Iran 116

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Nuclear Weapons program, Al-Qaeda Links, Mahdi Milita Support, Terrorism Ties, Religious Badging, Hostage-Taking, EFP Supply, Genocide Plans, etc.

Iran: a Chronology of Disinformation
By GARY LEUPP

Larisa Alexandrovna has recently written an excellent article detailing the neoconservatives' six-year long project to use American power to attack and produce regime change in Iran. Appended to the piece is a timeline including key Bush administration statements about Iran, "news" stories and neocon writings abetting efforts to vilify Iran, and the antics of such characters as former Congressman Curt Weldon, Iran-Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, and spy-for-Israel Larry Franklin who have worked to facilitate that attack. I've used it as the basis for this more elaborate (although surely incomplete and imperfect) chronology.
2002
On January 29, 2002, President Bush gave his State of the Union speech featuring the now infamous formulation "axis of evil" contrived by speechwriter and Richard Perle cohort David Frum. (Frum currently writes a regular column for the extreme rightwing National Review, arguing among other things that Iran is supporting al-Qaeda-related Iraqi Sunni groups.) Iran was of course included in that "axis" alongside Saddam's Iraq and North Korea. The conceptual sloppiness of the phrase puzzled world leaders, while its bizarre linkage of dissimilar regimes alarmed mainstream scholarship. But for mass consumption it successfully conflated disparate targets and vaguely associated Iran with the Evil represented by the 9-11 attacks.
On August 14, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (led by the armed Iranian dissident movement Mujahedin-E-Khalq or MEK) held a press conference in Washington D.C. and announced that Iran was constructing a secret nuclear facility near the city of Natanz. The MEK had long been (and still is) listed as a "terrorist" organization by the State Department, and had been under the protection of Saddam Hussein's regime since the 1980s although disarmed by U.S. forces following the Iraq invasion. But the Bush administration seized upon the report (while Cheney and the neocons pressed for a reconsideration of MEK's status). In February 2003 the International Atomic Energy Agency visited the Natanz site, finding centrifuge machines. Iran declared that the facility was part of a civilian nuclear energy program.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) criticized Iran for concealing this and other nuclear facilities and demanded that Iran submit to rigorous inspections of its nuclear sites. In December Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program and allowed such inspections, which have not to this day produced evidence for a nuclear weapons program. But the concealment in violation of IAEA rules (by no means unprecedented among Non-Proliferation Treaty signatories, such as close U.S. ally South Korea) was presented by the U.S. administration as virtual proof for an illegal nuclear weapons program.
2003
In January 2003, according to a New York Times report published in 2006, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation [with Iraq], including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire." In other words, the two leaders discussed the possibility of provoking an attack that could be represented as Iranian aggression against the "international community" in order to generate public support for a planned regime change operation.'

Lees verder: http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02172007.html