Featured image: Better be careful US President Donald Trump warns Iran president Rouhani (Source: Voice of People Today)
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According to London’s Guardian, “US intelligence officials are under pressure from the White House to produce a justification to declare Iran in violation of a 2015 nuclear agreement” – despite no evidence suggesting it.
The IAEA declared Tehran in compliance multiple times. The White House wants intelligence cooked to show otherwise, giving Trump a pretext to renege on the deal – an international treaty strongly supported by other P5+1 countries.
Collapse of the deal won’t “trigger a new crisis over nuclear proliferation,” as the Guardian suggests. It would further heighten tensions between Washington and Tehran – already strained because of longstanding US aims for regime change by color revolution or war.
According to the Guardian,
CIA “(i)ntelligence analysts, chastened by the experience of the 2003 Iraq war, launched by the Bush administration on the basis of phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction, are said to be resisting the pressure to come up with evidence of Iranian violations.”
Former CIA analyst Ned Price said current agency operatives told him
there’s “a sense of revulsion. There was a sense of deja vu. There was a sense of ‘we’ve seen this movie before.’ “
Former deputy CIA director David Cohen called it “disconcerting” for Trump to conclude Iran is in noncompliance without credible evidence proving it.
“It stands the intelligence process on its head,” he said. “If our intelligence is degraded because it is politicized in the way that it looks like the president wants to do here, that undermines the utility of that intelligence all across the board.”
Langley was never shy about rigging intelligence for political purposes. Nor was Colin Powell as Bush/Cheney’s secretary of state – lying to Congress about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs, infamously claiming:
“(F)acts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”
False!
“(E)very statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are the facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
False!
“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.”
False again. None existed and Powell knew it. War was waged against a nation threatening no one, raping and destroying it, massacring its people, endless conflict continuing.
Does Trump have something similar in mind for Iran? Would he wage war on a country able to hit back hard regionally?
The Guardian:
“(T)here is now a general consensus among US intelligence and foreign intelligence agencies, the state department, the IAEA and the other five countries that signed the JCPOA, as well as the European Union, that there is no significant evidence that Iran has violated its obligations under the deal.”
Trump appears hellbent on reneging Washington’s treaty obligation anyway. He, administration and congressional neocons, along with Israel alone will be pleased if he acts irresponsibly.
On Monday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini strongly supported the nuclear deal, saying it “was not an agreement between two countries. I have repeated it time and again, and I have the impression that we will need to repeat it time and again in the months to come,” adding:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is “a commitment undertaken by the entire international community on one side and Iran on the other, supported by a resolution of the UN Security Council, and certified regularly by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
“(C)ompliance with the deal is certified by the IAEA and by the Joint Commission I chair…not by one single individual country,” a clear reference to Trump’s likely intention to pull out.
America will be more of an international outlaw than already if he unilaterally decertifies the deal – what appears likely at this time around mid-October.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
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