The Canadian authorities linked the two to al-Qaeda factions in Iran, to the surprise of some security experts.
“The individuals were receiving support from al-Qaeda elements located in Iran,” Mr Malizia said.
Iran did host some senior al-Qaeda figures under a form of house arrest in the years following the September 11, 2001, attacks, but there has been little to no evidence to date of joint attempts to execute violence against the West.
However, a US government source said Iran was home to a little-known network of alleged al-Qaeda fixers and “facilitators” based in the city of Zahedan, very close to Iran's borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Both the critics and the admirers of the Central Intelligence Agency have tended to portray it as an all-knowing, all-powerful, invulnerable entity and to exaggerate the ability of America's spies to determine the outcome of developments around the world. An American reporter interviewing an ordinary citizen—or an official—in Cairo, Buenos Aires, or Seoul may hear that “everyone knows” that the CIA was behind the latest rise in the price of vegetables or the recent outbreak of flu among high-school kids. It’s like you Americans aren't aware of what's obvious (wink, wink).
New histories of the agency, drawing on recently released classified information and memoirs by retired spies, provide a more complex picture of the CIA, its effectiveness, and its overall power, suggesting that at times Langley was manned not by James Bond clones but by a bunch of keystone cops. My favorite clandestine CIA operation, recounted in Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, involves its 1994 surveillance of the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee. When the agency bugged her bedroom, it picked up sounds that led agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary. Actually, she was petting her two-year-old black standard poodle.
Fifty years ago, during the Cuban missile crisis, the United States faced what is frequently described as the defining challenge of the Cold War. Today, some argue that America is facing a similarly defining challenge from Iran’s nuclear activities. In this context, it is striking to recall President John Kennedy’s warning, proffered just months before the missile crisis, that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Half a century later, Kennedy’s warning applies all too well to America’s discussion — it hardly qualifies as a real debate — about how best to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For more than thirty years, American analysts and policy-makers have put forward a series of myths about the Islamic Republic: that it is irrational, illegitimate and vulnerable. In doing so, pundits and politicians have consistently misled the American public and America’s allies about what policies will actually work to advance US interests in the Middle East.
Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability.
Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright military strikes to prevent Iran’s presumed inexorable march towards that capability, one thing keeps getting overlooked: Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear weapon.
How is that possible? As states go, Iran has a reasonably well-developed scientific and industrial infrastructure, an educated workforce capable of working with advanced technologies, and lots of money. If Pakistan, starting from a much lower level, could develop nuclear weapons, why hasn’t Iran?
Agree that we are at a potentially historic transition point. However, the Atlantic Council lacks the strategic analytic model to make the most of its otherwise formidable brain trust. Agree on the need for a new mental map, but they chose the wrong map. See the HourGlass Strategy as an alternative (also below the line).
The report misses multiple big possibilities including the eight tribes, M4IS2, and OSE.
1. Frame second-term policies from a more strategic and long-term perspective, recognizing the magnitude of the moment and the likelihood that the United States’ actions now will have generational consequences.
Absolutely. Understanding emergent public governance trends rooted in true cost and whole system analytics, which harness the distributed intelligence of the five billion poor, not in this report.
2. Continue to emphasize what has been called “nation-building at home” as the first foreign policy priority, without neglecting its global context.
Left unsaid is the need to establish a plan, coincident with the creation of a 450-ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, and an air-liftable Army, to close most of our military bases around the world, and bring all of our troops – and their purchasing power – home.
Jeffrey St Claire, the editor at Counterpunch has given me permission to distribute the attached essay, “The Arab Spring at the Crossroads,” by Esam Al-Amin. It was published in the subscription edition of Counterpunch and is not available at the CP website. Al-Amin, who I do not know, has written a very informative summary of the crosscurrents now shaping the Arab world. This is a subject of very great importance to the welfare of all Americans. I urge you to read it carefully.
In addition to being informative, Al-Amin's essay is a prime example of the quality of the information now available in what the mainstream media likes to call the alternative press. This brings me to my second reason for writing this blaster. Counterpunch is having a rare fundraising drive and I am taking what for me is an unprecedented action of urging you to contribute. I think it is important to support alternative news/opinion outlets like Antiwar.com, Truthout, Alternet, and especially, since I am biased, Counterpunch. (Truth in advertising: I counted the late editor Alex Cockburn and still count his co-editor Jeffrey St Claire as friends.)
So, I urge you read the essay below — you can determine whether or not you think it stands on its own merits. If you feel this is the kind of info worth paying a little for, I encourage you to think about purchasing a subscription or a gift sub for a friend or relative or sending a small tax-deductible donation to CP's secure sever. The Counterpunchers promise they won’t contact you to shake you down for more money or sell your name to any lists–not Karl Rove’s and especially not MoveOn’s. To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
CounterPunch Volume 19 Number 17, >October 1-15, 2012, published October 2, 2012
Ever since Napoléon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, the relationship between the West and the Arab-Muslim East has been contentious and convoluted. Although this military leader of the first French Republic conquered Egypt for strategic reasons in his rivalry with the British and the Ottomans, the Muslim Arabs of the region – later dubbed “the Middle East” by an American naval officer – felt vulnerable, exposed, and weak.
For all the years that the world has focused on the confrontation between Western nations and Iran, oceans of ink have been spilled over many aspects of its nuclear program — the quantity and quality of its enriched uranium, various UN Security Council resolutions, the number of Iranian centrifuges, IAEA safeguards, compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, diplomatic negotiations, red lines, U.S. and Israeli attack scenarios, possible Iranian responses, the impact of a nuclear Iran, and so on.
Yet, almost nothing has been written about one critical factor: the impact on Iranian civilians, if the U.S. and/or the Israelis were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
That vacuum has now been filled, thanks to a recent lengthy report — The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble: The Human Cost of Military Strikes Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities. It was authored by Khosrow Semnani, an Iranian-American industrialist and philanthropist with extensive experience in the industrial management of nuclear waste and chemicals.
The University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and Omid for Iran, a nonprofit organization based in Salt Lake City, Utah, published the assessment. Author Semnani has provided support for conferences and educational initiatives in the United States.
The report examined various military options against different sites but regardless – perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise — the news was horrifyingly bad for Iraqi civilians. Iran insists its nuclear-development efforts are for peaceful purposes, and that it has no desire to build atomic weapons.
