Patrick Henningsen
GCN Live.com
January 25, 2012

“Remember the Maine!”, was the cry back in 1898 from William Randolph Heart’s New York Journal – a forerunner the modern Murdoch press.

The USS Liberty incident took place in 1967

Then, some 274 men lost their lives as a result of the explosion which sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. Hearst even told a story of how the enemy had planted a torpedo beneath the Maine and detonated it from shore. The only problem was – it never happened. Nonetheless, the event used as the popular pretext for the United State’s entry into the Spanish-American War, and ultimately, the acquisition of Cuba itself by the US. This was now the modern blueprint for using propaganda in conjunction with, what is accepted by many historians, a type of false-flag event.

Some 70 years later, on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, a similar event took place off the coast of Egypt. It could well have been, “Remember the Liberty!”, following an event which saw 34 US men killed and 170 wounded when the USS Liberty was attacked by both the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. History now reveals that Israel’s slaughter of the USS Liberty crew was designed as a false flag event, but luckily Russia intervened at the last minute before Israel could sink the decorated American ship. Had it worked, it could have been used to drag the US and her allies into a new regional, or even a third world war - with who knows what consequences.

If a conflict is to ignite in the Persian Gulf in 2012, it is highly likely that the US or Israel will use the false flag option. Two reasons support this. Firstly, Iran lacks a motive to want to engage in a suicidal first strike against the axis powers – a move which would no doubt cost them thousands of innocent lives and billions in infrastructure. Frankly, it’s safe to say that it’s not at all in the Iranian national interest to start such a conflict. History does show however, that the US and Israel can – and will, employ the technique of the false flag attack, where they would engineer an incident and then blame it on the Iranians. By all accounts, this is also how the US was able to fake their way into the costly and bloody Vietnam War, via the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

Recent weeks have seen a massive build-up of naval assets in the Persian Gulf by both the US and the British. The irony of surface naval power in the 21st century is that it is only good for one thing, and that is the ‘projection of force’. In fact, Naval Power ceased to be a major factor geopolitical power-play since the dawn of the 20th century, when it was usurped by Air Power.

As Great Britain learned in the Falklands War back in 1982, even a single French Exocet missile can sink a battleship, or aircraft carrier. Iran has more than this capability, so for all practical purposes, any American ships in the region are nothing more than bait – large, slow sitting targets. Which begs the obvious question: why would the US be sending its soon-to-be decommissioned, rusty chess piece – the 50 year old nuclear-powered USS Enterprise carrier into the line of fire in the Persian Gulf? A very large and expendable, floating museum, and one which, interestingly enough with its six on board nuclear reactors… would probably cost a fortune to dispose of.

If other sides are drawn in to a conflict, most experts agree that it has the danger of escalating into a WWIII situation, and both sides would surely be losers in such a scenario, not to mention the global economy.

However, we have the ideal set of conditions for a New Cold War to emerge in the early 21st Century – one where the Western Axis powers of the US, Europe, Israel and GCC countries sit on one side, and with Iran, Syria, Pakistan, China, and perhaps Russia sitting on the opposite side. This New Cold War will be more about the projection of power and securing sub-regional dominance in terms of economics – natural gas, mineral and trade relationships, as well as petroleum – than it will about the political ideologies that seemed to dominate the previous 20th Century Cold War.

On the surface, this latest spat between the US and Iran looks like a step closer to war, but on closer examination however, the present conditions are not at all ideal for a preemptive strike against Iran by the US, or Israel. Why? In a time when fuel consumption is down worldwide, and oil supplies are high, oil prices are defying economics and maintaining strength above $100 per barrel. It’s also worth noting that defense contracts – particularly in the GCC countries – are way up, meaning there is still much money to be made from this current crisis – on both sides, including Iran.

Still though, we must keep our eyes open for that false flag from the west.

Kurt Nimmo
GCN Live.com
January 23, 2012

Iran has reacted angrily to an agreement by European Union foreign ministers to impose an oil embargo on the country.

Following the agreement reached on Monday, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Ismail Kowsari, deputy head of Iran’s influential committee on national security, said the strait “would definitely be closed if the sale of Iranian oil is violated in any way.”

A fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Tehran will not grin and bear it when its interests are undermined,” said lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi, according to Press TV. Boroujerdi is a lawmaker who heads the national security and foreign policy committee in Tehran.

Another lawmaker, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, said Iran has a “right” to shut down Hormuz. Falahatpisheh is a senior member of Iran’s Majlis, or Iranian parliament.

Ali Falahaian, a former intelligence minister, said Iran should stop all its crude exports “so that oil prices would go up and the Europeans’ sanctions would collapse.”

Iran first issued warnings about closing down the Strait of Hormuz in December. “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” said Vice President Mohamed Reza Rahimi.

Admiral Habibollah Sayyari told Iran’s state-run Press TV that closing down the strait would be “very easy for Iranian naval forces,” but said “such a decision should be made by top establishment leaders.”

It now appears Iran’s leaders are a step closer to considering that option as the EU and the United States impose an embargo and punitive sanctions.

The price of oil surpassed $99 per barrel on news of the embargo and Iran’s response.

Benchmark crude for March delivery moved up about a dollar to trade 90 cents higher at $99.23 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, according to the Associated Press.

Kurt Nimmo
GCN Live.com
January 16, 2012

Iran confirmed today that it has received a letter from the United States concerning the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Ramin Mehmanparast, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the country is studying the letter and “will respond to it if it is necessary.”

“The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, sent a letter to Mohammad Khazaie, Iran’s UN representative, which was conveyed by the Swiss ambassador, and finally Iraqi President Jalal Talabani delivered its contents to officials” in Iran, the official IRNA news agency quoted Ramin Mehmanparast as saying.

“Providing security of the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf needs a collective measure and some cross-regional countries cannot decide about it,” he added.

The contents of the letter were not revealed.

Over the weekend, Iran sent a letter to the United States indicating it had reliable information concerning the complicity of Western intelligence agencies in the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist last week. The US has denied any involvement, according to CNBC.

Foreign Policy magazine reported last week that Israel’s Mossad posed as American CIA agents in operations to recruit members of Jundallah, a terrorist group that has carried out a number of bombings, assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks in southeast Iran. The article cites six U.S. intelligence officers as sources of information.

It is widely believed Mossad is repsonsible for the assassination campaign inside Iran.

According to Haaretz, the Sunday Times quoted an unnamed Israeli sources who claimed that the killing was conducted by Mossad and a precursor to a military strike.

Two top IDF officers, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz and Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai, have hinted Israel may be conducting the assassination campaign that has so far claimed the lives of four Iranian nuclear scientists.

Israeli president Shimon Peres, however, said Israel was not involved in the assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan.

It is not clear if the issue will be raised later this week when General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visits Israel. A military exercise, billed as the largest joint venture between the two nations, was postponed to later this year for unspecified reasons.

In recent days, the West has rolled back its rhetoric. British Foreign Secretary William Hague told Sky News television on Sunday that his government was not calling for military action. He did not rule it out, however. He denied British involvement in the killing of the Iranian nuclear scientist last week.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has characterized the murder of Roshan as a “wonderful thing.” Santorum said it was wrong for the Obama administration to condemn the assassination.

Washington’s Blog
Monday, January 16, 2012

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See thisand this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.)

The IAEA report being trumpted as a casus belli contains no new information, but is based on a re-hashing of old, debunked claims stemming from “laptop documents”.

State Department cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the new IAEA head was heavily backed by the U.S., based upon his promises of fealty to the U.S. Indeed, as we’ve seen in the nuclear energy arena, the IAEA is not a neutral, fact-based organization, but a wholly-captured, political agency.

But where did the documents come from originally?

As Gareth Porter noted in 2008:

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.

Interestingly, the Bush Administration – and especially Dick Cheney – helped to fund the MEK (see confirming articles here and here).

And the New York Times, Washington Post and others are reporting that Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey are supporting the MEK as well.

So the terrorist group which “found” the documents is funded by neoconservatives who want to overthrow Iran. What a coincidence!

And as Gareth Porter notes in the above-linked article, the Mossad may have created the documents in the first place:

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

One thing is clear: the U.S. and its allies have a long history of using forged documents as an excuse for war.