Trump As Netanyahu's Ventriloquist Dummy

Trump posted online this morning: "We [sic] now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran." A gloat over Israel's latest aggression against Iran. Presumably it's been Israel and Israel alone that has been bombing Iran and murdering top officials and nuclear scientists for almost a week now. Trump also says he wants a "total end" to Iran's nuclear program. (It's not a bomb program, it's a uranium enrichment program which creates fuel for nuclear power reactors. That's not an opinion, that's a fact according to U.S. intelligence and Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence/assassination agency.) Trump went on to boast about how great U.S. military weaponry and technology is. (Yes, with it, Israel and the U.S. can murder and destroy with impunity. Terrific. Lord Acton had a famous aphorism: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The corruption is both political and moral. The consequences are terrible for humanity.)

Trump has gone from resisting Netanyahu's demand that the U.S. join in a war on Iran, to threatening to murder the Ayatollah, Iran's Supreme Leader, and seems ready to bomb Iran's main uranium enrichment side under a mountain. Trump already sent B-2 bombers to the area for the purpose. 

Israel has been waging undeclared war on Iran for five days as of today. This has included murdering top Iranian government and military officials, with threats to murder the top ruler, the Ayatollah. 

A reporter asked Netanyahu if murdering the Ayatollah would escalate the "conflict." Netanyahu bellowed that "It would END the conflict!" How he figures that, I have no idea. It's typical Netanyahu supremacist bluster.

Israel has been drunk on its regional military supremacy for decades now. 

People seem to automatically, unconsciously even, have a simplistic attitude of Good Guys/Bad Guys, and one side has to be one, the other side the other, and whatever the "Good Guys" do to the "Bad Guys" is a good thing, including murdering them, because after all, they're "terrorists" and terrorists aren't humans, so it's a good thing to just kill them.

Of course this is mindless. Both Iran and Israel are loathsome political entities. I'm talking about their governments. But Israel is far worse because Israel has been committing the worst crime under international law and in terms of normal human morality, namely genocide, for over a year and a half now. (However, since 1948, Israel has been committing a lower grade genocidal campaign against the Palestinian Arabs, namely an attempt to deny and erase their identity as a people, which does constitute genocide under the international legal definition of genocide. Just as the Chinese regime is doing to the Uyghurs under its rule, brainwashing them in forced labor/torture camps and physically forcing them to renounce their culture, beliefs, dress, and family ties to make them into imitation Han Chinese. The Israelis of course have never sought to twist the Palestinian Arabs into Jews, but to banish them and kill large numbers of them, starting in 1948.

Trump cheaply and cynically evokes World War II, demanding "unconditional surrender" from Iran, and implicitly and not very subtly threatening the life of the Ayatollah by saying "we know where you are." 

Western propaganda ("news coverage") consistently omits the key fact that Iran does NOT have a nuclear bomb or warhead program, allowing people to be duped into believing it does.

Also NEVER pointed out, the key fact that if Iran HAD nuclear weapons, it wouldn't dare USE them against Israel, since Israel has hundreds of deliverable nuclear weapons, and the U.S. has thousands, some of which it would use on Iran if Israel for some reason didn't totally annihilate Iran itself if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

The whole thing about the imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons is to make sure there is never even a possible challenge to Israeli regional military supremacy. 

                                                                 A cruel demagogue, and also a sad, pathetic man.

 

Pompeo's Hitlerian Demands On Iran

In the wake of the brazen U.S. assassination of Iran's leading general, Qassem Soleimani, a hero of the Iraq-Iran war and head of the so-called Qods Force, by a missile strike from a drone attack on an international airport located in a sovereign nation and putative U.S. ally (the client state of Iraq, conquered and subjugated on the orders of U.S. emperor George W. Bush in 2003), now is a good time to review the outstanding U.S. demands against Iran. [U.S. media are spelling it Qassem, the BBC and Wikipedia, have Qasem.]

Trump's handpicked Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has a list of 12 outstanding demands against Iran. These are preconditions to the U.S. deigning to even TALK to Iran about the U.S. ceasing its relentless economic warfare against that country. This warfare is euphemistically called "economic sanctions." In fact they are total warfare, barring Iran from the international banking system (a system controlled by the U.S.- with the rest of the world's nations supinely acceding to this financial hegemony by the U.S.), and including the publicly stated goal of preventing Iran from selling ANY oil whatsoever outside its borders. Again, the other 200 or so allegedly sovereign nations of the world, including large, powerful ones like China, have all knuckled under to U.S. diktat and ceased buying oil from Iran, at least openly. If this isn't global domination, I don't know what is.

Under the "principle" that it is criminal to go against U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. government ordered Canada to arrest a top executive of China's premiere high tech company, Huawei, for violating U.S. anti-Iran sanctions- i.e. not participating in the U.S. economic war on Iran.  Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and the daughter of the company boss, was tracked by the U.S. global secret police surveillance system as she flew to Canada, where she was held at the airport, her luggage "searched" for 3 hours without explanation, and then was arrested on a U.S. extradition "request." (Really an order. Canada is a virtual satrapy of the U.S.) Her alleged "crime" is violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. You see, if the U.S. decides to wage economic warfare against another country, it demands that all the other nations in the world participate in that war. In other words, the U.S. dictates foreign policy for all other nations. And lacking political or moral integrity, those nations make themselves U.S. lackeys and obey. Because they refuse to resist U.S. power, even though collectively they obviously could do so. (Even in some cases individually, as China could.)

Oh, and the U.S. applies its laws not just within its own borders, but over the entire planet earth. That's how Meng Wanzhou could be "guilty" of breaking U.S. law while OUTSIDE the U.S.

Meng has been held in Canada for over a year as Canada is the rope in a tug of war between China and the U.S. Canada allowed her out of jail but confined to Canada after China retaliated against Canada by jailing a couple of Canadian citizens. (Labeled "hostages" by the U.S. propaganda system.)

I should mention so as not to be misunderstood: I am NOT a supporter of the Iranian theocracy. As a lifelong atheist, democrat, and pro-human rights person, I have no truck with that regime. But contrary to its self-deluding propaganda, the U.S. is the opposite of a paragon of virtue. It is one of history's most aggressive empires which has committed innumerable atrocities and crimes against humanity through its history, starting with its foundational principles, genocide and slavery.  Moreover this is not about taking sides. As always, I strive for the objectivity that is sorely lacking in most public commentary, most people's minds, and certainly in propaganda.

I call these demands "Hitlerian" because of their extremism, and because the target of the demands would find them virtually impossible to accept. Hitler made such demands with a deliberate goal of having an excuse for war when his demands were rejected. Trump claims not to want war with Iran, but he has surrounded himself with a coterie of imperialist fanatics who DO want war with Iran, such as the recently-cashiered John Bolton. It's been reported that Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani

Here now are the Trump-Pompeo Demands On Iran. To call them "sweeping" is a gross understatement. Notice that eleven of the twelve begin with the words "Iran must." "Must" is a demand word.

In perpetuity! I guess that means until the end of time.

I'll just note in passing that the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons, and Israel has hundreds. Also even the CIA concluded that Iran was NOT trying to build nuclear weapons. However I believe they wanted to have the option to create them if they felt it necessary at some future point. Otherwise it makes no sense to incur the huge expense of money and energy to building underground facilities deep under mountains to prevent Israel from blowing them up (as Israel blew up atomic reactors in Iraq and Syria) with thousands of centrifuges, just to enrich uranium which it could easily purchase from Russia, for example.

By the way, Iran only ever enriched to 20%. allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). For bomb-making purposes, uranium has to be enriched to 90% or more. Under the agreement Iran on one side and the Obama regime, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and China on the other, Iran turned over virtually all its enriched uranium, mothballed its centrifuges used for enrichment, and agreed to intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Trump tore up the agreement and reimposed sanctions, with the avowed aimed of strangling the Iranian economy to force Iran to make a new deal with Trump. (Imperialist thugs like John Bolton and perhaps Michael Pompeo also wanted the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime in response to this foreign attack on their country and their lives. It's a strategy the U.S. is also using against Venezuela, making people's lives miserable to destabilize an unwanted government, has used against Cuba since 1959, that Nixon used against Chile from 1970-73 when he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to "make the economy scream," and in other places at other times.)

Even though Iran is entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 

                                       Treaty to enrich uranium to the 20% level, as I mentioned.

Meaning U.S. spies will gain access to every single military base, command and control center, etc. 

Just as they did during the UN inspection regime inside Iraq after the first Gulf War of 1991. 

We know this from a leading member of that team, former U.S. Marine Major Scott Ritter.

Iran isn't allowed to have missiles. Just its enemies can: Israel, Saudi Arabia, 

and the U.S.A. That's reasonable. Why wouldn't Iran agree to THAT?

Including all enemy spies. Because some of those prisoners certainly are. Meanwhile the U.S. will continue to imprison

 Iranians for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, "espionage," and whatever, and keep those now in prison locked up.

Because anyone who resists Israeli oppression is a "terrorist." Iran must surrender the region to Israeli hegemony. And of course the U.S. is free to continue aiding Israel in every possible way, as an accomplice to the oppression of the Palestinians and the periodic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure. And the U.S. can support any actual terrorists it likes, such as the anti-Iranian MEK. And Israel can keep assassinating Iran's nuclear scientists, if it so chooses.

That actually would be a good thing. Those militias have in the past few months slaughtered hundreds of protesters against the corrupt and venal Iraqi "government," and wounded thousands. They have also "disappeared" some, U.S.-death-squad style.

Now if only the U.S. would respect Iraq's sovereignty. After murdering Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and eight others right in the Baghdad, Iraq, airport, the Iraqi legislature voted to kick out the thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Trump himself responded with contempt. There's also a couple of hundred other nations whose sovereignty the U.S. regularly tramples.

The Houthi tribesmen overthrew the very weak "government" of Yemen starting in 2014. The Saudis decided this internal Yemeni power struggle was their business, and picked the overthrown president as their choice to rule Yemen. So for years, to place their chosen puppet back in his seat,w the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (and the UAE until very recently) have waged a relentless war against Yemen, committing war crimes on a daily basis, bombing mosques, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, and so on, instituting a naval blockade, causing a massive cholera epidemic, and a famine. The Obama regime participated in this criminal enterprise, not only selling all the bombs and missiles used to attack Yemen- the Saudis and Emiratis already owned the U.S.-made warplanes they needed, and the U.S. trains their pilots- but even providing targeting information and having U.S. Air Force aerial tankers refuel the Saudis planes on their attack missions. Obama sold tens of billions of arms to the Saudis, and Trump tried to outdo Obama in evil with more arms sales. "Great" Britain, with a hunger for blood money, has also sold significant quantities of weapons to the Saudi "royals" for their war on Yemen.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. Thus we see the ubiquitous pattern of the U.S. waging class warfare on a global scale against the world's poor.

 Yemeni enemy of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia gets what he has coming.

The UN has determined that a Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from hunger or disease 

caused by the Saudi-U.S.-UK-UAE war on Yemen. They probably deserve it.
They might grow up to be "terrorists."

By bombing this schoolbus, the valiant Saudi allies of the U.S. took out 40 terrorist school children, along with eleven adults (who by definition were terrorists because U.S. bombs killed them). The Saudis couldn't have done it without the U.S. Thank you, Obama Trump U.S. Congress!

Multiply this by one million or so, and you have the history of the U.S. Now do you understand why it is undeniable that the U.S. Government is a criminal enterprise? It is only because your mind is marinated in a sea of propaganda that you don't see it, feel it, know it.

Now let's return to those oh-so-reasonable and justified demands that Pompeo-Trump have pending against Iran:

This demand is actually morally sound. Iran is helping the vile Assad dictatorship crush the rebellion of the Syrian people by wholesale slaughter, systematic bombing of medical facilities, torture and atrocities on a massive scale. Of course it isn't morality that motivates this demand, nor concern for the Syrian people, but motives needn't be pure for an action or demand to be a good thing.

This one sure is ironic. When the Taliban fanatics ruled Afghanistan, they murdered a group of Iranian diplomats. The Taliban were only in power at all thanks to the U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi buildup of the most medieval, reactionary forces in Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. The Soviets were lured into invading by President Jimmy Carter's sinister righthand man, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole with a tremendous lifelong hatred of Russians. Years later Brzezinski made a slip and boasted to a French newspaper about how he suckered the Soviets into invading. Just a few months before the 1979 invasion, Brzezinski, the head of the U.S. National Security Council, which coordinates the operations of the U.S. military, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA and other "intelligence agencies," had nothing more important to do than to fly into Afghanistan, a desolate backwater. Hmmm!  [1]

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Iran actually helped the U.S. cause. Then emperor George W. Bush fabricated an "Axis of Evil" in an infamous speech, pretending that Iran, Iraq (then still ruled by Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran with U.S. connivance, used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, caused hundreds of thousands of Iranian casualties and war invalids, and hated by Iran), and North Korea (sic!) were in a World War II-style alliance like the fascist Axis powers Nazi Germany, Italy, and Imperial Japan. Crude and mendacious propaganda, it put Iran on notice that it was an Official Enemy of the U.S.

Now that the U.S. has embedded itself in Afghanistan, and wages constant attacks on Iran, it wouldn't surprise me if Iran's attitude towards the Taliban has changed. But if the U.S. wants to look for nations to blame for propping up the Taliban, I'd suggest they start with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But the U.S., under whatever president, is apparently too dishonest, too greedy, and  too morally cowardly, to do that.

 Presumably including domestic ops inside Iran. Hey, I have a suggestion: end the operations of U.S. "Special Forces" inside the scores of countries they currently operate in!

This one reeks to high heaven with the stench of hypocrisy. 

Israel regularly bombs Iranian targets inside Syria with impunity. It has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran. Saudi Arabia treats Iran as the Devil Incarnate. The U.S. of course has been effectively at war with Iran since the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-imposed dictator the "Shah" (King). The Iranian "threat" consists of its growing influence in the region, which the U.S. and its partners find objectionable.

It's interesting that the demand here is for Iran to end its "threats" against shipping, NOT attacks against shipping. Previously the U.S. made a big stink about the simultaneous attacks on both a Norwegian and a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, which the U.S. government and corporate media parrots shrilly blamed on Iran. It has been definitively proven that Iran DIDN'T commit those attacks, which were probably U.S. operations. [2]
Finally cyber attacks. I have no idea what specifically Pompeo is referring to, if anything.  He and Trump- indeed U.S. apparatchiks and politicians generally- often spout baseless rhetoric. Certainly Iran's cyber capabilities are a tiny fraction of the U.S.' And it must be exasperatingly galling for the U.S. to make such a charge, given the relentless U.S. cyber attacks on Iran, including the unleashing of the Stuxnet malware (and others) which targeted Iran's nuclear centrifuges for destruction. (Obama was really proud of that one.)

Again, as usual in the demented world of U.S. political ideology, reality is stood on its head. This is not a defense of Iran. It is looking at the objective facts, nothing more.

Pompeo is a political creation of the greedy, thieving, reactionary billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David. (One of them just died. Hopefully the other one will follow him to the grave soon.) They got Pompeo elected to the U.S. Congress from Kansas, the Kochs' base. Pompeo is a former army officer and rabid, violent imperialist who went on television to call for the execution of Edward Snowden, whose "crime" was revealing the fact that the NSA conducts a program of total surveillance over the entire U.S. population. See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden." 

1]  For Brzezinski's malign role in creating today's Afghanistan, see "The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998)," in which he incriminates himself, English translation on the website of the University of Arizona. For the full article from which it was drawn from International Politics, see "Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect." Also see "Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare," June 17, 2016.

Ice water ran in the veins of the late "Dr." Brzezinski. He sneers that the fate of the Afghan people has no more weight than the death of a fly compared to the great benefit of weakening the Soviet Union. Of course the Afghans didn't get a vote on that. So much for U.S. devotion to "democracy" and "human rights."

2]  See "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression" for the proof.  

Graphics used in this essay by RT network.

Trump Not Bombing Iran Is Like Nixon Going To China

After the U.S. establishment has pretty much blamed Iran for a drone and cruise missile attack on a Saudi Arabian petroleum processing facility last weekend, and Trump blustered that the U.S. was "locked and loaded," (a firearms term meaning ready to fire), and the always belligerent Secretary of State Michael "Spawn of the Koch Brothers" Pompeo spent every day furiously spewing invective against Iran, the military response ordered by Trump is pretty restrained. More U.S. forces are being rushed to the area, but in an explicitly defensive role- to try and intercept any future aerial attacks on Saudi Arabia.

We should not attribute this to any pacifism on Trump's part. It is strictly his own personal self-interest that guides his decisions here, as in all matters. The truth is, outside of the lairs of the ruling elite in the capital city of the empire, Washington, D.C., and the digs of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, and places like the arch-reactionary Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California, pretty much everyone else in the U.S. is against more U.S. wars. Even Trump's nationalistic base is opposed. Why? The Iraq war is the answer. The American public was duped (most of them) by a gigantic propaganda campaign by the regime of Bush the Younger and the corporate media that was a pack of putrid lies from start to finish. That illegal aggression fractured Iraq and produced a chaotic situation, eventually leading to a near-takeover of the country by ISIS, an Islamofascist entity more fanatical, ruthless, and murderous than Al-Qaeda.


In a sense it was a repeat of history, but not as farce, but a repetition of tragedy.  Woodrow Wilson lured the public into World War I on false pretenses, and after that war the U.S. public was revolted by the idea of ever fighting another war in Europe- so strong was the revulsion that until the Japanese Empire bombed Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler declared war on the U.S., very few in the U.S. saw a reason to get involved against the Axis Powers that were running wild. There were even Congressional hearings targeting war profiteers.

The same thing happened after the Iraq invasion and occupation fiasco. Plus there is a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. The U.S. has been at war for the 18 years since the arranged "attack" of 9/11/01.

If Trump's base thirsted for Iranian blood, you can bet Trump would feed them some. But fortunately they don't. So no aggressive military response (which would be the "normal" U.S. reaction to such a "challenge") coupled with tightening the economic noose around Iran's neck.

So how is that like Nixon going to China? Simple. Because the Democratics always have to prove they're "tough," whereas it is taken for granted that the Republicans are, the Democrats cannot be "soft on communism" (or "terrorism" or whatever), as Republicans habitually accuse them of being. The Democrats have the political albatross of "Liberalism" hung around their necks, an epithet that connotes softness, weakness, appeasement. (Including appeasing poor people with crumbs, which the GOP- Gang Of  Plunderers- would cut off entirely.)

Thus it required a Republican, and one with a long record of being "tough on communism" going back to 1949 (Nixon was so "tough" that he painted his Democratic opponents for House of Representatives and later for U.S. Senate as "pink" and "red," and won) to "open" to China, that is, to stop refusing to recognize the fact that the party of Mao ruled the country, not the fascist Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-Shek, the general/warlord exiled with his gang to the island of Formosa (Taiwan). In other words, only the Republican Party felt politically able to behave rationally.



 It is the same with Trump and Iran. He is able to resist the pressure from the pro-war bloc, including inside the Party. A Democrat would at least have a much harder time doing so.

So Trump is avoiding a ruinous war. He saw how the Iraq war harmed the Bush presidency. Although since the invasion was in 2003 and Bush ran for reelection in 2004, the shit hadn't really hit the fan yet. As it was, the GOP stole the 2004 election by stealing Ohio, without whose Electoral College votes Bush would have lost to fellow Skull and Bonesman John Kerry. (Skull and Bones is a secret society for rich Yale University students who were born into the ruling class of the U.S.) Trump needs, above all else, to win reelection next year, so he can run out the clock of the statute of limitations on various criminal charges he is vulnerable to.

The Crafty Emperor Alienates Not His Base

 

Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression

Last time it was Iraq. This time Iran.

We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)


Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.


And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.

Qatar TV station Al-Jazeera.

So if you accept the U.S. government and media version of reality, seconded by lackey stooges like the British government and media and others, Iran invited the prime minister of Japan to Tehran for a rare visit just to sabotage Iran's own diplomatic effort.

Yeah, right.

Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]

So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]

Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!

Tellingly, the Japanese government, which has been a supine lickspittle to the U.S. ever since the U.S. occupied it in 1945, hasn't fallen into line behind the U.S. The government has been very circumspect. The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, even referred to the sabotage attack as an "accident." (!) And in a sign that the U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran's diplomacy has failed for now, Kono said that Japan will continue to engage in "dialogue" with Iran to reduce tension (which the U.S. is working overtime to ratchet up) and "seeking the peace in the region." Refusing to go along with the U.S. "proof" of Iran's guilt, he said Japan would continue to gather information to find out "what really happened." 

Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)

Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.

Singapore station cna.

What about the other tanker that was attacked by the U.S. and blamed on Iran? It is Norwegian. Here's why I think that was a deliberate choice. Trump obviously is reluctant to start an actual war with Iran. He knows how bad that would be, and indeed the entire region would be thrown into even greater turmoil. The last thing he needs as he runs for reelection is another unpopular war. And he badly needs to get reelected to run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various crimes he committed before becoming president. (Maybe the New York State Attorney General should get some indictments for state crimes NOW.) It has been reported that he's griped about his "National Security Advisor" John Bolton pushing him to war. And just today (June 20) Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone and Trump publicly soft-pedaled it as no big deal and opined that it was probably an accident by low level personnel as opposed to a state decision.

Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.

And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.

So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.

Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq. 

Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.

Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.

Qatar station Al-Jazeera.
 See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?

Also, IF there was a mine on the hull, how do we know the U.S. didn't put it there for the Iranians to find when they sent out vessels to rescue the crews of the tankers? (No crew members were injured or killed in the U.S. attacks on the vessels. Apparently the U.S. deliberately fired relatively low-yield projectiles at the tankers designed to start fires but not sink the ships or cause loss of life.)

One last note on videos: this video may well be genuine, but on the day of the incident it was reported that a bogus video was posted I believe on Facebook seeming to show Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never actually said. Also I recently heard a program about the "danger" of technology allowing the creation of seemingly genuine videos that are fake, but the fakery is undetectable by technical means. It has been possible to create undetectable photographic forgeries for years with Photoshop. The point being, images are not the last word on anything. Even before digital photography, photos could be dramatically altered, as when under Stalin, officials who had been purged had to be airbrushed out of photos. So this kind of manipulation is nothing new, but with digital technology it has reached dramatic new levels of verisimilitude. (Go see a Hollywood "action" or Sci-Fi or comic book "hero" sometime and see!)

The grainy video the U.S. released seems genuine, as we would expect a surveillance video taken from far away to look like this. (But I think that is naive. The U.S. has space satellites that can resolve objects the size of car license plates. Surely their warships have camera lenses that can do better than this video.) Conveniently, you can't really make out what the Iranian crew is doing.

Over the following days, the U.S. dribbled out more "evidence," such as a photo of the Japanese ship with a black triangle smudge on the hull that it purported was the "unexploded mine," but could just as well have been (indeed looks like) a mark added with a simple photo editing program.

A ship mine makes such a TINY HOLE? How could it ever sink a ship? That's what ship mines are designed to do! And that little triangle- DEFINITELY a mine!

Pompeo has also claimed that the U.S. had mine fragments that were Iranian-like.

Last month four tankers were sabotaged in some vague way in a UAE port. Saudi Arabia rushed to blame Iran. But apparently the designed effect wasn't achieved.

To be sure, Iranian officials have publicly noted that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic if it wished. This is played as an "Iranian threat" in Western media and by government officials.

I don't think they could. The U.S. Navy could wipe out Iran's fleet of tiny patrol boats, and minesweepers could clear sea lanes of any floating mines.

There are plenty of covert units in the U.S. government that specialize in false flag operations and such types of frame-ups. When Pompeo was CIA director, his first job for Trump, in addition to demonizing Julian Assange and increasing vicious sneaky attacks on Venezuela, he took the opportunity to form a CIA task force, the "Iran Mission Center," in 2017.

The U.S. has had it in for Iran ever which the Iranian people had the temerity to overthrow one of the U.S.' favorite dictators, a man president Jimmy Carter called a "great friend," "Shah" Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. (Pahlavi was installed in 1953 in a CIA coup ordered by president Dwight Eisenhower, which destroyed Iranian democracy and resulted in the deaths of a quarter million Iranians during the Shah's 25 year reign, many after hideous torture by the CIA-created and coached secret police, the SAVAK.)

Now, I don't like the current Iranian regime. it is a repressive theocracy. But that is NOT why the U.S. opposes it. Saudi Arabia is a FAR MORE repressive theocracy, and the U.S. is joined at the hip to it. The U.S. is in the business of destroying democracies and creating and backing dictatorships to allow economic exploitation of captive nations. But it won't admit that of course because it isn't inspirational. It needs to dupe people, especially the American people. So it pretends to be a spreader of freedom and democracy, when it does the exact opposite, over and over and over.

The war cabal in the U.S. government, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, a political creature created by the Koch Brothers, a man who has publicly called for the execution of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden [3], and John Bolton, a lifelong psychopathic war monger and fanatical imperialist, are maneuvering Trump into war against Iran. The U.S. is already waging economic warfare against that country- which of course primarily hurts the people of Iran. (People whom the sick imperialist dog Bolton says "deserve a better government," as if he or any U.S. imperialist gives a shit about the welfare of Iranians or of any other people, for that matter. Similar Bolton opined on television that having U.S. oil companies seize control of Venezuela's oil would benefit the American AND Venezuelan people. How the hell diverting that oil wealth into the coffers of large corporations would do that, he didn't bother explaining.)

If and when the war cabal succeeds in its goal, a goal enthusiastically supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, two darling nations of the U.S. government, the only thing most Americans will care about, unfortunately, is American casualties, not the far greater number of Iranian deaths and maimings, or the devastation to be wreaked upon Iran's infrastructure. And Iran's retaliation and self-defense will be branded "terrorism," and used as excuse and justification for the U.S. aggression.

Just as, during World War II, the Nazis branded the armed partisans who resisted them in various occupied nations "terrorists." Really, the same word. Oh, and "enhanced interrogation techniques," the euphemism the Bush regime and U.S. media adopted to pretend they didn't torture people, was lifted straight from the Gestapo interrogation manual, which the CIA carefully studied after the war. (Ray McGovern, the retired career CIA analyst who briefed presidents daily and who is fluent in German and Russian, revealed this.)

Anyway, here's hoping you won't drink the propaganda Kool-Aid being served up daily around the clock by "the" media.

Propaganda smoke gets in your eyes.

Enemies of humanity Pompeo and Bolton.

The primary target of the war cabal's psychological-political warfare: the Grifter-in-Chief as dupe.

1] Speaking of well-timed sabotage of diplomatic events, remember when special counsel Robert S. "Grand Inquisitor" Mueller III released an indictment of Russians RIGHT BEFORE Trump was to meet Putin? Quite a "coincidence."

Or how about the October Surprise, when Reagan's gang cut a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of U.S. embassy personnel until minutes after Jimmy Carter was out of office, thus insuring his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election?

Or Nixon's sabotage of Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968? He told the "South" Vietnamese military regime to refuse to go along with a deal. FBI wiretaps alerted Johnson to this, but he didn't want to expose that spying so kept it quiet. Nixon beat the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by about 1/2 of 1% of the "popular' vote.  (Oh, but Trump is paranoid and insulting to think a sitting president would wiretap a candidate!)

2] Not that the blackout was total. But it doesn't need to be to keep most people in the dark. For example, there was one article in the Washington Post about the Japanese tanker company's statement. Did YOU happen to read it? How about everyone you know? They've all heard the U.S. propaganda line, day after day after day.

Incessantly for a week now, "the" media has repeated the government line about Iran's guilt, while ignoring the facts that prove the U.S. assertions a lie, so most people will be unaware of these key facts. Bourgeois commentary now takes for granted the "fact" that Iran mined two tankers, just as it takes for granted the lie that Russia "hacked the DNC server." All that remains to be determined is what the U.S. should do to punish Iran. For that purpose, it gives a platform to, for example, Senator Tom Cotton. A first-term senator from the insignificant state of Arkansas, Cotton is a former military officer and rabidly aggressive militarist and imperialist. Why HE of all people should be all over television is a question properly put to the media czars and their henchmen, the executives and producers of television propaganda programs. ["Japanese ship owner contradicts U.S. account of how tanker was attacked," Washington Post, June 14, 2019.

3]  See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden."