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

DISINFO – “Brace yourself, the American Empire is over, and the descent is going to be horrifying.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges conducts an illuminating if depressing discussion on politics, poverty, and everything else regarding the way we live and where we are headed:

Chris Hedges on The End of the American Empire

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MEDIA ROOTS — Some of us will do our best to counter the two-party dictatorship, recognising they are both financed by the same Wall Street, corporate, paymasters with the obvious attendant consequences.  Yet, due to the grip corporate media has on the minds of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., the anger against non-two-party candidates isn’t just coming from the two-party establishment leaders, but from its constituent voters as well.

Glenn Greenwald quotes a Matt Stoller essay about how “the anger [Ron Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear.”  Greenwald continues, “Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.”

Ron Paul has been deemed “more progressive” than Obama on civil liberties issues by the ACLU, and his strict non-interventionist foreign policy views makes him a much stronger opponent against the military-industrial complex than the President.  However, most progressives are still going to vote for Obama this year, even though he “advocates views…liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.”

On New Year’s Eve, Greenwald cut through much of the U.S. Presidential Election spin cycle, as it further dumbs down the already embarrassing state of U.S. political discourse.  Our job is to understand our political process as clearly as possible in order to make informed decisions as voters.  To that end, this article is among the more thoughtful analyses of Election 2012 to date. 

MR

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SALON – As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture – obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.

Read more about Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies.

© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

MEDIA ROOTS – Paul Rockwood Jr. was a weather forecaster in King Salmon, Alaska who became highly critical of US foreign policy in a post-9/11 world.  During his quest to understand the motive behind 9/11, he was drawn to the Islam religion and eventually converted.

At the mosque he attended, he was approached by an undercover FBI operative who eagerly commiserated with Rockwood about his views on terrorism.  Over time, the informant manipulated Rockwood’s frustration and demanded that he take it one step further by providing him with an “assassination list” of those responsible for war atrocities perpetrated by the US in exchange for a sum of $8,000.  With a baby on the way and little financial stability, Rockwood took the bait and now faces an eight year prison sentence for charges of terrorism and perjury.

Rockwood is now just another casualty of the War on Terror’s domestic front, exemplifying the lengths at which the FBI will go to make their case for combating terrorism on US soil.  It is immoral at best, and an enormous waste of US taxpayer resources.

The FBI’s methods of entrapment eerily mirrors those used by the recruiters of the very suicide bombers the War on Terror is waged against.  When the FBI’s plans of entrapment don’t backfire, the agency preys upon the emotionally deranged or weak, financially down and out members of society and facilitates them to carry out crimes in exchange for financial compensation.

Abby

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ALASKA DISPATCH –A little more than a year ago, he was a weather forecaster at a remote outpost in King Salmon, Alaska, population 442. He and his wife — he with his close-trimmed red beard and shy smile, she with her rosebud cheeks and sweet English accent — lived in a two-story frame house strewn with toys. They were popular dinner companions and regulars at community theater productions.

Now Paul Rockwood Jr. is a convicted terrorist, serving eight years in a federal prison. His wife, Nadia, is exiled on probation in England after her own criminal conviction. Since their arrest in 2010 — accused by the FBI of drafting and delivering a list of targets for terrorist attacks — friends and neighbors have been left in confusion, wondering how the nice young couple could have turned into the terrorists next door.

The possible answer, provided in Rockwood’s first interview since his arrest, opens a window on one man’s uncertain spiritual journey and radicalization after the Sept. 11 attacks. It also offers a look at the government’s increasingly deep dragnet for suspected domestic terrorists.

To federal authorities, Rockwood, 36, is a man who turned from hard-partying bartender and ex-Navy seaman to Muslim militant committed to killing fellow Americans.

To Rockwood, the plot involving targeted assassinations and bombs was a “pure fantasy” created by a government agent he thought was his friend, a common refrain in the nation’s burgeoning number of “home-grown” terrorism plots prosecuted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rockwood concedes that he drew up a list of people. He thought they should be punished.

“But … it was all talk,” Rockwood said in a small interview room at the correctional facility he has called home since July 2010.

Read more about Former Weatherman to Accused Terrorist.

© 2011 Alaksa Dispatch

Photo by Flickr user Dnewman8