U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged

Source: Inter Press Service

U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged

Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel's threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.

Read more: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49833

Who has anything to gain if we bomb Iran?

So sad to see such a fine and historical newspaper go down the tubes.

And the boor at the party finally starts to notice the people moving away. How long before we're shown the door? We'll we actually have to be bounced?
These are the questions the boor is too drunk (on whatever, greed, power, drugs?) to ask.

Just last week, it named that dead demonstrator woman as its person of the year.

Maybe the mullahs were on to something when they went after Britain earlier this year.

is on a roll.

What's one more war for the sake of empire?

Well, if we do attack Iran, and if we don't find nuclear weapons technology, we can always do the Iraq-fall-back and default to the state-sponsor-of-terror justification for the invasion.

the non-shakey hand

I hope the results will be different this time.

- a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence"

We need to cut them loose and stop letting them drag us into their shit. But wait until Lieberman's over there visiting.

...and the infamous "Yellowcake" forgery re Saddam Hussein's supposed attempt to obtain uranium ore from Africa. I suspect that particular conspiracy was a neo-con + right-wing/rogue Italian intel agent job...but anyhow, for those who have not read the Suskin's 2006 book, State of War, here's a synopsis of Operation Merlin:



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/05/usa.books

"The CIA may have helped Iran to design a nuclear bomb through a botched attempt to channel flawed blueprints to Tehran's weapon designers, according to a new book on the US "war on terror".

In an excerpt from State of War, printed today in G2, the author and New York Times intelligence correspondent, James Risen, writes that the abortive operation misfired when a Russian defector on the CIA payroll, chosen to deliver the deliberately flawed nuclear warhead blueprints to Iranian officials in February 2000, tipped them off about the defects.

The operation, codenamed Merlin and approved by the Clinton administration, was intended to send Iranian scientists down a technological dead end, according to this account. They would spend years building a warhead which would fail to detonate. Instead, Risen writes, the operation may have helped Iran to "accelerate its weapons development" by extracting important information from the blueprints and ignoring the flaws.

Asked for comment yesterday, a US intelligence official said the account was "inaccurate", but gave no more details. The CIA's public affairs director, Jennifer Millerwise Dyke, issued a written statement saying "every chapter of State of War contains serious inaccuracies ... The author's reliance on anonymous sources begs the reader to trust that these are knowledgeable people. As this book demonstrates, anonymous sources are often unreliable". The statement added that the operational details revealed in the book showed "an unfathomable and sad disregard for US national security".

...more...

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2008/02/operation-merli.html

Don't let the fact that a document is forged deter you from using it as a reason to bomb the hell out a country.

:sarcasm:

sometime back and many a DUer calling the elected leader of another country 'CRAZY'. Who is CRAZY now? I also really question the glorification of the many Iranians protests on this site. Funny how we call the Iranians on the street attacking their own brothers and sisters 'fighting for freedom' and the same actions in Iraq or Afghanistan 'insurgents or terrorists' when they rally against foreigners. Where are the daily glorification of protesters after the widely acknowledged fraudulent election of the current President of Afghanistan on this site? So stolen elections are okay if that country is our pal or are we playing our part in stoking the drums of war only in Iran? I am just saying...

Last week Ahmadinejad said the document was forged. He has been vindicated. He was telling the truth.

Rove lent Cheney a typewriter, I just know it.

Cheney's Feith-based forgery ops..., December, 2001



U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged , December 28, 2009, by Gareth Porter






And the beat goes on.

Most intelligence services, by the nature of their work defending their governments (and sometimes their peoples), are more hawkish than the average Joe who decides on the election of their bosses.
Russia, US, China, Iran and Israel are no exceptions.

Fortunately some VERY BRAVE persons actually go into these services to moderate these tendencies and end up getting exposed, sometimes!

If this forgery is from Israeli intelligence with the objective to push for another war, it is because they calculate that this will be in their interest but they are probably wrong.

They would like to manipulate average Joe's opinion through the Murdoc networks but they mostly aim at fear mongering among diaspora Jews especially in the US where they are often in key political positions and to seek further financial contributions from them.

If this was truly doable, one could say why not! Who cares if all this can be done with minimum civilian casualties.
For me the main issue for Israel should be to correctly assess what will be gained and at what cost.
At this New Year 2010, Israeli national interests are well represented in Western politics, of course in the US and UK, but also in Europe and to some degree in Russia due to the 10% Russian-speaking population of Israel.
So may be it can be done but Iran has oil, has learned the tricks and has 75 million citizens, mostly young. It will for sure set them back, not counting the colateral losses of life in Israel and among US soldiers within range of the mulahs.

But a couple of years later, we will be back to square one.
Israel should negociate with the Palestinians now and give up East Jerusalem to achieve peace.
The powerful, affluant and arrogant groups that want it all should think of their bargaining position when China becomes the first economic and military power in the world in ten years and China is irritated, doesn't understand and is sick of the monotheistic religions fighting for "walls" in Israel/Palestine.

So the down side is that time is against those who use the settlers from New York and Tel Aviv to expand the grip on the holy land.

To me, it's just so transparent that I find it hard to understand anyone's blindness to, a) the reason why these countries have been targeted by the global corporate predators and war profiteers who rule over us (--they need OIL to fuel their monstrous war machine), and b) the consequent behavior of the leaders of these countries, who are responsible for their peoples' safety (such as allying with each other; or, in Iran's case, seeking a nuclear deterrent against attack; or, in Venezuela's case, closing its borders with Colombia, where the Pentagon is planning a massive U.S. military buildup).

I mean, it's not as if the U.S. had NOT just invaded Iraq, with no justification, slaughtered a million innocent people, tortured many more, and set up a puppet government to hand the oil over to western multinationals. And it's not as if Iran isn't right next door to Iraq, and hasn't been watching its neighbor get invaded, slaughtered and demolished. And it's not as if Venezuela isn't right next door to Colombia, and hasn't been watching the slow, South Vietnam-like U.S. military buildup right on its border, and hasn't been aware of the $6 BILLION in military aid that the U.S. has larded on Colombia--a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth--and hasn't objected (along with most of Latin America) to the latest outrage--a secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement for U.S. military use of SEVEN new bases in Colombia (one of them overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela and all of Venezuela's main oil reserves and facilities), NO LIMIT on the number of U.S. soldiers and U.S. contractors who can be deployed to Colombia, UNLIMITED diplomatic immunity for whatever U.S. soldiers and 'contractors' do in Colombia, and U.S. military use of ALL civilian airports and other facilities in Colombia.

Venezuela is not stupid. Iran is not stupid. And neither has invaded ANYBODY, or shown ANY territorial ambitions. Their concerns are clearly, demonstrably, and obviously defensive.

Furthermore, Iran is one of the potentially most progressive countries in the Middle East. And they would BE a progressive democracy if the U.S., England and Israel had not destroyed their new democracy in 1954 and had not installed the horrible 'Shah' of Iran who inflicted 25 years of torture and repression on the Iranian people, which drove the Iranians into the arms of mullahs, to protect them from further interference, and theft of their oil, by the west. That's WHY the first elected president of Iran, in 1954, was overthrown by the CIA--because he wanted to nationalize the oil to benefit the poor! OIL!

Venezuela has one of the most vibrant democracies in the western hemisphere--it being a COMPLETE AND TOTAL LIE of the corpo-fascists that it is not--so, democracy does not exempt you from threats, attacks and bullying by the U.S war machine--not to mention a U.S. supported rightwing military coup attempt in 2002, and numerous other anti-democracy plots.

Iran knows this. Venezuela knows this. The U.S. government is egregiously hypocritical. It tolerates the murder of thousands of union leaders, peasant farmers, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists and others in Colombia, and rewards the extermination of the left in Colombia with $6 BILLION in aid! And it is using this fascist narco-thug government in Colombia as part of a plan to seize control of Venezuela's (and probably Ecuador's) northern oil regions adjacent to Colombia.

OIL! To fuel the great war machine, and to fuel the tankers of "free trade for the rich."

It is our own government that threatens world peace--NOT Iran's, NOT Venezuela's. They are reacting to the obvious, palpable, visible threat of U.S. invasion.

Did we, or did we not, just invade another country, and bomb the shit out of its people, with no justification whatsoever, in order to steal their oil? DID WE NOT DO THAT? Are people who defend this U.S. demonization of Iran and Venezuela BLIND? Do they have Alzheimer's, or what? They can't remember what happened six years ago?

Like I said, it's plainly obvious to me that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela--one country whose democracy we destroyed, and the other whose democracy we almost destroyed, to get control of the oil--are afraid for their people. And they are not alone.

Lula da Silva, president of Brazil--who also recently welcomed Iran's leaders to his country--has said, of the U.S. reconstitution of the 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, that this "poses a threat to Brazil's oil." (Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela's.) Latin American leaders are currently reeling from what the U.S. just did in Honduras--its slimy, deceptive, treacherous, backstabbing support of a rightwing military coup! They know that multimillions of U.S. taxpayer money are going to rightwing groups in their own countries, plotting similar overthrows of democracy. Brazil has oil. Ecuador has oil. Bolivia has oil. Cuba has oil. None of them are safe. And is it any wonder that they fear the U.S., and are allying with other victims of the U.S.?

The U.S. is the biggest threat in the world to the stability and safety of other countries and their peoples. We are threatening and slandering peaceful countries--and, in the case of Venezuela, a country with a better democracy than our own--because our corporate rulers lust after their OIL.

Here's something else Lula da Silva said. He was interviewed about a year ago, and was asked about this corpo-fascist bullshit that Hugo Chavez is a "dictator." His reply: "They can invent a lot of things to criticize Chavez, but not on democracy!"

So, how does that testimony, from Venezuela's neighbor, gel with the lies, psyops and disinformation that has been aimed at this oil target? Who is telling the truth? The Venezuelan people, who know Chavez better than anybody, consistently vote for him, in fair and transparent elections, in overwhelming numbers. How does that gel with the crapola we are fed by the State Department and its scribes in the corpo-fascist media?

We are being fed LIES--both overt and subliminal. And the reason is OIL.

--------------------------------------

(NOTE: I posted this comment in older forum on this issue--the forged Iran document--and have re-posted it here, because I think it's relevant. Here's the older thread. My post is comment #32, in reply to Steven Johnson's comment #39.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4183247 )

And, it is finally bubbling up to the surface.


The people of the US have been buried in a blizzard of right-wing propaganda and outright lies, foisted on us by our own government. It has been aimed at us for decades.


It is time for all of us who care about the future of humanity, to reject this dangerous imperialism, and to hold all those accountable for their criminal acts.