Tag: iran

Why the US & Israel are preventing aid from reaching one of the poorest countries in the Middle East

Despite the recent signing of a historic maritime border agreement, tensions continue to remain high, with both Israel and the United States attempting to force Lebanon into compliance with their regional agenda.

Although Israeli and Lebanese leaders signed letters of intent earlier this month ending their long-standing maritime border dispute and averting a major escalation in their ongoing conflict, the two sides still remain technically at war. Beirut refuses to recognise the Israeli state, maintaining the stance that first the Palestine issue must be resolved, as Israel maintains control over the Shebaa Farms area which Lebanon claims to be its territory.

Last week, drone strikes were reported to have killed up to 25 people after targeting a fuel aid convoy that had just passed the Al-Qaim crossing into Syria from Iraq. There are conflicting reports on who actually carried out the attack, with both Israel and the United States accused of having been behind it. The US military instantly distanced themselves from the incident, by denying they had carried out any strikes, whilst the Israeli government refused to comment and is now widely assumed to be culpable. According to Iraqi authorities, the fuel trucks, numbering 22 according to Iranian state-media, were approved for heading out of the country and seemed to be part of Iran’s new agreement with Lebanon to provide free fuel.

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Journalistic Responsibility Vanishes When Reporting On US-Targeted Nations

Two false news reports have gone viral in recent hours due to sloppy sourcing and journalistic malpractice. As usual they both featured bogus claims about US-targeted nations, in this case Russia and Iran.

An article in Responsible Statecraft titled “How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III” details how the propaganda multiplier news agency published a one-source, one-sentence report claiming that Russia had launched a deadly missile strike at NATO member Poland, despite evidence having already come to light by that point that the missile had probably come from Ukraine. This set off calls for the implementation of a NATO Article 5 response, meaning hot warfare between NATO and Russia in retaliation for a Russian attack on one of the alliance members.

Mainstream news reports circulated the narrative that Poland had been struck by a “Russian-made” missile, which is at best a highly misleading framing of the fact that the inadvertent strike came from a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile system still used by Ukraine, a former Soviet state. Headlines from the largest and most influential US news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NBC all repeated the misleading “Russian-made” framing, as did AP’s own correction to its false report that Poland was struck by Russia.

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Saudi Arabia, US On High Alert After Warning Of Imminent Iranian Attack; US Prepared To Respond

With oil prices set to soar after the midterms as the SPR drain ends and markets no longer have desperate democrats to help fulfill their immediate energy needs, moments ago the WSJ unveiled another potential oil price powder keg, so to speak, when it reported that according to Saudi and U.S. officials, Saudi Arabia has shared intelligence with the U.S. warning of an imminent attack from Iran on targets in the kingdom, putting the American military and others in the Middle East on an elevated alert level.

The report goes on to note that Iran is poised to carry out attacks on both the kingdom and Erbil, Iraq, in an effort to distract attention from domestic protests that have roiled the country since September.

In response to the warning, Saudi Arabia – which until recently was on the Biden admin “naughty list” after the crown prince snubbed Biden’s demands for no OPEC+ output cut – the U.S. and several other neighboring states have raised the level of alert for their military forces, the officials said. They didn’t provide more details on the Saudi intelligence.

Separately, the White House National Security Council said it was concerned about the warnings and ready to respond if Iran carried out an attack.

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US Hints At Preparing Military Option Against Iran To Israeli Officials

An Israeli official said that the US hinted it was preparing a military option against Iran during a meeting between Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Friday, The Times of Israel reported.

The Israeli official said that Gantz told Sullivan that Israel “needs” the US to have a credible military option against Iran. The meeting came as Washington and Tehran are engaged in negotiations to revive the nuclear deal.

The official said that Gantz received “good hints” that the US was preparing a military option. The official didn’t offer details but said the idea of the military option that Israel wants would be to get Iran to make more concessions in negotiations. If not, the US could potentially take military action against the Islamic Republic alongside Israel.

Gantz expressed his opposition to the nuclear deal in the meeting with Sullivan, and the Israelis are stepping up pressure on the Biden administration to abandon the talks. As part of the pressure campaign, the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, David Barnea, is heading to Washington next week.

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69 Years Ago Today, the CIA Conspired with the UK to Overthrow Iran on Behalf of Big Oil

Today marks the 69th anniversary that the west carried out a coup in Iran that destabilized the county by overthrowing the country’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed a CIA groomed dictator.

What was once considered a conspiracy theory is now a fact as the government has since admitted to carrying out Operation Ajax that was planned by the CIA in conjunction with MI6 in the UK to exploit the Iranian people and steal their oil on behalf of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – the British state-owned oil company established in 1908 with this objective in mind and the forerunner of today’s global oil conglomerate BP.

As TFTP reported, the State Department released a trove of documents that give insight into the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup d’état that led to the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq.

Those declassified documents, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Iran, 1951–1954,” provide a notable difference from the State Department’s 1989 version of the coup, which left out any involvement from American and British intelligence.

A memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower, dated March 1, 1953, serves as a reminder that internally, “the elimination of Mossadeq by assassination or otherwise,” was used as a method in repairing ties with Iran, restoring oil negotiations, and stopping a “Communist takeover.”

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War With Iran

The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived.  U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.

During his visit to Israel, Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. 

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and such groups as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth. 

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. 

In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper drone to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport. 

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Biden Just Said He’s Willing To Go To War With Iran, Mainstream Yawns

US President Joe Biden said in an interview aired Wednesday that he would be willing to go to war with Iran to prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, a position that drew condemnation from advocacy groups and foreign policy analysts who questioned the moral, strategic, and legal bases for such a stance.

Biden also reiterated in the sit-down interview with Israeli broadcaster N12 that he is committed to keeping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, even if it means sinking the prospects of a deal to revive the nuclear accord that former President Donald Trump violated in 2018.

While acknowledging that Trump’s decision to abandon the seven-country deal was a “gigantic mistake,” Biden said he would not delist the IRGC to advance nuclear talks that have hit a wall in recent weeks.

Biden offered a one-word answer—”yes”—when asked whether he would keep the IRGC on the terror list “even if that means that kills the deal.”

The US president went on to say that he’s prepared to use military force “as a last resort” to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran has repeatedly said it is not pursuing a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear energy program is designed for peaceful domestic purposes.

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Disclosed: How Obama Administration Officials Conducted Shadow Diplomacy With Iran To Undermine Trump

Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.

As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.

The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.

The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

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Biden administration to waive sanctions so Russian energy firm can build Iranian nuclear plant

As we’ve said before, the Biden administration has some mixed feelings about getting into a direct confrontation with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. At first, the administration sanctioned everything but energy and continued buying oil from Russia, with the explanation that the United States imports only 10 percent of its oil from Russia. Then there’s climate envoy John Kerry, who’s counting on Russia to be a partner in things like the Paris Accords. And speaking of Kerry, there’s also his precious Iran nuclear deal to consider.

Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon is reporting Wednesday that the Biden administration’s new Iran deal will remove sanctions so that a Russian energy firm can build Iran a nuclear power plant.

Kredo writes:

Russia’s top state-controlled energy company is set to cash in on a $10 billion contract to build out one of Iran’s most contested nuclear sites as part of concessions granted in the soon-to-be-announced nuclear agreement that will guarantee sanctions on both countries are lifted.

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September 11 Victims Want the US to Seize and Sell Iranian Oil

Families of victims of the September 11th attacks have asked the US government to seize Iranian oil that might be on a US-owned ship in Asia.

Even though Iran had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks, a US court has ordered Tehran to pay out more than $3 billion to the families of 9/11 victims. The ruling doesn’t make much sense since nobody has ever seriously accused Iran of being behind the attacks.

But the families are still seeking the money, and since Iran would never voluntarily pay, they are asking the US to seize and sell the Iranian oil.

The oil tanker Suez Rajan is under federal investigation for allegedly carrying oil placed on the ship by the National Iranian Oil Co. and the National Iranian Tanker Corp, which are both under US sanctions. The 9/11 families submitted a court filing on Thursday night asking for the oil to be taken.

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