Global Research

Clinton denies US involvement in murder of nuclear scientist – despite waging ‘no options off the table’ war against Iran

After months of relentless threats against Iran in which the Islamic Republic has been warned by no less than the President of the United States that “no options are off the table” – the US is now denying it had a role in the assassination a top Iranian nuclear scientist this week.

The terroristic formula of all options of aggression being available to Washington has been reiterated time and again by defense secretary Leon Panetta and other senior Washington figures, and even extends to pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons – recall, for example, Hillary Clinton telling the Islamic Republic that it would be “obliterated”.

Furthermore, the “all options” American strategy has been demonstrated in practice, with systematic cyber-attacks on Iranian computer networks, the incursion of CIA aerial drones into the country’s territory, and deadly explosions at military or nuclear research facilities. The no-holds-barred American terror diplomacy against Iran can also be traced back to cruise missile attacks on Iranian oil installations in 1987 and the blowing out of the sky of an Iranian civilian airliner by American warship in 1988, killing 290 passengers onboard.

In that context, official US denials are not worth the paper they are written on.

And Iran knows that. Its head of national security Saeed Jalili and the country’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei have now said so. Indeed, the rest of the world knows it. Already, there is a sense that countries are backing away from Washington’s lynch mob oil embargo against Iran, with even American allies India and Japan now expressing reservations in the aftermath of Tehran’s bloodied streets.

Iranian nuclear scientist 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was killed instantly on Wednesday when assailants on motorbike planted a magnetic bomb on the roof of his car in Iran’s capital city, Tehran. He was the fifth Iranian scientist to be assassinated in the last four years. As with the other assassinations, this was a professional hit-job. The victim was pinpointed in a busy northern part of the capital, the execution was coolly carried out, the device was a weapon-of-choice in covert operation, and the killers made their escape with ease.

Professor Roshan worked at Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, overseeing procurement of equipment for Iran’s nuclear project (– a project, by the way, that is legitimate under Non-Proliferation Treaty rules, but which Western governments and media continually distort as being illegitimate or, worst still, without a scintilla of evidence, for weaponisation).

It is sure that Roshan was targeted deliberately because of his senior role in Iran’s ongoing nuclear development – as with the other targeted scientists – precisely because these scientists are defying Washington’s maniacal demands for Iran to halt such development.

His murder points to a carefully calculated programme of assassination, with specific information, deliberate purpose and lethal precision. It is hardly the work of Iranian militant dissidents, such as the Jundallah or MKO, working in isolation. These Western intelligence-backed groups may have a role in providing the trigger men, so to speak, but the author and director of such a sophisticated assassination programme must be a governmental source. And the perpetrator with the record, means, motive and indeed implicitly stated intention is Washington.

No doubt other shadowy governmental agents could be involved – Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, as they are reliable clients outsourced by Washington to do its dirty work. But whatever the exact chain of execution in the latest killing, the fact is that Washington is the CEO of this Murder Inc.

Recall too that the campaign of covert terror is not just limited to assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists. Last November, an explosion at a military installation at Bid Kaneh, near Tehran, killed 17 personnel, including Brigadier Hassan Moghadan. Several Iranian scientists and engineers have been abducted by American proxy agents while traveling abroad and subsequently rendered to the US; one was disappeared by Saudi agents while he was making a pilgrimage to the holy city of Medina.

In addition to this murder and mayhem, and threats of annihilation, we have a US campaign of economic strangulation of a sovereign country, with Washington thuggishly trying to recruit other countries to implement an oil embargo on Iran ( – ironically one those countries being Japan which was similarly set up for war by an American oil embargo in 1941).

And all the while, the Western media disinform and distort this undeclared war by the US and its allies against a country that has committed no crime. The New York Times and the British Guardian, for example, continually refer to Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” in sinisterly coded fashion that acts to excuse the campaign of aggression and emboldens the logic of murder. More disturbing is the endorsement by the mainstream media of Washington’s programme of murder.

Following the cold-blooded killing of Prof Roshan this week, an editorial comment by Britain’s Daily Telegraph said: “Whatever the moral considerations, there is no doubt that curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a paramount goal for policy-makers and security services alike, and the covert campaign appears to the most effective means of delaying the Iranians’ progress.”

In a comment in The Guardian headlined ‘A covert campaign is the only way to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions’, the writer says: “Ultimately, covert action should be aimed at bringing enough pressure on Iran’s leaders so they understand they will never reach their goal of being a nuclear power.”

Note the intellectual bankruptcy of peddling Washington’s propaganda over nuclear ambitions, and note the moral bankruptcy of prescribing state-sanctioned murder.

The logic of murder and war has become so commonplace among Washington and its Western allies that Republican presidential campaigner Rick Santorum can even quip that “Iranian nuclear scientists turning up dead is wonderful”; the other campaigner Newt Gingrich also recommending “taking out the scientists”.

The degenerated political mind in the Western establishments is a reflection of degenerated, criminal practice where murder is something banal, even amusing to the practitioners.

So when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton comes out in front of the cameras and, with a straight faces, denies “categorically” that America has had any role in the latest assassination in Tehran – far from reassuring the world’s public, she sounds exactly like the cold-blooded killer that her government is.

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent

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