Letter from Iran

(The better informed everybody becomes the greater the chance that war can be prevented and propaganda can not distort reality. With a couple of clicks you can do your part by simply forwarding this to others.)
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(In a courtroom where a judge and jury are to arrive at a verdict most of the evidence depends on the police report. Unfortunately in Iran's case the current police chief is biased which makes reaching a just verdict very difficult. Below Prof. Muhammad Sahimi's details just how biased the police chief is.)

Yukiya Amano: Minion of the Empire

By Prof. Muhammad Sahimi

//original.antiwar.com/muhammad-sahimi/2012/0...

Amano has demonstrated that he is nothing but a minion of the United States whose reports on Iran have contributed significantly to hysteria about Iran and its nuclear program, which has remained completely peaceful.

It is clear why Amano makes baseless allegations about undeclared nuclear materials in Iran. If such materials did exist, they would represent a gross violation of Iran’s safeguards obligations. Thus, Amano alleges their existence to provide ammunition to the West in its confrontation with Iran, even though he has no evidence to support his outrageous claim. Such allegations have become a pattern in Amano’s reports on Iran.

Once again the U.S. government is using international organizations to advance its imperial ambitions. It is helped by Yukiya Amano, who has demonstrated that he is willing to be a minion of the empire, and by the mainstream media, which accepts Amano’s allegations about Iran’s nuclear program without examining them critically and thereby contributes significantly to the hysteria over Iran’s nuclear program. Only a sustained public campaign of informing the people and pressuring the mainstream media to report the truth, rather than propaganda, can reverse this trend, and there are already signs that the tide is turning.

For years The New York Times’ David Sanger and William Broad have routinely referred to Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapon program, but they took a particularly hawkish position on the issue after the IAEA latest report on Iran’s nuclear program in November 2011, describing the report, which was simply a rehashing of the unfounded old allegations, as full of “chilling” details.

Yukiya Amano is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. If his antics continue, the IAEA will be a prime culprit in starting a war with Iran.

(Make sure to keep up with the writings of Prof. Muhammad Sahimi as he presents one of the most thorough reporting on what is going on in Iran which is vital to understand by American policy makers. His writings can be found mostly on Tehran Bureau and Antiwar.com)

//original.antiwar.com/author/muhammad-sahimi...

(Another must read is Prof. Sahimi's latest on Tehran Bureau "U.S. Demands will Doom Negotiations with Iran.")

//www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbure...

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US-Israel Deal to Demand Qom Closure Threatens Nuclear Talks

Gareth Porter

//www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/13

The Obama administration appears to be counting heavily on the one incentive it is prepared to offer in the talks: the recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil. The U.S. and Europeans will certainly demand strict limits on the number of centrifuges and the level of enriched uranium Iran could maintain.

Iranian agreement to such limits would require major changes in U.S. policy toward Iran, including dismantling sanctions and accepting a major Iranian political-diplomatic role in the region as legitimate.

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Why Washington’s Iran Policy Could Lead to Global Disaster: What History Should Teach Us About Blockading Iran

By Juan Cole

//www.tomdispatch.com/post/175528/tomgram%3A_...

Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.

It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians.

The United States is already effectively embroiled in an economic war against Iran.

And worse is on the horizon. A financial blockade is being imposed that seeks to prevent Tehran from selling petroleum, its most valuable commodity, as a way of dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear enrichment program.

Iran’s supreme theocrat, Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly condemned the atom bomb and nuclear weapons of all sorts as tools of the devil, weaponry that cannot be used without killing massive numbers of civilian noncombatants. In the most emphatic terms, he has, in fact, pronounced them forbidden according to Islamic law.

Only a few years ago, a majority of Iranians disapproved of the idea of having an atomic bomb. Now, according to a recent Gallup poll more support the militarization of the nuclear program than oppose it.

The great oil blockade of 2012 may still be largely financially focused, but it carries with it the same dangers of escalation and intervention -- as well as future bitterness and blowback -- as did the campaign of the early 1950s.

If children suffer or even experience increased mortality because of the sanctions, that development could provoke future attacks on the U.S. or American troops in the Greater Middle East. (Don’t forget that the Iraqi sanctions, considered responsible for the deaths of some 500,000 children, were cited by al-Qaeda in its “declaration of war” on the U.S.)

As the sanctions morph into a virtual blockade, they raise the specter that all blockades do -- of provoking a violent response. Just as dangerous is the specter that the sanctions will drag on without producing tangible results, impelling covert or overt American action against Tehran to save face.

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Q& A: Hooman Majd on Iran and sanctions

By Matthew Cassel

//www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/03/...

The difference this time is that the administration is not trying to prepare the public for war and is not manipulating the media, which is actually the ironic thing because in some ways they're trying to step back a bit … it's the media this time that has just jumped on this idea that we're going to go to war.

And I certainly think there’s an influence from the Israeli media and the Israeli propaganda machine, which is very powerful and permeates the American media all the time. I think there is a concerted effort on (their) part to prepare people, particularly Americans, that it's a righteous war.

Obama came into office saying that they were going to engage Iran and they never really did. … Telling Iranians 'take it or leave it' on deals that they think are good deals for the west, is not diplomacy. You don’t tell people to ‘take it or leave it,’ there is back and forth.

Outright rejection of a Brazilian-Turkish initiative (in 2010) to alleviate the crisis on the part of the US administration and going for more sanctions, that’s also not diplomacy … You can’t argue that the US administration has engaged Iran. That is nonsense.

I think there is definitely a nationalistic sense that we're under siege among a big part of the population. And the people who oppose the regime or want to oppose the regime ... also feel like they're being unfairly targeted.

Lifting the sanctions is not an easy feat on its own. In Iraq, sanctions weren’t lifted until six years after the invasion. And that was when the US controlled the damn place ... It’s not like Obama can just wave his hand and say ‘alright, sanctions are over.’

Everything that we’re doing, not just the west but even the pressure that some of the Arab countries are putting on Iran by going along with the sanctions is actually incentivizing Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

Headlines tend to form peoples opinions. You get headlines like, ‘Iran’s nuclear programme,’ they always refer to this. And sometimes they'll sneak in ‘nuclear weapons programme,’ when it doesn't exist and even the US intelligence community says it doesn't exist. Leon Panetta and President Obama say it doesn't exist, and our media still talks about it as if it exists. If you repeat it enough times it becomes true.

If you report that Ahmadinejad wants to kill all the Jews of the planet it becomes true even though he’s never said that. He's never said that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, he’s always said that the ‘Zionist regime will disappear.’ And he’s even explained it in interviews with American media with Charlie Rose he’s said ‘it’s clear what I meant. The Soviet Union doesn't exist on the map anymore, now it’s Russia. Doesn't mean all Russians are dead. South Africa the apartheid regime doesn't exist anymore, doesn't mean that all South Africans (are dead).’

And the other thing is that no one in the American media ever want to talk about fact that Israel has 200 nukes and nuclear powered submarines in the Persian Gulf and a second strike ability. (Israel) could destroy Iran in a matter of minutes, but nobody wants to talk about that. And Iran has no such ability and even if they built and tested a nuclear weapon would probably still not have the ability to target Israel that is in a way effective and not kill millions of Palestinians who are they supposedly support.

You drop a nuclear weapon on Israel you destroy the third most holy site in Islam, which is Jerusalem, and you destroy the lives of millions of Palestinians. It’s nonsensical.

And I partly blame the Iranian government. They’re very bad at explaining themselves (and) countering a lot of this stuff. On top of that you have the 2009 elections in Iran, which did not present Iran in a good light. You’ve got a regime that in the minds of people in the west is already a horrific, brutal, despotic, illegitimate regime, and the Iranian people want to be free from this tyranny. It plays well into the whole thing.

If you try everything to destroy the Iranian economy, which is what basically America is set out to do. And President Obama said himself that (Iranians) are going to hurt, and that's the idea to continue trying to do that. But to what end? To try to get Iran to capitulate on its nuclear programme? Well, like I said before that's not going to happen.

So what is the next step and when you have Obama and basically everyone else saying well
if it doesn't work then we’re going to bomb, then you start thinking ‘ well it’s not going to work so its just a matter of time before they bomb.

Unless something happens, unless president Obama changes tact here and suddenly decides the US has to compromise as much as Iran in the negotiations, people are pessimistic about the chances.
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The Undersea World of Ali Khamenei

By Scott Charney

//www.fpif.org/articles/the_undersea_world_of...

The reason for this submarine construction binge is very similar to the reason for Iran's missile program: it circumvents their aerial deficiencies and, in so doing, creates a deterrent to attack.

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Iran's nuclear programme: legal debate stirs over basis for US or Israeli attack

The Guardian

//www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/12/iran-m...

Amid the sabre-rattling and bluster over Tehran's nuclear programme, a furious if little-noticed debate is boiling over the legal basis for a US or Israeli attack on Iran.

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Iran Nuclear Crisis Needs ‘Disruptive Diplomacy’, Not Shock and Awe

By Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo is Executive Director of Greenpeace International

If we are really concerned about human security, if we are really concerned about our children and grandchildren’s peace and security, then we should be mustering all investments to move us in a direction of green, clean, renewable energy options. We must recognise that our quest for nuclear energy, the attendant threat of nuclear proliferation, and our reliance on fossil fuel-based energy have been the major drivers of conflict, war and flawed foreign policies.

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3 Decades Later, Ex-Hostages Press On for Damages From Iran

By Matthew Wald

//www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/us/politics/ex-h...

(I think Iran should compensate the former hostages even though the Algiers Accords stated that they could not sue Iran. They were by standards to larger events and it is unfair that they should pay the price of those long past events.)