wildly expensive cyber-security technology from their private-sector clients as well as seize greater control over the Internet to protect against the threat).

But — as is usually true when it comes to Washington warnings about the evils of Others — this is pure projection. The U.S. is the leading developer and perpetrator of cyberwarfare, not the leading target. The New York Times this morning has a long excerpt from a new book by its hawkish national security reporter David Sanger — the book is entitled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power” — which reveals that President Obama personally oversaw the development, and ordered the deployment, of the world’s most sophisticated computer virus, unleashed (in cooperation with Israel) on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility.

[...]

Isn’t it amazing how the U.S. is constantly the world’s first nation to use new, highly destructive weapons — at the same time that it bombs, invades, and kills more than any other country by far — and yet it still somehow gets its media to tell its citizenry that it is America’s Enemies who are the aggressors and the U.S. is simply a nation of peace seeking to defend itself.

Needless to say, if any cyber-attack is directed at the U.S. — rather than by the U.S. — it will be instantly depicted as an act of unparalleled aggression and evil: Terrorism. Just last year, the Pentagon decreed that any cyberattack on the U.S. would be deemed “an act of war.” As Rudy Giuliani said about whether waterboarding is torture: “It depends on who does it.”

once again, i'm led to speculate that the u.s. engages in such hypocritical and provocative behavior precisely because it does engender acts of reprisal which the u.s. then uses as justification for continuing to pump more cash into the pockets of our super-rich elites...

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Seymour Hersh reports on the U.S. trained terrorist group, the M.E.K.

from the new yorker...

[T]he Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training [at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site], beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

[...]

The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations.

[...]

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training.

[...]

The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations than it never had before.”

glenn weighs in...

So let’s review what we have here. If this report is true, it means the U.S. Government actively trained a group that the U.S. Government itself legally categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a clear felony under U.S. law:

Whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

That alone compels serious DOJ and Congressional investigations into these claims. Worse, this reportedly happened at the very same time that the U.S. aggressively prosecuted and imprisoned numerous Muslims for providing material support for groups on that list even though many of those prosecuted provided support that was far, far less than what the U.S. Government itself was providing to MEK. Meanwhile, right at this moment, America’s closest ally — Israel — is clearly a state sponsor of this designated Terrorist organization, providing training, funding and arms to it, and the U.S. may very well be as well (independent of all else, given that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid, the U.S., at the very least, is financing a state sponsor of Terror).

[...]

Anyone in government, media and think tank circles who routinely and angrily accuse others of being “terrorists” or “supporters of terrorism” without recognizing that the U.S. and its closest allies are plainly and routinely guilty of that is just a rank propagandist. That the U.S., in the midst of its vaunted War on Terror, directly trained a group on its own Terrorist list — while its closest ally and Washington’s venerated former officials continue to provide ample support to that group even as it escalates its violent acts – is about as conclusive a demonstration of that fact as one could have conjured.

lies, manipulation of fact, hypocrisy... is this a great country or what...?

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Glenn on the drums beating for war with Iran

where did we hear all this nonsense before...? oh, yeah... i remember...

U.S. media takes the lead on Iran

Many have compared the coordinated propaganda campaign now being disseminated about The Iranian Threat to that which preceded the Iraq War, but there is one notable difference. Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the war drums against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant. Consider this highly illustrative, one-minute report yesterday from the nightly broadcast of NBC News with Brian Williams, by the network’s Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim “Mik” Miklaszewski, which packs multiple misleading narratives into one short package:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross belong in a fear-mongering museum

I just saw this two-minute ABC News report from Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross that sinks to even lower depths than what I highlighted yesterday. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s a perfect museum exhibit for how empty-headed American media stars uncritically recite whatever they are told by government officials, exaggerate or fabricate bad acts by the designated Enemy du Jour while ignoring and suppressing the precipitating acts of America and its client states, and just generally do whatever they can to keep fear levels and war thirst as high as possible. This is nothing short of irresponsible propagandistic trash:

what a load of bollocks...

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Why are SOME terrorist organizations not treated as terrorist organizatons?

inquiring minds want to know...

glenn...

[T]hose who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting [Rudy] Giuliani, [Ed] Rendell, [Tom] Ridge, [Fran] Townsend, [Howard] Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group [Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)] is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups. But this incident also underscores the specific point that the term Terrorism is so completely meaningless, manipulated and mischievous: it’s just a cynical term designed to delegitimize violence and even political acts undertaken by America’s enemies while shielding from criticism the actual Terrorism undertaken by itself and its allies. The spectacle whereby a designated Terrorist group can pay top American politicians to advocate for them even as they engage in violent Terrorist acts, all while being trained, funded and aided by America’s top client state, should forever end the controversy over that glaringly obvious proposition.

but, glenn, terrorism is whatever we say it is and, besides, it's NEVER terrorism when WE do it...

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Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do

glenn on the assassination of iranian scientists...

Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos (while wounding several of their wives, including, in one instance, shooting them in front of their child’s kindergarten), that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion? As always, Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.

* * * * *

Regarding the question of who is responsible for the spate of scientist murders and explosions in Iran, it is true that there is no dispositive evidence on that question; that’s one of the benefits of conducting most consequential governmental action behind a wall of secrecy: no public accountability. But as the links above demonstrate, there is strong circumstantial and even direct evidence that (a) Israel is involved and (b) the U.S. has engaged in substantial covert acts of war aimed not only at the Iranian nuclear program generally but at Iran’s nuclear scientists specifically.

That all of this is done with total secrecy and no oversight by design enables deniability, if one is eager to embrace that. Newsweek‘s neocon national security reporter, Eli Lake, even went so far yesterday as to suggest the “possibility” that Iran is behind these acts of violence: because, as is well known, countries love to murder their own nuclear scientists and blow up their own nuclear facilities (Lake, of course, is right that it’s a “possibility” that Iran is behind this; as I replied: “Another possibility: maybe Senegal, or Singapore, is killing Iran’s scientists – or maybe Martians don’t like their nuclear program”). But by far the most likely explanation is that Israel is responsible, and one would have to be deliberately gullible — to the point of extreme self-delusion — to believe that the U.S. not only has no knowledge of or complicity in a spate of assassinations by its closest client state in a nation in which it has exhibited an intense interest, but also has no ability to stop it if it chose to (at the very least, the U.S. frequently sanctions state sponsors of Terrorism; if it objected to Israel’s acts, wouldn’t it do that here?).

Whatever else might be true, Israel and the U.S. are certainly the leading suspects behind these killings. And that is what explains the vehement resistance against calling this Terrorism.

nobody can tell me that this spate of killings isn't deliberate, targeted assassination... who's behind it is questionable but it's hard to imagine that either israel or the u.s. - or both - don't have something to do with it...

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Funny how the IAEA made a u-turn after Mohamed ElBaradei

it took 'em almost 24 months to move the iaea from a respected, objective watchdog to a shill for u.s. propaganda...

see jim white at emptywheel...

Two Years After ElBaradei’s Departure, IAEA Joins Anti-Iran Drumbeat

and, sure enough...

U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device

United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” and that the project may still be under way.

The long-awaited report relies on evidence whose scope and depth is far greater than any the agency has made public before, and represents the harshest judgment that the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.

robert parry offers a rapid response as well as some context on the bogus "authority" behind this equally bogus return bout of u.s. and media hyperventilation on iran, the same guy who sold us a bill of goods on iraq's non-existent wmd...

An Iraq-WMD Replay on Iran?

The American public is about to be inundated with another flood of “expert analysis” about a dangerous Middle Eastern country presumably hiding a secret nuclear weapons program that may require a military strike, although this time it is Iran, not Iraq.

In the near future, you will be seeing more satellite photos of non-descript buildings that experts will say are housing elements of a nuclear bomb factory. There will be more diagrams of supposed nuclear devices. Some of the same talking heads will reappear to interpret this new “evidence.”

You might even recognize some of those familiar faces from the more innocent days of 2002-2003 when they explained, with unnerving confidence, how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein surely had chemical and biological weapons and likely a nuclear weapons program, too.

For instance, back then, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright was all over the news channels, reinforcing the alarmist claims about Iraq’s WMD that were coming from President George W. Bush and his neocon-dominated administration.

Today, Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is issuing a flurry of alarmist reports about Iran’s nuclear bomb progress, often accompanied by the same kind of satellite photos and diagrams that helped persuade many Americans that Iraq must possess unconventional weapons that turned out to be fictitious.

imho, this is nothing more and nothing less than another fabricated diversion to get us to stop focusing on real issues and keep us cowering under the bed in fear of yet another boogeyman... (pay no attention to ows... look over here at what iran's doing...!)

what's particularly disturbing about this turn of events isn't the patently propagandistic nature of the breathless revelations, it's the leaking scuttlebutt about israel's plans for attacking iran which would be ever so much worse than iran actually having the bomb...

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Marcy says what needs to be said about the Very Scarey Iran Plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador

amazingly, there has not yet been a case submitted to a grand jury...

marcy - emptywheel - wheeler...

Our government has had eleven business days now to subject its amended case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, it had two and a half months to subject its original case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, and it hasn’t yet bothered to do so. We’re sharing our case with the rest of the world before we’re subjecting it to the most basic level of oversight enshrined in our Constitution. Instead of using the legal process laid out in our founding document, we’ve gotten the signature of a Magistrate Judge and run off with it to the rest of the world. And while I have no doubt of the competence of Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger, the judge who signed the complaint in this case, that’s simply not the way our judicial system is supposed to work. Average citizens are supposed to review the work of the government when it makes legal cases, not just Magistrates.

All of which ought to raise real questions why our government has decided to share these details with the rest of the world, but bypassed the step where they’re supposed to share them with its own citizens.

how interesting that it takes a lone blogger to make the kind of substantial point that should have been a glaring omission to even the least perceptive of our so-called professional news media... if the case was worth the paper it's printed on, a grand jury indictment should have been a slam dunk and certainly something our fear-mongering leaders would have wanted to have had in hand before trying to put that horribly scarey country, iran, back on the front burner...

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Not fit for U.S. media - Freed U.S. Hiker Shane Bauer: Iranian Guards Cited Guantánamo, CIA Prisons to Justify Mistreatment

from democracy now...



glenn has some thoughts as well...

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Chomsky: "democracy is dangerous and intolerable" and stability "means obedience to US domination"

as usual, professor chomsky 'splains it ever so much better than most...

There is a reason why there is so much concern about the democracy uprising in the Arab world than in, say, the sub-Saharan Africa. This is where the major energy resources of the world are. There is quite a good reason why the US and its allies will pull out the stops to prevent any really functioning democracy from developing in the Arab world.

[...]

The leaders of the EU and of the US happen to agree with the ruling clerics in Iran that democracy is dangerous and intolerable.

[...]

You have to remember that stability is a cold code word. Stability doesn't mean stability; it means obedience to US domination.

[...]

Support them as long as possible. When it is no longer feasible, maybe it is the army's turn to turn against them or send them out to pasture, forget about them, issue a ringing declaration about how we are on the side of the people and how we have always loved democracy and then try to restore as much of the traditional regime as possible.

[...]

[E]lite elements are in the West, in Egypt, the old regime, and Iran and elsewhere are not ready for democracy. People are ready for democracy everywhere. That is the problem elite face.

yes, our super-rich elites cannot be happy with current developments...

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Egypt update: several of the policemen stripped off their uniforms and badges and joined the demonstrators

not lookin' good for mubarak...

In one of many astonishing scenes Friday, thousands of anti-government protesters wielding rocks, glass and sticks chased hundreds of riot police away from the main square in downtown Cairo and several of the policemen stripped off their uniforms and badges and joined the demonstrators.

if mubarak, certainly one of the strongest of the middle east strongmen, goes down, look out... yemen, algeria, morocco, syria, jordan, saudi arabia, the uae, iran, kuwait, and - dare i say it - even iraq, are sitting ducks... in fact, any country with a corrupt and repressive leader at the helm (think karzai) is going to be seriously vulnerable...

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A tale of the nuclear power programs of two countries

both from today...

the first is about that satanically-driven, axis-of-evil country, iran...

Iran injects fuel into first nuclear reactor

Iran began loading fuel into the core of its first atomic power plant on Tuesday, moving closer to the start up of a facility that leaders have touted as defying of international efforts to curtail the country's nuclear ambitions.

The Russian-built nuclear power plant in Bushehr has international approval and is supervised by the U.N.'s nuclear agency. However, the U.N. security council has slapped four rounds of sanctions against Iran over a separate track of its nuclear program — its efforts to refine uranium, which could eventually be used to create material for a weapon.

and the second is about that tango-obsessed country parked somewhere in the southern hemisphere, the one that when i tell people in the u.s. that i live here part-time, they usually try singing the first bars from the signature song in the evita movie, "don't cry for me, argentina"... ha. ha.

Argentina announces production of enriched uranium for 2011

“We are returning to Argentina a right that we should never have renounced such as managing strategic nuclear resources that had been abandoned during the 1990s,” Mrs Kirchner said in a televised speech at the Pilcaniyeu uranium enrichment plant in the Patagonian province of Rio Negro.

The enriched uranium produced at the 30,000 square metre Pilcaniyeu plant will be used as reactor fuel, the Planning Ministry said in a press release.

[...]

Argentina re-launched its civilian nuclear-power program in 2006 amid worsening shortages of natural gas used to heat homes, power industry and fuel conventional electricity generation plants. Those shortages persist, with winter time rationing of gas to industry a seasonal fixture in the country's economic calendar.

Argentina currently operates two nuclear power plants--Atucha I, built with Siemens AG (SI, SIE.XE), and Embalse, built with AECL, in the province of Cordoba. The 360MW Atucha I came online in 1974, followed by the 650MW Embalse a decade later.

Argentina has already started a $1 billion life-extension upgrade of Embalse, which supplies power to the country's northeast, including the Cuyo and Centro regions and greater Buenos Aires.

two questions... did you know argentina even HAD nuclear power plants and, two, which country do you think is going to earn u.s. condemnation for its nuclear program...?

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The Speech President Obama Should Give about the Iraq War (But Won’t)

an excellent, sobering and very sad piece by juan cole...

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The American hikers detained in Iran - a "no-context" triumph for an NYT op-ed

ya gotta love our so-called news media... they never hesitate to step forward with stories and opinions unequivocally stating facts and taking strong positions... yes, they want to appear like they're doing their job and, to all appearances, they are... what isn't apparent, principally because it's almost never there, is the context so vitally necessary to truly understanding anything presented as "news" or "opinion"...

take today's nyt op-ed, calling on iran to follow its own rule of law and to release the three detained american hikers apprehended while hiking along the iran-iraq border (see my previous post here)... now that the hikers have finally been charged, after a year in confinement, with "illegal border crossing," the piece very reasonably lays out a strong argument that iran should observe its own law, a law which states that such an offense is punishable with a fine but not jail time... the piece goes on to lament that iran seems to be treating the three as pawns in its ceaseless game of taunting the united states...

never once in the piece nor in any other mainstream news media reports i've read on the detainees is the broader context mentioned, context that would point out that unlawful detention, detention without charges, and detention under potentially damaging physical and emotional conditions is precisely what the united states itself has been doing and continues to do, all under the justification of our superior moral authority: u.s. = good; iran = bad...

perhaps an even bigger piece of unmentioned context is how united states behavior is mirrored, emulated and even aspired to by other countries... the united states is always pushing its status as a role model in the world of nations and, while there are some who would snicker at such a boast (and i'm frequently one of them), the truth is that the united states does indeed set the bar for nation-state behavior in the foreign policy arena and, to a lesser extent, the internal domestic policy arena as well... i've heard officials of other countries, first-hand and in so many words, say, "well, what's the problem...? YOU do it, why shouldn't we...?"

lack of context in news and opinion reporting, reporting we should be able to rely on as not only factual but textured, complete and fully informative, is a very slippery slope... we need look no further than andrew breitbart's recent deliberate omission of a key part of shirley sherrod's speech to see just how dangerous and manipulative the absence of full context can be, but what we fail to realize is that the breitbart scam is only the tip of a very large iceberg...

why are we given so little context...? i don't think anyone with half a brain could miss the answer to that one... if we did have the full context or even half of it, we might arrive at very different conclusions about the meaning and implication of news events than we do currently... people are not stupid and, in fact, far from it... we are fully capable of rational thought and forming our own conclusions based on information and evidence at hand... when deprived of that information and evidence, we will form conclusions based on the information and evidence we're given... and that, my friends, is the whole idea...

Since their detention, the Americans have been denied access to their lawyer and allowed only one telephone call to their families and one visit from their mothers. There is particular worry now about Ms. Shourd, who spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement — the reason is unclear — and has a precancerous condition on her cervix and a breast abnormality, both of which require monitoring. The Iranians are withholding results of her medical tests.

It’s hard not to compare the hikers’ experience with that of Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who recently returned to Tehran. He claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had abducted him in Saudi Arabia. American officials said he was an informant who defected and then got cold feet.

Given the shady world of espionage, we may never know the truth. What we do know is that he was allowed to leave this country and was last seen embracing his family in Tehran. It’s long past time for the three Americans to have the same opportunity.

what about the host of detainees the united states has kept sequestered in places like bagram and guantánamo for years without charges and without any family visits at all...? don't they deserve the same opportunity...? don't they deserve the same empathetic treatment from the nyt...? isn't it important that we see the similarities between the our treatment of detainees and that of iran...?

yes, the circumstances of the hikers and the detainees in guantánamo are different but what isn't different is that we're dealing with real, live human beings... you can't call for decent treatment and following the rule of law for one set of human beings and not recognize that all human beings deserve that same treatment... yet it is the position of organs like the nyt, faithfully mirroring the position of our government, that OUR detainees are somehow in a lesser category, somewhere between wild animal and human... and yet we can still ask with perfectly straight faces, "why do 'they' hate us?"...

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Things that make me crazy

i was driving back from a lunch meeting and listening to an interview on public radio international with two of the mothers of the american hikers that have been detained without charges for over a year in iran... the mothers had been allowed to visit their children in tehran in may and, at the time, made a direct appeal to the iranian government for their release without success...

nora shourd, the mother of sarah shourd, one of the detainees, was particularly distressed that her daughter had been kept in solitary confinement for most if not all of her time in prison and was suffering from severe loneliness and appeared to her to be clinically depressed... in so many words, mrs. shourd called her daughter's treatment torture and was appalled that, as a u.s. citizen, she could be subjected to such degradation and made to endure so much personal suffering when she had committed no crime...

as a parent, i would be equally outraged and absolutely beside myself with worry if one of my children was in a similar situation... in fact, i can't imagine any parent anywhere in the world who wouldn't feel the same... but i also couldn't help but think of the parents of all the detainees held by the u.s. in equally troubling circumstances, also without charges, not for one year, not for two years, not even for five years, but for seven, eight, nine and, for some, going on ten years... is anyone interviewing THOSE parents...? did the interviewer even mention that the u.s. is doing the very same thing, only a great deal more of it...? did the mothers bother to acknowledge that there are a lot of mothers around the world struggling with the same situation...? no... of course not...

makes. me. crazy.

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If the U.S. mindset wasn't irretrievably fixated on the demonization of Iran, this development might be seen as uniformly positive [UPDATE]

but, since that's not the case, the rest of this article goes on to wax pessimistic about previous iranian "duplicity" and the concern that there are secret stockpiles of enriched uranium that would make this step "hollow"...

Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.

we shall see what we shall see, now won't we...?

[UPDATE]

i just knew juan cole would have something to say lickety-split...

Barack Obama pwned Bush-Cheney in one day, and got more concessions from Iran in 7 1/2 hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling.

good point...

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Juan Cole: Israel's original sin

leave it to professor cole to put the iran nuclear hoo-ha in perspective...

There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production.

There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and not just enriched uranium, which has the capacity to make 10 nuclear warheads a year.

Here is a 3-D reconstruction of the most dangerous weapons plant in the Middle East, at Dimona in Israel.

It is Israel's ongoing nuclear weapon production that drives the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Saddam wanted a bomb because Israel had one. The Iranians were then worried both about an Iraqi and an Israeli bomb. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others are annoyed at their geostrategic helplessness in the face of Israeli nukes.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is the region's Original Sin.

funny how israel's nuclear capability and arsenal mysteriously never get mentioned in our esteemed news media...

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Ahmadinejad congratulates Karzai

juan cole's dry sense of humor, when he decides to use it, always tickles me...

Iranian authorities maintained that they counted the ballots of a nationwide election in June in only about 10 hours and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad immediately claimed victory, despite widespread suspicions of fraud.

Afghanistan held its presidential election on August 20 and all the ballots are still not counted, and it isn't clear whether there will be a runoff election because of widespread ballot fraud.

But Ahmadinejad knows how to handle all this. The Tehran Times writes: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has congratulated his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai on his re-election. In a telephone conversation on Thursday, Ahmadinejad said that Afghan people have voted for Karzai as he is a 'devout and competent' leader."

You wonder if Karzai can survive that endorsement.

'nuff said...

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