Month: September 2010

Never trust a bureaucracy. This should perhaps go without saying but the singularly remarkable series of events which has ended in my feeling the need to pen a formal denial of a bizarre accusation has reinforced the belief in my mind, and perhaps after reading this, it will have done so for you as well.

Over the Labor Day weekend it came to my attention that Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), an official part of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government of the United States of America, had penned an article entitled “A Name, A Phenomenon, An Iranian Website.” The article concerned a relatively anonymous and heretofore to me unknown website with an Iranian domain name, BarackObama.ir.

Which is perhaps an odd enough thing for Radio Free Europe to be concerning itself with, but in the course of insinuations about the site’s possible links to the Iranian government, and its role as part of a post-2009 election attempt by the Ahmadinejad government to “artificially construct” a presence a funny thing happened and the article became about me.

Well not so much about me, but the author speculates that I personally was either “recruited to write exclusive for BarackObama.ir or agreed to share (my) content” with a site that the article makes very clear is up to some dastardly deed on behalf of the Iranian government. They add “or neither” parenthetically later on but it seems pretty clear this is an afterthought.

My first thought was “why me,” as the website has lifted content (entirely without permission) from countless writers, including many much more well known than I. With such luminaries as John Pilger and Tom Engelhardt also having had content copied and pasted by this site, it seems odd that my name should be singled out for scrutiny.

But I assure you that I, Jason Ditz, am not now nor have I ever been an agent provocateur for any government, let alone the Iranian one. The fact that such a proclamation has to be made is perhaps a lesson in the absurd state of affairs for a radio station that has gone from Cold War propagandist to CIA proxy to forgotten (but still funded) ward of the government.

After all the speculations about my so-called relationship with that website or, for that matter, the Iranian government, could have been readily cleared up with a phone call or a simple email. My contact information has never been difficult to find, and with the administration’s “Broadcasting Board of Governors” insisting these sites maintain the highest standards of journalism one wonders how such content is invented, let alone published as what one is supposed to accept as “official policy” without even cursory fact-checking.

In the era of the Internet wild accusations gain a remarkable level of currency across broad swathes of society, and certainly people making up stories is nothing new. It’s just that these stories usually aren’t backed by $90 million annually of taxpayer funding.

Which is perhaps the real story here. With the Cold War long since over and virtually the whole of Europe long ago freed from totalitarianism why on earth does Radio Free Europe still exist as a federally funded program? Despite federal law openly forbidding them from duplicating any service provided by private media their website appears to cater primarily to American audiences with content that is by and large culled from private wire services. The service pumps its content, such as it is, to a handful of nations in Central Asia and the Near East, but its era of dropping leaflets into enemy countries and fomenting revolutions in Hungary is clearly past. Its attempts to reinvent itself as a “model of media professionalism” on the taxpayer’s dime seems downright silly, when at the end of the day they are eagerly (and inexplicably) muck-raking about my non-existent ties with Iran.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for September 10th, 2010:

The Washington Post: The Post’s editorial board writes that while sanctions have constricted the Iranian economy, the White House “has yet to produce tangible results” in bringing Iran into compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The editorial cites the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report which says that there has been no change in Iran’s accumulation of low-enriched uranium. If Iran is diverting weapon-grade uranium to a secret facility, then “economic sanctions are unlikely to prevent it,” warns the Post.

The National: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the U.S.’s encouragement of democratic forces in Iran, saying that support from Washington does not undermine or endanger them. Clinton told a group of policy experts that Iran was becoming a “military dictatorship.” “There is a very… sad confluence of events occurring inside Iran that I think eventually — but I can’t put a time frame on it — the Iranian people themselves will respond to,” Clinton reportedly told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this week.

The National: Jason Shams complains of a “lack of understanding that persists about Iran” in Washington, noting the absence of a U.S. embassy in Tehran that forces reliance on severely limited sources of information. The result is a U.S. policy on Iran that has been “a total blunder”: “The drums of war in Washington have helped the Iranian government crush the civil rights movement; the U.S. hawkish policies are used by hardliners in Iran to rally political forces to their cause.” Shams adds that sanctions have allowed the elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) to consolidate its power over industry. “With its ineffective policies, the U.S. government has been the main obstacle for moderates in the Middle East,” he writes. He concludes that U.S. diplomats on the ground, in a U.S. interests section that mirrors the Iranian office in Washington, would gain a granular knowledge of both street level and elite politics and Iran.

Foreign Policy: William Tobey, who served in the National Nuclear Security Administration under George W. Bush, writes on FP’s Shadow Government blog that the latest IAEA report exemplifies Iran’s unwillingness to cooperate with the international community and highlights the failure of sanctions to make any meaningful headway in slowing Iran’s nuclear program. Tobey argues that sanctions targeting the IRGC and others seen as responsible for the nuclear program are counter-intuitive because such elite groups are well insulated from sanctions and are “committed militants.” The solution, he suggests, is to expand sanctions to broaden the portion of Iranian society which will “feel the costs” of the nuclear program. “As Iran marches towards nuclear capability, further delay will only narrow our options to a choice between the unacceptable and the unthinkable,” he concludes.

Foreign Policy: Our IPS colleague Omid Memarian interviews Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the daughter of Iran’s powerful opposition figure Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. She speaks of a hopelessness in Iranian politics and, asked about a potential meeting between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Barack Obama, she says, “I don’t think anyone is waiting for any positive change in Iran’s internal or foreign politics or putting too much hope on it.” She says Iran’s leaders need a “wake-up call” and, in her next thought, positively cites the Iraqi experience: “Didn’t the people of Iraq join with foreigners who attacked their country in order to free themselves from injustice and to save themselves and their country? Was this their initial demand, or did their deteriorating conditions lead them to this? It won’t be a bad idea to review history from time to time.”

After Approving Release of Book Pentagon Scrambles to Buy Every Single Copy

The Pentagon spends an inordinate amount of time demanding changes and redactions to books to “protect national security,” but the mass destruction of a book already in print? It may sound far-fetched but that is exactly what is happening.

Having signed off on the publication (with a number of changes) of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s memoir “Operation Dark Heart” the publisher went on with plans for an August 31 release. But then the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) still wasn’t happy, insisting the book still would cause “serious damage to national security.”

Which is why despite being “out” for over a week the book is out of stock literally everywhere. Because the Pentagon is in talks to buy every single copy in the world. And then destroy them.

Which seems like sort of an odd strategy, because if the book has already been cleared for publishing it seems like the publisher will just keep printing more, if for no other reason than to sell them to the military for destruction. Moreover, it seems only a matter of time before such a high-selling book, which seems destined for the oddest Best Seller list of all time, becomes an e-Book or an audio book, at which case it will be infinitely reproducible.

The Ninth Circuit court of federal appeals embraced the Obama and Bush administration’s spurious arguments that Americans cannot be permitted to know the details of Bush-era torture. But the court, in one of the most optimistic moments in recent judicial history, declared that its decision “does not preclude the government from honoring the fundamental principles of justice.”

Of course, the executive branch doesn’t have to honor any such principles – because the court permitted them to hide their crimes behind the doctrine of “state secrets.”

Amazingly, Judge Alex Kozinski – often reputed to be the most libertarian-leaning appellate judge in America – cast the deciding vote in favor of immunity for torturers in the 6-5 decision.

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece on the ruling.

As the mothers of Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, have spent the last year pacing up and down in the private hell of not knowing whether they will ever see their children again, the Iranians who are detaining the ostensibly luckless hikers have dickered around, threatened and thrown out small bones of hope. Their latest: they plan to release one — just one, and we don’t know which — of the Americans on the Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, as a traditional gesture of faith and good will. This is to take place on Saturday, according to reports today.

While the news is not unwelcome, it will be painfully difficult for the mothers of the two detainees left behind. But if it has to be one, no doubt they are hoping it’s Sarah, who has told her mother in fleeting phone calls that she is ill — apparently, a breast lump and precancerous cervical cells — but her Iranian captors will not give her access to medical treatment. She has been in solitary confinement, while the men are sharing a cell, according to reports. The three have been accused of entering Iran with the intention of spying, though they have insisted they were captured in Iraqi Kurdistan near the border, and never had any intention of going into Iran. They were taken in July 2009.

It is clear they are pawns in a much greater battle of wills between the Iranian regime and the American government, which has succeeded in the last year to impose greater sanctions on Iran and is seeking even more over the Persians’ alleged nuclear weapons program. But to engage in this kind of revenge on three young people who by all reports have spent much of the last several years working in underdeveloped regions and learning about and working for social justice in the Muslim world, is the height of perversity.

On a side note, Bauer is a great and sensitive writer who shed amazing light on the Iraqi Special Forces (brought to you by America’s finest) just before he was jailed. “Iraq’s New Death Squad” is an important read and probably didn’t make him many friends within the military either. Our own Scott Horton interviewed Bauer in June 2009 — you can listen here.

Unfortunate technical difficulties today preempt the LRN edition of Antiwar Radio. Please join Scott Horton this afternoon on KPFK at 4pm Pacific for a one hour special on Iran.