The undertow of anti-Iranian fearmongering becomes stronger. This is a tremendous bit of totally baseless fearmongering from an Obama administration official in the New York Times, positing nuclear bomb collaboration between Iran and North Korea:
The Iranians are also pursuing uranium enrichment, and one senior American official said two weeks ago that “it’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries.” Some believe that the country may have been planning two simultaneous tests, but it could take time to sort out the data.
This is on a par withthe Bush administration’s totally false claim of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. There is no linkage between the governments of Iran and North Korea; both regimes are highly unpleasant in many ways, but they have utterly conflicting ideologies and absolutely zero history of political collaboration. This is ludicrous scaremongering fantasy.
New CIA haed John Brennan put Iran and North Korea into the same sentence with nuclear weapons in his Senate confirmation hearing. This aspect was overlooked by the mainstream media, which focused on Brennans defence of drone killings (and ludicrous claims of absence of bystander deaths). But Ray McGovern rightfully picked up on this part of his opening statement:
“regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons”.
As Ray points out, the US intelligence services own assessment is that while Pyongyang plainly is developing nuclear weapons, the situation in Tehran is much more nuanced. There is no clear intention of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. That Brennan gives a position at variance with the actual analysis of the agency he is to head is worrying, to say the least.
We have the same seamless and completely unjustified linguistic waving together of North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes from former Israeli Foreign Minister and Netanyahu prop Liebermann quoted here:
Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says North Korea’s nuclear test was an “obvious example” of diplomacy failing to curb a nuclear program. Lieberman told Army Radio on Wednesday that “anyone who thinks sanctions or negotiations will stop Iran is wrong.”
Iran remains the best justification for bloated military budgets and the next obvious target for war profiteers and hydrocarbon vultures. Expect a crescendo of this nonsense this summer/
e.g.
Obama: Nuclear test ‘isolates North Korea further’ today
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21437876
North Korea nuclear test branded ‘serious threat’ to US yesterday
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21429544
and from Medialens
Short email to Mardell…
Posted by Ed on February 12, 2013, 7:09 pm, in reply to “Re: The BBC’s Mark Mardell “what is actually happening in the world”.”
Mr Mardell,
In your “Analysis” piece that accompanies the BBC report “”North Korea nuclear test branded ‘serious threat’ to US”, you state:
“But perhaps the biggest test of the Obama administration is how Beijing responds – a key plank of his foreign policy is bringing China into the international community and get it to , in some senses, start to act like a superpower.”
By acting “like a superpower”, I take it you have the USA in mind? So that would mean starting illegal wars of aggression on defenseless countries, kill lists which include their own citizens and the extra-judicial murders that this involves, drone strikes that kill untold numbers of innocent people, inflicting crippling sanctions on countries who won’t do as they are told and deposing democratically elected governments around the world.
Instead of tacitly endorsing that China “act like a superpower” by your uncritical acceptance of Obama’s pronouncements , your “Analysis” badly needs a bit more definition and explanation as to what this “superpower” status actually means in practice, to those unfortunate millions who are caught up at the sharp end of its illegal activities and war crimes.
The US “superpower” is actually more like a “rogue” or “terrorist state” and “what is actually happening in the world” is clear evidence of that.
Yours,
Ed Murray
And what Netanhahu’s lot did to the Palestinians yesterday. Just one day when they didn’t actually kill anybody.
http://www.sapienspromise.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2687
So on one side we have Iran who have a history of non aggression, have signed the NPT and are abiding by the terms.
On the other we have America, history of little but aggression who signed the NPT but are totally ignoring the terms by building and testing their new bunker buster bombs. Plus of course Israel who didn’t even sign the NPT and gave nuclear technology to apartheid South Africa.
I think America is being more than a little hypocritical.
Superb Ed! 🙂
Dan Rather’s ‘stenographer’ description comes FTL to mind.
The thread on Medialens on N Korea
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1360689566.html
“Plus of course Israel who didn’t even sign the NPT and gave nuclear technology to apartheid South Africa”
There are suggestions also that N Korea’s 2009 test used one of the three Israeli/S African nukes “missing” since the early 90s. The contention that N Korea is testing on behalf of another country nay well be true but if so I bet it’s not Iran.
Little wonder that North Korea is Twitchy, and paranoid, about amerca –
The prewar (1946-49) massacres by the U.S.’ South Korean flunkeys (sometimes overseen by American officers) were only the warm-up to the wholesale slaughter of Koreans carried out directly by the U.S. military during the Korean War, as American warplanes and troops returned, this time supposedly as “United Nations” forces. In the name of “freedom” and “democracy,” the United States engaged in mass murder in Korea on an industrial scale from 1950 to 1953. This included leveling virtually every city in North Korea with carpet bombing; targeting civilian population centers with firebombs and dropping huge quantities of napalm (jellied gasoline), burning inhabitants to a crisp; executing vast numbers of peasants and “suspected Communists” in cold blood; and deliberately murdering thousands of refugees. This was a policy of mass extermination. The United States wiped out one fifth of the entire North Korean population at the time. In addition, Washington prepared to drop scores of atomic bombs on the North and turn the country into a vast radioactive cemetery.
Scene of the crime: railroad bridge where hundreds of South Korean refugees were massacred by U.S. troops on 25 July 1950. (Photo: USAF aerial photo, from U.S. Department of the Army, No Gun Ri Review [January 2001])
For years, there was a curtain of silence about the massacres in the South. But in 1999, a team of reporters for the Associated Press – Sand-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza – published a series of groundbreaking articles laying out in horrific detail a massacre on 26 July 1950 of up to 400 Korean refugees at a bridge outside No Gun Ri, near the city of Yongdong.1 The reports were based on testimony from Korean survivors and from a dozen U.S. soldiers who had participated in or witnessed the slaughter. The reports had a profoundly shocking effect. The Pentagon had been denying this and similar reports for years. At first it claimed that no troops were even in the area of No Gun Ri. But faced with the testimony of a dozen American veterans, it had to backtrack. The AP stories won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
And in the North –
In North Korea, in contrast, the U.S. bombing went on for three years, and its purpose was not terrorizing the population, it was annihilation. cumings quotes Curtis LeMay, the architect of the aerial bombing that incinerated Japanese cites (and who later advocated bombing Vietnam “back to the Stone Age”). LeMay says he argued with his Pentagon superiors at the outset to “let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea.” While there were objections about civilian casualties, he said, in the end “over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too.” The number of civilian dead in North Korea during the war was over 1 million, and total casualties were 1.5 million-plus, out of a total population at the time of 8-9 million: almost 20 percent of the population. Plus another million killed in South Korea.
“The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August [1950], a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.”
–“Korea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats,” Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), December 2004
But that’s only (some of) what the U.S. did. What it was preparing to do was far worse. After MacArthur had been pushed out of the North, on 24 December 1950, the U.S./U.N. commander made a formal request for 38 atomic bombs accompanied by a list of 24 targets, to turn North Korea from a wasteland (which U.S. bombing had already made it) into an uninhabitable moonscape. In posthumously published interviews, MacArthur claimed he had a plan to win the war in ten days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria,” leaving “behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea – a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.”2 Or any human life in Korea north of the 38th parallel.
This was a program for genocide on a scale surpassing Hitler
Nuclear weapons are not what N. Korea and Iran have in common. What they have in common is banking where the Rothschilds are not in total control. That’s why they are big prizes to the Zionist-owned Yanks.
That is the Zionists who will have this Palestinian man’s death on their hands.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/13/are-they-just-waiting-for-samer-issawi-to-die/
Shame on Amnesty International too for their lack of involvement.
The new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA – Suzanne Nossel – is a recent U.S. government insider.
Nossel would have worked for and with Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and undoubtedly helped them successfully implement their “Right to Protect (R2P)” – otherwise known as “humanitarian intervention” – as well as the newly created “Atrocity Prevention Board.”
This cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy (which has served mainly to rationalize the launching of war on Libya) is now being hauled out to call for U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria.
in fact, Nossel is herself credited as having coined the term “Smart Power,” which embraces the United States ’ use of military power as well as other forms of “soft power,” an approach which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at her confirmation as the new basis of State Department policy.
Mossel also worked as deputy to Crypto-Jew, Richard Hallbrooke who played a major role in the dimemberment of Bosnia as a Muslim state in 1990s
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/18/amnestys-shilling-for-us-wars/
Mary you have Posted a few times now on matters relating to the Korea’s…i ment to put this link up for you, it’s where i got some info for my post at 4;15…its one of a few pages iv’e had bookmarked for a couple years…its truly heartbreaking what the us were getting away with in BOTH Korea’s
http://www.internationalist.org/northkoreawarneverended1012.html
‘Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says North Korea’s nuclear test was an “obvious example” of diplomacy failing to curb a nuclear program.’
The best case of ‘pot, kettle, black’ I’ve seen this year, given that western countries don’t even pretend to exert ‘diplomatic pressure’ over the Dimona facility, and the warheads that Israel has developed as a result.
@ BrianFujisan, so thank God Nossel’s gone. But thanks too for the information because not everybody knew.
Where’s Werrity?
“Expect a crescendo of this nonsense this summer”
Traditionally spring is the time for military offensives to begin in the northern hemisphere.
Iraq main offensive began 20th March 2003, for example.
I was quite young when the Korean War was being fought 1950-1953. The coverage was only in the press and on the radio in those days and I can remember thinking how brutal it looked in the photos and how much slaughter was taking place. There was a lot about the Glorious Gloucesters. Even then, as now, war and killing was glorified just five years after the carnage of WWII amazingly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
Look at the casualty and wounded statistics on the RH side.
Then later they made light of it by making MASH.
Thanks Brian for that link and agree about Nossel John.
She has left AI US after about a year and has found a new niche at PEN US as Executive Director. Not sure what Pen is about but Nossel’s CV does not fit very comfortably in their tag line –
Promoting Literature, Defending Freedom of Expression
Is Pen similar to any of those international set ups which act as left covers for US militarism? I do not know the answer to that but there is something at the back of my mind about one of the UK membership whom was found to be dubious but cannot recall it now.
http://www.pen-international.org/who-we-are/board/ I always want to know who runs an organisation and how it is funded and by whom.
Iran remains a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003. Iran permits inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in accordance with the NPT. As a non-member of the NPT, North Korea undergoes no such inspections.
So, very little similarity, I’d say, and North Korea’s test is being used as yet more propaganda against Iran.
Jives, 6:12 pm:
Let’s hope he was at 41.30°N 129.08°E near Mantapsan, Kilju County until 02:57 UTC on 12 February 2013.
The Sigrid Rausing Trust donates £50k to PEN International a charity registered in the UK and based in London. Freedom of Expression, remember that when you read below.
http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends88/0001117088_ac_20111231_e_c.pdf
Rausing owns Portobello Books/Granta Books famous or rather infamous for airbrushing Craig Murray out of ‘Ian Cobain’s history of British state involvement in torture, “Cruel Britannia” – appears to have been radically censored between the review copies and publication.’
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/01/the-disappearance-of-craig-murray/
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/01/the-disappearance-of-craig-murray/#comment-387798
Perhaps Ms Rausing did not like Craig reminding us of this about her daddy within
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/06/us_military_hon/
Earlier this year The Guardian disclosed that Hans Rausing, the Swedish billionaire and former head of Tetra Pak, was awarded an honorary knighthood for philanthropy in January despite questions over his use of legal loopholes to avoid paying tax.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/war/cameron-iran-speech-lip-synced-to-video-of-blair-on-iraq-201203084988
Nice one Clark! 🙂 Where did you get those coordinates from?
Seriously, do you think we will ever see Werritty again or has he heen given plastic surgery and a new identity?
Quick – we need another war.
There are real problems to be addressed:-
i) An enormous debt
ii) Homelessness
iii) Joblessness
iv) Cost of health for the general populace
v) A defence budget that increases in each new fiancial year and exacerrbates the already exorbitant national debt –
BUT – WE DO NEED ANOTHER WAR!
“Cost of health for the general populace”?
WELL –
A) If one stays at home in the US and does not enter the armed forces – there is the issue of the cost of domestic health care.
B) If one goes abroad to a war and is killed – problem A) is solved.
C) If one comes home, back to the US – but has suffered trauma or been injured – there still is the cost of domestic health care to be concerned about – from whatever source it is provided – veterans medical – or – civilian services. Serious injuries can demand very costly treatment if the patient is to be properly tended.
BUT – WE DO NEED ANOTHER WAR! – HOW ELSE ARE THE DOCTORS TO BE KEPT BUSY?
USUK EMPIRE – MUPPET STREAM MEDIA LIES
IRAN
Iran USUK MSM lies – why today?
– ‘IAEA experts arrive in Iran for new round of talks on nuclear deal’ – 13th February, 2013 – Xinhua news agency –
– http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2013-02/13/c_132167427.htm
Oh look – What a surprise, etc, etc.
More US Empire Muppet Stream Media propaganda perchance? No change there, then!
Is it a poor thing when the Chinese provide (reasonably) accurate (foreign ; ) ) information and the BBC slavishly repeats the lies of the US Muppet Stream Media??
(ER, Is the Pope a Catholic?? etc. Ed.)
UP THE USUK NEO-CON NAZI NONCE EMPIRE !
Just say “Up yours” to USUK Empire Neo-Con Nazi mass psychosis! –
USUK Empire Neo-Con Nazism made mainstream by ‘Biggus Dickus,’ (of Wome on the Potomac) — Big Oil tool and US Torture promoter – brought to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Aden, Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Poland, Lithuania and many, many more —
– “You lucky bastard” – Monty Python – Life of Brian –
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EI7p2p1QJI#t=00m34s
Mary, Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_Korean_nuclear_test
There is a link on the right to ToolServer GeoHack, which is a remarkable service. Loads of mapping tools, linked from a single page with coordinates pre-entered for you:
http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=2013_North_Korean_nuclear_test¶ms=41.30_N_129.08_E_type:event_region:KP
Werrity: “…as you can see it’s a very nice bomb, quite small, not a huge yield, but easily deployed, and only $ NO DON’T PUSH THAT YET!!!”
Mary,
The approximate coordinates popped up on real time seismic monitors immediately it happened. Here’s the summary from EMSC http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/
2013-02-12 02:57:51.0 41.32 N 128.99 E 1 5.0 CHINA-NORTH KOREA BORDER REGION
Magnitude 5.
EMSC has a real time “for seismologists” link that gives unfiltered data direct from the various monitoring networks. Those bastard commie North Koreans waited until I had checked it one last time for the night and then set it off.
Thanks Clark and Anon. V interesting.
O/T What is it with the wish to have statues of living or dead PMs? Didn’t we have enough of them in their time not to want reminding?
Harold Wilson Westminster statue plea
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-21442959
Living we have Cameron, Brown, Bliar, Major and Thatcher.
http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/past-prime-ministers/
“George Galloway has made the most salient point: Iraq was attacked because it DIDN’T have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea will not be attacked because they DO have weapons of mass destruction, and this is the logic of western (led by US) foreign policy since 1991. Any nation that fears the west, or has valuable resources that may lead them to be invaded, has every reason to obtain or develop a nuclear capacity.”
Jeez – the debate on the Left in the UK used to be about whether nuclear disarmament should be unilateral, bilateral or multilateral – no one but no one, with the possibility of a few nutters, argued for everyone to have nuclear weapons. I’m worried enough about Israel and Pakistan having them without extending the franchise even further.
And before anyone bothers to ask I don’t believe a war against Iran or North Korea is the way to stop them developing nuclear weapons or that they are working together for that matter. But it should be recognised that they would be breaking UN Resolutions (or International Law if you like) if they were to do so; and I have no problem whatsoever with other forms of pressure being applied on them not to develop nuclear weapons. Especially given that there are recent signs that Ahmedjinadhad is on the way out and possibly something similar may be happening in North Korea, given that the usually do these tests as a form of blackmail in ordert to get food aid.
BTW despite what Galloway says Saddam did at one time have WMD and he used them againt the Kurds and Iranians, and his indefatigable friend had something of a track record of invading his neighbours and that Stalin for whom he cried wasn’t adverse to miltary intervention in other countries – so perhaps George’s advice on how to maintain peace might just be a little flawed.