Israel's Knuckleheads Forgot Obama Can Get Slick: He Finally Declassifies Info On Israel's Massive Nuclear Arsenal — Rendering Israel's Whining About Iran Laughable

When it comes to weapons of mass destruction, Israel is the major threat in the Middle East, not Iran

An unidentified inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency examines equipment at the Natanz facility in Iran
in January, 2014.  While the West makes massive demands about Iran's nuclear industry, Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran has) and has never had anyone inspect its nuclear facilities -- Even though it's armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't have a single nuke. (Screen shot from YouTube video)

By Ronald David Jackson

Big media publishes phony estimates of "how many more months before Iran will be capable of producing an atomic weapon" without reminding us that Israel already has hundreds of atomic weapons. The West has demanded—and achieved—inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, and negotiations to limit Iran's ability to produce atomic weapons.  Meanwhile, Israel hasn't had a single inspection, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran is), and hasn't agreed to negotiate a damn thing with anybody regarding its nuclear arsenal.  In fact, Iran has signed treaties forsaking the possession of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.  Israel has not. Underlying this particular super lie is the "special treatment" big media doesn't want to admit Israel gets from big media. A big media which constantly reminds us of the "big threat" of Iran's atomic bomb potential while saying nothing about the reality of Israel's hundreds of A-bombs. Thus the scenario of big media's "Iran is the nuclear threat and Israel is under nuclear threat" is yet another big lie by omission.

RELATED STORY: Israel's Worst-Kept Secret - US Government Employees Are Not Allowed To Mention Israel's Massive Nuclear Arsenal

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Right-wing media are up in arms over the Department of Defense's (DOD) release of a 1987 report suggesting Israel has nuclear capabilities, claiming the acknowledgement of the country's nuclear program is an "unprecedented" "leak" and act of "treachery" from the White House. In reality, the Bush administration declassified information on Israel's nuclear program years ago, and the DOD only released the 1987 report after years of fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.—Media Matters

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The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons
(Despite this study by a US Army officer, US officials
have been pretending for decades that Israel's nukes don't exist)

Bill O’Reilly’s Sick Pathology: He Doesn’t Just Lie About His Own Experiences – He Lies About Everything

Fox News' bully may be in hot water for lying about his war correspondence. But his lies go much deeper than that

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By Calvin F. Exoo and Christian Exoo
Much like suspended NBC anchor Brian Williams, Bill O’Reilly’s war stories are unraveling. His tales of reportorial derring-do – in Argentina, El Salvador, Ferguson, Northern Ireland – are turning out to be stories of derring-didn’t.

O’Reilly addressed the Brian Williams controversy in a February 5 segment for The O’Reilly Factor. “You go on Letterman– I’ve been on there many times– and you want to please. You want to be interesting. You want to be fascinating. You want to be cool…. It is easy for me, but for some people it’s hard,” O’Reilly explained.

“He knows what he did was wrong. A lot of people exaggerate their life experience, and he got caught…. I don’t think Americans care anymore. I think they’re so used to being lied to, they’re so cynical about the media, they don’t trust the media at all,” O’Reilly added.

And O’Reilly should know, because it turns out that he’s among the people who “exaggerate their life experience.” But so far, the reports of O’Reilly’s strained relationship with the truth have neglected a very important point: He doesn’t just lie about his own experiences – he lies about everything. And because “everything” includes important political issues, most of his lies are much more damaging than his claims to have drawn fire in the Falklands. From a myriad of examples, we’ve focused on five instances where O’Reilly’s not just lying, but where he demonstrably knows he’s lying, and doing so to better fit a right-wing slant.

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Legacy of Chemical Weapons in Iraq Compounds Lies and Failures of US Invasion

New reporting by the New York Times show how the only chemical weapons found in Iraq—long-abandoned stockpiles dating back to the 1980's— don't in any way conform to the pre-invasion narrative used by the Bush administration to justify the war.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President
Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

By Jon Queally

These aren't the chemical weapons you're looking for.

New reporting from the New York Times, published online late Tuesday, reveals that although the administration of George W. Bush employed false claims of an active chemical weapons program to justify its 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq (no such program existed) – the reality is that some degraded stockpiles of weapons did exist inside the country.*

However, according to the Times, because those "abandoned" weapons dated back to the 1980's—when the U.S. and other western nations were acting as an ally to Iraq and supplying weapons and chemical agents to Hussein during his war against Iran—U.S. troops who ultimately came across these weapons and were ordered to destroy them were told to remain quiet about what they'd encountered, even as it put their own health and those of others in grave danger.

As the newspaper reports, former U.S. soldiers who participated in the disposal of such weapons during the long occupation of Iraq said the Bush administration, including the Pentagon, suppressed the existence of them for several reasons, "including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong."

“They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war, told the Times. His unit, he says, found more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound, but said, “all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”

According to the Times:

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.

As a result, Murtaza Hussain, a journalist with The Intercept, responded to the story by tweeting, "What is new from this story is the U.S. government under Bush was as cavalier about American lives as it was Iraqis."

What's more, according to the investigation, "In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies."

For those who interpreted the New York Times' revelations as somehow a vindication of the rationale that led to the 2003 U.S. invasion, The New Republic's Jessica Shulberg was among those quick to counter that emerging narrative.

"The debate over the legitimacy of the Iraq War was never about whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction at some point in history," Shulberg writes. "It is well known that Saddam Hussein used a variety of chemical weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s—and the U.S., eager to see the destruction of the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran, aided him in creating the program."

She continues:

While Bush’s plea to the international community did not win the blessing of the U.N. Security Council, he used this rhetoric as the justification for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein. He was not declaring war on a decades-old chemical weapons program, but on an alleged new and ongoing program that could be used to destroy mass civilian populations.

If the post-2003 discovery of a decaying chemical weapons program could serve as proof that the invasion was justified, the Bush White House would have seized the opportunity to proclaim so. By 2005, CIA weapons inspectors concluded in a 92-page report that the WMD investigation had “gone as far as feasible” and found no evidence of an active weapons program. The CIA report included an addendum: “military forces in Iraq may continue to find small numbers of degraded chemical weapons — most likely misplaced or improperly destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.”

Bush’s approval ratings, which peaked at 70% during the March 2003 invasion, had plummeted to 48% by the time the CIA weighed in. The Administration could have used an example of, "Look, we were right!" But rather than tout the discovery of remnants chemical weapons from the 1980s, the Pentagon went to extreme lengths to cover it up. The harm these weapons posed to U.S. troops was unanticipated and the injuries they were suffering were an embarrassment. [...]

The existence of aging chemical weapons in Iraq was never the justification for Bush’s invasion, nor was it a secret. The secret was the harm that they were causing to U.S. troops and the subsequent failure to care for these individuals.

*This news brief has been updated from an earlier version for both context and clarity.

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Israel Flagged as Top Security Threat to US - According to New NSA Whistleblower Document

Israel is considered a 'leading threat' to the infrastructure of US financial and banking institutions, and a threat in the development of weapons of mass destruction.

Photo by brionv.

By Jeff Stein
Israel was singled out in 2007 as a top espionage threat against the U.S. government, including its intelligence services, in a newly published National Security Agency (NSA) document obtained by fugitive leaker Edward Snowden, according to a news report Monday.

The document also identified Israel, along with North Korea, Cuba and India, as a “leading threat” to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions.

RELATED STORY: The Israeli “Art Student” Mystery — Hundreds of Young Israelis Falsely Claiming to be Art Students Haunted Federal Facilities

The threats were listed in the NSA’s 2007 Strategic Mission List, according to the document obtained by journalist/activist Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept, an online magazine that has a close relationship with Snowden, a former NSA and CIA contractor who fled the U.S. with thousands of top-secret documents last year.

In this new document, Israel was identified by the NSA as a security threat in several areas, including “the threat of development of weapons of mass destruction” and “delivery methods (particularly ballistic and nuclear-capable cruise missiles).” The NSA also flagged Israel’s “WMD and missile proliferation activities” and “cruise missiles” as threats.

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Condoleezza Rice Cancels Commencement Speech at Rutgers University Due To Protests

Display at Washington, DC Protest by Code Pink Activists - June 4, 2008. (Photo by
IntangibleArts)

By David Smith
Former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced on Saturday on her Facebook page that she was not going to speak at the commencement at Rutgers University this year, after there were protests by students against her appearing.

The protesting students made accusations about Rice’s connection with the Iraq War. Rice wrote that commencement should be a time that is celebrated by all graduates with family and friends.

The invitation by Rutgers for me to give the commencement speech has now become a distraction for the graduates, professors and everyone at the university during the special time of graduation, said Rice.

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Another NYT-Michael Gordon Special?: Reports of Russian 'Special Forces' in Eastern Ukraine are Spearheaded by a Journalist With History of Pro-West Sham Reporting

From the New York Times graphic package of photos in
support of its article accusing Russia of sending special
forces soldiers into eastern Ukraine.

The New York Times is at it again with a lead story citing grainy photos from the post-putsch regime in Kiev as proving that Russian special forces are behind the popular uprisings in eastern Ukraine, another slanted story coauthored by Michael Gordon.


By Robert Parry
There is now a pattern to New York Times “investigative” stories that seek to pin the blame on some nefarious foreign enemy, as in the 2002 article on Iraq buying aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges; the 2013 “vector analysis” tracing sarin-laden rockets to a Syrian military base; and now a photographic analysis proving that Russian soldiers are behind unrest in eastern Ukraine.

All these stories draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations. They also pile up supportive acclamations for their conclusions from self-interested sources while treating any doubters as rubes. And, these three articles all involved reporter Michael R. Gordon.

The infamous aluminum tube story of Sept. 8, 2002, which Gordon co-wrote with Judith Miller, relied on U.S. intelligence sources and Iraqi defectors to frighten Americans with images of “mushroom clouds” if they didn’t support President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The timing played perfectly into the administration’s advertising “rollout” for the Iraq War.

Of course, the story turned out to be false and to have unfairly downplayed skeptics of the nuclear-centrifuge scenario. The aluminum tubes actually were meant for artillery, not for centrifuges. But the article provided a great impetus toward the Iraq War, which ended up killing nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Gordon’s co-author, Judith Miller, became the only U.S. journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless and shoddy reporting that contributed to the Iraq disaster. For his part, Gordon continued serving as a respected Pentagon correspondent.

Gordon’s name also showed up in a supporting role on the Times’ botched “vector analysis” of Sept. 17, 2013, which nearly helped get the United States into another Mideast war, with Syria. That story traced the flight paths of two rockets, recovered in suburbs of Damascus after the Aug. 21 sarin gas attack, back to a Syrian military base 9.5 kilometers away.

The article became the “slam-dunk” evidence that the Syrian government was lying when it denied launching the sarin attack that killed several hundred people.

However, like the aluminum tube story, the Times’ ”vector analysis” also ignored contrary evidence, such as the unreliability of one azimuth from a rocket that landed in Moadamiya because it had struck a building in its descent. That rocket also was found to contain no sarin, so it’s inclusion in the vectoring of two sarin-laden rockets made no sense.

But the Times’ story ultimately fell apart when rocket scientists analyzed the one sarin-laden rocket that had landed in the Zamalka area and determined that it had a maximum range of about two kilometers, meaning that it could not have originated from the Syrian military base.

C.J. Chivers, one of the co-authors of the article, waited until Dec. 28 to publish a halfhearted semi-retraction. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Backs Off Its Syria-Sarin Analysis.”]

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The Corporate Media Gatekeepers: An Awkward Silence - Burying The Hersh Revelations Of Obama’s Syrian Deceit

America's corporate media gatekeepers are good for only two things: Distortions and
entertainment. (Photo by Vincent Tijms)

By David Cromwell
'All governments lie', the US journalist I.F. Stone once noted, with Iraq the most blatant example in modern times. But Syria is another recent criminal example of Stone's dictum.

An article in the current edition of London Review of Books by Seymour Hersh makes a strong case that US President Obama misled the world over the infamous chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21 this year. Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai atrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam and the subsequent cover-up. He also helped bring to public attention the systematic brutality of US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq...

RELATED STORY: The Syrian Sarin Gas Scam - The Threatened US Missile Attack On Syria Was Based On Evidence Known To Be Flimsy - And Most of the Media Failed Us Again

Obama did not reveal that American intelligence agencies knew that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had the capability to manufacture considerable quantities of sarin. When the attack on Ghouta took place, 'al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.' Indeed, the 'cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.'

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