US planned 9/11 attacks to invade Middle East: Iran cmdr.

A senior Iranian commander says the United States planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as pretext to invade the energy-rich Middle East.

The US, looking for a pretext to invade the Middle East, masterminded the 9/11 incident and pointed an accusing finger at Muslim countries,” Commander of the Iranian Army Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan said on Saturday. 

Pourdastan added that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the US introduced itself as the world’s sole superpower and moved to instill the new world order to prove its supremacy. 

The Iranian commander noted that the US later found its geopolitical policies a failure and decided to follow a geo-economic policy and control the world’s energy resources, 60 percent of which was located in the Middle East. 

“To achieve that goal, they launched preemptive attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran was their next target, but wise policies adopted by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei along with the unity of the Iranian nation prevented them from achieving their objective,” Pourdastan said.

On September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out in the United States leaving almost 3,000 people dead. 

The US, under the administration of former President George W. Bush, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after claiming that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda harbored by the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan. 

The US also attacked Iraq in 2003 claiming that the Middle Eastern country was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed the lives of more than a million people. 

US cooks up nuclear fairy tale on Iran

In a 155-page report, four US nuclear experts have called upon the Obama administration to impose tougher economic sanctions against Iran and resort to 'overt operations' through using warplanes and missiles on Iranian nuclear sites.

Apart from the fact that morbid mindset of this nature only helps fan up chaos and serves as an impetus to widespread pandemonium in the region, any mention of any such policy let alone an adoption of it will gradually terminate in an endless array of military legitimizations. 

Co-authored by Mark Dubowitz, who runs the Zionist Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and David Albright, a physicist who heads the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and who was responsible for concocting lies and myths about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and drawing the country into an abysmal vortex of destruction and devastation, the report can be but seen in the light of yet another overtly brash attempt by the US to push ahead with further militarism in the Middle East. 

Dubbed as ‘U.S. Nonproliferation Strategy for the Changing Middle East,’ the report falls short of mentioning any other Middle Eastern countries, which may be seeking a nuclear weapons program, and instead focuses heavily on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The authors of the conspiratorial report urge Washington to “undertake additional overt preparations for the use of warplanes and/or missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities with high explosives” and “increase Iranian isolation, including through regime change in Syria and deepening Iran’s diplomatic isolation.”

Naturally, the words have been deliberately and carefully chosen in the report. By ‘overt preparations’, the authors explicitly admit that the US government has in the past used ‘covert operations’ as well i.e. assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and infiltrating and disrupting the computer systems. Somewhere in the report, the authors unambiguously refer to Washington’s sabotage activities in Iran. They say, “Press reports indicate that sabotage has been used to slow the Iranian nuclear program, including through infiltration and disruption of procurement networks and cyberattacks designed to inflict physical damage to the program. Judicious use of this tool should be included in continued U.S. efforts to constrain the Iranian nuclear program.” 

Iran will save itself, the report says, only if it accepts the terms set by the authors. In other words, Iran has to kowtow to the terms set by the report which are as follows: 

1) Suspension by Iran of the following proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities: (a) all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA; and (b) work on all heavy water-related projects, including the construction of a research reactor moderated by heavy water, also to be verified by the IAEA; 

2) Provision by Iran of such access and cooperation as the IAEA requests to be able to verify the suspensions and to resolve all outstanding issues, as identified in IAEA reports; 

3) A full accounting and resolution of all outstanding questions about Iran’s past and any current (as of the time of agreement) nuclear weapons related activities; 

4) Complete closure of the Fordow facility and any other deeply buried enrichment facility that is either complete or under construction; and 

5) Iran’s binding agreement to intrusive and comprehensive inspections that are at a minimum as stringent as those outlined in the IAEA’s Additional. 

If truth be told, these terms are nothing new and only reek of a Zionist influence contaminating the already decomposing American policy. On May 9, 2012, just ahead of the May 23 talks in Baghdad, where six world powers were slated to sit down with Iranian officials and resolve the so-called nuclear issue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the talks will be successful only if Iran agrees to “halt all uranium enrichment, ship its current stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country and dismantle an underground enrichment facility near the city of Qom (Fordow).” Interestingly, when the IAEA-Iran meeting took place in May, these three demands were exactly (but not coincidently) put on IAEA’s agenda and the Iranian side was demanded to abide by these if it sought any resolution of the issue. 

What strikes the mind as reasonably acceptable is that the authors are no political well-wishers; rather, they are indeed so morbidly obsessed with paving the way for another ravaging war in the Middle East that they are cooking up another fairy tale as David Albright and his ‘company’ did in Iraq. 

In point of fact, similar lies were told about Iraq before the US invaded the country. US intelligence agencies announced in 2003 that Iraq “could be planning a chemical or biological attack on American cities through the use of remote-controlled "drone" planes equipped with GPS tracking maps”. They even said that these “vehicles have already been, or could be, transported” inside the United States. Add to this a more blatant lie: Iraq could be 'months away' from building a nuclear bomb. Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in 2002 that Saddam Hussein could be "months" away from assembling a nuclear bomb and has stockpiled possibly thousands of liters of deadly anthrax”.

Former US president George W. Bush who was extremely keen on launching a war in the Middle East came up with ‘new evidence’ which he said showed Iraq’s ‘continued appetite’ for nuclear bombs. His evidence: Iraq had tried to buy thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes which Bush said “were used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon”. Bush presented this as a document to the UN to justify his future invasion of Iraq. However, UN weapons inspectors conducted investigations for weeks and acquired conviction that the tubes were never meant to be used for enriching uranium (See Iraq, Lies, Cover-Ups, and Consequences By Rodney Stich p. 141). 

The Iraq war was waged on the strength of a heap of lies disseminated by all and sundry in the US government and that which claimed the lives of over one million people. 

The bitter irony is that those who are responsible for playing havoc with the lives of a million people are not surprisingly fettered by shackles to await a sore chastisement as the essence of humanity necessitates it; instead, they are free and to crown it all, they are even allowed the latitude to continue with their myths and engage in yet another military mischief.

The Lies Of Democracy and the Language Of Deceit

In an increasingly media-driven age, language is everything and is often used by officialdom to tyrannise meaning. With the deaths of millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world’s number one terror state. By the 1980s, former CIA man John Stockwell had put the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass bombing in Southeast Asia to employing death squads in South America, the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million deaths (1). But it’s not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has hijacked the word ‘terror’ to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission, but on a certain policy. It’s not browbeating. It’s structural adjustment.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have taken their own lives over the past decade and a half largely as a result of US agribusiness manipulating global commodity prices courtesy of policies enacted on its behalf by the US government or due to the corporate monopoly, or frontier technology, of terminator seeds that also landed farmers in debt which was just too much for them to bear (2).

The plight of Indian farmers is not unique. How many lives have been cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence or silent killing of the everyday seemingly benign functioning of predatory capitalism? The built-in inequalities of the system have effectively stolen years from people’s lives, the health from their bodies, the livelihoods from their hands, the water from their taps and food from their plates. From the UK to Africa, the subjugated classes – the now often discarded economic fodder, the cannon fodder during times of war or the returning heroes to be thrown overboard by the system on coming home, the people who are to be manipulated and exploited at will via bogus notions of nationalism or the national interest – have had their lives cut short or stripped bare of opportunities due to the hardships imposed by the iron fist of capitalism (3).

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession (4) is celebrated as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain, the reality for the majority has been increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.

You wouldn’t know much about this if you just used the mainstream media for information, though. Sure, you may have been told to tighten your belt because we are all in it together and must make some sacrifices in these difficult economic times.

And just for good measure, as much of the country (any country) is thrown onto the scraphead because it is surplus to requirements now that their jobs have been outsourced abroad, we simply must attack Mali, Syria, Libya, Iran (the list goes on) because not to do so would let the evil-doers take over the world. And then where would we be without such high-minded notions? It’s not resource plunder. It’s humanitarianism.

Well, we would be precisely where we are right now because the evil-doers are already in control and waging war not only on the people of those countries just mentioned, but on the people within their own countries too via the tools of surveillance, the penal system, the comotosing effects of spymaster imported illegal drugs or the infotainment industry and the barrage of legislation that is serving to strip away civil liberties. The game is up, the dominant Western economy (the US) is broken beyond repair (5). Imperialism and militarism won’t save it, but dissent won’t be allowed.

And as private bankers entrap us all even further via their licence to print and loan currencies to national governments then also loan them the interest on it that spirals out of hand so it can never be paid back (6), they are able to line their pockets even further by buying up national assets on the cheap from the countries they bankrupted in the first place. It’s not racketeering. It’s austerity.

“And now they’re coming for your social security. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all sooner or later because they own this place.” Gorge Carlin, writer, critic and comedian.

And where is the mainstream media in all of this? Where are those journalists whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity? If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being in the pocket of and not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom, lobbyists or corporate think tanks then they are paragons of absolute virtue!

Peddling their high salaried lies, they have failed and continue to fail the public. By shining their dim ‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving power broking and unity of interests that enable Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them to keep bleeding us all dry.

Looking back to the BBC’s reporting of the NATO bombing of Libya provides quite revealing insight into the mainstream media. The coverage was disgracefully one-sided. Is the public to pay for a ‘public service’ broadcaster in order to be misled and for it to secure our compliance for illegal state-corporate policies? There was little analysis of ‘mission’ drift’ or of where the insurgents where getting their arms from despite a UN-sanctioned arms embargo. Much less of NATO’s moral right to bomb a path into Tripoli. No talk there of what University of Johannesburg professor Chris Landsberg said was NATO’s violation of international law or of the 200 prominent African figures who accused western nations of subverting international law.

On the other hand, though, what we are served courtesy of the mainstream media each time Britain decides to wage war is a tasty dish of nationalistic sentiment and the old colonial mentality of ‘our boys’ going out ‘there’ to help civilise the barbarians.

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the material conditions of an exploitative and divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s liberal democracy. That’s the role not only of the media, but the education system and the political system too.

And that’s why former British PM was some years ago told by his financial masters to sell of what was laughingly regarded as ‘the nation’s gold’ at a knock down price on behalf of bankers’ (not the nation’s) interests without being held up to genuine public scrutiny. Some say that was the first ‘bail out’ (7). That’s why taxpayers’ money, unbeknown to most of the taxpayers, is being used unaccountably and undemocratically to help prop up banks and to topple various countries and bring death and destruction to thousands via ‘covert ops’. Covert – hidden from the public who remain blissfully unaware of where their hard earned dollars, pounds or euros are actually going.

That’s why the state-corporate fraudsters, murderers and liars who wrap themselves in the language of freedom and democracy have been getting away with it for so long. Sadly, that’s why they continue to do so.