Search Is Urged for Syrian Nuclear Sites:
US Presses UN on Three Alleged Facilities
Joby Warrick, Robin Wright, WaPo, May 29, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052803061.html

The Bush administration is pressing UN inspectors to broaden their search for possible secret nuclear facilities in Syria, hinting that Damascus’s nuclear program might be bigger than the single alleged reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes last year. At least three sites have been identified by US officials and passed along to the IAEA, which is negotiating with Syria for permission to conduct inspections in the country, according to US government officials and Western diplomats. US officials want to know if the suspect sites may have been support facilities for the alleged Al Kibar reactor destroyed in an Israeli air raid Sept. 6, the sources said. The UN nuclear watchdog, which has been seeking access to the Al Kibar site since shortly after the bombing, has acknowledged receiving requests to expand the scope of its inspections, but provided no details. US government officials declined to describe the specific sites that have drawn interest, or to discuss how they were identified.

Yesterday, Asia Times ran a story saying ‘Bush plans air strikes’ on Iran by August. “After receiving secret briefings on the planned air strike, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said they would write a New York Times op-ed piece ‘within days’, the source said last week, to express their opposition,” the outlet reported, adding that the oped hadn’t materialized. I chased down Senator Lugar’s spokesman today who told me the story is flat out untrue. Senator Lugar “wasn’t briefed, there’s no oped,” says Andy Fischer, spokesman for Lugar, who is vice chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fischer said he’d been getting calls about the bogus report for two days. Trita Parsi, the head of the pro-engagement National Iranian American Council and a former Congressional staffer, tells me he too heard the rumor of Congressional briefing on Iran, but that the whole thing “doesn’t make sense to me though.” Parsi said.

Well, that explains why they want to keep boots on the ground close by.

This must be stopped.

Poor Kilo’s world is collapsing around him. His God Bush is being exposed for the lying POS he is, the Repugs are heading for a cliff this November, even the fat maggot KKKarl is being forced to testify.

That rancid stench is the desperation of the rightwingers.

1) Resolution declaring the Iranian Kuds Force a terrorist organization passed by Congress in 2007; 2) Increasing drumbeat of war carried by the MSM (those liberals!) 3) Constant denials by the Bush administration of any intention for military action against Iran and using diplomacy (sound familiar?); 4) Adm. Fallon is removed as head of Centcom, who had declared no strike against Iran would occur on his watch; 5) Strikes occur and Bush administration justifies by stating 2002 Resolution gave them the authorization they needed; 6) Attacks inside U.S. or uprising among citizens and Bush declares martial law due to a “national emergency”; 7) the elections are suspended due to this “national emergency.”

Bush/Cheney have no intention of leaving office.

What is going to take?

$10 for a gallon gas to go from point A to point B?

stir it up…

by Douglas Herman

Exclusive to STR

January 31, 2007

In the first fierce day of war, when coordinated air strikes on Iranian targets destroyed most of the Iranian air force and navy, the US military appeared invincible again. Wrecking a second-rate military power does that for an imperial war machine.

By the second day of the war, however, most American and Iranian citizens wished for peace. Unfortunately, wars are always easier to get into than out of. While the war planners in the Pentagon and Israel had devised a workable plan to force Iran into war, using a fake attack on US warships by Iranian gunboats (as the faked Tonkin Gulf attack initiated the Vietnam War), the US Navy fared far worse than the planners wished.

In 1987-88, during the First US-Iran Gulf war, the combined US Navy, Navy Seals, Marines and Army copters easily destroyed the navy of Iran in a single day. Yet Iranian gunboats continued to harass US shipping in that undeclared war, culminating in the USS Vincennes shooting down an unarmed Iranian jumbo jet while in Iran water.

Nearly 20 years later, after being armed with Russian and Chinese weapons, the Iranian defensive forces proved far more capable than the civilian wizards at the Pentagon predicted. Before the war, the chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said the advanced missile system served “to show our deterrent and defensive power to trans-regional enemies, and we hope they will understand the message.”

By the second day, the message became clearer: Iran was no longer the pushover of years past. The combined effect of Sunburn, Exocet and Yakhonts missiles striking several US Navy ships fleeing the fishbowl of the Persian Gulf was an unforgettable sight. So unforgettable that CNN and Fox chose not to show them.

According to Mark Gaffney: “At the time of the Falklands war the Argentine air force possessed only five Exocets, yet managed to sink two ships. With enough of them, the Argentineans might have sunk the entire British fleet, and won the war.”

By contrast, the Iranians, cognizant of their defeat at the hands of the Iraqi and US forces in 1987-88, aware of the twin threat from Israel and the US, had focused heavily on defensive weaponry, supplied to them by Russian and Chinese manufacturers.

“The Russian SS-N-22.Sunburn (Moskit), which technical journals and experts have termed the most effective and lethal anti-ship weapon extant, is far cheaper to produce than a fighter plane or a missile destroyer, cruiser or aircraft carrier,” wrote Gaffney before the war. To make matters worse for US Navymen, the Russians provided the SS-NX-26 Yakhonts anti-ship missiles to Iran, reported to possess Mach 2.9 speed and a range of 180 miles.

The width of the Persian Gulf? 100-180 miles.

The immediate closure of the Persian Gulf to oil tankers from six nations provided a huge boost to peace advocates. By the second day of the war with Iran, with US Navy ships ablaze and sinking, with dire forecasts of worldwide fuel shortages, with gas prices spiking at $10 a gallon in some places, with increasing calls for impeachment appearing in the mainstream media, with environmentalist decrying the spread of radiation from the bomb blasted atomic sites in Iran, suddenly the neocon-sponsored war with Iran no longer seemed like such a good idea.

Despite the claimed success of the pre-emptive attack on Iran, despite the round-the-clock appearances of neocons on most US news channels, the fallout from the war, both in Iran and America, had become exceedingly toxic.

By the middle of the second day, with reports of missile strikes on the Green Zone, the media spin became harder to control. The glorious flag-waving patriotism that followed 911 and the approach of the Iraq War never materialized. Along the smalltown streets of America, fewer folks unfurled a flag. Instead, lines of panicked motorists, faces stricken by the new reality of another war, a war they had chosen to ignore for so long, unfurled into every gas station in America as a frightened mob. Most rushed to the pumps with a single thought in mind: I am going to fill my SUV to the top and woe be to anyone who tries to stop me.

Predictably the price of platinum, gold and silver rose. Gold topped $1000 an ounce while silver, the poor man’s gold, approached $50. Predictably, the US dollar fell, as nations as diverse as China and Kuwait began dumping greenbacks for gold. Predictably, most stocks not related to war industries tumbled. Housing starts dipped and sales dried up.

And all because of an ill-conceived war designed by a few Israel-centric US leaders with lots to gain and little to lose.

The retaliatory strikes by US carrier-based fighter planes that struck the Iranian oil platforms along Bandar Abbas and left them ablaze never appeared on American television. Likewise the attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran by Israeli and US warplanes. These were purely punitive attacks by US Navy fliers in revenge for ship losses in the Persian Gulf. The war with Iran had become a retaliatory war, a war of attrition, by the second day.

Yet throughout the Middle East, the television coverage by Al Jazeera of bomb damage to bridges, waterworks, power stations and oil platforms–not to mention schools, mosques and houses—only served to drive a wider wedge between US and their few remaining Islamic and European allies.

Throughout the first week, while US and Israeli fighter bombers attacked Iran at will, suffering an occasional loss, Iranian missiles rained down on US troops huddled in semi-permanent bases in Iraq. Resistance in Iraq grew as the war with Iran waxed and waned and US casualties rose.

Meanwhile another sort of war raged at home, another unexpected resistance. The American public, too long acquiescent, took to the streets, took to campuses, courthouses and public squares, loud, outrageous and strong. Uncivil disobedience, a public strength the powerful always feared, had returned to America three decades later.

The White House threatened to mobilize troops to handle dissidents at home, but Keith Olbermann asked President Bush: “Sir, from where do you intend to get those troops?”

Public support for the Iraq and Iran wars and support for the Bush administration fell to record lows. In Congress, the docile, do-nothing Democrats proved less adversarial than the tougher Republicans. But in the streets, where the fate of any nation thrives or dies, the spirit of Americans grew angrier and angrier. For each spike in crude prices, each report of new losses, each report of new atrocities inflicted on Iran, the calls for a change became cruder and more violent.

The first to fall, surprisingly, was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Imams, wielding real power in Iran, disapproved of the increasingly bellicose stance of Ahmadinejad and the destruction of the war, forcing his resignation.

Later in the week, calls for the impeachment of George Bush forced a brokered peace deal and a hurried vote by the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment by an overwhelming majority.

The US Senate, under as much fire as the troops in Iraq, dragged their feet but the words “High Crimes” began to filter into their brains by the end of the first week of the war.

nineteen84,

You’re welcome.
You got that right. In keep wondering though, when will the 9/11: The Sequel occur?

Time is running out. If another false-flag event does occur on US soil, this scenario could go either way for the Criminals at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One could say that the Bush Team didn’t protect the US or they’ll just spin it with Propaganda to attack Iran.

Then again, the clock is ticking for The Cabal. We may all wake up one morning and see oil production halted, our men and women in Iraq all killed and gas at $10 a gallon.

We are living in dark days. And I’m afraid it’s going to get a hell of a lot more darker.

Uh oh, he’s worked it out. Get the pickup and shovel… ;)

Thanks for the article. These are dark days.