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 — RT reported yesterday how Israeli “Mossad intelligence officers posed as CIA agents in order to recruit and train Iranian terrorists…”  This comes after reports surfaced of Obama deploying thousands of troops to Israel in apparent preparation for a potential standoff with Iran. 

Both Israel and its Mossad are funded billions of dollars annually by the U.S. and CIA.  As the U.S. Empire projects its hegemony across the globe under pretext of humanitarian intervention, U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel routinely engage in atrocities and crimes against humanity, revealing the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy. 

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the recent murder of multiple Iranian scientists by “some combination of Israel and the U.S.”  Western forces have a long history of disruptive intervention against Iranian sovereignty, including the CIA coup against Mosaddegh in ’53. 

The current killing of Iranian nuclear scientists in the midst of sanctions, threats, and intimidation against Iran amounts to covert warfare.  Then Obama signs the NDAA provisions, among other things, barring transfer of detainees and insuring Gitmo’s operations bolstering perpetual war.  One detects an overarching theme to Obama’s Presidential leadership and Executive decision-making, namely—imperialism and covert warfare abroad and class warfare domestically.

MR

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RT — The buddy-buddy relationship between American and Israel could falter as it is revealed that Mossad intelligence officers posed as CIA agents in order to recruit and train Iranian terrorists, all unbeknown to US authorities.

American intelligence officials have come clean with details surrounding Israel’s attempt to infiltrate the network of the Iranian terrorist group Jundallah. According to internal memos just released, Washington was initially unaware that agents working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, were recruiting Iranian terrorists under the guise that they would be hired and trained by the CIA.

The memos that reveal the CIA’s then discovery of the program come from the last year of the George W Bush administration, and it is unsure if such campaigns still exist overseas today. What is known, however, is that Mossad — who is largely funded by the CIA and typically works hand-in-hand with their American counterpart — did not approach American officials for authorization in fronting as US agents in their attempt to infiltrate Jundallah.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” an intelligence officer speaking on condition of anonymity tells Foreign Policy’s Mark Perry. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

The account has been confirmed to Foreign Policy by four retired intelligence officers who have either worked with the CIA or in conjunction with Mossad.

Read more about Israeli agents posed as CIA to recruit terrorists.

© 2005-2012 Autonomous Nonprofit Organization ‘TV-Novosti’

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SALON — Several days ago I referenced a controversy that arose in 2007 when the law professor and right-wing blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds criticized President Bush for not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and then advocated that the U.S. respond by murdering that nation’s religious leaders and nuclear scientists. “We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists…” he argued. The backlash against Reynolds’ suggestion was intense, especially among progressive writers.

Back then, I wrote about Reynolds’ suggestion several times, but I was far from alone. Law Professor Paul Campos wrote a column in the Rocky Mountain News denouncing Reynolds for publicly advocating “murder,” which, he pointed out, is exactly what this would be given that the U.S. is not at war with Iran (he went on to suggest that targeting civilian religious leaders and scientists would still be murder even if the U.S. were at war with Iran); Campos added: “government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.” Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller documented with absolute clarity that such assassinations would be illegal in the absence of a formal war.

But the angriest reactions came from progressive bloggers, who widely denounced Reynolds as “contemptible” for suggesting this; one progressive writer, Lindsay Beyerstein, was horrified that one could even suggest such a thing, explaining that she “despair[s] for our society when it’s necessary to supply a rigorous analytical exposition of why our government shouldn’t have scientists and religious leaders whacked.” Scott Lemieux railed against what he called Reynolds’ “kooky scheme for illegal death squads” as “crackpot,” “dumb” and “nuttier than a Planters factory.” And Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, went the furthest of all — in a post he entitled “Terrorism” — branding the killing of Iran’s scientists as “Terrorism”:

I imagine a lot of people agree with [Reynolds], but his recommendation really demonstrates the moral knot caused by George Bush’s insistence that we’re fighting a “war on terror.” After all, killing civilian scientists and civilian leaders, even if you do it quietly, is unquestionably terrorism. That’s certainly what we’d consider it if Hezbollah fighters tried to kill cabinet undersecretaries and planted bombs at the homes of Los Alamos engineers.

If you think Iran is a mortal enemy that needs to be dealt with via military force, you can certainly make that case. But if you’re going to claim that terrorism is a barbaric tactic that has to be stamped out, you can hardly endorse its use by the United States just because it’s convenient in this particular case.

Read more about More murder of Iranian scientists: still terrorism?

© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Photo by AP/Fars News Agency, Mehdi Marizad