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Weekly Review And Open Thread 2018-13
The last week at Moon of Alabama was again dominated by the Skripal incident. Another long piece about a different issue is still on hold. This week thus saw less posts than desirable.
Mar 19 – NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury" and
Mar 21 – Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' – High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated)
I had added additional historic information on the chemical agents in question in a comment to the March 21 piece.
The British government is milking the incident to push russophobia and to divert from its failure in the Brexit negotiations and all its other problems. But the diversion will only succeed so long. The NHS doctor as well as court testimony by scientists from Proton Down contradict the claims made by the British government. Let's hope that the British opposition picks up on that.
Mar 20 – Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People by Debs is Dead
Mar 23 – John Bolton – The Man With A Hammer Is Looking For Nails
The one man now seen as the most 'moderate' on war issues in the Trump administration is a retired four star marine general with the nickname "mad dog" who was fired by the Obama administration for being too aggressive towards Iran.
Mar 25 – Syria – The East-Ghouta-Afrin Exchange Is Complete – Where Will The SAA Go Next?
Use the comments as open thread …
Gareth Porter writes:
> What we do know is that more than anyone else, Bolton has come back over and over again over the last 10 years since he left the Bush administration. Every time I have heard him on Fox News or have seen a video of his appearance on Fox News when he’s been asked about Iran, he’s called for bombing Iran. He said now is the time for the United States to bomb Iran, to attack Iran. That’s an extraordinary situation. No one else in history has ever been so extreme as him. And that raises all kinds of questions about what is going on with Trump that we that we don’t really have clear answers to at this point.
> 2003-2005 in the Bush administration, he was involved very deeply with with Dick Cheney in carrying out a policy that was aimed at positioning the United States for a war against Iran that Dick Cheney was clearly very much not just in favor of, but it was really his idea in the first place. Dick Cheney was surrounded by people who were violently anti Iran, and he was all on board for eventually going to war with Iran once the invasion and occupation of Iraq had been successful. So John Bolton’s role as undersecretary was largely to carry out a policy toward Iran and its nuclear program that would make it possible for the United States to be in a position politically and diplomatically to carry out the war that Dick Cheney wanted. And so what he did was, in the first phase in 2003-2004, he began to essentially try to frustrate the effort by Mohamed El Baradei, the secretary general of, or director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to try to figure out a way to come to an agreement with Iran with the support, by the way, Of the major U.S. allies in Europe, the British, French, and Germans, to come up with an agreement that would resolve the issues about the Iranian nuclear program that had been arising since 2002. And of course, this was exactly the opposite of what Dick Cheney and John Bolton wanted. They were determined, essentially, to make sure that there was no agreement between the Europeans and the Iranians or the IAEA and the Iranians that would frustrate their plan. So what Bolton did was to have a strategy that would move the Iranian file out of the IAEA and into the U.N. Security Council, where the United States had the power along with its European allies as long as it could bring them into line, to essentially accuse Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program which is what the IAEA at that point in 2003, 2004 was unwilling to do. And so Bolton was all about coming up with a scheme that would be, would allow him to move the file to the U.N. Security Council. What he did was to come up with a mysterious set of aerial photographs of a key military base in Iran where they were carrying out testing of conventional weapons, and various sites within that military reservation were depicted in these aerial photographs. And Bolton went public through leaks to the networks, ABC in particular. And turning them over to the IAEA claiming that these were pictures that showed that the Iranians were carrying out nuclear weapons-related testing in this military reservation. Now, what the pictures actually showed, and they were on the ABC network and they were on the Internet later on, so we’ve we’ve had an opportunity to see all these pictures, all they showed was places like bunkers which were used to test ordinary, conventional bombs. But Bolton tried to turn this into a, an issue of the IAEA needs to go into this military reservation and investigate. Obviously what he was hoping was that the Iranians would say no, you can’t come into our very sensitive testing area and just muck around and look for yourself. Instead, the Iranians invited the IAEA to come in twice, not just once but twice, and looked at ten different sites of their own choice. And and they of course found nothing. So Bolton’s strategy was frustrated in 2003-2004. But that was the first phase of what he tried to do. And the second phase, which is much more murky, was a phase that had to do with the Israeli contribution to the effort to accuse Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program. And that took the form of leaking a set of documents, a whole cache of documents that were supposedly from this covert Iranian nuclear weapons research program. The documents which later on recalled, the laptop documents, were supposedly from the laptop computer of one of the Iranian participants in this program. And they supposedly fell into the hands of Western intelligence because this guy, his computer was stolen or fell into the hands of somebody else, and were turned over to Western intelligence. But I found out from a former senior official of the German Foreign Office who had been brought in by high officials of the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundensachrichtendiest, that, that they knew all about these documents, that they were upset that the U.S. government was making a public issue of these documents as though it were evidence of an Iranian secret nuclear weapons program, because they had been given those documents by one of their sometime sources. An Iranian obviously who they didn’t trust, because they knew that this person was a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Iranian anti-regime armed organization which had been used by the Saddam Hussein regime to make war against Iran, and then was used by Israel to make public information that the Israelis did not want associated with themselves. So there is a string of influence here which ties these very questionable documents which I reveal in my book to be fakes to the Mossad. Now, this goes back to the Bolton scheme because in 2003 and 2004 Bolton was taking unannounced trips to Israel which were not approved by the State Department’s Regional Bureau, as is normally the case, and meeting with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, where no one was there to take notes, and to send a report on what was discussed back to the State Department. So it was a secret between Bolton and, and Mossad. And that furthermore Mossad created a new organization that was not made public, but it was revealed by two American journalists later on, which had the job of circulating information to the news media and to governments about the Iranian nuclear program. So all of this leads to the conclusion which I talk about in my book, that Bolton probably knew what was going on with Mossad’s program to create and circulate these, these documents that were used as evidence by the Bush administration against Iran.
> it was Bolton last October who, on the phone from Las Vegas were Bolton had been meeting with Sheldon Adelson, Trump’s leading finance, financial contributor, in the 2016 election, as well as Netanyahu as a main contributor in past elections. He called from Las Vegas to Trump and convinced Trump to use very specific language saying that unless Congress and the Europeans forced the Iranians, or agreed to force the Iranians to make major changes in the Iran nuclear deal, he would withdraw from the deal. Now, that’s a major pronouncement by Trump which puts him on record and puts him in the position of being committed to a policy that almost guarantees that there will be a confrontation of some sort. Because the Europeans are not going to be able to deliver on trying to negotiate with the Iranians on making these changes that Trump wants, and therefore we can see that the Iranians are going to be in a position where they have to either go along with the ending of this agreement with the U.S. commitment to all of the concessions that the United States made without doing anything, or they’re going to have to pull back on their commitment to the to the Iran nuclear deal, and thus move toward a new confrontation with the United States. So I think that’s where the real danger lies of Bolton in the White House.
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21437:Bolton%3A-A-One-Man-War-Cabinet
Posted by: mauisurfer | Mar 25 2018 19:31 utc | 17
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