Standard Chartered shares tumble

August 7, 2012

Shares in Standard Chartered tumbled as much as 20 per cent in morning trading after the New York State financial regulator accused the UK merchant bank of hiding $250bn of transactions with the Iranian government.

The New York state Department of Financial Service claimed on Monday that the bank had concealed about 60,000 transactions with Iranian clients from US regulators, violating sanctions against the Iranian government, and labelled the UK bank a “rogue institution”.

StanChart’s shares dived on fears that the bank could lose its clearing licence for US dollars, which could wipe 30-40 per cent off the group’s earnings, according to analysts at Sanford C Bernstein.

“If you lose your US dollar clearing permission, you cannot be a wholesale bank in Asia. If you lose that licence, you cannot be a trade bank,” said Chirantan Barua, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein.

Other analysts thought it unlikely that StanChart would be stripped of its clearing licence. “It’s difficult to think that the bank could lose its licence, but you can’t rule it out,” said Chintan Joshi, at Nomura, which downgraded the bank from “buy” to “neutral” on Monday night.

StanChart, led by chief executive Peter Sands, issued a trenchant rebuttal to the US regulator, claiming that the DFS did not present “a full and accurate picture of the facts”.

The statement said: “As we have disclosed to the authorities, well over 99.9 per cent of the transactions relating to Iran complied with the U-turn regulations [which enable non-US countries to trade with Iran using dollars]. The total value of transactions which did not follow the U-turn was under $14m.”

The drop in its London share price accelerated losses on Standard Chartered’s dual listing in Hong Kong, with the group’s fall more than doubling after the London open.

A spokesman for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Chinese territory’s banking regulator, said it was “reviewing the order concerning the Standard Chartered Bank issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services, to see if there are issues that have relevant implications for Hong Kong”.

The Financial Services Authority in London could not be reached for comment.

Shares in the group were down 16 per cent at £12.31 just before 9am.

By Duncan Robinson
Financial Times

Bank secrecy masks a world of crime and destruction

The Observer, Sunday 22 July 2012

Banks seem willing to exploit the loopholes found in tax havens and it’s costing the British taxpayer dear.

Last week’s US Senate report into industrial-scale money laundering at banking giant HSBC reads like a John Grisham novel. Terrorists vie with Mexican drug lords for a place in the report’s often breathless narrative that is as absorbing as it is alarming.

But while the headlines have been about cocaine cartels, the most troubling aspect of the Senate’s investigation is that the criminal, often violent, activities of the drug lords were facilitated by a byzantine, albeit legal, infrastructure that made tracking their activities near impossible.

This is particularly true of the subsidiary set up in the Cayman Islands by HSBC’s Mexico division that handled some 60,000 accounts. According to the report, the drug lords used these accounts to fuel their jet-set lives. But, staggeringly, HSBC’s oversight was so lax it knew nothing about who was behind 41% of the accounts.
This lack of transparency is troubling. Tax avoidance is big business. A report by the TUC found that the UK’s four largest banks – HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and RBS – have some 1,200 subsidiaries in tax havens. At a time when the banks are in the dock following a spate of scandals that have exploded the arguments for “light-touch regulation”, the lack of oversight afforded by structuring transactions through tax havens threatens further scandals.

As we report today, new research by the campaign group Tax Justice Network suggests a global plutocracy has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary $21tn of wealth offshore in tax havens.

This gargantuan sum is difficult to comprehend, but it becomes more understandable at a parochial level. According to an earlier report by the PCS union, the Tax Justice Network and War on Want, the use of tax havens costs the UK taxpayer at least £16bn a year, double the annual budget of the Department for International Development.

That many of the tax havens depriving UK taxpayers of billions of pounds are crown dependencies and British overseas territories should be a subject of acute national embarrassment. It should also be a source of profound concern. Tax havens perpetuate wealth inequalities by depriving governments of legitimate revenues that should be used to address social problems. As Carl Levin, who chaired the Senate committee into the HSBC scandal, said: “Ultimately, the rest of us are forced to pay more on our tax bills to make up for those who shirk their taxpaying responsibilities.”

Tax havens also allow companies to avoid accountability through their opaque structures. And, as the Senate report highlights, by facilitating money laundering, they perpetuate criminal behaviour including corruption, piracy, terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, counterfeiting, bribery and extortion.
What is to be done? Experts suggest the UK should embrace a range of remedies, from pressing for automatic information-sharing agreements with other countries to increasing the level of corporate transparency in its own crown dependencies and overseas territories.

A publicly available registers of trusts – the vehicles commonly used for tax avoidance in tax havens – would also be a positive step. So, too, would a decision by the UK government to support “country by country” reporting, whereby companies are required to show the profits and the tax they pay in each country within which they operate, an accounting initiative that would encourage transparency and accountability and highlight when tax havens were being used.

Politicians must also step forward. Ed Miliband has made the right noises by calling for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man to reveal the identity of British tax evaders with money hidden on the islands. But more needs to be done to make more accountable those in the City who push tax havens. Highly remunerated executives must be held responsible for what happens on their watch in these often poorly supervised territories. For this reason, tax campaigners are pushing for a new law that recognises a crime of “wilful blindness”. Under this scenario, executives and their financial advisers would be held accountable if they failed to ask searching questions of those clients for whom they opened dubious accounts in tax havens.

Admittedly, what constitutes wilful blindness would be difficult for legislators to define. But HSBC’s chronic failure to know its customers in the Cayman Islands might just provide a definitive case study.

Source:- Observer - Editorial.

Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above

Alexander Jacob - London: Arktos, 2011

To those who suffer from the general malaise that is induced by American globalism today, Kerry Bolton’s new book provides a useful guide to the specific financial elites that have been directing geopolitics since the early twentieth century, beginning with the Jewish bankers Warburg and Schiff and continuing, through the CIA, with the American Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the foundations of Rockefeller, Ford, and Soros.

Carefully documented with references to the standard literature on these various bodies that constitute the present plutocracy of America, this work shows us how the American ambition to rule the world began indeed with President Wilson’s efforts, during and after the first World War, to end European imperialism and institute a new age of world-democracy. Wilson’s anti-imperialism also allowed America to work in sympathetic, especially financial, collaboration with the Bolsheviks during the first years of their reign of terror.

Indeed, the Cold War between American and Russia was begun only because the Bolshevik rule was transformed into a nationalistic dictatorship under Stalin and the pro-American Jewish communist leader, Leon Trotsky, was forced into exile from Russia in 1929. Since that time, America’s globalist aims have been tinged with Trotskyist internationalism and, as is well-known, even the so-called “Neo-Conservatives” of today are former Trotskyists who have transformed themselves into bourgeois capitalists.

Bolton maintains that most of the socialist revolutions of the world were simply used by the plutocratic elites to effect their own agenda of an international world order based on commercial exploitation. He devotes a lengthy chapter (Ch. 6: “Revolution from Above”) to show how the Americans supported the Bolsheviks during the Revolution and the Civil War that followed it because they hoped to achieve commercial gains from the Soviets that they could not have contemplated during the closed Tsarist regime.

The next chapters, in which Bolton demonstrates the “socialistic” techniques used by the oligarchic elites, are focused on the American leftist movements of the sixties that aimed, through feminism, drugs, and degenerate art, to destroy the family and all national authority as obstacles to the establishment of a world tyranny.

But these social evils had in fact been combated, successfully, for decades, by the Stalinist Soviet Union, which rightly considered the entire West as “decadent,” and it would have been useful if Bolton had highlighted this as indeed one of the reasons why America, in league with the Hungarian Jewish speculator billionaire George Soros, engineered the various Eastern European “color” revolutions that brought down the Soviet Union in 1989 and threaten the Russian Federation today.

Bolton goes on to show how even the “Arab Spring” revolts were, partially at least, products of secret American interventions in order to promote democracy and capitalism in the Middle East. While this cannot be denied given the fact that shady American organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute do operate in these vulnerable areas, it is less clear what the American elites that already supported moderate dictators like Mubarak in the past hope to gain by revolutions against the latter and by the installation of more Islamist governments in their place.

The final chapters consider the other internationalist agendas of today, such as family planning and global warming, that serve to facilitate the establishment of a world government. This world government, Bolton predicts, will be a “World Collectivist State” that is “communistic in organisation but run by oligarchs” (p. 251).

The question of how the Marxist notion of a collectivist workers’ utopia with a total aversion to private property was turned into a bourgeois one with monstrous acquisitions of private wealth is not specifically addressed. But we may infer from the conduct of the American Trotskyists who turned into “Neo-Conservatives” that Trotskyism was only used by the American Jews to counter Stalinism while they continued to pursue their own Jewish oligarchic ambitions. Indeed, a major fault of Bolton’s work is his failure to observe that the vast majority of the oligarchic organizations determining the agendas of globalism were, and are, predominantly Jewish. He also does not seem to have noted the chronological coincidence between the western cooperation with the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the triumph of Zionism (itself a movement of international scope and ambition)[1] in the British Balfour Declaration of November 1917, both of which served as preparatory steps for the establishment of Wilson’s world-democracy.

Indeed, we may wonder whether the globalism that Bolton, as well as many others, rightly despises is not inextricably linked to Zionism itself and, when Bolton decries the “creation of a ‘World State’ built on the edifice of Mammon” (p. 8), whether it may not have been more pertinent to mention, instead of a god derived from classical mythology, the actual god of the Jews.

Another question that arises in connection with Bolton’s view of the globalist threat — namely, how capitalism, based on private property and individualism, can lead to a “collectivist” state — is more difficult to answer. Bolton attempts to do this by highlighting the interlocking institutions that have directed education in America towards an “international viewpoint” (p. 28) as well as the methods of indoctrination adopted by the American elite organizations that sponsored, first, abstract art, atonal music and jazz in the forties and fifties (under the guidance of the Jewish Marxist Theodor Adorno, the Institute of Social Research in New York and the CIA’s Council for Cultural Freedom) and, then, the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll revolution of the sixties.

Timothy Leary, the drug guru who was funded by the CIA, for instance, was not just a “hippy” but apparently sought to “set up new social forms” that corresponded to “the possibilities of expanded consciousness” (p. 121). The problem with such pleasure-indoctrinations (Aldous Huxley’s alternative to George Orwell’s indoctrinations of pain), however, is that they are not collectivist in any economic sense but only in a cultural one.

The danger of the American oligarchic world-rule today is, thus, no longer a problem pivoted on the old Marxist categories of collectivism and capitalism but rather one of the erosion of aristocratic social cultures by a universal proletarian one. In other words, whereas Marx focused mainly on the economic and social independence of the working classes, the American plutocrats used the Cultural Marxists to destroy the culture of all classes as a necessary condition of their international commercial gains and rule.

Bolton’s early reference (Chapter 2: “Plato: The Father of Collectivism”) to the collectivist aspects of Plato’s ideal republic is, in this respect, quite unfortunate since it seems to give the present Jewish-American world-order an excellent classical precedent. I feel obliged therefore to correct here this misleading impression. Plato’s ideal republic is, in fact, a eugenic one which is to be ruled by guardians who are “good and noble” and who unite in themselves “philosophy and spirit and swiftness and strength” (Jowett translation). The education of these guardians is aimed at controlling the intellectual and passionate aspects of the soul through a regimen of well-chosen music (as well as literature) and gymnastics. Particular care should be taken to see that the guardians do not “grow up amid images of moral deformity” which might allow them to develop “a festering mass of corruption in their own soul.” This is the very opposite of the education and art propagated by the oligarchic elites of the American world order.

As regards the equalization of the sexes, too, Plato takes care to first point out the differences between men and women: “all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” However, “those women who have such qualities [as those of the male guardians] are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character.”

The apparently “communistic” recommendation of the sharing of wives and children in Platonic eugenic republic is also restricted to the noble guardians of it: “’that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.” The reason for this is that guardians will therefore not stoop to base actions through envy. Since all guardians “have nothing but their persons which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or relations are the occasion.”

The more important reason for the establishment of a communal life among the guardians, however, is to instil, from the top down, a common nationalistic feeling among all the citizens of the state. Plato’s cultivation of a national aristocracy thus has something in common with the National Socialist, Walther Darré’s attempt to create a new aristocracy in Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1930), and also with the effort to preserve the integrity of the upper castes in the caste-system of India. It has nothing to do with Marxist, or modern Jewish American, notions of the equality of the sexes or of any economic cooperatives.

Besides, Plato’s political guardians are obliged to be philosophers, for they must always have in their minds the ideal of “another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.” Aristocratic elevation is thus an indispensable Platonic political ideal and the entire eighth and ninth books of the Republic are devoted to a study of the inevitable ruin of nations that abandon timocracy (or aristocracy) for oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny (the chief characteristics of the present American world order).

We see, from Plato’s model of the development of states as well as Bolton’s revelations of the American oligarchic networks, that the destruction of the aristocratic rule of Europe at the end of the first World War has indeed driven the world into the hands of a primarily Jewish plutocracy that relentlessly works for “democracy” in order to establish its own “tyranny”. The reader of Bolton’s fascinating book should certainly be grateful to the author for having carefully unraveled the socio-political mechanisms of an anti-aristocratic oligarchy that can only rule the world by essentially destroying it.

Note

1. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, for instance, remarked in his work on the projected Jewish state, Der Judenstaat (1896) that “The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness.”

Pot heads may cause new Holocaust.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/new-yorkers-seek-new-zionist-high-from-israeli-gas-mask-bongs-1.425809 It’s A Real Gas, Man I think this is a HOOT! The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports: “Israel has a shortage of civilian gas masks, but you wouldn’t know it from walking down Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Place, where the masks are on sale in half a dozen stores for a mere $25 each. The Israeli model 4A1 gas masks on display in the East Village — where storefront noodle shops bump up against vintage clothing stores — might not protect you from a chemical weapons attack. That’s because their protective filters have been removed and replaced with foot-long acrylic bongs meant for smoking marijuana. Ha’aretz goes on: “Gas mask bongs, used by pot aficionados to intensify the drug’s impact, started flooding American head shops about a decade ago, some insiders say. That is roughly around the same time that the Israeli government recalled millions of masks it had distributed to civilians during the 2003 invasion of Iraq that the United States led. It’s hard to say whether that timing is coincidental. But it is clear that the black gas masks with circular glass eyeholes, sold in American head shops, are authentic Israeli masks, down to the telltale rubber-triangle seal of Shalon Chemical Industries Ltd., the Tel Aviv-based company that makes all the civilian gas masks of Israel. ‘They’re the real deal,’ said Tony Lomeli, manager of RDD USA, a Los Angeles military surplus dealer that sells Israeli 4A1s for use as survival gear.” So—in light of the impending Israeli attack on Iran, the Jews in Israel are scrambling for gas masks, which may well be needed in view of the thousands of rockets and missiles that are pointed at the small country from all around it, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, etc. some of which this time might contain for real nerve gas and other chemical agents. But they’re short on masks—because some hebe spirited them out of Israel, converted them to marijuana-smoking bongs, and they’re now being sold in head shops in New York. I swear to God, you couldn’t make this stuff up! Back to Ha’aretz: “Though the masks themselves all look alike, the attached bongs vary. Some are long and straight, others end in a bubble. One mask-attached bong spotted in a display on St. Mark’s Place was shaped like a human face. Though the appeal of the gas mask bongs may lie partially in their spooky aesthetic, they are valued mostly for the way they force smoke into the lungs. The seal around the user’s face, designed to keep out chemicals during an attack, locks in the marijuana smoke, forcing the smoker to inhale it all at once. ‘It’s kind of a step above a bong,’ said Rick Cusick, associate publisher of the marijuana-themed magazine High Times. ‘It makes for a slam dunk kind of thing.’” So it’s just possible that while Israeli citizens huddled in shelters in Tel Aviv and Herzliya will be sucking in sarin or anthrax, their Brooklyn cousins will be sucking in reefer fumes through the masks that might have saved them, just to put a few shekels in some profiteering hebe’s pocket. Like, far out, man.

Community Security trust said jump - 'how high?' said May

The cool Mrs Theresa May is acting like a hothead New Labour’s first rule of government was a point blank refusal to be outflanked from the Right when it came to law and order. Theresa May leaves the Houses of Parliament after making a statement defending the Home Office's handling of the Abu Qatada affair By Peter Oborne Telegraph Every one of the great principles which for centuries have underpinned the criminal justice system in Britain came under attack: trial by jury, habeas corpus, free speech, even the separation of powers between executive and judiciary. Tony Blair, who had trained as a barrister, took the view that ancient liberties like a fair trial and the presumption of innocence belonged were Dickensian. He licensed a series of home secretaries, from David Blunkett to John Reid, to wage war on the judges, and undermined the judiciary’s standing and independence. It is greatly to the credit of Theresa May that when the Conservatives were in opposition she resisted this calculated populism and stood up for traditional liberties. Almost her first act in office was to put an end to ID cards, and early on she displayed a level-headed and unexcitable statesmanship of a kind that the Home Office had not experienced for many years. For some reason, Mrs May has “immatured” in power. The first sign that something was going wrong was when the Supreme Court sensibly ruled that sex offenders would be given the right to appeal against having to register with the police. Mrs May expressed outrage, announcing that she was “appalled’ by the ruling and would set the bar for appeals as high as she could. The came her hysterical call for the abolition of the Human Rights Act at last autumn’s Conservative Party conference, in the course of which she alerted her audience to the case of an illegal immigrant “who cannot be deported because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat”. Embarrassingly for Mrs May, further investigation showed that her telling of the cat story was exaggerated. It turned out that the immigrant she cited, a Bolivian man named Camilo Soria Avila, did indeed own a cat. But his feline companion was only one factor taken into account by the immigration tribunal that allowed him to stay in this country on human rights grounds. A second example of Mrs May’s recklessness with the facts was more serious. It concerns Sheikh Raed Salah, a distinguished Palestinian politician, who was invited to address a meeting in the House of Commons. Mrs May banned the sheikh on the grounds that he had supported terrorism, had once written an anti-Semitic poem, and constituted a grave threat to public order. But, to the Home Secretary’s consternation, he was able to enter Britain unhindered last June. Sheikh Salah was imprisoned, and later detained under close house arrest. Earlier this month Mr Justice Ockelton of the Upper Immigration Tribunal found that the Home Secretary had been ''under a misapprehension as to the facts’’, that the sheikh did not hold the views she attributed to him, and that he represented no threat of any kind. More devastating, it now emerges that Mrs May made her decision on the basis of information provided by a single source, the Community Security Trust, an organisation that combats anti-Semitism in Britain. She appears to have made no serious attempt to check its allegations, and reached her decision in a matter of minutes. There are no two ways about it. Mr Justice Ockelton’s ruling, which received very little publicity, was humiliating for Mrs May, and damaging to Britain. It is important that we should be seen as a disinterested broker in the Middle Eastern peace process. To jail a distinguished visiting Palestinian on the basis of such limited testimony looks like evidence of bias. And now along comes the Abu Qatada affair, which threatens to pin down Mrs May as a serial bungler. To her credit she has resisted the temptation to deport Qatada immediately. When the appalling Conservative MP Charles Walker urged her in the Commons to press on without delay ''in getting this scumbag and his murderous mates on a plane and out of this country’’ the Home Secretary was dismissive. She very correctly insisted that, whatever her personal inclinations, she would respect the rule of law. Nor should she be blamed over the muddle over the date set for Qatada’s appeal. Mrs May has gallantly volunteered to shoulder the blame, but it is surely not her job to engage in such recondite technical questions as the difference between a legal month and an actual one. Her legal advisers should accept responsibility, if a mistake has been made, something that is not yet certain. Mrs May has not, however, displayed the cool, calm deliberation one would expect from a Home Secretary properly conscious of the gravity of her office. Lawyers for Qatada have asserted that he is liable to be tortured or, at the very least, convicted on the basis of evidence gathered under torture. This claim may be wrong, but it is a serious one. It was therefore disgraceful of Mrs May to exploit the prospect of Qatada’s imminent departure to his native Jordan as some kind of propaganda coup. There is a common calculation underlying the Home Secretary’s handling of Abu Qatada, Sheikh Salah and the cat at last year’s Tory conference. In each case Mrs May appears to have been extremely poorly briefed. She has acted in haste, without making sure of the facts, or even the lawful basis for her action. It may be she has been calculating that none of this matters. Mrs May is a renowned moderniser who once informed Conservative conference that the Tories must lose their image as the ''nasty’’ party. This modernising mission seems, in Mrs May’s mind, to involve an attack on the criminal justice system. Certainly New Labour gloried in its wars with the judiciary. It may have lost the fight in the courts, but it always won the battle of public opinion. Yesterday, the newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch arrived in Britain in preparation for next week’s Leveson hearing. For more than two decades his newspapers were openly hostile to the rule of law. They did not merely break the law themselves, but collaborated with Labour and Tory ministers in vicious battles against the judiciary, at one point threatening a ''name and shame’’ campaign against ''liberal judges’’ and other vulnerable minorities. Sometimes we may not like the decisions judges make, or the people they protect, but it is nevertheless important to recall the rule of law is at the heart of everything we are and do. It protects property, contract, freedom. Without it democracy is impossible. Every Home Secretary faces a choice between courting popularity and doing the right thing. Mrs May needs to return to the lucid rectitude of her early days in office.

FABRICATING A "SMOKING GUN" TO ATTACK IRAN?

FABRICATING A "SMOKING GUN" TO ATTACK IRAN? Israeli Spies Disguised as Iranian Soldiers on Mission Inside Iran By Julie Lévesque Global Research, March 27, 2012 URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29981 A report published in The Sunday Times on March 25 suggests that “Israel is using a permanent base in Iraqi Kurdistan to launch cross-border intelligence missions in an attempt to find ‘smoking gun’ evidence that Iran is building a nuclear warhead.” (Israeli spies scour Iran in nuclear hunt, The Sunday Times, March 25, 2012) Western sources told the Times Israel was monitoring “radioactivity and magnitude of explosives tests” and that “special forces used Black Hawk helicopters to carry commandos disguised as members of the Iranian military and using Iranian military vehicles”. The sources believe “Iranians are trying to hide evidence of warhead tests in preparation for a possible IAEA visit”. (Cited in Report: Israeli soldiers scour Iran for nukes, Ynet, March 25, 2012) The number of Israeli intelligence missions at the Parchin military base in Iran has increased in the past few months, according to the article. During that period, Tehran has been negotiating with the IAEA which had requested to visit Parchin. According to Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, both parties had agreed in early February that the visit would take place in March. (Gareth Porter, Details of Talks with IAEA Belie Charge Iran Refused Cooperation, IPS, March 21, 2012) The IAEA requested to visit Parchin in late January and late February, after having agreed to a visit in March. The IAEA thus requested to visit the military complex exactly at the same time Israel was intensifying its secret operations to allegedly search for a “smoking gun”. A few years ago it has been suggested that Israel was the source of fake intelligence, a stolen laptop, related to Iran’s alleged nuclear program. The New York Times reported in 2005 on what was presented as “the strongest evidence” Iran was building nuclear weapons: American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East. (William J. Broad and David E. Sanger Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims - New York Times, November 13, 2005) In 2010, an investigative report suggested that those documents were fake: The warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar "dunce cap" shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s [...] The laptop documents had depicted the wrong re-entry vehicle being redesigned [...] The origin of the laptop documents may never be proven conclusively, but the accumulated evidence points to Israel as the source. As early as 1995, the head of the Israel Defense Forces' military intelligence research and assessment division, Yaakov Amidror, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his American counterparts that Iran was planning to "go nuclear." By 2003-2004, Mossad's reporting on the Iranian nuclear program was viewed by high-ranking CIA officials as an effort to pressure the Bush administration into considering military action against Iran's nuclear sites, according to Israeli sources cited by a pro-Israeli news service." (Gareth Porter, Exclusive Report: Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent, Global Research, November 18, 2010). The fact that Israeli intelligence officers were on a secret mission in Parchin, dressed up as Iranians and driving Iranian military vehicles, while the IAEA was pressuring Tehran to visit that precise location, raises serious questions. The stated goal of those secret missions is the search for a smoking gun. The smoking gun allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have proven that such evidence can be fabricated and used to launch so-called pre-emptive wars.

The Bloody Road From Damascus to Teheran

The Bloody Road to Damascus: The Triple Alliance’s War on a Sovereign State James Petras March 2012 Introduction There is clear and overwhelming evidence that the uprising to overthrow President Assad of Syria is a violent, power grab led by foreign-supported fighters who have killed and wounded thousands of Syrian soldiers, police and civilians, partisans of the government and its peaceful opposition. The outrage expressed by politicians in the West and Gulf State and in the mass media, about the ‘killing of peaceful Syrian citizens protesting injustice’ is cynically designed to cover up the documented reports of violent seizure of neighborhoods, villages and towns by armed bands, brandishing machine guns and planting road-side bombs. The assault on Syria is backed by foreign funds, arms and training.Due to a lack of domestic support ,however, to be successful, direct foreign military intervention will be necessary. For this reason a huge propaganda and diplomatic campaign has been mounted to demonize the legitimate Syrian government. The goal is to impose a puppet regime and strengthen Western imperial control in the Middle East. In the short run, this will further isolate Iran in preparation for a military attack by Israel and the US and, in the long run, it eliminates another independent secular regime friendly to China and Russia. In order to mobilize world support behind this Western, Israeli and Gulf State-funded power grab, several propaganda ploys have been used to justify another blatant violation of a country’s sovereignty after their successful destruction of the secular governments of Iraq and Libya. The Larger Context: Serial Aggression The current Western campaign against the independent Assad regime in Syria is part of a series of attacks against pro-democracy movements and independent regimes from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. The imperial-militarist response to the Egyptian democracy movement that overthrew the Mubarak dictatorship was to back the military junta’s seizure of power and murderous campaign to jail, torture and assassinate over 10,000 pro-democracy protestors. Faced with similar mass democratic movements in the Arab world, the Western-backed Gulf autocratic dictators crushed their respective uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The assaults extended to the secular government in Libya where NATO powers launched a massive air and sea bombardment in support of armed bands of mercenaries thereby destroying Libya’s economy and civil society. The unleashing of armed gangster-mercenaries led to the savaging of urban life in Libya and devastation in the countryside. The NATO powers eliminated the secular regime of Colonel Gadhafi and along with having him murdered and mutilated by its mercenaries.Nato oversaw the wounding, imprisonment, torture and elimination of tens of thousands of civilian Gadhafi supporters and government workers.NATO backed the puppet regime as it embarked on a bloody pogrom against Libyan citizens of sub-Saharan African ancestry as well a sub-Sahara African immigrant workers – groups who had benefited from Gadhafi’s generous social programs. The imperial policy of ruin and rule in Libya serves as “the model” for Syria: Creating the conditions for a mass uprising led by Muslim fundamentalists, funded and trained by Western and Gulf State mercenaries. The Bloody Road From Damascus to Teheran According to the State Department ‘The road to Teheran passes through Damascus’: The strategic goal of NATO is to destroy Iran’s principal ally in the Middle East; for the Gulf absolutist monarchies the purpose is to replace a secular republic with a vassal theocratic dictatorship; for the Turkish government the purpose is to foster a regime amenable to the dictates of Ankara’s version of Islamic capitalism; for Al Qaeda and allied Salafi and Wahabi fundamentalists a theocratic Sunni regime, cleansed of secular Syrians, Alevis and Christians, will serve as a trampoline for projecting power in the Islamic world; and for Israel a blood-drenched divided Syria will further ensure its regional hegemony. It was not without prophetic foresight that the uber-Zionist US Senator Joseph Lieberman demanded days after the ‘Al Queda’ attack of September 11, 2001: “First we must go after Iran, Iraq and Syria” before considering the actual authors of the deed. The armed anti-Syrian forces reflect a variety of conflicting political perspectives united only by their common hatred of the independent secular, nationalist regime which has governed the complex, multi-ethnic Syrian society for decades. The war against Syria is the principle launching pad for a further resurgence of Western militarism extending from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, buttressed by a systematic propaganda campaign proclaiming NATO’s democratic, humanitarian and ‘civilizing’ mission on behalf of the Syrian people. The Road to Damascus is Paved with Lies An objective analysis of the political and social composition of the principle armed combatants in Syria refutes any claim that the uprising is in pursuit of democracy for the people of that country. Authoritarian fundamentalist fighters form the backbone of the uprising. The Gulf States financing these brutal thugs are themselves absolutist monarchies. The West, after having foisted a brutal gangster regime on the people of Libya, can make no claim of ‘humanitarian intervention’. The armed groups infiltrate towns and use population centers as shields from which they launch their attacks on government forces. In the process they force thousands of citizens from their homes, stores and offices which they use as military outposts. The destruction of the neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs is a classic case of armed gangs using civilians as shields and as propaganda fodder in demonizing the government. These armed mercenaries have no national credibility with the mass of Syrian people. One of their main propaganda mills is located in the heart of London, the so-called “Syrian Human Rights Observatory” where it coordinates closely with British intelligence turning out lurid atrocity stories to whip up sentiment in favor of a NATO intervention. The kings and emirs of the Gulf States bankroll these fighters. Turkey provides military bases and controls the cross-border flow of arms and the movement of the leaders of the so-called “Free Syrian Army”. The US, France and England provide the arms, training and diplomatic cover. Foreign jihadist-fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda fighters from Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, have entered the conflict. This is no “civil war”. This is an international conflict pitting an unholy triple alliance of NATO imperialists, Gulf State despots and Muslim fundamentalists against an independent secular nationalist regime. The foreign origin of the weapons, propaganda machinery and mercenary fighters reveals the sinister imperial, ‘multi-national’ character of the conflict. Ultimately the violent uprising against the Syrian state represents a systematic imperialist campaign to overthrow an ally of Iran, Russia and China, even at the cost of destroying Syria’s economy and civil society, fragmenting the country and unleashing enduring sectarian wars of extermination against the Alevi and Christian minorities, as well as secular government supporters. The killings and mass flight of refugees is not the result of gratuitous violence committed by a blood thirsty Syrian state. The Western backed militias have seized neighborhoods by force of arms, destroyed oil pipelines, sabotaged transportation and bombed government buildings. In the course of their attacks they have disrupted basic services critical to the Syrian people including education, access to medical care, security, water, electricity and transportation. As such, they bear most of the responsibility for this “humanitarian disaster”, (which their imperial allies and UN officials blame on Syrian security and armed forces). The Syrian security forces are fighting to preserve the national independence of a secular state, while the armed opposition commits violence on behalf of their foreign pay-masters – in Washington, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Ankara and London. Conclusions The Assad regime’s referendum last month drew millions of Syrian voters in defiance of Western imperialist threats and terrorist calls for a boycott. This clearly indicated that a majority of Syrians prefer a peaceful, negotiated settlement and reject mercenary violence. The Western-backed Syrian National Council and the Turkish and Gulf States-armed “Free Syrian Army” flatly rejected Russian and Chinese calls for an open dialogue and negotiations which the Assad regime has accepted. NATO and Gulf State dictatorships are pushing their proxies to pursue violent “regime change”, a policy which already has caused the death of thousands of Syrians. US and European economic sanctions are designed to wreck the Syrian economy, in the expectation that acute deprivation will drive an impoverished population into the arms of their violent proxies. In a repeat of the Libya scenario, NATO proposes to “liberate” the Syrian people by destroying their economy, civil society and secular state. A Western military victory in Syria will merely feed the rising frenzy of militarism. It will encourage the West, Riyadh and Israel to provoke a new civil war in Lebanon. After demolishing Syria, the Washington-EU-Riyadh-Tel Aviv axes will move on to a far bloodier confrontation with Iran. The horrific destruction of Iraq, followed by Libya’s post-war collapse provides a terrifying template of what is in store for the people of Syria: A precipitous collapse of their living standards, the fragmentation of their country, ethnic cleansing, rule by sectarian and fundamentalist gangs, and total insecurity of life and property. Just as the “left” and “progressives” declared the brutal savaging of Libya to be the “revolutionary struggle of insurgent democrats” and then walked away, washing their hands of the bloody aftermath of ethnic violence against black Libyans, they repeat the same calls for military intervention against Syria. The same liberals, progressives, socialists and Marxists who are calling on the West to intervene in Syria’s “humanitarian crises” from their cafes and offices in Manhattan and Paris, will lose all interest in the bloody orgy of their victorious mercenaries after Damascus, Aleppo and other Syrian cities have been bombed by NATO into submission. James Petras latest book ,The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack (Clarity Press:Atlanta2012)2ND EDITION