Iran=CIA Connection?
I am picking up from various groups some information on Iran that is not simply an analysis of what the mainstream media is saying. The whole situation there stinks of manipulation from the CIA.
Campaign Iran put out this statement on Iran today.
“Campaign Iran: Support democracy struggle, not Western hijack
June 21st, 2009
In light of the current events in Iran, Campaign Iran has decided to issue a statement regarding our position on the elections and the subsequent wave of protests.
Campaign Iran is an organisation which works solely with the aim of halting the threat of war and the continuing sanctions on Iran. Therefore, we clearly do not express an opinion on individual candidates within the Iranian election, nor any particular preference.
However, as an activist based campaign we always support the right of protest and condemn the repression of any demonstrations in Iran from the state. We support democracy and human rights in Iran and believe that the current movement which has taken to the streets vindicates our position that the Iranian people, and only the Iranian people, have the ability and the right to make change in Iran as they best see fit. It is clear that the democracy movement can fight its own battles and we support their struggle.
Through the revolution of 1979 Iranian society rejected the colonial mindset of foreign influence and still carries this position today. Those who argue for a ‘war of liberation’ can look both to the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition we strongly believe that the current situation must not be used as an excuse for war or further sanctions. We fear that any instability within the country could be used as a pretext to launch an attack on Iran and we, along with the Iranian people, stoutly reject such an eventuality. We stand against the hijacking of this movement from any western power, in order to weaken Iran as an obstacle to imperialism.
We call on international anti-war activists to support the right of Iranians to protest and bring about change, free from the influence of Western leaders. We must continue to play our role and limit the threat of war which only serves to strangle any movements for change.”
This is an article I found on the Prison Planet site.
“Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?”
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counter-punch
Saturday, June 20, 2009
A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Tehran. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.
The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.
As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.
There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs’ lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad’s attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.
Commentators are “explaining” the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad’s win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.
On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”
On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”
On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”
The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine. It requires total blindness not to see this.
Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.
Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘color’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”
I don’t know about a CIA inspired plot to overthrow the Iranian government, it could be true, it certainly has all the required aspects. Obama certainly was no idiot when he made his speech in Cairo. The fact that it could be a coordinated effort with the CIA is chilling. I could see that Obama is a smart operator, I did not know he was as ruthless as this would make him appear. Being willing to sacrifice Iranian lives for the sake of American and Israeli foreign policy is pretty much what we would have expected from the Republicans and the Clinton Democrats. We can see now that Obama has not fallen too far from that tree.
Remember the Baluchistan rebels that the CIA was supporting in hopes that they would overthrow the Iranian government? Here is an article about that from Prospect Magazine.
“Balochistan’s rebels
by Willem Marx
Is the US providing covert support to Baloch rebels in Iran? If so, what does this say about its support for Musharraf in Pakistan?
Willem Marx is a freelance journalist based in New York
Discuss this article at First Drafts, the Prospect blog
The Toyota pick-up truck roared through the green gates into the dusty walled compound and juddered to a halt inches from a small well. Eight figures, their faces swathed in cloth, stood up stiffly from their crouched positions before clambering down. They lifted their weapons gingerly from the floor where they had lain concealed. I counted five semi-automatics, a light machine gun and a green rocket-propelled grenade launcher before the vehicle’s driver slammed his door. Iran’s most wanted terrorist walked towards me with his hand extended, a dazzlingly white smile beneath a Pashtun hat.
But 24-year-old Abdulmalik Rigi is not Pashtun, he’s Baloch—an ethnic minority that straddles an area across southeast Iran, southwest Pakistan and south Afghanistan. In February, the Iranian city of Zahedan was hit by a bomb—for which Rigi claimed responsibility—that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards, and placed Rigi at the top of Tehran’s hit list. A series of American media reports had linked Rigi’s guerrilla attacks to a wider US-sponsored covert war against Iran. Rigi had agreed to meet me, a western journalist, to publicly refute these allegations, which he says have been levelled against his group by the mullahs of Iran.
Balochistan is a vast expanse of territory separating the middle east from the Indian subcontinent (see below—the Baloch region is coloured pink). The Baloch people are ethnically heterogeneous but united by their language and culture, and their Sunni Islam faith. In the late 19th century, the highly tribal Baloch homeland was carved up by British India, Afghanistan and Persia, and the Baloch have thus never enjoyed a modern sovereign state. Nevertheless, the difficult terrain kept the Baloch relatively isolated, allowing them to preserve a centuries-old cultural heritage, and in both Iran and Pakistan they have offered armed resistance to central government control since the early 20th century.
Today, Afghanistan’s chaos has spilled over its southern borders into the contiguous Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan provinces. Afghan refugees have been flooding the northern edges of Pakistan’s Baloch territory, while arms and narcotics smuggling into Iran prop up the local economy among the largely unemployed Baloch youth. Smuggled Iranian oil products fuel swathes of Pakistani Balochistan, and convoys of pick-up trucks—overloaded with diesel barrels—regularly arrive in plain sight at any one of a dozen border towns inside Pakistani territory. (A veteran Baloch guerrilla commander told me that a large part of Abdulmalik Rigi’s revenue comes from tolls levied on illicit trade in the area he controls. Rigi denied personal involvement in smuggling, but acknowledged that some members of his organisation might not be so scrupulous).
I witnessed Pakistani policemen accepting bribes from truck drivers carrying several dozen such barrels, but the security forces here are disliked for other reasons. According to Pakistan’s Commission for Human Rights, several hundred ethnic Baloch are missing and unaccounted for in the province. Some are human rights activists, political leaders and journalists, but many more are simply ordinary workers picked up at police checkpoints and never heard from again. I met countless families with stories of loved ones who had gone missing, they said, for expressing Baloch nationalist sentiments.
Abdulmalik Rigi and I settled on a shaded mat, surrounded by dwarf palms, at the outskirts of a small village on the mountainous Pakistan-Iran border that had been chosen for our rendezvous. As his eight young fighters sat around, fingering their weapons and laughing at their leader’s jokes about “cowardly Iranian soldiers,” Rigi told me similar horror stories from Iranian Balochistan, while denying that he was a Washington stooge. He claimed to be fighting for Baloch minority rights, and says he hopes to replace Iran’s current theocracy with a federal union, a “United States of Iran.” Affable and impassioned, he willingly discussed his group’s weapons, tactics and martyred members.
What had driven him to fight the Iranian government? I asked. He told me how at the age of 13 he had come around a corner in Zahedan, his hometown, and seen the corpses of several young men, strung up from an industrial crane. It was a common punishment for “counter-revolutionary” behaviour, he explained, and it compelled him to abandon his urban life and take up arms.
A day later, 800 miles away across inhospitable deserts and dark granite mountains, a separate group of Baloch fighters shared their dinner with me. These men formed part of the growing Baloch Liberation Army, and say they are engaged in a struggle with Pakistan’s government for the independence of that country’s Baloch minority. Five hours’ hike up a narrow ravine, they live with their donkeys and their ageing rifles, occasionally venturing out of their craggy maze to attack military checkpoints. Their commander, a tall man with a green and black cloth masking his face, sat on a rock and held forth on the Balochi hatred of Pakistan’s military elite. His fighters had survived overwhelming firepower, he said, including “the helicopter gunships that are provided by America in order to co-operate against Taliban and jihadi organisations.”
It was recently reported that Pakistan had suggested a barter deal with the British government: Islamabad would extradite Pakistani citizens allegedly involved in the July 2005 London bombings, and in return the British would hand over a group of Baloch men that President Musharraf has accused of supporting the BLA’s increasingly successful insurgency from afar. Until now, the British have refused to co-operate, but meanwhile the US state department has not wavered in its support for Musharraf, despite the continued unrest and repression occurring across Pakistan. Is there an inconsistency in American and British support for the government of Pakistan—with its poor treatment of the Baloch minority—and simultaneous criticism of Iran for similar transgressions? The US has been learning valuable lessons from its earlier support of Islamic mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. One is that proxy groups may one day turn around to bite the hand that feeds them. If the CIA really is supporting Rigi’s guerrillas in Iran, while simultaneously helping Musharraf’s army stifle the Baloch nationalist insurgency in Pakistan, there may be trouble ahead.”