Tag: United Nations

THIS is Research: Calling out the Lies on Both Sides (about Iran, not Kavanaugh)

 

While it could be tempting to wade into the whole Dr. Ford vs. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh circus, it is not worth it. Giving time to the biggest show that our government has produced this year only encourages them. Now I know what all my taxes are for. Entertainment:

There is no doubt that the Military Industrial Complex / Deep State are using this distraction to their own advantage somewhere on this globe, maybe even in Iran itself!

This post, however, is about the last accusations that Israel’s Netanyahu has made about the same old song sung for years about Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. For well over three decades, Israel / US’ CIA / Mossad (yes, a lot of overlap there) has used this mantra as a way to threaten the sheep with lies so they would be more than happy to use military means towards “safety”:

The lies started shortly after Iran left the US Empire’s orbit in 1979 as shown by this quote in an article written five years ago:

The suggestion that Iran would soon be in possession of, or be in a position to quickly manufacture, nuclear weapons has been in constant circulation for nearly three decades. In 1984, Iran was reportedly moving “very quickly” towards a nuclear weapon and could have one as early as 1986. By the early 1990’s, the CIA predicted Iran was “making progress on a nuclear arms program and could develop a nuclear weapon by 2000,” later changing their estimate to 2003.

Israeli estimates have always been of an especially hysterical quality. In March 1992, The Jerusalem Report, noting that “Israel keeps a wary watch on Teheran’s march to the Bomb,” predicted that, “[b]y the year 2000, Iran will almost certainly have the Bomb.”

This lie has enabled sympathy on the part of many Christians in the US as well as the US government to directly support Israel economically and militarily over the years on an increasing basis and polarizing the world in the post Cold War 1.0 era.

For today’s post, I will just focus on the latest lie OR set of lies where real research sifts truth from. The Moon of Alabama article quoted below not only shows errors in Israel’s claim, but also errors in Iran’s counter-claim. So we have lies, half-truths and truth to sort through, hang on, this will require some critical thinking.

To kick of this adventure, here is what Israel’s leader said at the United Nations this last week:

Netanyahoo said:

“In May we exposed the site of Iran’s secret atomic archive. It’s right here in the Shuabad Distrcit of Tehran. Today I’m revealing the site of a second facility: Iran’s secret atomic warehouse. It’s right here, in the Turkuzahbad Distrcit of Tehran. Just three miles away. Let me show you exactly what the secret atomic warehouse looks like. Here it is. You see, like the atomic archive it’s another innocent-looking compound. Now for those of you at home using Google Earth, this no longer secret atomic warehouse. You have the coordinates, you can try to get there. And for those of you who try to get there: It’s 100 meters from the rug-cleaning operation By the way, i hear they do a fantastic job of cleaning rugs there. But by now they may be radioactive rags. This is the second secret site. Now countries with satellite capabilities may notice some increased activity on the alley in the days and weeks ahead.”

Netanyahoo added the obviously false claim that Iran removed radioactive material from the warehouse and spread it over Tehran.”

So how does Israel’s staunchest ally respond? Well, to it’s credit, it corrects some claims:

But just like back in May, when Netanyahoo presented old material that was long known to the IAEA and relevant governments, no one came out in support of his exaggerated claims. Yes, the ‘atomic warehouse’ in Tehran exists. But it is neither secret, nor does it hold anything radioactive or of current relevance:

“A US intelligence official has said that the speech delivered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday at the UN General Assembly about the existence of a second secret atomic facility in Iran was “somewhat misleading.”
…
According to the US intelligence official, knowledge of the facility is nothing new to the Americans.
“First, we have known about this facility for some time, and it’s full of file cabinets and paper, not aluminum tubes for centrifuges, and second, so far as anyone knows, there is nothing in it that would allow Iran to break out of the JCPOA any faster than it otherwise could,” the official said.

Another US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States is aware of the facility Netanyahu announced and described it as a “warehouse” used to store “records and archives” from Iran’s nuclear program.

I am told that the IAEA also knows of the archive and its harmless content.

If you are Iran, how do you respond? Well, in this case, Iran’s press responded rather poorly as Moon of Alabama demonstrates below in reference to this Twitter post:

The first picture in Meysam Yaghoubi’s tweet is indeed the gate to the compound Netanyahoo showed. The other pictures though, which show a carpet cleaning facility, were taken inside a compound on the other side of the street of the archive compound. They were not taken inside the compound that Netanyahoo pointed out. This can be easily discerned by comparing the second picture in the tweet above with a satellite view of the place…The notable gate structure of the archive compound visible at the upper left is not the gate of the compound where the picture was taken, but on the other side of the road.

When you are wading in a sea of lies, you have to be able to pick up on nuances. The Dilbert Test can sometimes help:

Guilty people almost always question the source of the information first.

Innocent people start with a clear denial, or sometimes confusion as to why the question is being asked.

Some guilty people will give you a straight denial if they know the question is coming and they prepared for it.

With state agencies, there is certainly a period of time one has to respond. One can reply in haste and come off as being in error or falling into a well laid trap OR one can use the opportunity to their advantage and again show which state is the “bigger person”.

I have seen Russia take a tactic that places itself above the US’s level of dishonesty by clearly stating the part of a US statement that is true as true but then countering with parts of the statement that are misleading. Such is the way in this world when so many half-truths and statements taken out of historical context are involved.

The tougher part, when considering the typical US citizen is, since they have almost zero historical context, how do you keep their attention long enough to paint the truth as it is? Basically, you cannot. Governments love an ignorant society, they can get away with murder!

However, many people abroad tend to think more critically, and measure what the state puppets across the globe say against their own instinct and research. With that in mind, Moon of Alabama concludes with a challenge:

This ISNA piece and the attached pictures unintentionally confirm exactly what Netanyahoo said about the location of the archive building: “It’s 100 meters from the rug-cleaning operation.”

Iran’s foreign ministry is also somewhat hapless when it describes Netanyahoo’s speech as “false, meaningless and unnecessary”. Why can’t Tehran simply say: “Decades old administrative records of our legitimate nuclear energy program are archived in a warehouse that is well known to all relevant entities. There is nothing secret nor nefarious about it.”

Hapless attempts to debunk Netanyahoo even where he is right will be used by his propagandists to claim that “Iran lies”. Tehran, and its news agencies, must up their game.

I do hope that people in Iran can access Moon of Alabama and challenge their journalists and state writers to “up their game”!

-SF1

North Korea: Another Country Misunderstood? (Do You Still Listen to US Govt/Media?)

I do hope that this is what you picture when you hear “North Korea”. The darkness on the Korean peninsula is in fact the country of North Korea, and we (USA) helped.

You might think “they deserve it”, that they are “evil” (as if you believe George W. Bush when he said):

… but he also said Iraq had WMDs (of course what he didn’t say is that we GAVE Iraq these in the 1980s and expected that they were still there).

What if what you know about North Korea has been mainly a government/media spin that didn’t just start in 2017 when North Korea toyed with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It didn’t start in 2002 either when President Bush lumped them in with Iran and Iran. So what did North Korea do?

Like in my previous post about Iran, we need to go back a few years, a few decades actually to really get a big picture of how North Korea has actually behaved or misbehaved.

One year ago in this Anti-Media article, Darius Shahtahmasebi shared in part:

In the early 1950s, the U.S. bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and eventually killing off perhaps 20 percent of the country’s population. As noted by the Asia Pacific Journal, the U.S. dropped so many bombs that they eventually ran out of targets to hit:

“By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.”

While “technically” a United Nations action, the US Congress never declared war on North Korea, and yet technically, North Korea is still at war. Once a cease-fire was agreed to, North Korea faded into the “dark” (see picture at the top of this post) not unlike Cuba.

Going back even farther, you will better understand the real tragedy as Eric Margolis points out in this Lew Rockwell article:

In 1950, at the time of the Korean War, North Korea’s economy was larger than that of South Korea thanks to Japan’s colonial industrial policies. Korea’s Communists, like their allies in China, took the lead in fighting Japanese occupation. America suffered heavy casualties fighting North Korean forces.

To many Koreans, particularly young ones, North Korea is the authentic Korea while South Korea remains a well-off but politically powerless American semi-protectorate. The humiliating collapse and impeachment of South Korea’s first female president, scandal-ridden Park Geun-hye, only reinforces the South’s image as a rudderless ship in stormy seas.

Wow, so who is the “grown-up” now? South Korea with all the lights is but an obedient kid to the American Empire while North Korea attempts to almost go it alone. Its 60 warheads (only one-fourth of what Israel has) are its only asset (i.e. gun) in negotiating anything in this world these days.

The US Empire in typical fashion can’t seem to let this chapter go as the US is passionate about proving itself as the world’s policeman. Eric Margolis share from this Lew Rockwell article some tough truth about the US “mismanagement” of past “regimes” that do not want to play “ball” with the American Empire:

After Washington overthrew the rulers of Iraq and Libya, it became painfully apparent that small nations without nuclear weapons were vulnerable to US ‘regime change’ operations. The North Koreans, who are very eccentric but not stupid, rushed to accelerate their nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Almost equally important, North Korea boasts one of the word’s biggest armies – 1,020,000 men, 88,000 crack special forces, and an trained militia of over 5 million. The North’s weapons are obsolescent; its small air forces and navy will be vaporized by US power but its troops are deeply dug into the mountainous terrain and would be fighting from prepared positions. War against North Korea would be a slow and bloody slog– even a repeat of the bloody, stalemated 1950-52 Korean War in which 39,000 Americans and at least 2.5 million Koreans died. I’ve been in the deep North Korean-dug tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone. A full division can be moved through in only 60 minutes.

Ever since being soundly beaten in Vietnam and fought to a draw in Afghanistan, the US military has preferred to attack small countries like Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon is not eager to tangle with the tough North Koreans. Estimates of the cost of a US invasion of North Korea have run as high as 250,000 US casualties and tens of billions of dollars.

So now what? Why can’t we leave North and South Korea alone to resolve their differences and maybe capitalize on their similarities? Well how about pure economics, the true source of peaceful relations in the long haul as outlined in this Russia Today article:

The project to unite the Korean Peninsula with a gas pipeline has been discussed for a long time, but official talks started in 2011. The negotiations were frozen after relations between Seoul and Pyongyang deteriorated.

In March, Seoul announced that it is ready to resume the project. According to South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha “if the North participates in talks on Northeast Asia energy cooperation, it would serve as a catalyst that helps ease geopolitical tensions in the region.”

It is things like that that give me hope that cooler heads will prevail and that the true free market could improve the lives of some many people all around the globe. Just LEAD US Empire .. or get out of the way!

-SF1

Why I Appreciate (and Support($)) True Researchers

Holding the UN accountable is _____? Yeah, no official body of any government really holds anyone accountable for the numbers they generate .. out of thin air.

This is where Moon of Alabama and others like this website are willing to spend hours to get down in the weeds and validate (or invalidate) the claims of these bureaucracies:

Neither the OCHA map nor the UN report explain how, when or why 164,000-171,000 people are supposed to have moved the few miles towards the Israel occupied Golan Heights. There is no evidence that this claimed movement of IDPs, who may or may not exist, happened at all.

Where does the OCHA claim come from?

The nearly unreadable fine-print of the OCHA map says about the “Map Data Source(s)”:

The data of this map has a limited number of sources, including parties of the conflict. The data has not been independently verified and is subject to error or omission, deliberate or otherwise, by the various sources.

There is the explanation for the unbelievable high refugee numbers the UN is peddling around. They are based on claims made by the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and various other sectarian “rebel” groups and their propaganda outlets. These claims have not be verified at all. Whoever made up that map did not even ask if the numbers were plausible or made any sense. They obviously don’t.

It is irresponsible that UN spokespersons come out and make claims of an extreme refugee flow when only some dubious ‘rebel’ sources say that these happened and no reasonable explanation exists why such a movement might have taken place at all.

There has so far only been moderate fighting during the three weeks of the Daraa campaign. Most of the affected towns reconciled with the  Syrian army without any fight. The real recent refugee flow in the whole Daraa governorate is thus more likely in the order of ten-thousands than in the order of hundred-thousands.

The UN must stop to distribute such alarming numbers that evidently can not be backed up at all. Otherwise its credibility and long term efficiency will be severely damaged.

Yeah, it has come to the point where EVER government and/or international organization is going to give data that supports their agenda but never gives the people the truth. You probably already support a government (and UN indirectly) with your tax money .. why not search out true researchers and support them as well?