Guardian’s War on Iran — Continued
May 26, 2007
New Labour rag Guradian continues its disinformation campaign against Iran with with a follow up on Simon Tisdall’s frontpage propaganda piece with a new one by neocon favorite, Robert Tait. In classic eco chamber approach, Tait follows the usual banalities about political repression in Iran with a reiteration of Tisdall’s unsubstantiated claims.
With Iran this week defying yet another security council deadline for suspending its uranium enrichment and the International Atomic Energy Agency declaring its nuclear programme to be making dramatic progress, the image projected abroad is one of powerful menace by a populist self-confident government. That view has been enhanced by US claims of an Iranian summer surge designed to force American troops out of Iraq.
A journalist covering Iran would surely know that Iran is well within its rights to enrich Uranium under the NPT. The UN resolution he refers to was obtained under pressure from the US, and it deals with the inspections agreed to voluntarily by Iran, not with its NPT obligations. The IAEA, on the other hand has been turning over information gathered during the inspections to US and Israel. Both the countries have prepared the detailed target lists for their planned bombing of Iran through the information provided by IAEA inspectors. There is no reason, therefore, that Iran should cooperate with an organization, whose sole purpose is to legitimize US-Israeli aggression against other sovereign states — especially, when it has shown no interest whatever in preventing, or for that matter containing, the vast Israeli nuclear program.
In a display of total contempt for the reader’s intelligence, Tait then goes on to dump Tisdall’s load of unsubstantiated tosh on the reader once more. As I had shown earlier, Tisdall’s airy claims are based entirely on unnamed official sources.
It is not until the last paragraph that the real purpose of the article becomes obvious. Tait ends by saying,
If the west really is headed towards a full-frontal confrontation with Iran, it will find itself up against a country not at ease, but at loggerheads, with itself.
While it is clear why the neocon extremist, Michael Ledeen should sing praises of Tait, it isn’t clear why a British liberal daily should have its foreign correspondent easing the apprehension of would-be invaders. The only thing missing here is a promise of ’sweet and flowers’.
Guardian Declares War on Iran
May 22, 2007
Simon Tisdall, pip-squeak hack for the New-Labour rag, Guardian, has an article on the frontpage that would make Judith Miller blush. With its preferred news outlets in the US thoroughly discredited, it appears the Bush-Cheney junta is using British press to place its stories. Relying exclusively on unnamed official sources, Tisdall wants to convince us that the Shia Iran is collaborating with Salafi al-Qaidah to prepare a summer showdown against the US-UK occupation forces.
Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
Leaving aside the silliness of the charge and the hack’s uncritical reporting, it is the sources and the fact that a British liberal publication would place it on its frontpage that make this highly suspicious. Here, for example, are all the sources for the charges: “US officials say”; ”a senior US official in Baghdad warned”; “The official said”; “the official said”; ”the official said”; “US officials now say”; “the senior official in Baghdad said” “he [the senior official in Baghdad] added”; “the official said”; “the official said”; “he [the official] cited”; “a senior administration official in Washington said”; “The administration official also claimed”; ”he [the administration official] said”; ”US officials say”; “the senior official in Baghdad said”; “he [the senior official in Baghdad] said”; ”the senior administration official said”; “he [the senior administration official] said”; “the official claimed”; ”he [the official] said”; ”Gen Petraeus’s report to the White House and Congress”; “a former Bush administration official said”; ”A senior adviser to Gen Petraeus reported”; “the adviser admitted”.
26 references to official sources (the only non official source cited in the article is “Washington analysts and commentators”) – not a single one named! This is what passes for journalism in UK.
The Expanding French Kennel
May 18, 2007
British media loves poodles. First there was the revoltingly sycophantic farewell to Tony Blair. I forced myself to sit through 10 minutes of BBC’s Newsnight before my patience was taxed. Now the media is delighted Britain would no longer remain the most ridiculed little country in Europe. France is in competition. If Hitler were alive today, he would be a ‘reformer’ in British media lexicon. So of Sarkozy the Guardian writes:
The energetic rightwing reformer, elected with a huge mandate for change, is a fan of America and there was a hint of John F Kennedy as he and his military escort slowly drove past crowds on his way to rekindle the flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe…Mr Sarkozy set a tone of glamour and informality. All eyes were on his wife Cecilia, their four adult children from earlier marriages and their 10-year-old son who laughed and chatted at the official ceremony in the Elysée’s Salle des Fêtes.
French TV decided it was very “American” and “à la Kennedy”, an observation that the US-friendly Sarkozys, avid readers of biographies of JFK and his wife Jackie, would welcome.
John F Kennedy was all about an “open-topped car and waving to crowds” of course. The New Labour rag forgot to add of course that unlike Jackie, Cecilia did not even consider the husband worthy of her vote.
THE wife of Nicolas Sarkozy did not vote in the election in which he won the French presidency, according to a website that claimed the newspaper which had the information first gave in to pressure not to reveal it.
Cecilia Sarkozy, 49, a fiercely independent PR executive, was absent from much of her husband’s election campaign.
Rue89.com…attributed the news that Ms Sarkozy did not vote in the May 6 second round to Le Journal du Dimanche.
The newspaper’s managing editor, Jacques Esperandieu, conceded he had decided not to publish the story, saying it concerned “the private sphere”. He had received “a number of phone calls from people stressing the very private and very personal nature of the information”.
That is not where the comedy ends, sadly. The New Labour rag now turns its affections towards Sarkozy’s choice for the post of Prime Minister, François Fillon. There is no doubt that he must be a ‘reformer’, given the limited option of adjectives with which British media can manifest its deference to power. All that remains, however, is the question of temperament. If Sarkozy was the ‘energetic rightwing reformer‘, Fillon, we are told, is a ‘cool-headed reformer‘ – besides being a ‘a tea-drinking anglophile who has spent time at Downing Street observing Tony Blair, impressed by New Labour’s “informal” style.’ But he has more achievements under his belt.
Mr Fillon, a loyal Sarkozy adviser, shares the president’s conviction that France is reformable [notice the recurrance of this word -- m.i.a] and desperate for change, and that street protests can be faced down.
As social affairs minister he pushed through controversial pensions reform [again!] despite strikes and demonstrations by more than a million protesters and is known as a “listener” among powerful union leaders. He is determined to quickly enact Mr Sarkozy’s plans to cut taxes, loosen the 35-hour week rule and curb strike powers.
The editorial in the Guardian, pride of Britain’s liberal press, starts off berating the tabloid press, in particular the Daily Mail, for their “desire for pointless sacrifice to salvage national glory from defeat…in the outburst of resentment against the 15 sailors and marines captured and then released by Iran.” At the same time, on its frontpage, it prominently features commentary by Marina Hyde — “Whatever happened to name, rank and number?” — which expresses little more than a “desire for pointless sacrifice to salvage national glory from defeat”. The title itself is a quote from one of the blowhards in the Daily Mail that the Guardian purportedly took exception to. “Ahmadinejad’s exercise was revolting, but the detainees were coopted as propaganda tools with alarming ease”, she complains.
Meanwhile, the editors’ proceed blithely with their inanity unencumbered by any concern for fact or rational thought. As far as the Guardian editors are concerned, the fact that the Marines have already admitted to Sky News that they were on an intelligence gathering operation never happened. When you wrap yourself this tight in the flag, I presume, nothing is too incredible. “The clear and intelligent explanations given by seven of the captured men at yesterday’s gripping press conference squashed such ignorant and premature criticism,” say the editors. Notice the absence of the kind of scepticism that was much in evidence when the same Marines were giving unprepared statements in Tehran, even though their performance at the press conference was noticeably stunted. No speculation here if the British state or military establishment had influenced their statements. Coercion can take many forms of course: Pistachios in florid bags or threats of court martial. The latter is more likely to make someone change their testimony.
And the comedy continues. “The group’s treatment – and the way they were used to further Iran’s propaganda interests – verged on the grotesque,” say the editors. I am not sure what part of it they found “grotesque”; if plastic handcuffs are the worst they can blame Iran for, then perhaps the editors’ righteous outrage could find better use at the treatment of detainees — mostly innocent, and some of whom get repatriated, without gift-bags, to countries where they face certain death — at Dungavel and Belmarsh. If the next couple of sentences are the most shameless example of flag-waving jingoism — “They seem to have behaved both honourably and rationally. Their captors did neither” — then what follows will leave even the more forgiving amongst us bemused: “Their evidence may build public outrage about the incident, which has been strangely lacking until now.”
Elsewhere in the paper, we have neocons favorite journalist, Robert Tait, offering a caricature of political debate in Iran by picking up a trivial detail to juxtapose it against more pertinent news, namely the British establishment dictating the account read out at the press conference: ”An influential MP accused the president and senior cabinet colleagues of belittling the country’s Islamic system by meeting the Britons in person before a global television audience.”
As for Marina Hyde’s article, perhaps the issue is best summed in one of the myriad — moslty inane — comments that appear under Guardian articles. “Oh Marina, aqua-Marina. Your Daily Mail column awaits you. Why not tattoo the Union Jack on your arse and be done with it?”
So much for British liberal media.
Iran Update: The Spy Game
April 6, 2007
In an apparent confirmation of the role of corporate media as organs of state propaganda, Sky News makes the following revelation:
The captain in charge of the 15 marines detained in Iran has said they were gathering intelligence on the Iranians.
Sky News went on patrol with Captain Chris Air and his team in Iraqi waters close to the area where they were arrested – just five days before the crisis began.
We withheld the interview until now so it would not jeopardise their safety…
The UK Defence Secretary Des Browne told Sky News it was important to gather intelligence to “keep our people safe”.
He said: “Modern military operations all have an element of gathering intelligence…” He added: “The UN mandate would clearly empower [but does it?] the military taskforce to gather information about the environment in which they were working…”
“It’s good to gather int on the Iranians,” [Captain Air] said.
The Guardian and Iran
March 31, 2007
Last year, the Guardian had to apologize and retract an interview with Noam Chomsky in which one of its hitmen, Emma Brockes (an admirer of Ariel Sharon), smeared the eminent linguist by fabricating quotes and misrepresenting statements. One would have thought that the Guardian would dissociate itself from the disgraced hack, but today she returns triumphantly with a story on the frontpage of Guardian website, “My year with Camilla“. This of course is merely symptomatic of the paper’s low regard for accuracy, which is further in evidence in todays leader.
Neocon favorite, Robert Tait, regurgitates American propaganda about the Iranian diplomats captured by US forces in Irbil on January 11 in suggesting that “the seizure of the Britons was intended as a stunt to restore the IRGC’s prestige after a string of setbacks, including the arrest of senior officers of the guard’s elite Quds force by US troops in Iraq and the disappearance of two leaders last month.” The claim about the diplomats being members of the Quds force is then echoed by the editors in their otherwise sensible, if rather obsequeous (towards Tony Blair), leader in a show of total contempt for the intelligence of its readership. Tait even finds an ‘Iranian expert’, Ali Ansari, at the tory bastion St Andrews University who supports his thesis. Against the backdrop of Iranian Revolutionary Guard power politics, according to Tait, ”Britain is trying to negotiate the release of its citizens using normal diplomatic channels” [notice the use of the word 'citizen']
To their credit, the Guardian editors have finally manage to distinguish the militarists in Washington from the liberal imperalists.
The paper, which only recently reported on the alleged ‘confessions’ by prisoners at Guantanamo under torture without comment, once again bristles at the parading of British servicemen on Irani TV.
The Iranian captors continued to use the only female captive, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, to broadcast anti-British messages. A third letter in her handwriting claimed she was being “sacrificed, due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments”. “It is now our time to ask our government to make a change to its oppressive behaviour towards other people,” the letter said.
Another captive, Nathan Summers, was also broadcast admitting the British crew had “trespassed without permission”.
On the other hand, it takes a curiously uncritical approach towards the intransigence of its own government.
The letter [presented yesterday to Britain's ambassador in Tehran] restated that the British naval patrol was in Iranian waters when it was intercepted… [and demanded] just a guarantee it would not happen again.
After the delivery of the letter, an Iranian official expressed hope to the Guardian that the crisis would be “resolved soon”. But Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, dismissed it, saying it did not suggest Iran was looking for a way out.
One could be forgiven for believing that the facts suggest the reverse.
…and above all Statistics: Iran Update
March 30, 2007
I was unable to post much the past few days because I was saddled with the task that I like the least — marking Sociology essays. I finished today, but it feels as though the experience fried my brains. Many interesting things have happened in the meanwhile, and I’ll attempt a quick roundup here.
First thing I noticed in the subway yesterday was the cover of the Metro, a daily newspaper available for passengers at at all train, bus and underground stations in UK. It was the usual fare, heavy on sports and celebrity gossip with the occasional news item (so long as it is sensational) to break the monotony. The cover was indeed sensational. It has a large grainy picture of the female British sailor in Iranian custody and the big headline reads: ”A prisoner, a pawn — but above all a mother”. The mawkish layout even succeeded in drawing readers away, if only for a brief while, from the all important details of the latest sightings of Jordan or Paris Hilton’s undergarments outside some club somewhere, but I noticed that few gave it more than 10-15 seconds of their time (perhaps because like me, they are all certain that the end would be an anticlimactic release of the captives). The Metro made another attempt today to whip up some patriotic fervor — this time with the picture of the sailor along with a letter she purportedly wrote. From the reaction of the passengers, the effort looked equally futile. Between Sir Bono and Jennifer Lopez, they could pack enough enchantment to make news from a distant conflict appear dreary in comparison.
But how is the mainstream media faring?
The left-liberal Guardian‘s Leader rebukes Iran for its ‘unacceptable behavior’, for ’parading’ leading seaman Faye Turney on Iranian television, where she is shown ”admitting” [sic] the sailors had trespassed into Iranian waters. While the British State’s main propaganda organ, the BBC, has merely been speculating if the confession was made under coercion, Guardian dismisses such pussy footing. It instead wants to know “under what duress” the confession was filmed. It even plays on the collective unconsious by comparing the behavior to ”all the worst Iranian hostage dramas”, implying there have been many. Meanwhile on the frontpage of its website, the paper reports on the confession of Australian Guantanamo inmate David Hicks — except, there is no reference to “all the worst American prison scandals” or “torture dramas”. Instead, the headline boldly declares “Guantanamo Detainee Guilty” — even though the linked article goes on to say further down that “Rights groups have condemned the tribunals as unfair, arbitrary and reliant on confessions obtained through torture.”
The neocon’s favorite journalist Robert Tait invites us to witness the spectacle of Iranian apathy, who are busy celebrating Norouz “in contrast to the political mood in London”. The hack clearly has no trouble declaring the Iranian government “staunchly anti-western”, even though the hostility is mostly reactionary and confined to the rhetorical, but it is clearly inconceivable that he would refer to US-UK governments as “staunchly anti-Iranian; anti-Muslim; or anti-Arab” when the evidence of military aggression these nations has filled up libraries full of history books.
So, we are required to feel empathy for the captive, becuase “above all she is a mother”. But one must ask, how many Irani mothers, armed with assault rifles, do we have patrolling the North Sea or the English channel, kilometers away from British territory at the moment? It is hardly the apotheosis of maternal instincts to grab a gun and menace the shores of a country half a world away. One could feel some sympathy if similar sensitivity were show the Iraqis who have been slaughtered in droves. They may have been fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters — however to the British media, they were above all Statistics. All the moral indignation rings a little hollow, since Britain or its US ally have not felt any compunction about parading Iraqi prisoners on TV. By the standards set by UK and US, the prisoners are doing eminently well. Unlike the Iraqi and Afghan prisoners in coalition custody, none of them are being raped, sexually humiliated, tortured or sodomized by torchlights as far as we know — and we should, since US-UK also introduced us to the jolly activity of immortalizing such moments for posterity by publishing the trophy shots on websites.
Only a year and a half back, I remember reading in the same Metro the story of US military personnel trading photos of dead Iraqis for porn online. Something tells me that many, including Bush & Blair, are glad that the wogs have not internalized all ‘Western values’.
Guardian in the Gutter: New(con)speak
March 26, 2007
Neocon favorite, Robert Tait, reports from Tehran again, and the editors choose a headline very likely to please militarists in Washington and London. “Kidnappings came day before UN resolution“, it reads. So now, the armed British marines and sailors on Iran’s international borders are “kidnapped”! Such an innocent word. Almost makes it appear as if Iranian revolutionary guards visited them at home, tied their parents to their chairs, threw them over their shoulders and vanished into the night before they could get dressed.
Now where have we heard that language before?
Remember that armed Israeli soldiers who was ‘kidnapped’ while his comrades were wasting whole Palestinian families in Gaza? Remember the other two who were ‘kindapped’ while they were on an armed patrol on or inside the borders of another sovereign country – Lebanon?
Tait is a shrewd journalist however. He does make a distinciton between kidnapping and “kidnapping”. The latter he applies to situations when diplomats are snatched by armed men, as in the case of the Iranian diplomats. He writes:
The arrests could have been motivated by other factors, including a desire to strike back at what Iran sees as “kidnappings” of its diplomats and operatives by US forces in Iraq.
But irony is clearly not a notion the paper is too familiar with. While the Tait starts by declaring that defining “demarcation lines in the Shatt al-Arab waterway has proved a historical challenge for cartographers, so it is not unlikely that it may have been beyond the 15 British sailors patrolling the internationally sensitive route last Friday,” however, he goes on to make his assertions, as if he were certain of the sailors position: ” The Britons were captured a day before the UN security council met to approve a resolution imposing fresh sanctions over Iran’s continued refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment activities…The timing seemed more than mere coincidence“.
He is talking about the timing of the capture, of course, not the incursion, which, according to Tait “came as a welcome gift not only to the Revolutionary Guard crew that intercepted them but to the more hardline elements of Iran’s political leadership.”
Elsewhere in the Guardian, the Saudi propaganda organ Al-Sharq al-Awsat is quoted as saying, that according to “an unnamed military source”, who is apparently ”close to”[Guardian's quotes] the al-Quds brigade of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards “the seizure of the two-boat British patrol had been planned at a high level days in advance.” Guardian left out the rest of the sentence which read “…and pigs fly!”
No wonder Michael Ledeen likes these guys.
Guardian in the Gutter: Flag-waving Time
March 24, 2007
As the British state contemplates another conflict, centre-left publications are dropping their liberal veneer to furnish the propaganda necessary to build an illusion of support for the war policy. The Guardian‘s coverage of the capture of 15 British sailors and marines is a case in point. Not content with merely reporting the facts, the paper attempts to contextualize it within the framework of establishment propaganda about a belligerent Iran. Starting with the title of the report — “Sailors fall foul of emerging regional superpower” — the article may very well have been written by someone at the foreign office.
The first paragraph of the report has positive Pravda connotations:
The 15 British sailors and marines seized by the Iranian navy yesterday appear to have been well inside Iraqi waters, but they had the ill fortune to stray into the path of the region’s aspiring superpower as it flexes new-found muscles.
So the Guardian somehow ascertained that the Marines were “well inside Iraqi waters”, even though the “extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated,” according to Commodore Nick Lambert of the HMS Cornwall. So Iran, a country that has never attacked another nation, is the “regional superpower”, “flexing its muscles”, and the poor Marines were unfortunate enough to “stray” into its path. I wonder how many armed Iranian revolutionary guards are straying into the English channel these days?
But perhaps this is merely the folly of ill-informed journalists unwilling to jeopardize their careers by publishing something critical of the powers that be. Surely the editors of this esteemed paper would be more perceptive. Here is from the editors:
If [the Royal Marines and Royal Navy] patrol was operating in disputed waters, there was no dispute that British, Australian and US forces operate under a UN mandate to provide maritime security in that region…In today’s febrile atmosphere the source of a dispute matters less than the leverage that Tehran thinks it can extract from it.
Of course it is only Tehran that could possibly be cynical enough to extract “leverage” out of such incidents, when all the Brits were doing were abiding by the UN mandate. Remember how bravely they drove the Isarelis out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories to implement UN 242 and 338? Remember how they respected Iraq’s sovereignty according to the wishes of the UN? Remember how they rushed to implement the ceasefire in Lebanon demanded by every member of the UN, save three?
Onwards.
So what evidence do we have of Iran’s aspirations towards becoming the “regional superpower”? Fearless Leader said so!
The comedy doesn’t end there. The following would leave even an Izvestia journalist giggling:
Wherever Britain and its American allies turn these days in the Middle East, they are bumping into the new realities of Iran’s spreading influence.
Imagine that!
Had Julian Borger and Ian Black, the hacks who typed this handout, pulled their heads out of their respective arses, they may have questioned how the Iranians feel about “Britain and its American allies” having a military presence in the East (Afghanistan), West (Iraq), North (Azerbaijan) and South (Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean) of their country. It must take extraordinary discipline to invert reality to match the state’s interest.
…and it continues:
Iran increasingly appears to be the quartermaster and banker behind the Shia militias keeping British troops pinned down in southern Iraq.
That is true, it “appears to be” — because 2nd rate lazy hacks like you have not taken the trouble to verify the proclamations of Fearless Leader — but it is not. The attacks mostly come from the nationalist Mahdi Army, whereas the benefeciaries of Iran’s support are US-UK allies — SCIRI and Dawah.
In Lebanon, Iran’s client Hizbullah holds the key to war or peace,
Wrong again. The “key to war and peace” in Lebanon lies with Israel and its backers in the US-UK. Presumably these hacks forgot that its their Fearless Leader who was rushing arms in and preventing a ceasefire. Hizbullah, like any other national resistance, has a right to defend its people.
and Tehran is also now a player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a sponsor of Hamas.
No it is not. It merely intervened to prevent the starvation imposed on the Palestinians by the Fearless Leader, his poodle, and the “moderate Arabs” of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
In little more than a year, the allies ensured Iran achieved its key strategic objective: to become the dominant power in the Gulf and the Middle East
So a country is the “dominant power in the Gulf and the Middle East” if it refuses to surrender its rights enshrined in International Law and treaties?
Protecting Iraq’s Oil Supply
So what were these Good Samaritans up to in the Shat-al-Arab. It is a very long way from home after all. Richard Norton-Taylor reports:
The frigate HMS Cornwall is on patrol as the lead ship of Combined Task Force 158, whose UN-backed mission is to protect Iraq’s oil platforms and exports against pirates, smugglers, and terrorists.
…and Iraqis, he forgot to add. The mention of UN is rather endearing. Somehow that makes it all appear so innocent. But tell me Guardian hack, isn’t this the same war that was waged against the express wishes of the UN?
So why would British military be so keen to protect the resources of a foreign country?
An attack in 2004 led to a two-day shutdown costing up to $28m (£14.2m), the MoD said. The knock-on effect was a spike on the world oil market, causing a further loss of some $6bn.
The Tink-Thanks
Interestingly enough, the hacks speak of the “intelligence fiasco over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction”, yet the only ”expert” opinion in support of their Greater Iran thesis comes from someone at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a pro-war think-tank notorious for publishing its own dodgy dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction on September 9, 2002, to bolster poodle’s case for the war.
Bobby Sands Remembered
In order perhaps to balance of the blatant propaganda of the headline and the first few paragraphs, they do throw in some information about past mistakes, and surprisingly for a mainstream publication, they also quote Ahmadinejad correctly.
Britain has an almost demonic image in Iran, dating back to the MI6-backed coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and years of British support for the shah, especially in the volatile period before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In the Khomeini era the traditional hostility was encapsulated in the renaming of the road outside the British embassy in Tehran as “Bobby Sands Avenue” after the IRA hunger striker, who to Iranians symbolised resistance to colonial rule…
October Ahmadinejad says “regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] the page of time”
