Iran Solidarity Tour in Scotland

[Annie]

Justin passed on the details of this tour in Scotland by Prof. Abbas Edalat of Iran Solidarity:

http://www.iransolidarity.endofempire.org/

[xmasdale]

Kevin Boyle has sent us this:







White Man Who Speaks with Forked-Tongue


You would think from the apparently conflicting news reports that there is a deep division in the Blair cabinet as there appears to be in Washington about whether or not to conduct a military strike against Iran. In an interview last Sunday, Blair assured us that British forces would not be involved in such an attack. But questioned in parliament a few days later he gave Bush support for an attack. Giving him support, of course, is not the same thing as involving UK troops. And not involving troops isn't, by any means, a full dissociation from an attack.

UK bases in places like Fairford and Diego Garcia would still be used. RAF AWACs might still provide support as well as clandestine SAS troops based on Iran's frontiers. So UK complicity in a US-led attack would still remain high. This would, in turn, lead to making the UK a prime target for revenge attacks by Iran. Once again, Blair is shown up for his cavalier disregard for the welfare of his own people.

What is it, I wonder, that leads him to hold his people in such low disregard? What is it that the US secret services have in his dossier that makes him so easily blackmailable? Since fooling the electorate into giving his party the greatest electoral landslide since 1945 he has done nothing but betray Britain and its European partners over and over in the most sickening sell-offs to America's extreme right.

Firmly attaching his colours to the Project for a New American Century, Blair has done everything he could to revive an Anglo-Saxon hegemony in a world where the dollar -and inevitably the pound- live on strictly borrowed time and that only thanks to an Asian super-power, China. Perhaps the intention was never more than to squeeze a little bit more borrowed time but the price that the world and its people have been forced to pay has been horrendous.

In a thoroughly corrupt world where might is again right and legislatures and judiciaries are coerced by the jack-boot mentality the likes of Blair, Bush and Cheney may never have to pay the full price that their guilt requires of them. They should, at least, be made to know that never in the history of modern politics were ever a bunch more hated and despised than they and should such a thing as natural justice exist then theirs is soon nigh.

http://chimesofreedom.blogspot.com/2006/04/white-man-who-speaks-with-f orked.html

[xmasdale]

Media Workers Against the War have sent us this:

Media Workers Against the War

PR FOR WARMONGERS
BBC coverage of Iran, The Today Programme, April 13, 2006

The Today Programme -- the BBC’s flagship news broadcast -- on April 13
did a great job stoking up the drive for war on Iran.

Please take a few minutes to:

* Read the complaint below (sent to the BBC in the name of MWAW this
week)

* Listen to the 7.09am and 8.10am segments of the programme:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/zthursday_20060413.shtml

* Send your own complaint to:
helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/make_complaint.shtml
(Please copy us in! mwaw@btinternet.com)

* And forward this email far and wide.

In peace,

MWAW
Tel 07801 789 297

PR FOR WARMONGERS
BBC coverage of Iran, The Today Programme, April 13, 2006

Dear Ms Boaden and colleagues,

We are a group of concerned journalists, including BBC journalists, and
other media professionals who campaign for fair, well-researched, and
non-alarmist coverage of the so-called war on terror, the foremost
global issue of our time.

Brief summary of complaint:

We are writing to express our dismay at the coverage of the Iran crisis
on the flagship Today programme on Thursday April 13. The 7.09am and
8.10am segments on Iran:

* Painted an unqualified, one-sided picture of Iranian aggression;

* Made no attempt to put in proportion the supposed threat posed by
Iran, or to outline similar potential threats posed by other
nuclear-capable nations;

*Made no attempt to explain the Middle-Eastern context in which the
belligerency of the US administration and its allies has strengthened
conservative elements in Iran;

* Presented without challenge or qualification lengthy comment from
sources known to have played crucial roles in preparing the ground for
the ill-advised invasion of Iraq;

* Made alarmist statements on the basis of pure speculation;

* Contributed to strengthening the notion among the British public that
Iran must be dealt with aggressively by the West.

The programme therefore failed to comply with the BBC’s own procedures,
introduced post-Hutton, for ensuring balanced reporting. A detailed
analysis of these failings follows below.

We believe that woefully inadequate coverage of this sort can only
contribute to a widespread concern that the post-Hutton BBC is failing
in its public service duty to inform the population about the course of
the "war on terror", and that the Corporation is overly deferent
towards a political establishment that is largely unrepresentative of
the country as a whole.

We would be happy to suggest to the BBC alternative sources of
authoritative, informed comment on the war on terror.

In April 2003 Mark Damazer, then deputy director of news, accepted our
invitation to a debate these issues in public. We would like to invite
the BBC to debate them with us once more.

Yours sincerely,

Media Workers Against the War
c/o NATFHE
27 Britannia Street,
London WC1X 9JP
Tel 07801 789 297


The Today Programme, Thursday April 13

1) Range of voices

The main figures interviewed on the Iran crisis were:

a) John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, a leading neoconservative
hawk, one of the foremost proponents of war in Iraq, who insisted that
the US had “very convincing evidence” of an extensive Iraqi weapons
programme; and who as undersecretary of state for arms control was
accused of trying to coerce intelligence analysts to tailor their
reports according to his preferences;

b) Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted Shah of Iran, who can provide no
evidence of representing a significant proportion of the Iranian
population, would like to see the US-backed monarchy restored, is
considered by US conservative think-tanks such as a the American
Enterprise Institute as a potential “Ahmad Chalabi” in Iran: i.e. a US
client in Iran after regime change has been achieved;

c) Jeremy Greenstock, former UK ambassador to the UN, who played a
prominent role in the flawed, manipulative and cynical diplomacy
leading up to the invasion of Iraq;

d) Emyr Jones Parry, the UK ambassador to the UN who was centrally
involved in policy decisions concerning the disastrous US/UK-led
occupation of Iraq.

The programme included just one sentence from Mohamed ElBaradei (head
of the IAEA), calling for a negotiated solution to the crisis.

The programme also used the voices of experts -- professor Gerard de
Groot (University of St Andrew’s), Corey Hinderstein (Institute for
Science and International Security), and John Eldridge, Editor of
Jane's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence -- in such a way as to
support the allegations against Iran made by the main interviewees
listed above. Voices critical of the allegations were not included.

In sum:

* The coverage was dominated by voices from the Western political
establishment pursuing the case for action against Iran, voices also
intimately linked with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq.

* There were no sceptical voices from the political, academic or
scientific world giving alternative assessments of how real Iran’s
motivation and scientific capability to launch a nuclear attack might
be.

* There were no voices representing the Iranian point of view.

Can this really be called balanced coverage? At least 20 minutes were
devoted to Iran in these segments of the programme -- plenty of time to
achieve genuine balance.

As the BBC reporters within our group can attest, in the post-Hutton
BBC journalists are regularly, and properly, asked to complete computer
modules which test their ability to select a properly balanced range of
voices for programmes. The Today team appears to have ignored the basic
tenets of this exercise.

2) Questionable assertions left unchallenged

a) John Bolton

“The risk that Iran poses by mastering the nuclear fuel cycle and
especially by uranium enrichment is that the decision whether to
accumulate enough highly enriched uranium to construct a nuclear weapon
is entirely in their hands, and given their record, and the statements
of Ahmadinejad, that is leaving a potential nuclear weapons capability
in the hands of the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and that
isn’t a happy prospect.”

(i) “Highly enriched uranium”: Iran is far from being capable of
industrial-scale uranium enrichment. The enrichment facility in the
Iranian city of Natanz, equipped with 164 gas centrifuges, cannot
produce any significant amount of enriched uranium -- instead the
centrifuges allow Iran to conduct laboratory uranium enrichment to a
low level in insignificant amounts.

A sceptical scientist or alert reporter could have provided this
context.

(ii) “Given their record”: What record? Iran under the ayatollahs has
started no wars -- not itself a guarantee that it will never launch a
war in the future, but a necessary qualification to any discussion of
potential Iranian aggression. Given Mr Bolton’s record as a leading
member of a highly belligerent US administration, and the record of
US-backed regimes in the Middle East, this comment should not have been
left unchallenged.

b) Sir Emyr Jones Parry

“One has to say, why is it that enrichment, that has no civilian energy
or economic purpose that any of us can work out, why would one want to
do this? And you lead incontrovertibly to the conclusion that you
should be very, very wary of this.”

Uranium enrichment certainly does have a civilian energy and economic
purpose. The BBC’s own website states: “Iran has announced that it has
enriched uranium, which is a key step in making both nuclear power and
a nuclear bomb. ... Iran says the enrichment is to 3.5% which is
sufficient for nuclear power fuel and not high enough for a nuclear
bomb, which it says it is not making.”

Iran’s nuclear programme was begun under the US-backed Shah, who said
it was necessary to diversify the country’s energy resources given the
finite life of its oil and gas supplies, an assertion which Western
powers did not then challenge. In fact, at that time they assisted in
providing the necessary technology.

c) Reza Pahlavi

“I believe the support for democracy and the right of the Iranian
people to freely choose for themselves what they want ought to be the
course of action and frankly, the past 27 years I have not seen to this
day any tacit engagement by the free world with the forces of change
and democracy. Perhaps the time has come for the world to give up its
endless negotiations with the regime that has no intentions to remedy
the problem and begin investing in a process of change at the hand of
the Iranian people themselves.”

(i) What democratic credentials does this man have? His father, the
Shah, was imposed on Iran in a US-backed coup after Mossadeq
nationalised the oil industry;

(ii) The Iranian people elected President Ahmadinejad;

(iii) Mr Pahlavi has made abundantly clear his understanding of
“democracy” – that the US should fund groups such as his to pursue US
interests in Iran.

Why was he not challenged on these elementary points?

d) Jeremy Greenstock

(i) “You’ve had journalists talking about military action [by the US
against Iran] – you haven’t had a threat from the US to use military
action, they’re merely saying that they have a range of instruments and
they’re not taking anything off the table.”

Mr Greenstock was allowed to dismiss as mere journalistic opinion the
suggestion that the US is preparing for military action on Iran. The
programme’s editors should have briefed the presenter that Seymour
Hersh’s New Yorker article, which was the original source of
information about US military plans, cites high-level sources in the US
administration, military and intelligence services -- certainly not
journalists’ opinions.

A minimum of research by the programme’s editors would have found that
US marines are conducting operations in southern Iran with a view to
assessing the likely consequences of a military strike; that a section
of influential conservative opinion in the US has been calling for
military action against Tehran; that the US government has refused
diplomatic overtures from the Iranians, setting up a dangerous game of
brinkmanship in which neither side wants to be seen to back down. Yet
Sir Jeremy was not challenged on his dismissal of the suggestion that a
military strike is a real possibility.

(ii) “This is about more than just the breaking of the
non-proliferation regime”: Iran has not broken the non-proliferation
regime. Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which
Iran is a signatory, states that “Nothing in this Treaty shall be
interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to
the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy
for peaceful purposes”.

(iii) “This is about the creation in the area of stable, collective
organisations for keeping international order.” How could the Today
Programme allow the double-standards expressed in this quote to go
unchallenged? The US currently maintains an estimated 10,300 nuclear
warheads, and President Bush has sought funding for research on new
nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Israel and India are known to have nuclear
programmes tolerated, even supported, by the West, despite the fact
that they are not signatories to the NPT.

Again, a sceptical expert might have been able to provide these crucial
facts.

3) Alarmist statements by Today presenters and reporters

a) “The suspicion of course is that Iran intends to make nuclear
weapons. … How soon could a country that’s committed to wiping Israel
off the map be in possession of its own atomic bomb?” (Caroline Quinn,
8:10)

Ms Quinn takes literally President Ahmadinejad’s threats to Israel,
implying that they constitute the motivation for Iran to pursue a
nuclear weapon.

Most analysts would confirm, however, that an Iranian attack on Israel
would be suicidal and is extremely unlikely. The Today programme made
no note of Iran’s propensity to issue such threats as a populist
measure intended for domestic consumption, particularly given the
US/UK-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and support for Israel.

Ms Quinn’s statement did inadvertently allude to one of the more
plausible motivations for Iran to become nuclear-capable: it is ringed
by nuclear states, including many non-NPT signatories, such as India,
China, Russia, Pakistan and Israel. (Israel, according to the CIA, now
possesses between 200 and 400 nuclear devices.) In addition, the US-led
invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan has put US troops on two borders with
Iran, stoking Iranian fears that it may become an object of aggression
from the US or its allies.

Iran was occupied by both British and Soviet forces during World War
II, its elected government was overthrown in a coup backed by the US
and UK in 1953, and from 1980 to 1988 Western powers abetted Saddam
Hussein’s onslaught in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died.

In Iran’s case, self-defence rings truer here than a desire to attack –
a point that Today ignored.

Finally, 36 states are “nuclear capable” because they possess nuclear
power reactors and/or nuclear research reactors, yet none have so far
built a bomb. Why didn’t Today explain why should Iran be so different
from, for example, Algeria, Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Bangladesh or
Indonesia?

b) “The country’s success in enriching uranium has already given the
country a frightening new weapon” (Mike Thomson, 8:12)

This scaremongering statement paved the way for Prof Gerard de Groot to
spell out this threat: i.e. a “dirty bomb” consisting of plastic
explosives and uranium and designed to spread radioactive
contamination. Reporter Mike Thomson further built up the scale of the
assumed threat posed by Iran by suggesting that building a nuclear bomb
is very straightforward, with the information freely available on the
internet.

However:

(i) If Islamist terrorists wanted to get hold of nuclear material for a
dirty bomb, they could long ago have turned to Pakistan (whose
government is an ally of the United States), which has nuclear weapons,
and where the military backed the Taliban and has strong sympathies
with Islamism;

(ii) There has been only one incident of an attempted dirty bomb -- in
Moscow in 1996.

This dirty bomb suggestion is therefore both highly speculative and
alarmist. It was extremely irresponsible of the Today programme to
include such alarmist speculation in its report.

c) “Corey Hinderstein of the Washington-based ISIS, believes Tehran is
at least three years away from a nuclear bomb. But she says if its
scientists have mastered the process of enriching uranium it’s no
longer a question of if, and more one of when…” Mike Thomson

This circuitous statement is saying that because Iran is enriching
uranium it therefore MUST be constructing a bomb. But this is the nub
of the debate, and yet Today manages to reach this conclusion purely on
technical grounds -- without ever exploring why Iran would create such
a weapon and why it would employ it.

The Today programme appeared to be cherry-picking statements by
scientists to paint as grim and frightening a picture of the threat as
possible, without due scepticism and without alternative points of
view.

This smacks of the notorious 45-minute claim seized upon by the British
media in the run-up to war on Iraq, and of the anthrax and ricin scares
whipped up by the media in the early phases of the war on terror.