Wall Street mocks Senator Rand Paul's constitutional concerns

The Wall Street Journal Mocks Senator Rand Paul's Constitutional Concerns

By Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org | March 7, 2013

When President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder channel the policies of George W. Bush they win plaudits from the Money Power and neocon Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. 

On March 6 Republican Rand Paul filibustered on the floor of the U.S. Senate against the confirmation of John O. Brennan as CIA director, and the prospect of US government assassination of American citizens on American soil. In news reports of the Orwellian corporate media, the word assassination is seldom employed. The preferred cosmetic euphemisms spoon-fed to the infantilized public are "drone strikes, targeted killings" and "lethal military force." God forbid any reporter or official would utter the word “government assassination.” The phrase carrries with it a potential wake-up call which the managers of opinion avoid like the plague.

During his filibuster, Senator Paul eloquently stated, “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

How could anyone object to Paul’s protest? What is there in the words of this senator that could possibly be objectionable to any supporter of the rule of law and the Constitution? Yet, neocon Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham disparaged Paul's protest.

Graham played the 9/11 card, saying, “The drone program he [Obama] has utilized overseas, I think has made us safer. This idea that we’re going to use a drone to attack an American citizen in a cafe in America is ridiculous...I don’t worry about [drones killing Americans]. Here’s what I worry about: that al-Qaeda has killed 2,958 of us (on Sept. 11, 2001), and is going to add to the total if we let our guard down. And I will do everything in my power to protect this president — who I disagree with a lot — and future presidents in having an ill-informed Congress take over the legitimate authority under the Constitution and the laws of this land to be the commander in chief on behalf of all of us.”

The Wall Street Journal blasted Sen. Paul in an editorial titled, "Rand Paul's Drone Rant” (March 7,  p. A16). Here are excerpts:

"...Senator Paul said an 'alarm' had to be sounded about the threat to Americans from their own government...Senator Paul had written the White House about the possibility of a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on American soil. Attorney General Eric Holder replied that...as a hypothetical Constitutional matter, Mr. Holder acknowledged the President can authorize the use of lethal military force within U.S. territory...

"Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well...What it (the U.S. government) can do under the laws of war is target an 'enemy combatant' anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant.

"...Mr. Holder is right that the U.S. could have targeted (say) U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki had he continued to live in Virginia. The U.S. killed him in Yemen before he could kill more Americans...if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms.” (End quote from the Wall Street Journal).

The aforementioned Anwar al-Awlaki was a reckless and foolhardy orator and writer who advocated violence. Contrary to the Wall Street Journal however, there is no conclusive evidence that al-Awlaki ever killed anyone, or ordered anyone to be killed. The U.S. government evidently assassinated him because of the words he spoke and wrote. The same lethal criterion for defining an “enemy combatant" can be applied to radical U.S. writers and speakers who offend His Presidential Majesty.

The George W. Bush administration asserted that the President of the United States could, entirely on his own authority and judgment, designate any American citizen an enemy combatant. Once this absolutist designation was applied, the American citizen could be assassinated by his own government, using an aerial drone, or an FBI, CIA or military intelligence agent, or mercenary contractor.

Bush achieved for himself the same pharaonic power which the crowned heads of Europe exercised over their peons in the eighteenth century. It is one significant reason people fled Europe for America, where a revolution was fought against the tyranny of kings. The twenty-first century "war on terror” has given us King George Bush and now Pharaoh Barack Obama. If Rand Paul is wrong to contest this state of affairs, then the American Revolution was wrong. 

(Even Sen. Paul needs to be reminded that focusing primarily on whether or not Obama's assassins will be allowed to perpetrate the killing of American citizens in the U.S. with flying drones, provides a loophole for government assassination of citizens by other, more conventional killing methods). 

The root of this harbinger of Federal government tyranny is not limited solely to the European monarchies of old. The assassination praxis which “our" government has embraced is an Israeli doctrine which has been used with impunity for decades against Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state, as well as Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Lebanese. In the Israeli state the security apparatus decides who needs to die and that person is assassinated by poison, gun fire, tank or artillery shells, or air force missiles and bombs. In several cases which this writer has studied, the victim's wife and children die with him -- not because he was using them as a "human shield” -- but because he had sat down to dinner with his family, or been riding in a car with them when Israeli assassins struck.

Israeli assassination doctrine is considered a legitimate part of “the laws of war" according to that august organ of the money bags, the Wall Street Journal. What the plutocrats have papered over is that one reaps what one sows. When the U.S. abandons the rule of law rooted in western Christian civilization, for the misrule that constitutes state terror, it invites a similar response from its adversaries. If it is right to murder anyone who the president labels an "enemy combatant," even a writer or speaker who has never picked up a gun or a bomb, then what prevents Islamic forces from deciding that U.S. invasion troops and U.S. bombs dropped on their wedding parties, homes and villages, are the actions of terrorist enemy combatants who should be, along with their commanders and political leaders, in retribution, targeted and killed?

Bush and Obama, and their handlers, were and are certainly aware of the invitation to retribution which their assassination policy establishes. It should come as no surprise that this is what they deliberately invite, at great cost to our troops and the American taxpayer. Those who control the U.S. government desire a savage war to the hilt against all who stand in the way of the Israeli holocaust against Palestine and Lebanon, and the spread of the international Money Power and its enslaving usury (a fact about which the libertarian Sen. Paul is tragically unaware).

George W. Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, predicted that the war on terror would last for generations. The Cryptocracy that controlled Bush and now Obama seeks a titanic global struggle,  another "Good War” on the World War II model of total mobilization and unconditional surrender, that will firmly galvanize the American people in favor of huge expenditures of blood and treasure; one that will be so brutal it will last for Mr. Cheney’s “generations." Is this not a curse?

According to the Wall Street Journal, those who are receptive to learning about the hidden threat to freedom represented by the executive branch's doctrine of assassination of American citizens, are "impressionable...kids," while Rand Paul is a “ranting...fired-up" hysteric.

But who really is impressionable? The peons who dutifully swallow the official story put forth by the media’s gatekeepers of orthodoxy, or the citizens who ask questions and probe beneath surface appearances and rhetoric?

Moreover, is this writer an enemy combatant for having written this column? Which star chamber, under a cloak of "national security," decides whether I live or die? Are we living in the constitutional republic of America, or the Israeli States of America?

Michael Hoffman is the author of Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not.

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George Bush ordered training in Nevada for terrorists

BY ALEXANDER ABAD-SANTOS

April 6, 2012

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/04/us-trained-terrorists-part-war-terror/50831/

M.E.K. might be the most infuriating thing you will read about the global war on terrror today: The New Yorker's Sy Hersh reports that during the Bush years,  the U.S. military trained the Iranian opposition group even though it is and was on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. 

Members of M.E.K. (which translates to the People's Mujahedin of Iran) were trained at a U.S. base in the Nevada desert starting in 2005. 

More recently, as NBC's Richard Engel and Robert Windrem reported in February, they have been involved in the targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Hersh adds in his report that while it's not known if those involved in the scientist killings are the same operatives as those who were trained in Nevada, Pentagon officials are impressed with how far M.E.K. has come. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” a senior Pentagon consultant told Hersh, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations than it never had before."

OUR MEN IN IRAN?

By Seymour M. Hersh

The New Yorker • April 6, 2012  (excerpt)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. 

The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”

It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time, he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated group that went though the training course; the former senior intelligence official said that he was aware of training that went on through 2007.)

Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a nickel to the same organization?”

Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled. “They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California, recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that the operation was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”

Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group. Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before the fall of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved in intelligence activities as well as providing security for the M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity is ongoing.

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins." 

“The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,”* he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.

The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations that it never had before...”  (End quote; emphasis supplied).

*The lowering of the "morale" of the American people is also the "goal" of US and Israeli intelligence, so that Americans will fail to challenge evil and go along with a Romney (or Obama) presidency, and more useless, costly and terrorizing foreign wars on behalf of counterfeit "Israel," and the fevered war mania typified by the messianic complex of world-policing, American neconservative Zionists. --Michael Hoffman

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Media Newspeak Calls Israeli Terrorism “Covert Actions"

[Michael Hoffman’s comments are in red]

Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions

Mehdi Marizad/Fars News Agency, via Associated Press

A bomb attached to a car killed an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran on Wednesday. The United States condemned the attack.

By SCOTT SHANE

New York Times  January 11, 2012

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WASHINGTON — As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.

Multimedia

Iranian Nuclear Scientist Is Killed

Timeline: Attacks on Iran’s Nuclear Program

Related

• New Study Ranks Countries on Security of Materials That Fuel Nuclear Arms (January 12, 2012)

• China Balks as Geithner Presses for Iran Curbs (January 12, 2012)

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Fars News Agency/European Pressphoto Agency

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a supervisor at a uranium enrichment plant.

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The [terror] campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon [which "western leaders" and on what evidence?]. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. [No mention that the terror attack wounded Abbasi’s wife].

Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities ["Lethal activities"? Why can’t the Times call it terrorism, as they would if a similar attack on an American missile base had occurred?], the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks [lethal attacks = euphemism for terrorism], which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported. [The world would be expected to shed copious tears if an Israeli scientist had been assassinated by Islamists].

Like the drone strikes that the Obama administration has embraced as a core tactic against Al Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign [covert campaign = euphemism for terror campaign] against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war [this is quite a stretch: terrorism as an “alternative” to war]. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran’s enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon. And some skeptics believe that it may harden Iran’s resolve or set a dangerous precedent for a strategy that could be used against the United States and its allies.

Neither Israeli nor American officials will discuss the covert campaign in any detail, leaving some uncertainty about the perpetrators and their purpose. For instance, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he believed that at least some of the murdered scientists might have been killed by the Iranian government. [Okay to accuse Iran of this but absolutely discreditable to accuse the US government of being behind the 9/11 attacks] Some of them had shown sympathy for the Iranian opposition, he said, and not all appeared to have been high-ranking experts.

“I think there is reason to doubt the idea that all the hits have been carried out by Israel,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s very puzzling that Iranian nuclear scientists, whose movements are likely carefully monitored by the state, can be executed in broad daylight, sometimes in rush-hour traffic, and their culprits never found.”

A more common view, however, is expressed by Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I often get asked when Israel might attack Iran,” Mr. Clawson said. “I say, ‘Two years ago.’ ”

Mr. Clawson said the covert campaign [when Israelis assassinate a scientist it is a “covert campaign;” when Muslims assassinate someone it is terrorism] was far preferable to overt airstrikes by Israel or the United States on suspected Iranian nuclear sites. “Sabotage and assassination is the way to go, if you can do it,” he said. “It doesn’t provoke a nationalist reaction in Iran, which could strengthen the regime. And it allows Iran to climb down if it decides the cost of pursuing a nuclear weapon is too high.”

[“Sabotage and assassination is the way to go” says Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- cheerleading for terrorism!].

A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign ["covert campaign" again; the NY Times simply will not ever refer to it as terrorism] only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.”

Multimedia

Iranian Nuclear Scientist Is Killed

Timeline: Attacks on Iran’s Nuclear Program

Related

• New Study Ranks Countries on Security of Materials That Fuel Nuclear Arms (January 12, 2012)

• China Balks as Geithner Presses for Iran Curbs (January 12, 2012)

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.

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The former Israeli official noted that Iran carried out many assassinations of enemies, mostly Iranian opposition figures, during the 1980s and 1990s, and had been recently accused of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington.

“In Arabic, there’s a proverb: If you are shooting, don’t complain about being shot,” he said. But he portrayed the killings and bombings as part of a larger Israeli strategy to prevent all-out war. [Can you believe this: when Israelis kill and bomb it’s part of a peace strategy!].

“I think the cocktail of diplomacy, of sanctions, of covert activity might bring us something,” the former official said. “I think it’s the right policy while we still have time.”

Israel has used assassination as a tool of statecraft since its creation in 1948, historians say, killing dozens [hundreds] of Palestinian and other militants and a small number of foreign scientists [“In Arabic, there’s a proverb: If you are shooting, don’t complain about being shot,”] military officials or people accused of being Holocaust collaborators. [The Times  invokes the 1940s-era “Holocaust" in a report on the Middle East].

But there is no exact precedent for what appears to be the current campaign against Iran, involving Israel and the United States and a broad array of methods.

The assassinations have been carried out primarily by motorcyclists who attach magnetic bombs to the victim’s car, often in heavy traffic, before speeding away.

Iran’s Mehr news agency said Wednesday’s explosion took place on Gol Nabi Street, on Mr. Roshan’s route to work, at 8:20 a.m. The news agency said the scientist, who also taught at a technical university, was deputy director of commercial affairs at the Natanz site, evidently in charge of buying equipment and materials. Two other people were wounded, and one later died in a hospital, Iranian officials said.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter of protest to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, blaming “certain foreign quarters” for what he called “terrorist acts”  [the NY Times wouldn’t call them that] aimed at disrupting Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program, under the false assumption that diplomacy alone would not be enough for that purpose.”

The ambassador’s letter complained of sabotage, a possible reference to the Stuxnetcomputer worm, believed to be a joint American-Israeli project, that reportedly led to the destruction in 2010 of about a fifth of the centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium. It also said the covert campaign included “a military strike on Iran,” evidently a reference to a mysterious explosion that destroyed much of an Iranian missile base on Nov. 12.

That explosion, which Iran experts say they believe was probably an Israeli effort, killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who was in charge of Iran’s missile program. Satellite photographs show multiple buildings at the site leveled or heavily damaged.

The C.I.A., according to current and former officials, has repeatedly tried to derail Iran’s uranium enrichment program by covert means, including introducing sabotaged parts into Iran’s supply chain.

In addition, the agency is believed to have encouraged some Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, an effort that came to light in 2010 when a scientist, Shahram Amiri, who had come to the United States, claimed to have been kidnapped by the C.I.A. and returned to Iran. (Press reports say he has since been arrested and tried for treason.) A former deputy defense minister, Ali-Reza Asgari, disappeared while visiting Turkey in 2006 and is widely believed to have defected, possibly to the United States.

William C. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, said he believed that for the United States even to provide specific intelligence to Israel to help kill an Iranian scientist would violate a longstanding executive order banning assassinations. The legal rationale for drone strikes against terrorist suspects — that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies — would not apply, he said. [Will there be anti-terrorist drone strikes against the Israelis suspected of assassinating Iranian scientists?]

“Under international law, aiding and abetting would be the same as pulling the trigger,” Mr. Banks said. He added, “We would be in a precarious position morally, and the entire world is watching, especially China and Russia.” [Correct. China and Russia don’t want to be lectured on morality by an American government that assists the murder of foreign scientists by Israeli terrorists — oops -- I should say, covert campaigners].

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, said he believed that the covert campaign [covert campaign = euphemism for terror campaign] , combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.

“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers from Washington, David E. Sanger from Cairo, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.

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Hoffman’s Afterword: New York Times reporters in the preceding article observe remarkable, automaton-like conformity to Zionist Newspeak and neocon hubris: neither the US nor its Israeli ally ever engage in terrorism. Israeli assassination is never once described in this report by the New York Times as terror, always with cosmetic weasel words: "lethal activities” and  "covert campaign." This is a textbook example of Orwellian manipulation of language on the part of a newspaper which arrogantly regards itself as the ethical watchdog over the propaganda of other nations and rival publications.

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Michael Hoffman was the media critic for Willis Carto’s now defunct Washington, D.C. newspaper, The Spotlight.

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