Iran Info-Op Update 4-17-06
It just wouldn't feel like a normal workday without a good dose (or two or three...) of anti-Iran info-op nuggets.
Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week.
The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon.
Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years ago. Western analysts long suspected that Iran had a second, secret program--based on the black market offerings of the renegade Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan--separate from the activity at its main nuclear facility at Natanz. But they had no proof.
Suspicions arose because inspectors knew that Dr. Khan had supplied Libya and North Korea with actual P-2 centrifuges in the late 1990's, and they repeatedly heard that he had done likewise with Iran.
B. S .A. Tahir, the chief operating officer of the Khan network, now in prison in Malaysia, has reportedly said that Iran received far more P-2 technology than it has admitted and that some shipments took place after Dr. Khan and the Iranians supposedly ceased doing business around 1995.
The "mushroom cloud" scenario is usually a winning hand when trying to scare people into going along with a political or military initiative, but there are additional strategems in play today.
We need to work Iran's support of terrorists into the conversation. Who have been the poster boys for the public face of terrorism since the 1960's?
Iran said Sunday that it would give $50 million in aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government after the United States and the European Union froze financing.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, announced the donation on the last day of a pro-Palestinian conference.
"We warn that if the aid is cut and if this continues in the near future," the Palestinians "will witness a humanitarian disaster and the occupiers and their supporters will be responsible," Mr. Mottaki said, referring to Israel.
Today's tour de force concludes with the scary revelation that the Islamic Republic of Iran did not celebrate Easter with an official Easter egg hunt. But they are hunting for spare parts for the then-advanced weaponry they purchased from the U.S. during the Shah era.
Over the past two years, arms dealers have exported or attempted to export to Iran experimental aircraft; machines used for measuring the strength of steel, which is critical in the development of nuclear weapons; assembly kits for F-14 Tomcat fighter jets; and a range of components used in missile systems and fighter-jet engines.
"Iran's weapons acquisition program is becoming more organized," said Stephen Bogni, acting chief of the Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations Unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "They are looking for more varied and sophisticated technology. Night-vision equipment, unmanned aircraft, missile technology" and weapons of mass destruction...
Since 2002, there have been 17 major cases involving the illegal shipment of weapons technology to Iran, outpacing the 15 cases involving China, the other main nation seeking U.S. military goods, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2000, the U.S. government has instituted 800 export investigations involving Iran.
Although arms dealers work nationwide, many of the Iranian cases have connections to Southern California, which remains a center for aeronautics and is home to the biggest concentration of Iranians outside of Tehran. Some neighborhoods of Los Angeles, such as Brentwood on the west side and parts of the San Fernando Valley, are jokingly referred to as "Irangeles."
Federal agents said the main method for obtaining U.S. technology is not through espionage but through simple business deals. "We're not talking about 007 running around trying to steal these parts," Bogni said. "We're talking about the Iranian government putting out shopping lists to brokers and greedy businessmen."
I've known my share of greedy businessmen, but I doubt that even any of them would actually sell weapons of mass destruction to Iran. Methinks the boys in the psy-op shop may have overdone it a bit with that extraneous detail.
Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week.
The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon.
Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years ago. Western analysts long suspected that Iran had a second, secret program--based on the black market offerings of the renegade Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan--separate from the activity at its main nuclear facility at Natanz. But they had no proof.
Suspicions arose because inspectors knew that Dr. Khan had supplied Libya and North Korea with actual P-2 centrifuges in the late 1990's, and they repeatedly heard that he had done likewise with Iran.
B. S .A. Tahir, the chief operating officer of the Khan network, now in prison in Malaysia, has reportedly said that Iran received far more P-2 technology than it has admitted and that some shipments took place after Dr. Khan and the Iranians supposedly ceased doing business around 1995.
The "mushroom cloud" scenario is usually a winning hand when trying to scare people into going along with a political or military initiative, but there are additional strategems in play today.
We need to work Iran's support of terrorists into the conversation. Who have been the poster boys for the public face of terrorism since the 1960's?
Iran said Sunday that it would give $50 million in aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government after the United States and the European Union froze financing.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, announced the donation on the last day of a pro-Palestinian conference.
"We warn that if the aid is cut and if this continues in the near future," the Palestinians "will witness a humanitarian disaster and the occupiers and their supporters will be responsible," Mr. Mottaki said, referring to Israel.
Today's tour de force concludes with the scary revelation that the Islamic Republic of Iran did not celebrate Easter with an official Easter egg hunt. But they are hunting for spare parts for the then-advanced weaponry they purchased from the U.S. during the Shah era.
Over the past two years, arms dealers have exported or attempted to export to Iran experimental aircraft; machines used for measuring the strength of steel, which is critical in the development of nuclear weapons; assembly kits for F-14 Tomcat fighter jets; and a range of components used in missile systems and fighter-jet engines.
"Iran's weapons acquisition program is becoming more organized," said Stephen Bogni, acting chief of the Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations Unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "They are looking for more varied and sophisticated technology. Night-vision equipment, unmanned aircraft, missile technology" and weapons of mass destruction...
Since 2002, there have been 17 major cases involving the illegal shipment of weapons technology to Iran, outpacing the 15 cases involving China, the other main nation seeking U.S. military goods, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2000, the U.S. government has instituted 800 export investigations involving Iran.
Although arms dealers work nationwide, many of the Iranian cases have connections to Southern California, which remains a center for aeronautics and is home to the biggest concentration of Iranians outside of Tehran. Some neighborhoods of Los Angeles, such as Brentwood on the west side and parts of the San Fernando Valley, are jokingly referred to as "Irangeles."
Federal agents said the main method for obtaining U.S. technology is not through espionage but through simple business deals. "We're not talking about 007 running around trying to steal these parts," Bogni said. "We're talking about the Iranian government putting out shopping lists to brokers and greedy businessmen."
I've known my share of greedy businessmen, but I doubt that even any of them would actually sell weapons of mass destruction to Iran. Methinks the boys in the psy-op shop may have overdone it a bit with that extraneous detail.
posted by Effwit at 10:16 AM
11 Comments:
M1:
Thanks.
Although my older call that the PLO would weasel itself into a seat or two on the Hamas Cabinet turned out to be suspect. You nailed that one.
It's getting to the point where the average American should be saying, "What are you doing, Bush?! Why did you waste time, lives and money going after Iraq when you should have been going after Iran?!" It makes him look almost...incompetent.
Seems like Iran has turned from a virtual sleepy backwater into the second coming of the Third Reich in a matter of weeks. The slippery slope into war just got a nice wax job.
On a related note, any chance that the Valerie Plame affair had more to do with Iran than it did with Iraq? She supposedly was involved in covert WMD monitoring of Iran. With her and her intel network out of the way, it opened things up for all manner of lies and innuendo with no one sufficiently placed to counter it. Even allowed a relative unknown such as Ahmadinejad to gain power. The same guy who now appears to push all the buttons that Washington wants him to. If I were a cynic, I'd say that something is afoul here.
Then again, perhaps I've just been reading too many conspiracy theories...and watching too much of "24".
D-Dawg
From my highly contorted perspective only...sure GG (genocide george) wasted lives and money....but it wasn't his lives or his money he wasted...and it was only a waste if you compare his stated objectives and promises with the situation of steady state chaos in Iraq.
But from where I'm looking, Iraq is all muddied up and unable to project much regional or petro influence for a long while and that's almost as good as a thriving America-friendly democracy in Iraq (certainly it's at least always been a more realistic scenario!). And that is a good thing for GG's geostrategic posse.
Oil prices are sky high and that's an excellent dividend if not the only dividend that matters. OPEC isn't smashed and that's also a good thing for petroprofiteers - white or olive-hued. (Dumbfuck GG and his neo-com minions had initial designs to smash OPEC by smashing Iraq but then the WASPY oil boys tald GG et al to leave OPEC the fuck alone. OPEC is good not just for towel-head biz (many a neo-con just hates! that Arabs have such might) but more importantly WASP biz. So the Israel lobby had to back down on that wish.
If I owned Shell I'd be praying to every God there is that Bush muddies Iran and further raises petro prices.
The only discrepancies are between what he tells those whose lives and money he expropriates to pay for his private interests and what actually ends up panning out.
But hey, we're all born 'n raised in America....if there's one thing we all should've learned by the time the 2nd Persian Gulf War officialy began in 2003 is that advertising slogans are one thing - reality is another.
So D-Dawg...have you ever been introduced to the way of the perfect dry martini?
DrewL:
The psyche of the average American is a very real battlefield in the "war on terror." When you can lead people around by the leash into supporting whatever lunatic policies you can dream up, you are in a very strong position.
People should have stood up before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. When W claimed that all the European intelligence services believed that Saddam possesed WMD--but none (save the Brits) were willing to support an invasion--Americans should have realized that it was all BS.
On the Plame skullduggery, yes there are reports that her propriatary cover job involved--inter alia--monitoring Iran's nuclear program. In that light it would indeed be advantageous to some people to get her and her colleagues out of the picture.
There is a rumor floating around--and I don't really know how legit--that Brewster/Jennings (Plame's cover) blew the whistle on a (U.S. sponsored) shipment of nerve gas from Turkey into Iraq so that it could then be conveniently "found" by American troops in the aftermath of invasion in 2003.
The Plame outing and subsequent Brewster/Jennings exposure is said then to be payback for thwarting the neo-con plan to find the WMD (nerve gas).
M1:
Your "steady-state chaos" theory is (as usual) proving to be quite precient.
For Iraq--certainly. For Iran--looking better every day.
The motive of restricting oil output in order for petrol companies to get top dollar is also a valuable contribution from your side.
When one takes the trouble to decipher your (occasionally trying) syntax and symbolism, one often gains great insights into the important matters of the 21st century.
Bravo (no Sierra attached to this comment).
...call my garbled mumbojumboisms mixed with porn a steganogrophy of sorts - my grainish wisdoms are only intended to be shared with the most persistent and delving of passer-byers.
Maybe one week I'll try plain-texting my rantings but it will have to be a week when I'm on the wagon. Did you know I was once the debating champion of some anglophonic nation? Shame on me now - or perhaps shame on that nation then!
Till that week of grammatolatry, blessed be the seekers for only they get the dirt of meatballian truth under their nails.
(...such utter BS that fills my mind)
M1:
Do not plaintext your valuable info. You would not want the riff-raff to get to the truth with no effort.
Nothing in life worthwhile is easy.
I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work at it, they work at it because they excel.
Just like the Meatball One (Zorro) posts.
LMAO...you are kind and you are good at projecting your qualities unto us lesser life forms. We mean well but we so wish our meanings and leanings had the lucidities and prescience of an Effwit.
M1:
Thanks.
You also spell "prescience" better than me.
See "precient" above.
It takes more than a typo's missing S to topple a king. At least we know now that you aren't Jesus
M1:
We always try to introduce one flaw into every work of art. For the reason you site.
Only the gods are perfect. (Any monotheistic Xtian or Muslim might object to the plural, while an atheist would have his own problems with the formulation.)
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