1.

FALSE POSITIVE: BUSH’S DEADLY ODOR OF MENDACITY
By Chris Floyd

Empire Burlesque
August 8, 2007

Original source: Empire Burlesque (see here for links)

President Bush's many media sycophants tell us over and over that he is not the dribbling idiot of popular imagination. As Hugh Hewitt and other genuflectors who are ushered routinely into the great man's presence insist, George W. Bush is an intelligent, focused, purposeful leader, with a firm grasp on the complexities of modern statecraft.

Let us grant the truth of this assertion. (Indeed, I have already granted it, in two previous pieces: here and here.) What this means, of course, is that when Bush makes a statement in public, he is very much aware of what he is saying, and fully cognizant of the implications of his words. Therefore, when the intelligent, focused and purposeful Mr. Bush declared Monday -- at a highly publicized meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- that the Iranian government "has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon," we must assume that he knew full well that he was telling a barefaced lie, and that he told this lie for some specific purpose. That purpose is obvious: to further prepare the PR ground for inducing the public to go along with a future military strike against Iran.

This is precisely the same kind of focused and purposeful lie that Bush told when he declared, on national television, that there was "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," and that Saddam Hussein had "aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operative of al Qaeda." In fact, the new lie is even more brazen, for it involves only the public statements of Iranian leaders, not cherry-picked and falsified nuggets of murky intelligence data buried from all public view. Anyone with a computer -- or a memory -- can readily determine that Iran's government leaders have insistently proclaimed their adamant opposition to building a nuclear weapon; the nation's theocratic leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, has even declared such a weapons program to be against the will of God.

The veracity of such statements might be controversial, of course. After all, there is no particular reason to believe that the government leaders in Iran are any more honest than, say, American presidents (or American clerics) have proven to be down through the years. But it is simply, literally, indisputably an outright lie to declare that the Iranian government has "proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon." The very opposite is true.

Bush knew he was lying -- and he was lying with a purpose. He was trying to inject this poisonous falsehood into the public debate, and he succeeded. The remark went largely unnoticed by the corporate media, which focused on other themes in the joint press conference. The U.S. media's flagship, the *New York Times*, did not even mention Bush's falsehood, much less point out the inaccuracy of the remark. As it does so often, the *Times* smoothed over Bush's actual words with a bland paraphrase, saying only that Bush "is deeply suspicious of [Iran's] nuclear ambitions, a view he reiterated Monday." (That is a further lie in aid of the original lie. Bush did not say he was "deeply suspicious" of Iran's nuclear ambitions; he said outright that Iran has declared its desire for nuclear weapons. There was no "suspicion" about the statement at all; Bush retailed it as an established fact.)

Some outlets, such as the *Washington Post*, did report Bush's remark -- and even went on to note, at the very bottom of the story, that "Iran actually has not proclaimed a desire to build a nuclear weapon." But instead of asking why Bush would tell such a glaring, provocative lie, the Post merely, and meekly, allowed an Administration spokesman to explain away the remark with a non sequitur: Iran had once kept its nuclear energy program a secret and was now resisting some of the extra inspections demanded of them outside the the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that they have signed and followed for years. The spokesman did not explain how any of this constituted a "proclamation" of the desire to build nuclear weapons. And the *Post* obviously did not press him on it. Still, in this degraded age of journalism, I suppose we must give a gold star to the *Post* for even mentioning the discrepancy between Bush's statement and the truth.

(However, full marks must go to AFP for writing a whole story (http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6558/) on the lie: Bush levels dubious Iran nuclear arms charge. But they're just a bunch of foreigners anyway, so they don't count. Only the echo chamber of the Homeland media is important in the new warmongering campaign.)

Bush's deliberate lie ratchets that campaign up to another level. We have already had months of stories asserting Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers in Iran and Afghanistan -- stories rooted, like the WMD canards, in the murk of unsourced, unverifiable "intelligence data" passed along by Bush's military minions to credulous reporters. Now the Bush Regime is moving on to fantastical falsehoods, based on nothing but a bold perversion of facts available to anyone. And again, as with Iraq, the main war drum remains centered on that ole debbil "mushroom cloud" rising over an American city. (And why not? The Money Power militarists have made mountains of hay (and silos of cash) with that threat for nigh on 60 years now.)

But before the "debate" about striking Iran slips away entirely into the realm of fantasy, it might be useful to look at Iran's nuclear program in context -- provided here by Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi in their Guardian article, “Prospects of Armageddon”: “[T]he calamity of Iraq has failed to dampen the belligerent clique within the White House. The arrival of an IAEA team in Tehran yesterday to discuss inspections is equally unlikely to dissuade advocates of a strike, nuclear or conventional. Such an assault would be in flagrant breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but it would hardly be the first time the U.S. has disregarded the 1968 accord.

“The treaty obliges nuclear states to pursue negotiations in good faith towards cessation of the nuclear arms race and on to disarmament. It also guarantees non-nuclear states help with and access to peaceful nuclear know-how and technology. All five original nuclear states are in violation of the treaty for failing to take effective action towards disarmament. The U.S. systematically contravened the treaty in the 1980s and 1990s by successfully bringing pressure to bear on Western governments and companies, as well as China and Russia, not to enter nuclear collaborations with Iran -- which, as a signatory of the treaty, has been entitled since 1970 to receive material, technology, and information for the peaceful use of nuclear power. This eventually drove Iran, after the bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant by Israel in 1981, on to the black market in order to pursue its nuclear program. The subsequent partial concealment of Iran's nuclear activities gave rise to Western suspicion of its nuclear ambitions, but rarely does the media characterization make reference to the context in which the recourse to the black market took place. It is rare, too, to see mention made of the fact that the IAEA has found no evidence of a weapons program after over 2,200 hours of snap inspections of Iranian nuclear plants.

“In marked contrast to Western suspicion of Iran, the real nuclear program in Israel has been eagerly sponsored by the governments of France, Britain, and the U.S. They have actively supported Israel's development of an arsenal estimated to include more than 200 warheads. It is a weapons program Tel Aviv is determined to shroud in secrecy. Mordechai Vanunu served an 18-year prison sentence, including 12 years in solitary confinement, after speaking publicly of Israel's possession of nuclear weapons in 1986. Last month he was sentenced to a further six months in prison for speaking to foreigners.

“Even as Iran discusses renewed inspections with the IAEA, the risk of a military attack on its nuclear facilities remains high. Israel's threat to deploy nuclear bunker busters to destroy Iran's weapons potential is in line with the U.S.'s national security strategy of 2006 and the Pentagon's doctrine for joint nuclear operations which justifies use of tactical nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states as a ‘deterrent.’ The ultimate irony is that the leading violator of the treaty, the U.S., and the region's sole nuclear power and non-signatory, Israel, are contemplating nuclear strikes on the pretext of nuclear limitation.”

But this is nothing new. The National Security State that essentially replaced the American republic in 1947 has always relied on "scaring the hell out of the American people," as we noted here earlier this year, when writing of Bush's brutal regime change by proxy in Somalia: “It's clear that no nation on earth will be allowed to organize its own society as it wishes, or work out its own internal conflicts, if the American élite decides they have some financial or strategic interest in the matter. The only nations immune to this power-mad interventionist philosophy are those who can strike back hard enough to upset the élite's apple cart. And thus we have Bush's "war on terror" -- which is, as we've often noted, simply an escalation of the long-running, bipartisan foreign policy of the ‘National Security State’ that has ruled America for 60 years.”

This year marks the anniversary of this coup d'état: the 1947 "National Security Act." Writing on the 50th anniversary of this supplanting of the Republic, Gore Vidal wrote: “Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues . . . we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine . . ."

Obviously, the situation that Vidal describes didn't begin with the illegal implantation of the Bush Regime by the rightwing faction of the Supreme Court (two of whom had family members profiting from the Bush campaign) in December 2000. It has gone on for decades, under "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans. But it has reached a new pitch of intensity, audacity, and recklessness today.

That audacity was on vivid display in the latest war-stoking lie to issue from the presidential mouth: a lie rank with the smell of corpse-flesh -- past, present, and future -- that mingles with Bush's every breath.

2.

PROSPECTS OF ARMAGEDDON
By Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi

** The logic that defends past nuclear atrocities is now used to support a strike against Iran **

Guardian (UK)
August 7, 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2143030,00.html

It is appalling, if unsurprising, to read the neoconservative cheerleader Oliver Kamm arguing in these pages that the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62 years ago saved lives and ended suffering. The subtext is plain. The same camp whose vocal endorsement led to the present catastrophe in Iraq are now hawkishly gazing at Iran. The same absurd and dangerous logic that defends the nuclear atrocities of 1945 can now be used to support the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran -- the threat of which in turn makes the idea of a conventional attack appear more palatable. Now, more than ever, we should be unequivocal in our moral position: as Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said, the mere possession of nuclear weapons today should be viewed with the same condemnation and horror as we have regarded slavery and genocide in our modern civilized world.

Astonishingly, the calamity of Iraq has failed to dampen the belligerent clique within the White House. The arrival of an IAEA team in Tehran yesterday to discuss inspections is equally unlikely to dissuade advocates of a strike, nuclear or conventional. Such an assault would be in flagrant breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but it would hardly be the first time the U.S. has disregarded the 1968 accord.

The treaty obliges nuclear states to pursue negotiations in good faith towards cessation of the nuclear arms race and on to disarmament. It also guarantees non-nuclear states help with and access to peaceful nuclear know-how and technology.

All five original nuclear states are in violation of the treaty for failing to take effective action towards disarmament. The U.S. systematically contravened the treaty in the 1980s and 1990s by successfully bringing pressure to bear on western governments and companies, as well as China and Russia, not to enter nuclear collaborations with Iran -- which, as a signatory of the treaty, has been entitled since 1970 to receive material, technology, and information for the peaceful use of nuclear power. This eventually drove Iran, after the bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant by Israel in 1981, on to the black market in order to pursue its nuclear program. The subsequent partial concealment of Iran's nuclear activities gave rise to western suspicion of its nuclear ambitions, but rarely does the media characterization make reference to the context in which the recourse to the black market took place. It is rare, too, to see mention made of the fact that the IAEA has found no evidence of a weapons programme after over 2,200 hours of snap inspections of Iranian nuclear plants.

In marked contrast to Western suspicion of Iran, the real nuclear program in Israel has been eagerly sponsored by the governments of France, Britain, and the U.S. They have actively supported Israel's development of an arsenal estimated to include more than 200 warheads. It is a weapons program Tel Aviv is determined to shroud in secrecy. Mordechai Vanunu served an 18-year prison sentence, including 12 years in solitary confinement, after speaking publicly of Israel's possession of nuclear weapons in 1986. Last month he was sentenced to a further six months in prison for speaking to foreigners.

Even as Iran discusses renewed inspections with the IAEA, the risk of a military attack on its nuclear facilities remains high. Israel's threat to deploy nuclear bunker busters to destroy Iran's weapons potential is in line with the U.S.'s national security strategy of 2006 and the Pentagon's doctrine for joint nuclear operations which justifies use of tactical nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states as a "deterrent." The ultimate irony is that the leading violator of the treaty, the U.S., and the region's sole nuclear power and non-signatory, Israel, are contemplating nuclear strikes on the pretext of nuclear limitation.

Last year John McCain, a Republican presidential hopeful and an advocate of keeping the military option against Iran on the table, was asked what the consequence of an attack on Iran would be. His response was only one word: "Armageddon." After three devastating wars driven by the U.S., Britain and Israel since 9/11, the prospect of a catastrophic war against Iran hangs over the region.

While the world remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an international statement endorsed by dozens of leading peace, anti-nuclear, and community organizations in the U.K., U.S. and Israel, as well as five Nobel laureates, calls for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. Israel could do the region a great service by announcing immediately that it is to disable its nuclear arsenal.