A Cloud of Witnesses

The Anti-Empire Report

2012-02-28T08:16:00.002-08:00

February 3rd, 2012

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org

The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats. The Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace.

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you've forgotten ...

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears." ¹

2009: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." ²

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, "believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons."

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: "Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability." ³

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that "three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel."

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now ... in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. ... There are "certain things [the Iranians] have not done" that would be necessary to build a warhead. ⁴

Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: "But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us." Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No ..." ⁵

One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:

Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I've researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn't deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they're the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. ... We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons ... thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can't relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities ... Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It's called "plain common sense". Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: "That's not what the United States does." ⁶

Does anyone know Leon Panetta's email address? I'd like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully. ⁷

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this "threat" was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran's lifeline — oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America's unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: "In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways."

How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of "The Free World". (Is that expression still used?)

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America's most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, "See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn't getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately." ... And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem. ⁸

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?

Please tell me again ... What is the war in Afghanistan about?

With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent ... or better than nothing ... or let's get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven't yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009: "But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." ⁹

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the "plotting to attack America" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard?

Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only "necessity" that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia — which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world — and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here's Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: "One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south." ¹⁰

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions. ¹¹ Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region's total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels ... From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can't be "won" short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare "victory". Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words "freedom" and "democracy", but certainly not "pipeline".

Love me, love me, love me, I'm a Liberal (Thank you, Phil Ochs. We miss you.)

Angela Davis, star of the 1960s, like most members of the Communist Party, was/is no more radical than the average American liberal. Here she is recently addressing Occupy Wall Street: "When I said that we need a third party, a radical party, I was projecting toward the future. We cannot allow a Republican to take office. ... Don't we remember what it was like when Bush was president?" ¹²

Yes, Angela, we remember that time well. How can we forget it since Bush, by all important standards, is still in the White House? Waging perpetual war, relentless surveillance of the citizenry, kissing the corporate ass, police brutality? ... What's changed? Except for the worse. Where's our single-payer national health insurance? Nothing even close. Where's our affordable university education? Still the most backward in the "developed" world. Where's our legalized marijuana — I mean really legalized? If you think that's changed, you must be stoned. Where's our abortion on demand? What does your guy Barack think about that? Are the indispensable labor unions being rescued from oblivion? Ha! The ultra-important minimum wage? Inflation adjusted, equal to the mid-1950s.

Has the American threat to the environment and the world environmental movement ceased? Tell that to a dedicated activist-internationalist. Has the 50-year-old embargo against Cuba finally ended? It has not, and I can still not go there legally. The police-state War on Terror at home? Scarcely a month goes by without the FBI entrapping some young "terrorists". Are more Banksters and Wall Street Society-Screwers (except for the harmless insider-traders) being imprisoned? Name one. The really tough regulations of the financial area so badly needed? Keep waiting. How about executives of the BP Oil Spill Company being arrested? Or war criminals, mass murderers, and torturers with names like ... Oh, I don't know, let's see ... maybe like Cheney or Bush or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or someone with a crazy name like Condoleezza? All walking completely free, all celebrated.

"A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration." — Sam Smith¹³

"A change of Presidents is like a change of advertising campaigns for a soft drink; the product itself still tastes the same, but it now has a new 'image'." — Richard K. Moore

Notes

Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26 ^↩
Washington Post, March 5, 2009^↩
"Face the Nation", CBS, January 8, 2012; see video ^↩
The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012" ^↩
"PBS's Dishonest Iran Edit", FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012^↩
Reuters, January 12, 2012 ^↩
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm ^↩
Video of Pletka making these remarks ^↩
Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009 ^↩
Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007 ^↩
See, for example, the December 17, 1997 article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, "Oil barons court Taliban in Texas". For further discussion of the TAPI pipeline and related issues, see this article by international petroleum engineer John Foster. ^↩
Washington Post, January 15, 2012 ^↩
Sam Smith was a longtime publisher and journalist in Washington, DC, now living in Maine. Subscribe to his marvelous newsletter, the Progressive Review. ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

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The Daily Bell - Larken Rose on Taxes, Freedom and Life After Prison

2012-02-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

The Daily Bell - Larken Rose on Taxes, Freedom and Life After Prison

FBI May Shut Down Your Internet Access March 8th

2012-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

FBI May Shut Down Your Internet Access March 8th

This March 8th, the FBI is planning to unplug DNS servers it set up to help eliminate malware from over half of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies still infected in early 2012.

The change could potentially leave a great number of Internet users without access to the Web.

Friday: Another Week, Another Milestone

2012-02-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

E. F. SCHUMACHER

E.F. Schumacher is best known as the Author of Small Is Beautiful, however he is best known to me as the Author of A Guide For The Perplexed.

Today I finished A Guide for the Perplexed, by E.F. Schumacher. Wow!

The last chapter, Two Types of Problems, was a series of crescendos and descendings and I despaired for I wanted to end my reading on a high note. No less than five peaks I had to endure, or to be more correct, it was the five valleys I had to endure that I could revel in the heights.

What is that saying: It is not what gives you breath; it is what takes your breath away?

The message of this book is the exact message needed by myself, and I am suspecting others, especially who hold to conspiracy history rather than accidental history, i.e. (Schumacher made several references to Dante’s Inferno), “Today, people who acknowledge the Inferno of things as they really are in the modern world are regularly denounced as “doomwatchers,” pessimists, and the like. Dorothy Sayers, one of the finest commentators on Dante as well as on modern society, has this to say”:

That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and “spell-binding” of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are the all-too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations.

These are the valleys we live in. But here are the mountain peaks that our understanding tells us we can strive for:

“life is bigger than logic”

Schumacher distinguishes existing problems as being one of two kinds: convergent, where solutions are more easily and readily found because the answer “complies with the laws of the Universe – laws at the level of inanimate nature” which he explains can be manipulated (his example was the wheel); and divergent, where solutions are not so obvious, even to the point that as they become more numerous they also become more opposed to one another, offering contradictions that do not “yield to ordinary , ‘straight-line’ logic” (his example was education with divergent solutions of ‘discipline & obedience’ vs ‘freedom,’ or ‘freedom vs equality’).

Convergent problems relate to the dead aspect of the Universe, where manipulation can proceed without let or hindrance and where man can make himself ‘master and possessor,’ because the subtle, higher forces – which we have labeled life [plant], consciousness [animal], and self-awareness [human] - are not present to complicate matters.

The moment we deal with problems involving the higher Levels of Being, we must expect divergence, for there enters, to however modest a degree, the element of freedom and inner experience. In them we can see the most universal pair of opposites, the very hallmark of Life: growth and decay.

Growth thrives on freedom (I mean healthy growth; pathological growth is really a form of decay), while the forces of decay and dissolution can be contained only through some kind of order.

Growth versus Decay and Freedom versus Order are encountered wherever there is life, consciousness, self-awareness.

“to solve a problem is to kill it”

There is nothing wrong with ‘killing’ a convergent problem. . .But can – or should – divergent problems be killed? (The words ‘final solution’ still have a terrible ring in the ears of my generation.)

Divergent problems cannot be killed; they cannot be solved in the sense of establishing a ‘correct formula’; they can, however be transcended. A pair of opposites – like freedom and order – are opposites at the level of ordinary life, but they cease to be opposites at the higher level, the really human level, where self-awareness plays it proper role. It is then that such higher forces as love and compassion, understanding and empathy, become available, not simply as occasional impulses (which they are at the lower level) but as a regular and reliable resource.

Divergent problems – opposites – ‘are not logical but existential questions. . .The main concern of existentialism. . .is that experience has to be admitted as evidence. . .without experience there is no evidence.

Our logical mind does not like [divergent problems]: it generally operates on the either/or or yes/no principle, like a computer. . .this exclusiveness inevitably leads to an ever more obvious loss of realism and truth. . .Divergent problems offend the logical mind. . .A refusal to accept the divergency of divergent problems causes these higher faculties to remain dormant and to wither away, and when this happens, the ‘clever animal’ is more likely than not to destroy itself.

‘[a]ll great works of art are ‘about God’

If art aims primarily to affect our feelings, we may call it entertainment; if it aims primarily to affect our will, we may call it propaganda. . .a pair of opposites. . .

No great artist has ever turned his back on either entertainment or propaganda, nor was he ever satisfied with just these two. Invariably he strove to communicate truth, the power of truth, by appealing to man’s higher intellectual faculties. . .Entertainment and propaganda by themselves do not give us power but exert power over us. When they are transcended by, and made subservient to, the communication of Truth, art helps us to develop our higher faculties, and this is what matters. . .the purpose of the whole is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and lead them into a state of felicity.

“the real problems of life have to be grappled with”

While the logical mind abhors divergent problems and tries to run away from them, the higher faculties of man accept the challenges of life as they are offered, without complaint, knowing that when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, then, just then, life really makes sense: as a higher Level of Being.

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something much better: that we can become oak trees.

“the true progress of a human being”

1. One’s first task is to learn from society and ‘tradition’ and to find one’s temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.

2. One’s second task is to interiorize the knowledge one has gained, sift it, sort it out, keeping the good and jettisoning the bad; this process may be called ‘individuation,’ becoming self-directed.

3. One’s third task cannot be tackled until one has accomplished the first two, and is one for which one needs the very best help that can possibly be found: It is ‘dying to oneself,’ to one’s likes and dislikes, to all one’s egocentric preoccupations. To the extent that one succeeds in this, one ceases to be directed from outside, and also ceases to be self-directed. One has gained freedom or, one might say, one is then God-directed.

Now, let’s go be oak trees!