More Nuclear Scaremongering about Iran from Clinton; Neocons Quake at Ahmadinejad threat to make . . . gasp . . . Medical Isotopes

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engaged in some fearmongering on Iran on Sunday on Candy Crowley's CNN magazine show, State of the Union. Here is how the exchange went:

'CROWLEY: If you were to say to the American people, this country is the most dangerous to Americans and to the U.S., where is that country?

CLINTON: You know, Candy, in terms of a country, obviously a nuclear-armed country like North Korea or Iran pose both a real or a potential threat.

CROWLEY: And you're convinced Iran has nuclear...

CLINTON: No, no, but we believe that their behavior certainly is evidence of their intentions . . .

Kudos to Crowley for not letting that ridiculous assertion pass. To put Iran in the same category as North Korea in 2010 and to make it among the primary 'threats' challenging the United States is just bizarre. The US intelligence establishment continues to doubt that Iran has or wants a nuclear weapons program. Tehran does have a nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran allows United Nations inspections of it nuclear facilities. Although Iran is not as transparent as the UN International Atomic Energy Agency would like, there is no dispositive evidence of a weapons program. For the Secretary of State to frame Iran as she did is just muddled or dishonest.

Clinton again repeated that the new facility near Qom is evidence that Iran intends to build a bomb. But then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohammed Elbaradei was invited to inspect it in late October and found a 'hole in a mountain' with no equipment or uranium on-site. The facility is too small to be an efficient producer of High Enriched Uranium for bombs, and is more likely intended to serve as a repository of equipment and know-how that cannot be bombed by the Israelis or Americans.

It is a trick of the Washington Establishment to scare apparently easily frightened Americans into a conviction that some small, poor, third world country is a dire threat to the most massively funded and armed military in the world. Repeating falsehoods is one way the Big Lie is implanted, that then allows US belligerence to be unquestioned at home.

Clinton did go on to defend the Obama administration's attempts to engage North Korea and Iran (again, placing them on the same plane), but not on the grounds of success in negotiations. Rather, she argued that attempting to engage the problem countries made it easier, when the negotiations failed, to convince countries such as Russia and China (in N. Korea's case) or Russia (in the case of Iran) to ratchet up sanctions at the UN. But if all engagement accomplishes is to make imposition of sanctions easier, it isn't really engagement, it is just posturing. Here is the video:



News from Iran will be spun by the US press to justify Clinton's fears. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made headlines Sunday by directing Iran's (regularly inspected) nuclear research establishment at Natanz near Isfahan to begin attempting to enrich uranium to 19.75% so that that country will eventually have the ability to supply its own fuel for its sole reactor that produces medical isotopes for treating, e.g., cancer. Any uranium enriched to 19.75% and fed through the reactor is transformed into isotopes and then used up.

Note that Iran is openly announcing this decision and is informing the International Atomic Energy Agency of it, in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nor is it something they'll be able to accomplish soon.

Iran's PressTV reports on the Western reaction to the announcement:



But if all Iran does is enrich to 19.75% (the upper level of low-enriched uranium) for the isotope reactor and then use up the isotopes, this step is the least dangerous one it could take.

Iran in the past bought the enriched uranium for the isotope reactor from Argentina. So it would be nothing new if Iran came to possess that grade of LEU. Iran's government is horrible, but it is less dictatorial than that of the Argentinean generals of the 1970s and early 1980s who developed Buenos Aires' nuclear enrichment capabilities to the point where it really could have made a bomb. But the country foreswore any such ambitions despite its knowledge. Iran likewise denies it wants a bomb, and there is no good evidence to the contrary. It is just that Washington adored the far rightwing generals in Argentina who made people disappear in the thousands, and didn't care if they had the Bomb. And much of Washington is determined to lie about what is known of Iran's capabilities and intentions.

The list of other countries capable of producing LEU of 19.75% includes Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Holland, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about Iran joining this list, and none of the others on it except N. Korea is being sanctioned-- and that is for constructing a bomb, which Iran is not doing. Argentina was sanctioned neither for enriching to 19.75% nor for selling that stock of LEU to Iran! And South Korea was never sanctioned for secretly enriching to 77%, near bomb grade, something Iran has never been accused of.

It is not dangerous for Iran to produce low enriched uranium, whether for reactor fuel for the nuclear electric plants it is building or for its small medical isotopes reactor (given to it in 1969 by the United States).

It would be dangerous if Iran determined to enrich to 95% to make a bomb. In order to do so, it would have to evade all US electronic surveillance, withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and throw out the UN inspectors. No country being actively and continuously inspected by the IAEA has ever developed an atomic bomb. The US National Security Agency can hear a walkie-talkie conversation in the jungles of Guatemala, and for Iran to hide a decision to make a bomb would be very difficult. The US has also been successful in enticing Iranian nuclear physicists into defecting, with insider knowledge and documents. The idea that Iran could conceal a major enrichment facility somewhere is far-fetched, because enrichment is a water- and electricity-intensive activity that can be detected. Even just the building activity for the new small facility near Qom showed up on US satellite surveillance.

Does the step Ahmadinejad announced on Sunday make sense for Iran? The answer is yes. Jeffrey Lewis of the New America Foundation writes that:

'Iran has developed plans to use naturally occurring uranium as a “target” for producing an important medical diagnostic isotope of molybdenum, an isotope whose decay product can be used to scan for cancers in bone, heart, lung, and kidney. Iran already imports a sizable quantity of this pharmacological radionuclide but producing it indigenously would not only save Iran a considerable amount of money each year, much more than it would pay for the fuel for the reactor it would use to produce it, but also allow a more efficient use of this short lived isotope by preventing the decay of nearly half of the amount bought before it even reached the patients. Perhaps the biggest incentive indigenous production of 99Mo in Iran would be the encouragement of its entire nuclear medicine infrastructure; an infrastructure that might right the imbalance of medical isotopes into this developing country relative to other nations." '

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Iran is already producing low enriched uranium for reactor fuel. That it has decided to produce a higher grade of it for its medical infrastructure is neither surprising nor a cause for panic. You'll know if Iran decides to build a bomb. It will throw out the inspectors or refuse them access, including to places the US detects a huge electromagnetic signature but which Iran declines to declare as facilities. None of that has happened. Until then, the world should relax.


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Saying 'Constitution' while meaning 'Lawlessness': Palin attacks Obama

Sarah Palin's turn before the teabaggers was an exercise in emptying the US Constitution of meaning while seeming to exalt it.

She praised US military personnel for defending the constitution.

But she complained that constitutional protections were offered to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber. She said it is 'our' constitution, reducing it from a universal document (the Declaration of Independence says 'all men' are endowed with inalienable rights) to a tribal one.

She said Abdulmutallab could otherwise have been questioned. But why should he have answered, rights or no? Holder's methods got him talking. (Nor is it likely constitutional to arrest a lawbreaker on US soil and whisk him off to military detention.)

Then she said we need a commander in chief, not a professor of constitutional law.

But Obama is designated by the constitution as commander in chief. Is she denying that status to him?

And if the constitution is so great and worth dying for, why is it bad to study it systematically?

So at every turn she invoked the constitution to undermine the constitution.

She is not about law, but is about power. We've had enough narcissistic sociopaths in politics.

And note that Jerry Brown, e.g. Would not be put on CNN addressing 600 leftwing democrats in prime time. I'm afraid of Time Warner now.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone


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Thousands Flee Marja Area as NATO Prepares Campaign; Anti-American Rally in Kapisa

Agence France Presse reports that thousands of Afghans are fleeing an anticipated NATO/Afghan (mainly British) campaign against the Taliban stronghold of Marja, a city of 80,000, south of the capital of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province. Marja is in the midst of a major poppy-growing region and so a center of narco-terrorism (the poppies are used to make heroin, and it is estimated that 40% of the drug trade goes to insurgents fighting the Karzai government).

The 5,000-man strike force will be British troops in the majority, and the rest will be Afghan or American. Although the campaign is called Operation Mushtarak, the Dari Persian word for "joint," it seems obvious that Afghan Army troops are a small part of the force. Unlike past such campaigns, the invasion force will be garrisoned in Marja rather than withdrawing, so as to allow the troops to keep the Taliban out and to win over local hearts and minds.

Perhaps in preparation for the campaign against Marja, in the past couple of days NATO and Afghan troops attacked insurgents in the Baba-ji district of Lashkar Gah, killing some 19 and taking control of it. Afghan troops will be garrisoned in Baba-ji to consolidate Kabul's control.

NATO and the Afghan army have waged similar campaigns in Qandahar and its environs. NATO is now racing to train enough Afghan troops to stay in the major southern city and keep it out of the hands of the Taliban.

In other news, several hundred demonstrators in Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul, staged an anti-American demonstration in which they blocked the road to Kabul on Saturday. The crowd was protesting the US military's arrest of Col. Ataullah Kohistani, security chief of the province. Protesters insist that only the Kabul government has the right to arrest Afghan officials, not foreign troops.

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Undoing Lex Luthor

The red increase in job loss is the climax of Republican White House control. The blue decrease in job loss is Obama and the Democrats. Sort of like when Superman flies around the world counter-clockwise to undo Lex Luthor's fiendish destruction.



h/t TPM docs.

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Reading cuts stress levels by 68%

Reading cuts stress levels by 68% | Health news | Marie Claire

Well now we've solved the difference in approach to the world of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.


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40-Day Mourning Sessions targeted by Sunni Radicals in Karbala, Karachi

The 40th day mourning ceremonies after the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn (the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) in 680 CE was marred by bombings in both Iraq and Pakistan. This violence on the terrain of sacred space and sacred time marked a regional low-intensity war between Shiite revivalists and Sunni vigilante extremists. In Iraq, the Shiites came to power in the wake of the US overthrow of the secular, Arab nationalist (and Sunni-tinged) regime of Saddam Hussein, and are being resisted by radical Sunni Arabs, whether religious or secular. In Pakistan, the Taliban in the northwest Pashtun areas are hyper-Sunni and have often attacked Shiites. The current president, Asaf Ali Zardari, is a nominal Shiite, and many Shiites support the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP). It is the center-left PPP that has authorized massive military operations against the ultra-Sunni Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.

In Iraq, the Sunni radicals attacked pilgrims pouring into the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad, the site of Imam Husayn's tomb. A car bomb blew up among a throng of pilgrims, and than they were subjected to a further mortar attack. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that as many as 41 persons were killed and about 150 wounded in the attacks, though exact statistics were hard to come by in the chaos. The atrocity came after a bomb killed 22 pilgrims on Tuesday.

According to al-Zaman, Shiite authorities claimed that "10 million" pilgrims had packed into the shrine city and environs over the past 5 days, 100,000 of them "Arabs and foreigners." Personally, I don't find an estimate of more than a million pilgrims for Arba'in (the 40th-day mourning ceremonies) plausible. During the official pilgrimage to Mecca, about 2 million persons come from all over the world. Moreover, Shiism is a minority branch of Islam, encompassing about 10%. And the 40th-day observations are not as central as Ashura, the day of Imam Husayn's martyrdom.

In any case, Shiites in Karbala seemed more resigned than revengeful, according the anonymous NYT reporter in Karbala.

In the major southern port of Karachi in Pakistan, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a busfull of pilgrims went by, as well as attacking a hospital, killing 22. The guerrillas followed the wounded pilgrims to the hospital and attacked them again there. Karachi has been filled with sectarian tensions since early January.



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Informed Comment Poll: Should US Troops be in Pakistan?

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Michael Schwartz, Will Iraq's Oil Ever Flow? | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Will Iraq's Oil Ever Flow? | TomDispatch

Sociologist Michael Schwartz, a sharp Iraq-watcher and author of a provocative book on the Iraq War, surveys the travails of Iraq's oil industry since the 2003 Bush-Cheney invasion and points to the continued difficulties of the Iraq petroleum industry.

My own guess is that eventually the security situation will settle down enough to allow the foreign petroleum companies now signing bids to develop specific fields to press forward. It will be a long slow haul, but Iraqi petroleum will likely come online over time. When that expansion of production happens,it will have a big impact on Iraq. There will be massive internal migration of labor to the Basra and other oil-rich areas, mixing up Sunni Arabs and Kurds with regional labor migrants from e.g. Egypt, India and Pakistan.

The Neoconservative dreams that Iraq would rival or replace Saudi Arabia as swing producer, and that it would recognize and perhaps supply petroleum to Israel, however, are both unlikely developments. Moreover, as China, India and other Asian giants begin growing more rapidly and depending on automobiles, demand for petroleum could well grow so fast over the next twenty years that any new big fields' production is just slurped up, with the world demanding more. That is, Rupert Murdoch's notion that Iraq production could plunge prices down to $14 a barrel for the long term, helping industrialized economies, was always stupid, since it did not take account of rapidly growing demand from Asia.

The emergence of Iraq as a petroleum state (or rather a bigger, wealthier petroleum state) will also further upset the geopolitical balance in the Middle East. With a Shiite majority, it will offset Saudi Arabia in the Sunni-Shiite culture wars. It seems likely to have a big, well-trained and effective army, which cannot always be depended on to be allied with the interests of Washington. A military coup down the road cannot be ruled out (there are few democratic oil states, where petroleum supplies more than a third of the national income). And, it likely will be a friendly and supportive big brother to movements like Hizbullah in Lebanon. While it won't always be on the same page as Iran, it will likely be an ally of and support for Tehran. One possibility is that a rich Iraq 20 or 25 years from now will be in a position to promote Twelver Shiism in the region, picking up some of the Alevis in Turkey, the Nusairis in Syria and the Zaidis in Yemen. With its possession of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, with the enormously influential chief cleric of Najaf as among its more prominent residents, Iraq's soft power among Afghan, Pakistani and Indian Shiites has the potential for being greater than that of Iran.

In the end, an oil-rich, Shiite-dominated Iraq is far more likely to be a victory for the Shiite revival kicked off in 1979 by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini than a triumph for Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Pipes and the other hard line warmongers who advocated for a revolution-by-invasion in Iraq.

But Schwartz is correct that all these developments are likely a decade or more off.


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Al-Maliki Gov't Appeals Reinstatement of Candidates, Calls Special Session of Parliament

Iraqi politics and the conduct of the March 7 elections has been thrown into turmoil by the reversal on Wednesday by a judicial appeals panel of the exclusion of over 500 candidates for parliament out of several thousand.

The decision of the appeals panel evoked outrage among the Shiite religious parties, including the State of Law coalition of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Iraqi National Alliance (which groups the Sadr Movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, among others). The INA condemned what it called the interference of the USA in the appeals panel decision and called the decision "unconstitutional." It warned that any step to rehabilitating Baathists and allowing them to serve in the front ranks of the government would doom Iraq's nascent democracy.

The original decision to disqualify the candidates was made by the Justice and Accountability Commission. Technically it falls under the authority of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, since the Baath Party is illegal and therefore continued connections to it are a crime. It is for this infraction against the law, i.e., continued ties to Baathism, that the Justice and Accountability Commission excluded those hundreds of candidates. Its decisions could therefore be appealed to the appellate panel of the CCCI.

In the meantime, the Independent High Electoral Commission confirmed the disqualifications. This Commission was created by parliament and therefore is technically under the legislature.

The appellate panel agreed that the over 500 figures disqualified should be further investigated, but said that the investigations should be carried out after the election. This scenario is potentially nightmarish, since it could lead to the removal of members of parliament and an alteration of its balance of power, after the people had spoken.

Ali al-Lami, the head of the Accountability and Justice Commission, denied that the appeals panel had any standing to intervene in the issue.

The Independent High Electoral Commission made a different argument, suggesting that the appeals panel only had the prerogative of deciding guilt or innocence. But it simply postponed that judgment and allowed the accused to run anyway. The IHEC insisted that deciding whether a candidate could run was its own prerogative and that the appeals panel could only decide guilt or innocence, which it had declined to do. Its decision was therefore irrelevant and the High Electoral Commission ruling should therefore be unaffected (i.e. the disqualified candidates should remain disqualified).

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the al-Maliki government is combatting the appellate panel reversal in two ways. It is appealing the ruling to the Federal Supreme Court. And, on Sunday, it is calling a special session of parliament to discuss the issue.

The Independent High Electoral Commission has also sent a letter to the Federal Supreme Court about the reversal, asking for a clarification of the authority of the appeals court reinstatement of the secular candidates. In the meantime, the IHEC has postponed the beginning of the campaign season from 7 February to 12 February to give the Supreme Court time to rule first.

Riz Khan of Aljazeera English interviews Salih Mutlak, the secular Sunni Arab leader of the 11-seat National Dialogue Bloc in parliament, who was among those disqualified to run on March 7:



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Sophisticated Taliban Bombing, Deaths of 3 US Troops, Embarrasses Zardari Government by Revealing US Troop Presence on Ground in Pakistan

The fragile Pakistani government of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari was deeply embarrassed Wednesday when a massive bombing killed 3 US soldiers on the ground in that country. The Pakistani public has been increasingly upset about US military and para-military (Blackwater/ Xe) actions in their country. On Tuesday, several US drone strikes killed a total of 29 persons. The controversy over whether the US is actually fighting a third war, in Pakistan, may have been settled by the troop deaths.

On Wednesday morning, A suicide car bomber slammed into a Frontier Corps convoy of vehicles heading to inaugurate a girls school in the village of Kad, in the Lower Dir district of northwest Pakistan, killing 7 and wounding at least 130. Among the dead were 3 US troops in Pakistani dress and a Frontier Corpsman. The others were schoolgirls. The attack occurred as the convoy was reaching two girls' schools, one an elementary school and one a high school rebuilt with US funds. The force of the blast collapsed the high school's walls, but it was empty. Most of the wounded were schoolgirls in the elementary school, hit by flying glass and debris; ironically, given that the Taliban claim to be Muslims, some were having their class on Islam when the shrapnel hit them.

The bombing was claimed by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan), according to Agence France Presse: "We claim responsibility for the blast," Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq said in the call from an undisclosed location. "The Americans killed were members of the Blackwater group. We know they are responsible for bomb blasts in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities." '

Many Pakistanis believe that the wave of bombings besetting their country, blamed by the mainstream on the Taliban, is secretly carried out by American agents, in order to destabilize Pakistan and justify a US imperial presence.

The bombing differs little from numerous other such attacks in the frontier badlands, but is distinctive because it accidentally revealed that some 200 US troops are on the ground in Pakistan, some 60-100 on a training mission. Those killed had been giving training and support to the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani unit charged with policing the lawless Pashtun areas on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The News says, "The US soldiers were apparently in the area to train the FC [Frontier Corps] personnel engaged in the military operation against the Taliban in Maidan, which is the native area of Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi's [Organization for the Implementation of the Law of Muhammad's] jailed chief Maulana Sufi Muhammad. The Taliban group in the area was commanded by Hafizullah, who had escaped the action."

The Daily Times notes that 'Local authorities appear confused by the foreign troops’ plans to attend the inauguration of the school, as “they had little role in the project”. '

But in fact, The Guardian reveals that 'The attack also highlighted an even less well-known civilian aid scheme: a retired US official said the defence department had been discreetly funding development projects such as schools in North West Frontier for years. The targeted soldiers could have been going to the school in Dir as "a show of solidarity" with their Pakistani colleagues, he said. '

The targeting of the convoy by truck bomb strongly suggests that the operation was an assassination aimed at the US troops, and further suggests that the Taliban had a man on the inside among the Frontier Corps, who could report the Americans' movements. The US military is known to use jamming technology that interferes with the detonation of roadside bombs by remote control, so that ramming by car bomb would be the only way an insurgent group could bomb them.

Aljazeera English has video:



Opinion polls show that many observers in Pakistan already feel that the US is humiliating their country and sowing discord there, and this revelation of the presence of US troops on the ground, along with the Department of Defense role in building girls' schools, will further raise hackles (and risks making girls' schools unpopular even among non-Taliban).

The USG Open Source Center translated an editorial by Dr Hussein Ahmed Paracha: "How Much Dignity is Left?", published in Nawa-e Waqt in Urdu on January 18, 2010, which exemplified this point of view:

'The United States has been attacking within Pakistani land with drones for the last four to five years and is also killing innocent people. . . There were 44 drone attacks in 2009 alone in which more than 700 innocent people, majority of whom were innocent children, elderly, and women, were killed. According to the statistics provided by various agencies, those who belonged to "Al-Qa'ida" or the Taliban could not be more than 18. . .

Having made sure that the wealth of our national dignity has turned to ashes and the last flame has burned down, the US Administration has now announced a program of naked screening for the passengers coming from a few countries. All these countries are Muslim countries, and Pakistan is one of them. Yes, the same Pakistan, which is the frontline US ally in war against terror. Pakistan has danced to death in others' parties and has made fun of itself. It is the same Pakistan, which left its citizens starving and spent $35 billion in others' war. . .

The United States is bent on treating us shamelessly. Moreover, we pay too much regard to anyone coming from the United States. The Blackwater operatives, who committed heinous and inhuman crimes in Iraq, come wherever they please in Pakistan without visa or travel document. They keep on roaming around in vehicles with fake number plates with dangerous weapons. These US officials point guns at the security people if asked to reveal their identity. During a few minutes debate, there is a series of phone calls from the high officials, and they, who consider Pakistan as their playground, are allowed to go with honor.'

In an opinion poll done last summer, 64% of the Pakistani public said that they saw the US as an 'enemy,' and only 9% saw it as an ally.

Pakistan was born out of the Freedom Struggle against British colonial domination, which aimed at securing independence for what had been branded as 'British India' and an end to control of the place by foreign Western white Christian troops. The return of such troops to Pakistani soil under an American guise will be highly unwelcome to most Pakistanis. Now that Pakistan is having parliamentary elections again, moreover, it matters what the public thinks, because they could well vote for anti-American parties in the next polls, as part of a backlash against US intervention.

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