Le regime Seoudien, lui aussi, a appris ses lecons apparemment. En reponse aux premieres manifestations, le gouvernement a fait contrepoids par une campagne mediatique massive, des sermons fievreux dans les mosquees et l’inevitable presence super lourde d’agents securitaires dans tout le pays. Tous trois signes de peur d’un vieux regime assis depuis des decennies, voire meme depuis sa conception, sur la pratique de corrompre afin de gouverner.

La carte joker dans tout cela? Les chefs des tribus. L’Arabie Seoudite est essentiellement un pays forme par des tribus bedouines qui sont presentes dans les quatre coins du pays. Ces tribus et leurs chefs ont ete “achete” il y a quatre-vingt-dix ans par Abdulaziz et ont ete au service de la famille royale depuis. Inter-marriages, relations de sang, argent et positions ont ete, et sont toujours, le prix de leur silence et le prix de leur loyaute. Quelques metropoles omises, et a un moindre degre la region de l’Est (ou il y a une lourde presence Shiite), ces “cheftains” sont censes controler leurs tribus respectives: precher le secte d’Etat, le Wahhabisme; controler les moeurs; et inculquer a leur peuplade la loyaute aveugle a Al-Saud.
Ayant dit cela, des fissures existent neanmoins. Il y a eu des dissensions entre la famille royale et quelques tribus dans le passe et il y en aura certainement plus dans le futur. C’est le role de l’elite opposante de trouver ces fissures et d’en prendre avantage.

Les Seoudiens, comme des animaux de labeur, ou plus precisement, comme des animaux de compagnie, ont ete longtemps coinces entre la carotte et le baton. Ils ont toujours baisse la tete et ont avance au pas. Ils ne sont pas aussi politises que les Tunisiens ou aussi nombreux que les Egyptiens, mais ils auront le temps de s’informer, de communiquer et de s’immobiliser. Le temps et l’histoire, qui continue a se faire autour d’eux, seront leurs guides.

Al-Saud, a vos marques; faites attention; le compte a rebours a commence!

Tom Engelhardt wrote the following on ICH…

Graduates of the class of 2010, I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you.
I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a sunnier moment in this country.  We were, after all, still surfing the crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity.  The first oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon.  I never gave a thought to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen “bug” I bought with a friend my last year in college.  In those days, the oil for that gas had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not dumped in the Gulf of Mexico).  Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap.  No one thought about it — or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).

Think of it this way: in 1966, the United States was, in your terms, China, while China was just a giant, poor country, a land of — as the American media liked to write back then — “blue ants.”  Seventeen years earlier, it had, in the words of its leader Mao Ze-dong, “stood up” and declared itself a revolutionary people’s republic; but just a couple of years before I graduated, that country went nuts in something called the Cultural Revolution.

Back in 1966, the world was in debt to us.  We were the high-tech brand you wanted to own — unless, of course, you were a guerrilla in the jungles of Southeast Asia who held some quaint notion about having a nation of your own.

Here’s what I didn’t doubt then: that I would get a job.  I didn’t spend much time thinking about my working future, because American affluence and the global dominance that went with it left me unshakably confident that, when I was ready, I would land somewhere effortlessly.  The road trips of that era, the fabled counterculture, so much of daily life would be predicated on, and tied to, the country’s economic power, cheap oil, staggering productivity, and an ability to act imperially on a global stage without seeming (to us Americans at least) like an imperial entity.
I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state.  After all, we — the “sixties generation” — grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that an American government should and would hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen.  We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country.

That, I suspect, is why we took to the streets in protest — not just because we despaired of American war policy, which we did, but because under that despair we still held on tightly to a hope, which the next decades would strip from our world and your generation.  And we had hopeful models as well.  Remember, the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was still a force to be reckoned with — and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, the riots of 1968, the burning ghettoes, the shock of American troops occupying American inner cities, as yet had no reality for us.

Even in protest, there was a sense of… well, the only word I can think of is “abundance.”  At the time, everything seemed abundant.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was expansively underway in the midst of war — and even guns and butter seemed (for a while) a plausible enough combination for a country like ours.  The Peace Corps, that creation of the Kennedy presidency — which my future wife joined in 1964 — was still new and it, too, encapsulated that sense of American abundance and the hubris that went with it.  It was based, after all, on the idea that you could take a bunch of American kids like you, just out of college, with no particular skills, and ship them off with minimal training to needy nations around the world to improve life, all as part of a great Cold War publicity face-off with the Soviet Union.

And those kids, who turned out in droves to experience something bigger and better than themselves, did often enough find ingenious ways to offer limited amounts of help.  The Peace Corps was but one small measure of a pervasive sense — about to be shattered — of our country’s status as the globe’s preeminent can-do nation.  There was nothing we couldn’t do.  (Hadn’t we, after all, singlehandedly rebuilt devastated Europe and Japan after World War II?)

Then, of course, there was “the war.”  Vietnam, that is.  It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as “an American tragedy” (never a Vietnamese one).  The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come; that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of communist North Vietnam, “I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.”

The very idea of defeat — hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present — was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s “victory culture.”  Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that “meat grinder” of a war in which millions of Vietnamese (and tens of thousands of American soldiers) would die, doubt, like that oil seeping into the Louisiana marshes today, oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.

Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side — and you can thank the draft for that.  The U.S. then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army.  It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the “people’s armies” that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse.  For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft — the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia — ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most of your lives.

With rare exceptions, you, the class of 2010, live unconnected to the wars America has been fighting these last nine-plus years.  As a result, you also live in avoidance not of a draft, but of the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands.  That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now far less well known for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments.  Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from your lives (though you will, in the end, pay a price for it).

When it came to this country and its wars, my education took place not in the classroom, but extracurricularly, as part of an antiwar movement.  It involved a kind of stripping down of so much I thought I knew, so much I had been taught or simply absorbed.  Much that I had to unlearn about this country is now your birthright, for better or worse.

Can’t-Do America

Who can deny that our American world is in trouble?  Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?

You, the graduating class of 2010, are caught in a system; then again, so are our leaders.  In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who could not be mistaken for one another.  In most obvious ways — style, thinking, personality, politics, sensibility, impulses — they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems.  One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political “pragmatist” in our world.  Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places — whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, the treatment of prisoners, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other topics which matter in our lives.

This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans.  If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems.  We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.

Compared to the long-gone world I graduated into, yours seems to me little short of dystopian, even if, on the surface, it still has something of the look of American abundance.  If nothing changes in this equation, your experience, as far as I can tell, will be of ever less available, ever less decent jobs and of ever less wealth ever less well distributed, as well as of a federal government (“the bureaucracy”) that has everything to do with giant corporations, their lobbyists and publicists, and the military-industrial complex — and nothing to do with you.

You have grown increasingly used to an American world in which a war-fighting state armed with increasingly oppressive powers offers you a national security version of “safety,” directed by Fear Inc. and based on waning liberties.  You seem to me deeply affected by, but detached from, all of this.

In many ways, given our situation, your response seems reasonable enough.  The problem is: if you simply duck and go about your lives as best you can, what can this country hope for?

Do you think that it is justifiable now to call the Zionist horde that leads the Zionist hordes in Israel “ZioNazis” or is that still politically incorrect? Is it justifiable now to consider Israel as the absolute incarnation of evil, fraudulence and brutality? Since its establishment, the Zionist regime has carried out actions which contravene the international regulations and cancel out the human rights in a way or another. Only a brief look into the account of Israel’s bloody interaction with the Palestinian people over the past years shows us that this fabricated regime does not deserve “the right of existence”, as the U.S. and European officials put it periodically. So, to hell with political correctness! And to hell with those ZioNazi bastards!

The massacre that took place Monday was a premeditated operation. Israel wanted blood because it believes that its ‘power of deterrence’ expands with the more dead it leaves behind. The Israeli decision to use hundreds of commando soldiers against civilians was taken by the Israeli cabinet together with the Israeli top military commanders. What we saw Monday wasn’t just a failure on the ground. It was actually an institutional failure of a morbid society that a long time ago lost touch with humanity.

Here are a few numbers for you that will make you sick in the stomach… Since September 2000, Israel killed more than 6,300 Palestinians, most of whom were children and defenseless civilians. Israel has also demolished more than 25,000 Palestinian homes since 1967. It possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads in violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution 487. Interestingly, it receives something around $7 million of military aid from the U.S. per day. 7,383 Palestinians are being kept in the prisons of Israel. The racist regime of Israel has built 223 settlements on the Palestinians’ confiscated lands. Over the six-year period between September 2000 and February 2006, 36589 Palestinians were injured by the Israeli forces of whom 3530 Palestinians were permanently disabled or maimed. Shockingly, this six-year period was witness to the confiscation of 249680 km2 of Palestinian lands. Israeli forces even refused to overlook the Palestinian trees as they uprooted 1,187,762 Palestinian trees from 2000 to 2006. This shows the nature of the brutal regime of Israel which is even at odds with the natural resources and trees, let alone the human beings.

Lord, when will this end? Lord, is it ever going to end?

My condolences to the families of those who were murdered by the cold-blooded bastards. Their heroism will be legend and their memory will live forever. To those of us still breathing, let’s make sure that those brave souls did not die for naught. Stand united against evil wherever it is. Stand up and shout for those around you to hear, illegitimi non carborundum! Don’t let the bastards grind us down!

Here’s how it should go, or political analysis 101, if you will… First, gather all the facts. Second, identify all parties directly involved in the incident. Third, identify all parties who are or might be affected by the incident. Fourth, familiarize yourself with all the dynamics at work between each and every party you identified. Fifth, and this should come easy at this point,  determine the motives. It’s that simple!

So, here’s what we’re being fed by the MSM (mainstream media), the crap that we are supposed to believe. In the middle of a war games exercise with the US and South Korea, the North Koreans entered undetected with their non-stealth submarines and shot off a German made torpedo, again undetected by our Aegis submarine detection systems, and then stealthily snuck away. Yes, that is what we are supposed to believe! Are you kidding me?

Could it, instead, have been a war games accident which can now be strategically blamed on the North Koreans so the US and South Korea can save face? Could it be a scare tactic to make the Japanese reconsider their desire to move our Marine base off Okinawa so we continue keeping a close watch on the Chinese? Or could it be a convoluted way to try to force the Chinese to intervene with North Korea, and sanction the North Koreans from sending armaments to Israel’s enemies, Iran and Syria? Hmmm… Another recurrence of the war drum theme of the Forces of Good versus the Axis of Evil? Another fabricated disaster to pave the way for another war, much like The Gulf of Tonkan, Reichstag or even 9/11? These are all guesses, I admit, but EDUCATED ones at least, not some juvenile, over-simplified guesses meant for the consumption of “the fat and stupid” masses.

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare-the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

The former right-wing government of Greece lied about the size of the country’s budget deficit. It was not 3.7 percent of gross domestic product but 13.6 percent. And it now looks like the economies of Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal are as bad as Greece’s, which is why the euro has lost 20 percent of its value in the last few months. The few hundred billion in bailouts for other faltering European states, like our own bailouts, have only forestalled disaster. This is why the U.S. stock exchange is in free fall and gold is rocketing upward. American banks do not have heavy exposure in Greece, but Greece, as most economists concede, is only the start. Wall Street is deeply invested in other European states, and when the unraveling begins the foundations of our own economy will rumble and crack as loudly as the collapse in Athens. The corporate overlords will demand that we too impose draconian controls and cuts or see credit evaporate. They have the money and the power to hurt us. There will be more unemployment, more personal and commercial bankruptcies, more foreclosures and more human misery. And the corporate state, despite this suffering, will continue to plunge us deeper into debt to make war. It will use fear to keep us passive. We are being consumed from the inside out. Our economy is as rotten as the economy in Greece. We too borrow billions a day to stay afloat. We too have staggering deficits, which can never be repaid. Heed the dire rhetoric of European leaders.

“The euro is in danger,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told lawmakers last week as she called on them to approve Germany’s portion of the bailout plan. “If we do not avert this danger, then the consequences for Europe are incalculable, and then the consequences beyond Europe are incalculable.”

Beyond Europe means us. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the current government of George Papandreou, did what the Republicans did under George W. Bush. They looted taxpayer funds to enrich their corporate masters and bankrupt the country. They stole hundreds of millions of dollars from individual retirement and pension accounts slowly built up over years by citizens who had been honest and industrious. They used mass propaganda to make the population afraid of terrorists and surrender civil liberties, including habeas corpus. And while Bush and Karamanlis, along with the corporate criminal class they abetted, live in unparalleled luxury, ordinary working men and women are told they must endure even more pain and suffering to make amends. It is feudal rape. And there has to be a point when even the American public-which still believes the fairy tale that personal will power and positive thinking will lead to success-will realize it has been had.

We have seen these austerity measures before. Latin Americans, like the Russians, were forced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to gut social services, end subsidies on basic goods and food, and decimate the income levels of the middle class-the foundation of democracy-in the name of fiscal responsibility. Small entrepreneurs, especially farmers, were wiped out. State industries were sold off by corrupt government officials to capitalists for a fraction of their value. Utilities and state services were privatized.

What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

We are facing the collapse of the world’s financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies-much of their work done by private contractors-has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.

Dwight Macdonald laid out the consequences of a culture such as ours, where the waging of war was “the normal mode of existence.” The concept of perpetual war, which eluded the theorists behind the 19th and early 20th century reform and social movements, including Karl Marx, has left social reformers unable to deal with this effective mechanism of mass control. The old reformists had limited their focus to internal class struggle and, as Macdonald noted, never worked out “an adequate theory of the political significance of war.” Until that gap is filled, Macdonald warned, “modern socialism will continue to have a somewhat academic flavor.”

Macdonald detailed in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” the marriage between capitalism and permanent war. He despaired of an effective resistance until the permanent war economy, and the mentality that went with it, was defeated. Macdonald, who was an anarchist, saw that the Marxists and the liberal class in Western democracies had both mistakenly placed their faith for human progress in the goodness of the state. This faith, he noted, was a huge error. The state, whether in the capitalist United States or the communist Soviet Union, eventually devoured its children. And it did this by using the organs of mass propaganda to keep its populations afraid and in a state of endless war. It did this by insisting that human beings be sacrificed before the sacred idol of the market or the utopian worker’s paradise. The war state provides a constant stream of enemies, whether the German Hun, the Bolshevik, the Nazi, the Soviet agent or the Islamic terrorist. Fear and war, Macdonald understood, was the mechanism that let oligarchs pillage in the name of national security.

“Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the architects of their own enslavement,” he wrote. “This does not make the slavery less, but on the contrary more- a paradox there is no space to unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most dangerous future enemy of socialism.”

Macdonald argued that democratic states had to dismantle the permanent war economy and the propaganda that came with it. They had to act and govern according to the non-historical and more esoteric values of truth, justice, equality and empathy. Our liberal class, from the church and the university to the press and the Democratic Party, by paying homage to the practical dictates required by hollow statecraft and legislation, has lost its moral voice. Liberals serve false gods. The belief in progress through war, science, technology and consumption has been used to justify the trampling of these non-historical values. And the blind acceptance of the dictates of globalization, the tragic and false belief that globalization is a form of inevitable progress, is perhaps the quintessential illustration of Macdonald’s point. The choice is not between the needs of the market and human beings. There should be no choice. And until we break free from serving the fiction of human progress, whether that comes in the form of corporate capitalism or any other utopian vision, we will continue to emasculate ourselves and perpetuate needless human misery. As the crowds of strikers in Athens understand, it is not the banks that are important but the people who raise children, build communities and sustain life. And when a government forgets whom it serves and why it exists, it must be replaced.

“The Progressive makes History the center of his ideology,” Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man.” “The Radical puts Man there. The Progressive’s attitude is optimistic both about human nature (which he thinks is good, hence all that is needed is to change institutions so as to give this goodness a chance to work) and about the possibility of understanding history through scientific method. The Radical is, if not exactly pessimistic, at least more sensitive to the dual nature; he is skeptical about the ability of science to explain things beyond a certain point; he is aware of the tragic element in man’s fate not only today but in any collective terms (the interests of Society or the Working Class); the Radical stresses the individual conscience and sensibility. The Progressive starts off from what is actually happening; the Radical starts off from what he wants to happen. The former must have the feeling that History is ‘on his side.’ The latter goes along the road pointed out by his own individual conscience; if History is going his way, too, he is pleased; but he is quite stubborn about following ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is.’ “

Robert Naiman wrote the following in the Huffington Post earlier today…

Sao Paulo – If you get your information from major U.S. media, and you follow U.S. foreign policy, then you know that last week Iran, Brazil, and Turkey signed an agreement for Iran to ship about half of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Turkey, in exchange for subsequent Western supply of higher-enriched uranium to fuel Iran’s medical research reactor – fuel Iran needs in order to treat Iranian medical patients, fuel to which Iran is entitled as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

If you were paying close attention, you might know that the deal is quite similar to one proposed a few months ago by the United States. An initial AP story on the Washington Post‘s website last Monday – which I cited at the time – said the agreement was “nearly identical” to the deal the U.S. was pressing for, although by the end of the day the AP article on the Post‘s website had been revised to downgrade this comparison to “mirrors.” [The original AP story is still visible here.] U.S. officials have dismissed the deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey, even though the deal is “nearly identical” to the one proposed by the U.S. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, U.S. officials are “thoroughly irritated” with Turkey for its role in mediating the agreement.

But if you get your information from major U.S. media, here’s something that you almost certainly don’t know: Brazil and Turkey say that before they reached the deal, they understood that they had the backing of the Obama Administration for their efforts. The available evidence suggests that Brazil and Turkey had good reason to believe that they had U.S. support, and that the Obama Administration has taken a 180 degree turn in its position in the last few weeks, and is now trying to cover its tracks, with the active collaboration of major U.S. media.

Reuters reports from Brasilia – in an article you won’t find on the web sites of the New York Times or the Washington Post:

Brazil argues Washington and other Western powers had prodded Brazil to try to revive the U.N. fuel swap deal proposed last October.”We were encouraged directly or indirectly … to implement the October proposal without any leeway and that’s what we did,” said Amorim.

In a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva two weeks ago, U.S. president Barack Obama said an Iranian uranium shipment abroad would generate confidence.

“From our point of view, a decision by Iran to send 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium abroad, would generate confidence and reduce regional tensions by cutting Iran’s stockpile,” Obama said, according to excerpts from the letter translated into Portuguese and seen by Reuters.

I haven’t seen any reference to this letter from President Obama to President Lula in the U.S. press – have you? But in Brazil, this letter from Obama to Lula was front-page news on Saturday morning – I saw it on the front-page of O Estado de S. Paulo, above the fold.

Note that the Reuters story, dated May 22, says Obama sent this letter two weeks ago. The deal was announced Monday, May 17. So, about a week before the deal was announced, Obama told Lula that from the U.S. point of view a decision by Iran to send 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium abroad would generate confidence and reduce regional tensions. Note furthermore that Obama’s words – according to Reuters, this is a direct quote from Obama’s letter – actually specify an exact amount of transfer that would “generate confidence”: 1,200 kilograms, exactly what was agreed a week later. So the U.S. officials and media stenographers (like Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post – “Iran creates illusion of progress in nuclear negotiations“) saying a 1,200 kilogram transfer would have been great in October but would be worthless now are directly contradicting what President Obama himself wrote to President Lula one week before the deal was announced. But if course you wouldn’t know about that direct contradiction from the U.S. media, because in the U.S. media, the letter from Obama to Lula apparently doesn’t exist.

Morever, Brazil says that before the deal, no-one raised the issue of Iran’s 20% enrichment as an obstacle:

“It wasn’t on the agenda. Nobody told us, ‘Hey if you don’t stop 20 percent enrichment, forget the deal’,” said [Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso] Amorim.

So, if Brazil is telling the truth – and there is no evidence that they are not – then this means that President Obama’s letter to Lula did not raise the 20% objection, and the excerpt provided by Reuters suggests that it didn’t.

So far, I’ve seen one clear reference in U.S. media to claims by Brazil and Turkey that they had the Obama Administration’s backing in pursuing negotiations: not in a news article, but in an International Herald Tribune column by Roger Cohen reprinted by the New York Times, “America Moves the Goalposts.”

Cohen wrote:

No wonder Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, is angry. I believe him when he says Obama and U.S. officials encouraged Turkey earlier this year to revive the deal: “What they wanted us to do was give the confidence to Iran to do the swap. We have done our duty.”

Cohen’s explanation for the Obama Administration’s stunning flip-flop? Domestic politics:

I believed Obama was ready to think anew on Iran. It seems not. Presidents must lead on major foreign policy initiatives, not be bullied by domestic political considerations, in this case incandescent Iran ire on the Hill in an election year.

Last year, the Administration concluded that Iran wasn’t ready to negotiate with the U.S. because of Iranian domestic politics. Now, it seems, the United States isn’t ready to deal because the Obama Administration is afraid of Congress.

It’s a shame we don’t have a leader in the White House right now who is ready to lead on this issue.

Philip Giraldi wrote the following on AntiWar.com …

There have been recent reports that Iran has enabled the travel of al-Qaeda leaders to Afghanistan and Pakistan where they will be able to confront and kill American soldiers.  If you think you have heard the story before, you have, in another context.  In the earlier rendition it was Saddam Hussein who was hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda, helping the group in its nefarious planning to attack the United States and kill Americans.  Saddam, who was in reality only a threat to his own people, was on the receiving end of a barrage of fabricated information claiming that he was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction and clandestinely dealing with the terrorists who were responsible for 9/11.  Or so the story goes.  And now it is Iran’s turn and the story and the storytellers are exactly the same.

Even when everything changes, nothing changes for the American mainstream media (MSM), which continues to be wedded to a policy of all war all the time. There is a long history of media lies. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal used deliberately sensationalized news reports to stir up hysteria in 1897 that led to war with Spain, a war that he later boasted had been enabled by his newspaper.  But other leading American newspapers of that era were a lot more cautious in their reporting and some even lampooned Hearst’s hysterics in the lead-up to the conflict.  Today it is different as newspapers rarely compete for market share and have no interest in exposing the half-truths of their peers.  The unanimity of view is particularly evident on the editorial pages where the neocons and the groupthink that they have fostered have become deeply embedded.  Everyone in the MSM agrees that Iran either already has nukes or is about to go nuclear and that the country shelters terrorists on every block, all colluding to attack a completely innocent and guileless United States.  Saturated with the propaganda, the American public more or less accepts that narrative.

How we Americans have arrived at this sorry point is somewhat difficult to explain.  That most media outlets have become parts of much larger corporations that are uninterested in challenging authority, making their news coverage a large dose of pablum, is clearly part of the problem.  The closure of most overseas newspaper bureaus hasn’t helped either as it has reduced the number of local reporters who might have applied their own insider knowledge to developing stories.  Also the use of embedded journalists in war coverage has meant that only reporters writing stories favorable to the Pentagon spin are given access to the “hot information.”  But the biggest factor has been the de facto takeover of many editorial pages by hardliners who perversely believe that the United States can resolve its problems by continuing with the so-called “long war,” a conflict in which Washington is fated to engage in never ending struggles against an enemy that is increasingly being seen around the world as all Muslims.

The media hypes the threat and keeps the story going so the public is acquiescent as more Americans die and countless billions of dollars are thrown down a money pit.  This is frequently accomplished by redirecting the narrative when the truth is somehow unpalatable.  If, for example, Israel’s bestiality towards the Palestinians is creating danger for American soldiers deployed overseas it is far better to write instead about how deeply concerned Israelis are about the “existential” threat coming from Iran.  That ignores the actual clear and present danger to Americans and moves the discussion to the completely theoretical threat experienced by Israelis, reinforcing along the way the old narrative about Jews as victims, not as persecutors.

How this process works in practice with Iran is not too dissimilar to the way it worked with Saddam.  Make up a bunch of garbage and let it fly, hoping that some of it might stick.  Readers of Antiwar.com might recall the phony Iranian nuclear triggers allegations that Gareth Porter and I put to rest back in January.  The Sunday Times of London, which is owned by Zionist stalwart Rupert Murdoch, has an astonishing track record for floating stories that in all likelihood come from Israel’s intelligence service Mossad.  The Times story, which claimed that Iran was developing an electronic trigger for a nuclear weapon in 2007, was important because if it had been true it would have meant that the December 2007 CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was flawed.  The NIE had maintained (and the intelligence community still maintains) that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  Undermining that judgment has been a key objective of the various neocon talking heads, all claiming that Iran has a secret program that the CIA does not know about.  The nuclear trigger story would have challenged the main conclusion of the NIE while also serving as confirmation of the allegations about the hidden nuclear laboratory, so it would have been a two-for-one if it had been accepted.  Fortunately, the story proved so full of holes that it went nowhere, but not for lack of trying.

Which brings us to the tale being spun by the Associated Press (AP).  If nukes are number one in the Iran narrative, terrorists are certainly number two.  And if allegations about Hezbollah and Hamas don’t excite you what could be better than producing a link to the ultimate nasties, al-Qaeda?   A week ago an investigative story was featured as an AP Exclusive:  “CIA tracks al-Qaeda moving from Iran.”  The account is based on the fact that a handful of al-Qaeda officers, including at least one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, fled to Iran after the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and were subsequently placed under house arrest. They have been there ever since.

The AP story claims that there is intelligence suggesting that some of the detainees have now been released.  The authors of the story opine that the change in policy is so al-Qaeda can “replenish its ranks.”  They cite a number of “current and former” intelligence officers as their sources but actually only quote two former CIA officers who apparently claim to have current knowledge about the movement of the terrorists.  The other sources are anonymous and it is not even completely clear if they are all American. One of the cited authorities, Bruce Riedel, has been retired from the Agency since 2006 and now works at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute.  How Riedel would have access to highly sensitive information on the movement of al-Qaeda is by no means evident and the article does not reveal his connection to Haim Saban, a Hollywood billionaire whose deep attachment to Israel is well documented.

The second CIA officer is Clare Lopez, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, which claims to be non-partisan but is basically a pro-Israel Muslim-bashing organization, as revealed by its website.  Leading neocon Frank Gaffney is the founder and president.  Lopez retired from CIA at some point prior to 2005, so she has been out of the loop even longer than Riedel.  Is the AP story being honest about the likely reliability and possible biases of its sources?  Apparently not.

The AP story’s contention that al-Qaeda is “replenishing its ranks” is nowhere supported by evidence that any of the detainees has shown up in any terrorist operation.  Nor is it clear how a handful of detainees could effectively replenish anything.  The account also ignores one fundamental problem in depicting a pattern of Iranian-al-Qaeda interaction.  Al-Qaeda is a Sunni fundamentalist group that thinks that Shi’ite Muslims are heretics and should be killed.  Iranians are predominantly Shi’ites.  It is hardly a basis for bonhomie.  And the account is sprinkled with questionable commentary, like the assertion that Iran “has historically allowed al-Qaeda members safe passage through the country,” which is flat out untrue.  The speculation that the departure of some al-Qaeda from Iran “foreshadows the release of al-Qaeda’s ‘management council,’ including some of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous figures” is also advanced without any evidence, apparently to hype the danger.  Even if it is true that some of the al-Qaeda are being released it is not credible to believe that a handful of men who have been under house arrest for nine years will suddenly appear in Pakistan and make magic, particularly as their prior to 2001 experience would count for little as both al-Qaeda and the American response to it have shifted dramatically since that time. Also, al-Qaeda would not be likely to trust the returnees, suspecting, not unreasonably, that they had been turned by the Iranians and were actually little more than spies for Tehran.

The AP story received considerable replay in the usual places, including on NPR, increasingly a shameless promoter of neocon foreign policy.  Thoroughly indoctrinated by propaganda, most readers or listeners would not question the fantasy tale of a handful of aging al-Qaeda men appearing from nowhere and using their ancient wisdom to turn the tables on the US Army.  And most would also unthinkingly buy into the explicit linkage of Iran to active support of the most reprehensible type of terrorists.  Ironically, Adolph Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, responsible for orchestrating the Third Reich’s media, best explained what is happening in today’s America vis-à-vis Iran.  He wrote, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

The juvenile “draw Muhammad” day has generally been avoided by professional editorial cartoonists. One Islamophobic theme apparent in the writing on it is that Muslims are peculiar in their thin-skinned responses to such assaults on their religious sensibilities and that members of other religions never riot or protest. This assertion is not only bigoted but it is silly. So here are some other needlessly offensive cartoon-drawing days that could be adopted by the jerks bothering Muslims today, just to show that they are jerks toward other communities as well. All these subjects have produced vigorous protests or rioting and violence among members of other religious traditions. Me, I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

10. Cartoons of Hindu goddesses or of Mother India, nude.

9. Cartoon of a Haredi Jewish woman locked up in an insane asylum by secular Jewish authorities in Israel.

8. Buddha with girls in bikini: In Sri Lanka this spring “Buddhist extremists attacked the offices of Sirasa Media, who in cooperation with the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau was organizing the tour for Akon . . . an American pop singer of Senegalese extraction. The protesters were offended by Akon’s latest video “Sexy Chick,” which shows bikini-clad women dancing at a pool party, while in the background stands a statue of the Buddha.”

7. Cartoon showing a rape in a Sikh temple.

6. Cartoon showing Moses as gay lover.

5. Cartoon of Christians shooting down a Hindu pandit in India.

4. Cartoon of Irish Catholic neighborhoods festooned with banners showing a crown on a bible– celebrating the victory on 12 July 1690 of Protestant King William of Orange over his Catholic rival as king, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne near Belfast. It was such provocations by Protestants that kicked off decades of Troubles in Northern Ireland that left nearly 4000 dead and led to several major bombings of London.

3. Cartoon of witch casting a spell on an African soccer match.

2. Cartoon of Hindu Goddess Lakshmi eating a Burger King Texas Whopper. (Hint: Hindus hold cows sacred and forbid the consuming of beef.)

1. Cartoons showing people parking cars in Jerusalem on Saturday.