When you’re already the white supremacist candidate of choice—how do you top yourself? Easily, apparently—just get the truthers behind you. Which is why Trump just went full on “Bush lied, people died.” Continue reading
Two Palestinian children were shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank this past week as a United Nations human rights investigator called on Israel to investigate its excessive use of force against Palestinians. Continue reading
My first experience with the Wounded Warriors Project came in 2006, when I made several donations from between $200 and $500 to the organization. I was a stock broker at the time and my income allowed for such idiocy. I guess you could say that I had more money than I had sense, but more importantly, I gave the money because I felt that I needed to do something to take part in the war effort, and what better way than to provide financial assistance to those who were coming back from the wars in the Middle East maimed and wounded. At least that is where I thought the money that I was donating was going. Continue reading
Whatever else the Palestinian intifada may be accomplishing, it does seem to be driving average Israelis into a frenzy, apparently even triggering hallucinations in their heads in some cases. In the above video we see a young Palestinian woman being held to the ground while a mob debates whether or not to kill her. “Why are you playing around? They are coming to murder our children!” one of them screams at one point–while at another the young girl is kicked in the head. The incident apparently took place on October 12. Today it was reported that the young woman did not have a knife after all. The whole thing was for nothing. This of course comes just a day after Israeli forces shot to death an unarmed Eritrean man in the mistaken belief that he was a Palestinian. Continue reading
The world’s most wanted drug lord has declared war on the Islamic State, promising the terror group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that his narcotics cartel will wipe them off the planet.
“My men will destroy you,”’ El Chapo huffs to the ISIS leader in an encrypted email that was leaked to a cartel-linked blogger in Mexico. Continue reading
Rand Paul addresses the funding of ISIS while Authentic Enlightenment’s Chris Perkins asks him about the funding of Israel. Shortly after Rand’s speech, Chris meets him and tries to get him to answer another question. Watch to see and hear the results!
True to form, the CIA waited until 4:16 p.m. EDT this afternoon to release a trove of documents related to the September 11 attacks. Deep within one of those documents is a section on everything the agency learned after 9/11 about “Issues Relating to Saudi Arabia.” We can now share it here for the first time.
The 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Samuel Hersh claimed yesterday that the Obama administration lied to the American people about certain aspects aspects of the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. According to Hersh, the United States did not act alone when Navy SEALs were sent to capture or kill the world’s most wanted terrorist. The real story, according to the report, is that members of Pakistani intelligence services were privy to the raid months before it happened and that it was a “walk-in” Pakistani intelligence officer who gave up the location of Bin Laden rather than a CIA operation that tracked him down by following various couriers. Further, it has been claimed that Bin Laden was not buried at sea the way the Obama administration said, but rather, his limbs were simply thrown from the helicopter after the mission (suggesting that some portion of his body, perhaps his head, were retained for posterity’s sake). Continue reading
Twelve years after the U.S. launched its invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the secret intelligence report repeatedly cited by the George W. Bush administration as it campaigned for war has finally been made available to the American public.
The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate provides further proof that the president and his aides purposefully mischaracterized and exaggerated the dangers posed by the Iraqi regime in an effort to stoke fear about a nuclear or biological attack on the U.S. and its allies. A close reading of the report, which reflects the consensus of U.S. intelligence at the time, reveals an intelligence community at odds with itself about the nature of the potential threat.
In case you missed this absurd joke, the latest from yarmulke-wearing Rand Paul. On November 12, 2013 RandAddressed Cadets at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C and gave these incredible comments: Continue reading
(BBC) - A report by the US-based group says the deaths occurred in villages inhabited predominantly by members of President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect near the coastal city of Latakia. Continue reading
MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS OF THE MIDDLE-EAST, HEED MY WORDS…
You have been victims of a divide-and-conquer strategy that has completely demoralized your people, created strife and tension and disunity which has successfully pitted Shia against Sunni, Muslim against Christian, Kurdish against their neighbors, and vice-versa on all previous groups mentioned, all benefitting the furtherance of “The jewish Utopia.” http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=
(Intellihub) -Is the nation too distracted by the George Zimmerman trial’s 24/7 news cycle to even know about this developing situation that coincides with escalating tensions between Russia and US-affiliated nations around the world? Continue reading
If we wish to end the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, we need to know who created Israel and why. In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour penned a letter to Zionist Second Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild in which he expressed support for a Jewish homeland on Palestinian-controlled lands in the Middle East. This Balfour Declaration justified the brutal seizure of Palestinian lands for the post-WWII establishment of Israel. Continue reading
WASHINGTON, DC June 4, 2013 DC Pro-Palestine Activist Interrupt Ehud Olmert’s Speech calling him a war criminal, a murderer, & a terrorist who should be arrested.
On June 4, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Washington, D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson Center to offer a so-called “moderate” perspective on Middle East affairs and the Palestinian-Israeli impasse. A DC area coalition of Palestinian justice activists, led by George Mason University Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA), were there to challenge Olmert and interrupt the Wilson Center’s complicity with the ongoing normalization of Israeli occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid. Making clear that no Zionist presence is welcome in the DC metropolitan area, throughout the event activists interrupted Olmert, discrediting the supposed “peace plan” he has been parading around as a viable solution.
Far from the generous offer Olmert would have the Wilson Center audience take it for, Olmert’s two state plan is a Zionist strategy that frames Palestinians as “against peace” for rejecting it. As activists in the audience insisted, a plan which refuses rights of refugees, maintains occupation, and keeps in place the Wall and the apartheid system it reinforces, offers no peace at all.
At one point during the disruptions, Jane Harman, CEO of the Wilson Center and former member of Congress, presented for the audience what passes for the “common sense” perspective of a peaceful and just solution to the conflict. The hegemonic rationale grounding a two state solution permeates nearly every discussion of Palestine in the United States. This view is presented as the moderate, reasonable position for peace and justice. Meanwhile, Olmert justifies his aggressive advocacy for a two- state solution out of fear that the Palestinians will soon demand their fundamental human rights under a one state solution.
As members of SAIA, we represent a growing international movement to deconstruct and undermine this false rationale of a just solution in a Palestinian state alongside a Zionist, Israeli state. The two state solution is not only exclusionary, racist and anti-democratic, but moreover, structurally impossible. The territories designated for a future Palestinian state have been sliced, diced, and carved up over decades of Israeli military encroachment, followed by the on-going construction of illegal settlements. With little-to-no control over water, trade, transportation, or governance, the vision of a Palestinian state is merely a fabrication propagated by Israeli hawks to buy more time for further encroachment.
It is in this spirit that we claim that the only just solution to the Israeli occupation is a democratic, one state solution led by the three tenets of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
It is appalling that the Wilson Center would host a war criminal of Olmert’s caliber. It is less surprising that Olmert would jump at the invitation since opportunities to speak must be shrinking, as nations across Europe revoke Olmert’s diplomatic immunity, leaving him susceptible to arrest and prosecution for his violations of international law.
GMU Students Against Israeli Apartheid
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, speaking today at the Wilson Center in D.C., delivered an address that was the reverse mirror image of his address to the Jerusalem Post conference in New York in April. The content of the speech was the same: Olmert argued that Israel’s security situation is better than ever before; that neither its traditional enemies (Syria, Egypt) nor its current enemies (Iran) pose a debilitating threat to it; and that it is therefore in an excellent position to make peace with the Palestinians. The reception, too, was the same: just like in New York, Olmert was repeatedly interrupted by angry hecklers in D.C. today. The only difference was that this time, he was taking heat from the left instead of the right.
Olmert was in the middle of discussing the threat of a nuclear Iran, and his hope that America will take the lead in neutralizing that threat, when a young audience member wearing a black Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) shirt called out, “I’m appalled that the Wilson Center would host a war criminal such as yourself. Be sure that the international community will hold you accountable for your war crimes.” He walked to the back of the room, where another young man unfurled a Palestinian flag and joined him in marching out. There was a small smattering of applause from the audience.
Olmert laughed off the disturbance, noting that he’s experienced much worse in the Knesset, and then continued to make the same argument he’d made in New York: that President Obama doesn’t want his legacy to be a nuclear Iran, and that when he, Secretary of Defense Hagel, and Secretary of State Kerry all say they will not allow that to become a reality, we have to take that commitment seriously. He added that the American leaders are “the ones that ought to lead this campaign against Iran.” And, expressing admiration for the Secretary of State’s “emotional involvement” in the peace process, Olmert said he hoped Kerry would be able to stir Obama to greater involvement “on a daily basis.”
But at that point, another young man in a SAIA shirt stood up to share some thoughts of his own—including “To hell with you! Free my people, free Palestine!”—before storming off. Once again, Olmert laughed, noting that this light-skinned heckler (unlike the first one) “doesn’t look like a Palestinian.”
This did not endear him to the crowd. Soon a female heckler shouted and marched off. She was followed by another young woman, who screamed, “Shame on Woodrow Wilson for inviting a war criminal! This is disgusting!” before leaving. The audience member beside her, whose T-shirt read “Olmert is a murderer,” cited the death toll in the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, and shouted, “You’re a murderer! You talk about peace? You could have prevented this!” while being escorted out.
Ultimately, Wilson Center Director, President and CEO Jane Harman was forced to call for a tightening of security, and to defend the Center’s decision to invite a broad cross-section of speakers. “I also defend free speech in this country,” she noted. “But it is unfortunate that people feel the need to disrupt a gathering where they could peacefully and civilly ask questions.”
Whereas Harman seemed perturbed by the disturbances, Olmert cynically delighted in being called a war criminal. Referring to the hecklers, he said, “These guys made a mistake. They don’t understand that for me, in Israel, there couldn’t be any better PR than their comments… For many Israelis, this may restore some of my reputation.”
But when Aaron David Miller moderated a question and answer period later on, Olmert turned from cynicism to earnestness, showcasing his moderate side. Asked about his September 2008 offer to Abbas, which recently became the subject of renewed press attention, Olmert clarified that the Palestinian president never said yes to the terms of his peace plan, but never said no, either. Olmert insisted that Abbas is a true partner for peace whose leadership can now help break the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, because the latter understands that any final deal between the two peoples will look a lot like the one Olmert presented. That deal, Olmert hastened to add, includes resolving the issue of Palestinian refugees within the framework of the Arab Peace Initiative, which has recently been revamped following talks between Kerry and the Arab League.
Asked about the issue of Jerusalem, Olmert suggested we should resist talk of “dividing” the holy city (he prefers the term “sharing”), as if granting Palestinians sovereignty over part of it would constitute a gross betrayal of age-old Jewish dreams. “The part of Jerusalem that the Palestinians are insisting on is not really part of what we thought of as Jerusalem for generations,” he stated. The upshot was that it’s not worth trying to maintain Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem neighborhoods that are mainly inhabited by Palestinians—and that are not of historical importance to Jews, anyway—if that effort would forever foreclose the possibility of peace.
Olmert’s stance on Jerusalem, like his broader attitude toward negotiating a peace deal with Abbas, hews closely to the stances of the Israeli and American Jewish left wing. Yet, as the disruptions at today’s event proved, Olmert is too right-wing for the left—and, as the disruptions at the Jerusalem Post conference proved, he is also too left-wing for the right. Today, Olmert convincingly argued that “this is possibly the last but also the best time that we have to make peace.” The great misfortune is that this man, who is moderate enough to recognize that and to be able to strike a deal, has neither the power nor the broad support—from either side of the political spectrum—to do so.
Six mass graves features the remains of dozens of Palestinians killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, when the Jewish state was founded have been uncovered in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv.
An official at the Muslim cemetery there told AFP that the grisly find happened on Wednesday when ground subsided as builders carried out renovation work.
In 1948 Jaffa was a Palestinian town but there was an exodus of most of its Arab population when it fell to the fledgling Israeli army and right-wing Jewish militias.
Human skeletons are clearly visible in a mass grave found at a cemetery in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv, Israel
The grisly find occurred on Wednesday when ground subsided as workers carried out renovations
Researcher and historian Mahmoud Obeid, a Jaffa resident, told As-Safri newspaper: ‘We discovered six mass graves, two of which we dug up. Our estimate is that they contain around 200 bodies, with an unknown additional number in the other graves.
‘The remains belong to people of different ages, including women, children and the elderly, some of which bear signs of violence.’
A local fisherman Atar Zeinab, 80, said that as a teenager during the final months of fighting in 1948 he helped to collect the Arab dead in the area south of Jaffa.
They were then brought for a quick burial in the cemetery, the area’s main graveyard.
Tthe head of the Islamic Movement in Jaffa, Sheikh Mohammed Najem (right) looking at the hole that was made above the mass grave
Estimates are that the six mass graves could contain the bodies of around 600 people
‘I carried to the cemetery 60 bodies during a period of three or four months,’ he told AFP. ‘We used to find the people in the street and most of the time we didn’t know who they were.’
He said that the danger of being hit by flying bullets or grenade fragments was such that bodies were dumped one on top of the other in existing family crypts in the cemetery, contrary to Muslim custom.
‘We carried them early in the morning or in the night. We put women, children and men in the same place… nobody prayed for these people.
In 1950 Jaffa was incorporated into Tel Aviv, and was renamed Tel Aviv-Jaffa. It now a mixed Arab and Jewish population.
Around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.
The remains are thought to be Palestinians killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948
The cemetery in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv contains six mass graves
Israeli forces have shot and injured nine Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank, Press TV reports.
Palestinian paramedics said the men were hit in the legs near the city of Ramallah.
Earlier in the day, Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian demonstrators protesting against Tel Aviv™s plans to expand an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Scores of Palestinians marched toward the Efrat settlement near Bethlehem to express their outrage over Tel Aviv™s expansion project, which would see more land taken away from the Palestinians in the village of al-Masaara.
Israeli troops fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, witnesses said.
The UN and most countries regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbids construction on occupied lands.
The presence and continued expansion of these settlements has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.
Israel agreed to freeze settlement construction under the Roadmap for Peace plan in 2002. But it has failed to comply with that commitment despite repeated and widespread international condemnation.
More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel™s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.
MP/HGL
This article originally appeared on : Press TV
BEIJING/LONDON – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu slammed Prof. Stephen Hawking for joining the boycott against Israel and cancelling plans to attend President Shimon Peres’s conference next month, saying the celebrated physicist should “study the facts.”
Asked by The Jerusalem Post about Hawking’s boycott at a press briefing, Netanyahu said, “He should investigate the truth, he is a scientist. He should study the facts and draw the necessary conclusions: Israel is an island of reason, moderation and a desire for peace.”
Netanyahu said that Hawking knows that there are many false theories in science. “There are also false theories in politics, and this [the slandering of Israel] is one of them, maybe the foremost among them,” he said. “There is no state that yearns for peace more than Israel, nor any state that has done more for peace than Israel.”
One official in the prime minister’s entourage went even further, comparing Hawking to Shakespeare and Voltaire, both of whom held anti-Semitic sentiments.
“History shows that there are people who are no less great than Hawking who believed things about Jews that it was impossible to imagine they actually believed,” he said. “I am talking about Voltaire, or Shakespeare. How do you explain that someone with the encyclopedic knowledge of Voltaire believed what he did about the Jews. How can you explain it? But it is a fact.”
Apparently, the official continued, “intelligence and achievements are no guarantee for understanding the truth about the Jews or their state.
What was true regarding Jews for generations, is now true about the state of the Jews.”
Meanwhile questions have been asked as to why Hawkins felt it fit to visit Iran in 2007 and China in 2006.
Left-wing political blog Left Foot Forward, sister-site of the US blog Think Progress, questioned why Hawking visited China “where some of the most visible and egregious human rights violations committed by the Chinese state have occurred” and were highlighted by Human Rights Watch several years before his visit.
Commenting on Iran, the blog said: “As far as I am aware, there was no statement at the time from Hawking refusing to travel to the Islamic Republic out of “respect” for the country’s political dissidents, or until the government stopped executing homosexuals.”
In summary, Left Foot Forward said: “Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?”
Cambridge University said on Thursday that The Jerusalem Post was the catalyst behind the decision to retract its statement about Hawking’s ill health and confirm what was really behind his decision to withdraw from next month’s Presidents of Major American Jewish Communities Conference.
On Wednesday morning the university had released a statement saying the renowned physicist pulled out of the Jerusalem event because of ill health.
“Professor Hawking has decided to cancel his planned visit to Israel on the advice of doctors,” the spokesman said.
Later that day, the university retracted this after the Postshowed proof that Hawking had told organizers of the June 18-20 conference that pressure from Palestinian academics made him withdraw.
“I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics,” Hawking said in the letter. “They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this I must withdraw from the conference.”
When this was put to Tim Holt, acting director of communications at Cambridge, he was surprised and said he would look into it. Hours later, the university retracted its statement and confirmed that Hawking withdrew in order to respect the boycott.
“We had understood previously that his decision was based purely on health grounds, having been advised by doctors not to fly,” Holt said. On Thursday, Holt said that the information from the letter provided by the Post had made them amend their position.
“When we realized that the letter was being made public by you [the Post] we changed the statement to reflect this.
Prof. Hawking’s health is a factor and his doctors have indeed instructed that he should not travel,” he said.
The Israeli Ministerial Committee on Legislation passed a draft law yesterday regulating Bedouin settlement in the Negev known as the “Prawer Plan”, which will allow the seizure of approximately 700,000 dunams of the Negev and the destruction of 40 unrecognized villages. The government will present the draft law to the Knesset for approval over three readings before it becomes law.
Hundreds of “1948 Palestinians”, most of whom are Negev Bedouins, protested in front of the office of Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in objection to the “Prawer Plan”. The protestors held signs saying “Work towards stopping the Prawer Project” in Arabic, Hebrew, and English and chanted “Listen Prawer… the land of the Negev will not surrender to you.” The protest was in response to the Israeli Ministerial Committee on Legislation’s discussion held yesterday on the Prawer Plan and its plans to regulate the settlement of Negev Bedouins.
The Israeli government ratified a “plan for the regulation of Bedouin settlements in the Negev” during its earlier sessions. This decision was based on reports prepared by the Goldberg Committee and the Prawer report to relocate the Bedouins in the Negev, the Israeli government has allocated a budget for this process.
Atiya al-Aassam, head of the Regional Committee for unrecognised villages in the Negev, said in a speech before the protestors, “We want to tell Prawer, Tzipi Livni (Minister of Justice) and all decision-makers that we have endured 65 years of water scarcity and all forms of torture, and we will continue to endure and will not give up one inch of our land.” He stressed that “the Prawer Plan being passed as law aims to expel us from our land, displace about 90,000 citizens, seize 700,000 dunams of land to establish settlements on, eliminate 40 villages and concentrate the Bedouins in cities amounting to only 100,000 dunams.”
He then spoke in Hebrew and said, “I urge the Ministers not to pass their discriminatory law; do not drive us to violence.” About 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, with over half in the Negev desert, but they do not benefit from any of the municipality’s services such as water and electricity because the Israeli authorities do not recognise them.
Senators Approve Resolution 65 to Assist Israel in Iran Strike
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee adopted on Tuesday a resolution which stipulates that the U.S. will assist Israel if it is forced to take action against Iran.
The resolution, Senate Resolution 65, was introduced last month by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and was co-sponsored by 15 Senators, including Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
It states that the United States has a vital national interest in and unbreakable commitment to, ensuring the existence, survival, and security of the State of Israel; reaffirms the United States support for Israel’s right to self-defense; and urges that if Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States will stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.
It also states that U.S. policy is to halt Iranian nuclear ambitions. Senate Resolution 65 gained the support of 70 of the 100 senators.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/167205#.UXYCCLVfAls
Text of the Resolution:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:S.RES.65:
Its a war resolution.
They clearly paint Iran as the “biggest” current threat, then call for military force. It’s blatantly obvious what this is, they even have to end it by saying that it’s not a declaration of war. Its completely fork-tongued like most resolutions.
There is no authorization to go to war, the House doesn’t get to make that call, they just URGE the Congress to.
Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/the-us-pre-declares-war-with-iran-senators-approve-resolution-65-to-assist-israel-in-iran-strike-its-a-war-resolution/#KcSOID5B1QUjxivs.99
Ron Dermer, a diplomatic advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and candidate for the post of Israeli ambassador to Washington, told a closed meeting of U.S. Jewish leaders in New York last week that the Boston marathon bombings would increase American support for Israel - just as that support increased following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Video of Ron Dermer. His comment about the Boston bombing building support for Israel is at 1:22.
On the day of the 9-11 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked what the attacks would mean for US-Israeli relations. His quick reply was: “It’s very good… Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)”
Fool me once…
ed note–The ‘FBI’ that was ‘meeting’ with the 2 pasties in Boston were more than likely Mossad.
Israeli Mossad agents posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistani terror group to carry out assassinations and attacks against the regime in Iran, Foreign Policy revealed on Friday, quoting U.S. intelligence memos.
Foreign Policy’s Mark Perry reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government, and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.
Perry quotes a number of American intelligence officials and claims that the Mossad agents used American dollars and U.S. passports to pose as CIA spies to try to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization that has carried out a series of attacks in Iran and assassinations of government officials.
According to the report, Israel’s recruitment attempts took place mostly in London, right under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.
“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”
According to a currently serving U.S. intelligence officer, Perry reports, when Bush was briefed on the information he “went absolutely ballistic.”
“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told Perry. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”
The intelligence officer said that the Bush administration continued to deal with the affair until the end of his term. He noted that Israel’s operation jeopardized the U.S. administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was under immense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah.
According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothing.
“In the end it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat,” the intelligence officer said.
Apparently, the Mossad operation caused a fiery debate among Bush’s national security team and it was only resolved when U.S. President Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, Perry quotes several serving and retired officers as saying.
The U.S. State Department has vehemently denied any ties to Jundallah and many U.S. intelligence officials remained angry with Israel over the 2007-2008 operation.
“Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us,” Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. “If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.”
The CIA, the White House, and the Mossad failed to respond to the Foreign Policy report by the time it went to press.
Di$info Jone$ isn’t even worth talking about anymore. The real Truth movement and alternativenews crowd has disowned him long, long ago. Contrary to what he tries to tell the uneducated, he was never the “leader” of anything in our movement. He never contributed anything new, he never moved his followers act on anything but making Di$info some money.
But there has been one lingering question: who pulls the fat little loudmouth phony’s strings? Who’s paying him the big bucks to make us look like idiots and mislead thousands of young people when they first step away from the MSM camp? Who pays Di$info Jone$?
Looks like he answered that question last night. The Mossad pays. That’s who.
While trying to keep a straight face on his Sat. night radio show, Di$info said this while reviewing the Debkafile’s story which basically said the two brothers did it because they were radicalized by Islam:
“You can say what you want about Debkafile, how it’s run by a bunch of Mossad and Shin Bet people, I’ve found it overall to be pretty damn accurate” Di$info Jone$
Shin Bet is Israel Security Agency Sherut haBitachon haKlali. The Mossad is the Israeli version of the CIA. Their motto is “By Deception Make War” or something to that effect. Debkafile does even attempt to hide what it is. “DEBKAfile (Hebrew: תיק דבקה) is a Jerusalem-based, English- and Hebrew-language, Israeli, open-source, militaryintelligence website with commentary and analyses on terrorism, intelligence, security, and military and political affairs in the Middle East.”
It’s pure Israeli military intelligence, filtered through the propagandists of the Mossad, and packaged up as “alternative” news… basically the same thing Di$info serves up.
Now think about this: Bloomberg has his intelligence division go to Israel a couple months ago to train with Israeli intelligence. Then the bombing happens in his friend’s town Boston. Bloomberg sends his intelligence team over there to help out after Bloomberg’s WMD-CST team “helped” onsite during the bombing and of course it has been reported (by me) that Israel also sent over their police commissioner to help with the “investigation” on Tuesday.
Now we got a story from Israeli military intelligence and the Mossad saying that the two boys were double agents who turned on American and blew up civilians in Boston? And Di$info Jone$ helps peddle it?
Ok. Is there any question anymore who he works for?
(BBC) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the BBC that Israel has a right to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands in Syria.
He said that if terrorists seized anti-aircraft and chemical weapons they could be “game changers” in the region.
There have been growing calls for the international community to arm rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad.
But there is increasing concern that Islamist militants could use such weapons to further their own causes.
Israel has said its policy is not to get involved in the Syrian conflict.
But in recent months it has retaliated following Syrian firing into Israeli-controlled areas in the Golan Heights.
Israel first occupied the Golan Heights in 1967 and later annexed the territory in a move that is not internationally recognised.
Mr Netanyahu, in an exclusive interview with the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, said Israel’s concern was “which rebels and which weapons?”
“The main arms of concern to us are the arms that are already in Syria - these are anti-aircraft weapons, these are chemical weapons and other very, very dangerous weapons that could be game changers,” he said.
“They will change the conditions, the balance of power in the Middle East. They could present a terrorist threat on a worldwide scale. It is definitely our interest to defend ourselves, but we also think it is in the interest of other countries.”
‘Not aggressive’
Mr Netanyahu was in London to attend the funeral of former prime minister Baroness Thatcher, and also held talks with current Prime Minister David Cameron.
Asked if Israel would adopt a more aggressive military stance in Syria, Mr Netanyahu said: “We are not aggressive. We don’t seek military confrontation, but we are prepared to defend ourselves if the need arises and I think people know that what I say is both measured and serious.”
Mr Netanyahu would not confirm what was widely believed to have been an Israeli air strike on a suspected Syrian government weapons convoy in January.
It was reported that the convoy had been heading for Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.
Mr Netanyahu also reiterated his view that Iran and its nuclear programme posed a direct threat to world peace, which could only be stopped by a “direct military threat”, not sanctions or tough diplomacy.
“Other countries, once they see Iran getting nuclear weapons, will rush to get their own nuclear weapons and then the Middle East will become a tinderbox,” he said.
He added that the current North Korea crisis had shown world leaders what could happen when a rogue state acquired nuclear weapons.
“The entire world is paralysed [and] destabilised,” Mr Netanyahu said.
“Iran is many times stronger than North Korea, both in GDP and aggressive tendencies. I think there’s an interesting change of perception because people can understand what it would be like to have Iran with their imperial ambitions, with their messianic and apocalyptic ideology possess atomic bombs.”
Asked about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mr Netanyahu said the creation of a two-state solution depended “on the Palestinians”.
“I’m ready to sit down. I think we shouldn’t talk about the talks. We should just get on with it and try to negotiate a real lasting and defensible peace between us.”
The investigation into Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon has officially gone international: law enforcement officials from Israel have been sent to the United States to assist in the probe.
Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the Times of Israel Reports.
Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv, Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”
The paper reports that Israeli law enforcement planned the trip before the deadly pair of bombings on Monday that has so far claimed three lives, but the discussions will now shift focus in order to see how help from abroad can expand the investigation.
In an address made Tuesday, Israel President Shimon Peres said that tragedies such as this week’s incident in Boston, sadly, bring people together from across the world.
“When it comes to events like this, all of us are one family. We feel a part of the people who paid such a high price. God bless them,” Peres said. “Today the real problem is terror, and terror is not an extension of policy: Their policy is terror, their policy is to threaten. Terrorists divide people, they kill innocent people.”
Around 20 hours after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the annual race, United States President Barack Obama went on record to condemn the tragedy as a terrorist attack.
“This was a heinous and cowardly act,” said Obama from the White House, “and given what we now know the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism.”
But even as officials come to assist from as far away as Israel, authorities are still in the dark as far as finding any leads in the case. Pres. Obama has directed the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security to assist in the investigation, but no agencies have identified suspects or motives at this time.
Pres. Obama has also said that his administration has been directed to implement “appropriate security measures to protect the American people,” but details as to what that could mean remain scarce. Meanwhile, at least one leading lawmaker is asking for the US to respond to the terrorist attack by increasing the scope of the ever-expanding surveillance program already growing across the United States.
“I do think we need more cameras,” Rep. Peter King (R-New York) told MSNBC after Monday’s attacks.“We have to stay ahead of the terrorists and I do know in New York, the Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that. So yes, I do favor more cameras. They’re a great law enforcement device. And again, it keeps us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill us.”
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also confirmed that he has dispatched law enforcement officers from the Big Apple to assist in the investigation by meeting with agents at a Boston fusion center, one of the DHS-funded data facilities that collects surveillance camera footage and other evidence in order to analyze events like Monday’s attack.
“We are certainly engaged in the information flow with the FBI through our Joint Terrorism Task Force. We have two New York City police officers, police sergeants, who are in the Boston Regional Intelligence Center,” Bloomberg said on Tuesday. “They’re up there, they’ve been up there since last evening.”
But in a study conducted last year by the Senate’s bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lawmakers found that those fusion centers have been more or less unhelpful in assisting with terrorism probes.
The Department of Homeland Security’s work with state and local fusion centers, the subcommittee wrote, “has not produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts.” Instead, they added, so-called “intelligence” shared between facilities consisted of tidbits of shoddy quality that was often outdated and “sometimes endangering [to] citizen‘s civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”
“More often than not,” the panel added, information collected and shared at DHS fusion centers was“unrelated to terrorism.”
WASHINGTON — Members of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee have adopted “Senate Resolution 65,” according to which the US will support Israel in case it is compelled to take military action and actualize its right to self defense in the face of an Iranian threat.
The resolution stipulates that Israel will enjoy Washington’s diplomatic, economic and military aid.
According to the resolution, sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez and Sen. Lindsey Graham, the US’s policy is to halt Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Senate Resolution 65 has successfully gained the support of 70 of the 100 senators.
In a statement issued by AIPAC it was noted that “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has sent a very clear and enormously important message of solidarity with Israel against the Iranian nuclear threat—which endangers American, Israeli, and international security.”
President Barack Obama sent his holiday wishes to Israel on its 65th Independence Day, stating: “On this date 65 years ago, the Jewish people realized their dream of the ages – to be masters of their fate in their own sovereign state.”
“The strong and prosperous Israel we see today proves Herzl’s vision – ‘if you will it, it is no dream,” the US president added.
AFP contributed to this report
(israelnationalnews.com) President Shimon Peres said that he believes that U.S. President Barack Obama will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomatic efforts fail.
“I have no doubt that if diplomatic talks fail with Iran and Tehran doesn’t stop accelerating its nuclear development – U.S. President Barack Obama will conduct a military attack against Iran,” Peres told the Israel Hayomnewspaper this week, in an interviewahead of Israel’s 65th Independence Day next week.
“Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon isn’t only an Israeli interest, but a global and an American interest. As long as the U.S. is in the lead — why shouldn’t we use its assistance?” Peres said.
“It could be that the Iranians are trying to buy time, but they are also losing. The situation in Iran is greatly deteriorating, the economy is collapsing, and the people understand this very well,” said Peres. The full interview with Peres will be published in Israel Hayom on Monday.
The latest round of international discussions with Iran over its nuclear program ended in Kazakhstan this past week without any breakthroughs and the sides even failed to set a new date and time for a resumption of talks.
In fact, Iran insisted this week it will not suspend its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent nor will it ship out its existing stockpile, two keys demands of world powers in failed nuclear talks with Tehran.
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Peres in a meeting that “President Barack Obama is not bluffing when he says he will stop Iran’s nuclear program.”
“We understand the nature of the threat of Iran. And as the President has said many times — he doesn’t bluff. He is serious. We will stand with Israel against this threat and with the rest of the world, who have underscored that all we are looking for is Iran to live up to its international obligations. No option is off the table. No option will be taken off the table,” Kerry said.
Iran this week marked its National Nuclear Technology Day by announcing theopening of two new uranium mines and a new plant capable of producing 60 tons of raw uranium (also known as “yellow cake”) per year.
Western nations have “tried their utmost to prevent Iran from going nuclear, but Iran has gone nuclear,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech on Tuesday.
“They caused restrictions and issued threats, thinking that the Iranian nation cannot achieve nuclear energy … The best way for you is to cooperate with Iran,” he said.
On Friday, Russia responded to Iran’s unveiling of the new uranium production facility, warning the move could hurt progress in negotiations with world powers over Tehran’s nuclear program.
An unnamed source in the Russian foreign ministry told Interfax that Iran’s announcement does not actually breach its obligations under various international nuclear agreements.
(PolicyMIC) -While aggressive war, drone strikes, and a global network of military bases are the most visible aspects of American hegemonic power, what is often overlooked is the U.S. policy of training, assisting, and subsidizing foreign militaries. Although these actions are largely covert and discreet, they serve the same purpose of hegemonic control, diminish peace and national security, and help contribute to the subjugation of foreign citizens.
The training of foreign militaries to serve the interests of the American state goes all the way back to at least the Cold War. The U.S. used taxpayer money and weapons to subsidize foreign governments and militaries that were “anti-communist” even if the regimes were incredibly brutal and ruthless. All an authoritarian had to do was refer to his political opponents as “communists” and the Americans came rushing in.
In nearly every continent, the U.S. taught extremely fascistic, right-wing governments the art of cracking down on domestic dissent, jailing and torturing political opponents, centralizing power, making deals beneficial to American corporations, and employing death squads. Cheaper and less visible than directly invading and overthrowing governments the U.S. didn’t like, sock puppet dictators were the preferred means of implementing policy.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left very little justification for an American imperial position throughout the globe, yet those same Cold War policies were not only not discarded, but expanded upon. Back in 2010, President Obama and the Pentagon began implementing a strategy with a larger emphasis on “combat operations” and military-to-military coordination. U.S. Special Forces are now operating in (at least) 75 countries, teaching their governments more efficient means of subjugating their populations, creating chaos, and serving the interests of the American empire.
Syria is the most recent example of this policy. While publicly claiming that the U.S. is helping build schools and hospitals in Syria, the Associated Press and New York Times reports document that the U.S. is training and arming Syrian “rebels” opposing the Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. With the help of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, most of the weapons are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, many of whom belonging to groups that just a few years ago were killing U.S. Marines in Iraq.
President Obama, secretly and without the consent of Congress, sent more than 150 Special Forces to Jordan to train the anti-Assad fighters on the use of sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons.
What is even more disturbing is that the Syrian “rebels” have most likely already used chemical weapons, have a reputation for beheading prisoners, and that U.S. support is prolonging the conflict in the region. The reasons for U.S. intervention are of course complicated and multifaceted, but it most likely has to do with attempts to destabilize Iran’s strongest ally and what the Romans called divide et impera.
Syria may be the most dangerous example of the Obama administration’s enhanced policy of covert military training and assistance, but unfortunately it is nowhere near the only one. In Mali, along with building a brand new drone base, U.S. AFRICOM chief General Carter Ham admitted that while training Mali’s military, they “skipped ethics.” Targeting dissidents based on ethnicity and executing them is a staple of the U.S.-trained Mali government.
In Indonesia, the Obama administration resumed training and assisting an elite Indonesian military unit whose members have been convicted of massive human rights abuses in East Timor. U.S.-trained forces in Guatemala have incredibly close ties to some of the region’s most violent drug cartels and are notorious for their brutal treatment of civilians during the Guatemalan civil war.
A report from the Washington Office on Latin America details a U.S. policy called “the Merida Initiative” designed to “help the region’s militaries take on internal security roles” and use American police to train local police. Although President Obama publicly denounced the 2009 military coup in Honduras, Wikileaks cables later revealed that the Obama administration had members of the State Department meet with the illegitimate new Honduran “president” to help coordinate the implementation of the Merida Initiative.
The policy of militarizing, arming, and subsidizing foreign governments, especially those with well-known and documented human rights abuses and commissions of war crimes, appears to be a staple of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. But these policies help contribute to the spread of dictatorships, humanitarian crises, and instability while making the possibility of resentment and blowback much more likely.
It is becoming more and more clear that the bipartisan consensus policy of military interventionism is a threat to peace and security. Neutrality and non-intervention, as the Founders recommended, is a far more practical alternative and is still the best way to spread the American values our politicians are so fond of endorsing.
(Times of Israel) Israel’s leaders, in private exchanges with senior US officials in 1975, flatly denied that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, and foreign minister Yigal Allon also claimed Israel had no intention to build such weapons, according to diplomatic cables published this week by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.
This despite the fact that, according to foreign reports, Israel is now believed to have begun full-scale production of nuclear weapons soon after the 1967 war, and to have stockpiled a number of nuclear weapons by the early 1970s.
The cables are part of a trove of more than 1.7 million US diplomatic cables sent between 1973 and 1976. Among the 5,000-plus documents that deal with Israel are messages that shine light on the development of Israel’s nuclear program, as well as on Israel’s relationship with pre-revolutionary Iran and a 1973 plan by then-defense minister Moshe Dayan to extend Israeli citizenship to Palestinian residents of Ramallah and Bethlehem.
In May 1975, senator Howard Baker asked prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and defense minister (today President) Shimon Peres about speculation that Israel had acquired nuclear weapons.
“Rabin told senator Baker that GOI [the government of Israel] had made a commitment not to be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons into the area. Israel had kept its word,” states the document, which was quietly declassified in 2006 but only published now by WikiLeaks.
In the document, which the US Embassy in Tel Aviv sent to the embassy in Turkey, Peres is quoted as saying that Israel’s introduction of nuclear weapons into the Middle East would lead to a conflict with Washington and would encourage the Soviet Union to give similar devices to the Arab nations in the region, which “would bring [the] Middle East to [the] point of no return.
“Peres, in reply to [a] direct question, states that Israel has not constructed a military nuclear device,” the document continued. Baker asked whether that meant Jerusalem had not constructed an explosive device, and Peres answered affirmatively.
Israel has always pursued a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither denying nor confirming the possession of atomic weapons. Yet the existence of an Israeli nuclear-weapons program has been widely reported in the foreign media, and it is widely believed that Jerusalem has had such devices since at least 1973.
In one of the cables from the summer of 1975, Rabin said that Israel has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty “because it regarded this as part of [an] arms race issue in [the] area and of an eventual overall political settlement” of the Middle East conflict.
The Israeli prime minister also commented on repeated American requests to inspect the nuclear facilities in Dimona, telling Baker that Jerusalem and Washington had in 1969 — “and rightly so” — agreed that such visits had been “terminated.”
“The Dimona facility was not open for inspection,” the document states.
A few months earlier, in January 1975, a cable that the US Embassy in Tel Aviv sent to Washington quotes US senator Charles Mathias asking foreign minister Yigal Allon about Israel’s nuclear capabilities.
“Allon replied that Israel had the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons. However, he said that [the government of Israel] did not currently possess nuclear weapons, nor did it intend to manufacture them.”
The senator then remarked that the secrecy surrounding the Dimona reactor and Jerusalem’s refusal to allow inspection “were a public relations problem for Israel in the US.” Allon agreed in principle, but offered no immediate remedies.
In November 1976, a dozen American senators visited Israel, with “one of their principal interests” being an inspection of the Dimona nuclear reactor, according to another US Embassy cable. Jerusalem denied the senators’ requests. “When asked regarding the reason for this decision,” the document states, “we were simply told that adequate attention would be given to Israel’s energy situation in briefings and a visit to Dimona would not be considered useful.”
The US Government suspected Israel of having nuclear weapons since 1970 and, according to foreign media reports, Israel assembled more than a dozen nuclear warheads during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1986, former Dimona nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu gave detailed information about the country’s “secret nuclear arsenal” to the London Sunday Times. In 2008, former US president Jimmy Carter saidthat Israel had at least 150 nuclear weapons.
The diplomatic documents, which WikiLeaks dubbed the “Kissinger Cables,” also reveal that, in the 1970s, military legend Dayan — serving as defense minister — planned to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinian residents of Bethlehem and Ramallah, while retaining full control over the West Bank.
A cable from May 1973 quotes former minister Gad Yaacobi, who was a close ally of Dayan, saying that Dayan was preparing to expand the degree of autonomy for Arab municipalities in the West Bank, which Israel had captured in the Six-Day War.
Yaacobi said Dayan encouraged Israeli settlements everywhere in the West Bank except in “Arab metropolitan areas.” The two exceptions to that rule were Ramallah and Bethlehem, which Dayan considered parts of the “greater Jerusalem area.”
“As for Dayan’s thinking on [an] ultimate peace settlement with Jordan, Yaacobi said Dayan would only return one or two small enclaves of the West Bank,” the cable states. “But Dayan, according to Yaacobi, envisages [the] rest of [the] West Bank population though living under Israeli sovereignty as being full-fledged Jordanian citizens, with [the] exception [of] inhabitants of Ramallah and Bethlehem, who would become Israeli citizens.”
‘What the Iranians and Israelis are specifically cooking up in the arms field remains to be ascertained, but the Shah has a complex game going’
The Kissinger Cables, named after former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, also shed light on Israel’s close military ties with Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which turned the two countries into bitter enemies.
In 1976, several top Israeli government officials, including Rabin, Peres and Allon, secretly visited the Shah in Tehran, writes then-US ambassador to Iran and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Richard Helms in acable.
Rabin’s visit, in July of that year, was clouded in particular secrecy, Helms writes. It was followed by a trip to Israel by Iranian vice minister of war Hassan Toufanian, ostensibly to discuss several joint military projects, such as the 1977 Project Flower.
“What the Iranians and Israelis are specifically cooking up in the arms field remains to be ascertained, but the Shah has a complex game going with both the Israelis and the Egyptians, the obvious purpose of which is to exchange or at least have available certain kinds of ammunition and weapons which are not subject to US Congressional control or veto,” Helms writes.
In a separate cable, Helms reports to the State Department in Washington that the Shah complained to Peres during a visit to Tehran about Jerusalem’s efforts to dissuade the US from selling arms to Iran.
In a third cable, Helms says that Toufanian told him that his trip to Israel and Peres’s visit to Tehran “were basically get-acquainted sessions.” The Iranian official said that “ways will be explored to expand military cooperation between the two countries, but that it is important [for] the prime personalities to get to know each other first and to come to understand each other’s particular problems.”
ed note–for the record, so that no one can say that the discussion never took place, let us consider the words of former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky concerning Israel’s plan to assassinate then-US President George Herbert Walker Bush at the Madrid peace conference in 1991–
‘Since the Mossad had all the security arrangements in hand, it would not be a problem bringing the killers as close as they wanted to President Bush and then staging his assassination. In the ensuing confusion, the Mossad people would kill the ‘perpetrators,’ scoring yet another victory for the Mossad. With the assassins dead, it would be difficult to discover where the ‘security breach’ had been, except that several countries involved in the conference, such as Syria, were regarded as countries that assisted terrorists.’
ynet
Around 15,000 police will participate in efforts to secure US President Barak Obama throughout his visit next week. Israeli police will go into operational activity level, cancelling vacations and days off.
Over 5,000 officers will be involved in protecting the presidential entourage, which includes more than 600 people. In Jerusalem, there will be 3,000 active officers.
“We are preparing for even the gravest possibility and are not relying only on intelligence. We are taking into account every scenario that could develop,” said head of operations, Brigadier General Nissim Mor. “We are talking about a very complicated operation.”
Police are preparing for different scenarios ranging from an attempt to hurt the president, to the possibility of developments in the north or the south. There are also arrangements being made with the Palestinian Authority and at the beginning of next week police will launch a campaign to track down Palestinians residing illegally in Israel.
Mor said that activists of Peace Now and haredi groups intend to hold demonstrations throughout the visit. “The police will allow demonstrations as long as they are within legal limits,” Mor said.
Security personnel will be stationed at Ben Gurion Airport, as well as at the other locations Obama is scheduled to visit. Each of these locations will have a high ranking officer with operations and special forces soldiers at his disposal. Special police forces will accompany the nearly 60-vehicle presidential motorcade.
As part of the preparations, case scenarios will be played out on Friday with American security officials. The police will open a special center on Sunday that will provide information to the public regarding the Obama visit.
On Monday, a ‘general rehearsal’ will be held for all forces participating in the operation. Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino and senior police staff will all be involved.
In a White House meeting that lasted longer than the scheduled hour, Obama listened to leaders of more than a dozen Israel advocacy groups, representing a spectrum of views over the challenges facing the Jewish state at a moment of regional instability and mounting threats.
The gathering was not listed on the president’s public schedule, and some participants spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the discussions. Some said Obama engaged most energetically, although never angrily, with those with whom he most disagreed.
In one exchange, Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, expressed concern that Obama might be softening his pledge to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, based on recent reports of frustrated international diplomatic efforts.
Obama has said his policy is to prevent Iranfrom developing a nuclear weapon, not containing the Islamic republic if it does achieve that capability. Vice President Bidenmade the same point earlier this week in an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but Hoenlein asked Obama what actions he intends to take to stop it, according to participants.
“I’m not going to beat my chest to prove my toughness on this,” Obama said, according to participants.
Obama continued by citing a quote attributed by some to the Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu, who suggested that a “golden bridge” must be built to give what Obama described as a “proud people” a face-saving retreat to a diplomatic solution.
“The president outlined in general terms what he hopes to accomplish during his trip,” said Robert Wexler, the former Democratic congressman from Florida who attended the meeting as the director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace.
“All of that was underlined by the president’s commitment — the reiteration of his commitment — to an unprecedented security relationship with Israel and with the president’s desire to have a meaningful conversation with the Israeli people,” he added.
Obama is scheduled to leave in just under two weeks for his first trip to Israel as president. He will also visit the occupied Palestinian territories and Jordan, whose leader, King Abdullah II, is facing growing public unrest over his family’s long rule of the desert kingdom of strategic importance to the United States.
Obama has met with Jewish leaders before, including a seminal July 2009 meeting held a few weeks after his call for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world in Cairo.
While a moving afternoon in which Obama highlighted the suffering of the Jewish people, the visit — and decision to skip Israel — appeared to locate the modern state of Israel’s right to exist in the Holocaust rather than in the period outlined in the Bible.
Obama’s visit to Israel, which will be focused in Jerusalem, is an effort to reset his relationship not with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has had a rocky one, but with a still-suspicious Israeli public.
Nathan Diament, director of the Institute for Public Affairs of the Orthodox Union, said he told Obama at the Thursday meeting that he must reach out not only to young secular Israelis but also to the nation’s growing religious community.
“I emphasized the importance that as part of what he does in that regard is speak, directly and symbolically, to the religious sectors of society and the millennia of connection the Jewish people have with the land of Israel,” said Diament, whose organization is the largest orthodox Jewish umbrella group.
Asked if that would help correct the impression left with Israelis in his Cairo speech, Diament, who attended Harvard Law School with Obama, said, “No comment.”
Obama was also urged Thursday to deliver a message to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whom Obama will meet in Ramallah, that Palestinians should not obstruct Israeli peace efforts.
According to participants, Obama said he would. But he added that he also planned to tell Israelis that they must do more than talk about peace.
He said they must also act in a way that encourages an acceptable resolution with the Palestinians, according to several participants.
“And that will be a difficult balance to accomplish,” Obama said, according to one participant.
White House officials said Thursday that Obama had no plans at this point to meet with Palestinian — or other Arab — leaders before the trip.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private meeting, said Obama during the Thursday meeting “noted that the trip is not dedicated to resolving a specific policy issue.”
“He also underscored that the trip is an opportunity for him to speak directly to the Israeli people about the history, interests and values that we share,” the official said.
(mondoweiss.net) Israel’s deportation policy entered a new phase on Monday when Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro, co-founders of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), arrived at Ben Gurion airport and discovered an entry ban on Shapiro, despite inquires made in advance by a lawyer for the couple. Arraf and Shapiro, now expecting their first child, are perhaps the most recognizable pair in the Palestine solidarity movement, and architects for building an international activist presence on the ground since the beginning of the second Intifada.
At the airport on Monday afternoon Israeli authorities informed Shapiro that in 2009, unknown to him, the Israeli Ministry of Interior issued a 10-year entry ban for him. Initially the border police “weren’t making much sense,” Arraf told Mondoweiss, but then Shapiro was taken to jail where he remained for two days until he and Arraf were briefly reunited at a court hearing Tuesday.
After Shapiro’s Monday arrest, Arraf sent a letter to friends and supporters on her husband’s arrest:
Adam and I are expecting our first child, a boy in about 5 weeks. As joyful as this blessing is, we’ve had / we have to make some difficult decisions (besides what to name our son that is!) I am an Israeli citizen (in addition to a US citizen). This fact has made it possible for me to continue accessing my homeland all these years in spite of some attempts by Israel to kick me out. Israel did however deport Adam in 2002 because of our human rights work and banned him from re-entering the country (including the occupied Palestinian territory) since, which is why we’ve had to spend so much of our married life apart. In order for us to ensure that in the future, if Israel remains the racist, apartheid state that it is, it won’t deny our son the right to visit his homeland and all his family in Palestine, we’ve had to think about getting Israeli citizenship for our son. However, because I’m Palestinian, and not a Jewish citizen of Israel, our child will not have the automatic right to visit the country or to claim citizenship. The only way for me to pass down my citizenship to our son is to have him in Israel.
Arraf explained that in Tuesday’s court hearing the state claimed that Shapiro was presented “a document all in Hebrew” that stipulated a 10-year entry ban when he was detained by Israeli authorities in 2009 and “they said that Adam refused to sign.” But Arraf says Shapiro was never given such a document, “this is the first time he’s been told he has a 10-year ban.” Yet at the trial, Arraf says the state’s attorney produced a copy of the letter, “it’s the state’s word against Adam’s.”
“When the judge ruled, it was basically a technical ruling,” explained Arraf. He “wouldn’t listen to evidence on the ban itself, whether it is legal,” and Arraf summarizes it was clear “they did not want Adam to enter the country.”
Arraf is Palestinian with U.S. and Israeli citizenship, and Shapiro is a U.S. citizen—facts that dictate the couple’s ability to live together, travel together, and now will impose a separation during the birth of their first child after 11 years of marriage. Because of Arraf’s Palestinian national identity, she traveled to Israel late in her pregnancy so she could give birth to her son in country, ensuring she could bequeath her Israeli citizenship. Although it is technically possible for Arraf to transfer citizenship abroad, for Palestinians it is an arduous task. By contrast, children of Israeli-Jews born outside of the country can be issued Israeli identification numbers, even in instances where the child is not registered by the parents. This past year an American activist born to an Israeli father toldMondoweiss that despite never applying for citizenship, the Israeli Ministry of Interior told her she was already registered in the system. They said it was illegal for her to enter on a U.S. passport as the state already considered her an Israeli citizen.
Last month a lawyer for Arraf and Shapiro twice inquired with the Israeli government on Shapiro’s ability to enter Israel. Both times Arraf said Shapiro “was never given any written notice that he has a 10-year ban.” In addition, in 2008 Arraf wrote a letter to the Ministry of Interior to inquire into Shapiro’s travel status. At the airport on Monday, border officials produced a copy of the letter and told Arraf that she should have waited for a response before entering. “Well it’s been five years, you want us to wait longer for a response?” said Arraf.
Arraf and Shapiro’s current predicament dates back to 2002 when Shapiro was working in the West Bank as a human rights activist. After an arrest that led to deportation Shapiro discovered he was persona non grata, when attempting to re-enter through an Israeli controlled border. Over the next ten years he tried to enter the country three times. The pair was advised that Shapiro had been issued one of the notoriously vague 10-year entry bans, typically given to activists without notice, or formal explanation. Indeed Shapiro was never officially told he had a 10-year ban, but it was a logical deduction.
Later in 2009 while aboard the flotilla to breach the Israeli sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, Shapiro was taken into Israel by Israeli forces against his will and was again deported. According to Arraf, at the time the judge in that case acknowledged that Shapiro did not intend to enter Israel and was taken into the country while under custody of Israeli authorities. Now the state is alleging a new entry ban was issued at that time.
Because Arraf and Shapiro have been in communication with Israeli officials about their travel plans, Shapiro’s secret 10-year entry ban is especially alarming. The couple seems to have taken every measure to ensure Shapiro could be present for the birth of their son. But with Shapiro’s looming deportation anticipated to take place this evening, their case demonstrates that Israel not only issues entry bans, but also conceals them until the time of arrival.
“A couple of years ago,” said Arraf, “a lawyer once told me that [the 10-year entry ban] is not in any official Israeli law.” Yet, the threat of a 10-year ban is considered a final banishment doled out to the most high profile activists. It is viewed as a punitive measure for internationals who are known supporters of Palestinian rights, a fact that is underscored by the fact that only Palestine solidarity activists have received it.
Because of an Israeli policy that allows for anyone who is a perceived “security threat,” to be denied entry on spot, Arraf was aware her husband could face complications upon arrival. It is not uncommon for activists working in the West Bank to be deported from Israel, even without ever exiting the airport. This policy was employed en masse in 2012 and in 2011 when dozens of internationals were denied entry when traveling for a “fly-in,” a protest against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
“I’m usually very optimistic” said Arraf in regards to Shapiro’s ability to be present for the birth of their son. But with “all of his human rights work and his activism the state doesn’t like him.”
Arraf has a reputation for hopefulness and resilience, and it is not surprising that despite this situation she is still committed to working for the rights of Palestinians. I interviewed her after she was arrested on the 2010 flotilla, and Arraf told me that the Israeli police beat her until she was concussed, ultimately dumping her from their car. She regained consciousness while medics put her on a stretcher after seemingly being left for dead in the middle of the desert. Arraf was then taken to a hospital. After treatment she left on her own and walked until she found a phone to call her family. She didn’t know where she was, or how much time had passed.
But a few days later Arraf was back on the ground, demonstrating and fighting for her cause. Now, just as in 2010, she moves forward even though her husband’s case will likely become a benchmark for secret travel bans.
“We continue our work on the larger picture,” wrote Arraf in her latest update to friends. “If our situation can be used to help shed more light on the racism and inhumanity rampant here (as well as Israel’s contempt for human rights defenders), with the goal of changing the system someday for the future of all the children of this region, that would be one of the best things that we could hope for.”
Presstv.ir March 7, 2013
With mock settlements, an apartheid wall and chants urging for cuts in funding to Israel, protesters collected outside of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee commonly called AIPAC.
They’ve come here from around the country for what they say is an important issue largely ignored by US media. Activist groups such as CODEPINK and others spring into activist mode every year to protest the Israel lobby’s annual policy conference.
AIPAC is considered the most powerful lobbying group in support of Israel. The power comes from money. The committee operates on a budget of $67 million each fiscal year. Some of that money goes to politicians through smaller organizations and committees, many of which support Israeli interests.
There are an estimated 13,000 people who attend the AIPAC conference. It’s a gathering that reportedly attracts more members of the US government than virtually any event other than the President’s State of the Union address.
Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren said:“The Israeli Embassy still doesn’t know what will be the extent of the sequester. The aid to Israel is included in the federal budget. Just as this budget is cut, so can the aid to Israel. As the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, Israel understands the complex budgetary challenges the Americans face. We are ready to carry our share of the burden, while trying to maintain the same projects that are essential to the security of the State of Israel, among them the Iron Dome.”
Israel may try to keep funding for its missile defense system at the expense of general military aid.
Funds for the Iron Dome shield are additional to the regular military aid to Israel. As noted in a Washington Post article last May:The Iron Dome funds, already in legislation before Congress, will be on top of the $3.1 billion in military aid grants being provided to Israel in 2013 and every year thereafter through 2017.
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced a Senate motion that says the United States should help Israel militarily and economically if it acts against Iran in self-defense.“We have no better friends in that part of the world than Israel. Last year President Obama told the people of Israel, ‘We have your back.’ Our resolution builds upon that statement and makes it clear that if Israel is one day forced to protect themselves we will stand with Israel.”
While there will probably be some cuts to Israeli aid, military aid to Egypt will face even higher hurdles. US lawmakers generally favor aid to Israel but the $1.3 billion a year aid to Egypt is coming under fire by more and more US lawmakers.The aid has included fleets of M1A1 tanks and F16 fighter jets.
John Kerry has insisted that disengaging with Egypt would be a mistake. He is meeting this weekend in Cairo with Egyptian leaders. The US wants to review military aid policy to Egypt now that they do not have an established pro-western authoritarian such as Mubarak in power but a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Already bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to halt military aid temporarily or end them entirely. Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Republican from Florida said:“Why are we giving billions to Egypt, when in my mind it is not a friend of America? We’re drowning in a sea of debt. Why are we spending so much money in a part of the world that doesn’t like us?”
Since 1979, after the signing of the Camp David Accords peace deal, Egypt and Israel have remained the top recipients of US foreign aid. Those accords are very unpopular among the Egyptian populace. Egyptian dependency on US foreign aid gives the US leverage that induces the Egyptian government to adhere to the terms of the agreement. If aid is withdrawn the Egyptian government would not have as much incentive to continue following an unpopular policy. Egypt also helped negotiate a ceasefire during the Gaza conflict.
David S Adams, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs said:“Maintaining this relationship and assisting with the professionalization and the building of the Egyptian Armed Forces’ capabilities to secure its borders is one of our key interests in the region. Egypt continues to play an important role in regional peace and stability.”
John MacCain the Republican senator from Arizona takes a more moderate approach in suggesting that aid to Egypt should be focused more on tools for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. John Kerry maintained that cutting off Egyptian aid would be very damaging to US policy interests in the middle east:“Egypt is a quarter of the Arab world. It is critical to everything we aspire to see happen in the Middle East.”
(RT) -President Barack Obama says the United States could launch an attack on Iran as early as this June, Israeli media reports.
According to a report on Israel’s Channel 10 News that has since been picked up by the Times of Israel, Pres. Obama will use an upcoming meeting overseas to discuss a military strike on Iran. Pres. Obama is scheduled to visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next month, and during the get-together the two leaders will reportedly work out the details for a possible assault.
Pres. Obama will tell Netanyahu that a “window of opportunity” for a military strike on Iran will open in June, Channel 10 claims.
Israel has long-urged the White House to use its military prowess to intervene in Iran’s rumored nuclear weapon procurement plan, demands which have by-and-large been rejected by the Obama administration. According to the latest reports, though, the United States might finally be willing to use its might to make a stand against Iran’s race for a nuke.
“I have conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu all the time. And I understand and share Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran should not obtain a nuclear weapon, because it would threaten us, it would threaten Israel, and it would threaten the world and kick off a nuclear arms race,” Pres. Obama said during an interview on the television program 60 Minutes last year, but not before adding that he’ll continue to block “noise” from Netanyahu’s camp. “Now I feel an obligation, not pressure but obligation, to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis — on these issues. Because it affects them deeply. They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence,” he said.
But five months after those remarks, Iran is still inclined to become a nuclear power. Only days earlier, The Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu said the details of a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment facility, sparking “very grave” concerns that Israel could be hit with a nuke.
Right now, five members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany are holding talks with Iranian officials in Kazakhstan, with the goal of reaching a diplomatic answer to the nuclear crisis. However, domestic tensions within Iranian political elite do not make the prospect of a solution any more viable for now. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second and final term in office is set to wrap up this June, and political fights within the country’s top contenders for the position has prompted possible presidents to take harsh stance on the issue and resist outside pressure.
“President Ahmadinejad’s second term in office expires in half a year. The law prohibits him from running for the third term. What is happening could be an intensifying power struggle,” Andrei Baklitsky of the Russian Center for Policy Studies tells the Moscow Times of the latest “5+1 talks” in Kazakhstan. “At first [Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar] Salehi signals the possibility of direct talks with the United States and then the supreme leader rejects it. But as Salehi is Ahmadinejad’s man, the controversy should be viewed through the prism of an internal political standoff rather than as Tehran’s official policy.”
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, told reporters in Berlin, “My hope is Iran will make its choice to move down the path to a diplomatic solution.”
When Netanyahu critiqued the United States’ reluctance to act first last year, a meeting between the prime minister and Pres. Obama was subsequently cancelled by the White House. Just next month, though, the commander-in-chief will travel to the West Bank and Jordan for the first time during his second term in office. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor has said of the trip that it will mark an “opportunity to reaffirm the deep and enduring bonds between the United States and Israel and to discuss the way forward on a broad range of issues of mutual concern, including Iran and Syria.”
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Researchers at Symantec Corp have uncovered a version of the Stuxnet computer virus that was used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in November 2007, two years earlier than previously thought.
Stuxnet, which is widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel, was discovered in 2010 after it was used to attack a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Iran. It was the first publicly known example of a virus being used to attack industrial machinery.
Symantec researchers said on Tuesday they have uncovered a piece of code, which they called “Stuxnet 0.5,” among the thousands of versions of the virus they recovered from infected machines.
They found evidence Stuxnet 0.5 was in development as early as 2005, when Iran was still setting up its uranium enrichment facility, and the virus was deployed in 2007, the same year the Natanz facility went online.
“It is really mind blowing that they were thinking about creating a project like that in 2005,” Symantec researcher Liam O’Murchu told Reuters.
Security experts who reviewed Symantec’s 18-page report on Stuxnet 0.5 said it showed the cyber weapon was already powerful enough to cripple output at Natanz as far back as six years ago.
“This attack could have damaged many centrifuges without destroying so many that the plant operator would have become suspicious,” said a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, which is led by former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright and closely monitors Iran’s nuclear program.
ALTERNATE APPROACH
Although it is unclear what damage Stuxnet 0.5 might have caused, Symantec said it was designed to attack the Natanz facility by opening and closing valves that feed uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges, without the knowledge of the operators of the facility.
Previously dissected versions of Stuxnet are all believed to have been used to sabotage the enrichment process by changing the speeds of those gas-spinning centrifuges without the knowledge of their operators.
“The report provides even more concrete evidence that the United States has been activity trying to derail the Iranian nuclear program since it was restarted under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reign,” said John Bumgarner, an expert on cyber weapons who works as chief technology officer with the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit.
The Natanz facility has been the subject of intense scrutiny by the United States, Israel and allies, who charge that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.
The United States began building a complex cyber weapon during the George W. Bush administration to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, U.S. officials familiar with the program have told Reuters. The government has declined to comment on the reports and has launched investigations into leaks on its cyber programs.
Since Stuxnet’s discovery in 2010, security researchers have uncovered a handful of other sophisticated pieces of computer code they believe were developed in tandem to engage in espionage and warfare. These include Flame, Duqu and Gauss.
Stuxnet 0.5 was written using much of the same code as Flame, according to Symantec’s report, which was published at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, an event attended by more than 20,000 security professionals.
Symantec said it has now uncovered four versions of Stuxnet and there are likely others that have not been discovered yet. Researchers at Symantec and elsewhere are still trying to understand the full extent of the virus’s capabilities.
“This fills in some of the gaps,” said O’Murchu.
He said the researchers found no evidence to prove who was behind Stuxnet.
Later versions of Stuxnet, which manipulates industrial control software known as Step 7 from Siemens AG, used more sophisticated methods to infect computer systems, he said.
Siemens previously said it plugged the security holes that allowed Stuxnet to breach its software. A company spokesman had no immediate comment on Symantec’s latest research.
“I put my money on this film to win the Best Picture Oscar (even though there is nothing remotely “best” about it) especially if Obama can pull off winning the Presidential election,” wrote cultural critic Kim Nicolini in an article published in October 2012.
“Argo, above all else, is a piece of conservative liberal propaganda created by Hollywood to support the Obama administration’s conservative liberal politics as we move toward the Presidential election,” she said before Obama was re-elected for the second term.
“It also primes the war wheels for an American-supported Israeli attack on Iran, so that Leftists can feel okay about the war when they cast their vote for Obama in November (2012),” the critic pointed out.
At the 85th edition of Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, on Sunday, Michelle Obama, the US First Lady, announced Argo as winner of the Best Picture Oscar, live from the White House.
The thriller directed by US filmmaker Ben Affleck is loosely based on the allegedly historical account by former CIA agent Tony Mendez about the rescue of six American diplomats during the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The revolutionary Iranian university students who took over the US Embassy believed that the embassy had turned into a den of espionage which aimed to overthrow the nascent Islamic Republic establishment.
Argo only tells the rescue operation of the six Americans from the Canadian Embassy in Iran, with no mentioning of the 53 Americans who spent 444 days in the US Embassy.
Nicolini lashed out at Argo for completely neglecting to provide the Iranian’s side of the story, noting, “The film is a sanitized version of the events.”
She argued that “there is nothing authentic about the film’s manipulation of historical events,” and described the movie as “pure political propaganda.”
“Given the vast number of people who have died in the Middle East (Americans, Iranians, Iraqis, Afghanis, etc.), why should we give so much attention to 6 white American diplomats who were saved by Hollywood and the CIA? What about all the other people from so many cultural demographics who have and are continuing to be massacred, murdered and tortured daily?” the critic questioned.
One of the most disputed aspect of Argo’s version of events has to do with Canada’s role in the escape, as the film is considered to be a very inaccurate dramatization of a purported joint CIA-Canadian secret operation.
Former Canadian Ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor has heavily criticized the movie, saying, “The amusing side is the script writer (Chris Terrio) in Hollywood had no idea what he’s talking about.”
He said Argo downplays the actual extent of the Canadian involvement which was considerable.
Taylor criticized Argo for incorporating a myriad of creative liberties that included the “black and white” portrayal of Iranian people and fabricated scenes, adding that Argo “characterizes people in a way that isn’t quite right.”
The former Canadian envoy argued that Argo didn’t portray “a more conventional side,” and “a more hospitable side” of the Iranian society as well, an “intent that they were looking for some degree of justice.”
Political analysts say Argo unmasks the elaborate US scheme to employ every medium in its propaganda apparatus to incite Iranophobia across the globe.
“Argo is an arrant instance of Hollywoodism. In point of fact, it is yet another attempt to foment Iranophobia not only in the USA but across the world as well,” Iranian academic Dr. Ismail Salami wrote in an article on Press TV website in November 2012.
“In recent years, Iranophobia has come to encompass a wider scope of media including cinema which is incontestably capable of exercising a more powerful effect on manipulating the audience,” he said.
The analyst also lashed out at Argo’s director for portraying a “stereotyped and caricatured view” of the Iranian society and noted that Affleck has consciously sought to ridicule “the very customs and traditions” of Iran.
In an interview with Press TV, top Iranian official Masoumeh Ebtekar who was a spokeswoman of the students who took over the US Embassy in 1979, says she initially thought that the film would be a balanced representation of events, but after seeing the film, she says it does not tell the story of the takeover as it actually happened.
“The group who took over the American Embassy were a group of young, very orderly and quite calm men and women … The scenes that you see in Argo are totally incorrect,” Ebtekar said.
Iranian film critic Masoud Foroutan told Press TV that Argo was “politically-motivated,” noting, “The making of the film from the technical aspect is ok but the story is not authentic. The story is custom-made and you could see where it would end up. The film was a politically-motivated one.”
On the 19th of January 1981, the Algiers Accords was signed by the United States and Iran which secured the release of the American diplomats. A day later, the 53 Americans were released in Tehran and minutes later former US President Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.
Meanwhile, political observers contend that the US has always sought to keep the Algiers Accords hidden from the general public and it comes as no surprise as Argo makes no mention of the accords either.
