American-Israeli strategy developing for clandestine not-quite-war strikes on Iran?
 Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program
Some officials say that a joint American-Israeli strategy is evolving — some might argue regressing — to a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes. NYT, By David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman, 12 July 20 As Iran’s center for advanced nuclear centrifuges lies in charred ruins after an explosion, apparently engineered by Israel, the long-simmering conflict between the United States and Tehran appears to be escalating into a potentially dangerous phase likely to play out during the American presidential election campaign.
New satellite photographs over the stricken facility at Natanz show far more extensive damage than was clear last week. Two intelligence officials, updated with the damage assessment for the Natanz site recently compiled by the United States and Israel, said it could take the Iranians up to two years to return their nuclear program to the place it was just before the explosion. An authoritative public study estimates it will be a year or more until Iran’s centrifuge production capacity recovers.
Another major explosion hit the country early Friday morning, lighting up the sky in a wealthy area of Tehran. It was still unexplained — but appeared to come from the direction of a missile base. If it proves to have been another attack, it will further shake the Iranians by demonstrating, yet again, that even their best-guarded nuclear and missile facilities have been infiltrated.
Although Iran has said little of substance about the explosions, Western officials anticipate some type of retaliation, perhaps against American or allied forces in Iraq, perhaps a renewal of cyberattacks. In the past, those have been directed against American financial institutions, a major Las Vegas casino and a dam in the New York suburbs or, more recently, the water supply system in Israel, which its government considers “critical infrastructure.”
Officials familiar with the explosion at Natanz compared its complexity to the sophisticated Stuxnet cyberattack on Iranian nuclear facilities a decade ago, which had been planned for more than a year. In the case of last week’s episode, the primary theory is that an explosive device was planted in the heavily-guarded facility, perhaps near a gas line. But some experts have also floated the possibility that a cyberattack was used to trigger the gas supply.
Some officials said that a joint American-Israeli strategy was evolving — some might argue regressing — to a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and setting back Iran’s nuclear facilities…….. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-trump.html
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Explosion at Iran’s nuclear facility probably caused by Israel
What caused the explosion at a nuclear facility in central Iran?, The Strategist 10 Jul 2020|, Connor Dilleen It seems increasingly likely that the 2 July explosion at the Iran Centrifuge Assembly Centre, located near the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, was the result of sabotage. And, despite initial speculation that it was the result of a cyberattack against critical operational control systems—and thus of a similar vein to the Stuxnet attack that took down multiple centrifuge cascades at Natanz in 2010—the simpler and more plausible explanation is that the explosion was caused by a bomb.
Despite claims of responsibility by a previously unknown group calling itself the Homeland Cheetahs that supposedly comprises disgruntled Iranian former military and security services personnel, it now appears widely accepted that Israel was behind the attack. There has been further speculation that Israel was also behind other curious incidents that have occurred at Iranian facilities in recent weeks—including explosions at the gas storage area near the Khojir missile facility at Parchin, at a medical facility in Tehran, and at a factory south of Tehran—although there is as yet no evidence of foul play in these events.
Multiple media outlets—including the New York Times and the Washington Post—have referenced intelligence officials attributing the Natanz attack to Israel. And while Tehran was slow in apportioning blame, on 7 July it accused Israel of being behind the attack, saying it was ‘a “wake-up call” meant to deter Iran amid advancements in its nuclear program, and … [that] those who planted the explosives had significant insight into the country’s nuclear program’.
Israel has form in using lethal force against high-value nuclear targets in the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2012, Israeli agents murdered four Iranian nuclear scientists. Earlier, Israel launched military strikes that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 and the Syrian Al Kibar reactor in 2007, the two most obvious manifestations of the Begin doctrine, which stipulates that Israel cannot allow any of its regional adversaries to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
However, two key issues remain unresolved. First, it’s not clear that the explosion at the centrifuge assembly centre will be a significant a setback for Iran’s enrichment capabilities. Second, if it is accepted that Israel was behind the incident, it’s difficult to assess whether the Natanz attack was merely a warning to Tehran or represents a new stage in Israeli efforts to curtail Tehran’s nuclear program. It’s possible that the attacks were also intended to provoke a reaction from Tehran that would justify more punitive and definitive military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities by either Israel or the US…….. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/what-caused-the-explosion-at-a-nuclear-facility-in-central-iran/
Iran says world ‘must respond’ to Israel after blast at nuclear site
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Iran says world ‘must respond’ to Israel after blast at nuclear site, Times of Israel,
Government spokesman calls for ‘limits to these dangerous actions by the Zionist regime’; Mideast official says explosion at Natanz was meant as a ‘wake-up call’ to Tehran By TOI STAFF7 July 2020, Iran on Tuesday called for action against Israel, following a recent blast at the Natanz nuclear facility that has been blamed on the Jewish state.
“This method Israel is using is dangerous, and it could spread to anywhere in the world,” government spokesman Ali Rabiei said during a press conference, according to a translation of his remarks by Israel’s Channel 12 news. He added: “The international community must respond and set limits to these dangerous actions by the Zionist regime.” His comments came as Iran appeared to publicly acknowledge on Tuesday that last week’s fire at Natanz, which badly damaged a building used for producing centrifuges, was not an accident. Israeli TV reports, without naming sources, have said the blast destroyed the laboratory in which Iran developed faster centrifuges and set back the Iranian nuclear program by one or two years. Nour News, seen as a mouthpiece of Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security, claimed that the blast at the Natanz facility, which came amid a series of mysterious disasters that struck sensitive Iranian sites in recent days, bore similarity to other strikes against the country’s security infrastructure. While asserting that “an airstrike on the Natanz plant is almost impossible” due to its strong air defenses, an article on the site said that “the combination of intelligence, logistics, action and the volume of destruction” prove that the incident was deliberate. The Washington Post and New York Times quoted Middle Eastern officials earlier this week as saying the blast at Natanz was caused by a large bomb planted by Israeli operatives…….. A member of the Revolutionary Guard confirmed to the Times on Sunday that an explosive was used, but didn’t specify who was responsible. ….. The building at Natanz was constructed in 2013 for the development of advanced centrifuges, though work was halted there in 2015 under the nuclear deal with world powers, Iran’s atomic agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said earlier this week. When the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal, work there was renewed, Kamalvandi said. He claimed the fire had damaged “precision and measuring instruments,” and that the center had not been operating at full capacity due to restrictions imposed by the nuclear deal. Iran began experimenting with advanced centrifuge models in the wake of the US unilaterally withdrawing from the deal two years ago…….. https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-says-world-must-respond-to-israel-after-blast-at-nuclear-site/
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Nuclear Weapons: The Reason Why Even Iran Fears Israel
Nuclear Weapons: The Reason Why Even Iran Fears Israel, Kyle Mizokami,The National Interest•June 1, 2020
Netanyahu’s deceitful push to try to get USA to attack Iran
 Netanyahu pushed U.S. to attack Iran with fabricated nuclear documents: report, Tehran Times May 1, 2020 – TEHRAN — The Iranian nuclear documents presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were an Israeli fabrication designed to trigger U.S. into a war with Iran, according to an investigation.U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018 partly based on Netanyahu’s claim that Iran was determined to build nuclear weapons, the investigation said.
In April 2018, Netanyahu claimed publicly that Israel’s Mossad spy agency had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” he declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.” However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. The following is an excerpt of an article published in The Grayzone on Wednesday: This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself. According to the official Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells about the story’s legitimacy. Even more problematic was the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse contained the binders with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a handful of people” knew. No proof of authenticity Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve a plan to build five nuclear weapons by mid-2003. Another document that generated widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussion among leading Iranian scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s defense minister to separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert parts. Left out of the media coverage of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency…… Withholding access to outside experts In fact, even the most pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy – reported in October 2018 that they had been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the documents. When a team of six specialists from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged through a bit of it.” But they were shown no documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”………….. The role of the MEK in passing the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad. For the Mossad, the MEK was a convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’s credibility in the eyes of foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later, it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations. By trotting out the same discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington and the Western corporate media. Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the U.S. to the precipice of military conflict with Iran.https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/447377/Netanyahu-pushed-U-S-to-attack-Iran-with-fabricated-nuclear |
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USA has helped Israel to develop a mighty armory of nuclear missiles
Israel’s Nuclear Missiles Could Smash You Back to the Stone Age, And that’s just for starters. National Interest, by Caleb Larson 6 Apr 20, Israel’s missile capabilities are perhaps among the most advanced in the Middle East. Through extensive aid from the United States and Europe, as well as collaboration in developing missiles, Israel has been able to nurture a mature domestic missile production capability that has been successful as exports.
Most of Israel’s missiles are relatively short- to medium-range, they also have several missiles in the Jericho family that can reach out into the 1,500 to 4,800-kilometer range (930 to 3000 miles). …… https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/israels-nuclear-missiles-could-smash-you-back-stone-age-141242
Israel’s High Court rejects Vanunu’s bid to leave Israel
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Nuclear whistleblower Vanunu denied permission to leave Israel High court rejects petition from man who revealed country’s nuclear secrets in 1986, Irish Times, Mark Weiss in Jerusalem , 16 Dec 19 Israel’s high court has rejected a petition from Mordechai Vanunu, the man who revealed the country’s nuclear secrets to the world in 1986, to be permitted to leave the country. The justices ruled that based on the material shown them, Mr Vanunu possessed secret and sensitive information that he had not revealed and that if he did, this would be dangerous for state security. They also ruled that they had been persuaded that the nuclear whistleblower wished to reveal his information. At the same time, they urged the state to continue to try to find ways to ease Mr Vanunu’s conditions in Israel. For years Mr Vanunu has demanded that Israel rescind his citizenship and allow him to leave the country. Mr Vanunu, a low-level technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, first hit the headlines in 1986 when he leaked details with photographs he took surreptitiously to the British Sunday Times. The revelations marked the first concrete proof that Israel had the capacity to manufacture nuclear bombs. Nuclear ambiguity’Israel maintains a policy of “nuclear ambiguity”, neither confirming nor denying foreign reports of its nuclear potential. It has refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or to allow international surveillance of its Dimona plant in the southern Negev desert. Partly based on the secrets Mr Vanunu revealed, foreign experts have concluded that Israel is the world’s sixth-largest nuclear power……… In 2004 he completed an 18-year sentence, most of which was spent in solitary confinement. However, strict conditions were attached to his release, including a ban on leaving the country, a ban on entering the Palestinian territories and a ban on meeting foreign journalists. Since his release, Mr Vanunu has twice served jail terms after convictions for parole violations. |
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Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz suggests bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program
 FM: Bombing Iran to stop its nuclear program remains ‘an option’
Speaking with Italian media on the sidelines of a foreign policy conference in Rome, Israel Katz rebukes European leaders for not taking a more aggressive stand against Tehran. Iranian FM accuses Israel of testing nuclear missile aimed at his country. Israel Hayom 12-08-2019 The option to launch a preemptive strike against Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon remains viable, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in an interview Saturday. Speaking with Italian-language daily Corriere della Sera, Katz – asked whether Israel was mulling military options vis-à-vis the Islamic republic – said, “Yes, it is an option. We will not allow Iran to produce or obtain nuclear weapons. If it were the last possible way to stop this, we would act militarily.” The comments were reportedly made on the sidelines of a foreign policy conference in Rome. They came just hours after Iran announced its ready to unveil a “new generation” of nuclear-related “products,” including new centrifuge systems and a heavy water power plant scheduled to be built by the spring of 2020. Katz further admonished European leaders for not taking a more aggressive stand against Iran over its repeated, escalating violations of the 2015 nuclear deal…… On Friday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif accused Israel of holding “a nuclear missile test aimed at Iran.” “Israel today tested a nuke-missile, aimed at Iran,” Zarif said on Twitter, adding that the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom “never complain about the only nuclear arsenal in West Asia – armed with missiles actually DESIGNED to be capable of carrying nukes – but has fits of apoplexy over our conventional & defensive ones.” The Israeli defense establishment successfully tested a rocket propulsion system on Friday. Defense officials stressed that the test was planned in advance and carried out as planned. https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/12/08/fm-bombing-iran-to-stop-its-nuclear-program-remains-an-option/ |
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Bacteria to consume CO2 – a climate change solution?
Some startups are already beginning to use microbes to transform CO2 into products; Air Protein, launched in November, uses CO2 to make protein for alternative meat. But microbes that these new companies use are proprietary. “They’re using microbes that are much harder to engineer than E. coli, and therefore the variety of products that these microbes can manufacture from the capture of CO2 is very limited compared to E. coli,” he says. ……
If the production process uses renewable energy, “then we will basically have negative emissions of CO2,” says Gleizer. Some products may be carbon neutral—if the bacteria make jet fuel, for example, the planes that use it will still emit greenhouse gases, but no more than the CO2 that was originally used to produce the fuel. The CO2 could potentially come from direct air capture.
Several steps are still necessary before it’s clear that the process is feasible. When the current strain of the bacteria feeds on CO2, it grows much more slowly than if it was eating sugar; the researchers think that future versions can be faster. The E. coli will also have to be further modified to produce specific products. And production equipment in biotech factories might also have to change. “There’s still a long way to optimize this process,” says Gleizer. https://www.fastcompany.com/90438169/scientists-just-engineered-bacteria-to-eat-co2
Entire world wants nuclear weapons-free Middle East — except for USA and Israel
US and Israel were lone votes against UN resolutions opposing space arms race, nuclear Middle East, Cuba embargo, The United States and Israel were the only countries that voted against UN General Assembly draft resolutions calling for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, measures to stop an arms race in outer space, and an end to the blockade of Cuba. THE GRAYZONE, By Ben Norton, 11 Nov 19,
Important breakthroughs have arrived at the United Nations seeking to prevent an arms race in outer space and create a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. There are just two main obstacles: the United States and Israel.
While Washington and corporate media outlets portray China and Russia as aggressive warmongering rogue states, their votes at the UN show which nations are actually expanding dangerous militarism into new frontiers.
China and Russia joined dozens of other countries in sponsoring resolutions at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that sought to prevent armed conflict in space. Most of the international community supported these historic peace measures. The only consistent outliers were the US and Israel.
Beijing and Moscow have been leading global efforts to stop the use of weapons in space. Meanwhile, Washington has unilaterally blocked the international consensus on preventing the deadly space race.
Moreover, as nearly all UN member states have united in calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, the US and Israel have singlehandedly undermined their peace efforts.
This roguish behavior predates the election of President Donald Trump.
At the UNGA on November 7, almost every country in the world also voted to end the US embargo against Cuba. This was the 28th year in row that the international community united in calling for the American noose to be taken off the neck of the Cuban people.
While 187 member states supported the resolution demanding an end to the blockade, the US, Israel, and Brazil’s far-right government were the lone nations to oppose it. American allies Colombia and Ukraine abstained.
Washington’s UN votes show who truly is a rogue state.
Entire world wants nuclear weapons-free Middle East — except for USA and Israel
The UNGA’s First Committee, which oversees disarmament and international security, voted on November 1 to overwhelmingly approve a draft resolution entitled “Establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East.”
A staggering 172 countries voted in support of this resolution. Only two nations voted against it: the US and Israel. Just two more countries abstained: the United Kingdom and Cameroon.
At the same meeting, the First Committee approved a draft resolution on “The risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East,” which called for the region to abide by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Given Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, the UNGA resolution called on Tel Aviv to join the NPT (Israel has long refused to sign the treaty), and demanded that Israeli nuclear facilities be overseen by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.
The draft resolution was also overwhelmingly approved, with 151 votes in support and a mere six votes against — from the US, Israel, and Canada, along with the tiny island nations of Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands, which function as vassals of Washington at the UN.
American and Israeli votes against resolutions to prevent an arms race in outer space…….https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/08/us-israel-un-resolutions-space-arms-race-nuclear/
Submarine launched missiles in Israel’s probably 300 Nuclear Weapons
Israel May Have 300 Nuclear Weapons (Including Submarine-Launched Missiles) National Interest Sébastien Roblin 11 Oct 19, Israel has never officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons.
Unofficially, Tel Aviv wants everyone to know it has them, and doesn’t hesitate to make thinly-veiled references to its willingness to use them if confronted by an existential threat. Estimates on the size of Tel Aviv’s nuclear stockpile range from 80 to 300 nuclear weapons, the latter number exceeding China’s arsenal.
To forestall such a strategy, Israeli has aggressively targeted missile and nuclear technology programs in Iraq, Syria and Iran with air raids, sabotage and assassination campaigns. However, it also has developed a second-strike capability—that is, a survivable weapon which promises certain nuclear retaliation no matter how effective an enemy’s first strike.
Israel’s duplicity about its nuclear weapons
Israel wants to keep leaders in Washington distracted and always a little off-balance, so they will end up without the bandwidth and the stamina needed to confront Israel over the continuation of colonial expansion in the lands occupied in 1967.byHelena Cobban
How is it still possible to write a lengthy article about the military/strategic dynamic among the triad of Israel, Iran, and the United States while making zero mention of Israel’s robust nuclear-weapons capability? New York Times staffers Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, and their editors at the Times magazine clearly think this is quite okay. In their recent lengthy article, “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran,” Bergman and Mazzetti looked at the U.S.-Israeli coalitional aspect of the past 17 years in the project to prepare for launching military or special-ops actions against Iran. They followed in the long tradition within the big corporate media of deliberately ignoring Israel’s nuclear capability, a factor that is central to any understanding of the forces at play in the Middle East and also, crucially, those at play in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
The authors’ omission of any mention of Israel’s nuclear capabilities—and the ability these capabilities have long given to the country’s leaders to exert strong, continuing nuclear blackmail on Washington—is one serious flaw in their narrative. Another is that they seriously downplay the importance of the fact that Israel’s military is incapable, on its own, of inflicting debilitating damage on Iran’s nuclear program using only “conventional,” that is non-nuclear, weapons. (The two lacunae could perhaps be linked, as we will see below.)
Early in the article, Bergman and Mazzetti set the scene for how they see the strategic dynamic among Israel, Iran, and Washington by citing an analysis provided by Ilan Goldenberg, who was an up-and-coming Pentagon official in the Obama administration………….
A few things about the nuclear dimension of the U.S.-Israel-Iran triangle have been clear to me for a long time. One is that the longstanding refusal of most members of the U.S. political elite (officials, legislators, think-tankers, corporate media, and so on) to even mention the fact of Israel’s own nuclear-weapons capabilities and to take full account of them in public discussions of strategic matters in the Middle East is extremely harmful. Among the harms inflicted by that refusal (and by the general political clout that Israel wields in Washington) is that Israel’s longstanding ability to wield a form of nuclear blackmail against Washington—as I have written about for more than 30 years now—is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that, while Iran has been a full member of the NPT and has submitted to a full range of inspections of its nuclear research facilities for many decades now, Israel is not a member and has never been subjected to any such inspections.
(Another thing that is almost never mentioned is that all journalists based in Israel—as Bergman is—are subject to the country’s rigorous censorship system. This censorship is particularly strict regarding all military issues.)
………… so long as Iran does not break out of the NPT, Israel can quietly, behind the veil of its longstanding policy of “nuclear ambiguity”, continue to exert a form of “extreme-case” nuclear deterrence against Iran. (And to use the threat of a potential unveiling as a potent means of leverage against decision-makers in Washington.)
So why, then, do we have all the continual hullabaloo and endless navel-scratching in the Western corporate media (and the Western political system, more broadly) about the possibility—not yet anywhere close to a fact, but a possibility, some time in the future—that Iran may start to build a nuclear-weapons capability?
My conclusion is that a good part of this navel-scratching is a deliberate tactic of diversion: a way for the decision-makers in Israel and their supporters to keep leaders in Washington and elsewhere distracted and always a little off-balance, so they will end up without the bandwidth and the stamina needed confront Israel over the continuation of its project of colonial expansion in the lands occupied in 1967.
That colonial project in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and in Golan is what all Israeli leaders since 2001 have cared about most deeply. And they all knew that one great way to head off any efforts a U.S. president might make to challenge the project was to raise a hubbub about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“Why do you keep talking to us about human rights or international law issues in the Palestinian territories?” was the essential message such efforts sent to decision-makers in Washington. “Stop worrying about those. We will handle them as we see fit, and you should butt out. But meantime, keep looking at all those shiny objects over there in the Iranian nuclear program! And by the way, keep your aid money flowing to our military. Otherwise, just imagine what havoc we could create for you in the Gulf…”
Fiery Imam suggests missile attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant
Israel’s Nuclear Reactor, Radio Farda, 7July 19, Tehran’s Friday Prayer Imam has suggested that Iran should launch a missile attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant.
In his Friday July 5 sermon, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, better known as Movahedi, addressed the United States and Israel, saying: “If Iran decides to confront you, a missile strike on the Dimona reactor would be enough,” threatening that the attack “will plough Israel 200 times.”
Dimona is an Israeli city in the Negev region, South of Beersheba and West of the Dead Sea. The city is nicknamed mini-India for its sizeable Indian Jewish community. The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center is located about 13 kilometers to the southeast of the city.
Movahedi warned the United States and Israel about their vulnerability: “You are living in a glass house. You’d better watch out!”
He also warned the United States against a military attack on Iran………
Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei changed his mind about appointing Movahedi as an interim chairman for the Expediency Council after a few weeks, probably fearing his occasional outlandish remarks could cause havoc in Iran’s domestic or international politics.
Some of Friday Prayer Imams in other Iranian cities have also made passing remarks about tensions in the region, but none was observed to make firebrand violent remarks. https://en.radiofarda.com/a/tehran-s-imam-suggests-missile-strike-on-israel-s-nuclear-reactor/30039265.html
Israel lobby in US pushing for war against Iran: Analyst
Fraud, money-laundering, convictions of staff at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor
The Beersheba District Court has convicted three persons engaged by Israel’s nuclear research agency in Dimona of an NIS 3.2 million fraud scheme, including also money-laundering and breach of trust.
Announced for the first time by the court spokesperson’s office on Wednesday, the convictions and jail sentences of the three were actually handed down in April and earlier, but were under gag order due to the implications for national security.
Unlike a normal case probed by police, the investigation was led by a special division in the Defense Ministry which eventually worked with a special team in the state prosecution – again all due to the extreme sensitivity of all issues related to Dimona.
Israel has never confirmed that it has nuclear weapons, but according to foreign sources, the Dimona reactor has been used to produce between 80-200 nuclear weapons which Israel can deploy by land, sea and air.
Unlike a normal case probed by police, the investigation was led by a special division in the Defense Ministry which eventually worked with a special team in the state prosecution – again all due to the extreme sensitivity of all issues related to Dimona.
Combined, the court fined those companies or seized assets worth NIS 450,000.
A statement by the Justice Ministry said that some of the defendants had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. …….
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