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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Just what Tel Aviv ordered? Inside the”manufactured”Iran nuclear crisis

The representative of the Jewish minority in Iran’s parliament (Majlis) has recently given an extensive interview to the Iranian Fars News Agency and discussed his different viewpoints regarding the Israeli regime.

According to Siamak Mareh Sedq, Tel Aviv needs to create crisis in the Middle East in order to survive. “If Israel faces no threat it will be destroyed within one month. Israel needs (regional) crises in a bid to continue its existence,” he said.

This analysis is exactly what the audacious commentators, intellectuals and journalists in the West who dare to criticize the policies and practices of the Israeli regime without fear of losing their jobs or being vilified as “anti-Semites” agree on. This is something that even the Israelis know well and confess to. An anonymous Israeli official once privately told the president of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, “You have to recognize that we Israelis need an existential threat. It is part of the way we view the world. If we can find more than one, that would be preferable, but we will settle for one.”

But what I want to touch upon today is not Israel’s illegitimate and unlawful military attacks on Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1967 or the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, even though all of these events need investigation and contemplation as the crises which Israel has nimbly created in order to consolidate its position in the Middle East and secure its fragile survival by the use of military force.

What I want to allude to is the crisis which Israel manufactured around one decade ago to make sure that the international community will be busy dealing with the different aspects of the crisis until finding a solution, and in this period, it can work to build more settlements, kill or imprison more Palestinian leaders and fortify the castle of its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

The crisis that Israel manufactured was the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. This is the topic which the prominent American investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter skillfully discusses in his recently published book “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.”

"Israel has been pulling all the stops to foil the endeavors of Iran and the international community to settle their dispute."

Although Gareth Porter does not concur with me on all points I have mentioned, he generally shed a light on “how Israel and the George W. Bush administration successfully portrayed the various actions taken by Western nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as responses to a long history of Iranian covert work on militarization of its nuclear program.”

The breakthrough book which is the product of Gareth Porter’s six years of close investigation of Iran’s nuclear standoff and the developments of Iran’s foreign policy tries to show that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been used as a pretext by the United States in unison with Israel to put pressure on Iran and extinguish its technological and political progress.

Porter says that the IAEA used documents as the reference of its allegations and accusations against Iran that were provided to it either directly by Israel or through the terrorist cult Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MKO or MEK) which was just recently removed from the U.S. Department of State’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in an attempt to provide political shelter for the group which sees Tel Aviv as one of its main benefactors and sponsors.

The book provides reliable and confirmable evidence showing that Israel was one of the main culprits behind the complication of Iran’s nuclear dossier through forging false documents and evidence and presenting them to the IAEA.

Porter’s book published by the “Just World Books” is a must read and is praised by such figures as the renowned American director Oliver Stone, leading investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, prominent Middle East expert Juan Cole and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman.

Gareth Porter’s book inspired me to think about the crisis that has been manufactured in the most wicked way by Israel and its patrons and led to years of animosity and acrimony between Iran and the West, in particular the United States. The controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program soared when the IAEA Board of Governors, under the pressure by the United States, voted in 2006 to refer Iran’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council.

It was after then that the economic sanctions began being shot at Iran one after the other. The inhumane, illegal and unjustifiable sanctions created different hardships for ordinary Iranians, including the patients suffering from chronic disorders in need of foreign-imported medical equipments and pharmaceutical products.

The “manufactured crisis” not only embittered Iran’s trade with the United States and the European Union, but also imposed costs on the European firms that sustained significant damages as a result of cutting their business with Iran.

There are credible statistics showing that in such countries as Germany and France, thousands of people lost their jobs due to the direct or indirect consequences of the economic sanctions. The sanctions which were pioneered and cheered by Tel Aviv also caused serious irregularities in international banking systems and protocols and brought about disastrous outcomes for the global economy.

However, after almost one decade of dispute and quarrel, Iran and the six world powers have once again sat at the negotiation table, and the first outcome of their intense negotiations became evident in November 24, 2013 when they reached an interim agreement in Geneva known as the “Joint Plan of Action” by which Iran would limit certain portions of its nuclear activities and will receive relief from some of the important parts of the sanctions it has been enduring in the recent years. This is what dissipates and fritters away more than one decade of Israel’s efforts to hamper Iran’s relations with the world and embroil it in a stalemate over its nuclear program.

As the negotiations for a comprehensive and final agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) get started in Vienna, Israel finds itself in an awkward position that will be costing it a lot if the talks lead to substantive and successful results.

Israel has been pulling all the stops to foil the endeavors of Iran and the international community to settle their dispute, which is why the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Geneva accord a “historic mistake” and the “deal of a century” for Iran.

The fact that Iran’s nuclear file was passed to the Security Council by the IAEA, that the Security Council decided to impose four rounds of sanctions on Iran in its eight resolutions regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and also the fact that the United States, in the past ten years, went through fire and water to make sure that Iran will remain under huge economic and political pressures indicate that Israel was pleased and somehow relieved as it could see that its efforts to manufacture a new crisis in the region were bearing fruits. No conscious mind would accept the claim that Israel didn’t play a central role in Iran’s nuclear standoff.

By Kourosh Ziabari , albawaba.com

March 27, 2014 0 comments
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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Manufactured Story about Iran’s Nuclear Program

Israel used Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult

As Iran and the world powers resume nuclear talks in Vienna with the hope of reaching a comprehensive agreement over Iran’s nuclear program by mid-July, the Israelis and their lobbyists in Washington are intensifying their efforts to scuttle the talks. In addition to all the efforts in the US Congress to impose additional sanctions on Iran, thus bringing the talks to a premature end, there are indications that Israel and her friends are continuing with various acts of sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities.

In 2010, the so-called Stuxnet virus temporarily disrupted the operation of thousands of Iranian centrifuges. At least five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated. Iran has also said that it has discovered tiny timed explosives planted on centrifuges but has disabled them before they could go off. On Monday 17 March 2014, Iran said that an alleged attempt to sabotage one of its nuclear facilities had involved foreign intelligence agencies that had tampered with imported pumps. However, in addition to all those acts of sabotage, there seems to be an intensive effort to manufacture a crisis by means of false intelligence.

Prior to the devastating Iraq war that destroyed the country and killed upwards of half a million people, not to say anything of thousands of Coalition forces who were killed and the two trillion dollars that was spent, a number of neocons bent on the invasion of Iraq manufactured various false reports in order to mislead the public and pave the way for the war.

On September 8, 2002, Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller published a story in the New York Times that openly alleged that Saddam Hussein had intensified his quest for a nuclear bomb. They wrote: “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium… Bush administration officials say the quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes is one of several signs that Mr. Hussein is seeking to revamp and accelerate Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.”

The unsuspecting public was misled by that false intelligence and the result was one of the longest and most disastrous wars in US history.

How the manufactured crisis was manufactured

In his latest groundbreaking book, entitled  A Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of Iran Nuclear Scare , the historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter catalogs a long list of false reports manufactured by Israeli intelligence agencies in order to mislead the public and pave the way for a war against Iran.1

MC-cover-final-684x1024In this book Porter shows how Israeli agents have fabricated many stories in order to accuse Iran of trying to manufacture nuclear weapons. He also shows how the IAEA has been manipulated to put out reports suggesting that Iran had a covert weapons program. One instance of the false intelligence is the story of how some documents allegedly stolen from an Iranian nuclear weapons research program became a primary driving force in building a consensus about an Iranian covert program.

Porter shows how John Bolton cooperated with the Israelis to ensure that “the IAEA would not be able to allow Iran to get by without being accused of having a nuclear program, and he didn’t believe that would be possible unless some special moves were made.”2

Around the same time, in the absence of any proof that Iran was trying to get nuclear weapons, the Israelis decided to create a file of documents, which would be attributed to a covert nuclear weapons program. They got the terrorist group the Mojahedin-e Khalq to make the public case on behalf of Israel about the existence of a covert military program in Iran.

A major revelation in the book concerns the account provided by a former senior official in Germany’s Foreign Ministry, Karsten Voigt , who was in charge of German-U.S. relation from 1997-2013 and who had warned his U.S. colleagues that the information about Iran’s nuclear program had come from a member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq and was unreliable.

The German Intelligence Service, the BND, had warned the Americans during the run-up to the Iraq war that a source used by American officials, now known as Curveball, whose false stories about mobile bioweapons lab had been used by Colin Powell in his UN speech could not be relied upon. However, it seems that the aim of the policy-makers is not to ascertain the truth, but to make use of any material that backs their policies.

As we saw during the run-up to the Iraq war such false assumptions could be very dangerous and could justify an illegal war. The same thing seems to be happening again. As Jim Lobe pointed out in an important article, “Top Israel Lobby Group Loses Battle on Iran, but War Not over,” frenzied efforts to demonize Iran and prevent the success of the talks are still continuing.3

Prominent neoconservative writers Bret Stephens and Reuel Marc Gerecht called for a much tougher approach to talks with Iran over its nuclear program in a debate hosted by the McCain Institute on March 11.4 In an article written in 2002, Reuel Marc Gerecht had argued that an invasion of Iraq would “probably” cause regime change in Iran. 5 As that did not happen, he is at it again, trying to bring the regime change by other means. Meanwhile, State Department Assures Israel that war is likely if Iran talks fail and that attacking Iran is “alternative” to diplomacy.6

However, faulty intelligence has enabled some US analysts to claim that Iran has a large-scale nuclear weapons program. However, none of these assumptions have been based on facts. Porter writes: “US and Israeli policies have been driven by political and bureaucratic interests, not by a rational, objective assessment of available indicators of the motives and intentions of Iranian leaders”.

Nevertheless, the same faulty intelligence has enabled the West to take Iran’s file out of the IAEA and into the U.N. Security Council and to impose unprecedented sanctions on Iran that have gravely affected Iranian economy and the lives of millions of Iranians.

A recent example: The Iranian ship with missiles heading from Iran to Gaza

It is clear that despite some setbacks the Israelis still continue to demonize Iran by any means possible. On the eve of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington early in March 2014 to meet with President Obama and speak at the annual AIPAC conference, suddenly a story grabbed the headlines of most Israeli and US newspapers about the Israeli Special Forces seizing an Iranian ship with missiles heading from Iran to Gaza.

Haaretz reported: “Israeli naval forces on Wednesday intercepted an Iranian arms vessel carrying medium-range missiles in the Red Sea, about some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from the Israeli coast. The shipment was headed for the Gaza Strip via Sudan.” The report helpfully added: “Israel is hoping the incident will help prove to the P5+1 that Iran is still deceiving the West, despite the friendly tone characterizing the recent talks in Vienna over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.”

According to the Israelis, the weaponry actually originated in Syria from where it was flown to Tehran. It was then put on board the Klos-C ship at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. From there it went to Um Qasr in Iraq, before heading back out of the Persian Gulf and round to the Red Sea where it was intercepted. 7

The Israelis say that it was due to dock in Port Sudan, from where the weapons would have moved overland through the Sinai Peninsula and ultimately into the Gaza Strip.

The fact that many parts of the story do not add up does not seem to bother anyone as long as it provides a backdrop to Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington.

Why in the midst of a war would Syria send some of her most sophisticated weapons to Tehran to be then sent to Iraq before heading back to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to go through the Sinai Peninsula that is in the midst of intense insurgency activities, to then be sent to the Gaza Strip through the tunnels that have been destroyed by the new Egyptian regime?

And why it is acceptable for Israel to intercept the ship heading for Sudan in international waters? These are some of the questions that need to be answered.

It seems that those who concocted this story did not even know that since the start of the Syrian crisis Iran has broken with Hamas, which has clearly sided with the rebels. At a time when the Iranian government is getting close to the West and is on the verge of make-or-break talks with the West, why would Iranian leaders jeopardize the success of the talks by trying to smuggle weapons to Hamas, with which they have hostile relations?

As Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s Twitter account noted, the weapons’ shipment was seized just in time “for the AIPAC conference”. He added: “An amazing coincidence! Or the same unsuccessful lies.”

The post 9/11 Karine A story

Shortly after 9/11 when the then reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami expressed condolences to “the great American nation” and collaborated with the Americans in Afghanistan and a new chapter of more friendly relations was about to open up between Iran and America, we had a similar incident, the so-called Karine A affair. In that incident too, commandos from Israel’s Navy seals unit allegedly swooped on the Karine A in international waters in the Red Sea, overpowering the crew of the ship and seizing the weapons that they claimed were intended for the Palestinian Authority headed by Yasser Arafat, with whom Iran did not have very warm relations

Ariel Sharon stood on the dock at Israel’s Red Sea Port of Eilat displaying the alleged weapons that had been seized. The illegal seizure of the ship in international waters achieved Sharon’s two main aims. It blew up the faint hopes of peace with the Palestinians, and at the same time it put an end to any rapprochement between Iran and the United States.

No excuse when it comes to Iran

If in the case of Iraq Western leaders could claim that they were not sure whether Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons or not – although the “Dodgy Dossier” and fabricated intelligence by the Office of Special Plans created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith suggests otherwise – in the case of Iran they do not even have that excuse.

At least since 2003 when an Iranian negotiating team led by Hassan Rouhani and the European Troika (Great Britain, France and Germany) reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and Iran signed the Additional Protocol and even suspended enrichment for over two years, and certainly since 2007 when the NIE said with “high degree of confidence” that Iran did not have an ongoing nuclear weapons program, the world has known that all the hype about Iran’s nuclear weapons was only aimed at manufacturing a false crisis.

It is in the light of all these previous experiences that Gareth Porter’s A Manufactured Crisis is of such great significance, because it shows once and for all with meticulous documentation the nature of the lies concocted by Israel against Iran.

Questions we must ask

The question is why the information provided by the book is not at the top of the news in the Western press?

Why is the case against Iran not reviewed in the light of these revelations and why has a final deal not been reached?

What are the negotiators waiting for and what else do they need to have in order to be convinced of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program?

Why is the public so quiet about all these lies and distortions, and why do they not speak out against a manufactured crisis that could affect us all?

Why are Israeli officials who have been guilty of such willful distortion of truth not brought to book and condemned by the international community?

Are we not colluding with all these lies and disinformation by remaining silent?

The Soviet dissident author Yevgeny Yevtushenko said: “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence itself is a lie.” It is time for all of us to speak out and put an end to all these lies.

•Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis (Just World Books, 2014) For a review of the book see: “A Manufactured Crisis”, by Peter Jenkins, Lobe Log, January 29, 2014. [↩]

•See “Manufacturing a Narrative for War – Gareth Porter on Reality Assets Itself”, The Real News Network, March 17, 2014. [↩]

•Jim Lobe, “Top Israel Lobby Group Loses Battle on Iran, But War Not Over”, antiwar.com, January 23, 2014. [↩]

•See “Iran Nuclear Deal: Breakthrough or Failure”; Also see: Derek Davison, “Give Peace (Talks) a Chance?” Lobe Log, March 12, 2014 [↩]

•See: Reuel Marc Gerecht ,“Regime Change in Iran? Applying George W. Bush’s ‘liberation theology’ to the mullahs”, The Weekly Standard, August 5, 2002 [↩]

•See Jason Ditz, “State Department Assures Israel: War Likely if Iran Talks Fail. Attacking Iran Is ‘Alternative’ to Diplomacy”, antiwar.com, February 01, 2014 [↩]

•See: Israel Halts ‘Weapons Shipment from Iran’, BBC [↩]

Dr Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, Iran, and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard. He is Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies and tutor in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford Read other articles by Farhang, or visit Farhang’s website.

Farhang Jahanpour

March 26, 2014 0 comments
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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Current Iran “Crisis” Began With Overthrow of Democratically Elected Government in 1953

MARK KARLIN interviews GARETH PORTER

In Manufactured Crisis, investigative journalist Gareth Porter details the manipulation and fabrications that have accompanied the current Iranian nuclear situation. The main difference between this and the Iraq war conspiracy, the author says, was that the neoconservatives who were carrying it out never got the war on Iran they wanted.

Have we narrowly averted a war with Iran, and were the Neocons again behind the bellicose threats against Tehran?  Investigative journalist Gareth Porter offers his perspective, as detailed in Manufactured Crisis in this interview with Truthout.

MARK KARLIN: You use the phrase Manufactured Crisis as the title of your book about the Iran nuclear scare. Were you thinking about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s manufactured crisis to justify the Iraq War as precedent?

GARETH PORTER: No, I wasn’t thinking of the direct parallel with the “manufactured crisis” that preceded and paved the way to the invasion and occupation of Iraq when I first came up with the title. But the more I have uncovered about the details of manipulation and fabrications that have accompanied the Iranian crisis, the clearer it has become that the parallel between the two “manufactured crises” is extremely close.

In fact, the book shows that the Bush administration was laying the groundwork for creating a false WMD case against Iran in much the same way that it did in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Readers will be shocked to find that the information that the Bush administration exploited politically most effectively in making the case for a covert nuclear weapons program in Iran came from a German intelligence agency source – a member of the same MEK terrorist organization – just as the source of the famous Iraqi “mobile bioweapons labs” story told by Colin Powell in a UN speech had been the source that the BND [German federal intelligence service] had code-named “Curveball.”

But the parallels between the two conspiracies are even stronger: In both cases the BND warned the US government not to rely on the information from its source, which had been passed on the CIA, because they had concluded it was not trustworthy. And equally startling, in both cases, the Bush administration officials pressured top CIA officials to use the information anyway, while keeping poor Colin Powell ignorant of the BND warning!

I show that the “manufactured crisis” over Iran’s nuclear program was part of a war conspiracy every bit as heinous as the Iraq war conspiracy. The main difference was that the neoconservatives who were carrying it out never got the war on Iran they wanted.

MARK KARLIN: You describe three primary stages to the Iranian nuclear crisis diplomatic narrative.  Can you briefly describe them?

GARETH PORTER: The first stage was triggered by the discovery of the Natanz enrichment facility in 2002 by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a terrorist organization that was working hand in hand with Israel. The Bush administration, in coordination with Israel, used that event to launch an [International Atomic Energy Agency] investigation that was intended by the two allies to put Iran on trial for deceiving the IAEA for two decades in order to cover up a nuclear weapons program. That would in turn make it possible to haul Iran before the UN Security Council, giving the Bush administration a basis for a potential military option.

But the IAEA investigation fizzled out, but the Bush neoconservative-Israel alliance had a secret weapon – a set of documents that was said to have come straight from a Iranian nuclear weapons research project. In 2008, the IAEA, cooperating closely with the Bush administration, began pushing those documents as evidence for Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions, thus beginning the second phase of the crisis.

The third phase of the crisis began with an IAEA report in November 2011 that was based almost entirely on intelligence coming from Israel. It was the signal for the phase of punishing sanctions against Iran’s oil exports and Central Bank, which followed immediately.

MARK KARLIN: What is your perspective on the current “bridge” agreement with Iran between the United States and its allies on the development of its nuclear program?

GARETH PORTER: I’m not sure that it was really necessary to have such an agreement, which appears to have been primarily pushed by the US side. The time spent on negotiating it could have been spent on negotiating the long-term agreement that they are now finally tackling more than three months later. One of the problems I see with it is that it may have reinforced the tendency for Obama administration policymakers to feel that the sanctions had put them in the driver’s seat in the negotiations.

MARK KARLIN: Was regime change in Tehran a major goal of the Iranian nuclear scare?

GARETH PORTER: For the Bush administration’s neoconservative inner core it was absolutely the major goal.  John Bolton and David Wurmser, both close to the Likudists, believed that regime change would require the use of US military force, which was the anticipated end result of the strategy they cooked up with Israel in 2003-04 to make the case that Iran was threatening to get nuclear weapons – the Iran equivalent of the Iraq war conspiracy that involved Wurmser as well.

MARK KARLIN: Within Israel, although Netanyahu was threatening a military strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, a significant number of former prominent Israeli politicians, the military and intelligence services were arguing that such an attack would be a mistake. What explains the unprecedented public disagreement with Netanyahu?

GARETH PORTER: The most important thing to understand about the Israeli threat of war on Iran, as I document in great detail in the book, is that it was always a political ruse which no Israeli government ever intended to actually carry out. It didn’t start with Netanyahu, but he and Defense Minister Ehud Barak refined it to an art form. The public disagreement with the idea of attacking Iran is a reflection of the fact that the Israeli military and intelligence establishment never supported an attack – although many believed that threatening to do so was necessary and effective. After 2011, however former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan broke publicly with the policy, because he believed that Netanyahu was irresponsible and had taken unnecessary risks of provoking Iran.

MARK KARLIN: How did you go about researching the book, given all the smoke screens thrown up around Iran’s nuclear programs. You provide very detailed footnotes to buttress your argument.

GARETH PORTER: It was a combination of two things that gave me sufficient evidence to make what I believe is an iron-clad case that the narrative about an Iranian nuclear weapons program was a fiction: First, I was able to establish clearly one falsehood in the narrative after another by identifying a series of contradictions between the official line and verifiable facts on the public record. In other words close analysis and the use of logic was crucial. Second, although most officials from the Bush and Obama administrations were not interested in cooperating with my investigation, some former intelligence officials and a key German source provided some key insights and facts that helped to give my account much more documentary basis.

MARK KARLIN: Can you summarize the “mystery of the laptop documents”?

GARETH PORTER: The “laptop documents” were the ones said to have come from the purloined laptop of a scientist in a purported Iranian secret nuclear weapons research project. But the Bush administration was always unwilling to answer questions about their origins. Fortunately I was able to penetrate that mystery thanks to a former high-ranking German official who told me on the record how the documents were given to German intelligence by a member of the Muhjadehin-e-Khalq, the terrorist organization that had worked for Saddam against the Iranian regime and then developed close ties with Israel’s Mossad.  I show in the book that the documents could not have been authentic, contrary to the IAEA’s official line that they were “credible” and that they were fabricated by Mossad.

MARK KARLIN: What shadow does the US overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 – and its long-term military support of the Shah – cast over the US confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program?

GARETH PORTER: The US relationship with the Shah, which was a central element of US Middle East policy for decades from 1953 until 1979, cast a long shadow on the policy of the Reagan administration toward Iran’s nuclear program. The Reagan administration was still looking for an opportunity to overthrow the Islamic regime and restore a cooperative government, and its support for Saddam’s war against Iran in the 1980s was the essential reason for trying to stifle the Iranian nuclear program in the early 1980s. I show that the misguided US policy led to Iran’s deciding to have its own uranium enrichment capability, contrary to its original plan.

MARK KARLIN: You single out Robert Gates, who has a best-selling memoir out now, as a key figure in laying the foundation for the Iran nuclear scare. Can you expand on his role?

GARETH PORTER: Gates had a twofold interest in keeping Iran as an adversary at a time when President Rafsanjani was trying to thaw the relationship in 1990-91. His career had almost been ruined by his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, which had gone off the rails when Rafsanjani had made the Reagan administration secret 1985 U.S. mission to Tehran public. But more important, he became CIA director in 1991 at a time when the agency desperately needed a substitute for the Soviet threat that had disappeared. I show in the book how he exploited the idea that WMD proliferation in general was the new equivalent of the Soviet threat and that Iran was the primary candidate to play the heavy on that issue.

MARK KARLIN: You appropriately single out the United States and Israel as perpetuating a war cry about Iran’s nuclear program, but haven’t other non-Persian and non-Shi’ite Arab states played a behind-the-scenes role in supporting the United States and Israel, particularly Saudi Arabia?

GARETH PORTER: It is certainly true that the Saudis and other Gulf Arab regimes were extremely suspicious of Iran’s nuclear program and wanted the United States to do something about it.  But it’s a bit more complicated than The New York Times coverage led the public to believe. The WikiLeaks documents show that those regimes were extremely concerned about the Israeli threat to attack Iran during the Bush administration’s second term, which most Gulf security officials believed would have disastrous consequences, and they wanted the United States to prevent it.

Obtain this book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, from Truthout with a minimum contribution. Just click here. You will be enhancing your knowledge, supporting progressive authors and backing the vital journalism of Truthout.

Mark Karlin

Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout.  He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for ten years before joining Truthout in 2010.  BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout’s Progressive Picks of the Week.

Truthout

March 26, 2014 0 comments
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Human Rights Abuse in the MEK

Please help us stop Human Rights abuse in Mojahedin

Open Letter to Ben Emmerson, QC.

Dear Mr. Ben Emmerson, QC

My name is Mehdi Nikbakht, I am one of the survivors and ex members of Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, PMOI, Rajavi cult). I have first hand experience of the cultish relationships inside the MEK.

Your long term activities as a Human Rights advocate and your responsibilities as the UN special rapporteur on human rights has brought me to write this letter to your good self appealing for help. Me and many of my friends have been the direct subject of human rights abuse inside this organisation (cult). We need help to achieve justice.

I take this opportunity to bring to your attention some brief explanations.

The Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) tries to portray a democratic, freedom loving, pro-human rights and pro-women’s rights face in the west. The reality, and what we have seen from the inside of this organisation is 180 degrees contrary to this claim. We have never seen anything but suppression and injustice. The leaders of MEK harshly crush any voice of criticism and they go to extreme extents to silence the voice of the survivors and ex members. They constantly spend money and energy to character assassinate and intimidate the vocal critics and survivors by calling them mercenaries, agents, traitors, etc. they try to dismiss their testimonies about the reality of the crimes they have suffered themselves and/or have seen at the hands of MEK leaders.

Inside the MEK cult no one has the right to have a spouse or family and even thinking about it is a severely punished crime. Members are regularly forced to write and announce their most intimate thoughts in front of large audiences and the audience is to shout and swear at the person.

Inside the MEK no one has the right to contact their families in any shape or form. Even mothers and fathers who come to Iraq from Iran with all the risks and hardships are not given permission (by MEK leaders) to meet their children. Some of these people have not seen their families for over 25 years.

Inside the MEK harsh forced labour, together with a regime of inquisition, has taken away the critical minds of the members. They can no longer think properly and normally. Their every day life is confined to a restricted, forced, mental and physical circle. They no longer decide for themselves about anything. It is the leaders who decide for them.

Leaving the organisation (cult) is forbidden and no one is free to choose. Being inside the cult is forcefully compulsory.

And there are hundreds more similar cases.

Dear Mr. Ben Emmerson. You know more than anyone that each and every one of these cases specially in this day and age is in direct contradiction with the recognised freedoms of individual and is an abuse of their human rights. The same human rights you have been so passionate about and have, and are, working so hard for. The Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) have been keeping thousands of people trapped in their camps for decades. Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, they were able to imprison and torture people inside their camp for crimes as simple as asking to leave the organisation and return to normal societies. After the fall of Saddam, the MEK leaders insisted on not leaving Iraq to the point of deliberately sending some members to their deaths, which had no effect and still the Iraqi Government is adamant that they should leave. They have now been moved to Camp Liberty which has been attacked a few times by terrorist groups and in this camp some of the members have again been sacrificed for the unlawful demands of the cult leaders. The MEK leaders do not want the trapped people to be moved to third countries and deliberately resist any attempt to facilitate such a transfer. They see this as an end to their cultish organisation and more than that, are afraid of the people reaching European countries where they can start exposing the real nature of the organisation and what has happened to them. They are afraid of the truth coming out.

Dear Mr. Ben Emmerson,

What I have explained here is no more than a very brief example of what is happening. Our claims are certainly backed by a huge amount of documents and evidence, as well as the testimony of many of my friends who have managed to get themselves to European countries. Me and my friends are ready to meet in person and explain in detail and clarify any question in this regards.

I urge you to investigate the abuses of human rights, women’s rights, individuals’ freedom, etc. inside the MEK, and as I mentioned we are ready to provide the documents and evidence at any time and any place you wish. We need your expertise and we need your help to bring a condemnation against these practices and certainly to stop the continuation of it against the trapped hostages inside the MEK.

Yours Sincerely,

Mehdi Nikbakht

Switzerland,Setaregan association

March 25, 2014 0 comments
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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 45

++ News in English about the Mojahedin Khalq was dominated by interviews with reporter Gareth Porter who has been promoting his new book, Manufactured Crisis. In it he reveals the MEK’s role in pushing false reports and documents into the nuclear crisis playing out between western governments, the IAEA and Iran. The fact that this misinformation did not even originate with the MEK further undermines its credibility as a group.

++ Atefeh Eghbal is an internal critic of the MEK who last year started the campaign for the immediate transfer of Camp Liberty residents to third countries, and was subsequently labelled by the MEK as an agent of the Iranian regime and subjected to a vicious denunciation campaign. Eghbal has written a short article about the MEK members’ families who also support the group under the title, ‘A simple question which has never been answered’. The article highlights the complaint of these sympathetic families that, “While they are in Camp Liberty we have no contact with our loved ones, but even with those few who have recently arrived in European countries and in Albania, the MEK still don’t allow us to contact them”. Eghbal poses the question, ‘The MEK leaders constantly praise the MEK members as “beacons of revolution”, and every six months come up with another set of signatories pledging themselves willing to die for the Rajavis, why then are they so hysterically afraid of a simple telephone conversation between these so-called ‘masters of the revolution’ and their mothers?

++ Iraj Mesdaghi, who started out by criticising the MEK in a positive effort to benefit them and help their survival rather than see them disintegrate, has a note on Pejvak Iran website about Maryam Rajavi’s claim that she has been chosen as ‘Woman of the Year’. He says the God Believers Association which made the award is headed by Dr. Raj Baldev, Cosmo Theorist, Ph.D (Astro), D.Lit. D.Sc (HC) He has been introduced by the MEK as an expert in Universe Theory. In fact, according to his own website, he is a fortune teller, born in India in 1927 in Montgomery which is now in Pakistan. He is expert in using water, the tips of fingers and toes, together with the time and place of questions to predict the future for both families and in international affairs. He uses what he calls the ‘well-known Sarjatik system’ to answer questions from individuals, groups, regions or countries.

++ Edalat (Justice) Society, which participated as an NGO in the UN Human Rights Convention in Geneva, has reported that the MEK tried to provoke its delegation and even physically attacked them because they were exposing the terrorist nature of the MEK. The MEK failed because such activity had been predicted and security at the UN was ready to prevent such problems. Once again, says Edalat, these incidents show that, contrary to what western governments claim, Maryam Rajavi is the same terrorist she has always been.

++ The latest reports from Albania are that eleven new people have arrived there. However, ex members who are living separately from the MEK in Tirana are saying that the UNHCR representative in Albania has told them they will not be given refugee status and will get no passport. Some commentators believe the UN has been pushed by the MEK to annoy members just as they pushed American army to annoy members who wanted to transfer from Camp Ashraf to the TIPF. The ex members were told ‘if the Albanian government gives you something, good luck! Otherwise, tough!’ Interestingly this report also says that immediately after the UN visit, Esmail Mortezai from the MEK, who claims to be working under the protection of the Pentagon, approached them and told the ex members “Don’t worry. To Hell with the UN and the rest of them! Come back to us and we will take you to European countries as we always have done”. The UNHCR representative had also told them that their accommodation was limited to four months and after that they will have to either pay for it or go. Again the MEK immediately stepped in and said, “We will take care of it ourselves”. Other reports say that the police in Tirana and the MEK themselves have placed CCTV and guards around their accommodation. The ex members believe this is to put pressure on them to either go back to the MEK or run away by themselves to escape the country, which is very dangerous. Even so, several have declared they will chose the second option and have asked the others to speak out on their behalf if they are killed along the way. On top of this, the Albanian government has told the ex members that, “Although people from the MEK are free to talk to you, and you have to talk to them because they are taking care of you, your families from Iran are not allowed to come to visit you”. Many organisations and other ex members in the west have written to Albania and the UN to ask “is the UNHCR working for Esmaili Mortezai, the MEK and Mossad, or is it supposed to help rescue refugees from the traps of terrorists?”

++ This week saw the anniversary of the Halabja chemical attack. In 1988, Massoud Rajavi announced the formation of the MEK’s National Liberation Army (or Saddam’s Private Army as it is known), in Iraq and organised a few operations in that region. On 16 – 17 March 1988, Halabja came under chemical attack resulting in 5,000 deaths. This was part of the Anfal campaign in which a total of 182,000 people were killed by the Baath army. The MEK were part of the intelligence gathering operation both before as well as afterwards. Many have written articles about the MEK’s involvement in Halabja and identify this as the beginning of the MEK’s collaboration as mercenaries for Saddam’s Mokhaberat.

++ New articles and documents have emerged about Mansour Ghadarkhah the film maker, connecting him financially to the MEK and, more than that, showing that he moved from Germany to Los Angeles with his German wife and children by the order of the MEK because of his dirty history in Germany.

++ Ebrahim Khodabandeh and Ali Moradi were in Kermanshah this week talking about cults and terrorism and related issues. They held a press conference hosted by Kermanshah TV station in which they answered reporters’ questions.

++ Mehr News reported that the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Danaifar, told reporters, “Following the process of checking the residents of Camp Liberty, I can announce that 423 have been vetted and have no problem to move back to Iran. This number might increase as the rest of them are processed. The names of the 423 have been given to the UN office.” On the subject of extradition he said, “This is a general issue and is not just about the MEK. I can tell you that the Prosecutor General of Iran has a planned trip to Baghdad next week to visit his counterpart and you can ask him about this while he is there.”

++ Representatives from Iran Pen (Ghalam) Association, Iran Fanous Association, Iran Setaregan and others, reported on pickets they held during the UN Human Rights Convention in Geneva and some interviews in which they have stated their demand that the UN intervene directly to curtail the head of the cult and start rescuing the individuals. They pointed out that UNAMI has repeatedly said that MEK leaders are obstructing the transfers, but the Iraqi government has complained that the UN will not allow Iraqi officials to take action to rescue the residents. The protestors said, “Allowing the head of a terrorist organisation to stop you is not good enough! They are the problem and you must push them aside.”

++ Mohammad Javad Hashemi Nejad, General Secretary of Habilian Association, had an interview with the Reporters Club in Tehran about the MEK and their latest position. He pointed out that at this point there is evidence the MEK have now passed the point of being an opportunistic group and is now proud of being a mercenary group. He also said that Massoud Rajavi is in hiding for two specific reasons. One is that the evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes is so overwhelming that he can’t escape it even though he is supported by some western intelligence services. Second is that his masters prefer to portray Maryam Rajavi as the leader of the terrorist organisation so it has a softer face and can continue claiming they are supporting human rights.

++ A letter with several signatories has been sneaked out of Camp Liberty. Homayoun Kohzadi has published parts of it in anonymity as the signatories asked not to be named. The letter says, “First how happy we are for all of you who have escaped from Hell. Second please do not mention our names, we have already taken enough risk because we weren’t even sure if this letter would reach you or be intercepted by the MEK. We have been clearly ordered in a message from Maryam Rajavi that in case of our deportation or even moving us out of Camp Liberty we must stage a minimum of 100 self-immolations every day in the camp to ensure that the international community will stop this process.” They letter says the message continues, “This is a military order, there is no yes or no, it must be obeyed. After this announcement the leaders in the camp broadcast the sound of a clock on the loudspeakers around the camp to indicate that the clock has started ticking from now. While it ticks the commanders from every group have brought paper and pens so we write our readiness for self-immolation and sign it. To encourage us they wrote their own papers first and said ‘we are ready’. We are writing this letter to the only people we know to ask you to do whatever possible through the UN, the Red Cross and anywhere else, to help us because, as Rajavi is saying, the clock is ticking. We don’t want to be burned and we don’t want our friends to be burned either.”

++ On the occasion of Norooz many western and eastern leaders have sent messages congratulating Iranians on their new year, including Obama, Biden, Cameron and Haigh. We saw that Maryam Rajavi also made an announcement which was, as usual, irrelevant to Norooz. Instead Rajavi claimed that events in Iraq prove that we won and Iraq, Iran, Syria and western governments who supported them against us, all lost. During Chahar Shambe Suri the week before she again asked for an uprising in Iran, which apparently nobody even heard. But still, the Norooz message was better received. Many people copied it and put it out as a refreshing joke for Iranians at the start of the new year.

21 March 2014

March 25, 2014 0 comments
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Iran

Iran says ready to pardon hundreds of exiled dissidents

TEHRAN: Iran is ready to pardon hundreds of members of an exiled Iranian opposition group based at a former military camp near Baghdad, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq told the Mehr news agency on

Iraqi and Iranians protest in the northeastern Iraqi city of Baquba, the capital of the province of Diyala, on November 18, 2011, calling on the government to have the residents of the Ashraf camp deported and the camp closed.

Wednesday.

"After conducting investigations, 423 members (of the People’s Mujahedeen Organisation of Iran – PMOI) who do not have any legal problems can return to Iran," Hassan Danaeifar was quoted as saying.

The number represents about 14 percent of the estimated 3,000 members of the PMOI who are living in exile at Camp Liberty, near Baghdad airport.

"Iran is ready to pardon those members who did not kill anyone or do not have complaints against them," he said, without elaborating.

Danaeifar added that a bid by "a considerable number of this group who wish to come back to Iran was blocked by their leaders".

The leftwing PMOI was founded in the 1960s to oppose the shah of Iran.

After the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the shah it took up arms against Iran’s clerical rulers and Tehran holds it responsible for murdering thousands of Iranian civilians and officials.

The group set up camp in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980s, but was disarmed after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled Saddam.

Today’s Shiite-majority and Iran-friendly government in Baghdad is eager to see it move elsewhere.

In 2012, the United State removed the group from its terror blacklist. The move was strongly condemned by Iran.

Scores of PMOI members have been killed in more than a dozen attacks on their camps since US troops withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011.

Mehr meanwhile also quoted Danaeifar as saying that Iranian Justice Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi will travel to Iraq later this month to sign several memoranda of understanding, including the extradition of criminals.

March 25, 2014 0 comments
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Albania

MKO high-rankings in Albania to keep relocated members under surveillance

Another 11 MKO members set foot in Albania

Another 11 members of the anti-Iran terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) have been transferred to Albania from Iraq.

Informed sources at the UN office in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, said the group, comprised of 10 women and a man, had resided in Camp Liberty in Iraq before being transferred to Albania. 

Meanwhile, three leaders of the terrorist organization have also arrived in the European country from France to keep relocated members under closer surveillance. 

The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and has committed numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.

The group fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it received the support of Iraq’s executed dictator Saddam Hussein and set up Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border.

Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks since the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, 12,000 have fallen victim to the acts of terror carried out by the MKO. The group also sided with Saddam during Iraq’s eight-year war on the Islamic Republic.

In December 2011, the United Nations and Baghdad agreed to relocate some 3,000 MKO members from Camp New Iraq, formerly known as Camp Ashraf, to the former US-held Camp Liberty.

The last group of the MKO terrorists was evicted by the Iraqi government on September 11, 2013 to join the other members of the terrorist group at Camp Liberty and await potential relocation to other countries.

Last March, then Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha announced in a statement that the Albanian government is ready to accommodate 210 members of the MKO group in Tirana.

Nearly 160 MKO terrorists had been previously granted asylum by the Albanian government.

March 25, 2014 0 comments
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Nejat Publications

Pars Brief – Issue No. 78

Inside this Issue:

  1. Obama pushes Israel to stop assassinations of Iran nuclear scientists – report
  2. John Kerry Gets Pressed To Grant Asylum To Former Terrorist Group Mojahedin Khalq
  3. Iraq urges UN to speed up relocation of MKO terrorists
  4. Iran can demand extradition of MKO members: Iraqi min.
  5. Mojahedin Khalq threatens French group protesting their presence in France
  6. UNHCR thanks Italy for welcoming Iranian refugees
  7. Manufacturing a Narrative for War – Gareth Porter on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3)

Download Pars Brief – Issue No. 78
Download Pars Brief – Issue No. 78

March 20, 2014 0 comments
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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Manufacturing a Narrative for War – Gareth Porter on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3)

Mr. Porter tells Paul Jay about his new book “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”

Bio

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes Manufacturing a Narrative for War – Gareth Porter on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3)regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of five books, the latest of which is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And this is Reality Asserts Itself with our guest, Gareth Porter, who joins us in the studio.

Thanks for joining us, Gareth.

GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Thanks again.

JAY: So, one more time, Gareth is a historian, an investigative journalist. He covers U.S. and foreign and military policy. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

So, in the first part we talked a bit about Gareth’s background, but we got up to the point where it was clearly the policy of the American neocons, of Israel—and I think we now know the Saudis were very much on board—from the late 1990s, at least, if not before, regime change in Iran was the big foreign policy objective. We talked about the Project for the New American Century, which kind of laid this all out fairly clearly, a document created by neocons towards the end of the Clinton administration. As the weapons of mass destruction narrative helped Bush and Cheney invade Iraq, they needed a narrative for an attack eventually on Iran. And that begins what Gareth picks up in his new book.

So thanks, Gareth.

So they needed to manufacture a whole narrative that would justify war. So how do they go about doing that?

PORTER: They went about doing it first of all by establishing John Bolton, who was the primary policymaker on WMD for the Bush administration, was—.

JAY: Who helped manufacture the whole Iraq narrative.

PORTER: He was the person who was coordinating this on the American side with Israel, working very closely with them, clearly. And his first move was to make sure that the IAEA would not be able to allow Iran to get by without being accused of having a nuclear weapons program, and he didn’t believe that would be possible unless some special moves were made.

JAY: Okay. Just a little bit of context. In 1968, under the Shah, Iran signs the NPA, the non-proliferation agreement, and agrees not to proliferate nuclear weapons technology and not to build weapons. Just for a little piece of context, it’s around—not that much later than that, but certainly Israel does not sign the agreement and, as we now all know, has many nuclear weapons—I think, what, it’s at least 200, if not more. So does India and Pakistan develop nuclear technology. Pakistan, and probably India, but certainly Pakistan directly with American assistance developed nuclear technology, do not sign the NPA. And I’ll repeat it again, but we’re going to pick up the story now: not any real evidence that Iran has ever violated the NPA, even though people keep suggesting they are.

Alright. Pick it up.

PORTER: So what Bolton was concerned about was that the IAEA’s handling of the Iran file was too easy on Iran. He was demanding actual evidence, actual proof that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program. And, in fact, in 2003, the IAEA published a report, in November ’03, that said, you know, Iran had not reported all of its experiments using nuclear material during the previous years, but that it did not have any evidence that Iran had in fact done this in order to carry out a nuclear weapons program. There was no evidence of that.

So the Bush administration people were apoplectic about that, and particularly John Bolton. And so he was determined to move that file out of the IAEA into the UN Security Council. He talks about this in his memoirs, that he would make sure that Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the IAEA at that point, would not be able to frustrate the strategy that they had in mind, which was to build a case that Iran was in fact a would-be nuclear power, to use that as a basis for, as you have pointed out, the military option against Iran, which it was understood in the inner core of the Bush administration that they might have to use military force as Iran got closer and closer to what they said was a bomb. And that, of course, was the Israeli position as well at that point. So that was the initial phase of this.

And around the same time, the Israelis then had a brilliant idea, which was that in the absence of any proof that they could come forward with to show that Iran was, you know, trying to get nuclear weapons, they would create a file of documents, a cache of documents, which would be attributed to a covert nuclear weapons program on the part of the Iranians. They would give it to the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the terrorist organization, so-called—not just so-called, but listed as a terrorist organization, with good reasons, by the State Department and other European countries. And then that would be passed on to Western intelligence, ultimately to be used to make the public case by the United States [crosstalk]

JAY: How do we know that the documents the MEK handed over came from Israel?

PORTER: Well, that’s what I’m getting to, because that’s the major revelation in my book. I learned this from a former senior foreign office official in Germany named Karsten Voigt. He was in charge of coordination of German-U.S. relations and had been since 1997, until he retired in 2010. He was the only person who had held that position all that time. And I interviewed him in March 2013. (7:01) He told me that in November 2004, after Colin Powell had made a public statement basically invoking this information from these documents without mentioning them specifically, and talked about Iran trying to mate a missile with a weapon, the BND, the German intelligence service, got in touch with him, and they were quite alarmed about this, because, they said, we know all about these documents; they came from one of our sources, who was somebody that we didn’t really trust; we knew he was a Mojahedin-e-Khalq member. (7:46) And therefore they did not think that this source was trustworthy. And so now they find Colin Powell invoking this information, looking like he was trying to build a case for war against Iran.

And, of course, only two years earlier the same thing had happened on Iraq. The BND had a source, now known as Curveball, who had made up these stories about mobile bioweapons labs that Colin Powell had then used in the UN speech. So they were afraid that the Bush administration was going to do the same thing on Iran that it’d done on Iraq. And so they were alarmed. And they were going to him because he was the U.S. guy in the foreign office. They told him about this, and he understood from this that they wanted him to do something to warn the Americans.

JAY: What year are we in?

PORTER: November 2004. So a few days after that meeting with the BND people, senior members of the BND, this guy, Carson Voigt, went to The Wall Street Journal and told them—he was quoted as saying, in The Wall Street Journal, the United States and Europe should not make their policy on the basis of these documents; they were brought in by a dissident group, an Iranian dissident group. That’s all that—that’s the way it was printed in The Wall Street Journal. So he was doing his part to try to warn the Americans.

But, of course, we know that the BND had warned the CIA, George Tenet, two years earlier about Curveball and he didn’t do anything about it. So it’s clear that the CIA knew about this as well, they knew this came from the MEK, and they weren’t going to do anything about it either.

JAY: What is the attitude towards all this of the American intelligence agencies? ‘Cause it’s not too much later, in 2007, their national security estimates come out and clearly say there is no weapons program. There may have been something before ’73, which the Iranians, I believe, deny, but the American intelligence agencies concluded that there was something pre-’73.

PORTER: Two thousand three, yes.

JAY: Yeah.

PORTER: Two thousand three.

JAY: I’m sorry. But nothing now. So they seem to have discounted this material.

PORTER: Well, here’s what actually happened. I mean, I’ve gotten the full story about that 2007 national intelligence estimate from Thomas Fingar, who was in charge of it and who I interviewed last year when he was in the U.K.—I happened to be there as well at the same time. And Fingar told me that, in fact, although the people doing the estimate were committed to members of Congress, senior people in Congress, who they promised this estimate to, they said they were going to reevaluate Iran’s nuclear intentions, and very thoroughly. They weren’t going to depend on previous estimates. They weren’t going to even pay any attention to previous assessments. They were going to start afresh and evaluate on the basis of whatever information they could find, carefully evaluate and analyze the intentions of Iran. They didn’t do it. He said, six months after they had started, when they did a first draft, they had essentially reaffirmed the previous judgments of the intelligence community, which had said Iran does have, in fact, a nuclear weapons program. They did in 2001. Two thousand five, again they reaffirmed that there was an Iranian nuclear weapons program. So they didn’t do what they had set out to do.

JAY: Which is telling Bush–Cheney what they wanted to hear.

PORTER: Well, in a sense I think they had become captive to this narrative that they had internalized in the intelligence community.

But there’s another factor here, which relates precisely to the previous theme that we’d been talking about, and that is that I ask specifically to Fingar: what about the laptop documents, this set of documents which had been used to show that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program? He said, well, yes, I mean, this was a very significant part of our thinking, because before those documents, there had been some ambiguity about the Iranian nuclear intentions with those documents that was clearer. So they obviously took them seriously. They believe they’re authentic. And they were relying on them in large part in making their judgments.

So this is an NIE that is seriously flawed. It’s based on false information. It’s based on false analysis of [crosstalk]

JAY: This is ’07?

PORTER: The ’07.

JAY: Well, when does the estimate come—when is the estimate when they say there is no weapons program?

PORTER: Well, they were saying that there was a weapons program in 2003, 2001 to 2003, in this 2007 estimate. But then they said they found—and this is what changed things—they found information—they obviously cracked somebody’s computer, although they’re not—they never said that. They cracked some computers in Tehran, and they were able to get a rather angry statement by somebody who had been involved in doing research related to nuclear weapons, saying, we’ve been shut down, I can’t do this anymore, and they were upset about it. And so that, apparently, was the basis for the people doing the NIE to say, we can now confirm that there was a nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003.

But that’s not the whole story. And what I show in my book is that the evidence that there was an actual nuclear weapons program, rather than independent work by a few people or, you know, possibly, you know, one or two people doing experiments or whatever, we don’t know what they did. I couldn’t find out from him, you know, what kind of evidence—I don’t think they knew anything about what was actually done. So the evidence of an actual nuclear program, even 2001 to 2003, is extremely weak.

JAY: Okay. But let’s—whether there was or wasn’t, the ’07 intelligence estimate concludes that there isn’t now.

PORTER: There was not then, that there was not then. That’s precisely right.

JAY: Yeah, which took a lot of the wind out of the Cheney–Bush sails heading towards war with Iran.

PORTER: But until they found that evidence, they were still saying that there is a nuclear weapons program today. As of mid 2007, they were still saying it on that first draft. But they changed it after they got the new evidence.

JAY: But coming out and saying that was—flew in the face—

PORTER: That’s right.

JAY: —of the whole official narrative and everything Bush and Cheney wanted.

PORTER: My point is that they came very close—

JAY: I get it.

PORTER: —to reaffirming that there was still a nuclear weapons program in mid 2007.

JAY: Based on this MEK stuff.

PORTER: Right. Right.

JAY: But then they must discount the MEK stuff, then.

PORTER: But they didn’t. They didn’t discount it.

JAY: No, but when they finally come out—.

PORTER: No, they didn’t discount it, they still didn’t discount it, because it was about 2001 to 2003.

JAY: Oh, the MEK stuff was about the earlier period.

PORTER: Yes.

JAY: At any rate, the NIE does come out in ’07, and it certainly takes the steam away from what—if Cheney was heading towards war with Iran, which a lot of people think that’s what he wanted. And in the next part of our interview, I guess, we will get into all this, because it seemed pretty clear they wanted this war and didn’t get it. And my question will be: why? And that’s what we’re going to pick up on the next segment of our series of interviews on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

The Real News,

March 19, 2014 0 comments
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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Israel Provided IAEA with Fake Documents on Iran’s Nuclear Program

Iran Review’s Exclusive Interview with Gareth Porter

The controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program in the recent decade has been the subject of millions of statements, thousands of news stories and articles, hundreds of speeches and interviews and tens of books and films. One of the most brilliant, revealing and educative books about Iran’s standoff with the West over its civilian nuclear program has been recently published by the prominent American investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

Gareth Porter is a leading American journalist, historian, anti-war activist and correspondent of the Vietnam War. Porter’s writings have appeared on such publications as The Nation, Inter Press Service, The Huffington Post, Truthout, Al-Jazeera, Press TV, Antiwar.com and Common Dreams. Porter is the 2012 winner of Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which is awarded annually to a journalist who exposes media propaganda.

Gareth Porter has recently published a book titled “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” which discloses the unseen and masked truths behind the decade-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. In this book, Porter endeavors to reveal the destructive role Israel has played in the exacerbation of Iran’s relations with the West over the former’s nuclear activities. Porter maintains that Iran’s nuclear program is completely legal and regularly inspected, abused by the United States and Israel as a pretext for pressuring Iran.

The former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman is one of many high-ranking diplomats and academicians who have praised Porter’s book. He writes, “Want to understand why a peaceful U.S. modus vivendi with Iran has been so elusive?  Read this exceptionally timely, gripping account of the Iranian nuclear program and the diplomacy surrounding it! Porter meticulously documents both Iranian misjudgments and American and Israeli diplomatic overreach based on willful self-deception and political, bureaucratic, and budget-motivated cherry-picking of intelligence to support unfounded preconceptions.”

On the publication of Gareth Porter’s vital book on Iran’s nuclear program by the Just World Books publications, Iran Review has conducted an exclusive interview with the American journalist and has asked him some questions on the important aspects of Iran’s nuclear program and its ongoing disputes with the West, which seem to be solved gradually during the course of talks between Iran and the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.)

Gareth Porter believes that although the U.S. President Barack Obama regularly talks of all options being on the table in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, his government does not have a clear understanding of what these options are: “under Bush, at least in the early period, there was an overt understanding between Israel and the top policymakers in the Bush administration that they would follow a joint strategy which was aimed at regime change, but that’s not the case with Obama. His policy is much more ambiguous and less distinct. I think he wants to resolve the issue, but he is still under the pressure from the Israeli lobby which restricts his freedom of action. He and his senior advisors are under the influence of a false narrative for so long that I don’t think they understand what the real options are.”

What follows is the text of Iran Review’s interview with Mr. Porter.

Q: Your recently published book on the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program is titled “Manufactured Crisis,” and as you may admit, Iran’s nuclear program was set in motion in 1950s by the then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower as part of the Atoms for Peace project for helping Iran meet its growing energy demands. However, following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the Americans stopped their nuclear cooperation with Iran, and since early 1990s, began intensively pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program, while there hasn’t ever been any evidence showing Iran’s diversion to militarization of its nuclear activities. Why do you think the U.S. changed its attitude toward Iran’s nuclear program while they were the ones who started it? Was it a matter of alliance with the United States and compliance with its Middle East policies?

A: I think there are a couple of factors that are combined to influence and shape the U.S. decision-making about the Iranian nuclear program. The first factor is of course that the United States had a foreign policy by 1981-82 to support Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran. It was secretly helping to arm Saddam Hussein and supporting him in various ways. They clearly had a stake in trying to prevent Iran from prevailing in that war and I was told by the former National Security Council staff and specialists on Iran at that time under the Reagan administration that the policy was largely influenced by the 8-year war between Iran and Iraq. I think behind that, of course, there is a much more fundamental element and policy on the part of the United States of hostility toward the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a challenge to the U.S. power prestige in the Middle East, and I would also say that importantly, because of a what I would call a dirty war taking place in Lebanon in the mid-1980s where the CIA was carrying out covert operations, and at the same time, that there were Shiite militias working against the U.S. forces and CIA personnel, in particular in the Beirut area, the CIA lost a significant number of personnel in that dirty war; first there were a group killed in the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the others were kidnapped and tortured to death. That undoubtedly created a very strong desire on the part of the U.S. national security state to get back and take advantage of the war against Iran, so I think that played a role in the U.S. policy in that period.

Q: So, do you also think that the pressures being put on Iran over its nuclear activities is part of a U.S. strategy to prevent Iran from becoming a regional superpower through acquiring a nuclear capability?

A: I’m not exactly sure how you are using the term nuclear capability. I assume you mean becoming a superpower by having a nuclear program. Is that what you mean?

Q: Well, I actually mean acquiring nuclear capability will be a deterrent for Iran and it might dissipate Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East even though we know Iran’s nuclear program is solely aimed at peaceful purposes.

A: That’s a very much complicated problem to disentangle exactly what the strategic calculations are with regards to the relationship between Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s obviously possessing 300 or so nuclear weapons, and how that plays out. I don’t really think that the United States policy has been based on very finely calculated vision of how things would be in the future. As I point out in the book, the Bush administration’s policy toward Iran was one of a regime change. They really wanted to overthrow the Islamic regime, just as the previous U.S. administrations had wanted to do, going back to the Reagan administration. They believed that they had to use force, and there was no doubt about it, and I think the initial calculation of the Bush administration, which really began in 2002 and 2003, as I point out in the “Manufactured Crisis” was that the United States would be able to use the accusation of an Iranian covert nuclear weapons program as a basis for justifying a military attack on Iran to change the regime. That obviously didn’t play out as they expected. For one thing, the Bush policy changed from regime change to pressure through sanctions. But I think that was also one of their miscalculations.

I think the Obama administration policy, when it came to power in 2009 was really that they didn’t have a clear strategy toward Iran but was leaning much more toward sanctions as its primary policy rather than diplomacy as it was publicly claiming, especially at the time of the presidential elections. So, generally I think the U.S. policy has been geared to very broad, and in the case of Bush administration, militaristic objectives rather than a very carefully calculated assessment of the region.

Q: You talked about George W. Bush’s policy on Iran. Do you think that his war threats were really credible and serious as he constantly made statements on all options being on the table? He couldn’t ever realize his war threats. Did he really mean what he said that he intended to attack Iran?

A: Well, I don’t think the problem was so much George W. Bush as it was his group of neo-conservative advisors and high officials, specifically the Vice President Dick Cheney and his senior Middle East advisor David Wurmser, as well as John Bolton, the then under-secretary of state in charge of policy toward Iran and the main administration’s policymaker on Iran as well as weapons of mass destruction; we know that Bolton cooperated with the Israeli government closely. He traveled to Israel frequently; he met in some cases with the Mossad chief in 2003, which were not approved by the State Department, and the circumstantial evidence strongly indicate that the manufactured crisis was really planned by Bolton in conjunction with the Israelis. They together mapped out a plan that they expected to lay the groundwork for what they believed would be ultimately the military option on Iran. So, I think we are talking about a plan for striking Iran that was planned by the Israelis and their strongest supporters and allies in the Bush administration.

Q: In your recent book, you imply that the IAEA has been somehow deceived by the reports provided to it by the Western governments, which usually came out from Israel, that there has been a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program prior to 2003. This is while the IAEA inspectors traveled to Iran and investigated the country’s nuclear facilities in the past decade tens of times. Why is it that the IAEA has been influenced by the Israeli claims while it couldn’t present any evidence to substantiate the claims?

A: The answer to the question is that the safeguards department of the IAEA was led by two individuals during that crucial period when the events took place, who were extremely anti-Iran and pro-Israel, worked closely with the Israelis and were happy to take intelligence from the Mossad and were working hand in glove with the Bush administration and Israel. They were [Pierre] Goldschmidt and [Olli] Heinonen; the two directors of the safeguards department of the IAEA at that period; Goldschmidt from 2003 to 2005 and then Heinonen from 2005 to 2011, and in both cases, it’s clear that they were both much at odds with the view of the Director General of the IAEA Mohamed ElBaradei and other high officials of the IAEA.

In fact, I recently had an interview with the former senior official of the agency who further elaborated on those differences and pointed out that outside the safeguards department, senior officials were not at all convinced by these documents, including the laptop documents which the IAEA called the alleged studies, and the green salt papers, believing that they were probably fabricated, and they suspected Israel all long as the logical candidate. So I think that we have to differentiate within the IAEA between the leadership of the safeguards department who were working closely with the United States and Israel on one hand, and the other senior officials of the agency including of course ElBaradei himself, who were extremely skeptical of that document. I think that the interesting questions is, why ElBaradei thought that he could not prevent particularly since 2008 onward from publishing a series of reports that leaned very strongly toward the U.S.-Israeli position, which other senior IAEA officials including ElBaradei didn’t agree with. I think that the answer is that the IAEA was under very great pressures by the United States and the Europeans, including enormous pressures on ElBaradei to make compromises with regards to their decisions.

Q: Right. I read in Peter Jenkins’ analysis of your book that Israel has fabricated certain documents, including the information said to have been retrieved from a laptop computer in Iran in 2004, as you mentioned earlier, and the fabricated, fake data helped keep Iran’s nuclear controversy alive. Would you please elaborate more on Israel’s involvement in providing the U.S. and the IAEA with the false and groundless data and how they complicated Iran’s nuclear dossier?

A: Well, I think that evidence that Israel was fabricating these documents that the IAEA received in 2005 as well as later documents turned over to the IAEA directly by Israel in 2008 and 2009, according to Mohamed ElBaradei, is very strong, and there are several indicators that it was an Israeli job. One is that we know the Mujahedin-e-Khalq turned these documents over to German intelligence; that’s where they came from. A former German intelligence official gave me a detailed account of that in an interview I did with him last year for my book. So, that’s the first indication that it was an Israeli job, because the MEK, we know, has been used by Israel to provide the intelligence they didn’t want to be known as coming from Israel on more than one occasion. And of course the MEK has let its name to testimony to support the Israeli point of view on accusations of Iranian terrorism, specifically in the case of the Buenos Aires bombing of the AMIA community center in 1994. That’s one indicator.

The second indicator is that we know the Israelis had a program in Mossad to influence the foreign governments and news media on Iran and that office sometimes basically claimed that there were documents that come from inside Iran that they would share with the governments and the press. So they had a special office for operations against Iran. So, I’m quite convinced that Israel was behind these documents.

Q: Many of the sanctions which were imposed on Iran following the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate reports in 2007 that cleared Iran of all the accusations that it’s intending to produce nuclear weapons were hinged on the basis of allegations made by the Israelis like their claims about Iran’s nuclear tests in the Parchin military site. The Americans and the Europeans were frightened and took action to avert the perceived Iranian threat by imposing new rounds of sanctions again and again. However, it’s now clear that the claims were baseless and unfounded. How is Israel going to be held accountable over the prices it imposed on Iran, the United States and Europe by complicating their relationships?

A: I don’t understand why you would expect Israel to be held accountable. There’s no indication that any of the major powers have any intention to hold Israel accountable. I don’t think that’s an issue. I don’t think that’s going to be a realistic possibility.

Q: Are you trying to impart this message in your book that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military-industrial complex needed a new threat and enemy to fight against, and that also Israel was in dire need of an existential threat to deflect attention from its felonies in the Occupied Territories and its brutalities against the Palestinian people and keep up with its project of colonial settlements on the Palestinian lands? Has Iran’s nuclear program served as a pretext for the United States and Israel to further their national interests?

A: Yes, that’s one of the themes of my book. Both the United States national security establishment or the national security state and successive governments, both Labor and Likud in Israel, have found citing the alleged threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon as useful both for domestic politics in the case of Israel, and for essentially making sure that the national security organizations, particularly the CIA and Pentagon continue to get adequate funding after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have documents on both cases, and some links that is one of the reasons I think this crisis ultimately arose and I’m suggesting that this is the only and necessarily the main reason it’s possible that this couldn’t happen even when the Soviet Union existed.

Q: What do you think about the approach taken by IAEA toward Iran following the stepping down of Mohamed El-Baradei and the beginning of Yukiya Amano’s term? Is it true that Amano has been enormously under the influence of the United States and has failed to provide impartial and unbiased reports on Iran’s nuclear activities?

A: Well, Amano clearly is much more willing to cooperate with the United States than ElBaradei was. I think ElBaradei bowed to some significant extent to the U.S. pressure, allowing the safeguards department to have a sway in determining what would be the IAEA reports in 2008 and particularly in 2009, but Amano clearly has an understanding of the basis on which the United States supported Amano to become the successor to ElBaradei in 2009. This is well-documented in the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks and we know for sure that Amano has an understanding of the U.S. support strategy when he was about to become the successor to ElBaradei.

Q: What’s your viewpoint regarding the importance of the Geneva interim accord on Iran’s nuclear program and the new round of talks in Vienna for a final, comprehensive agreement between Iran and the six world powers? Do you think that these talks can pave the way for the complete solution of the nuclear standoff and the removal of the unjust economic sanctions?

A: I would be plausibly surprised if that happens. I have to say that I feel overall somehow pessimistic about the possibility for reaching an agreement, but I hope I’m wrong. The reason I’m pessimistic is that I see so many indications that the Obama administration’s senior officials during the course of the negotiations are still very much under the influence of the false narrative that I deconstruct in my book, and I think that is undoubtedly leading the United States toward adopting a much harder line in the negotiations than it would otherwise be the case, and I’m just afraid that there’s not going to be a breakdown in the talks and it’s inevitable.

Q: Having in mind what you just said, do you believe that President Obama is striding on the same path of George W. Bush and following a policy of regime change in Iran under the influence of AIPAC and other Israeli advocacy groups?

A: No, this administration is not the same as the Bush administration with regards to its relationship with Israel and the Israeli lobby. As I said before, under Bush, at least in the early period, there was an overt understanding between Israel and the top policymakers in the Bush administration that they would follow a joint strategy which was aimed at regime change, but that’s not the case with Obama. His policy is much more ambiguous and less distinct. I think he wants to resolve the issue, but he is still under the pressure from the Israeli lobby which restricts his freedom of action. He and his senior advisors are under the influence of a false narrative for so long that I don’t think they understand what the real options are. I think they are under the illusion that they don’t have the freedom to reach an agreement with Iran without risking the United States security and I think they are under a false impression over several issues.

Q: I just want to ask you a final question. What do you think about the impact of the economic sanctions imposed against Iran? Do you think that the sanctions have a legal warranty and justifiability?

A: No way, I don’t believe the sanctions are justified. The entire intention of my book is to show that the U.S. policy in accusing Iran is unjustified and this simply misrepresents the actual history of the interaction between the United States and Iran’s nuclear program. So, there’s no justification to the sanctions.

Key Words: Israel, IAEA, Fake Documents Iran’s Nuclear Program, U.S. President, Middle East Policies, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mohamed El-Baradei, Yukiya Amano, Geneva Interim Accord, AIPAC, Porter

By Kourosh Ziabari

March 18, 2014 0 comments
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