He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.

He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.

He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a “dumb war.” when seeking the votes of citizens no longer supporting that war.

He has praised European settlers for their westward march across America without acknowledging the death and suffering of the indigenous peoples of the continent whose nations the settlers from across the sea conquered

He pre-justified the week long massacre of Gaza, and kept silent during the chilling dispatch of four hundred Palestinian children along with over a thousand of their relatives and friends

While still a candidate, he signed on to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers who favor, propagate and profit from wars.

We could have been pretty sure Obama would never condemn the industrial investment banks of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Dupont, Joe Kennedy, Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Brown Brothers, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, ITT, and media magnates William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, and others for having backed Adolph Hitler and invested in arming the Germany of the Nazis up to superpower status, knowing full well (and in most cases pleased) that Hitler persecuted Jews and Communists.

Obama has always proclaimed capitalism and the United States as, overall, “a force for good in the world.”

“Hope springs eternal.” is the saying often applied to circumstances that don’t appear to warrant hope.

Zen Buddhists, practicing a strict application of highly disciplined mind, understand “hope’ and “fear’ as two sides of the same coin.

Just as fear can have a negative function, hope can paralyze, can be made to substitute for action and can becloud accurate appraisal and decision making.

Both hope and fear anticipate something that has not yet happened. For example, hoping that a certain damn will not break is similar to fearing that it will.

Fear and hope, not unlike prayers evoked in their name, are retreats from endeavor, a postponement or avoidance of involvement. As does fear, hope lessens the awareness and attention so critical to decisive action.

Millions of progressives, even if not completely hooked by the campaign slogan of “change” hoped that Obama would be different. But, as the wise saying goes, “Hoping doesn’t make it so.”

Before the election our priority was getting a Democrat elected as America’s first black president, and we felt obliged to lay low so the rabid and ignorant right wing plurality out there would not associate Obama with criticism of America, or the peace movement which corporate media characterizes as appeasement and weakness. Immediately after inauguration Obama bombed Pakistan as promised (a promise most assuredly meant for the ear of the military complex).

During our present generation, the lies, misrepresentations and treachery of U.S. presidents (Obama now included), Congresses and a Pentagon subservient media cartel have caused a multi massive amount of Muslim children to fall in harms way of lethal U.S. military action in Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Pakistan and Yemen. This merely continues a century long history of vicious and cruel armed Western imperialism in Muslim lands: various sub-Saharan African colonies, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, since the Ottoman empire was sliced up for England and France with United States of America in profitable acquiescence.

Our hope was incredibly misplaced, that once in office, Obama would have acted contrary to his promises of bellicose intentions and as an exception to all his imperialist predecessors, that he had only pretended to be a hawk before an war indoctrinated electorate in order to gain office. A capitalist chief executive allowed to place the lives of children being slaughtered by U.S. military in poor Third World countries above the interests of Wall Street war profits would have no precedent.

Extremists fighting for justice in a world of U.S. military hegemony hold the millions of Americans limiting themselves to only hoping for a safer fate for foreign children, guilty and responsible as the Commander-in Chief Obama’s other officials of U.S. corporate governance.

Americans in general have a good amount of leisure but little or no interest in the crimes of their government abroad. Among them are many Americans who are personally disturbed or uncomfortable particularly about their awesomely powerful military taking the lives and limbs of children. But the greater part of pangs of conscience is devoted to hoping rather than any action at all. Those who seek news and information beyond that twisted on TV and in tabloids, will know of daily atrocities by the same boastful military that though having a large military facility less than three hundred miles from the Haiti earthquake zone did little more than block the aid coming into the Port-au Prince airport from other nations, disembarking its fine Navy hospital ship from Maryland only three days after the quake struck.

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, obviously fear of retribution beyond that of 9/11 is more prevalent than the hope that our killing will cease.

This article was originally published by OpEdNews in February 2010.

A former Mossad officer has alleged the Israeli spy agency has its own “passport factory” to create or doctor passports for use in intelligence operations. Relations between Australia and Israel are under strain after three Australian passports were apparently used by suspects in the killing of top Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Dubai police say they are 99 per cent sure Mossad was behind the operation to smother Mabhouh with a pillow in his hotel room. Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at Mossad for several years in the 1980s, says he has no doubt Australian passports have been forged or fraudulently used for similar operations in the past.

“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said. “They’ll shy away right away. So most of these [Mossad] operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.

Read More: ABC News (Australia)

With all the hubub about NASA blowing up the Moon last October, I thought disinfo.com readers would like to know the U.S. (and the Commies!) had it in mind all along.

Here’s another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the United States and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.

It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center spearheaded the project (labeled A119, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights”).

The idea was to shock and awe the Soviet Union, and everybody else, with a massive display of American nuclear might. What better demonstration than an atomic explosion on our closest celestial neighbor? According to the project’s reports, the flash would’ve been visible to the naked eye on Earth. (It’s been suggested that another motivation may have been to use the Moon as a test range, thus avoiding the problems with irradiating our home planet.)

Carl Sagan was among the scientists lending his intellectual muscle to this hare-brained scheme. The project’s leader was physicist Leonard Reiffel, who said: “I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth.”

When a reporter for Reuters asked him what had happened to Project A119, Reiffel replied, “After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the world of classified activities.”

Astoundingly, this wasn’t the only time that a nuclear strike on the Moon was contemplated. Science reporter Keay Davidson reveals that “in 1956, W.W. Kellogg of RAND Corporation considered the possibility of launching an atomic bomb to the Moon.” In 1957, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory put forth Project Red Socks, the first serious proposal to send spacecraft to the Moon. One of its lesser suggestions was to nuke the Moon in order to send lunar rocks hurtling back to Earth, where they could be collected and studied. The following year, the leading American astronomer of the time, Gerard Kuiper, coauthored a memo which considered the scientific advantages of nuking the Moon. The creator of the hydrogen bomb, physicist Edward Teller, similarly mused about dropping atomic bombs on the Moon in order to study the seismic waves they would create.

The Soviet Union got in on the act, also in the late 1950s. Project E-4 would’ve used a probe armed with an A-bomb to blast the Moon, apparently as a display of one-upmanship. The idea reached the stage of a full-scale model but was aborted for fear of the probe falling back to Earth.

References: Barnett, Antony. “US Planned One Big Nuclear Blast for Mankind.” Observer (London), 14 May 2000. • Davidson, Keay. Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. • Ulivi, Paolo. “Nuke the Moon!” Grand Tour Planetary Exploration Page, 13 Oct 2002. • Zabarenko, Deborah. “Moon Bomb?” Reuters News Agency, 17 May 2000. • Zheleznyakov, Aleksandr. “The E-4 Project: Exploding a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon.” • Enciklopediya Kosmonavtika

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico.

This reads like it probably is genuine treaty language, and if it is the real US proposal, it is the first time that this material has ever been visible to the public. According to my source, the US proposal is the current version of the treaty as of the conclusion of the Mexico round.

I’ve read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus. It contains, for example, a duty to technology firms to shut down infringement where they have “actual knowledge” that such is taking place.

This argument was put forward in the Grokster case, and as Fred von Lohmann argued then, this is a potentially deadly burden to place on technology companies: in the offline world Xerox has “actual knowledge” that its technology is routinely used to infringe copyright at Kinko’s outlets around the world — should that create a duty to stop providing sales and service to Kinko’s?

[Read more BoingBoing]

The companion article was titled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life” and intended to make readers consider the possibility of the United States losing World War II and falling under Nazi control. Thankfully, these are maps of a history that never occurred.

Senior United Nations officials in Afghanistan on Wednesday criticized NATO forces for what one referred to as “the militarization of humanitarian aid,” and said United Nations agencies would not participate in the military’s reconstruction strategy in Marja as part of its current offensive there.“We are not part of that process, we do not want to be part of it,” said Robert Watkins, the deputy special representative of the secretary general, at a news conference attended by other officials to announce the United Nations’ Humanitarian Action Plan for 2010. “We will not be part of that military strategy.”

The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has made the rapid delivery of governmental services, including education, health care and job programs, a central part of his strategy in Marja, referring to plans to rapidly deploy what he has referred to as “a government in a box” once Marja is pacified.

Mr. Watkins did not specifically criticize the Marja offensive, saying, “It is not the military that will be delivering the services, they will be clearing the area so the government can deliver those services.”

However, the United Nations would not be participating, he said.

Wael Haj-Ibrahim, head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs here, said the military should not be involved in providing health care or schools.

[Read more at NYT]

After a month of wrangling, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner succeeded in sacking central bank President Martin Redrado last week. In his place she named Mercedes Marcó del Pont, a Yale-trained economist who has expressed the view that central bank autonomy ought to be limited.

The opposition howled at the news. Felipe Sola, former governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires, warned that the new bank president “is going to do what the executive decides and they are going to modify the bank charter to justify her doing what the executive tells her.”

Of course that would seem to be the point. Mr. Redrado was fired because he refused to turn over $6.6 billion in bank reserves to Mrs. Kirchner, who wants to pay foreign creditors but doesn’t want to use treasury revenues. Ms. Marcó del Pont, if she wants to keep her job, will follow the orders of the president.

Mrs. Kirchner is not the first politician to covet the wealth available from the monetary authority. Closer to home, there is Barack Obama, who didn’t back Ben Bernanke’s controversial second term as head of the Federal Reserve out of magnanimity. Mr. Bernanke kept his job because he has shown a willingness to finance Mr. Obama’s big-government agenda.

[Read more at WSJ]

BAGHDAD (AFP) — China has agreed to cancel 80 percent of the 8.5-billion-dollar debt it is owed by Iraq, the finance ministry in Baghdad said in an official statement on Tuesday.

It said a bilateral agreement was signed in Beijing, without specifying the date, and that China’s ambassador to Iraq had met officials in Baghdad to confirm the agreement.

The statement added that the two countries entered into trade deals valued at 3.8 billion dollars in 2009.

Read More: American Free Press via the Tehran Times

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another — the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

A relevant Texas geological project

Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players — the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

Read More: Global Research

Tension between the US and Iran heightened dramatically today with the disclosure that Barack Obama is deploying a missile shield to protect American allies in the Gulf from attack by Tehran.

The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to four countries — Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait — and keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down Iranian missiles.

Washington is also helping Saudi Arabia develop a force to protect its oil installations.

American officials said the move is aimed at deterring an attack by Iran and reassuring Gulf states fearful that Tehran might react to sanctions by striking at US allies in the region. Washington is also seeking to discourage Israel from a strike against Iran by demonstrating that the US is prepared to contain any threat.

Read More: Global Research

From Blather:

Presidents Chavez and Ahmadinejad blame Obama administration for the Haiti earthquake, conflict in Israel, 13th century plague, the Crusades, the sinking of the Titanic and the clogging of Kim Jong Il’s toilet. A special conference, convened by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has met in Caracas Venezuela to explore ways in which alternative historians can justifiably blame the United States of America for any natural, political or military disaster since the dawn of time.

Historians, anthropologists, economists and randomly selected performance artists gathered together for a lavish five-day event at the Universidad de Pandejos, Caracas at the invitation of the Venezuelan and Iranian presidents.

[Read more at Blather]

Thousands of protesters from across Japan marched today in Tokyo to protest against U.S. military presence on Okinawa, while a Cabinet minister said she would fight to get rid of a marine base Washington considers crucial.

Some 47,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, with more than half on the southern island of Okinawa.

Residents have complained for years about noise, pollution and crime around the bases.

Japan and the U.S. signed a pact in 2006 that called for the realignment of American troops in the country and for a Marine base on the island to be moved to a less populated area.

[Read more at The Daily Mail]

In September Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington’s decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon’s main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador’s new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn’t resist an easy joke. “We’ll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”

Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we’ll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.” They add to Washington’s already considerable military presence in Colombia, as well as in Central America and the Caribbean.

[Read more at The Nation]

Haitian authorities conceded they had lost their battle to maintain order in Port-au-Prince after the leaders of the city’s crime gangs reclaimed their old turf since being freed when the national prison collapsed last week.

The gangsters have stepped into the law and order vacuum, notably in the sprawling shanty town of Cite Soleil which they dominated before being locked up following police operations supported by United Nations troops over the last three years.

“Even as we are digging bodies out of buildings, they are trying to attack our officers,” said Aristide Rosemond a Cite Soleil police inspector.

The Haitian authorities, already weak and reliant on UN forces, are now crippled by heavy casualties and widespread destruction of infrastructure while international peacekeepers are focused on disaster relief.

Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister, has despaired of the state’s ability to tackle a new post-earthquake crime wave sweeping his country’s devastated capital.

Read More: Telegraph

Fewer deaths occurred in Hiroshima in August 1945 than in Port-au-Prince last week and more people will die there soon than in Rwanda in 1994. Yet the modern global world was unprepared for it, so busy were they with Terrorism, which has killed fewer people in the last thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months.

When are we going to get the arithmetic right, and distinguish what threatens us mightily from what threatens us barely at all?

Cuba, a socialist state, is well-prepared for natural disaster and few die there in the hurricane season, and rebuilding happens quickly. The United States, a capitalist nation, was ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina though experts had warned for years of broken dykes, inundation, chaos, disease and looting, and its response was an international joke.

China, a socialist state, handles earthquakes well. Australia, a social democratic state, handles floods and bushfires fairly well. Yet on the US’s back doorstep a million people may die soon, thirsting to death under piles of bricks or in those rapidly-spreading diseases that follow earthquake, unhelped by America whose borrowed billions were that day bombing Kandahar not funding ambulance teams in Port-au-Prince.

When will we get our priorities right, and realise our biggest foe is wild nature not militant Islam and do such things as we can to survive it?

Read More of Bob Ellis’ essay on ABC’s Drum Unleashed

1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, “The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days.” “In a few days,” Mr. Obama?

2. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, “My sister, she’s under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?” Should I tell her, “Obama will have Marines there in ‘a few days’”?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “I don’t know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has.” We know Gates doesn’t know.

Read More on GregPalast.com

How difficult will it be for the United States and other donors to track the millions of dollars in earthquake aid headed to Haiti? U.S. government auditors pulled out of the country years ago after concerns over kidnappings and other crimes scuttled their efforts to monitor Haiti’s spending of $45 million in U.S. aid after storms there killed thousands.

Corruption, theft, violence and other security problems and Haiti’s sheer shortage of fundamentals — reliable roads, telephone and power lines and a sound financial system — will add to the challenges of making sure aid is spent properly as foreign governments and charities try not only to help Haiti recover from this week’s devastating earthquake but to pull itself out of abject poverty.

Past efforts haven’t been easy. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, faced problems on a smaller scale in 2005 and 2006 as auditors tried to review the use of roughly $45 million in aid the U.S. provided after Tropical Storm Jeanne struck Haiti in September 2004, killing more than 2,000 people, injuring more than 2,600 and affecting an estimated 300,000 others.

The inspectors wanted to visit projects funded with the money to measure progress. But after an initial fact-finding trip to Haiti, it was considered too dangerous for them to go back. They could visit only projects deemed safe as destinations. In summer 2005, many employees of the Agency for International Development — which is coordinating the current U.S. response to the earthquake — were temporarily pulled out of Haiti, according to government reports.

Haiti is one of the poorest places on Earth. Most basic public services are lacking, people typically live on less than $2 a day, nearly half the population is illiterate and the government has a history of instability. The public has little opportunity to be sure that aid to the government is used honestly and well. Nor is following the money easy for donors, including the United States, 700 miles away and one of the country’s biggest helpers.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

Google’s announcement that it may quit China over censorship and hacking drew applause, warnings and bouquets from dissidents and Internet activists on Wednesday, with few seeing much chance of the wary government giving ground.

Google, the world’s top search engine, said it might shut its Chinese-language google.cn website after China-based cyber attacks on dissidents using its Gmail service.

At the company’s China headquarters in Beijing’s university district, a dozen locals laid a bouquet of red roses and white lilies on Google’s sign at the company entrance.

They praised the company, shouting some salty Beijing slang.

“We want to express outrage, but not at Google. Coming here is a type of support for Google,” said IT worker Zhao Gang, 30.

“Google faces very strict and adverse conditions in China. Something we knew in our hearts is now out in the open. I believe it’s a watershed moment for the Internet in China this year.”

Chinese activists have long complained that China’s Communist Party has tightened its grip on the Internet, stifling the spread of information and ideas in the name of public safety and morals.

Their complaints have now been echoed by the world’s biggest Internet firm and by Washington, where Hillary Clinton said the Chinese government should explain the attacks.

With such volleys aimed at China, Internet control is sure to climb the pile of frictions between Washington and Beijing, joining economic disputes, arms sales to Taiwan and Tibet.

“The surprise isn’t the hacking or censorship. That’s everywhere here,” said Liu Ning, a writer and blogger in Beijing. “The surprise is such a big company breaking the silence about all these problems … Until now, they’ve kept quiet.”

[Read more at Reuters]

For those interested in helping immediately, simply text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.

Michael Isikoff writes on Newsweek’s Declassified:

The conspiracy theories about President Obama’s executive order on Interpol are getting wilder by the day.

Invoking no less an authority than Glenn Beck, movie tough guy (and political activist) Chuck Norris has taken aim at Obama’s Dec. 17 executive order extending certain “privileges, exemptions, and immunities” to Interpol, otherwise known as the International Police Organization, based in Lyon, France.

As we reported last weekend, thanks in part to the comments of Beck and Newt Gingrich (as well as the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy) the order has spawned a rash of conspiracy theories in the conservative blogosphere claiming that Obama has given Interpol (or “the global police force,” as the critics like to call it) new powers to investigate and even lock up U.S. citizens.

(Never mind, as we pointed out, that contrary to the Man From U.N.C.L.E. fantasies of the blogosphere, Interpol officers actually don’t have the authority to arrest anybody on U.S. soil. The group is, instead, an international organization of police agencies whose purpose is to share information: it maintains master databases—of stolen passports, for example—and posts “red notices” of criminal suspects, including terrorists, drug traffickers, and child pornographers, who are wanted by law-enforcement officials in its 188 member countries.)

Now Norris, famed for his expertise in the martial arts, attacks from a different direction. In a new column on World Net Daily, the right-wing Web site, he claims that Obama signed the executive order so that he can slyly, without anyone noticing, create a “secret vault” at Interpol’s New York office to conceal important records about the war on terror from the American public.

Read more of Michael Isikoff’s article on on Newsweek

The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition “Green Movement,” said senior U.S. officials.The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran’s dissident forces, said the U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran’s nuclear program.

U.S. Treasury Department strategists already have been focusing on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has emerged as the economic and military power behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In recent weeks, senior Green Movement figures — who have been speaking at major Washington think tanks — have made up a list of IRGC-related companies they suggest targeting, which has been forwarded to the Obama administration by third parties.

Names on the list include Iran’s largest telecommunications provider, Telecommunication Company of Iran, which is majority-owned by the IRGC, and the Iranian Aluminum Co. A U.S. official involved in Iran said the administration wouldn’t comment on whether it was acting on the information.

American diplomats, meanwhile, have begun drawing comparisons in public between Iran’s current political turmoil and the events that led up to the 1979 overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

“In my opinion there are many similarities,” the State Department’s chief Iran specialist, John Limbert, told Iran-based listeners this week over U.S. government-run Radio Farda. “I think it’s very hard for the government to decide how to react to the legitimate and lawful demands of the people.”

[Read more at WSJ]

An Israeli military delegation has canceled an official visit to Britain, officials said Tuesday, the latest in a string of politicians and army officials to put off travel to the U.K. because of fears of war crimes prosecution.

Israel complained that the practice, spearheaded by pro-Palestinian activists, is harming relations, and Britain’s visiting attorney general said an urgent solution must be found.

The Israelis called off their trip because their British army hosts could not guarantee they would not be arrested, the Israeli officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Neither the Israeli military nor the British government would comment.

The incident underlined the effectiveness of a pro-Palestinian legal campaign to harass Israeli officials in the wake of war crimes allegations after Israel’s devastating invasion of Gaza a year ago to stop rocket attacks.

Israelis brand the tactic “lawfare,” which they denounce as warfare through distortion of laws and conventions. It has crimped the travel plans of many officials and put Israel on the defensive in international bodies.

Read More: Huffington Post

A Middle Eastern investment fund that pays Tony Blair about £1m a year as an international adviser is in talks to develop one of Iraq’s biggest oilfields.

Mubadala, a United Arab Emirates investment firm, is in negotiations to join a consortium of western oil companies developing the Zubair oilfield in southern Iraq. More than £6 billion of investment is required for the project.

Blair has always insisted that the Iraq conflict was never linked to the country’s vast oil reserves, but he was facing criticism this weekend over his role with Mubadala. The investment firm, which receives 80% of its revenues from oil and gas, intends to build the biggest oil company in the eastern hemisphere.

It has been confirmed that Mubadala’s oil and gas division is in talks with Occidental Petroleum, an American company, about sharing some of its stake in the Zubair deal, which is to be developed by a consortium headed by Eni, the Italian energy firm. The talks were confirmed to financial analysts in a public briefing by Ray Irani, Occidental’s chief executive.

Read More: Times

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. “I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism,” Nairn says. “But once he became president … Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off … but he chose not to do so.” He continues, “In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year.”

Listen/Watch the Allan Nairn interview on Democracy Now!