Jamshid Chalangi:
In tonight’s program we will look at the ever-increasing tension between Tehran and Washington as Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, and Mike Pompeo have travelled to the Persian Gulf region to hold meetings with key allies after President Trump told a House of Representatives panel that “our pressure campaign” against Tehran is working.
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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Read More »
In tonight’s program we will look at the continued tension between Tehran and Washington as it has entered a new and dangerous phase after President Trump ordered the dispatch of 1000 more troops to the Middle East region and declared that the US would confront Iran’s interventions in the region and beyond it.
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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Read More »
In tonight’s program we will look at the following news and developments with our guests the commentator Dr. Saeed Bashirtash and the General Secretary of Democratic Front of Iran, Mr. HeshtmatullahTabarzadi.
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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Read More »
BY: JUAN COLE 14-JUNE-2019
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The mysterious mines that blew up two tankers, one of them Japanese-owned and operated, on Wednesday, sent a frisson of fear through the Gulf, since it was clear that Trump warmongers would blame Iran and then use the incident as a springboard to war.
Despite the confident pronouncements of “Benghazi Mike” Pompeo at his brief news conference, the fact is that US intelligence hasn’t had time or access to come to a firm conclusion about the author of the mine attack.
Pompeo’s people put out grainy video of some sort of small ship coming alongside one of the tankers and then leaving peacefully. Since this doesn’t look very much like an attack, they are alleging that the Iranians were taking away an unexploded mine. That doesn’t make any sense at all, and the video again needs to be carefully analyzed.
Pompeo alleged that only the Iranians had the expertise to deploy these mines.
We heard this crock for 8.5 years in Iraq– all shaped charges had to be Iran-backed, even those of al-Qaeda, because Iraqis didn’t have the expertise. Shaped charges are a simple WWII technology and the US invaded Iraq out of fears it was so sophisticated that it could construct an atomic bomb. But Iraqi Sunnis couldn’t make a shaped charge. Sure. Had to be Iran, helping those hyper-Sunni al-Qaeda. Very likely story.
In Iraq War days I was told that the Rumsfeld Department of Defense put out so much such arrant nonsense as anonymous news articles planted in the Iraqi press that some Defense Intelligence Agency analysts used to read my blog, confident that I would suss our the psyops horse manure and give an accurate picture. The Bush administration produced so much fake news about Iraq that Bush analysts were in danger of being fooled by it and recommending policy on the basis of it!!
So about the allegation that no other forces could have deployed mines in the Gulf area.
Just last December, 86 mines were swept in the Red Sea, the planting of which was attributed to the Houthi rebels of Yemen. The Straits of Hormuz might seem far away. But once they’re already on the sea in a small ship, all they’d have to do pack some mines and ply the waters off southern Yemen and Oman over to the Straits of Hormuz, and they could have easily committed this act.
The Houthis have been intensively bombed for four years, with about a third of the targets having been civilian.. Most of the sorties against them have been flown by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the aggressors in the war on Yemen. They do not have an air force and have had to watch helplessly for 48 months as fire fell on their women and children. Some 233,000 Yemenis have been killed in the war, and while the Houthis are responsible for some of those deaths, the Saudis and UAE are responsible for the lion’s share.
The Houthis have in recent weeks tried increasingly to take the fight to the enemy. They droned an oil facility, struck an airport with a rocket, and made incursions over to the Saudi side of the border, claiming, at least, to have taken some villages. That to accompany this pushback and press the Saudis to stop bombing and dicker, they might also try to target some tankers is perfectly plausible.
Despite what the Saudis and blowhards like Benghazi Mike keep alleging, the Houthis don’t take orders from Iran and don’t have that much to do with one another. Zaydi Shiites like the Houthis don’t even have ayatollahs; you can’t just read off politics from common Shiism, anyway, but in this case they aren’t even from the same sect. It would be like assuming that all Methodists would line up politically behind the Baptists because both are Protestants. Iran has slipped some help to the Houthis, maybe a few million dollars worth. Trump says he’s selling $110 billion worth of arms to the Saudis. So US help to Saudis is probably on the order of 10,000 times greater than Iranian aid to the Houthis.
Anyway, I admit that Houthi activity over in the Arabian Sea near the Gulf is a bit of a stretch, but it just isn’t impossible.
I don’t allege false flag attacks. They are rare, since too many possibilities for someone to blab or blow the whistle exist. But that the Houthis would and could take such an action would make sense.
It could also be by Iran, of course. I disapprove of violence, and denounce the attack on civilian tankers. But any reporter who reports that Iran might be the culprit is dishonest to Trumpan depths if they neglect to mention that that the US is stopping 100% of Iran’s oil exports with no warrant of international law, no resolution from the UN Security Council, and in direct contradiction of US obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Trump breached. A physical blockade of Iran would be an act of war. I don’t see why a financial blockade should be looked at as any different. Trump has committed numerous acts of naked aggression on the Iranian people. I don’t condone a violent response, but anyone should be able to understand it
The case is legally dubious and factually challenged.
By Alex Ward 14-June-2019
The Trump administration keeps saying that it doesn’t want to go to war with Iran. The problem is that some top officials continue to make statements that could pave a dubiously legal and factually challenged pathway to war.
If that’s the intention, a major flare-up between Washington and Tehran could lead the administration to say it has the right to launch what would be one of the nastiest, bloodiest conflicts in modern history — even if it really doesn’t legally have that authorization.
For months, President Donald Trump and some of his top officials have claimed Iran and al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that launched the 9/11 terror attacks, are closely linked. That’s been a common refrain despite evidence showing their ties aren’t strong at all. In fact, even al-Qaeda’s own documents detail the weak connection between the two.
But insisting there’s a nefarious, continual relationship matters greatly. In 2001, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), allowing the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”
Which means that if the Trump administration truly believes Iran and al-Qaeda have been in cahoots before or after 9/11, then it could claim war with Tehran already is authorized by law.
That chilling possibility was raised during a House Armed Services Committee session early Thursday morning by an unlikely pair: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a top Trump ally, and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a Pentagon official in the Obama administration.
“The notion that the administration has never maintained that there are elements of the 2001 AUMF that would authorize their hostilities toward Iran is not consistent with my understanding of what they said to us,” said Gaetz. “We were absolutely presented with a formal presentation on how the AUMF might authorize war on Iran,” added Slotkin right after, although she noted no one said they would use it to greenlight a fight.
It doesn’t help that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an anti-Iran hardliner, told lawmakers behind closed doors in May that he felt Americans would support a war with Tehran if the US or its allies were attacked, congressional sources familiar with that conversation told me.
The Trump administration already blames Iran for multiple attacks on oil tankers in a strategic Middle Eastern waterway, including two Thursday on Japanese- and Norwegian-owned vessels.
None of this means the US and Iran are going to war anytime soon, or even at all. But it does mean the administration may feel it has the legal basis to do so if it wanted to.
On the surface, al-Qaeda and Iran make an odd pairing. Iran is a Shia Muslim state, and al-Qaeda is a radical Sunni terrorist organization, so it stands to reason that they would have no business interacting with each other.
But it turns out they have worked together before.
Here’s a section from the 9/11 Commission report, the most authoritative account of how the attacks happened and the backstory behind al-Qaeda’s rise:
In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support — even if only training — for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Ladin reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.
Iran’s proxy group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, also helped train al-Qaeda operatives ahead of its 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2003, al-Qaeda killed more than 30 people in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, and the plotters fled to Iran. Eight years later, the Obama administration said there was a “secret deal” between Iran and al-Qaeda “to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.”
The US government maintains that Iran and al-Qaeda remain linked in that way. Take this, from a 2012 State Department report: Iran “allowed AQ [al-Qaeda] members to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iranian territory, enabling AQ to carry funds and move facilitators and operatives to South Asia and elsewhere.” A nearly identical passage exists in the latest version of the annual report from 2018, although that one specifically mentions “Syria” as a destination for the “facilitators and operatives.”
Those kinds of statements have led some experts to say the AUMF can be invoked to approve a war with Tehran. “If the facts show Iran or any other nation is harboring al Qaeda, that’s a circumstance which would make the argument for the applicability of the 2001 AUMF quite strong,” retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr., now at Duke University, told the Washington Times in February.
But there’s also a lot of evidence showing that Iran and al-Qaeda aren’t all that close and, crucially, haven’t colluded to commit terrorist attacks.
Just weeks after 9/11, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad falsely accused the US of having organized and carried out the attacks. Al-Qaeda wasn’t pleased: “Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?” the terror group wrote in its English-language magazine Inspire. “Al Qaeda … succeeded in what Iran couldn’t.”
A 2018 study by the New America think tank, based on roughly 470,000 declassified filesobtained from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in 2011, showed no links between Iran and al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. “In none of these documents did I find references pointing to collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iran to carry out terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud, the study’s author, wrote in a blog post last September.
What the documents do show is that Tehran was deeply uncomfortable having al-Qaeda on its soil, and that bin Laden fiercely distrusted Iran.
For example, Iran detained al-Qaeda members — and some in bin Laden’s family — for abusing the conditions of their stay in the country. An al-Qaeda operative thought Tehran was keeping some of its members hostage: “Iranian authorities decided to keep our brothers as a bargaining chip” after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a document reviewed in the study read.
In other words, Iran wasn’t holding al-Qaeda operatives just for fun; it was doing so as a way to possibly strike a deal with America down the line.
It turns out that Iran and al-Qaeda actually have been at odds for a long time.
“From his safe house in Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden considered Iran’s increasing regional footprint to be a menace and weighed plans to counter it,” Thomas Jocelyn, an Iran expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, wrote in the Weekly Standard last year. “Al Qaeda’s branches have also fought Iranian proxies, including Hezbollah fighters, on the ground in Syria and Yemen for years. Anti-Iranian rhetoric is a regular feature of al Qaeda’s propaganda and other statements.”
The question, then, is what one makes of this history. Does it mean that Iran should be forever linked with al-Qaeda? Or is it removed enough from the Sunni group that Iran isn’t covered in the AUMF?
The Trump administration clearly believes the former — but Congress just as clearly doesn’t.
When Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, he started off his announcement with a striking statement.
“The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda,” he said.
It’s an argument the administration continues to push.
In April, Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qaeda. Period. Full stop.” He continued: “They have hosted al-Qaeda. They have permitted al-Qaeda to transit their country.”
When pressed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) if he thought the 2001 AUMF applied to Iran, Pompeo refused to answer the question, saying he’d “rather leave that to lawyers.”
Also in April, the administration labeled Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s hugely influential security and military organization responsible for the protection and survival of the regime, as a “foreign terrorist organization.” That means if evidence surfaced of IRGC members working with al-Qaeda operatives, it’d be easier to say a terror group is aiding another terror group.
And in the same Thursday speech in which Pompeo blamed Iran for attacks on two oil tankers this week, he listed off a series of assaults he said were “instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests.” One of them was a May 31 car bombing in Afghanistan that slightly wounded four US troops and killed Afghan civilians. The Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan and harbored al-Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks, took responsibility for the bombing.
Pompeo thus linked Iran with the Taliban’s plot without providing any evidence. It’s unclear why he did that, but some — like Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) foreign policy adviser Matthew Duss— say the secretary wanted to build a case that the 2001 AUMF covers Iran.
Lawmakers from both parties in Congress, though, have staunchly pushed back against the administration’s argument. Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) put forward an amendment to this year’s must-pass defense bill requiring an entirely new AUMF to approve a war with Iran. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, also has said the 2001 AUMF doesn’t apply to Iran.
Others have also come out asking the administration to reconsider its position.
It’s worth reiterating that the administration continually says it doesn’t seek a war with Iran. Instead, officials claim it has applied immense economic pressure on the Islamic Republic solely in hopes of bringing it to the negotiating table — not as a prelude to conflict.
But if the administration changes its mind and decides war is necessary, it’s possible Trump’s team could use the AUMF to launch a strike — and it would be fair to consider that an illegal attack.
It doesn’t help that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an anti-Iran hardliner, told lawmakers behind closed doors in May that he felt Americans would support a war with Tehran if the US or its allies were attacked, congressional sources familiar with that conversation told me.
The Trump administration already blames Iran for multiple attacks on oil tankers in a strategic Middle Eastern waterway, including two Thursday on Japanese- and Norwegian-owned vessels.
None of this means the US and Iran are going to war anytime soon, or even at all. But it does mean the administration may feel it has the legal basis to do so if it wanted to.
On the surface, al-Qaeda and Iran make an odd pairing. Iran is a Shia Muslim state, and al-Qaeda is a radical Sunni terrorist organization, so it stands to reason that they would have no business interacting with each other.
But it turns out they have worked together before.
Here’s a section from the 9/11 Commission report, the most authoritative account of how the attacks happened and the backstory behind al-Qaeda’s rise:
In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support — even if only training — for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Ladin reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.
Iran’s proxy group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, also helped train al-Qaeda operatives ahead of its 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2003, al-Qaeda killed more than 30 people in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, and the plotters fled to Iran. Eight years later, the Obama administration said there was a “secret deal” between Iran and al-Qaeda “to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.”
The US government maintains that Iran and al-Qaeda remain linked in that way. Take this, from a 2012 State Department report: Iran “allowed AQ [al-Qaeda] members to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iranian territory, enabling AQ to carry funds and move facilitators and operatives to South Asia and elsewhere.” A nearly identical passage exists in the latest version of the annual report from 2018, although that one specifically mentions “Syria” as a destination for the “facilitators and operatives.”
Those kinds of statements have led some experts to say the AUMF can be invoked to approve a war with Tehran. “If the facts show Iran or any other nation is harboring al Qaeda, that’s a circumstance which would make the argument for the applicability of the 2001 AUMF quite strong,” retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr., now at Duke University, told the Washington Times in February.
But there’s also a lot of evidence showing that Iran and al-Qaeda aren’t all that close and, crucially, haven’t colluded to commit terrorist attacks.
Just weeks after 9/11, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad falsely accused the US of having organized and carried out the attacks. Al-Qaeda wasn’t pleased: “Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?” the terror group wrote in its English-language magazine Inspire. “Al Qaeda … succeeded in what Iran couldn’t.”
A 2018 study by the New America think tank, based on roughly 470,000 declassified filesobtained from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in 2011, showed no links between Iran and al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. “In none of these documents did I find references pointing to collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iran to carry out terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud, the study’s author, wrote in a blog post last September.
What the documents do show is that Tehran was deeply uncomfortable having al-Qaeda on its soil, and that bin Laden fiercely distrusted Iran.
For example, Iran detained al-Qaeda members — and some in bin Laden’s family — for abusing the conditions of their stay in the country. An al-Qaeda operative thought Tehran was keeping some of its members hostage: “Iranian authorities decided to keep our brothers as a bargaining chip” after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a document reviewed in the study read.
In other words, Iran wasn’t holding al-Qaeda operatives just for fun; it was doing so as a way to possibly strike a deal with America down the line.
It turns out that Iran and al-Qaeda actually have been at odds for a long time.
“From his safe house in Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden considered Iran’s increasing regional footprint to be a menace and weighed plans to counter it,” Thomas Jocelyn, an Iran expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, wrote in the Weekly Standard last year. “Al Qaeda’s branches have also fought Iranian proxies, including Hezbollah fighters, on the ground in Syria and Yemen for years. Anti-Iranian rhetoric is a regular feature of al Qaeda’s propaganda and other statements.”
The question, then, is what one makes of this history. Does it mean that Iran should be forever linked with al-Qaeda? Or is it removed enough from the Sunni group that Iran isn’t covered in the AUMF?
The Trump administration clearly believes the former — but Congress just as clearly doesn’t.
When Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, he started off his announcement with a striking statement.
“The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda,” he said.
It’s an argument the administration continues to push.
In April, Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qaeda. Period. Full stop.” He continued: “They have hosted al-Qaeda. They have permitted al-Qaeda to transit their country.”
When pressed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) if he thought the 2001 AUMF applied to Iran, Pompeo refused to answer the question, saying he’d “rather leave that to lawyers.”
Also in April, the administration labeled Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s hugely influential security and military organization responsible for the protection and survival of the regime, as a “foreign terrorist organization.” That means if evidence surfaced of IRGC members working with al-Qaeda operatives, it’d be easier to say a terror group is aiding another terror group.
And in the same Thursday speech in which Pompeo blamed Iran for attacks on two oil tankers this week, he listed off a series of assaults he said were “instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests.” One of them was a May 31 car bombing in Afghanistan that slightly wounded four US troops and killed Afghan civilians. The Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan and harbored al-Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks, took responsibility for the bombing.
Pompeo thus linked Iran with the Taliban’s plot without providing any evidence. It’s unclear why he did that, but some — like Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) foreign policy adviser Matthew Duss— say the secretary wanted to build a case that the 2001 AUMF covers Iran.
Lawmakers from both parties in Congress, though, have staunchly pushed back against the administration’s argument. Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) put forward an amendment to this year’s must-pass defense bill requiring an entirely new AUMF to approve a war with Iran. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, also has said the 2001 AUMF doesn’t apply to Iran.
Others have also come out asking the administration to reconsider its position.
It’s worth reiterating that the administration continually says it doesn’t seek a war with Iran. Instead, officials claim it has applied immense economic pressure on the Islamic Republic solely in hopes of bringing it to the negotiating table — not as a prelude to conflict.
But if the administration changes its mind and decides war is necessary, it’s possible Trump’s team could use the AUMF to launch a strike — and it would be fair to consider that an illegal attack.
Watch the latest video at foxnews.com BY CRISTINA MAZA Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Friday cast doubt on evidence that the U.S. government claims is proof that Iran was behind an attack this week on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. The attack on the two vessels, one Japanese and one Norwegian, took place as Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was visiting Iran to try to calm tensions between Tehran and Washington. The U.S. Navy later released a video that purported to show members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard sneaking over to the ship in the middle of the night to remove an unexploded mine. U.S. officials claimed this is evidence of Iran’s culpability, but Maas argued that the video was insufficient proof to pin the attack on Iran. “The video is not enough. We can understand what is being shown, sure, but to make a final assessment, this is not enough for me,” Maas told reporters during a press conference on Friday. The boat’s Japanese owner also cast doubt on the theory that a mine had been used to attack the ship, telling journalists that members of his crew had witnessed a flying object. Iran has denied any role in the event, and some observers have raised questions about whether the intelligence was being used as a pretext for the U.S. to escalate conflict with the country. “Whether it’s an attempt to remove Venezuela’s democratic government or regime change in Iran, the USA is causing global instability in furtherance of its imperial interests. We must reject the lies being used by the Trump admin to gain public support for their disastrous plans,” Chris Williamson, a member of the British parliament with the UK’s Labour Party, said in a statement. The Conservative-led government in the UK, however, released an official statement saying that it is “almost certain” that Iran’s military carried out the attack. A second U.S. ally, France, was less committal. While the French Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, it refrained from saying whether its government had assessed the U.S. intelligence or any other evidence. Meanwhile, European Union officials called for “maximum restraint.” “We are gathering more information and we are assessing the situation,” a spokeswoman for the EU’s foreign service told reporters. On Friday, President Donald Trump called the morning television show Fox & Friends and claimed unequivocally that Iran was behind the attack. “Iran did do it. And you know they did it because you saw the boat. I guess one of the mines didn’t explode and it’s probably got essentially Iran written all over it,” Trump said during the early morning interview. “You saw the boat at night trying to take the mine off unsuccessfully. Took the mine off the boat. And that was exposed. That was their boat. That was them. And they didn’t want the evidence left behind. I guess they didn’t know that we have things that can detect in the dark that work very well.” |
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