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 – You often hear the term Gulag and think of a secret prison in a third world dictatorship, where its purpose is to break you down, humiliate and torture you.  This style of imprisonment has been frequently used by members of the US military in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. 

Torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ fall outside of the realm of the Geneva Conventions since those imprisoned are deemed ‘enemy combatants’ instead of prisoners of war.  Labeling such prisoners as ‘enemy combatants’ is nothing more than a flimsy legal loop hole that gives the military carte blanch to treat them however they would like, without due process.  It’s hard to believe that someone would experience a similar fate on American soil.

Recently, in San Diego, California, a UCSD student named Daniel Chong was arrested during a 4/20 marijuana drug raid and left in a holding cell without charges for over five days.  He was without food, water, toilet, or human contact of any kind.  Chong eventually resorted to drinking his own urine and eating a bag of white powder he discovered in the cell, which turned out to be meth amphetamine–only exacerbating his psychotic state.  He described attempting to commit suicide with broken glass from his glasses and said that the he literally lost his mind and didn’t think he would survive. 

The DEA and San Diego police claim that this is a unique incident that rarely ever happens.  They chalk it all up to a “mistake,” stating that someone simply “forgot to go check on him.”  Whether or not the person [or people] accountable for driving Chong insane and leaving him to potentially meet his demise for the crime of smoking marijuana is yet to be seen.

Robbie Martin for Media Roots

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HIGHLANDER NEWS – For nearly five days, Chong sat alone in a room with no food, no water and no toilet. Chong told CBS News that he kicked the door many times and screamed for help, but his cries were ignored. “I just couldn’t believe that this was legal,” Chong told the AP. “I’m thinking ‘no way.’”

He drank his urine three times due to dehydration and unknowingly consumed methamphetamine after finding the drugs in the cell; the DEA has yet to explain why the methamphetamine was found in the holding cell.

“The DEA’s protocol was so sloppy that somebody who was a previous prisoner secreted a small amount of meth in a plastic bag inside a blanket,” stated Chong’s attorney, Gene Iredale, in an article by the LA Times. It is unclear whether the hallucinations that Chong experienced were caused by the drugs or other severe ailments such as starvation.

Chong told the New York Times that on the fourth day, the lights shut off in his holding cell. Chong, contemplating suicide, chewed into his glasses and attempted to carve the words “Sorry mom” into his arm using a glass shard. “I pretty much lost my mind,” he told the Associated Press.

Agents found Chong on the afternoon of April 25, covered in his own feces but still conscious. “He is glad to be alive,” Iredale said of Chong. “He wants to make sure that what happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Continue Reading UCSD student left in DEA cell for 5 days sues for 20 million.

Photo by Robbie Martin

MEDIA ROOTS – The feverish hysteria of the “red scare” during the 1950s and 1960s prompted the Central Intelligence Agency to do some dirty deeds, not the least of which was a pet project called Operation Midnight Climax.  The C.I.A. conducted the operation in the hopes of finding a truth serum by dosing civilians with psychotropic drugs, namely lysergic acid diethylamide.  Subsumed by the mind control program MK Ultra, Operation Midnight Climax became its sordid C.I.A. offshoot.

When the Central Intelligence Agency launched MK Ultra in the early 1950s, it was a reactionary and paranoid response to alleged mind control tactics being used on American prisoners of war in North Korea.  Fearing that the Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans were revolutionizing interrogation techniques, the C.I.A. began implementing a sinister, top secret program involving “scientific” experimentation on unwitting American civilians.  The C.I.A.’s desire to keep pace with the Soviet threat of mind control thus spawned Operation Midnight Climax, a spinoff project from the the depraved minds of George White and Sidney Gottlieb.

During the 1960s, the American status quo was being rocked by a raucous counter culture, with volatile anti-government sentiment and rebellious undercurrents affecting virtually every aspect of society.  Taking advantage of the chaos, White and Gottlieb established “safe houses” in New York City and San Francisco where they secretly dosed people with LSD, without the test subjects’ consent or prior medical examination.  Gottlieb, a chemist, provided the brains behind the operation.  However, the majority of the blame for the ill-conceived and unethical program belongs to George White.  Under his tutelage, Operation Midnight Climax developed into a sensationalist story more likely found in the pages of Hustler and High Times than from an actual program carried out by the United States government. 

Throughout the experiments, George White behaved like a power drunk sadist, reveling in his ability to foment debauchery.  He preyed on dozens of unsuspecting victims, filling their heads with potent doses of acid.  White, a bureau of narcotics veteran and a former Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the C.I.A.) agent, oversaw three safe houses in San Francisco where the human guinea pigs were lured in by drug addicted prostitutes.  The hookers would pour the johns LSD laced drinks.  Meanwhile, White would sit and observe behind two way mirrors installed in the rooms.  The drug took hold after some time and perversions quickly ensued.  The rooms were fitted with listening and recording equipment, providing agents further lurid insights into minds of the drug addled johns.  But the unsuspecting johns were not the only victims.  After a night of trying to drown the acid in booze, Wayne Ritchie, White’s coworker, lost his grip on reality and was arrested for armed robbery.  Whether it was a colleague like Ritchie, a random drunk at a bar, or a friend at a dinner party, White spared no one on his psychedelic dosing campaign.

The medically unsupervised LSD fest continued until 1964, when John F. Kennedy forced the resignation of C.I.A. director Allen Dulles.  The resulting shockwaves running down the C.I.A. hierarchy eventually exposed MK Ultra and Operation Midnight Climax.  In 1966, in the incoming C.I.A. director Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all MK Ultra and Operation Midnight Climax files and paperwork.  The files from the New York City safe houses were destroyed, but thanks to bureaucratic blundering, 20,000 documents were saved, unveiling the insidious nature of what took place on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

Think about how the government played a major role in demonizing and undermining the 1960’s counterculture.  Think about Hunter S. Thompson writing about Hell’s Angels, the motorcycle gang comprising some of the most reviled outlaws of the time.  Think about Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and his allegations about Abbie Hoffman’s intent to lace the city’s water supply with LSD.  Think about the numerous educational films that the government produced to trumpet the evils of LSD.   Now think about how the government deflected responsibility for some of that decade’s worst transgressions, and how they themselves were  some of the biggest drug villains of the era.  Given that our government frequently repeats history’s mistakes, what could Uncle Sam be doing now that we’re blissfully unaware of?

Written by Adam Miezio

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SF Weekly–  It’s been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid.

He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. Ritchie’s body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him.

The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn’t want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn’t like him, either. Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.

He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in girlfriend. It didn’t go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn’t handle the situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his life.

Now in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.

“I remember that night very clearly, yes I do,” he said in a recent interview. “I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. The whole world was against me.”

After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue.

“I decided if they want to get rid of me, I’ll help them. I’ll just go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar,” Ritchie recalls. “I thought, ‘I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an airline ticket back to New York, and I’ll turn myself in.’ But I was unsuccessful.”

Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon and soda. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver at the bartender and demanded money. Before joining the marshals, Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. But the cop had suddenly become the robber.

Read more about the C.I.A. gone wild with acid during the 1960s.

© 2012  SF Weekly

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Photo by flickr user cisc1970

MEDIA ROOTS — The U.S. Government’s raging paranoia regarding terrorism has now led to a high-octane obsession with perpetual and complete surveillance of its citizens in every manner conceivable. 

“The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself.  Thoughtcrime, they called it.  Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.  You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”  —George Orwell, 1984 (Book 1, Chapter 1)

Each day, we move closer to Orwell’s dystopic vision.  The latest addition to U.S. domestic surveillance is the National Security Agency’s (NSA) new data mining facility behemoth in San Antonio, Texas.  More worrisome, a Microsoft data centre is located just a few blocks away, so the NSA will be able to tap into the massive stores of data without a warrant being necessary, only a simple fibre optic cable.

The NSA’s hulking complex raises any number of serious questions, such as the large numbers of people arbitrarily placed on watch lists.  Does data mining even justify the ends?  Catherine Austin Fitts has long described the Data Beast, data mining apparatus, “the reality was you had Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors owning and controlling the data and you couldn’t get it.”

“And if you look at all the other databases that IBM and their subcontractors have access to government-wide, the question is if you integrate those databases what you’re talking about is a complete control system ‘cos you’ve got the mortgages, you’ve got the IRS payments, on and on and on and on and on.  So, if you watch the movie ‘Enemy of the State’ or you watch the movie ‘Listening,’ you’re talking about an intelligence capacity that can basically manage and manipulate the economy at a very detailed level, whether it’s manipulation of the stock in the financial markets or manipulation of households.” 

With so many lumbering and uncoordinated security agencies engaged in electronic surveillance, how can all this information be shared and correlated?  What risk does the U.S. run should it fall prey to a tyrannical despot with a fully functioning and devastatingly intrusive surveillance system already in place?  These questions and more must give U.S. citizens pause to reflect on the swiftness with which our privacy evaporates before our eyes.

The concept of the CIA project Total Information Awareness has now migrated over to the NSA, which is determined to turn that vision into reality.  The NSA wants to know every detail about our lives:  what we eat, where we travel, what books we read, what movies we watch, every iota of our lives.  But with very little progressive legislation emanating from the regressive two-party system to harness this rapid data grab for electronic omnipotence, is it too late for U.S. voters to pull their lives out from underneath the microscope of the state?

MR

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SAN ANTONIO CURRENT — “Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but now it’s mostly the security, industrial complex; it’s these people that build all the hardware and software for Homeland Security and Intelligence and all that,” says Bamford. “As far as I can see, nobody has a handle on how many contractors are out there, what they’re doing, how much money’s going to them, how much is useful, how much is wasted money.”

Cate says the NRC committee is not necessarily opposed to data-mining in principal, but is concerned about how it’s carried out. “The question is can you do it and make it work so that you don’t intrude unnecessarily into privacy and so that you reach reliable conclusions.”

Bamford writes in the Shadow Factory of how the NSA’s Georgia listening post has eavesdropped on Americans during the Iraq War, including journalists, without a warrant or any indication of terrorism. He also reports on NSA eavesdropping on undecided members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the vote on the Iraq War resolution, with the Bush regime seeking information with which to twist the arms of voting countries. The spying was only revealed due to British Parliament whistleblower Claire Short, who admitted she’d read secret transcripts of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s confidential conversations.

“The UN people have been aware of [NSA eavesdropping] for a long time, but there’s not much they can do about it,” says Bamford.

A common response to concerns about data surveillance is that those who keep their noses clean have nothing to worry about. But the reach of the NSA’s surveillance net combined with lack of oversight and the political paranoia escalated by the 9/11 attacks means that almost anyone could wind up on the terrorist watch list.

“The principal end product of all that data and all that processing is a list of names — the watch list — of people, both American and foreign, thought to pose a danger to the country,” writes Bamford. “Once containing just twenty names, today it is made up of an astonishing half a million — and it grows rapidly every day. Most on the list are neither terrorists nor a danger to the country, and many are there simply by mistake.”

Read more about the NSA’s long arm of surveillance

© 2012 San Antonio Current

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Photo by Flickr user satanoid