They Obviously Want Nuclear Warheads, They Know How To Make Them, So Let’s Bomb Them Now To Be On The Safe Side

From the London Sunday Times :

Keep the following fact in mind whenever you read yet another article or op-ed piece about the “nuclear threat” posed by Iran :

“…the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran.”

The more professional War On Iran propagandists will not claim that Iran has nuclear bombs, or that they will have them within a few months, but that Iran has the technical knowledge to build nuclear bombs, and the desire to build them. “We can’t afford to take the chance….” you know the spiel by now

It is a very GroundHog Day-like repeat of the lead-up to the War On Iraq. Perhaps they’re hoping that we’ve forgotten?

John Pilger on The Lying Game :

The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is “psy-ops”, the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its “nuclear threat”: a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as objective news. And it is fake.

On 16 September, Newsweek disclosed that the major US intelligence agencies had reported to the White House that Iran’s “nuclear status” had not changed since the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which stated with “high confidence” that Iran had halted in 2003 the programme it was alleged to have developed.

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Iran’s crime is its independence.

Having thrown out America’s favourite tyrant, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran remains the only resource-rich Muslim state beyond US control.

As only Israel has a “right to exist”in the Middle East, the US goal is to cripple the Islamic Republic. This will allow Israel to divide and dominate the region on Washington’s behalf, undeterred by a confident neighbour.

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On both sides of the Atlantic the media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war.

The US/Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal says 500,000 troops will be required in Afghanistan over five years, according to America’s NBC.

The goal is control of the “strategic prize” of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, central Asia, the Gulf and Iran ­ in other words, Eurasia. But the war is opposed by 69 per cent of the British public, 57 per cent of the US public and almost every other human being. Convincing “us” that Iran is the new demon will not be easy.

Robert Parry rips the American media for propagandising more war (excerpts) :

The U.S. press corps appears to have learned little or nothing from the Iraq debacle as a new crisis looms with Iran.

Yet, the most dangerous parallel between the misreporting on Iraq and the current hysteria about Iran may be that major U.S. news outlets, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to paint the disputes in black and white and leave shades of gray out of the frame.

In doing so, these news organizations again are casting aside their own rules about objectivity and balance. Just like in the run-up to the Iraq War, they obsess about a villain (with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad replacing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein) – and have thrown down the memory hole inconvenient facts and important context.

Robert Parry has a long memory for some of the familiar faces in the Iranian opposition movement, funded in part by the United States.

….the evidence of substantial election fraud in Iran’s election was always thin and many of the allegations touted by the U.S. news media failed to stand up to serious scrutiny.

For instance, a prevalent complaint that Ahmadinejad’s claim of victory came too fast ignored the fact that Mousavi was out with a declaration of victory before any votes were counted. The partial results showing Ahmadinejad in the lead followed hours later.

A poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org questioned 1,003 Iranians across the country between Aug. 27 and Sept. 10, discovering that 81 percent said they considered Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president of Iran. Only 10 percent called him illegitimate, with eight percent offering no opinion.

Sixty-two percent said they had strong confidence in the election results, which showed Ahmadinejad winning by about a 2-to-1 margin, and another 21 percent said they had some confidence in the official vote count, for a total of 83 percent expressing favorable views on the election. By comparison, only 13 percent said they had little or no confidence in the results.

Those poll results were either ignored by the U.S. news media or discounted as the result of fearful Iranians simply saying what their government wanted to hear.

Both Pilger and Parry point out the bizarre absence of debate, or even a legitimate comparative mention of Israel’s 200+ nuclear warheads, the corporate American media. Obviously that is not the case in the blogstream or on the majority of unbiased independent news sites.

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The U.S. press corps struts about in outrage over Ahmadinejad – just as they did with Saddam Hussein. The journalists know intuitively what points to highlight and what context to leave out.

In doing so, the journalists may feel they are protecting their flanks from criticism about their patriotism or their toughness. But the risk for the nation is that such unprofessional journalism is contributing to a new hysteria, creating a political dynamic that may block President Obama from taking actions for peace that might well be in the best interests of the country.