Last time it was Iraq. This time Iran.
We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)
Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.
And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.
Yeah, right.
Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]
So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]
Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!
Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)
Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.
Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.
And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.
So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.
Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq.
Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.
Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.
We KNOW that Iran didn't attack a Japanese oil tanker and a Norwegian tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just south of the Strait of Hormuz, as the Trump regime is asserting and the U.S. media is echoing. (Also part of the propaganda echo chamber are the media of stooge lackey nations. For example, the British government's overt propaganda arm, the BBC, is pushing the same lie. And the rightwing British government headed by the loathsome Theresa May is parroting the U.S. false indictment of Iran. Also Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, put in her sycophantic two cents blaming Iran. These craven courtiers to U.S. power are deluding themselves if they think Trump won't screw them on trade deals and everything else if they suck up to him hard enough. Trump is an ingrate, which makes him the perfect U.S. president. U.S. ingratitude is a historical fact. But that's another essay.)
Here's the proof the U.S. condemnation of Iran is a lie: the U.S. asserts that Iran placed mines on the hulls of the ships, damaging them, and then retrieved an unexploded mine from the side of the Japanese vessel. But the president of the Japanese shipping company that owns the Japanese tanker reports that the crew of the tanker said there was no mine, but that two flying objects hit the ship.
And this: the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was in Tehran, Iran, at the very time the U.S. claims Iran attacked a Japanese ship by attaching limpet mines to the hull. (Magnetic mines.) This was a critical visit for Iran, which is trying to find ways to defeat the U.S. economic strangulation of the country. Previously the Iranian foreign minister went to Tokyo, Japan, and this visit by the Japanese prime minister was set up. The top ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Kamenei was meeting with Abe when the "attack" occurred.
Qatar TV station Al-Jazeera.
So if you accept the U.S. government and media version of reality, seconded by lackey stooges like the British government and media and others, Iran invited the prime minister of Japan to Tehran for a rare visit just to sabotage Iran's own diplomatic effort.
Yeah, right.
Who is more likely to want to sabotage Iranian diplomacy, Iran or the U.S.? The question answers itself. [1]
So of course the U.S. and allied propaganda media systems simply IGNORE the facts that Abe was IN TEHRAN during this "attack," that the owner of the tanker SAYS IT WAS FLYING OBJECTS that hit the ship, and instead keep repeating the lies of the Trump regime. [2]
Iran's foreign minister saw right through the U.S. false flag attack. But it's not designed to fool Iran. It's designed to fool YOU!
Tellingly, the Japanese government, which has been a supine lickspittle to the U.S. ever since the U.S. occupied it in 1945, hasn't fallen into line behind the U.S. The government has been very circumspect. The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, even referred to the sabotage attack as an "accident." (!) And in a sign that the U.S. attempt to sabotage Iran's diplomacy has failed for now, Kono said that Japan will continue to engage in "dialogue" with Iran to reduce tension (which the U.S. is working overtime to ratchet up) and "seeking the peace in the region." Refusing to go along with the U.S. "proof" of Iran's guilt, he said Japan would continue to gather information to find out "what really happened."
Wow! What really happened? Don't you believe Michael Pompeo, the egregious U.S. Secretary of State, who within hours of the attack summoned the media to hear him read a statement that it was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that Iran mined two ships. (You don't think this wasn't all arranged in advance?) (Pompeo took no questions. Gee, I wonder why.)
Also, Japan's defense minister said Japan wouldn't send troops to the region, as the U.S. war cabal must have hoped to goad them into doing.
Singapore station cna.
What about the other tanker that was attacked by the U.S. and blamed on Iran? It is Norwegian. Here's why I think that was a deliberate choice. Trump obviously is reluctant to start an actual war with Iran. He knows how bad that would be, and indeed the entire region would be thrown into even greater turmoil. The last thing he needs as he runs for reelection is another unpopular war. And he badly needs to get reelected to run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various crimes he committed before becoming president. (Maybe the New York State Attorney General should get some indictments for state crimes NOW.) It has been reported that he's griped about his "National Security Advisor" John Bolton pushing him to war. And just today (June 20) Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone and Trump publicly soft-pedaled it as no big deal and opined that it was probably an accident by low level personnel as opposed to a state decision.
Trump also puts Norway on a pedestal. This was shown just recently when he was asked on TV if he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign nation, and Trump said "Norway" as an example of such a nation.
And a few years ago, when he referred to African and other "non-white" nations as "shithole countries," he he mused why can't "we" get more immigrants from Norway. Also, for what it's worth, his first Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is Danish on her father's side. Most of all, Trump is a well-know white supremacist.
So I have a suspicion that attacking a Norwegian tanker was designed to provoke Trump's ire at Iran.
Bonus Plus: Norway is a NATO member. When the U.S. goes to war on Iran, that gives it an excuse to demand that NATO members contribute forces, as some have done for the U.S.' Excellent Never-Ending Adventure in Afghanistan, and the "Liberation" of Iraq.
Trump has called in to Murdoch's propaganda minions on TV, Fox "News," to blame Iran categorically. So he is sinking into the quicksand trap laid for him. Of course, as president of the United States, he is way out of his depth. A sleazy grifter son of a cutthroat immoral and criminal real estate baron, he is experienced in pulling off scams and acting as a shill for himself on television, but he has no understanding of geopolitics or how to run an empire. And he picked the worst possible imperialist apparatchiks to help him do it. I guess he equates extremism with toughness.
Let us briefly consider the "evidence" that supposedly proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iran planted mines on the hulls of the two tankers. The first and main evidence is a grainy video purporting to show Iranians on a patrol boat removing a mine from one of the ships. Trouble is, no mine is visible in the video.
Qatar station Al-Jazeera.
See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?
See the mine? It's right there! Are you blind?
Also, IF there was a mine on the hull, how do we know the U.S. didn't put it there for the Iranians to find when they sent out vessels to rescue the crews of the tankers? (No crew members were injured or killed in the U.S. attacks on the vessels. Apparently the U.S. deliberately fired relatively low-yield projectiles at the tankers designed to start fires but not sink the ships or cause loss of life.)
One last note on videos: this video may well be genuine, but on the day of the incident it was reported that a bogus video was posted I believe on Facebook seeming to show Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never actually said. Also I recently heard a program about the "danger" of technology allowing the creation of seemingly genuine videos that are fake, but the fakery is undetectable by technical means. It has been possible to create undetectable photographic forgeries for years with Photoshop. The point being, images are not the last word on anything. Even before digital photography, photos could be dramatically altered, as when under Stalin, officials who had been purged had to be airbrushed out of photos. So this kind of manipulation is nothing new, but with digital technology it has reached dramatic new levels of verisimilitude. (Go see a Hollywood "action" or Sci-Fi or comic book "hero" sometime and see!)
The grainy video the U.S. released seems genuine, as we would expect a surveillance video taken from far away to look like this. (But I think that is naive. The U.S. has space satellites that can resolve objects the size of car license plates. Surely their warships have camera lenses that can do better than this video.) Conveniently, you can't really make out what the Iranian crew is doing.
Over the following days, the U.S. dribbled out more "evidence," such as a photo of the Japanese ship with a black triangle smudge on the hull that it purported was the "unexploded mine," but could just as well have been (indeed looks like) a mark added with a simple photo editing program.
A ship mine makes such a TINY HOLE? How could it ever sink a ship? That's what ship mines are designed to do! And that little triangle- DEFINITELY a mine!
Pompeo has also claimed that the U.S. had mine fragments that were Iranian-like.
Last month four tankers were sabotaged in some vague way in a UAE port. Saudi Arabia rushed to blame Iran. But apparently the designed effect wasn't achieved.
To be sure, Iranian officials have publicly noted that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic if it wished. This is played as an "Iranian threat" in Western media and by government officials.
I don't think they could. The U.S. Navy could wipe out Iran's fleet of tiny patrol boats, and minesweepers could clear sea lanes of any floating mines.
There are plenty of covert units in the U.S. government that specialize in false flag operations and such types of frame-ups. When Pompeo was CIA director, his first job for Trump, in addition to demonizing Julian Assange and increasing vicious sneaky attacks on Venezuela, he took the opportunity to form a CIA task force, the "Iran Mission Center," in 2017.
The U.S. has had it in for Iran ever which the Iranian people had the temerity to overthrow one of the U.S.' favorite dictators, a man president Jimmy Carter called a "great friend," "Shah" Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. (Pahlavi was installed in 1953 in a CIA coup ordered by president Dwight Eisenhower, which destroyed Iranian democracy and resulted in the deaths of a quarter million Iranians during the Shah's 25 year reign, many after hideous torture by the CIA-created and coached secret police, the SAVAK.)
Now, I don't like the current Iranian regime. it is a repressive theocracy. But that is NOT why the U.S. opposes it. Saudi Arabia is a FAR MORE repressive theocracy, and the U.S. is joined at the hip to it. The U.S. is in the business of destroying democracies and creating and backing dictatorships to allow economic exploitation of captive nations. But it won't admit that of course because it isn't inspirational. It needs to dupe people, especially the American people. So it pretends to be a spreader of freedom and democracy, when it does the exact opposite, over and over and over.
The war cabal in the U.S. government, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, a political creature created by the Koch Brothers, a man who has publicly called for the execution of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden [3], and John Bolton, a lifelong psychopathic war monger and fanatical imperialist, are maneuvering Trump into war against Iran. The U.S. is already waging economic warfare against that country- which of course primarily hurts the people of Iran. (People whom the sick imperialist dog Bolton says "deserve a better government," as if he or any U.S. imperialist gives a shit about the welfare of Iranians or of any other people, for that matter. Similar Bolton opined on television that having U.S. oil companies seize control of Venezuela's oil would benefit the American AND Venezuelan people. How the hell diverting that oil wealth into the coffers of large corporations would do that, he didn't bother explaining.)
If and when the war cabal succeeds in its goal, a goal enthusiastically supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, two darling nations of the U.S. government, the only thing most Americans will care about, unfortunately, is American casualties, not the far greater number of Iranian deaths and maimings, or the devastation to be wreaked upon Iran's infrastructure. And Iran's retaliation and self-defense will be branded "terrorism," and used as excuse and justification for the U.S. aggression.
Just as, during World War II, the Nazis branded the armed partisans who resisted them in various occupied nations "terrorists." Really, the same word. Oh, and "enhanced interrogation techniques," the euphemism the Bush regime and U.S. media adopted to pretend they didn't torture people, was lifted straight from the Gestapo interrogation manual, which the CIA carefully studied after the war. (Ray McGovern, the retired career CIA analyst who briefed presidents daily and who is fluent in German and Russian, revealed this.)
Anyway, here's hoping you won't drink the propaganda Kool-Aid being served up daily around the clock by "the" media.
Propaganda smoke gets in your eyes.
Enemies of humanity Pompeo and Bolton.
The primary target of the war cabal's psychological-political warfare: the Grifter-in-Chief as dupe.
1] Speaking of well-timed sabotage of diplomatic events, remember when special counsel Robert S. "Grand Inquisitor" Mueller III released an indictment of Russians RIGHT BEFORE Trump was to meet Putin? Quite a "coincidence."
Or how about the October Surprise, when Reagan's gang cut a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of U.S. embassy personnel until minutes after Jimmy Carter was out of office, thus insuring his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election?
Or Nixon's sabotage of Lyndon Johnson's peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968? He told the "South" Vietnamese military regime to refuse to go along with a deal. FBI wiretaps alerted Johnson to this, but he didn't want to expose that spying so kept it quiet. Nixon beat the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, by about 1/2 of 1% of the "popular' vote. (Oh, but Trump is paranoid and insulting to think a sitting president would wiretap a candidate!)
2] Not that the blackout was total. But it doesn't need to be to keep most people in the dark. For example, there was one article in the Washington Post about the Japanese tanker company's statement. Did YOU happen to read it? How about everyone you know? They've all heard the U.S. propaganda line, day after day after day.
Incessantly for a week now, "the" media has repeated the government line about Iran's guilt, while ignoring the facts that prove the U.S. assertions a lie, so most people will be unaware of these key facts. Bourgeois commentary now takes for granted the "fact" that Iran mined two tankers, just as it takes for granted the lie that Russia "hacked the DNC server." All that remains to be determined is what the U.S. should do to punish Iran. For that purpose, it gives a platform to, for example, Senator Tom Cotton. A first-term senator from the insignificant state of Arkansas, Cotton is a former military officer and rabidly aggressive militarist and imperialist. Why HE of all people should be all over television is a question properly put to the media czars and their henchmen, the executives and producers of television propaganda programs. ["Japanese ship owner contradicts U.S. account of how tanker was attacked," Washington Post, June 14, 2019.
3] See "Pompeo wants to execute Snowden."
