Freeway Blogging

Police state tactics

Police Break Up Anti-War Meeting in Washington

WASHINGTON - Mounted police charged in to break up an outdoor press conference and demonstration against the Iraq war in Washington on Thursday, arresting three people, organizers and an AFP reporter said.”The police suppressed the press conference. In
the middle of the speeches, they grabbed the podium” erected in a park in front of the White House for the small gathering, Brian Becker, national organizer of the ANSWER anti-war coalition, told AFP.

“Then, mounted police charged the media present to disperse them,” Becker said.

The charge caused a peaceful crowd of some 20 journalists and four or five protestors to scatter in terror, an AFP correspondent at the event in Lafayette Square said. No one appeared to have been hurt.

Three people — Tina Richards, the mother of a marine who did two tours of duty in Iraq; Adam Kokesh, a leader of the Iraq Veterans Against the War group; and lawyer
Ian Thompson, who is an organizer for ANSWER in Los Angeles — were arrested, Becker said.

The ANSWER coalition is trying to rally support for an anti-war demonstration in Washington that is due to take place on September 15.

Last month, the movement was threatened with a fine of at least 10,000 dollars unless it removed posters in the city announcing the September 15 march.

Washington city authorities have said the posters had to come down because they were stuck on with adhesive that did not meet city regulations.

“At our demonstration today we were showing the media that the paste we use conforms to the rules,” Becker said.

“One of our activists was making a speech when the police barged in and grabbed the podium. At that point, Tina Richards started to put up a poster, so they arrested her and two others.”

“This strategy of suppression has not worked. We expect many tens of thousands of people” in Washington for the September 15 anti-war demonstration, he said.

The march has been timed to coincide with the release of a report by the US military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and will be part of a week of protests led by veterans of the Iraq war.

A petition calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, allegedly carrying one million signatures and endorsed by former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, will also be submitted to officials during the week’s activities, ANSWER has told AFP.

David Addington - Cheney's Capo

[Note: David Addington's nickname in the White House's inner circle is "Octopus" because of his reach into virtually every aspect of the regime's activities. He's quoted below by Jack Goldsmith as saying "We're going to push and push and push [to assert unfettered executive powers] until some larger force makes us stop."

What is that larger force? It has certainly not been nor will it be the Democratic Party.

Here and there a judge who is not entirely craven will attempt to stop them, but the neocons have the Supreme Court majority in their pocket.

Is the larger force the electorate? Americans voted the GOP out in 2006 (and in 2000 and 2004 for that matter if the elections hadn't been hijacked), but we all have seen how much good that's done in holding these world-class criminals accountable.

That larger force - and Addington is right about this, it will take a larger force to stop them because they won't stop anymore than a vampire can become a vegetarian - has to be the American people in our millions taking mass, independent political action "in the streets."

That's what Declare It Now: Wear Orange is all about and a critical part of creating that larger, irresistible force. I'm reminded when thinking of the Bush White House of that line from the movie Terminator when the hero who comes from the future to save the mother of the future leader of the human resistance against the machines talks about the Terminator: You can't reason with him. You can't bargain with him...and he absolutely. will. not. stop.]

New Book Details Cheney Lawyer's Efforts to Expand Executive Power

By Dan Eggen and Peter Baker

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; A01

Vice President Cheney's top lawyer pushed relentlessly to expand the powers of the executive branch and repeatedly derailed efforts to obtain congressional approval for aggressive anti-terrorism policies for fear that even a Republican majority might say no, according to a new book written by a former senior Justice Department official.

David S. Addington, who is now Cheney's chief of staff, viewed both U.S. lawmakers and overseas allies with "hostility" and repeatedly opposed efforts by other administration lawyers to soften counterterrorism policies or seek outside support, according to Jack L. Goldsmith, who frequently clashed with Addington while serving as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004.

"We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop," Addington said at one point, according to Goldsmith.

Addington, who declined comment yesterday through Cheney's office, is a central player in Goldsmith's new book, "The Terror Presidency." It provides an unusual glimpse of fierce internal dissent over the legal opinions behind some of the Bush administration's most controversial tactics in detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects.

"As I absorbed the opinions, I concluded that some were deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President," Goldsmith writes, referring to Justice Department memoranda issued in the two years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "I was astonished, and immensely worried, to discover that some of our most important counterterrorism policies rested on severely damaged legal foundations."

The internal tensions peaked in March 2004 during the now-famous visit by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, whom Gonzales unsuccessfully pressed to approve a warrantless surveillance program that Goldsmith and other Justice lawyers had deemed illegal.

Goldsmith, who was in the room, recounted in an interview yesterday that as Gonzales and then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. turned and left, "Mrs. Ashcroft sticks out her tongue" to express her "strong disapproval."

Goldsmith also said in his book that -- like many other Justice Department hires -- he was quizzed about his political loyalties during his initial job interview. One of Gonzales's deputies, David Leitch, opened the conversation by asking him about an $800 campaign contribution Goldsmith had given to a law school dean who was a Democrat. "Why have you never given money to a Republican?" Leitch asked, according to the book. "Are you a Republican?"

Now a professor at Harvard Law School, Goldsmith, 44, described himself in the book as "a conservative and a Republican" who became troubled by what he saw as imprudent overreaching by the White House with support from badly-reasoned OLC memos, including at least two written or drafted by friend and fellow conservative John C. Yoo. The book was described in an article posted online yesterday by the New York Times. The Washington Post also obtained a copy.

Goldsmith portrayed the senior officials with whom he regularly met as unremittingly fearful of another terrorist attack and determined "to act aggressively and preemptively." At the same time, he wrote, they feared that they could one day be prosecuted for engaging in tactics that pushed legal boundaries. The solution was for lawyers "to find some way to make what [Bush] did legal," Goldsmith wrote.

Goldsmith for a time was in a unique position to do so, because OLC opinions carry unusual authority inside the government and are typically regarded as written in stone. Only a handful of OLC decisions have been altered by officials in successive administrations. But during Goldsmith's brief tenure, however, he wound up overturning numerous OLC decisions reached earlier in the Bush administration -- an unprecedented act.

Goldsmith's actions clearly surprised the White House. He was picked for the job, he wrote, because he had strongly supported trying detainees before military-run commissions instead of civilian courts, had opposed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court, and had spoken out against the rising influence of international legal norms on U.S. actions.

Goldsmith said in the book that he did not question the motives or integrity of Addington or others, and he portrayed them as sincerely concerned about the nation's security. But he depicted Addington, who served as "Cheney's eyes, ears, and voice" on counterterrorism matters and with whom he was present at roughly 100 meetings on the topic, as having little patience for views contrary to his own.

"After 9/11, they and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," Goldsmith wrote, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs spying by U.S. agencies within the United States.

Goldsmith described Addington as "the chief legal architect of the Terrorist Surveillance Program," which bypassed the secret court that administers FISA and allowed the National Security Agency to spy on communications between the United States and overseas without warrants. In a February 2004 meeting, Addington said sarcastically: "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court."

Addington is widely known as a prominent and influential advocate for presidential prerogatives and is also as viewed as one of the administration's fiercest political infighters. Bradford Berenson, a former White House lawyer, told the New Yorker magazine last year: "David is like the Marines. No better friend -- no worse enemy."

Addington reacted angrily to many of Goldsmith's legal opinions, telling him in reference to one concerning detainees in Iraq: "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision," according to the book.

"He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint," Goldsmith wrote. "They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch."

Gonzales, by contrast, is depicted in the book as a passive figure at the White House who mostly would "sit quietly in his wing chair, occasionally asking questions but mostly listening as the querulous Addington did battle with whomever was seeking to 'go soft.' "

After Goldsmith decided to resign in 2004, however, he recalled sitting down with Gonzales for what he described as a cordial conversation. Gonzales raised the issue of the memos on interrogation policy that Goldsmith overturned. "I guess those opinions really were as bad as you said," Gonzales told him, according to Goldsmith. Gonzales, now the attorney general, announced his resignation last week.

Goldsmith learned to be a tough interagency player during his tumultuous nine-month stint at the OLC. When he decided to suspend a classified March 2003 legal opinion justifying harsh interrogations conducted by U.S. military personnel, he "didn't inform the White House about my decision" because "I knew that running the matter by Gonzales and especially Addington would make it much harder to fix the opinions."

And when he later decided to suspend an August 2002 legal opinion by Yoo that sharply limited the kind of interrogations that could be considered torture, Goldsmith handed in his resignation at the same time because he believed the timing "would make it hard for the White House to reverse my decision without making it seem like I had resigned in protest."

In all, Goldsmith writes, he drafted three resignation letters while on the job.

Goldsmith accused Bush in his book of being "almost entirely inattentive" to factors that would have brought him greater success, including the need for consultation, deliberation, "the appearance of deference," and publicly expressed support for constitutional and international values.

Bush got less in the end from Congress when he finally asked for legislative sanction than he would have gotten from more compliant lawmakers immediately after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Goldsmith. "It was said hundreds of times in the White House that the President and the Vice President wanted to leave the presidency stronger than they found it. In fact, they seemed to have achieved the opposite," he wrote.

Staff writer Barton Gellman and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Cheney Orders Faux News et al to Prep Public for War on Iran

Cheney Orders Media To Sell Attack On Iran

Fox News, Wall Street Journal instructed to launch PR blitz for upcoming military strike

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University.

The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that "instructions" had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.

"It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects, writes Rubin, "It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”
Rubin subsequently confirmed with a second source that the propaganda coup had been launched and the individual, another top Neo-Con at a major think tank, had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

An organized mass media campaign to propagandize for a military strike on Iran mirrors exactly what happened in late 2002 in preparation for the invasion of Iraq and would be seen as par for the course in anticipation of an attack that presidential candidate Ron Paul amongst other expert observers fear will take place within 12 months.

President Bush met directly with talk radio idealogues [sic] at the White House last year to push the Neo-Con agenda. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Neal Boortz and Michael Medved (pictured below) amongst others all attended and received their talking points straight from the President's mouth.

Considering the history of the sordid "fake news" scandal, where millions of dollars were used to create pre-packaged government press releases disguised as news, along with the Armstrong Williams farce, it should surprise no one that such "instructions" are now being handed out to prepare the public for another military invasion.

The issuance of orders for Neo-Con mass media arms to push for an assault on Iran also puts the U.S. on red alert for a terror attack, whether real or manufactured, which Dick Cheney has already promised will immediately be blamed on Iran no matter who the real culprits are.

On August 1st, 2005 the American Conservative reported that Cheney had tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan involved a massive air strike on Iran which included the use of nuclear weapons.

The publication reported that, "The response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States," meaning that any such attack will immediately be blamed on Iran and any evidence to the contrary will be buried.

The London Times reported on Sunday that the Pentagon had finalized plans for a 3 day blitz designed to annihilate 1,200 targets in Iran and destroy the country's military capability.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Rhetoric regarding a potential military attack on Iran has heated again over the past week, with President Bush having warned of the risk of a "nuclear holocaust" if the country was allowed to acquire nuclear capability.

In a speech last Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that a diplomatic push by the world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear program was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad subsequently stated that a U.S. attack on Iran was "impossible" due to U.S. troops being tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yesterday, he claimed to have proof that the U.S. were not planning to attack, bizarrely citing his mathematical skills as an engineer and faith in God.

A January poll by Ipsos found that 40% of Americans thought it likely that Iran would be attacked by the end of the year. The U.S. has stationed three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, the Nimitz, a nuclear-powered carrier, John C. Stennis Strike Group, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a relief carrier.

The U.S. government is openly funding and supporting the activities of Jundullah, a Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly headed by the alleged mastermind of 9/11, to carry out bombings in Iran and destabilize Ahmadinejad's power base.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard military was recently declared to be a terrorist organization by the White House, another ominous sign that an attack is being readied.

Declare It Now: the 333 Plan

I call it 333: You get 3 people to Declare It Now (DIN) and wear orange and/or decorate with orange everyday (orange ribbon, armband, bandana, t-shirt, etc.), and each of those 3 people get 3 people. You call back your 3 people in 3 days to check in with them: thus, 3 3 3.

Orange means we're furious and we won't take it anymore! Orange means we're not going to allow them to take us and the world down their road of torture, tyranny and war crimes! Orange means that we're not "Good Germans."

This 333 plan puts the campaign into the hands of people immediately and if the people who do this just recruit their 3 people, assuming a starting group of 72 people, assuming no erosion in this chain, assuming no one recruits more than 3 ever, assuming no one takes up wearing orange on their own without being recruited by a personal network (through, e.g., seeing others doing it or hearing about it through PSAs and ads), then in 9 "generations" of this process, which should take about a week for each generation, we'll have 1.4 million people wearing orange. In 10 "generations" we'll have 4.25 million.

Obviously, all but one of these assumptions is conservative (erosion in the chain will probably happen in places); we could grow faster than this conservative projection predicts. We plan, for example, to take out ads in major newspapers, radio, TV and we have prominent people lined up who have been taping PSAs for the DIN campaign. We just need the money to do these ads. People who are thrilled by this campaign can and should recruit more than their 3. And so on.

Please join this campaign and participate in the plan. Be part of the historic change that we must together effect. We don't need to mobilize all of the millions who oppose this rotten regime in D.C., social change doesn't wait for or need absolutely everyone who feels a certain way to act. But we do need literally millions to declare themselves against what the Bush regime is doing and what it represents. If we mobilize millions - and there's no reason to think that we can't, the 333 plan is very, very doable and very concrete - then those millions will be seen by at least tens of millions of others, and we will have done something remarkable and unprecedented. We will have created the atmosphere in which a popular movement can flourish in and we will have triggered a massive cultural shift.

We will have done something that doesn't depend upon media news coverage of our actions because our actions will be visible to tens of millions of people in their everyday lives. We will have done something that doesn't depend on getting our political "representatives" to listen to us tell them something that they already know: that a large majority of people in this country want Bush and Cheney gone and want them to take their reactionary policies with them!

We are the people we've been waiting for. What are you waiting for? Write me and tell me that you're part of this campaign. Keep track of the 3 people (or more) that you recruit. Have them keep track of their 3 or more. Repeat till satisfied. : )

Get together with the 3 or 12 people under you in the chain. Plan activities together - hold a house party and raise money for the DIN campaign (see posting just before this one); gather to watch a video or do a reading group; go out in a group wearing orange to spread the campaign - you can get flyers from world can't wait, go out together wearing orange and see a film or play or just walk down the street and create a sensation, handing out orange ribbons. You can buy ribbons and safety pins at craft shops or fabric stores. Hardware stores sell orange tape in big rolls for $3. They tear by hand. Let's get it started!

Crucial Fundraiser - Please Read and Follow Up!

World Can't Wait proudly presents:

The First Nationwide Virtual Fundraiser to
Drive Out The Bush Regime

You select the date and time!
You select the theme!
You select the orange attire!

Be sure to invite your friends!

We face an urgent mission - to organize people living in the United States to take responsibility to stop the whole disastrous course of the Bush administration. Right now the world needs a political situation where the Bush administration's program is repudiated, where Bush and Cheney are driven from office and where the whole direction they have been taking U.S. society is reversed. It's on all of us who see this trajectory to mobilize millions to express their outrage, to speak the truth, to act with urgency and to form an organized political resistance.

World Can't Wait has launched Declare It Now-Wear Orange as a means for people to make their opposition to this regime visible. The urgent color of orange -- the color assigned to those detained and tortured with no due process -- must become the color of a gathering sentiment to repudiate the program of and drive the Bush regime from office. A groundswell of orange can break people out of this conundrum where millions are just furious but still numbed and rendered inactive by the complicity of the loyal opposition Party and by the anaesthetizing effects of the presidential elections.

Without funding we cannot succeed. There is nothing but money stopping us from fostering an orange uprising by putting ads on MTV or The Daily Show, from producing tens of thousands of orange bandannas or sending youth organizers to campuses as schools open.

Now is your opportunity to declare your desire to see campuses shut down until Bush and Cheney are removed from office, to see the streets flooded with orange, the color of resistance, and to see people – from prominent voices of conscience to professionals to stay-at-home moms – say ENOUGH to the Bush program and get out there and work to stop it. Now is your opportunity to make this desire a reality by making a financial commitment to be part of changing the course of history.

Give today because 2008 is too late. Give today because over a billion dollars will be spent by presidential candidates who aren’t even addressing the questions of how to change a situation where most people in the world think the US is the biggest threat to the future. Give today because the people are NOT powerless in the face of this horror. There is something we CAN do. We cannot wait. We cannot be paralyzed – we can resist and we can make this resistance uncompromising – and we can drive out the Bush regime.

Please support World Can't Wait now – no amount is too small or too large.

Click here to donate now.

Or phone 866.973.4463

Or mail your generous donation today. Learn about tax-deductible donations.

Contact Samantha Goldman our Development Director to discuss sponsorship level and stock donations.

Don’t want to wait? Check out our Declare It Now campaign.

World Can't Wait

info@worldcantwait.org

866-973-4463

305 W. Broadway #185
New York, NY 10013

Local chapters

Donate now

To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit http://www.worldcantwait.net/ and use the form in the top right of the page.

Study: US preparing 'massive' military attack against Iran

From Raw Story

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday August 28, 2007

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to an analysis paper.

The paper, "Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" - written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament - was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.

"We wrote the report partly as we were surprised that this sort of quite elementary analysis had not been produced by the many well resourced Institutes in the United States," wrote Plesch in an email to Raw Story on Tuesday.

Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran's WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran's actions.

Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.

US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.

US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.

Some form of low level US and possibly UK military action as well as armed popular resistance appear underway inside the Iranian provinces or ethnic areas of the Azeri, Balujistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. Iran was unable to prevent sabotage of its offshore-to-shore crude oil pipelines in 2005.

Nuclear weapons are ready, but most unlikely, to be used by the US, the UK and Israel. The human, political and environmental effects would be devastating, while their military value is limited.

Israel is determined to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons yet has the conventional military capability only to wound Iran's WMD programmes.

The attitude of the UK is uncertain, with the Brown government and public opinion opposed psychologically to more war, yet, were Brown to support an attack he would probably carry a vote in Parliament. The UK is adamant that Iran must not acquire the bomb.

The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran's actions.
When asked why the paper seems to indicate a certainty of Iranian WMD, Plesch made clear that "our paper is not, repeat not, about what Iran actually has or not." Yet, he added that "Iran certainly has missiles and probably some chemical capability."

Most significantly, Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a "full-spectrum approach," designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state." Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration's National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power. They suggest, therefore, that:

This wider form of air attack would be the most likely to delay the Iranian nuclear program for a sufficiently long period of time to meet the administration's current counterproliferation goals. It would also be consistent with the possible goal of employing military action is to overthrow the current Iranian government, since it would severely degrade the capability of the Iranian military (in particular revolutionary guards units and other ultra-loyalists) to keep armed opposition and separatist movements under control. It would also achieve the US objective of neutralizing Iran as a power in the region for many years to come.

However, it is the option that contains the greatest risk of increased global tension and hatred of the United States. The US would have few, if any allies for such a mission beyond Israel (and possibly the UK). Once undertaken, the imperatives for success would be enormous.

Butcher says he does not believe the US would use nuclear weapons, with some exceptions.

"My opinion is that [nuclear weapons] wouldn't be used unless there was definite evidence that Iran has them too or is about to acquire them in a matter of days/weeks," notes Butcher. "However, the Natanz facility has been so hardened that to destroy it MAY require nuclear weapons, and once an attack had started it may simply be a matter of following military logic and doctrine to full extent, which would call for the use of nukes if all other means failed."
Military Strategy

The bulk of the paper is devoted to a detailed analysis of specific military strategies for such an attack, of ongoing attempts to destabilize Iran by inciting its ethnic minorities, and of the considerations surrounding the possible employment of nuclear weapons.

In particular, Plesch and Butcher examine what is known as Global Strike - the capability to project military power from the United States to anywhere in the world, which was announced by STRATCOM as having initial operational capability in December 2005. It is the that capacity that could provide strategic bombers and missiles to devastate Iran on just a few hours notice.

Iran has a weak air force and anti aircraft capability, almost all of it is 20-30 years old and it lacks modern integrated communications. Not only will these forces be rapidly destroyed by US air power, but Iranian ground and air forces will have to fight without protection from air attack.

British military sources stated on condition of anonymity, that "the US military switched its whole focus to Iran" from March 2003. It continued this focus even though it had infantry bogged down in fighting the insurgency in Iraq.

Global Strike could be combined with already-existing "regional operational plans for limited war with Iran, such as Oplan 1002-04, for an attack on the western province of Kuzhestan, or Oplan 1019 which deals with preventing Iran from closing the Straits of Hormuz, and therefore keeping open oil lanes vital to the US economy."

The Marines are not all tied down fighting in Iraq. Several Marine forces are assembling in the Gulf, each with its own aircraft carrier. These carrier forces can each conduct a version of the D-Day landings. They come with landing craft, tanks, jump-jets, thousands of troops and hundreds more cruise missiles. Their task is to destroy Iranian forces able to attack oil tankers and to secure oilfields and installations. They have trained for this mission since the Iranian revolution of 1979 as is indicated in this battle map of Hormuz illustrating an advert for combat training software.

Special Forces units - which are believed to already be operating within Iran - would be available to carry out search-and-destroy missions and incite internal uprisings, while US Army units in both Iraq and Afghanistan could mount air and missile attacks on Iranian forces, which are heavily concentrated along the Iran-Iraq border, as well as protecting their own supply lines within Iraq:

A key assessment in any war with Iran concerns Basra province and the Kuwait border. It is likely that Iran and its sympathizers could take control of population centres and interrupt oil supplies, if it was in their interest to do so. However it is unlikely that they could make any sustained effort against Kuwait or interrupt supply lines north from Kuwait to central Iraq. US firepower is simply too great for any Iranian conventional force.

Experts question the report's conclusions

Former CIA analyst and Deputy Director for Transportation Security, Antiterrorism Assistance Training, and Special Operations in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, Larry Johnson, does not agree with the report's findings.

"The report seems to accept without question that US air force and navy bombers could effectively destroy Iran and they seem to ignore the fact that US use of air power in Iraq has failed to destroy all major military, political, economic and transport capabilities," said Johnson late Monday after the embargo on the study had been lifted.

"But at least in their conclusions they still acknowledge that Iran, if attacked, would be able to retaliate. Yet they are vague in terms of detailing the extent of the damage that the Iran is capable of inflicting on the US and fairly assessing what those risks are."

There is also the situation of US soldiers in Iraq and the supply routes that would have to be protected to ensure that US forces had what they needed. Plesch explains that ""firepower is an effective means of securing supply routes during conventional war and in conventional war a higher loss rate is expected."

"However as we say do not assume that the Iraqi Shiia will rally to Tehran - the quietist Shiia tradition favoured by Sistani may regard itself as justified if imploding Iranian power can be argued to reduce US problems in Iraq, not increase them."
John Pike, Director of Global Security, a Washington-based military, intelligence, and security clearinghouse, says that the question of Iraq is the one issue at the center of any questions regarding Iran.

"The situation in Iraq is a wild card, though it may be presumed that Iran would mount attacks on the US at some remove, rather than upsetting the apple-cart in its own front yard," wrote Pike in an email.

Political Considerations

Plesch and Butcher write with concern about the political context within the United States:

This debate is bleeding over into the 2008 Presidential election, with evidence mounting that despite the public unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Iran is emerging as an issue over which Presidential candidates in both major American parties can show their strong national security bona fides. ...

The debate on how to deal with Iran is thus occurring in a political context in the US that is hard for those in Europe or the Middle East to understand. A context that may seem to some to be divorced from reality, but with the US ability to project military power across the globe, the reality of Washington DC is one that matters perhaps above all else. ...

We should not underestimate the Bush administration's ability to convince itself that an "Iran of the regions" will emerge from a post-rubble Iran. So, do not be in the least surprised if the United States attacks Iran. Timing is an open question, but it is hard to find convincing arguments that war will be avoided, or at least ones that are convincing in Washington.

Plesch and Butcher are also interested in the attitudes of the current UK government, which has carefully avoided revealing what its position might be in the case of an attack. They point out, however, "One key caution is that regardless of the realities of Iran's programme, the British public and elite may simply refuse to participate - almost out of bloody minded revenge for the Iraq deceit."

And they conclude that even "if the attack is 'successful' and the US reasserts its global military dominance and reduces Iran to the status of an oil-rich failed state, then the risks to humanity in general and to the states of the Middle East are grave indeed."

Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact: larisa@rawstory.com
Muriel Kane is research director for Raw Story.