Iranian scientist assassinated as US steps up war threats
Bill Van Auken | 13.01.2010 16:51 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Other Press | World
Massoud Ali Mohammadi, one of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists, was assassinated in Tehran Tuesday, just two days after the top US military commander in the region announced that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
Massoud Ali Mohammadi, one of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists, was assassinated in Tehran Tuesday, just two days after the top US military commander in the region announced that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The killing and the ratcheting up of military threats are indicative of the deepening international tensions over the Iranian nuclear program. While the US, Israel and other Western powers have charged Tehran with seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon, Iran has insisted repeatedly that its nuclear programs are for peaceful purposes only.
Ali Mohammadi, 50, was killed when a powerful remote-controlled bomb exploded near his vehicle as he prepared to drive to work at Tehran University. The blast shattered windows 300 feet away in Ali Mohammadi’s northern Tehran neighborhood of Qeytariyeh. It was reported that the bomb was strapped to a motorcycle.
Ali Mohammadi taught neutron nuclear physics at the university, and, according to at least one report from Iran, he was among Iranian citizens subject to international sanctions for involvement in the nuclear program.
Colleagues of the murdered professor described him as apolitical, although his name appeared with those of more than 200 other academics in a statement supporting opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s challenge to the results of the disputed June12 presidential election, which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term.
Iran’s senior prosecutor charged the US and Israel with responsibility for the attack. “Given the fact that Massoud Ali Mohammadi was a nuclear scientist, the CIA and Mossad services and agents most likely have had a hand in it,” the prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, told the state-run media.
Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said that initial investigations pointed to “the Zionist regime, America and their mercenaries in Iran in this terrorist incident.” He added, “Such terrorist acts and the physical elimination of the country’s nuclear scientists will certainly not stop the scientific and technological process, but will speed it up.”
Iran’s Press TV commented, “It seems that kidnap and assassination of Iranian scientists is on the agenda of the United States.”
Washington brushed off the accusation. “Charges of US involvement are absurd,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
Given the growing bellicosity of Washington’s threats over the Iranian nuclear program, together with the fact that the US and Israel are the leading practitioners of the criminal policy of targeted assassinations, Tehran’s charges cannot be dismissed so easily.
The state prosecutor, Dolatabadi, said that the killing of Ali-Mohammadi follows the disappearance last June of Iranian nuclear researcher Shahram Amiri during a pilgrimage to the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government has charged that he was abducted by Saudi intelligence and handed over to the US.
The Financial Times of London also pointed to the case of Ardeshir Asgari, a professor at Shiraz University, who worked at Iran’s nuclear uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. His death in 2007, at the age of 44, was attributed to “gas suffocation,” but there are strong suspicions that he was murdered.
The US-based intelligence web site Stratfor noted: “Three years ago, a noted Iranian nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hassanpour, was killed. At the time, Stratfor had learned that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad was behind the assassination. Indeed, even this time around, Iranian officials have pointed fingers at the Jewish state. It is, however, too early to tell if that is the case.
“Assassinations of individual scientists and even defection and kidnapping of others is not unprecedented. Furthermore, there have been bombings in recent months that have targeted senior military commanders of the country’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
In another article, Stratfor wrote that the assassination of Ali-Mohammadi will complicate negotiations between the West and Iran over the country’s nuclear program. “That could provide an opportunity for Israel,” the web site continued. “If Iran becomes more inflexible in the nuclear negotiations, Israel will have a stronger argument to make to the United States that the diplomatic course with Iran has expired. And should the United States be driven by the Israelis to admit the futility of the diplomatic course, the menu of choices in dealing with Iran could narrow considerably.”
The assassination in Tehran came just two days after the senior—and highly political—US Army general, David Petraeus, announced in a television interview that Iran’s nuclear facilities “certainly can be bombed.” Petraeus heads the US Central Command, which oversees both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. His statement signaled a significant escalation of US military threats against Iran.
In an interview with the CNN cable news network broadcast Sunday, Petraeus declared that “it would be almost literally irresponsible” if CENTCOM (Central Command) failed to draw up “plans for a whole variety of different contingencies” relating to a potential military attack on Iran.
The general said that despite reports that Iran had dispersed its nuclear facilities and sought to protect them in underground tunnels, they can still be attacked. “Well, they certainly can be bombed,” he said in the interview. “The level of effect would vary with who it is that carries it out, what ordnance they have and what capability they can bring to bear.”
While Petraeus refused to comment on Israeli plans for military action, the statement was clearly an oblique reference to whether an attack on Iran would be carried out by Tel Aviv, which has repeatedly threatened such a strike, or the United States. The US military is accelerating production of its new “bunker buster” weapon, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This 30,000-pound bomb is reportedly capable of burrowing 200 feet into the ground before detonating.
In a statement that suggested the grand scope within which Petraeus sees his military responsibilities, the CENTCOM commander allowed that “there’s a period of time, certainly, before all this might come to a head, if you will.” In other words, he is prepared to allow the politicians and diplomats to go through the motions with Tehran before he takes charge.
Tehran issued a muted reaction to Petraeus’ provocative remarks. A foreign ministry spokesman referred to them as “thoughtless and irresponsible.” The Tehran Times quoted the spokesman as saying that “the US is retrogressing and repeating the mistakes of the previous administration.”
In another indication of the military pressure that Washington is bringing to bear on Iran, President Obama has ordered a carrier strike group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, into the Persian Gulf for a six-month deployment. The flotilla, including 6,000 sailors and Marines, four squadrons of fighter bombers and several missile cruisers and destroyers, set sail for the region on January 2.
The military escalation is running parallel to the Obama administration’s attempt to punish Iran with a new set of economic sanctions. The so-called P5+1—the US, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany—is set to meet in New York City Saturday to discuss punitive measures against Iran, over and above three earlier rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council over Iran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
The six powers had imposed an end-of-the-year deadline on Tehran to accede to a proposal made by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, that would have compelled Iran to ship most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France to be refined into reactor fuel.
Tehran ignored the deadline and put forward its own counter-proposal to exchange batches of the LEU for nuclear reactor fuel from Turkey, with which Iran has been developing close economic ties. The US and the other Western powers have ignored this proposal.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that Washington wants the implementation of “smarter sanctions” that would target “decision-makers.” Media reports have indicated that the US is pushing for a wide range of new sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is involved in Iran’s nuclear program, but also controls broad swathes of the Iranian economy, ranging from the Tehran airport to national telecommunications, with substantial investments in thousands of enterprises.
It is highly unlikely, however, that any substantial new round of sanctions will gain the approval of the UN Security Council, which is chaired by Beijing this month. Both Russia and China are among the five countries with veto power and neither has any interest in halting economic relations with Iran.
China is rapidly expanding trade with Iran and investment in its energy sector. Iran is now the third-largest supplier of crude oil to China and also exports large amounts of natural gas. For its part, Russia is responsible for 85 percent of Iran’s weapons imports. Both countries have interests in the region that are in conflict with those of Washington and do not see the Iranian nuclear program as any real threat.
Nor for that matter is the threat of an Iranian bomb the driving force behind US policy. US imperialism is seeking to establish its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East, where it is now waging two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iran lying between the two. It is seeking to reassert US dominance in Iran at the expense of its geo-strategic rivals and is threatening to ignite a conflict that could trigger a far wider war with incalculable consequences.
In the absence of Security Council approval, Washington will likely impose its own unilateral sanctions, with the support of Britain and other allies. Legislation now pending in the US Congress would give the Obama administration the power to enforce an embargo on Iran’s importation of refined petroleum. With Iran dependent on imports for 40 percent of its refined petroleum, such a measure would have a crippling effect and would be tantamount to the launching of a war.
Obama was elected in 2008 promising a new policy of “engagement” with Iran. As he nears the end of his first year in office, however, Washington’s rhetoric and policies are turning more and more threatening, while the diplomatic actions over Iranian sanctions begin to resemble the maneuvers staged by the Bush administration over Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the Iraq war.
The killing and the ratcheting up of military threats are indicative of the deepening international tensions over the Iranian nuclear program. While the US, Israel and other Western powers have charged Tehran with seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon, Iran has insisted repeatedly that its nuclear programs are for peaceful purposes only.
Ali Mohammadi, 50, was killed when a powerful remote-controlled bomb exploded near his vehicle as he prepared to drive to work at Tehran University. The blast shattered windows 300 feet away in Ali Mohammadi’s northern Tehran neighborhood of Qeytariyeh. It was reported that the bomb was strapped to a motorcycle.
Ali Mohammadi taught neutron nuclear physics at the university, and, according to at least one report from Iran, he was among Iranian citizens subject to international sanctions for involvement in the nuclear program.
Colleagues of the murdered professor described him as apolitical, although his name appeared with those of more than 200 other academics in a statement supporting opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s challenge to the results of the disputed June12 presidential election, which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term.
Iran’s senior prosecutor charged the US and Israel with responsibility for the attack. “Given the fact that Massoud Ali Mohammadi was a nuclear scientist, the CIA and Mossad services and agents most likely have had a hand in it,” the prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, told the state-run media.
Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said that initial investigations pointed to “the Zionist regime, America and their mercenaries in Iran in this terrorist incident.” He added, “Such terrorist acts and the physical elimination of the country’s nuclear scientists will certainly not stop the scientific and technological process, but will speed it up.”
Iran’s Press TV commented, “It seems that kidnap and assassination of Iranian scientists is on the agenda of the United States.”
Washington brushed off the accusation. “Charges of US involvement are absurd,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
Given the growing bellicosity of Washington’s threats over the Iranian nuclear program, together with the fact that the US and Israel are the leading practitioners of the criminal policy of targeted assassinations, Tehran’s charges cannot be dismissed so easily.
The state prosecutor, Dolatabadi, said that the killing of Ali-Mohammadi follows the disappearance last June of Iranian nuclear researcher Shahram Amiri during a pilgrimage to the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government has charged that he was abducted by Saudi intelligence and handed over to the US.
The Financial Times of London also pointed to the case of Ardeshir Asgari, a professor at Shiraz University, who worked at Iran’s nuclear uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. His death in 2007, at the age of 44, was attributed to “gas suffocation,” but there are strong suspicions that he was murdered.
The US-based intelligence web site Stratfor noted: “Three years ago, a noted Iranian nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hassanpour, was killed. At the time, Stratfor had learned that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad was behind the assassination. Indeed, even this time around, Iranian officials have pointed fingers at the Jewish state. It is, however, too early to tell if that is the case.
“Assassinations of individual scientists and even defection and kidnapping of others is not unprecedented. Furthermore, there have been bombings in recent months that have targeted senior military commanders of the country’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
In another article, Stratfor wrote that the assassination of Ali-Mohammadi will complicate negotiations between the West and Iran over the country’s nuclear program. “That could provide an opportunity for Israel,” the web site continued. “If Iran becomes more inflexible in the nuclear negotiations, Israel will have a stronger argument to make to the United States that the diplomatic course with Iran has expired. And should the United States be driven by the Israelis to admit the futility of the diplomatic course, the menu of choices in dealing with Iran could narrow considerably.”
The assassination in Tehran came just two days after the senior—and highly political—US Army general, David Petraeus, announced in a television interview that Iran’s nuclear facilities “certainly can be bombed.” Petraeus heads the US Central Command, which oversees both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. His statement signaled a significant escalation of US military threats against Iran.
In an interview with the CNN cable news network broadcast Sunday, Petraeus declared that “it would be almost literally irresponsible” if CENTCOM (Central Command) failed to draw up “plans for a whole variety of different contingencies” relating to a potential military attack on Iran.
The general said that despite reports that Iran had dispersed its nuclear facilities and sought to protect them in underground tunnels, they can still be attacked. “Well, they certainly can be bombed,” he said in the interview. “The level of effect would vary with who it is that carries it out, what ordnance they have and what capability they can bring to bear.”
While Petraeus refused to comment on Israeli plans for military action, the statement was clearly an oblique reference to whether an attack on Iran would be carried out by Tel Aviv, which has repeatedly threatened such a strike, or the United States. The US military is accelerating production of its new “bunker buster” weapon, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This 30,000-pound bomb is reportedly capable of burrowing 200 feet into the ground before detonating.
In a statement that suggested the grand scope within which Petraeus sees his military responsibilities, the CENTCOM commander allowed that “there’s a period of time, certainly, before all this might come to a head, if you will.” In other words, he is prepared to allow the politicians and diplomats to go through the motions with Tehran before he takes charge.
Tehran issued a muted reaction to Petraeus’ provocative remarks. A foreign ministry spokesman referred to them as “thoughtless and irresponsible.” The Tehran Times quoted the spokesman as saying that “the US is retrogressing and repeating the mistakes of the previous administration.”
In another indication of the military pressure that Washington is bringing to bear on Iran, President Obama has ordered a carrier strike group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, into the Persian Gulf for a six-month deployment. The flotilla, including 6,000 sailors and Marines, four squadrons of fighter bombers and several missile cruisers and destroyers, set sail for the region on January 2.
The military escalation is running parallel to the Obama administration’s attempt to punish Iran with a new set of economic sanctions. The so-called P5+1—the US, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany—is set to meet in New York City Saturday to discuss punitive measures against Iran, over and above three earlier rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council over Iran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
The six powers had imposed an end-of-the-year deadline on Tehran to accede to a proposal made by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, that would have compelled Iran to ship most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France to be refined into reactor fuel.
Tehran ignored the deadline and put forward its own counter-proposal to exchange batches of the LEU for nuclear reactor fuel from Turkey, with which Iran has been developing close economic ties. The US and the other Western powers have ignored this proposal.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that Washington wants the implementation of “smarter sanctions” that would target “decision-makers.” Media reports have indicated that the US is pushing for a wide range of new sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is involved in Iran’s nuclear program, but also controls broad swathes of the Iranian economy, ranging from the Tehran airport to national telecommunications, with substantial investments in thousands of enterprises.
It is highly unlikely, however, that any substantial new round of sanctions will gain the approval of the UN Security Council, which is chaired by Beijing this month. Both Russia and China are among the five countries with veto power and neither has any interest in halting economic relations with Iran.
China is rapidly expanding trade with Iran and investment in its energy sector. Iran is now the third-largest supplier of crude oil to China and also exports large amounts of natural gas. For its part, Russia is responsible for 85 percent of Iran’s weapons imports. Both countries have interests in the region that are in conflict with those of Washington and do not see the Iranian nuclear program as any real threat.
Nor for that matter is the threat of an Iranian bomb the driving force behind US policy. US imperialism is seeking to establish its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East, where it is now waging two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iran lying between the two. It is seeking to reassert US dominance in Iran at the expense of its geo-strategic rivals and is threatening to ignite a conflict that could trigger a far wider war with incalculable consequences.
In the absence of Security Council approval, Washington will likely impose its own unilateral sanctions, with the support of Britain and other allies. Legislation now pending in the US Congress would give the Obama administration the power to enforce an embargo on Iran’s importation of refined petroleum. With Iran dependent on imports for 40 percent of its refined petroleum, such a measure would have a crippling effect and would be tantamount to the launching of a war.
Obama was elected in 2008 promising a new policy of “engagement” with Iran. As he nears the end of his first year in office, however, Washington’s rhetoric and policies are turning more and more threatening, while the diplomatic actions over Iranian sanctions begin to resemble the maneuvers staged by the Bush administration over Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Bill Van Auken
Homepage:
http://wsws.org/tools/index.php?page=print&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwsws.org%2Farticles%2F2010%2Fjan2010%2Firan-j13.shtml
Comments
Hide 1 hidden comment or hide all comments
The Long history of British and American covert provocation and action in Iran
13.01.2010 17:00
Not my words, the words of high ranking CIA officials, Defense department officials, former UN officials and retired US air force Colonels.
Iran's state news agency, IRNA today listed five previous violations of Iranian territory by British armed forces:
June 2004: An unmanned reconnaissance plane violated Iranian airspace in northeastern Abadan and was hit by Iranian anti-aircraft guns.
June 22, 2004: Eight navy personnel in three speed boats entered Iranian territorial waters and were arrested by Iranian coast guards; the arrested were released after three days.
November 1, 2006: Two helicopters, hovering at a height of 150 meters (492 feet), violated Iranian airspace for a total of 10 minutes.
January 27, 2007: A helicopter violated Iranian airspace over the mouth of the Arvand river and left the area after a warning from Iranian coast guards.
February 28, 2007: Three navy boats entered Iranian territorial waters in the mouth of Khor Mousa.
Can we believe Iranian state news? Is Britain and/or the US engaging in covert intelligence gathering in Iran? The answer is we don't have to believe Iranian state news because it is a well established fact that a covert intelligence war is already being waged with Iran and has been ongoing for many years now.
In an article entitled The US war with Iran has already begun [1], written back in June 2005, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, addressed this very issue and described how intelligence gathering, direct action and the mobilizing of indigenous opposition is all being carried out already by CIA backed US special forces.
Ritter stated:
"As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah's to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.
But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.
As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.
The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.
The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase. President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran."
Ritter goes on to describe how Iranian opposition groups, including the well known right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations, are carrying out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.
He also describes how to the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.
Ritter is not alone in his assertions.
During an interview on CNN a year ago, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner claimed that U.S. military operations were already 'underway' inside Iran.
"I would say -- and this may shock some -- I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way," Col. Gardiner told CNN International anchor Jim Clancy.
"The secretary point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year," Gardiner said. "I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, 'Hey, I hear you're accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.' He said, quite frankly, 'Yes, we know they are. We've captured some of the units, and they've confessed to working with the Americans,'" said the retired Air Force colonel.
Around the same time that Gardiner revealed this, RAW story ran an exclusive [2] , which also revealed that, according to counterintelligence officials, covert operations were underway that included CIA co-option and use of right wing terror groups:
“We disarmed [the MEK] of major weapons but not small arms. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while,” said the intelligence official. According to still another intelligence source, the policy infighting ended last year when Donald Rumsfeld, under pressure from Vice President Cheney, came up with a plan to “convert” the MEK by having them simply quit their organization.
“These guys are nuts,” this intelligence source said. “Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them.”
The MEK were notorious in Iraq, indeed, Saddam Hussein himself had used the MEK for acts of terror against non-Sunni Muslims and had assigned domestic security detail to the MEK as a way of policing dissent among his own people. It was under the guidance of MEK ‘policing' that Iraqi citizens who were not Sunni were routinely tortured, attacked and arrested.
Just last month after a bombing inside Iran, the London Telegraph also reported [3]on how a high ranking CIA official has blown the whistle on the fact that America is secretly funding terrorist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.
The claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: "The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime."
John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington, said: "The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity."
If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because it is. The fact is that the US has a long history of provocation and covert action inside Iran.
The In 1953 the CIA and MI6 carried out Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX), a covert operation by the United Kingdom and the United States to remove the democratically elected nationalist cabinet of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, to support the Pahlavi dynasty and consolidate the power of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in order to preserve the Western control of Iran's hugely lucrative oil infrastructure.
In planning the operation, the CIA organized a guerrilla force incase the communist Tudeh Party seized power as a result of the chaos created by Operation Ajax. According to formerly “Top Secret” documents released by the National Security Archive, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate.
The conspiracy centered around having the increasingly impotent Shah dismiss the powerful Prime Minister Mossadegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans after careful examination for his likeliness to be pro-British.
Zahedi was installed to succeed Prime Minister Mossadegh. The deposed Mossadegh was arrested, given a show trial, and condemned to death. The Shah commuted this sentence to solitary confinement for three years in a military prison, followed by house arrest for life.
“If there had not been a military coup, there would not have been 25 years of the Shah's brutal regime, there would not have been a revolution in 1979 and a government of clerics,” Ibrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister and leading member of a political party that traces its origins to Mossadegh's National Front, told the Christian Science Monitor on the 50th anniversary of the coup and installation of the Shah. “Now it seems that the Americans are pushing towards the same direction again. That shows they have not learned anything from history.”
“For many Iranians, the coup was a tragedy from which their country has never recovered. Perhaps because Mossadegh represents a future denied, his memory has approached myth,” Dan De Luce writes for the Guardian. “Beyond Iran, America remains deeply resented for siding with authoritarian rule in the region.”
Alex Jones's latest film Terrorstorm [5] covers the ousting of Mossadegh in depth.
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the US again found itself sparring with Iran. Again we find a history of provocation and aggression. In particular, a fierce assault known as Operation Praying Mantis, is renowned. The operation began after a US warship had entered mined Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.
From Wikipedia [6] :
"On April 14 1988, the guided missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine while sailing in the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Earnest Will, the 1987-88 convoy missions in which U.S. warships escorted reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers to protect them from Iranian attacks. The explosion put a 25-foot hole in the Roberts' hull and nearly sank it. But the crew saved their ship with no loss of life, and Roberts was towed to Dubai on April 16.
After the mining, U.S. Navy divers recovered other mines in the area. When the serial numbers were found to match those of mines seized along with the Iran Ajr the previous September, U.S. military officials planned a retaliatory operation against Iranian targets in the Gulf.
The battle, the largest for American surface forces since World War II,[1] sank two Iranian warships and as many as six armed speedboats. It also marked the first surface-to-surface missile engagement in U.S. Navy history."
The US also attacked and destroyed several Iranian oil platforms in a full out military assault. At the time the Chicago Sun Times [7] reported:
"U.S. naval forces on Monday attacked Iranian targets in the Persian Gulf to show the Iranians that "if they threaten us, they'll pay a price," President Reagan said.
In fighting conducted over nine hours, the U.S. forces knocked out two Iranian oil platforms, and then sank or disabled a fast-attack missile patrol boat, two frigates, and three speedboats when Iran attempted to fight back. [8]"
Note Reagan's comments. Hence the name 'Operation Praying Mantis' was a reference to the fanning of the wings used to make the mantis seem larger and to scare the opponent.
On November 6, 2003 the International Court of Justice dismissed Iran's claim for reparation against the United States for breach of the 1955 Treaty of Amity between the two countries. The court also dismissed a counter-claim by the United States, also for reparation for breach of the same treaty. As part of its finding the court did note that "the actions of the United States of America against Iranian oil platforms on 19 October 1987 (Operation Nimble Archer) and 18 April 1988 (Operation Praying Mantis) cannot be justified as measures necessary to protect the essential security interests of the United States of America."
The fallout of Praying Mantis also resulted in the U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian commercial airliner, Iran air flight 665 , between Bandar Abbas and Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children. The Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot-down.
On the morning of July 3, the Vincennes crossed into Iranian territorial waters during clashes with Iranian gunboats. Earlier in the day, the Vincennes - along with Iranian gunboats - had similarly violated Omani waters until challenged by an Omani warship.
According to the U.S. government, the Iranian aircraft was mistakenly identified as an attacking military fighter. The Iranian government, however, maintains that the Vincennes knowingly shot down a civilian aircraft.
According to the Iranian government, the shooting down of IR 655 by the Vincennes was an intentionally performed and unlawful act. Even if there was a mistaken identification, which Iran has not accepted, it argues that this constituted gross negligence and recklessness amounting to an international crime, not an accident.
Newsweek reporters John Barry and Roger Charles wrote that Rogers acted recklessly and without due care. Their report accused the U.S. government of a cover-up. An analysis of the events by the International Strategic Studies Association described the deployment of an Aegis cruiser in the zone as irresponsible and felt that the expense of the ship had played a major part in the setting of a low threshold for opening fire.
George H.W. Bush, at the time Vice President said "I will never apologize for the United States of America — I don't care what the facts are" in reference to the incident.
The BBC later reported [9]:
It took four years for the US administration to admit officially that the USS Vincennes was in Iranian waters when the skirmish took place with the Iranian gunboats. Subsequent investigations have accused the US military of waging a covert war against Iran in support of Iraq. In February 1996 the US agreed to pay Iran $61.8 million in compensation for the 248 Iranians killed, plus the cost of the aircraft and legal expenses.
So we see that Britain and the US have a long history of covert action against and provocation of Iran in their bid to aggressively control the region. Nothing has changed. These facts and past precedents are exactly the reason why we should be questioning our own governments on the authenticity of the current seizure of the British marines [10] by Iran.
Our governments have continually violated Iranian territory covertly for decades and then covered up the fact.
In January Republican Congressman and 2008 Presidential candidate Ron Paul stated [11] that he feared a staged Gulf of Tonkin [12] style incident may be used to provoke air strikes on Iran as numerous factors collide to heighten expectations that America may soon be embroiled in its third war in six years.
Just last month former National Security Advisor and founding member of the Trilateral Commission Zbigniew Brzezinski also tacitly warned [13] that an attack on Iran could be launched following a staged provocation.
During a BBC Newsnight feature story this week, it was demonstrated that the Iranian footage of the capture of the British sailors was in large part likely faked and the commentators all but suggested the entire incident was staged or at least constituted "gross negligence" on behalf of the British.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray and others are highlighting the fact that the maritime border between Iraq and Iran is contested, and the British have essentially manufactured a border to make it appear as if HMS Cornwall was within Iraqi territorial waters. The mainstream media has uniformly failed to address this issue.
It seems that we are once again witnessing the unfolding of ongoing covert military action by our governments against (whether you agree with it or not) a democratically elected foreign government in Iran.
____________________
References:
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
_________________
Steve Watson
Homepage:
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/1810
"nuclear scientist" eh?
13.01.2010 18:12
If you bothered to research what his actual area of expertise was you would know it has nothing to do with nuclear power or nuclear bombs. About as far removed from you understanding of what a "nuclear scientist" as you can get.
slowly
He was not a nuclear scientist - he was a nuclear physics professor
13.01.2010 21:25
He taught nuclear physics. That is it. That was his job. He was not actively involved in politics, but was an "off-the-record" supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi and secular democracy.
He was also a pacifist with strong anti-war leanings and would never have participated in any research or development related to nuclear weapons.
An administrator at Tehran University once accused him of atheism because of his secularism, but there was never any evidence to suggest that this was true either and this issue has already been brought up in the hardline conservative press.
Again, he had no connection to any nuclear program, nor is there any evidence at this point to even remotely suggest that he had ever visited any nuclear facilities that are accused by the West of being used to develop nuclear weapons.
In fact, all the evidence currently suggests he was nothing more than an ordinary nuclear physics professor and he was popular with his students at Tehran University and was an unofficial (but not outspoken) supporter of Mir Hosssein Mousavi and secular democratic reform.
Antonin Alexander
A killer blow against US-Iran ties
14.01.2010 00:28
The US has officially denied any role in the incident in which a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorbike went off near the 50-year-old professor's home in the Qeytariyeh neighborhood in northern Tehran.
Bill Burton, the White House deputy press secretary, called the accusation "absurd", saying he would not comment further as he did not want to "prejudge any information about what actually happened".
An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehman-Parast, commented, "In the preliminary investigations there can be seen the traces of the triangular villainy of the US, the Zionist regime and their agents in Iran's terror attack."
Only a few days ago, there were unconfirmed reports that Iran was slowing down its nuclear fuel program as a gesture of goodwill to give diplomacy some breathing space, this after intense lobbying by senior European Union diplomats involved in the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Iran is being urged to halt its uranium-enrichment program, which many believe is designed to develop nuclear weapons - a charge Tehran vigorously dismisses.
Tuesday's assassination could torpedo this development-in-the-making and reinstate Iran on its previous stubborn stance. It also sends a message that the forces opposed to any breakthrough between the US and Iran are simply too formidable.
Iran's Fars news agency quoted a spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization as rejecting "rumors" that Mohammadi had been employed by the organization, appearing to pour cold water on speculation that Mohammadi had been killed in an attempt to derail Iran's nuclear program.
However, Asia Times Online correspondent Mahan Abedin, an Iran expert, observes that, while this is true, Mohammadi had a string of affiliations to scientific and research organizations at the center of Iran's nuclear program, such as the Theoretical Physics Institute headed by Mohammad Javad Larijani.
There have also been reports that Mohammadi was linked to the Iranian opposition, notably to Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former radical prime minister and now a reformist opposition leader.
Mahan comments, "The opposition led by Mousavi is by and large loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In any case, it is worlds apart from the illoyal dissidents based in the West. The loyal opposition inside Iran does not dispute the foundational strategic and ideological imperatives that underpin the Iranian nuclear program. But all of this is beside the point. All the available evidence suggests that the assassinated scientist was apolitical and wholly devoted to his scientific work."
Initially, the Anjoman-e-Padeshahi (Monarchical Association), a group that seeks to re-establish the Pahlavi reign (the pro-US shah regime prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979), announced in a statement that its "Tondar Commandos" were behind the assassination. Subsequently, sources inside the group denied any involvement. A leading Iranian opposition group, the Iraq-based Mujahideen-e-Khalq, is unlikely to have been involved as it claims that since 2001 it has renounced violence.
Tuesday's assassination follows the disappearance of another Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, who went missing while on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in late May 2009. Tehran has adamantly claimed that he was abducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Unconfirmed reports in December said Amiri had been transferred into the US government's custody by Saudi authorities.
The two cases could be viewed as an attack on Iran's human nuclear assets, as the next best substitute for outright military invasion. There is also a relentless public relations campaign in the West against Iran's nuclear program.
In the past month alone there have been front-page stories in The Times of London, The New York Times and The Washington Post with "revelations" of neutron triggers, Iran's purchase of uranium from Kazakhstan, and most recently, "the maze of tunnels" where Iran has purportedly buried "most" of its nuclear complex - little of which stands the weight of critical scrutiny.
The neutron trigger document, it now turns out, was not an original document, but a doctored one, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has had extensive access to Iran's nuclear facilities, has informed this author that the New York Times story on "nuclear tunnels" is news to them.
This is not to say that Iran has not taken some counter-measures with regard to a military threat. (See Iran places trust in 'passive defense' Asia Times Online, January 13, 2010). However, as confirmed by Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the small centrifuge facility known as Fordow near the city of Qom is Iran's only facility planted in bunkers, and even it is still under construction, with the completion date some two years away.
History repeats itself, and there is nothing to indicate that the Western media have learned any lessons from the fiasco of toeing the official lines on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction eight years ago that were used in part to justify the US-led invasion in 2003.
There is a grave danger in this shadow war, in that should it get much worse, Iran could decide to strike back where it can, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, with the US and Iran practically co-dependent in regional security, imperiled by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it is not in the interests of either country to allow a worsening of their relations at this delicate juncture.
Linking possible new sanctions on Iran with Iranian democracy issues, as inferred from the latest pronouncements of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is also a wrong move. For one thing, it further erodes the legitimacy of the pro-democracy movement and strengthens the hands of their hardline oppressors. Clinton's call for "targeted sanctions" on Iran's ruling elite may be on the US's foreign policy wish list, but they can hardly find a wide audience at the United Nations, where China has expressly opposed any new sanctions, as has, to a lesser extent, Russia.
To counter this, the US is saying that unless new sanctions are approved, there is always the option of military action, as per a recent statement by Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that the US is engaged in the preparation of military contingencies against Iran and that it is keeping "all options open".
The notion that Iran will back down in the face of such threats is an inheritance of the previous US administration of George W Bush; it did not work then, nor is it likely to work now.
The Barack Obama administration would be best-served to salvage its self-wrecking ship of Iran diplomacy by veering back to its initial intuition of what works with Iran, that is, persuasive diplomacy. Unfortunately, as the smoke of the bomb explosion that killed Mohammadi clears in Tehran, the hazy thickness of an undeclared shadow war with Iran grows.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) is now available.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Homepage:
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/9212
General Naqdi - Iran will take revenge on US over its crimes
14.01.2010 00:58
"People are angry at those who paved the ground for the recent incidents and assassinations," Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Reza Naqdi, commander of Basij forces said on Wednesday.
"The revenge for these crimes should be taken on the US and with the support of God we will do so," Fars news agency quoted Naqdi as saying.
He noted that the assassination of an Iranian scientist and university professor on Tuesday showed that the West is against Iran's scientific and technological progress.
Dr. Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, a lecturer at the University of Tehran, was killed when a booby-trapped motorbike exploded in front of his home in Tehran.
Iran's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said that Iran has found clues of the US and Israel's involvement in the assassination of Ali-Mohammadi.
presstv
Homepage:
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=116103§ionid=351020101
A Ploy to Prevent Reconciliation?
15.01.2010 04:32
Could be one motive for this murder ...
Iran, from confrontation to reconciliation?
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
A serious miscalculation on the part of the green movement, by holding political rallies last Sunday during the holy ceremonies of Ashura, has clearly backfired, especially since some militant demonstrators turned violent and attacked police stations, threw Molotov cocktails at police vans, and beat up members of the riot police.
Both Mousavi and a number of intellectual leaders of the green movement, such as Akbar Ganji, have explicitly distanced themselves from the violent demonstrators, with Ganji going further and writing that "our problem today is that some notable personalities of the movement and many of its intellectuals have mortgaged themselves to the collective populist action [the opposition street rallies] ... Resorting to violence is not justifiable under any excuse."
Seymour Hersh, Scott Ritter and others have documented the US and Israeli support given to terrorist groups like MEK and the al Qaeda-linked Jundullah in Iran as part of their on-going covert operations, but this has barely registered in our press.
Target Iran: Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh on White House Plans for Regime Change
US, Israel, Britain - Real Axis of Evil
Hide 1 hidden comment or hide all comments