The Rag Blog

Much of the intelligence on Iran’s nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by US spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, diplomatic sources in Vienna said today.

The claims, reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war, coincided with a sharp increase in international tension as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was defying a UN security council ultimatum to freeze its nuclear programme.

That report, delivered to the security council by the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, sets the stage for a fierce international debate on the imposition of stricter sanctions on Iran and raises the possibility that the US could resort to military action against Iranian nuclear sites.

At the heart of the debate are accusations – spearheaded by the US – that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.

However, most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.

“Most of it has turned out to be incorrect,” a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency’s investigations said.

“They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities.

Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author and foreign policy expert. On February 9, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in US policy toward Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Venezuela.

02/21/07 “FPIF” — – Michael Shank: With similar nuclear developments in North Korea and Iran, why has the United States pursued direct diplomacy with North Korea but refuses to do so with Iran?

Noam Chomsky: To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the [Bill] Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn’t do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress. So when [George W] Bush came into the presidency, North Korea had enough uranium or plutonium for maybe one or two bombs, but then very limited missile capacity. During the Bush years it’s exploded. The reason is, he immediately canceled the diplomacy and he’s pretty much blocked it ever since.

They made a very substantial agreement in September 2005 in which North Korea agreed to eliminate its nuclear programs and nuclear development completely. In return, the United States agreed to terminate the threats of attack and to begin moving toward the planning for the provision of a light-water reactor, which had been promised under the framework agreement. But the Bush administration instantly undermined it.

Right away, it canceled the international consortium that was managing the the light-water-reactor project, which was a way of saying we’re not going to agree to this agreement. A couple of days later they started attacking the financial transactions of various banks. It was timed in such a way to make it clear that the United States was not going to move toward its commitment to improve relations. And of course it never withdrew the threats. So that was the end of the September 2005 agreement.

That one is now coming back, just in the last few days. The way it’s portrayed in the US media is, as usual with the government’s party line, that North Korea is now perhaps a little more amenable to accept the September 2005 proposal. So there’s some optimism. If you go across the Atlantic, to The Financial Times, to review the same events they point out that an “embattled George W Bush administration”, it’s their phrase, needs some kind of victory, so maybe it’ll be willing to move toward diplomacy. It’s a little more accurate, I think, if you look at the background.

But there is some minimal sense of optimism about it. If you look back over the record – and North Korea is a horrible place, nobody is arguing about that – on this issue they’ve been pretty rational. It’s been a kind of tit-for-tat history. If the United States is accommodating, the North Koreans become accommodating. If the United States is hostile, they become hostile. That’s reviewed pretty well by Leon Sigal, who’s one of the leading specialists on this, in a recent issue of Current History. But that’s been the general picture, and we’re now at a place where there could be a settlement on North Korea.

That’s much less significant for the United States than Iran. The Iranian issue I don’t think has much to do with nuclear weapons, frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons – nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world’s energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after World War II, it’s been a US preserve.

That’s been an axiom of US foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access, as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas, it goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil, it’d have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it’d keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic of it: the issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power.

[Vice President] Dick Cheney declared in Kazakhstan or somewhere that control over a pipeline is a “tool of intimidation and blackmail”. When we have control over the pipelines it’s a tool of benevolence. If other countries have control over the sources of energy and the distribution of energy, then it is a tool of intimidation and blackmail, exactly as Cheney said. And that’s been understood as far back as [late US adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian] George Kennan and the early postwar days when he pointed out that if the United States controls Middle East resources, it’ll have veto power over its industrial rivals. He was speaking particularly of Japan, but the point generalizes.

So Iran is a different situation. It’s part of the major energy system of the world.

Shank: So when the United States considers a potential invasion you think it’s under the premise of gaining control? That is what the United States will gain from attacking Iran?

Chomsky: There are several issues in the case of Iran. One is simply that it is independent and independence is not tolerated. Sometimes it’s called successful defiance in the internal record. Take Cuba. A very large majority of the US population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time, with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it too.

But the government won’t allow it. It’s attributed to the Florida vote, but I don’t think that’s much of an explanation. I think it has to do with a feature of world affairs that is insufficiently appreciated. International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience, otherwise the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

If you look back at the record, what was the main reason for the US attack on Vietnam? Independent development can be a virus that can infect others. That’s the way it’s been put, [former secretary of state Henry] Kissinger in this case, referring to [Salvador] Allende in Chile. And with Cuba it’s explicit in the internal record. Arthur Schlesinger, presenting the report of the Latin American Study Group to incoming president [John] Kennedy, wrote that the danger is the spread of the [Fidel] Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which has a lot of appeal to others in the same region that suffer from the same problems. Later internal documents charged Cuba with successful defiance of US policies going back 150 years – to the Monroe Doctrine – and that can’t be tolerated. So there’s kind of a state commitment to ensuring obedience.

Going back to Iran, it’s not only that it has substantial resources and that it’s part of the world’s major energy system, but it also defied the United States. The United States, as we know, overthrew the parliamentary government, installed a brutal tyrant, was helping him develop nuclear power. In fact the very same programs that are now considered a threat were being sponsored by the US government, by Cheney, [Paul] Wolfowitz, Kissinger and others in the 1970s, as long as the shah was in power. But then the Iranians overthrew him, and they kept US hostages for several hundred days. And the United States immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein and his war against Iran as a way of punishing Iran. The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance. So that’s a separate factor.

And again, the will of the US population and even US business is considered mostly irrelevant. Seventy-five percent of the population here favors improving relations with Iran, instead of threats. But this is disregarded. We don’t have polls from the business world, but it’s pretty clear that the energy corporations would be quite happy to be given authorization to go back into Iran instead of leaving all that to their rivals. But the state won’t allow it. And it is setting up confrontations right now, very explicitly. Part of the reason is strategic, geopolitical, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us.

Shank: Venezuela has been successfully defiant, with President Hugo Chavez making a swing towards socialism. Where are they on our list?

On December 20 1954, a woman known as Marion Keech gathered her followers in her garden in Lake City, Illinois, and waited for midnight, when flying saucers were supposed to land and save them from huge floods about to engulf the planet.

Keech had received news of the impending deluge from Sananda, a being from the planet Clarion, whose messages she passed on to a small group of believers. Unbeknown to her, the group had been infiltrated by a University of Minnesota researcher, the social psychologist Leon Festinger.

As dawn rose on December 21 with no flying saucer in sight, Keech had another revelation. Sananda told her that the group’s advanced state of enlightenment had saved the entire planet. They rejoiced and called a press conference. “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” wrote Festinger in his book on the cult, When Prophecy Fails. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

George Bush is a man of conviction and clearly a hard man to change. When reality confronts his plans he does not alter them but instead alters his understanding of reality. Like Keech and her crew, he stands with a tight band of followers, both deluded and determined, understanding each setback not as a sign to change course but as further proof that they must redouble their efforts to the original goal.

And so we watch the administration’s plans for a military attack against Iran unfold even as its official narrative for the run-up to the war in Iraq unravels and the wisdom of that war stands condemned by death and destruction. As though on split screens, we pass seamlessly from reports of how they lied to get us into the last war, to scenes of carnage as a result of the war, to shots of them lying us into the next one.

Hundreds of Iraqi journalists and activists held a sit-in today in front of the headquarters of the Iraqi Journalists’ Syndicate to protest the recent US raid against the union, UPI is reporting.

As reported on Iraqslogger, US forces stormed the syndicate’s headquarters in Baghdad on Monday evening. Troops ransacked offices, arrested 10 of the syndicate’s security guards and confiscated 10 computers and 15 small electricity generators destined for the families of killed journalists, according to a statement released by the International Federation of Journalists.

Ali `Uweid, deputy head of the press syndicate, said that the raid demonstrated “contempt for Iraqi Journalism and civil society organizations” and added that the syndicate would continue its protests until the guards were released and the property returned, reported Aswat al-Iraq, in Arabic.

The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, an Iraqi watchdog that advocates for press freedom in the country released a statement demanding that the government immediately investigate, saying that “the ways that journalists have been targeted with desecrations have escalated in the last few days, without any response, the most recent occurrence being the raid on the journalists’ syndicate on the part of US forces.”

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) — Vice President Dick Cheney is finding it harder and harder to locate a welcome mat.

Cheney arrives today in Australia to meet with Prime Minister John Howard, a U.S. ally in the Iraq war who has resisted calls to withdraw his country’s 1,600 troops. The visit comes two days after the vice president’s meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, when he was greeted by shouts of “Yankee go home” from a loudspeaker outside the U.S. embassy and a controversy over Japan’s defense minister terming the war a “mistake.”

Even today, Cheney will have to tread carefully: A Feb. 16- 18 poll in the Australian, a national newspaper, showed that 68 percent oppose the war. “The vice president won’t be walking the streets of Australia, so he won’t have to be worried about being subjected to verbal abuse on this stop,” said Stephen Yates, who served as his national security adviser until 2005.

Cheney, 66, is also coping with growing criticism at home, where adversaries say he demonstrates a combativeness that may reflect frustration with his diminished role in an administration reeling from Iraq and trying to come to terms with a Democratic Congress.

“He’s not dominating administration policy and he’s taking some shots, even from fellow Republicans,” said Joel Goldstein, a vice presidential scholar at St. Louis University in Missouri. Cheney’s “operating style is not conducive to creating a reservoir of good feeling,” Goldstein said.

Pugnacity on Display

His pugnacity has been displayed in the divisive debate over Iraq. In recent weeks, he has feuded publicly with two prominent Republicans — Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and Arizona’s John McCain, a leading contender for the party presidential nomination.

Last month, Cheney told Newsweek magazine that he’s having a hard time restraining himself from assailing Hagel over the Nebraskan’s opposition to a Bush-Cheney plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

WASHINGTON – President Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” long seen by much of the world as a shell for a largely U.S. operation in Iraq, is quickly becoming a coalition of the unwilling.

Even as Bush sends more American forces to Baghdad, longtime war ally Tony Blair is pulling out British troops. Denmark is leaving. Lithuania says it may withdraw its tiny 53-troop contingent.

Bush’s alliance is breaking up as opposition firms against the U.S. troop buildup – among the American and Iraqi people, in Congress and among Iraq’s neighbors and some former U.S. allies.

“There is no military solution to the sectarian and insurgent conflict in Iraq,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the U.S. should follow the British prime minister’s lead and start reducing forces.

The British announcement reverberated on the U.S. presidential campaign trail as well.

“I hope that since the president seems unwilling to listen to the results of the November election or to the new Democratic majority in Congress, that he would at least listen to someone who he has claimed has been his strongest ally in this effort,” Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said.

In its anxious search for energy security, the United States has embarked on a risky strategy to arm and train the militaries of oil-producing West African countries under the rationale of pursuing the Global War on Terror. Over the past 15 years, amidst widening crises in the Middle East and volatile petroleum markets, the U.S. has quietly institutionalized a West African-based oil supply strategy, closely focused on an “Oil Triangle” centered on the Gulf of Guinea. These policies are deeply flawed because they will serve to undermine America’s energy security even as they breed growing resentment and violence against U.S. economic and strategic interests.

In order to manage this policy, the U.S. Department of Defense just announced the establishment of an African military command—AFRICOM—to spearhead an “oil and terrorism” policy, which will oversee the deployment of U.S. forces in the area and supervise distribution of money, materiel and military training to regional militaries and proxies. Pentagon analysts and generals claim that vast “uncontrolled spaces” in Saharan and Sahelian Africa, which are said to include large portions of northern Nigeria, are rife with terrorists seeking to damage the United States, even though the evidence for such claims is woefully thin. Nevertheless, a $500 million “Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative” (TSCTI), which will tie African militaries to American policies, is in the works. Given the internal security problems often found in resource rich countries, it is much more likely that the newly-acquired skills and equipment will be directed against domestic opponents than global terrorists.

The contradictions of this policy are evident in Nigeria, which currently provides 10-12 percent of U.S. oil imports and serves as the cornerstone of the strategy even as it demonstrates its deeply-flawed reasoning. Since the end of 2005, the on- and offshore oilfields of the Niger Delta––the major source of the country’s oil and gas––have essentially become ungovernable as a site of on-going and violent contestation between local ethnic groups, oil corporations and the Nigerian government. This violence results in repeated reductions and shutdowns of oil, sometimes exceeding 500,000 barrels per day. Moreover, reports the World Bank, some 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil monies flow to one percent of the population, while 75 percent of the country’s people live on roughly one dollar per day. In other words, the United States is relying on increased oil production from the African Oil Triangle to reduce its dependence on Middle East petroleum, but could replace one set of insecurities with another.

02/21/07 “AP” — – Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 even though no evidence linked them to terror activity, a Justice Department audit said Tuesday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were either diminished or inflated. Only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were accurate, the audit found.

Responding, a Justice spokesman pointed to figures showing that prosecutors in the department’s headquarters for the most part either accurately or underreported their data — underscoring what he called efforts to avoid pumping up federal terror statistics.

The numbers, used to monitor the department’s progress in battling terrorists, are reported to Congress and the public and help, in part, shape the department’s budget.

“For these and other reasons, it is essential that the department report accurate terrorism-related statistics,” the audit concluded.

Fine’s office took care to say the flawed data appear to be the result of “decentralized and haphazard” methods of collection or disagreement over how the numbers are reported, and do not appear to be intentional.

Still, the errors led Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., to question whether the department had exaggerated the number of terror cases.

“If the Department of Justice can’t even get their own books in order, how are we supposed to have any confidence they are doing the job they should be?” said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the department. “Whether this is just an accounting error or an attempt to pad terror prosecution statistics for some other reason, the Department of Justice of all places should be classifying cases for what they are, not what they want us to think them to be.”

Auditors looked at 26 categories of statistics — including numbers of suspects charged and convicted in terror cases, and terror-related threats against cities and other U.S. targets — compiled by the FBI, Justice’s Criminal Division, and the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.

“The US economy is in danger of a recession that will prove unusually long and severe. By any measure it is in far worse shape than in 2001-02 and the unraveling of the housing bubble is clearly at hand. It seems that the continuous buoyancy of the financial markets is again deluding many people about the gravity of the economic situation.” Dr. Kurt Richebacher

“The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles.” Karl Marx

02/21/07 “ICH” — — This week’s data on the sagging real estate market leaves no doubt that the housing bubble is quickly crashing to earth and that hard times are on the way. “The slump in home prices from the end of 2005 to the end of 2006 was the biggest year over year drop since the National Association of Realtors started keeping track in 1982.” (New York Times) The Commerce Dept announced that the construction of new homes fell in January by a whopping 14.3%. Prices fell in half of the nation’s major markets and “existing home sales declined in 40 states”. Arizona, Florida, California, and Virginia have seen precipitous drops in sales. The Commerce Department also reported that “the number of vacant homes increased by 34% in 2006 to 2.1 million at the end of the year, nearly double the long-term vacancy rate.” (Marketwatch)

The bottom line is that inventories are up, sales are down, profits are eroding, and the building industry is facing a steady downturn well into the foreseeable future.

The ripple effects of the housing crash will be felt throughout the overall economy; shrinking GDP, slowing consumer spending and putting more workers in the growing unemployment lines.

Congress is now looking into the shabby lending practices that shoehorned millions of people into homes that they clearly cannot afford. But their efforts will have no affect on the loans that are already in place. $1 trillion in ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) are due to reset in 2007 which guarantees that millions of over-leveraged homeowners will default on their mortgages putting pressure on the banks and sending the economy into a tailspin. We are at the beginning of a major shake-up and there’s going to be a lot more blood on the tracks before things settle down.

The banks and mortgage lenders are scrambling for creative ways to keep people in their homes but the subprime market is already teetering and foreclosures are on the rise.

There’s no doubt now, that Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s plan to pump zillions of dollars into the system via “low interest rates” has created the biggest monster-bubble of all time and set the stage for a deep economic retrenchment. Greenspan’s inflationary policies were designed to expand the “wealth gap” and create greater economic polarization between the classes. By the time the housing bubble deflates, millions of working class Americans will be left to pay off loans that are considerably higher than the current value of their home. This will inevitably create deeper societal divisions and, very likely, a permanent underclass of mortgage-slaves.

A shrewd economist and student of history like Greenspan knew exactly what the consequences of his low interest rates would be. The trap was set to lure in unsuspecting borrowers who felt they could augment their stagnant wages by joining the housing gold rush. It was a great way to mask a deteriorating economy by expanding personal debt.

The meltdown in housing will soon be felt in the stock market which appears to be lagging the real estate market by about 6 months. Soon, reality will set in on Wall Street just as it has in the housing sector and the “loose money” that Greenspan generated with his mighty printing press will flee to foreign shores.