[Mb-civic] Armageddon Gets No Press - US Plan To Nuke Iran

[Bahram Maskanian]

      Armageddon Gets No Press - US Plan To Nuke Iran

http://www.venusproject.com/ecs/Armageddon_US_Nuke_Iran.html

- By Paul Craig Roberts - August 2, 2005

What has become of the print and TV media watchdogs who hounded 
President Nixon from office because he lied about when he learned of a 
minor burglary of no consequence in itself?

What became of the watchdog media that bayed after President Reagan 
because some low-level neoconservative officials sold arms to Iran and 
diverted the money to anti-communist insurgents in Latin America?

President Clinton was impeached by the House, though not convicted by 
the Senate, for lying about a sexcapade with a White House intern.

Now that we really need them, the watchdog media has hired out as public 
relations and propaganda shills for the Bush administration and the 
neocon network.

The entire Bush administration--not merely the president--is involved in 
the most extraordinary lies and fabrication of false intelligence claims 
in order to lead America into an unwarranted and illegal invasion of 
Iraq, an invasion that has cost the US taxpayers $300 billion and 
resulted in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of people.

The sordid affair has been revealed in leaked top-secret Downing Street 
memos, which were prepared for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his 
cabinet. Unlike the Nixon episode, there is no need to search for a 
"smoking gun." Smoking guns have been printed all over the pages of the 
London Times. Yet hardly a peep from the watchdog media.

The August 1 issue of The American Conservative reports that Vice 
President Dick Cheney has instructed the - US Strategic Command - TO 
PREPARE A PLAN TO SPREAD THE WAR BY ATTACKING - IRAN - WITH TACTICAL 
NUCLEAR WEAPONS - in the event of another terrorist attack on the US. 
Appalled US Air Force officers have leaked the story, but you have not 
learned of it from the tamed media.

A federal prosecutor seems to be closing in on Karl Rove, president 
Bush's right-hand man, and on Scooter Libby, vice president Cheney's 
right-hand man. The two are suspected of leaking the identity of a 
covert CIA agent, a felony. Both have had to hire lawyers. But there is 
no demand for accountability from the US media.

American civil liberties have been trounced by the "Patriot" Act. 
Torture of detainees is now a routine practice of the US government and 
defended by the attorney general. Senators and military officers who try 
to place constraints on the inhumane treatment of detainees are 
stonewalled by the White House.

The mainstream media has been co-opted as propaganda organ for the Bush 
administration. How did this come about?

It came about through media concentration. There are no longer 
independent voices in the mainstream media. American news reporting is a 
corporate operation run with a view to advertising profits and the 
accommodation of government in order to protect holdings of valuable 
federal licenses. For reporters and editors, knowing what to say and not 
to say is the main qualification for job security.

A person who wants to find out anything must go online and spend time 
learning the sites that are trustworthy.

The Internet, thought invaluable for spreading news, hasn't the impact 
on the public of a story pounded over and over on TV news or newspaper 
front pages. Exposure on the Internet doesn't have the same 
embarrassment factor as exposure on TV news and the New York Times front 
page.

The public is still socialized into taking its cue from the old TV and 
print media. This media is now heavily controlled, partly through job 
fears of editors and reporters.

This raises the question whether government officials who have broken 
the law and betrayed trust will be held accountable.

Consider the implications if the Bush administration escapes 
accountability:

The executive branch will have established itself as above the law.

The executive, armed with a compliant media, will have war-making power 
subject only to successful PR spin. It means the final end of the 
people's right to declare war via elected representatives in Congress.

The few remaining restraints on the executive's ability to detain people 
indefinitely without charges will be removed. This power will silence 
the Internet.

Spiteful neighbors, employees, former spouses, whomever will gain the 
power to report any disliked person. The anti-terrorist apparatus needs 
victims to demonstrate its effectiveness, and as warrants, hearings, and 
evidence are no longer required, Americans will simply disappear like 
Soviet citizens in the Stalin era.

The "imperial judiciary" will disappear overnight. No checks and 
balances will remain.

Gentle reader, you can continue with this theme in "How the Worst Get on 
Top," a chapter in F.A. Hayek's classic, The Road to Serfdom. You might 
as well learn what it is going to be like as you are already half way 
there.

The worst rise rapidly as the honest depart the corrupt system. Two US 
Military prosecutors, Major Robert Preston and Captain John Carr, 
resigned after denouncing rigged Guantanamo trials of detainees as "a 
severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and a 
fraud on the American people."

Altogether now, let's yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take 
it any longer."

Write To Paul Craig Roberts <mailto:paulcraigroberts at yahoo.com>

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political 
Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former 
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor 
for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. 
Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

* * * * * * * * *


      Dick Cheney's Plan To Nuke Iran

Stand athwart the apocalypse, and shout: "No!" - By Justin Raimondo

A recent poll shows six in ten Americans think a new world war is 
coming: the same poll says about 50 percent approve of the dropping of 
the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the 
end of World War II. Somewhat inexplicably, about two-thirds say nuking 
those two cities was "unavoidable." One can only wonder, then, what 
their reaction will be to this ominous news, revealed in a recent issue 
of The American Conservative by intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick 
Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command 
(STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response 
to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan 
includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional 
and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major 
strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program 
development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep 
underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence 
the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not 
conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism 
directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers 
involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of 
what they are doing ­ that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked 
nuclear attack ­ but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing 
any objections."

Two points leap out at the reader ­ or, at least, this reader ­ quite 
apart from the moral implications of dropping nukes on Iran. The first 
is the completely skewed logic: if Iran has nothing to do with 9/11-II, 
then why target Tehran? As in Iraq, it's all a pretext: only this time, 
the plan is to use nuclear weapons. We'll wipe out the entire population 
of Iran's capital city because, as Paul Wolfowitz said in another 
context, "it's doable."

The other weird aspect of this "nuke Iran" story is the triggering 
mechanism: a terrorist attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11. While it 
is certain that our government has developed a number of scenarios for 
post-attack action, one has to wonder: why develop this plan at this 
particular moment? What aren't they telling us?

I shudder to think about it.

The more I look at it, and the more I think of it, the more I sense a 
monumental evil casting its shadow over the world, and I have to tell 
you, it makes me wonder how much more time I want to spend on this 
earth. In my more pessimistic moments, I doubt whether we can avoid the 
horrific fate that seems to await us just around the next corner, the 
next moment, looming over the globe like a gigantic devil stretching its 
wings and blotting out the sun.

It seems to me that the question of whether life is really worth living 
anymore is inextricably bound up with the question of whether or not 
these madmen can be stopped. If not, then the only alternative is to 
live it up while we can and laugh defiantly in the face of the 
apocalypse. Why write columns, why comment at all, if we can't have any 
effect on the outcome? On the other hand, some ask

"Surely the New York Times and the Washington Post can find a lede here: 
'US has plan to nuke Tehran if another 9/11.' Can we get at least a 
bloody story out of this?"

Might I suggest another lede?: "Armageddon approaches." Or perhaps, for 
the literary-mind secularists among us: "After many a summer dies mankind."

Where oh where is the "mainstream" media on this? That's a laughable 
question, because the answer is heartbreakingly obvious: they are 
nowhere to be found, and for a very good reason. As the Valerie Plame 
case is making all too clear, the MSM has been a weapon in the hands of 
the War Party at every step on the road to World War IV. It's an 
American tradition. As William Randolph Hearst famously put it to an 
employee in the run-up to the Spanish-American conflict of 1898:

"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

Any objective examination of the Anglo-American media's role as a 
megaphone for this administration's "talking points" would have to 
conclude that the Hearst school of journalism has been dominant since 
well before the invasion of Iraq. Aside from the post-9/11 hysteria that 
effectively swept away all pretenses of a critical stance, the MSM was 
well acclimated to simply reiterating the U.S. government line on 
matters of war and peace all through the Clinton era, when friendly 
media coverage of the Balkans and numerous other Clintonian 
interventions habituated the press corps to a certain mindset. By the 
time the Bush administration set out on a campaign of deception designed 
to lie us into invading and occupying Iraq, the MSM was largely 
reconciled to playing the role of the government's amen corner.

With the U.S. and British media in the pocket of the Powers That Be, 
what hope is there that the American people ­ who don't believe anything 
if they don't see it on television ­ will awaken to the danger in time? 
Again, in my more pessimistic moments, there doesn't seem to be any such 
hope: television news seems firmly in the camp of the War Party, and the 
"mainstream" print media also doesn't seem a likely venue for this kind 
of reporting.

On my more optimistic days, however, I almost believe it's possible to 
outflank the War Party on the media front ­ because the Internet is a 
mighty weapon that will defeat them in the end. A recent Pew study shows 
that this is not just a technophilic fantasy:

"The Internet continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. 
One-in-four (24%) list the internet as a main source of news. Roughly 
the same number (23%) say they go online for news every day, up from 15% 
in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week 
has grown from 33% to 44% over the same time period.

"While online news consumption is highest among young people (those 
under age 30), it is not an activity that is limited to the very young. 
Three-in-ten Americans ages 30-49 cite the Internet as a main source of 
news.

"The importance of the Web for people in their working years is even 
more apparent when the frequency of use is taken into account. One-third 
of people in their 30s say they get news online every day, as do 27% of 
people in their 40s. Nearly a quarter of people in their 50s get news 
online daily, about the same rate as among people ages 18-29."

What this means is that we can put the news the MSM won't cover ­ e.g., 
the story about Cheney's Dr. Strangelove plan to strike Iran ­ on the 
front page of Antiwar.com and potentially reach one-in-four Americans. 
Last month we had over 2 million readers; this month is headed toward 
the same range ­ and that's in summertime, a traditionally slow time for 
us. Yet we're setting new records.

This, it seems to me, is the only reason for hope: a strategy of doing 
an end run around the mass media. We must mount a last desperate attempt 
to stand athwart the apocalypse shouting "No!" The alternative doesn't 
bear thinking about.

Never for a minute did any of us who founded Antiwar.com imagine we 
would one day be front and center in a twilight struggle to protect the 
country and the world from such a monumental evil, and yet here we are, 
a band of hobbits up against all the dark powers of Mordor. Without 
getting any more melodramatic than is absolutely unavoidable, I can only 
note that we've come a long way on our quest to rid the world of this 
particular Ring of Power, and the battle seems to be reaching some sort 
of dramatic climax. As to whether or not the Cheney-neocon-War Party 
axis of evil will be defeated in the end, no one can confidently predict 
at the moment. Yet one thing does seem clear: as long as Antiwar.com is 
around, we have at least a fighting chance.

I want to thank each and every one of our readers who have supported us 
down through the years, even as I remind them that their future support 
is even more vitally important than ever before. Together we can beat 
the War Party ­ but not without constant vigilance. We stand on the 
watchtower just as long as you, our readers and supporters, keep us 
there. I hope and trust we will continue until the end ­ whatever that 
end may turn out to be.

- - Justin Raimondo

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6734


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