by Christopher Bollyn

I often wonder why young Americans do nothing to protest the outrageous criminal regime that has taken control of the United States.  Where is the resistance?  Two illegal wars, a growing police state, and several trillion dollars stolen by criminal bankers from the American people in the past year alone — why aren’t they protesting, resisting – burning tires in the streets?

Why are Americans unable to protest against the criminal regime that has taken over their nation?  Here French farmers protest low grain prices in Paris on October 16, 2009.  Why don’t we see such protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or against the trillion dollar rip-off for the big bankers?  Why is the resistance in the U.S. completely unorganized?

Having grown up during the Vietnam War, I was immersed in the protest movement and vibrant anti-war music and culture of the 1960s.  “Lucky Man” by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer is a good example of the anti-war music of the time.  I find it odd that there is no similar anti-war movement or music today.  Faced with never-ending wars in the Middle East, today’s youth seem completely apathetic and apolitical.

During the years that I attended public school, the United States was engaged in an undeclared war of aggression in Southeast Asia that nobody really understood.  Every week, the American people saw actual photos from the war in LIFE magazine and could easily see through the deception that we were fighting “communism”.   After 8 years of war in Afghanistan and 18 years in Iraq, however, there is no similar photo-journalism of comparable quality coming from the “embedded” journalists covering these wars.  Likewise, there is virtually no anti-war music or protest movement against the criminal wars being fought in our name.   Why?

We have to look at the media to understand the lack of a similar anti-war movement in the United States.  Today, there is no mass resistance because the U.S. media is now completely owned and controlled by Zionist Jews who actually support the fraudulent “War on Terror” and the illegal wars being fought by the United States and its allies.  These wars are being waged to benefit Israel and strengthen the Zionist hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia.  The Zionist-controlled mass media in the United States now works full time to promote the war agenda – first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran.  In the Zionist-controlled media there is no room for any real criticism of the Zionist war agenda.

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the senior U.S. officials who conspired and planned the wars of aggression against both Afghanistan and Iraq, is now pushing for war against Iran in the pages of the Financial Times (U.K.), for example.  It needs to be understood that Wolfowitz is guilty of the most serious war crime, “a crime against peace” as defined by the Nuremberg Principles.  That his opinion is published in a leading financial paper illustrates my point that the mass media actively promotes the Zionist war agenda.  Wolfowitz has strong connections to the state of Israel.  He lived in Israel as a teenager when his Polish-born father, Jacob, worked at the Technion, and his sister, Laura, married an Israeli and lives in Jerusalem.

The controlled media today censors and sanitizes the images and information about the wars and the human suffering the aggression has caused to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.  The public is kept in the dark about the true costs of the illegal wars, both human and financial.  Most importantly, the U.S. media keeps powerful images like these from the Vietnam and Iraq wars off the pages of our newspapers.

The famous photo of Vietnamese children burned with napalm changed U.S. public opinion about the war.

The photo of a summary execution by a South Vietnamese police chief showed the lawlessness of the war.

The U.S. evacuates after the fall of Saigon

After nearly 19 years of fighting and bombing Iraqis, very few images of the human cost of the war have been published.  The ones that have been seen are horrible beyond belief and reveal the criminal nature of the war of aggression.

A photo from the “Highway of Death” shows what happened to one of the thousands of retreating Iraqis who were incinerated by a U.S. gas-air MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) in 1991.

A U.S. Marine killing injured Iraqis in a mosque in Fallujah, November 13, 2004 (NBC/AP)

The Vietnam war was being fought, we were told, to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the communists.  Thousands of young men, including several of my relatives, went to Vietnam to fight “communism”.  Many thousands of young Americans died in Viet Nam.  An untold number of Vietnamese died.

Vietnam eventually did fall to the communists and the last U.S. personnel had to flee from the roof of the embassy in Saigon with desperate people being pushed off the over-crowded helicopters.  Despite the fact that the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, the world did not come to an end.  As a matter of fact, nobody even seemed to notice.  Most people were simply glad the 12-year old war was over.

I have often wondered why today’s youth seem utterly unable to resist the blatant lies of the criminal government and controlled media, which are clearly extremely harmful to them and their nation.  I can’t understand why the young people in America and Europe abuse themselves with tattoos and body piercings.  Don’t they care about themselves?  I have seen people with screws coming through their eyebrows that look like construction accidents that should be sent to the nearest emergency room. 

Christopher J. Petherick, the former chief editor of the Spotlight andAmerican Free Press, a weekly newspaper I wrote for in Washington, D.C., had an ugly metal stud sticking through his tongue that looked absolutely awful.  I had never seen such a thing.  He told me that he was a Satanist.  I thought he was just an East Coast trendie.  I sometimes told him that we were doing the Lord’s work by spreading the Truth.

Christopher J. Petherick, a self-avowed Satanist, was the editor ofAmerican Free Press and the former Spotlight, publications of the Liberty Lobby of Washington, D.C.  It makes no sense that a Satanist would be the chief editor of a newspaper that is purportedly written for patriotic Christian Americans, unless one understands that the Liberty Lobby is actually owned and controlled by a Zionist Jew named Mark Lane.  The paper is a controlled opposition outlet that acts like flypaper to create a list of active patriots — for the Jewish intelligence organization Lane works for.

Petherick fired me after a three-man team of heavily-armed undercover police broke my arm and TASERed me in front of my family, but only after collecting many thousands of dollars from readers for the Bollyn “legal defense fund,” which were kept by the so-called employee owned newspaper.  I later discovered that the newspaper and the organization behind it, the Liberty Lobby, are actually owned by the Jewish leftist lawyer, Mark Lane, and have been since the early 1990s when he bought the assets of Liberty Lobby with some of the $5 million he had been paid by Willis A. Carto in legal fees.

I learned this from L.T. Patterson, publisher of Criminal Politics of Cincinnati.  Patterson’s newsletter is similar to the publications of the Mark Lane’s Liberty Lobby, which is what led Lane to sue Patterson in the mid-1990s for some $10 million.  Lane, a Zionist Jew, wanted to have a monopoly in the patriotic newspaper business.  During the legal process Patterson learned that Lane had acquired the assets of the nearly bankrupt Liberty Lobby in the early 1990s.  Manfred Roeder, a German patriot who has been imprisoned often in occupied Germany, told me that such controlled opposition newspapers like National Zeitung are designed to skim the cream off of the nationalist movement.  They also serve as outlets of disinformation and have even more sinister purposes.

Jane Fonda and Mark Lane worked closely together in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War.  Lane, who served in U.S. Army intelligence in post-war Germany, owns the assets of Liberty Lobby andAmerican Free Press.

As the U.S. prepared for war in Kuwait and Iraq in the summer of 1990, I began organizing pro-Palestinian students at the University of California at Santa Cruz who were opposed to the war effort.  I learned a great deal through my anti-war efforts.  I saw how the anti-war movement was taken over by Jewish students from the Hillel organization (B’nai B’rith).  The issue of occupied Palestine was pushed to the side.  This is what controlled opposition means:  controlling both sides of the debate to control the message.

James B. Phillips, a devout Catholic and dear friend from Chicago who served in Vietnam, recently sent me a video from the mid-1980s that explains how Americans have been demoralized and why.

James B. Phillips, (top row, 3rd from left) commanded a U.S. rifle platoon in Viet Nam.

The information comes from a former agent of the Soviet K.G.B. who defected to the United States.

The former K.G.B. agents says:  “Exposure to true information does not matter anymore.  A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information.  The facts tell nothing to him.”

This is exactly the problem we face in 2009.  Although Americans have the information that proves that their government has not been elected and is lying to them about 9-11 and everything else, the people do nothing to resist.  They have become enslaved to lies.  This video explains how this was done.

As the former Soviet journalist Yuri Bezmenov says in the video clip about the KGB’s demoralization of American youth through the media, “Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes…. It has nothing to do with espionage… in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American [so] that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Today, nearly every network and news outlet in the U.S. mass media is owned and controlled by Zionist Jews.  This is a statement of fact and should not be misconstrued to be anti-Semitic in any way.  Zionist Jews control nearly all of the U.S. mass media: television and radio networks, major newspapers, book publishers and leading book stores, and the big film studios and chains of movie theatres.  They have taken control of the media for one reason – to manipulate public opinion by controlling the message.  It is the same with media as with pipelines:  He who owns the pipeline controls the product.

Many of the Jewish media moguls are members of the secret organization of Freemasons, the International Order of B’nai B’rith.  Philip Morris Klutznick, the man who made Obama president, was the international president of B’nai B’rith.  The Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times was one of the founding families of Lodge No. 1 of the B’nai B’rith, which was started in New York City in 1843.  It is through this secret society, which is closed to all non-Jews, that the media moguls and Jewish financiers are able to conspire against the American people while living among them.

The B’nai B’rith also started the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the early 1900s.  The ADL is an organization that protects the Jewish criminal network by attacking those who expose their crimes.  The ADL has infiltrated police departments across the United States.  The B’nai B’rith also runs Hillel, an organization for promoting the Zionist agenda at every college campus in the United States.  Through their organizations like the ADL and Hillel, the secretive Elders of Zion of the B’nai B’rith are able to push their agenda into every community and college campus in America.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is certainly not a “hoary fake”, and is most likely the protocols from a meeting of the leaders of the B’nai B’rith.

Bezmenov’s statement about the KGB being primarily occupied with disinformation and demoralization efforts aimed at Americans through the media is similar to the analysis by the German intelligence expert, Andreas von Bülow, who told me that 90 percent of the work done by the CIA and other intelligence agencies is disinformation and deception.

It needs to be understood that communism and Zionism are fraternal twins from the same mother — big Jewish capital of the Rothschild sort.  This relationship can be seen in Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the most senior advisers of President Barack Hussein Obama II.  Emanuel, the son of a Zionist terrorist, and Axelrod, the son of Jewish communists, were commissioned in 1992 by the daughter of Jewish financier Philip Morris Klutznick of Chicago to make Obama our “first black president.”  Zionism and communism are two heads of the same evil beast.

Communism and Zionism emerged together in the Russian Empire in the late 1800s.  There were six communist parties, two of which were also Zionist.  Although the Rothschild family who created the state of Israel is capitalist, the Russian Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the late 1800s and early 1900s were ardent communists and socialists.  Most of the Ashkenazi (Khazar and Slavic) Jews who built the Zionist state and who run it to this day come from the communist and Zionist parties that created the kibbutz and moshav settlements in Palestine.  The Jews who were forced to emigrate to Palestine (later Israel) and the millions of people who have lived under communism are similar.  Zionists and communists are both merely the pawns of the Rothschilds; foot soldiers for international Jewish bankers.

by Michael Gaddy (originally published in 2005)

My son returned from Iraq last weekend after a year’s service. I confess to breathing much easier now that he is out of that quagmire.

I have a personal request for all of you George W. Bush supporters and Christian warhawks: please do not support my troop. I have visions and aspirations of having him around, seeing him settle down and start a family at some point, and being near as I grow older. Your support would mean that he would be sent back to this war started and continued on lies to become a target for those who would rather live their lives without the interference of a foreign, empire-seeking, new-world-order, invader.

Actually, my son completed his contractual obligation to the military several months ago, but thanks to your support, he has been stop-lossed and has no idea when he will be allowed to resign his commission.

Why would I not want your support for my troop, you ask? Considering your support of our criminal government has led to the death, destruction and misery of millions of people on this planet, that is basically a no-brainer.

Of course you supported the troops back in WWII and thought that was a good thing, but somewhere along the line your support of the State led to the leaving behind of over 20,000 of our soldiers, those liberated from German POW camps by the Russians, never to be heard from again. I’m sure those families appreciated your support.

Back in 1950, you supported my father as he left my mother and me to go to war in Korea. He never returned, giving his life somewhere in that foreign land. Because of the loss of my father, my mother put a vodka bottle to her head and pulled the trigger. Your wonderful support took both my parents. Thanks again!

Your continued support in Korea led to the abandonment of over 8,000 POW’s and MIA’s to the enemy. Do you wonder why many find your support lacking? Just ask the families of those who have been left behind by this government you support blindly.

Some of you supported us as we went to the jungles of Southeast Asia; some chose not to. The results were the same; with or without your support, our criminal government cares nothing for those in uniform! Those of you who supported us claimed that those who didn’t were responsible for us losing the war. Horse Apples! We lost that war for the same reason we will lose the one in Iraq: wars started on lies to increase the bottom line of campaign contributors are seldom won because the war must be extended for as long as possible to insure the corporatocracy gets a full return on its money. There is a black granite wall in DC so all of you warhawks can go there and read the names of the 58,000+ charred souls you killed with your support. Just exactly where did that get us? Does Vietnam have a “democracy” today? Your continued support for a corrupt government led to over 2,000 military personnel being left behind in that war; with grieving families never knowing what happened to their loved ones.

Your support in Beirut cost the lives of hundreds of Marines and Soldiers as people who wanted us to hell out of their country destroyed our soldiers’ poorly protected barracks. Please give me the upside to this loss. Is Lebanon better off today because those good soldiers gave their lives?

I can still see the faces of the young Army Rangers that were killed in the illegal invasion of Panama. With your support, they gave their lives to assist in serving a drug warrant on a foreign Head of State, one our government had supported for years. Is it not ironic that we later went to war with Iraq for doing to Kuwait the same thing you supported our soldiers doing to Panama?

Your wonderful support led to the unspeakable horrors inflicted on those soldiers who were in Somalia! You should be especially proud of that one. Those dead soldiers dragged through the streets would not have been there had it not been for your “support.” If you have trouble remembering this, some time spent with the book Black Hawk Down should jog your memory.

Only in a true Orwellian society could citizens send off poorly trained and equipped soldiers, serving in a politically correct military, led by a civilian leadership that has spent the majority of their adult lives in a revolving door between the military industrial complex and government service, and call the damn thing, “supporting the troops.”

Why do we call people who prefer to live their lives without having their land bombed, their women, children and old folks killed, their national infrastructure destroyed and foreign soldiers on their soil, terrorists? Have you ever wondered what word the American Indian had for the U.S. government back in the middle to late 19th Century? History tells us we referred to them as “savages” and “those Red Devils” because they fought and died for their land and their culture. What did our ancestors call the British who were doing to the colonists precisely what our government does to others today?

Time to come clean, America: you do not in any way support troops by sending them to die for Halliburton and Bechtel’s bottom line. This is analogous to sending your teenager out in a car with no brakes and bald tires, accompanied by a child rapist high on crystal meth, and calling that “supporting” your children.

Rush Limbaugh was actually right for a change: there can be no support for the troops without supporting the war and the government that sent them there. Your misplaced support for the troops is actually support for a criminal enterprise in which the military serves as the enforcement arm of that enterprise. If you want to support the troops, do not allow the State to send them to their deaths for corporate profits in wars sired by lies!

by Paul Craig Roberts

Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “Main Stream Media”about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?  These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that no such weapons existed.

The weapons inspectors did an honest job in Iraq and told the truth, but the mainstream media did not emphasize their findings.  Instead, the media served as a Ministry of Propaganda, beating the war drums for the US government.

Now the whole process is repeating itself.  This time the target is Iran.

As there is no real case against Iran, Obama took a script from Bush’s playbook and fabricated one.

First the facts: As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which carefully monitors Iran’s nuclear energy program to make certain that no material is diverted to nuclear weapons.

The IAEA has monitored Iran’s nuclear energy program and has announced repeatedly that it has found no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.  All 16 US intelligence agencies have affirmed and reaffirmed that Iran abandoned interest in nuclear weapons years ago.

In keeping with the safeguard agreement that the IAEA be informed before an enrichment facility comes online, Iran informed the IAEA on September 21 that it had a new nuclear facility under construction.  By informing the IAEA, Iran fulfilled its obligations under the safeguards agreement.  The IAEA will inspect the facility and monitor the nuclear material produced to make sure it is not diverted to a weapons program.

Despite these unequivocal facts, Obama announced on September 25 that Iran has been caught with a “secret nuclear facility” with which to produce a bomb that would threaten the world.

The Obama regime’s claim that Iran is not in compliance with the safeguards agreement is disinformation.  Between the end of 2004 and early 2007, Iran voluntarily complied with an additional protocol (Code 3.1) that was never ratified and never became a legal part of the safeguards agreement. The additional protocol would have required Iran to notify the IAEA prior to beginning construction of a new facility, whereas the safeguards agreement in force requires notification prior to completion of a new facility.  Iran ceased its voluntary compliance with the unratified additional protocol in March 2007, most likely because of the American and Israeli misrepresentations of Iran’s existing facilities and military threats against them.

By accusing Iran of having a secret “nuclear weapons program” and demanding that Iran “come clean” about the nonexistent program, adding that he does not rule out a military attack on Iran, Obama mimics the discredited Bush regime’s use of nonexistent Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to set up Iraq for invasion.

The US media, even the “liberal” National Public Radio, quickly fell in with the Obama lie machine. Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers declared the non-operational facility under construction, which Iran reported to the IAEA, to be“a secret nuclear facility.”

Thomma, reported incorrectly  that the world didn’t learn of Iran’s “secret” facility, the one that Iran reported to the IAEA the previous Monday, until Obama announced it in a joint appearance in Pittsburgh the following Friday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Obviously, Thomma has no command over the facts, a routine inadequacy of“mainstream media” reporters.  The new facility was revealed when Iran voluntarily reported the facility to the IAEA on September 21.

Ali Akbar Dareini, an Associated Press writer, reported, incorrectly, over AP:  “The presence of a second uranium-enrichment site that could potentially produce material for a nuclear weapon has provided one of the strongest indications yet that Iran has something to hide.”

Dareini goes on to write that “the existence of the secret site was first revealed by Western intelligence officials and diplomats on Friday.”

Dareini is mistaken. We learned of the facility when the IAEA announced that Iran had reported the facility the previous Monday in keeping with the safeguards agreement.

Dareini’s untruthful report of “a secret underground uranium enrichment facility whose existence has been hidden from international inspectors for years”helped to heighten the orchestrated alarm.

There you have it.  The president of the United States and his European puppets are doing what they do best–lying through their teeth. The US “mainstream media” repeats the lies as if they were facts. The US “media” is again making itself an accomplice to wars based on fabrications.  Apparently, the media’s main interest is to please the US government and hopefully obtain a taxpayer bailout of its failing print operations.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency,  a rare man of principle who has not sold his integrity to the US and Israeli governments, refuted in his report (September 7, 2009) the baseless

“accusations that information has been withheld from the Board of Governors about Iran’s nuclear programme. I am dismayed by the allegations of some Member states, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board.  These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless. Such attempts to influence the work of the Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of Article VII.F. of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith.”

As there is no legal basis for action against Iran, the Obama regime is creating another hoax, like the non-existent “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” The hoax is that a facility, reported to the IAEA by Iran, is a secret facility for making nuclear weapons.

Just as the factual reports from the weapons inspectors in Iraq were ignored by the Bush Regime, the factual reports from the IAEA are ignored by the Obama Regime.

Like the Bush Regime, the Middle East policy of the Obama Regime is based in lies and deception.

Who is the worst enemy of the American people, Iran or the government in Washington and the media whores who serve it?

by Justin Raimondo

What did the U.S. government know about the “secret” Iranian nuclear research facility at Qom and when did it know it? That’s the question that isn’t on everyone’s lips, as the chatter about Iranian “intransigence” on nuclear issues reaches a crescendo in the run-up to Oct. 1, the date negotiations with Tehran are scheduled to start. Practically no one wants to ask let alone answer this question, because it torpedoes the American narrative that is being carefully constructed by the Obama administration and its media fan club, which runs something like this: the Iranians have been actively deceiving us all along and simply can’t be trusted – the only solution, therefore, is to initiate a series of escalating sanctions, up to and includingmilitary action.

The Obama-worshippers in the punditocracy are telling us that this is an example of the Dear Leader’s genius: unlike George W. Bush and the neocons, whose crude unilateralism and unmitigated arrogance was a turnoff to our allies and a boon to our enemies, Obama wisely held back and waited until he had the Iranians just where he wanted them, and then, as one of the more unhinged Obama maniacs put it, “Ka-pow!“

“And so you see the Obama mojo again. Look at the moves of the last month. He scraps the missile defense in Eastern Europe, pleasing Russia, and moves the focus of defense to the Mediterranean, pleasing Israel.

“He pwns [sic] Ahmadinejad at the UN by being the first president of the U.S. to preside over the resolution to enforce nuclear non-proliferation.

“He corrals the rhetorical support of the developing world, isolating Tehran still further. He hangs back a little and allows Brown and Sarkozy to do the heavy hitting on NoKo and Iran this past week, again revealing that the desire to curtail Ahmadinejad’s nukes is not only an American project.

“And then, this morning… kapow!”

This tale of heroic cunning and diplomatic derring-do is largely a product of Sullivan’s hero-worshipping imagination – the same tendency to idolatry that moved him to praise George W. Bush as little short of the second coming of Winston Churchill back in the day. It is, however, based on even less substance this time around, for it turns out that the U.S. has known about this “secret” facility for years, as CNN reports:

“The United States was aware of Iran’s unfinished uranium enrichment site for several years, senior U.S. officials told CNN on Friday. U.S. officials have known about the facility since President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the officials who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations.”

Yes, the Bushies knew about it, too, and said nothing – but why not? After all, George W. was not exactly known as an apologist for the Iranian regime, and he was no less eager than his successor to tag Tehran as a serial deceiver. The CIA knew about it when they issued that now inconvenient National Intelligence Estimate [.pdf] averring that Iran had abandoned all efforts to militarize its nuclear research in 2003. Were they trying to protect the Iranians, too? And, of course, Obama knew all about it – and decided to make use of it, in spite of the fact that (a) the Qom facility is not operational and (b) there is no evidence it is being used to create a nuclear weapon.

We are told the Iranians only recently discovered that we knew about Qom, which is why they chose to reveal its existence in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – but, really, since the Iranians had a direct line to our most closely guarded secrets, via Ahmed Chalabi, in the days of the Bush administration, it’s hard to make that case with absolute assurance. In any case, they did admit the existence of the Qom facility and have now invited in the inspectors – and all of Obama’s stern admonitions to the Iranians to “come clean” cannot obfuscate Tehran’s transparency in this matter.

In his UN oration, Obama declared “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow,” a manifestly untrue statement that nonetheless went largely unchallenged. Because “all nations” apparently doesn’t include the state of Israel, which has as many as 200 nuclear weapons and is no doubt developing more.

Obama hailed efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) andsingled out Iran and North Korea as two examples of nations that “choose to ignore international standards” and “put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people.” These two miscreants, he intoned, “must be held accountable.”

There is one other miscreant, however, that is never to be held accountable, either by the president of the United States or by anyone who works in “mainstream” journalism, on pain of being charged with a hate crime. Israel’s nukes are common knowledge. Yet the Jewish state not only refuses to acknowledge its possession of weapons of mass destruction, it also disdains efforts by the international community to monitor their development and placement.

Israel has always steadfastly refused to join the NPT, and when the possibility that they could be pressured to do so was raised as the Obamaites were flocking to Washington to take power, the idea was quickly shot down. That a U.S. government official had even mentioned Israel in relation to its well-known possession of nukes was denounced by the Israelis and their American amen corner as a “violation” of a supposedly 40-year agreement between the U.S. and Israel that Washington would not only give the Israelis a pass, but would refrain from even referring to the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Which means: quite apart from evidence – or the absence of it – that the Iranians are actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons, we aren’t allowed to even talk about why they would possibly want them.

Israel has been threatening Iran with military action for quite some time, and, armed as the former is with a formidable nuclear arsenal, the Iranians would be foolish not to take the Israelis seriously. However, the biggest weapon in the Israeli quiver isn’t nukes, it’s their “special relationship” with the U.S., and the Iranians know it.

The devastation and occupation of Iraq had barely begun when Ariel Sharon publicly stated that America’s next target must be Iran, and the U.S. has dutifully taken up this charge, in spite of Obama’s guff about engaging in “dialogue” with Tehran. That’s just window-dressing for the liberals who supported him on account of his antiwar credentials.

And so it begins: phase two of the American project for the transformation of the Middle East into an environment that guarantees “security” for Israel as she represses her Palestinian helots [.pdf], expands her borders willy-nilly, and defies the standards and benchmarks that all civilized nations are expected to adhere to.

Change? You’ve got to be kidding! What we’re getting from this administration in the foreign policy department is an uncanny repetition of the same folly engaged in by the Bush administration, complete with “weapons of mass destruction” and the hosannasof the Establishment pundits as they march in lockstep to war. The only difference is that many of these very same pundits were singing a far different tune when it was Republicans doing the warmongering.

We are told by the pro-Obama foreign policy analysts that the president’s efforts to negotiate with Tehran have put the military option “on the back burner.” Really? What’s on the front burner is a proposal – guaranteed to sail through the U.S. Congress – to impose draconian sanctions on Iran, including petroleum products. What this would amount to is a blockade of Iranian ports, i.e., an act of war.

Iran has the right to the production of peaceful nuclear power under the terms of the NPT, a treaty the Israelis refuse to sign. Why are they being held “accountable,” and not the Israelis? Everybody in the Middle East knows the answer to this question – as they do in Washington, although the rules of political correctness won’t permit them to utter it.

This whole campaign against Iran for supposedly harboring a desire to nuke Israel is absurd from beginning to end. A nuclear attack on Israel would not only annihilate the Israelis, but also the Palestinians – which one has to assume the Iranians have no desire to do. It would also invite massive retaliation from the U.S. and universal condemnation. The myth that Israel is going to be the site of a second Holocaust if we don’t stop the Iranians first is one that is being energetically pushed by Israel and her American lobby – and it is a very crude and easily refutable lie. Which doesn’t mean they won’t try to pull it off. After all, the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, although absurd on its face, was relentlessly repeated by the Bushies during the run-up to the Iraq war, and there’s no reason, at this point, to suspect that the new guys in charge are above such tactics.

Indeed, we are fast learning that they aren’t – that’s what the Qom kerfuffle shows us, and we ought to be prepared for more, and much worse, in the coming months. The Obamaites are going into the October talks guns blazing, and you can be sure that, although this process of baiting Iran is going to go on for many months, if not years, this first phase will be relatively short-lived: the War Party is hoping for an Iranian walkout, and I suspect they’ll get their wish.

Investor’s Business Daily, BLNZ

Defense Spending: The TARP bailout may hit $24 trillion, but the Senate says the F-22 is too expensive to build and maintain. So why are the Japanese so desperate to buy this “unnecessary” Cold War weapon?

By a vote of 58-40, the Senate on Tuesday voted to remove $1.75 billion set aside in a defense bill to build seven more F-22 Raptors, adding to the 187 stealth technology fighters already in the pipeline.

After some hope the production lines would be kept open, the Senate succumbed to arguments by the administration and others that the fighter was too expensive, too hard to maintain and not built for the wars America is fighting these days.

President Obama welcomed the Senate vote, saying he rejected the notion that the country has to “waste billions of taxpayers dollars” on outdated defense projects.

Well, the inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program now says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. Yet we can’t afford to build just seven more F-22s?

Keeping the F-22 production lines open would be a real stimulus saving real jobs. Lockheed Martin, the main contractor, says 25,000 people are directly employed in building the plane, and another 70,000 have indirect links, particularly in Georgia, Texas and California. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., a supporter of the program, says there are 1,000 suppliers in 44 states. That’s wasteful?

Speaking to the Economic Club of Chicago last Friday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates repeated his assertion that “the F-22 is clearly a capability we do need — a niche, silver-bullet solution for one or two potential scenarios — specifically the defeat of a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet.”

But the “F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict,” he added.

Air dominance is not a “niche scenario,” and while we’re lucky the Taliban does not have an Air Force, other potential opponents do. It would prove quite useful over the skies of North Korea, if necessary, or in thwarting a Chinese threat in the Taiwan Straits. Gates forgets that it was high-tech “Cold War” weapons such as the stealthy F-111A that shattered Saddam Hussein’s air defenses and infrastructure and controlled the skies during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, chief executive of the Air Force Association, notes that in last year’s conflict in Georgia, the Raptor was the only aircraft in our inventory that could have penetrated the defended airspace and had a chance of surviving.

The F-22 Raptor is also perhaps the only plane that could evade the sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system Russia has contracted to sell Iran. Russia’s S-300 system is “one of the most lethal, if not the most lethal, all-altitude area defense” systems, according to the International Strategy and Assessment Service, a Virginia-based think tank.

Gates and the Pentagon prefer the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But many believe its lesser abilities have been further compromised by making it a one-size-fits-all aircraft for all services in all conflicts.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., in whose state final assembly occurs, says, “The F-35 was designed to operate after F-22s secure the airspace and does not have the inherent altitude and speed advantages to survive every time against peers with counter-electronic measures.”

In an interview with Human Events, Japanese ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki said Tokyo wants F-22s to replace its aging F-4s and F-15s. Japan is facing an increasingly capable and unstable North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and the weapons to carry them. It also confronts a future superpower in China, with which it has territorial disputes.

Japan wants the F-22 to deal with both threats. It will soon have to deal with fifth-generation Chinese fighter aircraft and aircraft carriers to carry them. Japan is wise to prefer the F-22, which can fly 300 to 400 mph faster and two miles higher than the F-35.

We would be too.