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Loose Change - Final Cut - New Chapter

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Loose Change - Final Cut - New Chapter - Planes

This is another chapter of Loose Change - Final Cut which is not in the movie. The chapter is called Planes.

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Should Corporate Media Be ‘Wiped Off the Map’?

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Until they begin to act responsibly and come clean with their readers, corporate media are deserving of the same fate they would have visited upon those they help to fraudulently demonize and wage war upon.

Dan Alba

Despite a double brick wall of facts to the contrary, corporate media are still peddling neocon fraud — the existence of a viable Iranian nuclear weapons program — in the ongoing effort to foster public support for another neocon-exacted genocide in the Middle East.

It’s certainly nothing new under the Sun for the traitorous neocon cartel. The build-up to war on Iran has been going on for many years. But in light of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and the consistent findings of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — which has confirmed that Iran is not in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — concerned observers everywhere must wonder what could possibly be the next stage of treachery carried out by these madmen of D.C. and Tel Aviv.

As should be expected, the answer is more of the same: denial, guilt transference, projection, and sheer neocon fantasy; only this time around, they are starting to really squirm, as they run out of wiggling room. To the neocons’ benefit, however, the same corporate media that helped them commit genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t appear to be any worse for wear. After all, one of the many benefits of being in power and in control of the message is not having to say you’re sorry.

But what if those in control of the message — arguably, in control of the fate of the world — did have to face reality and admit defeat? What if they were forced to endure a fate similar to that of the people whose lives they’ve been destroying all these years?

For example, let’s say the neoconnivers and their “mainstream” media get what they apparently want: another full-fledged world war, wherein thousands of innocent civilians in Iran and the greater Middle East are incinerated and hundreds of millions more are made victims of the deadly nuclear fallout across South and Central Asia.

And let’s assume that the war finds its way to US shores, as it most likely will in one way or another. Suppose the United States is infiltrated by foreign agents, and those infiltrators strike the communications hubs of state and corporate (do I repeat myself?) entities with “mini-nukes” or other ordnance capable of leveling half a city block or more.

Would you be personally disappointed if among those targets were the headquarters of The Associated Press, American Enterprise Institute, and the New York Sun?

I certainly would. I’d wonder, “Is that all? They missed MEMRI, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Center for Security Policy, et al.”

No, but seriously, I wouldn’t actually be so cold-hearted. I’d at least argue that warning should be given in advance — in the tradition of Zionist terror gangs in Palestine, for example — so that civilians could evacuate in time. After all, even lowlife militant thugs should show some semblance of honor, right?

Of course I don’t really want to see such a scenario played out — at least not one where innocent civilians are put in harm’s way. Nobody except for the neoconnivers and their back pocket media want such a thing; which is why it actually wouldn’t bother me all that much to see their agitprop-generating headquarters taken out. The way I see it: If the neocons don’t mind putting US military and civilians in the line of fire under contrived pretenses and for their own personal gain, then I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing the neocons’ intellectual property — and their ability to further propagate their lying, treasonous, warmongering filth — destroyed.

Perhaps then, the neocons and their complicit media would have finally gained a sense of irony — the hard way.

Policy experts would call such repercussions “unintended consequences” or “blowback”; I’d call it long-overdue justice.

In reality, such warfare on US soil or anywhere would mean many more innocent people would perish. Therefore I favor, rather, the cordoning, capturing, and hauling off to federal courts and The Hague every last one of the traitors who had a hand in sculpting and carrying out the disastrous, anti-American foreign policy that has directly led to death, dismemberment, and disease for millions of innocent civilians, and that has put the US military, economy, and international integrity in shambles: from the greaseball bastards who wrote and co-sponsored the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, to the cesspool of scumbags who wrote “A Clean Break” and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” to the fecal underdrippings who constructed all the lies and propaganda building up to the invasion of Baghdad and who are doing the same toward another brown-people-genocide in Iran today, to the turd-eating turncoats who penned the Military Commissions Act and the PATRIOT Act, to the complicit media elite and politicians who are enablinge and carrying out the high crimes. In light of the overwhelming evidence against them, the verdict would be a resounding “Get a rope!” What a joyous day that would be for US patriots and peace lovers everywhere.

But until that day, we are relegated to exposing, one at a time, instances of treasonous propagandizing by the various entities within the Mainstream Mafia. The latest one comes in the form of a December 5 AP report under the tear-jerking headline “Israel Feels Alone After Report on Iran.”

The background of the story is the aforementioned NIE that was officially released earlier this week after a year-long Dick Cheney fillibuster — the findings of which contradict the neocon-Likudnik claims that Iran has been working to develop nuclear weapons.

As is typically the case with such corporate media pieces, many journalistic frauds are perpetuated for the purpose of state damage-control, and with the intent of furthering illicit neocon warmongering efforts. (Imagine my surprise.) The true villains and liars are given the lecturn from which to spew their unsubstantiated (contrived) fears of a nuclear Iran, while imaginary Iranian threats are further hyperbolized with hardly a trace of proper historical context and absolutely zero evidence. Also notable is the fact that zero authoritative (or neutral) sources are quoted — nothing from IAEA chief Mohammad el-Baradei or any member of the US “intelligence community.”

It is important to note here that while the NIE claims that Iran “halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003,” Iran never really had a nuclear weapons program. But more importantly, the NIE findings basically concur with those of the IAEA, which have shown that there is no evidence that Iran is building nukes, and that the Iranian nuclear program is complying fully with IAEA inspections and NPT guidelines.

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration and its Israeli co-conspirators have gone into denial mode, insisting that further, tougher sanctions must be placed on the Iranian regime in order to make it halt Uranium enrichment — a process the Iranians are fully lawful in carrying out under the NPT. The neoconnivers insist that, in spite of US intelligence and IAEA findings to the contrary, the Iranians are planning to build nuclear weapons to be used against Israel and other allied targets. (Thanks to the intentionally misleading — actually, false — language of the NIE ["halted its nuclear weapons program"], the neoconnivers have a win-win angle in saying, “See? I told you so. They were building nukes, so they have the capability.”)

But regardless of the ludicrous rantings of those in the neocon cartel, the facts are thus far indisputable, absent evidence to the contrary; so, you’d expect that any pertinent news report would provide such a context, and therefore pose, in so many words, the following questions:

Why, then, should Iran be sanctioned?
What is the solid evidence?
Why all the talk about military action and nuclear threats, if indeed Iran is not violating IAEA safeguards and is therefore no threat to Israel or its neighbors?

But no. Instead, we get implicit approval of further warmongering and false propaganda. Instead of pondering why the aggressive neocon warmongering is happening at all, AP tacitly promotes neocon policy of immenent preemptive war against Iran.

A U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran has stopped developing atomic weapons is putting a burden on the Jewish state, which has long relied on Washington to lead the international charge against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. . . . A summary made public Monday of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran concluded the Iranians suspended their attempt to build a nuclear weapon four years ago, leading to increased calls within the U.S. for a less confrontational approach to Tehran.

What “atomic weapons”? They haven’t built any. And what “ambitions”? Electricity? To follow through with what the Ford Administration advised them to do (develop a nuclear energy program to compensate for the diminishing oil reserves)? Neocons Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz didn’t disagree with President Ford’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when he said, “Introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.”

We’re also led to believe that nuclear superpower Israel — by far, the most powerful military and the only state with a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East — is trembling in fear of third-world, nuke-less Iran:

With the U.S. now less likely to take military action, an increasingly nervous Israel might feel compelled to strike out on its own if it perceives a dangerous threat.

Israeli officials say their intelligence forces believe Iran is
still working aggressively to build nuclear arms. The Islamic regime in Tehran is strongly opposed to Israel’s existence and frequently boasts of its ability to strike the Jewish state with long-range missiles.

Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have indeed boasted of their ability to STRIKE BACK at Israeli targets in response to a US or Israeli first strike. Such statements FOLLOWED bellicose US and Israeli threats of military action, and were made in light of 1) the covert war already being waged by the neocons against Iran, and 2) the constant build-up of US nuclear-equipped naval fleets in the Persian Gulf, and the threat it poses.

Still, commanders in the IRG have no more influence over Iranian foreign policy than neocon finks like Norman “I pray that Bush will bomb Iran” Podhoretz, Joshua “We must bomb Iran” Muravcik, David “must break Iran and Syria regimes” Wurmser, et al., have over US foreign policy.

Surely, AP might find newsworthy the sentiments of Israeli leaders like Avigdor “If we bomb Iran, the US will join in” Lieberman, General Oded “If the US won’t bomb Iran, we will” Tira, or Binyamin “It’s 1938, Iran is Nazi Germany, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler” Netanyahu.

There are indeed numerous examples of US and Israeli government officials and think-tankers openly calling for aggressive war, nuclear strikes, and crippling sanctions against the Iranian people, and each one is arguably a violation of international law as incitement to genocide.

Yet astonishingly, the same maniacs in the United States and Israel who have been conducting and supporting the genocide in Iraq, as well as publicly inciting genocide against Iran, are the same ones who baselessly accuse Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of doing the same.

Recall the recent, nearly unanimous vote in Congress, calling on the UN to bring genocide-incitement charges against Ahmadinejad for the “rumor of the century,” wherein he was mistranslated as saying that Israel must be “wiped off the map,” when in fact he was merely quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini by saying, “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

Thanks to the incestuous and mutually-beneficial relationship between neocons and the corporate media, the mistranslation has been published in newspapers and on websites across the world tens of thousands of times and peddled as an incitement to genocide upon “the Jewish people,” or “another Holocaust,” despite the fact that it has been irrefutably debunked ever since shortly after it originally aired, by Farsi experts and Iranians who are politically opposed to Ahmadinejad.

Needless to say, AP slid that fraud into the current report as well:

Israel lives with the memory of the Nazi Holocaust and has vowed never again to rely on anyone but itself to safeguard its people. Iran funds Islamic groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, both openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

And of course it’s not a matter of why the Iranians will be further attacked, but instead, how or when:

“The situation can become tense if they (the Israelis) decided their red line has been crossed,” said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector who now heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “They may force a military confrontation.” [...]

“This forces the Israelis to make a decision instead of being able to take some comfort that the U.S. would take action at some point,” said Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department’s Middle East Intelligence Office.

“With Israel, you can be sure they will be unwilling to tolerate as much risk as the U.S. … because they can get hit,” he said.

And when it’s time to face the music, the warmongers expose themselves as frauds in denial:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that despite Washington’s assessment, his own intelligence analysis indicates Iran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

“We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend,” Barak said.

Meeting with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Wednesday, Israeli President Shimon Peres said many intelligence assessments around the world have later turned out to have been inaccurate, a statement from his office said.

He did not refer specifically to the flawed 2002 U.S. intelligence estimate of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.

Of course not. They don’t have their guys on the inside, rigging the apparatus. The intelligence is not coming from exiled Iraqi (or in this case, Iranian) dissidents with an agenda. Ahmed Chalabi and Mujahideen e-Khalk aren’t party to this one. Therefore, it is a more unbiased analysis; which is precisely why the dogs of war growl at the results.

Iran’s military said last month it had produced a new missile with a range of 1,200 miles capable of reaching Israel and U.S. bases across the Mideast.

Peres, who as Defense Ministry director general in the 1960s spearheaded the development of Israel’s own nuclear program, told Albright that Iran’s heavy investment in missiles could only be intended to deliver a nuclear payload.

“There is absolutely no justification for developing such missiles and equipping them with a conventional warhead,” he said.

Israel has never confirmed or denied possessing nuclear weapons, but it is widely believed to have a formidable atomic stockpile.

But of course nobody is pressuring Israel to open their nuclear facilities to UN inspectors, even though Israel is arguably the most egregious violator of human rights in the Middle East and undoubtedly the most aggressive, belligerent state, illegally occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights for more than 40 years.

Furthermore, no UN Resolutions or sanctions were leveled against Israel for its bombing raid over Syria in early September, or its constant — almost daily — incursions and fly-overs into Lebanese territory.

Indeed, it’s only newsworthy when the Arabs and Muslims violently resist. It’s only tyranny, terrorism, and murder when they do it. And the timeline almost always starts with those acts of resistance.

The above neocon-Likudnik denial of the overwhelming lack of evidence of Iranian guilt, coupled with their own histories of illegal nuclear activities and war crimes, is definitive projection. It’s reality inversion and transference of guilt on the grandest scale.

There’s a good reason why corporate media never mention the Algiers Accord, signed by the United States and Iran in January 1981, which clearly states (.pdf):

The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.

Bet your first born that it’s the same reason why they never mention the laundry list of US violations of the treaty over the last few years alone.

But whether we consider the Algiers Accord, and whether Iran is operating according to IAEA and NPT guidelines, one thing is for sure: The United States government has no business strong-arming other governments or telling them how to run their affairs. That is the m.o. of a tyrannical empire or a mercantilistic, Wilsonian “democracy” — not this constitutional republic!

Here’s the bottom line: Until US corporate media begin to look out for the interests of the American people by exposing the actual facts in proper contemporary and historical context, they are at least partially complicit in the war crimes carried out by the political leaders whose exploits they “cover.” And until they begin to act responsibly and come clean with their readers, they are deserving of the same fate they would have visited upon those they help to fraudulently demonize and wage war upon.

Additional Resources

“Iran’s nuclear file must now return from UN Security Council to IAEA,” by CASMII

“Iran Intelligence Report: More Psychological Warfare?,” by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

“Fact Sheets of Iran-US Standoff: Twenty Reasons against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran,” by CASMII

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Why did Netherlands vote against DU enquiry?

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

SP: why did the Netherlands vote against an international enquiry into depleted uranium?

The Netherlands delegation to the United Nations General Assembly has been instructed by parliament to change its position and give its support to demands for an international enquiry into the effects of depleted uranium. A motion presented by SP defence and disarmament spokeswoman Krista van Velzen in favour of such an enquiry won the backing of her parliamentary colleagues earlier this week, yet when the matter came before the UN the Dutch delegation voted – for the second time in a month - against. Declaring that she is not prepared to put up with such a blatant negation of a democratic decision, Van Velzen is demanding an explanation from the cabinet. At the same time, the SP will be joined by Labour colleagues in organising a hearing on the effects of depleted uranium on health.

Krista van Velzen The Netherlands delegation last month voted against a resolution in favour of an enquiry, on the grounds that a single word suggested a causal connection between depleted uranium and negative health effects. “There’s a great deal of uncertainty about the effects of the military use of depleted uranium,” Van Velzen said. “In Italy a parliamentary enquiry is currently being conducted and compensation has been paid out to soldiers who probably became ill as a result of contact with recycled nuclear waste. Families of such people have also received compensation payments. This is not a time to be burying our heads in the sand. We need to know precisely what we are dealing with and take appropriate measures.”

The SP motion adopted this week by parliament called on the government to change its position in a UN vote scheduled for the following day and support an enquiry, if necessary having the single offending word removed. Together with the PvdA (Labour Party) the SP has also taken the initiative to organise a hearing to look into the health effects of depleted uranium.

Despite parliament’s demand for change, the Netherlands delegation last night nevertheless once again voted against a resolution calling on the UN to establish an enquiry into the matter. “Unlike the Italians, who are paying compensation, the Dutch government is refusing to face the facts,” said Van Velzen. “They’re obviously better informed down there, which is why we need a parliamentary hearing, so that we can gather as much information as possible on the adverse health effects of depleted uranium.”

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Bush under fire over Iran claims

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

AFP

The White House Thursday struggled to defend the dire warnings about Iran made by US President George W. Bush even after he had learned that Tehran had likely frozen its atomic weapons program in 2003.

A new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on Monday formally endorsed that conclusion, which Bush had first heard about in August from US Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell.

On August 28, Bush warned of a “nuclear holocaust” if the Islamic republic developed nuclear weapons, and on October 17 he warned that anyone interested in avoiding “World War III” should support US pressure on Tehran.

On October 21, US Vice President Dick Cheney warned Iran to suspend uranium enrichment or face “serious consequences” — the very language in the UN resolution on Iraq that the White House says justified the March 2003 invasion.

On Tuesday, the US president defended himself from Democratic charges of exaggerating the threat by saying that he had only been briefed on the NIE on November 28 and suggesting that McConnell’s earlier warning had been vague.

“In August, I think it was, Mike McConnell came in and said, ‘we have some new information’. He didn’t tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze,” Bush told a press conference.

But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said one day later that McConnell had told Bush that he was looking into information that Tehran had frozen its atomic weapons quest, casting doubt on previous US charges.

McConnell “said that if the new information turns out to be true, what we thought we knew for sure is right. Iran does in fact have a covert nuclear weapons program, but it may be suspended,” the spokeswoman said.

Confronted with the apparent contradiction between her comments and Bush’s own words, Perino replied: “The president could have been more precise in that language. But the president was being truthful.”

But some of Bush’s Democratic critics, including candidates to succeed him in the November 2008 election, charged that Bush knew or should have known in August about the blockbuster finding that upended years of US rhetoric on Iran.

“Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ‘03?” asked Senator Joseph Biden.

Biden noted Bush’s contention that McConnell’s warning had not been specific and flatly declared: “That’s not believable.”

“If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history,” the senator told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday.

Biden also linked the latest flap to the flawed case for war with Iraq.

“For this president to knowingly disregard or once again misrepresent intelligence about the issue of war and peace, I find it outrageous. This is exactly what he did in the run-up to the war in Iraq,” said Biden.

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