Blacklisted News
John Glaser
Iran’s recovery of a downed U.S. surveillance drone publicized America’s ongoing covert war on Iran, a part of the Obama administration’s strategy even more bellicose than his predecessor’s.
U.S. actions towards Iran are being couched as an attempt to prevent their attainment of nuclear weapons, despite a failure to put forth a shred of evidence that a weapons program is underway.
In a statement on Thursday, President Obama reiterated this confrontational approach with a popular euphemism for international aggression: “No options off the table means I’m considering all options.”
And many options are indeed being carried out. Antiwar.com columnist and former CIA agent Philip Giraldi wrote this week that sources have revealed to him secret presidential findings “authorizing stepped-up covert action” against Iran.
“A ‘finding,’” he explained, “is top-level approval for secret operations considered to be particularly politically sensitive.” President Bush had issued a number of findings authorizing “the use of intelligence assets to disrupt Iranian Revolutionary Guard” as well as one in 2007 that authorized “attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists” and the use of “computer viruses to disrupt the Iranian computer network.”
But President Obama has gone a step further. He recently issued a finding which “extends existing initiatives and is intended to strangle Iran by creating insurgencies along all of the country’s borders,” primarily by supporting Iranian dissident groups to conduct domestic terrorism and undermine the Iranian regime.
In addition to those efforts, according to the Washington Post, the “White House also has boosted sales of bunker-busting munitions, fighter jets and other military hardware to Persian Gulf states as well as to Israel, building on long-running efforts to boost the military capabilities of key U.S. allies in the region” in a broad effort to garrison Iran’s surroundings with provocative militarism.
The Iranian government issued a formal complaint and summoned Swiss ambassador Livia Leu Agosti, who handles diplomacy for the U.S. in Iran. Iranian officials said the U.S. drone they are now in possession of is evidence of espionage efforts inside Iran and that Iran ”strongly protests the violation of an RQ-170 spy aircraft deep into its airspace,” and asked for “an urgent response and compensation from the US government.”
Rhetoric from the White House and Congress remains aggressive and threatening towards Iran, despite being exposed as the aggressors themselves. Surely, if the U.S. had uncovered a number of Iranian spy operations and terrorism-funding programs inside America, Washington would be doing much more than issuing formal complaints.
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