By Kenneth J. Theisen
As Bush regime beats war drums, IAEA Chief states this is “a reminder of pre-war Iraq”
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohamed ElBaradei chastised the Bush regime on September 7th warning against the sounding of the “war drums” over the Iranian nuclear program. El Baradei stated that the IAEA has a timetable for Iran to disclose its past nuclear activities, but that the Bush administration and it allies were not allowing the IAEA to do its job.
The Bush regime contends that Iran’s uranium enrichment program is for producing nuclear weapons and the regime says that all options to stop this are on the table, including nuclear war. In direct response ElBaradei called for stopping the “war drums from those who are basically saying ‘the solution is bomb Iran.'” He accurately stated that this is “a reminder of pre-war Iraq”We have not seen any weaponization of their program, nor have we received any information to that effect – no smoking gun or information from intelligence. Based on the evidence, we have, we do not see … a clear and present danger that requires that you go beyond diplomacy… For the last few years, we have been told by the Security Council … that we needed to clarify the outstanding issues. We obviously had to welcome Tehran’s decision to cooperate with the agency.”
Bush regime State Department spokesman Tom Casey retorted he “would certainly hope that those kinds of comments wouldn’t be referred to the United States, because they certainly wouldn’t be true. It would be really hard for anyone to say that the United States has been anything but at the forefront of supporting the work of the IAEA to try and resolve these issues.” The last thing the Bush regime would ever consider is war, right?
Recently the IAEA and Iran negotiated a plan committing Tehran to report on its past nuclear activities by the end of the year. ElBaradei said, “We have a timeline which would enable us by … December to check clearly whether Iran is ready to work with us in good faith or whether (as) some like to suspect, Iran is buying time. This is a reasonable time in our view to resolve a number of complex issues.” The IAEA plan is to be debated at a 35-nation board meeting of the agency that begins on September 10th.
The Bush regime has been highly critical of the plan and accuses Iran of just trying to direct attention away from is nuclear weapons” ambitions. While going through the motions of diplomacy, including attempting to increase U.N. sanctions, the administration has been planning military moves against Iran.
WAS ISRAELI FLYOVER OF SYRIA A PRELUDE TO ATTACKING IRAN?
On September 6th, Syria announced that Israeli aircraft invaded Syrian airspace. The question is why Israel would do this now. One answer: test an air route to Iran. The possibility that Israel’s air force may attack Iranian nuclear facilities by going through Syrian airspace should not be discounted.
The air corridor which the Israeli aircraft penetrated is the closest straight line from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. Israel can legally and safely fly in the Mediterranean. On June 7, 1981 Israel bombed and destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facilities. It is not out of the question that the Bush regime could let Israel attack Iran’s facilities as well.
Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, stated, “Of course Israel wants to let the Americans do that. But if we are left alone, the Israeli army is preparing to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat – if the political level allows it to – and this could have been a part of that.”
On January 20, 2005 Dick Cheney appeared on the Don Imus show where he said about a possible Israeli attack on Iran, “Well, one of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked, that if, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant capability, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
CIA DIRECTOR DEMANDS MEDIA COOPERATION IN CIA TORTURE, RENDITION
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden claimed that fewer than 100 prisoners have been held in secret CIA prisons since 2002. He stated that even fewer prisoners were subject to “extraordinary rendition to other countries”. The “extraordinary rendition” program was revealed by the media in 2005. This program allows the exporting of torture when a prisoner is sent to another country for “interrogation.” The Bush regime claims it gets a guarantee from foreign governments that they will not torture prisoners that are sent to them by the U.S. But then the Bush regime does not think waterboarding and other extreme methods of “interrogation” constitute torture. A number of prisoners in the rendition program have ultimately been released because of their innocence and they have reported being tortured, contrary to claims of the Bush regime and its apologists.
In his September 7th speech, Hayden told the media to keep stop what few attempts there have been in the mainstream media to learn of these programs, while at the same time defending the Bush regime’s secret prisons and its rendition program. Hayden claimed, “Revelations of sources and methods, and an impulse to drag anything [the] CIA does to the darkest corner of the room, can make it very difficult for us to do our vital work.” He said such media leaks damage national security. He also said that media reports “cost us several promising counterterrorism and counter proliferation assets,” when CIA sources stopped cooperating because of fear of exposure. He stated that media reports often falsely report information about CIA interrogations and that the media should stick to “exposing al-Qaida and its adherents for what they are.” From Hayden’s point of view, the media should just report what is contained in Bush regime press releases and ignore all the crimes of the regime.
EDWARDS WILLING TO INVADE PAKISTAN JUST LIKE OBAMA
“I want to be clear about one thing: If we have actionable intelligence about imminent terrorist activity and the Pakistani government refuses to act, we will.” With these words on September 7th, John Edwards joined Democratic candidate Barack Obama in flexing his national security muscles with his willingness to invade Pakistan. Last month Obama made a similar declaration in a speech.
In Edward’s speech he also stated, “We need a counterterrorism policy that will actually counter terrorism. We’ve got to throw away the failed George Bush policies of the past, and move in a bold new direction”Today, terrorism is worse in Iraq, and it’s worse around the world. It means the results are in on George Bush’s so-called global war on terror and it’s not just a failure, it’s a double-edged failure.” Evidently invading another country constitutes a “new direction” for Edwards. But for the people of the world, it is the wrong direction.