From WMD to ‘laptop WMD’

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
11/11/2011



This century began with hopes of lasting peace as the threat of a nuclear MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) came to an end. Only one superpower was left; and in its hands, the peace that could prosper. But no sooner had the new century limped through toddlerhood that this lone superpower staged a “false flag” operation against its own people. Supposedly to avenge the three-building 9/11 World Trade Center “terror attacks,” the US pounded heavily on the medieval nation of Afghanistan in order to flush out the attacks’ alleged mastermind, Osama bin Laden. But it was too small a war.

In his 2002 State of the Union Address, then US President George W. Bush lashed out against the “Axis of Evil,” shattering all dreams of world peace. The following year, his country attacked another nation (Iraq) under the pretext of securing Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD), which scenario turned out to be a “Weapon of Mass Distraction.”

Ten years later, and with $1.2 trillion spent, 30,000 civilian casualties (including disproportionate number of children and women); 20,000 Taliban and 2,700 coalition forces’ deaths in Afghanistan; 650,000 (according to a Lancet study) to 1.5 million dead Iraqis; mounting Pakistani civilian drone killings; and an expansion of the conflicts into Côte d’Ivoire and Libya, now coming to be known as the new colonial resurgence, there is no end in sight to the Western powers’ 21st Century wars.

The peoples of the world should take heed: There is planning for all these wars and more to come. This was already detailed in the 1990s by US neoconservative think tank, PNAC (Project for a New American Century), which drafted the plan “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that called for a “New Pearl Harbor” to justify US military resurgence.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a military alliance against a bygone Soviet regime, then shifted its support to US military aggression and went off to start its own adventures in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya, with current US President Barack Obama “leading from behind.” The whole of Africa is now even threatened by the US’ own Africom (Africa Command) as interventions in Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen loom.

Even the much ballyhooed “Arab Spring” was a component of the plan with Arab Spring NGOs and “civil society” now shown to be funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House, and trained in Serbia’s CANVAS (Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies), with experience in the Balkanization of Serbia.

Now, Egypt is far more repressive than ever, with sham elections bringing in worse dependency on the West, as in Tunisia and Libya. Then there’s the US-Israeli thrust through Syria and then Iran.

The drums of war against Iran have been beaten for years now. Previous IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) heads, though, from Hans Blix to Mohamed El Baradei, have never given credence to claims of Iran’s nuclear capability for military use.

But suddenly, with a new Japanese nuclear watchdog chief who was aggressively lobbied for by the US, the agency is now producing a “laptop” of weapons of mass distraction.

The latest came in 2004 when “a mysterious figure handed over to the CIA a laptop he had purloined from an Iranian technician, purportedly working at a nuclear plant in Iran. (It was) said to contain pages and pages of top-secret information in English detailing Iran’s lust for attaining technical knowhow to produce nuclear payroll for Shahab III missile” — this, according to Iranian scholar and author Ismael Shalabi on the Center for Research on Globalization Web site.

Furthermore, “non-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis of the New America Foundation says the biggest loophole in the claim is the crude manner in which the laptop documents were constructed… (with reports indicating that) ‘some of the view graphs were done in Power Point, which suggested to me that the program was not terribly sophisticated.’ Another fault… is that the documents were written in English, a language barely used in official Iranian documents, let alone in documents of such paramount sensitivity. In 2005, the US officials briefed the IAEA of the contents of the documents, but they declined to provide the IAEA officials with any actual documents. In 2008, a battle ensued between IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei and George W. Bush… (as El Baradei) thought Iran should be given a fair chance to see at least some of the invisible documents” (Inter Press Service, Dec. 9, 2006; New York Times, Dec. 4, 2007). But the US would not oblige.

According to a cable released by WikiLeaks in October 2009, “(Yukiya) Amano (current IAEA chief) reminded (the US) ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 (the developing countries group), which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

Furthermore, “Amano recently delivered, reporting that Iran had carried out activities ‘relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device’ with ‘evidence’ provided by ‘more than 10 member states as well as its own information’ which turns out to be the US ‘laptop of WMD.’”

All these remind us of Bush’s infamous “Sixteen Words” in his 2003 State of the Union speech: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Those 16 words were about the Niger “Yellow Cake” Colin Powell said before the UN that Saddam obtained for his WMDs. After, the CIA sent US Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate and found the allegation to be false, the US eventually had to admit that Saddam had no WMDs. It was a barefaced lie told to 300 million Americans and 6 billion people of the world.

We have an obligation today to inform our fellow human beings of this new US lie for war — this “laptop Weapon of Mass Distraction.” We must take our role seriously as peacemakers and stop the warmongers-for-profit from destroying more than they already have. A war on Iran will raise oil to $300 per barrel that would devastate our already suffering nation.

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