MEDIA ROOTS — The drums of war can be heard in the distance as the mainstream media begins to grease the wheels of the war machine.  This time Iran finds itself in the crosshairs of Western aggression as Israel is perched ready to strike.  The United States military, now firmly in the grasp of the United Nations, will undoubtedly support Israel’s efforts both directly and indirectly.  In fact, the collusion between America and Israel against Iran is already deeply entrenched.  The use of the Stuxnet computer worm is an excellent example of both the collusion and existence of an already occurring shadow war.

“Cyber warfare against physical infrastructure is absolutely feasible,” said Carey Nachenberg of the Symantec Corporation during a recent lecture at Stanford University.  He is referring to the most complicated piece of malicious software (malware) ever built–Stuxnet.  More expansive than any other computer virus ever created, the Stuxnet weapon has new techniques of penetration, sleeping and stealth.  And it was reported by the Institute for Science and International Security to be responsible for the sudden Iranian replacement of roughly 1,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility.

One must be very careful when considering these “expert” reports, cited by the mainstream media as fact. The founder of the Institute for Science and International Security and co-author of the previously mentioned report, David Albright, has walked both directions on this path before.  In 2003, Albright argued that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs in the lead up to the Iraq war.  Conversely, Albright argued that centrifuge tubes found in Iraq were likely not to be for uranium enrichment.  To his credit Albright said, “…In this case, I fear that the information was put out there for a short-term political goal, to convince people that Saddam Hussein is close to acquiring nuclear weapons.”

It appears Albright is sensitive to exacerbating intelligence to promote or justify an entrance to war, on the other hand we can see he has some experience perpetuating erroneous intelligence to satiate the war hawk appetite.  Nonetheless, we can safely assert that Stuxnet is more non-fiction than the fictional Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  On November 23, 2010, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iranian Foreign Minister confirmed that malware had indeed attacked Iran when he said, “One year and several months ago, Westerners sent a virus to [our] country’s nuclear sites.”

While the mainstream media characterizes the war against Iran as an act yet to occur, it can be said Stuxnet is a weapon of war already deployed alongside the use of targeted assassination.  The Stuxnet worm and assassinations of nuclear scientists are indeed Declarations of War that violate Iran’s sovereignty.  One can only imagine if this scenario was reversed finding Israel and the United States the subject of equivalent Iranian attacks, it would most definitely be viewed as a Declaration of War.

One cannot begin to understand the reasons behind Western targeting of Iran until you consider Britain’s role.  Britain created Israel and dominates the trajectory of American foreign policy.  In the dusk of the 19th Century, Iran was subjected to British and Russian aggression known as the “Great Game.”  The British invaded again in the 20^th Century, thus the Iranians have endured 200+ years of invasion, territorial concessions and castration of regional influence as a result of British and Russian imperialism.  The seeds of distrust had been sewn for multiple generations.

In 1951, Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s petroleum industry.  Britain’s Winston Churchill embargoed Iranian oil and enlisted American President Dwight D. Eisenhower to carry out Operation Ajax.  This was the first time the United States had openly overthrown a democratically elected civilian government.  The roots of distrust were now firmly taking hold as Uncle Sam lined up to slide down the slippery slope of imperialism.  Indeed the clouds of war cast shades of history repeating itself.

Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini an expert in Islamic Law and jurisprudence, philosopher, poet, and Sufi mystic returned from 16 years of exile in 1979, to steamroll the provisional government and appoint his own interim government. Iran has been in control of its own destiny since this revolution and this has infuriated Western powers, especially Britain.  In November of 2011, the British embassy in Tehran was stormed on the heels of an International Atomic Energy Agency report.  The British-Iranian relationship is at a new low.  Britain certainly has and will have a hand in assisting Israeli and/or American aggression, since it is the wizard behind the curtain.

The United States made it possible for India to acquire nuclear weapons, opaquely provided Israel with nuclear weapons, clumsily allowed Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons, occupies countries on both the eastern and western borders of Iran and is quite likely the origin of at least pieces of Stuxnet.  Iran is infinitely patient to endure centuries of imperialism and these modern Declarations of War.  American citizens can only hope these years of diplomacy at the gates of war have provided Iran with the diplomatic savvy to negotiate an aversion to war.  America cannot afford the blood and soul of one more American soldier in the interests of British and Israeli imperialism.  Iran is sovereign and this sovereignty should be respected, engaged and the resulting goodwill harvested.

Chris Martin for Media Roots

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History of US Intervention in Iran since 1953

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Photo by Robbie Martin for Media Roots

MEDIA ROOTS — During an episode of Media Roots Radio last year, Abby and I speculated on who might be behind the infamous ‘stuxnet’ virus, a sophisticated piece of computer malware designed to interfere with Iran’s uranium enrichment process.  We guessed that it was perhaps the United States and Israel working in concert on a covert warfare effort with the shared goal of derailing any potentiality of Iran producing a nuclear bomb. 

Well, it turns out that our assertions were correct. The United States and Israel essentially came out swinging, bragging about the success of this covert and highly sophisticated act of cyber terror against Iran.

According to The New York Times:

“This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program…… None would allow their names to be used”.

So there you have it, another PR campaign in the form of “anonymous sources.”  It almost gives it a more exciting extra dimensional tone, instead of the boring old ‘known sources’ we usually rely on.

Software publications and programmers alike are decrying the US government for what they call “opening Pandora’s box.”  Some have a more reasoned approach saying that similar clones of stuxnet can be used against corporations and businesses via industrial sabotage.  Others declare that this opens the door for a new kind of cyber warfare that terrorists can and will use since we handed them the tools to do it.  The latter theory rings of the all too familiar ‘blow back’ hypothesis, one which we try to avoid on this website.  With our increasing power and surveillance technologies, where will the United States draw the line in disrupting the activities of other nation states?  As long as US troops aren’t dying in battle, most likely no one will notice.  And even if they do, people as a whole won’t care very much. 

We can safely assume that stuxnet is just an additional tool in the arsenal for the covert war already being waged against Iran. In January of this year, 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a nuclear scientist working on the Iran nuclear program and his driver were assassinated with a sophisticated remote controlled magnetic bomb stashed underneath their car.  On November 4th of 2011, an Iranian missile test accident caused the deaths of 14 people, including the head of Iran’s missile program, Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, at an integral military research site.  Many speculate that this was again a sophisticated form of a computer virus like stuxnet or even stuxnet itself that altered the course of the launched rocket causing it to fly back down directly on top of the observers. 

Another Media Roots article entitled ‘Stuxnet, A Declaration of War?‘ describes in detail how the US has been waging a consistent covert war against Iran since 2005 (Seymour Hersh wrote about it).  The main difference now is that the US has directly admitted involvement in events that were long suspected to be the invisible hand of US intelligence and black ops.  It’s now out in the open, perhaps intended as a game of cat and mouse where the intention is to see what happens when we throw the truth it in their face.

Robbie Martin for Media Roots

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NY TIMES – Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Continue Reading Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

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Article Photo by AP/Fars News Agency, Mehdi Marizad, Headline Photo by Flickr user Mypoorbrain

MEDIA ROOTS – Kathyrn Bigelow made a huge splash at the 2010 Academy Awards by usurping predicted winner Avatar with her depiction of soldiers fighting in Iraq in her movie The Hurt Locker.  The Oscar winning film was revered by conservatives and anti-war liberals alike for its ‘balanced’ and ‘realistic’ tone, but in reality the movie is a clever form of pro-military American propaganda.  It depicts an imaginary super hero-like character wearing a bomb protection suit, whose sole job is to diffuse IEDs from military zones.

Bigelow’s follow up film to The Hurt Locker is called Zero Dark Thirty, which will portray a real time account of the unfounded Seal Team 6 raid that supposedly killed Osama Bin Laden.  Considering how the film is scheduled to be released immediately following the Presidential election, the Obama campaign will likely be ecstatic with the additional marketing boost they will receive from the Hollywood hype.  While a movie about this event was probably inevitable, regardless of government involvement or sanction, one can’t help but wonder how close the relationship between the White House and Hollywood was in this particular case.

It’s been long known that movies glorifying our military receive free props and sets from said military as long as the movie’s message is pro-military.  This type of quid pro quo has been commonplace in Hollywood for years, a perfect example being Top Gun, the popular eighties movie about U.S. Navy pilots.  However, syncing up political propaganda movie releases with major political events is something relatively new.  In 2006, the respected, gritty filmmaker Paul Greengrass released United 93, which illustrated via shaky cam the events that supposedly took place on the doomed Flight 93 before its inevitable demise on 9/11.  The coincidental timing of United 93’s release coinciding with the trial of supposed twentieth hijacker Moussai cannot be denied.  During his trial, they focused heavily on the events of Flight 93, even playing unreleased audio recordings from the plane.  United 93’s marketing campaign happened simultaneously with the media hype surrounding the trial.

Even though Democrats will argue that Obama isn’t running his re-election primarily on the supposed targeted killing of Bin Laden, it has been one of the main pillars of the Obama administration.  On top of the billion dollars that Obama already has at his disposal, he will now have the full force of a Hollywood movie marketing campaign behind his election which can be argued as the most expensive campaign advertisement ever made.  The trailers for Zero Dark Thirty will most likely be running constantly on television leading up to election day.

It was previously unclear if the White House had any direct involvement in the movie, but now there is ample proof that Bigelow and crew were given exclusive access to classified details in order to make the film that no one has ever seen.  Despite Obama’s claims that little facts about the raid could be made public because of “national security” purposes, apparently it was fine to share this information with a multi million dollar Hollywood production.

Not only is it highly disturbing that the corporate controlled media regurgitated this manufactured narrative of an event no one actually witnessed, but now it’s combined with an expensive major Hollywood dramatization that will make millions of dollars.  This collaboration will cement the government narrative forever in the American psyche, causing historical revisionism to prevail over truth.

Glenn Greenwald and Abby Martin of Media Roots and RT TV explore the significance of the link between the White House and the upcoming Bin Laden movie.  Abby discusses the subject with a White House reporter and writer from Politico on RT TV; notice as the guest shuts down Abby’s rational questioning about the raid while providing no proof to the contrary, instead he repeats official government propaganda as if it were religious dogma.

Written by Robbie Martin of Media Roots

Edited by Abby Martin

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SALON – As part of a court order in the Judicial Watch lawsuit, the Obama administration yesterday disclosed dozens of emails from the DoD and the CIA documenting that, as NBC News put it, “the Obama administration leaked classified information to filmmakers on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.” Politico‘s Josh Gerstein added: “Just weeks after Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency officials warned publicly of the dangers posed by leaks about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, top officials at both agencies and at the White House granted Hollywood filmmakers unusual access to those involved in planning the raid and some of the methods they used to do it.”

The internal administration documents — which pointedly note that the film has a “release date set for 4th Qtr 2012 (Sep-Dec)” — reveal enthusiastic cooperation with the filmmakers by top-level DoD officials, including Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers, all done at the direction of the White House. The very first DoD email indicates the request to work with the filmmakers came from the White House. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta is deemed “very interested in supporting” the film. The documents also reveal a meeting between the filmmakers and Obama’s chief counter-Terrorism adviser John Brennan and National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, at which the two White House officials shared information about “command and control.” The DoD officials meeting with the filmmakers were given the White House talking points from the night of the raid, which including hailing the President’s actions as “gutsy” and stressing the heavy involvement of the White House in the raid.

Continue Reading Whitehouse Leaks for Propaganda Film.

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Abby Martin discusses the Bin Laden leak on RT with a writer from Politico.

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Article Photo by Flickr user Ssoosay

Front Page Photo Public Domain (by US law any photo taken by a solider while on active duty automatically becomes public domain) 

MEDIA ROOTS — It’s been a whole year since Osama bin Laden was allegedly assassinated in a Pakistani Navy Seal raid, but that isn’t stopping water-carrying media outlets and the White House from ratcheting up fears of terrorism, painting the potential for an ‘anniversary attack.’  Not surprisingly, a federal judge recently ruled, because of ‘national security,’ the Obama Administration does not have to release photos or video of the raid.  We were told by the White House the Seals had helmet cams running in real-time during the operation.  However, they have now back peddled on that claim, stating no video exists, as the feed allegedly, and coincidentally, experienced an apparent ‘black out’ during the actual raid itself.

In a 2011 60 Minutes interview, a week after the raid, Obama said, “We have done DNA sampling and testing… we are absolutely sure it was him.”  If they’ve done DNA testing to prove it, why can’t they—at the very least—show us that evidence?  It raises many questions, among others, why they would need to do DNA testing at all, unless his body was unidentifiable to the naked eye.

The timing of Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming bin Laden raid movie could prove to be very convenient for the Obama re-election campaign.  She was granted exclusive access to classified documents detailing the accounts of the raid, but unlike most White House propaganda ‘leaks,’ this one will be in the form of a Hollywood film.  It’s still in production, but one shoud expect the previews and TV spots for Bigelow’s movie to help remind everybody why Obama ‘keeps us safe‘ right before the November 2012 election.

Written by Robbie Martin of Media Roots

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SALON — Earlier this week, an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of the government in a national security case (needless to say), when he denied a FOIA request to obtain all photos and videos taken during and after the raid in Pakistan that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death. The DOJ responded to the lawsuit by arguing (needless to say) that the requested materials “are classified and are being withheld from the public to avoid inciting violence against Americans overseas and compromising secret systems and techniques used by the CIA and the military.” Among other things, disclosure of these materials would have helped resolve the seriously conflicting statements made by White House officials about what happened during the raid and what its actual goals and operating rules were.

But while the Obama administration has insisted to the court that all such materials are classified and cannot be disclosed without compromising crucial National Security secrets, the President’s aides have been continuously leaking information about the raid in order to create politically beneficial pictures of what happened. Last August, The New Yorker published what it purported to be a comprehensive account of the raid, based on mostly anonymous White House claims, that made Barack Obama look like a mix of Superman, Rambo and Clint Eastwood; The Washington Post called it “a fascinating, cinematic-like account of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.”

Read more about Selective Bin Laden Leaking.

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Photo by Flickr user Ssoosay

MEDIA ROOTS — Former Air America radio show host Rachel Maddow has, by now, become MSNBC’s de facto ‘liberal watch dog,’ long since the network kicked Keith Olbermann to the curb and told Cenk Uyger that Washington ‘doesn’t like his tone.’

In a world where the Republican propaganda machine has been able to characterize a network part-owned by software giant Microsoft and General Electric, one of the world’s biggest
corporate conglomerates, as the ‘liberal media,’ black is white and up is down.

In an interesting twist, Rachel Maddow has now come out with a book, MSNBC’s version of an anti-war history lesson.  Even Glenn Greenwald, one of our favorite authors here at Media Roots, seemed comfortable lavishing praise on Maddow’s masterful work of omission, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.  Another writer and journalist,  David Swanson, has a very different take on the matter.  (David Swanson has also appeared as a guest on Media Roots Radio back in 2011.)  

Written by Robbie Martin of Media Roots

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WAR IS A CRIME — Maddow’s book picks out episodes, from the war on Vietnam to the present — episodes in the expansion of the military industrial complex and in the aggrandizement of presidential war powers. Some of the episodes are extremely revealing and well told. Maddow’s is perhaps the best collection I’ve seen of nuclear near-miss and screw-up stories. But much is missing from the book. And some of what is there is misleading.

Missing is the fact that U.S. wars kill people other than U.S. troops. The U.S. Civil War’s battles, in Maddow’s view “remain, to this day, America’s most terrifying and costly battles.” That depends what (or whom) you consider a cost. A listing of U.S. dead on the television show “Nightline,” Maddow writes, “would be a televised memorial to those who had died in a year of war.”  Would it really?  Everyone who had died? Victims of U.S. wars make an appearance in these pages as the sex slaves of U.S. mercenaries, but not as the victims of murder on a large scale. This absence is in contrast to a large focus on the damage done to U.S. troops, and a much larger focus on financial costs — and not even on the tradeoffs, not even on the things that we could be spending money on, but rather on the “threat” of deficits and debt. Maddow notes the dramatic conversion from weapons factories to automobile, tractor, and refrigerator factories that followed World War II, but she does not propose such a conversion process now.

Missing is resistance and conscientious objection. “War will exist,” wrote President John Kennedy, “until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”  That day grows more distant with books like Maddow’s. In “Drift,” everything warriors do is called “defense” (except with the Russians whose actions are called “strategic (aka offensive)”; when the troops do things they are “serving”; they are “patriotic”; and in times when the military becomes widely respected that is considered a positive development. Jim Webb is “an extraordinary soldier.”  Soldiers in Vietnam “served honorably,” but sadly the military was “diminished” and the troops “demoralized.” Or is it de-moral-ized?  Maddow fills out her book with dramatic accounts of Navy SEALs trying to invade Grenada that appear to have been included purely for the adventure drama or the pro-troopiness — although there’s always some SNAFU in such stories as well.

War, in Maddow’s world, is not in need of abolition so much as proper execution, which sometimes means more massive and less hesitant execution. LBJ “tried to fight a war on the cheap,” Maddow quotes a member of Johnson’s administration as recalling. On the other hand, when Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf propose five or six aircraft carriers for the First War on Iraq, Maddow recounts that this “would leave naval power dangerously thin in the rest of the world.” Dangerous for whom?

Read more about Catching Rachel Maddow’s Drift.

Photo by upstateNYer from Wikimedia Commons