D4net Netwerk voor Dromers, Denkers, Durvers en Doeners

By Pepe Escobar

As the climax to a leaking frenzy in Western corporate media that bordered on - literally - nuclear hysteria, United Nations inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally released a report essentially charging that Tehran had tried to design a nuclear weapon to fit in a missile warhead until as late as last year.

According to the report, Iran worked "on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components".

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Pepe Escobar has written a piece for Al Jazeera, Max Fisher of The Atlantic,   Julian Borger of the Guardian, who lists no less than eight perfectly legitimate questions as holes in Eric Holder's account. Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Tony Karon, Stephen Walt, and John Glaser also raise serious and unanswered questions about the Attorney General's story

"Did an elite branch of Iran's military handpick a divorced, 56-year-old Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas to hire a hitman from a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the ambassador to Saudi Arabia by blowing up a bomb in a crowded restaurant in Washington?" 

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Captive and prisoners behind the dark walls,

We know our destiny to freedom.

We, the cage birds fearful of outside, in Evin prison

We sing the song of flight.

Together, solid as a row of cypress.

In memory of brave Neda, Alive and Green! [Neda, meaning "voice" in Farsi, was the young woman whose death during a 2009 protest was widely seen on YouTube and became a rallying point for the opposition movement.]

Dedicated to the soil of Iran,

Captive of the bitter sunset,

But tomorrow's green sunrise belongs to us

Artikel PBS Newshour

by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective
While building solidarity between activists in the U.S. and Iran can be a powerful way of supporting social justice movements in Iran, progressives and leftists who want to express solidarity with Iranians are challenged by a complicated geopolitical terrain. The U.S. government shrilly decries Iran’s nuclear power program and expands a long-standing sanctions regime on the one hand, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes inflammatory proclamations and harshly suppresses Iranian protesters and dissidents on the other. Solidarity activists are often caught between a rock and a hard place, and many choose what they believe are the “lesser evil” politics. In the case of Iran, this has meant aligning with a repressive state leader under the guise of “anti-imperialism” and “populism,” or supporting “targeted” sanctions.

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door Noam Chomsky Z Magazine juli 2010

In brede kring wordt de dreiging door Iran gezien als de meest serieuze crisis in de buitenlandpolitiek van de regering Obama.

Generaal Petraeus informeerde in maart 2010 de Senaatscommissie voor de Strijdkrachten dat “het Iraanse regiem de voornaamste bedreiging voor de stabiliteit op staatsniveau vormt” in het gebied dat onder de verantwoordelijkheid van het Amerikaanse Centrale Commando in het Midden-Oosten en Centraal-Azië valt. Dit is de belangrijkste regio voor de Amerikaanse mondiale betrokkenheid. De term ‘stabiliteit’ wordt hier gebruikt in haar technische betekenis: stevig onder Amerikaanse controle. In juni 2010 heeft het Amerikaanse Congres nieuwe sancties tegen Iran goedgekeurd. Deze sancties bevatten nog hogere boetes voor buitenlandse bedrijven die met Iran handel drijven.

Door: Juan Cole, Informed Comment Thursday, January 07, 2010

 
In the past three weeks, Iran observers have been baffled by the range of opinion appearing on the op-ed page of The New York Times concerning Iran, and the uneven reporting on that country. Before the holidays, Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the University of Texas Austin, called for bombing Iran-- becoming the first respectable academic in the US to take a position usually associated with discredited angry Neoconservatives such as John Bolton. Kuperman's argument is wrong in almost every particular, and that the NYT editors published it was considered alarming by many Iranists. We all remember how the newspaper printed a long series of bald-faced lies and easily disproved fantasies about 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq in 2002, which certainly helped legitimate and pave the way for war on that country. We worried that the fix was in against Iran.

De druk van het Westen op Iran om af te zien van haar uraniumverrijkingsprogramma neemt steeds verder toe. Westerse landen, waaronder ook Israël kan worden gerekend, vrezen dat Iran kernwapens wil maken. Tegelijkertijd is de nucleaire deal tussen de VS en India in de laatste fase van het goedkeuringstraject beland. Als het Amerikaanse Congres het bilaterale kernverdrag tussen de beide landen goedkeurt kan India als niet-lid van het Non-Proliferatie Verdrag (NPV) rekenen op dezelfde privileges als NPV-leden.

Deze quote is van de directeur van het Internationaal Atoomenergie Agentschap (IAEA) en tevens de titel van een artikel van de stichting Laka dat onlangs verscheen in de Nuclear Monitor, het blad van World Information Service on Engergy (WISE Amsterdam) en Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS).