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ASIA TIMES


July 23, 2010

[Re Amiri to CIA: Iran had no bomb program, Jul 21] With incessant talk of attacking Iran from the people who brought us Iraq/Afghanistan and media manipulation to influence the American public, Gareth Porter should be thanked for revealing the continuous big lie that Iran has a nuclear weaponization program. He should also be thanked for showing how mainstream journalists for the past several months have hyped this lie when actually, what Amiri told the CIA was that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
The world has seen this horror movie before, when the United States and the international community were manipulated into attacking Iraq. This shameless manipulation of what Amiri said is being led by the George W Bush/Dick Cheney crowd and their fellow travelers. And the media is blindly reporting this big lie. This is the same group that let the real enemy, al-Qaeda, escape and metastasize to 65 countries. The question is, whose interests are being served? Isn't Iraq and Afghanistan enough? Has nothing been learned? Coincidentally, as this story by Gareth Porter was breaking, the ex-head of British MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was telling an inquiry in London that "Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 US-led invasion" and that the war in Iraq led to a loss of "focus on the al-Qaeda threat" creating a "long-term, major and strategic problem." Manningham-Buller went on the say "our involvement in Iraq radicalized a whole generation of young
people who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam."
Common sense would dictate that it is not in the national security and economic security interests of the US to be duped into another war. The way forward is what President Barack Obama said recently, that US-Iran must move past "suspicion, mistrust and confrontation". The president went on to say the US seeks a relationship "based upon mutual interest and mutual respect". And only patient, positive diplomacy can achieve that.
Fariborz S Fatemi
United States (Jul 23, '1