In two articles yesterday (1/5/12), the New York Times misled readers about the state of Iran's nuclear program.

On the front page, the Times' Steven Erlanger reported this:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign.

There is no such International Atomic Energy Agency assessment. The IAEA report the Times is mischaracterizing raised questions about the state of the Iranian program, and presented the evidence, mostly years old, that Iran's critics say points towards a weapons program. (This evidence has been challenged by outside analysts--see FAIR Media Advisory, 11/16/11.) But the IAEA report made no firm conclusion that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, and noted that its inspections of Iran's facilities continue to show no diversion of uranium for military purposes.

Elsewhere in the Times, readers saw this in a piece by Clifford Krauss about a potential conflict over the Strait of Hormuz:

Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons.

Again, Iran has said repeatedly and emphatically that they are doing no such thing.

(Interestingly, the Times has changed the Web version of the Erlanger article, removing the relevant paragraph - but without noting the error.)

Overstating the case on Iran isn't a new problem at the Times. One story last month (12/8/11) referred matter-of-factly to the "recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."

With tensions between Iran and the United States rising, and Republican presidential candidates agitating for a more confrontational stance, it is imperative that outlets like the New York Times get the story right.

If the Times wishes to do better than it did during the run-up to the Iraq War, it should be more careful.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appears on CBS' Face the Nation this morning and declared, despite enormous public rhetoric among pundits and many US government officials - not to mention GOP presidential candidates, that Iran is not currently trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Associated Press reports today:

[Panetta] says Iran is laying the groundwork for making nuclear weapons someday, but is not yet building a bomb and called for continued diplomatic and economic pressure to persuade Tehran not to take that step. 

As he has previously, Panetta cautioned against a unilateral strike by Israel against Iran's nuclear facilities, saying the action could trigger Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces in the region.

The comments suggest the White House's assessment of Iran's nuclear strategy has not changed in recent months, despite warnings from advocates of military action that time is running out to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Iran says its nuclear program is only for energy and medical research, and refuses to halt uranium enrichment

And although such comments pair with Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is strictly for domestic non-military purposes, and despite renewed warnings to US-allied Israel not to strike Iran prematurely, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, who joined Panetta on Face the Nation rattled the US saber without mistake, saying: he wanted the Iranians to believe that a U.S. military strike could wipe out their nuclear program.

"I absolutely want them to believe that's the case," he said.

Panetta did not rule out launching a pre-emptive strike.

As such threats from both Israel and the United States continue it's little wonder the Iranians would seek to put their nuclear facilities beyond the reach of incoming airstrikes. As Reuters reports:

Iran will in the "near future" start enriching uranium deep inside a mountain, a senior [Iranian] official said. 

A decision by the Islamic Republic to conduct sensitive atomic activities at an underground site - offering better protection against any enemy attacks - could complicate diplomatic efforts to resolve the long-running row peacefully.

Iran has said for months that it is preparing to move its highest-grade uranium refinement work to Fordow, a facility near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Qom in central Iran, from its main enrichment plant at Natanz.

Responding to threats by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, Panetta did not hesitate to raise the possibility of military intervention yet again. According the Agence France-Presse:

"We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz," Panetta told CBS television. "That's another red line for us and that we will respond to them."

Panetta was seconded by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Iran has the means to close the waterway, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes.

"But we would take action and reopen the Straits," the general said.

Iran Not Building A Nuclear Weapon

Such rare voices against war on mainstream US TV ….

from Antony Loewenstein …..

War Made Easy

As arguments flare in Israel and the US about a possible military strike to set back Iran's nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyber attacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to present and former US officials and specialists on Iran.

The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a nuclear scientist in Tehran.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran's halting but determined progress towards making a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be murdered since 2007. A sixth, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of the Atomic Energy Organisation in Iran.

Iran blamed Israel and the US for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base. While US officials deny a role in lethal activities, the US is believed to engage in other covert efforts against Iran.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any complicity. The US statements appeared to reflect serious concern about the attacks, which some believe could backfire by undercutting future talks and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

Like the drone strikes the Obama administration has used against al-Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran's enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon.

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia University, said he believed the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work. ''How [would] the US would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed ... I think we'd fight back, and Iran will, too.''

The New York Times

US, Israel Taking A Risky Path Over Iran

and the consequences of our terrorism ....

The method of the assassination was all too familiar. The motorcycle with the pillion passenger, the magnetic bomb and the lifeless body left in the car. Wednesday's attack in Tehran was the fifth on an Iranian nuclear scientist. In four cases, including Wednesday's assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the results have been fatal.

What is different is the level of tension surrounding the murder. Naval war games have been performed in the Gulf and more are planned. There is a war of words between Tehran and Washington over the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point in the Gulf that Iran threatens to close.

The level of stress in the West's confrontation with Tehran is about to be raised yet again with a new EU oil embargo, due to take effect in six months' time, according to an agreement in principle in Brussels.

The European embargo is due to coincide with US measures targeting the financing of the Iranian oil trade, effective in June - an attempt forced through by a combative Congress in December to strangle the Iranian economy. Even some US commentators think this could be equivalent to a declaration of war.

''The Obama administration has no intention of going to war with Iran,'' said Trita Parsi, author of a new book on Obama's policy on Iran, A Single Roll of the Dice. ''But the administration wants to create a credible threat of war, in the belief that Iran only responds to such credible threats.''

In the midst of this volatile situation, the killing of another Iranian nuclear scientist has all the potential of a struck match at an explosives dump.

And Parsi said the Israelis, well aware they cannot destroy the Iranian program on their own, have a motive for lighting the match.

Whether it is responsible or not, the Israeli military establishment has a motive to claim successes in the covert war on Iran, as General Benny Gantz did this week, because it is under political pressure to start an overt one.

The generals, however, know Israeli air strikes would unleash a war without accomplishing their goal of destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

A covert war may appear a better alternative. Individual killings may not seriously hinder a large program, but they would certainly deter young Iranians from taking that line of work.

However, such a campaign is not without huge risks for the region. Elements of the Iranian establishment seem to be lashing out in frustration. Last October's bomb plot against the Saudi ambassador and Israeli diplomats in Washington, alleged to be the work of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was amateurish and reckless.

Likewise, the storming of the British embassy appeared to have gone much further than the leadership intended, and deepened Tehran's isolation.

The fragmentation of the regime will have unpredictable, and possibly very violent, outcomes. Whoever is killing Iran's scientists is clearly willing to risk catastrophic consequences that could engulf the region.

Killing Iran's Nuclear Scientists Courts Catastrophe

Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistani terror group to carry out assassinations and attacks against the regime in Iran, Foreign Policy revealed on Friday, quoting U.S. intelligence memos.

Foreign Policy's Mark Perry reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government, and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.

Perry quotes a number of American intelligence officials and claims that the Mossad agents used American dollars and U.S. passports to pose as CIA spies to try to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization that has carried out a series of attacks in Iran and assassinations of government officials.

According to the report, Israel's recruitment attempts took place mostly in London, right under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.

"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."

According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, Perry reports, when Bush was briefed on the information he "went absolutely ballistic."

"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told Perry. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."

The intelligence officer said that the Bush administration continued to deal with the affair until the end of his term. He noted that Israel's operation jeopardized the U.S. administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was under immense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah.

According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothing.

"In the end it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat," the intelligence officer said.

Apparently, the Mossad operation caused a fiery debate among Bush's national security team and it was only resolved when U.S. President Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, Perry quotes several serving and retired officers as saying.

The U.S. State Department has vehemently denied any ties to Jundallah and many U.S. intelligence officials remained angry with Israel over the 2007-2008 operation.

"Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us," Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. "If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."

The CIA, the White House, and the Mossad failed to respond to the Foreign Policy report by the time it went to press.

Israeli Mossad Agents Posed As CIS Spies To Recruit Terrorists To Fight Against Iran

Israel’s war against Iran has been going for years. It receives backing from the Western powers and most corporate journalists. Just today Hamish McDonald, a good reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, spews Zionist propaganda about Tehran after a nice, cozy Zionist lobby trip to Israel. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, long-time friend of autocrats everywhere, writes similarly after meeting Netanyahu on the same visit organised by Australian Zionist lobbyist Albert Dadon.

Memo to the MSM; this isn’t journalism, it’s shameless stenography with no alternative voices. If another war erupts in the Middle East, these journalists will be partly to blame for creating an atmosphere of menace based on lies and distortions by a notoriously lying Israeli state (and here’s real reporting, by Max Blumenthal, if journalists need pointers).

Antony Loewenstein

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head.

Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions – like Wednesday’s assassination of yet another Iranian scientist – push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting.

Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. "The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday’s editions.

Though U.S. officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said he didn’t know who killed the scientist but added: "I am definitely not shedding a tear."

The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran’s nuclear program to be killed in the past four years, with a sixth scientist narrowly escaping death in 2010, Fereydoon Abbasi, who is now head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

As might be expected, Iran has denounced the murders as acts of terrorism. They have been accompanied by cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility late last year killing a senior general and 16 others.

While this campaign has slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, it also appears to have hardened its resolve to continue work on a nuclear capability, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only. Iranian authorities also have responded to tightening economic sanctions from Europe and the United States with threats of their own, such as warnings about closing the oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and thus damaging the West’s economies.

Target: USA

Another front in Israel’s cold war against Iran appears to be the propaganda war being fought inside the United States, where the still-influential neoconservatives are deploying their extensive political and media resources to shut off possible routes toward a peaceful settlement, while building support for future military strikes against Iran.

Fitting with that propaganda strategy, the Washington Post’s editorial page, which is essentially the neocons’ media flagship, published a lead editorial on Wednesday urging harsher and harsher sanctions against Iran and ridiculing anyone who favored reduced tensions.

Noting Iran’s announcement that it had opened a better-protected uranium enrichment plant near Qom, the Post wrote: "In short, the new Fordow operation crosses another important line in Iran’s advance toward a nuclear weapons capability.

"Was it a red line for Israel or the United States? Apparently not, for the Obama administration at least. In a television interview Sunday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: ‘Our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon.’ He asserted that Tehran was not trying to develop a weapon now, only ‘a nuclear capability.’ The Revolutionary Guard, which controls the nuclear program, might well take that as a green light for the new enrichment operation."

While portraying Panetta as an Iranian tool, the Post suggested that anyone who wanted to turn back from an Iran confrontation was an Iranian useful fool. The Post wrote:

"The recent flurry of Iranian threats has had the intended effect of prompting a new chorus of demands in Washington that the United States and its allies stop tightening sanctions and instead make another attempt at ‘engagement’ with the regime. The Ahmadinejad government itself reportedly has proposed new negotiations, and Turkey has stepped forward as a host.

"Almost certainly, any talks will reveal that Iran is unwilling to stop its nuclear activities or even to make significant concessions. But they may serve to stop or greatly delay a European oil embargo or the implementation of sanctions on the [Iranian] central bank - and buy time for the Fordow centrifuges to do their work."

The Post’s recommended instead "that every effort must be made to intensify sanctions" and to stop Iranian sale of oil anywhere in the world. In other words, continue to ratchet up the tensions and cut off hopes for genuine negotiations.

A Vulnerable Obama

The escalating neocon demands for an ever-harder U.S. line against Iran - and Israel’s apparent campaign of killings and sabotage inside Iran - come at a time when President Barack Obama and some of his inner circle appear to be looking again for ways to defuse tensions. But the Post’s editorial – and similar neocon propaganda – have made clear that any move toward reconciliation will come with a high political price tag.

Already, a recurring Republican talking point is that Obama’s earlier efforts to open channels of negotiation with Iran and other foreign adversaries proved his naivete and amounted to "apologizing" for America. Obama also has faced resistance within his own administration, especially from neocon-lites such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For instance, in spring 2010, a promising effort – led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil’s then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – got Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country’s supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research.

The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 – and the effort had the President’s private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.

At the time, Clinton’s position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."]

As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations’ sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington’s political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.

Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran’s work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.

In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex. So, if he again searches for openings to negotiate with Iran, he can expect the same kind of nasty disdain that the Washington Post heaped on Panetta on Wednesday.

The Carter-Begin Precedent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders appear to fear a second Obama term – when he’d be freed from the need to seek re-election – much as their predecessors feared a second term for President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Then, Prime Minister Menachem Begin thought that Carter in a second term would team up with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in forcing Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Begin’s alarm about that prospect was described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin’s government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinians.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington," Kimche wrote. "They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Extensive evidence now exists that Begin’s preference for Ronald Reagan led Israelis to join in a covert operation with Republicans to contact Iranian leaders behind Carter’s back and delay release of the 52 American hostages then being held in Iran until after Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s "The Back Story on Iran’s Clashes."]

Today, Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu seems as strained as Carter’s relationship with Begin was three decades ago. And already many American neocons have signed up with Obama’s Republican rivals, including with GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney whose foreign policy white paper was written by prominent neocons.

So the question now is: Will the President of the United States take his place amid the herd of cattle getting steered into the slaughterhouse of another war?

Herding Americans to War With Iran

They buried a young scientist called Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan in Tehran on Friday. And if the hazardous carousel of attacks, embargoes and official threats does not slow down soon, there could be other bodies and hopes wrapped in a sheet and put into the ground. Many more young men, peace in the Straits of Hormuz and beyond, and supplies of oil at an affordable price could all be as dead as the assassinated Roshan if the crisis over Iran's nuclear project ratchets up further.

The United States, trying to put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme, is pressing for a worldwide embargo on sales of oil from Iran, the world's second-largest supplier. Iran says it would then order its navy to close the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 per cent of global oil passes. The White House response is that this would be the "crossing of a red line", which would be met with armed response. Britain agrees and has despatched HMS Daring to the area. Yesterday, a semi-official Iranian news agency said Tehran would punish "behind-the-scene elements" involved in Roshan's death. This weekend tensions are as high as they have been in a long while.

The US and Israel are not alone in believing that Iran's nuclear work is designed not, as Tehran maintains, purely for energy supply, but so the Shia state has a weapons capacity. A week ago, the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) confirmed that Iran was now enriching uranium to 20 per cent, a level more appropriate to weapons than energy supply. And, in November, the IAEA issued a document drawing on 1,000 pages of intelligence which said for the first time that some of the alleged experiments can have no other purpose than developing nuclear weapons. On 28 January, a senior UN nuclear agency team will visit Tehran to discuss allegations that Iran is involved in secret nuclear weapons work.

President Barack Obama approved new sanctions last month that would target Iran's central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad. The US has delayed implementing the sanctions for at least six months, worried about sending the price of oil higher at a time when the global economy is struggling. The attempts to embargo Iranian oil sales have met a frosty reception in China, and a pretty cool one in Japan and India. European Union foreign ministers are expected to agree to a ban on imports of Iranian crude oil on 23 January. However, even Europe, whose governments largely share the concerns of Israel and Washington over Iran's nuclear ambitions, is looking for ways to limit the pain of an embargo. Firms in Iran's three biggest EU oil customers, Italy, Spain and Greece, all suffering economic pain, have lately extended existing purchase deals in the hope at least of delaying the impact of any embargo for months.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, the anger on show at the funeral of Mostafa Roshan, when thousands screamed "Death to Israel! Death to America!", grows. Yesterday, Iran's official news agency, IRNA, said the country was holding Britain and the US responsible for the assassination. Tehran has now sent two separate diplomatic notes to London and Washington, in which it claimed that both countries had an "obvious role" in the killing of Roshan. It has previously accused Israel's Mossad, the CIA and Britain's spy agency of engaging in an underground "terrorism" campaign against nuclear-related targets, including at least three killing since early 2010 and the release of a malicious computer virus known at Stuxnet in 2010 which temporarily disrupted controls of some centrifuges - a key component in nuclear fuel production. All three countries have denied the accusations.

Like other Iranian scientists working on Iran's nuclear programme before him, Roshan was killed by a magnetic bomb placed on his car by two men on a motorbike. Tehran swiftly said the assassins were working for Israel, with President Ahmadinejad declaring: "Once again the dirty hands of arrogance and the Zionist elements have deprived our scientific and academic community of the graceful presence of one our young intellectuals."

While assassination by opponents of the Tehran regime is the most obvious explanation, opposition groups or internal saboteurs cannot be ruled out. And the defections of at least two prominent Iranian nuclear scientists raise the question of whether some of the killings might be an inside job, aimed at those thought to be actually, or potentially, disloyal - with the added benefit of being carried out in a way that deflects blame abroad. Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible.

The Israelis, as ever, are relaxed about being blamed, as they were in the case of the other assassinated Iranian scientists. In an interview on Friday with CNN Spanish, Shimon Peres, Israel's President, said that "to the best of my knowledge" Israel was not involved in the hit on Roshan. Given the longevity of Mr Peres's intimate connection with Israel's defence establishment, his words carry some weight. But his remarks were limited to this one assassination out of several - successful and unsuccessful - attempts on the lives of scientists connected with Iran's nuclear programme.

There is little doubt that Israel has worked covertly in the past, along with the US, to perpetrate some of what the IDF Chief of Staff, Benny Ganz, making predictions about what might happen in 2012, reportedly described last week as "unnatural events". And not always in co-operation with the US. A new and apparently well-sourced report in Foreign Policy describes how, to the vexation of the Bush administration and US intelligence, Mossad agents using US passports posed as CIA operatives, mainly in London, and sought to recruit members of the Pakistani Sunni extremist organisation Jundallah during 2007-08 to carry out anti-regime operations inside Iran.

The assassination, whoever carried it out, was obviously aimed at delaying and harrying Iran's nuclear programme, but such killings certainly will not stop the programme or bring Iran to the negotiating table. And security officials think time is running out. They believe Iran will pass the technological threshold for producing nuclear weapons - the "point of no return" - later this year, and that they will be able to develop an actual weapon within two or three years.

Hence the raising of stakes by both sides. The hope is that, amid the brinkmanship, some diplomatic way through is found. In remarks made in an interview with The Weekend Australian and released on Friday night, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, broke - for him - new ground by declaring that sanctions were actually working. "For the first time, I see Iran wobble under the sanctions that have been adopted and especially under the threat of strong sanctions on their central bank," he declared. "If these sanctions are coupled with a clear statement by the international community, led by the US, to act militarily to stop Iran if sanctions fail, Iran may consider not going through the pain. There's no point gritting your teeth if you're going to be stopped anyway."

If nothing else, the interview implied that the Prime Minister believes that Israel's refusal to rule out a military strike has had, as he would see it, a positive impact on the international community's willingness to impose genuinely tough sanctions. The alternative to them working is not a good one. Sanctions, like covert operations, are not a mutually exclusive alternative to war, of course; indeed, they can exacerbate the tensions that then lead to war. But, for now, those wanting to avoid a conflagration in the Middle East have to hope that Mr Netanyahu's new, if cautious, expressions of faith in them are both genuine and sustained.

Tension at new high as Iran vows to punish West

The West is shredding its values in the name of security as nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in distant lands are killed with impunity, writes Mehdi Hasan.

On the morning of January 11, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He was not armed, nor anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage, we have been treated to undisguised glee.

''On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead,'' bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum. ''I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly.''

On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced: ''I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear.''

This sentiment was echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the London Telegraph: ''I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes.''

These ''men on motorbikes'' have been described as ''assassins''. But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.

Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance (''such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim''); moral distance (''the kind of intense belief in moral superiority''); and mechanical distance (''the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight'').

Thus Western liberals, who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers as state-sponsored murder, fall quiet as their states kill nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands with impunity. Yet a ''targeted killing'', the human rights lawyer and anti-drone activist, Clive Stafford Smith, tells me, ''is just the death penalty without due process''.

Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terrorism suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video-game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified.

Nor are we only talking about foreigners. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaeda supporter and US citizen. On September 30, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdel-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment (''No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law'').

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be ''placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the President of its decisions ... There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel ... Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.''

Should ''secret panels'' and ''kill lists'' be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner?

Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against Western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. ''Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them,'' George Orwell observed, ''and there is almost no kind of outrage ... which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side.''

But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? This is not complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and risk descending into lawless barbarism?

Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman.

State-Sponsored Killing Is Just Murder By Another Name

There is little realism behind the demand that Tehran give up its capacity to enrich uranium.

The Iranian nuclear controversy is reaching a critical juncture. On Monday, the European Union agreed on an oil embargo as part of sanctions against the country. On Sunday, Britain, the US and France sent warships through the Strait of Hormuz. Recent months have seen a big rise in the twin risks of military action and grave damage to the world economy. This is the consequence of what I believe to be a great diplomatic overbid - the West's demand that Iran surrender its capacity to enrich uranium.

Nine years have passed since I first talked to Iranian diplomats about their nuclear program. Then, I was Britain's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency and I disbelieved the reassuring words of my Iranian interlocutors about their commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. At the time, I was all for denying Iran any capacity relevant to making nuclear weapons. Now, however, I see things differently.

The treaty prohibits the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear weapons. But it permits the uranium enrichment that has been at the heart of the West's quarrel with Iran. I say ''the West's quarrel'' because more has changed since 2003 than my beliefs.

Then, almost all the states in the IAEA were angry that Iran had concealed its research into enriching uranium. They backed the West's demand that Iran account for its secret work. And they supported the West's view that Iran must suspend enrichment until that accounting was complete.

Now, the West is all but isolated. Most non-Westerners would prefer to see Iran treated like other treaty parties - allowed to enrich uranium in return for intrusive monitoring by IAEA inspectors. My sympathies lie with the non-Westerners. My hunch is this gathering crisis could be avoided by a deal along the following lines - Iran would accept top-notch IAEA safeguards in return for being allowed to continue enriching uranium. In addition, Iran would volunteer some confidence-building measures to show it has no intention of making nuclear weapons.

This, essentially, is the deal that Iran offered Britain, France and Germany in 2005. With hindsight, that offer should have been snapped up. It wasn't, because our objective was to put a stop to all enrichment in Iran.

That has remained the West's aim ever since, despite countless Iranian reminders that they are unwilling to be treated as a second-class party to the treaty and despite all the evidence that the Iranian character is more inclined to defiance than buckling under pressure.

But that missed opportunity need not prove lethal if the West can pull back now and join the rest of the world in seeing an agreement of this kind as the prudent way forward. Some might object: ''But surely the IAEA just reported that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons?'' No. The IAEA says that before 2003 Iran researched some of the know-how needed for a weapon and that further research may have taken place in the years since.

The key bits of November's IAEA report were based on material supplied by Western intelligence. For years, the Western assessment has been that Iran seeks the capability to build nuclear weapons but has not taken a decision to produce them.

Imposing sanctions or even going to war could be a proportionate - and therefore a just - reaction to any Iranian decision to acquire nuclear weapons. But these measures are a disproportionate response to a state acting on its right to enrich uranium.

At the moment, we are locked into a process of imposing ever-tighter sanctions on Iran. This economic warfare has many drawbacks. It requires an exaggeration of the Iranian ''threat'' that fuels the scaremongering of those who want this pressure to be a mere step on the way to war. It risks provoking retaliation, while hurting ordinary Iranians. And it risks higher oil prices, which the West can ill afford. Moreover, even if Iran were unexpectedly to give way, coercion rarely delivers durable solutions. Its effect on motives is unpredictable. It can breed resentment, while restrictions can be circumvented in time.

It may be asking a lot of our leaders that they swallow their words, lower their sights and focus on a realistic target. They could do it, though, and the talks to take place in Turkey could be the setting for a change of course.

What is much more likely, unhappily, is that we will continue to see a variant on the devil having the best tunes. Far too many US politicians see advantage in whipping up fear of Iran. I can almost hear them sneering that the treaty is for wimps. The odds must be that they will continue to propel the West towards yet another Gulf war. Still, nothing is inevitable.

Peter Jenkins was Britain's permanent representative to the IAEA from 2001-06. This article was first published in the London Telegraph

Europe Oil Embagro On Iran | Warships Sail Through Hormuz

From Chris Floyd..

This week, the warlords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war againt Iran. (Open war, that is; their covert war has been going on for decades -- via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein.) On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil.

The embargo bans all new oil contracts with Iran, and cuts off all existing deals after July. The embargo is accompanied by a freeze on all European assets of the Iranian central bank. In imposing these draconian measures on a country which is not at war with any nation, which has not invaded or attacked another nation in centuries, and which is developing a nuclear energy program that is not only entirely legal under international law but is also subject to the most stringent international inspection regime ever seen, the EU is "targeting the economic lifeline of the regime," as one of its diplomats put it, with admirable candor.

The embargo will have serious, perhaps disastrous effects on many of Europe's sinking economies, which are heavy users of Iranian oil. This is particularly true in Greece, the poster boy for our modern "Shock Doctrine über alles" global economic system. For even as Greece writhes beneath the blows of European bankers determined to bleed the country dry to avoid the consequences of their own knowingly corrupt loan policies, the Iranians have been giving the Greeks substantial discounts on oil, which has helped ease -- at least in some measure -- the economic ruin being imposed on the "birthplace of democracy."

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2210-pups-on-parade-eu-obediently-pushes-toward-war-with-iran.html

The head of US intelligence has warned that there is an increasing likelihood that Iran could carry out attacks in America or against US and allied targets around the world.

The warning from the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, reflects rapidly rising tensions over Iran's nuclear programme after the US and EU announced embargoes on the Iranian oil trade in the past few weeks, Israel leaked details of its preparation for a possible conflict and both the west and Iran boosted their military readiness in the Gulf.

The US plans to send a third aircraft carrier to the region in March, while Iran's military has threatened to block the entrance to the Gulf in the strait of Hormuz and is planning to hold naval exercises there in the next few weeks involving a host of new weapons.

Presenting his annual "worldwide threat assessment" to Congress, Clapper said an alleged plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington last year, which the US blamed on the Iran's Revolutionary Guard, "shows that some Iranian officials - probably including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei - have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime."

Clapper added: "Iran's willingness to sponsor future attacks in the US or against our interests abroad probably will be shaped by Tehran's evaluation of the costs it bears for the plot against the ambassador as well as Iranian leaders' perceptions of US threats against the regime."

Western officials say that in the past year there has been a notable increase in activity around the world by suspected members of Iran's Quds force, the external operations arm of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which they say could reflect positioning of units capable of carrying out reprisal attacks against western and Israeli targets if Iran was itself attacked. "There have been a lot of reports recently of IRGC activity abroad," one western official said. "There is a great deal of worry about the IRGC carrying out covert and deniable actions. But they may be overestimating how much they can hide their role. The US and others are very concerned about this.

"In this situation, there is a risk of miscalculation," the official added, "or of rogue elements operating independently."

US officials say that the alleged Washington bomb plot showed a new recklessness by an increasingly embattled Iranian regime. An Iranian-American was charged last October with planning to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the US while he ate at his favourite Washington restaurant, potentially killing many Americans at the same time.

The US has claimed authorisation for the attack came from the highest levels of the regime, but Clapper's remarks marked the first time Washington has openly blamed the supreme leader.

However, a western official cautioned that there was no evidence a final decision had been taken to go ahead with the attack. "Our understanding is that this was at the stage of operational planning. The order was for everything to be put in place. There was not, as far as I know, a green light," the official said.

In recent days, both the Thai and Azeri governments made a number of arrests of suspects allegedly linked to Iranian intelligence who are accused of planning to kill Israel diplomats and a rabbi. One possibility, western governments believe, is that the plots were intended as reprisals for a string of murders in Tehran of Iranian scientists linked to the country's nuclear programme. Iran has blamed Mossad for the killings, an accusation that many western officials think is plausible.

After an Iranian threat last month to close the strait of Hormuz in response to oil sanctions, the US has deployed two aircraft carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Carl Vinson, in the region. A thirdis scheduled to head to the Gulf in March.

John Pike, a military analyst and the head of the GlobalSecurity.org thinktank said: "That almost never happens. They seldom even have two."

He added that a fourth carrier, the USS John Stennis, was sailing away from the area but at a slow pace and could be back within a few days.

Tensions have been stoked further by leaked details of Israeli military preparations and cabinet deliberations on whether to strike Iran in the next few months, in an effort to set back its nuclear programme by a few years. Western officials confess they are unsure to what extent such reports represent an Israeli bluff to force urgent action by the US and its European allies, but say they do take the Israeli threats seriously.

One possibility is that Israel could launch air strikes at the height of the US presidential election campaign, on the grounds that the Obama administration would have to mute any politically risky criticism of a longstanding US ally.

Some observers believe the planned European and US oil embargoes, due to come into effect five months from now with potentially severe implications for the Iranian economy, along with a military build-up in the region, could themselves raise the risk of miscalculation on all sides.

"I don't think they are playing Iran anything like as well as they think they are," said Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Tehran. "The oil embargo tends to give those elements in Iran who want to have maximal defences, including nuclear defences, added weight to their arguments. Also they are poking Iran with a sharp stick but this is not accompanied by a new negotiating incentives."

In a strikingly critical report, an influential Israeli thinktank, the Institute for National Security Studies, warned that the Israeli leadership could be rushing into a decision to attack without properly thinking of the implications. The authors said that Israeli society should "not assume that decision makers will automatically make correct choices based on a rational of an attack's cost effectiveness".

"Past experience has proven that such an in-depth discussion does not always take place," the report said. It questioned whether a nuclear Iran was really an existential threat to Israel and warned that unilateral action would alienate the US and other Israeli allies.

"The image - not the first of its kind - will be of an Israel unilaterally violating the rules of the international game and launching a military campaign without legitimacy from the security council. This might increase Israel's isolation as well contribute to its delegitimisation."

Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. The west and Israel allege it is intended to give Iran at least the capacity to make a bomb, but Clapper conceded in his remarks : "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

Iranian Attack On America & Allies Increasingly Likely

45 US Bases Surround Iran

Each star on the above map is a US base.

But, just to be clear & as everyone understands, Iran is threatening US.

A perfect example of propaganda demonising Tran as the greatest threat to world peace.

More here & here.

Antony Loewenstein