In reply to “The Pentagon’s Lie Machine,” by Justin Raimondo, 02/15/12:
As a long time supporter of Antiwar.com, I am pleased to write to you for the first time and it’s about your column today.
My view is that you have the tail wagging the dog, the New York/Washington media corporations are not being bamboozled by the Pentagon.
Not at all, The New York Times and the Washington Post and the major TV networks are the initiators of propaganda that an often reluctant (more reluctant in the past than today) military goes along with. The good Colonel is correct in asking how no one in the major media can see the truth. It is because they do [not] want to see the truth. The lie machine did not start with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia/Serbia, Vietnam.
As a Serbian American and a close follower of the anti-Serb propaganda in the US media, I noted the much more favorable stance of the US military towards Serbia. I saw firsthand who was leading and who was following the charge to war.
It goes back to Henry Luce and company who realized that the Soviet Union’s different mechanism of property ownership was an existential threat to the West’s elite in general and so a vast PRIVATE propaganda machine was organized that brow beat our otherwise relatively benign military into the present war machine over the last 60 years.
The pen is mightier than the sword, who wields the pen?
Robert A. Oklejas
In reply to “Harsher IAEA Report on Iranian Nuclear Program Expected Next Month,” by John Glaser, 02/09/12:
In the 2005-2006 period there were a few articles in mostly science-oriented publications (like Nucleonics Week) that discussed the quality of the uranium hexafluoride (UF6) being produced at a conversion facility near Isfahan. (UF6 is the gaseous form of U-235 & U-238 that is sent to centrifuges for enrichment.) Based on samples of this gas taken by the IAEA it was concluded there was so much molybdenum and other oxyfluoride contamination in the UF6 feedstock that, while upgrading to 3.5% LEU was possible, the LEU could never be upgraded to 90% U-235 for weaponizing as this would destroy Iran’s P-1 centrifuges.
More importantly, even if Iran was willing to make a dash for HEU by sacrificing its centrifuges — a project it has now been working on for 25 years — the resulting ignition of this material (if Iran had a nuclear trigger) would not result in a nuclear explosion because of the contamination. One scientist was blunt in his assessment of Iran’s UF6 — “It’s garbage.”
In approximately the last six years since this contamination issue came up there has (as far as I can tell) been zero mention of this not unimportant fact — Iran could never build a nuclear weapon from its existing inventory of LEU. China helped the Iranians with the design of the plant at Isfahan, but in 1997 the Clinton administration convinced China to withdraw its technical support and Iran was stuck trying to reverse engineer the purification process in the Chinese specifications — and couldn’t do it, and pursued the so-called “pulse” purification process, that hasn’t worked. IAEA reports do not discuss this topic for various reasons, and these reports reveal practically none of the technical data available to the IAEA.
However, Isfahan remains under inspection and if the Iranians were to either change or upgrade the purification step and actually were able to produce pure UF6 this would become a “reportable event” — and then there might be some cause for concern. U.S. sanctions began in 1995 and are now really starting to increase the misery index of the Iranian populace: Iran just defaulted on its payments to India for rice imports and has been cut off, it appears other food exporters to Iran have put their deliveries on hold, and the threat to cut off Iran’s oil exports plus isolating its banking system is having ripple effects beyond the food situation. The hysteria level about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program raised by both Israel and the USA is nothing more than an advancing fog bank to achieve one end — regime change.
To conclude: The UF6 issue is a Big Deal, but seems to have escaped media coverage.
Eric Petersen
In reply to “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” by US Rep. Ron Paul, (R-TX), 10/11/2003:
Why do American Elections always bring out the drums of war? With nine months before the election the US and Isreal are taking the world to the brink of war. This time it will not be confined to a single country and may involve the world.
