War drum: Tool for destruction of Constitutional liberties

Godfather Politics

Verbatim Post

Tamir Pardo, chief of Mossad since last January, in a meeting with Israeli ambassadors, said that there is no threat to Israel from Iran, and Iran is only engaged in peaceful research in its nuclear facilities.

Pardo is not a name that can be easily ignored. He is part of a generation of exceptional military leaders who fought in the wars for the defense of the State of Israel. In addition to his experience as a communication expert with special forces, Pardo was also part of Operation Entebbe in 1976 – the most daring special forces and intelligence operation in the 20th century, where 100 commandos flew 2,500 miles to a hostile country to rescue Israeli hostages. (Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, commanded the operation and was killed in action.) Pardo knows both the intelligence and the military side of his work; he is a true expert.

In his assessment of Iran Pardo echoes the words of his predecessor, Meir Dagan, himself a decorated soldier with a long and illustrious career. Dagan also spent the last years of his term at the head of Mossad opposing a military attack against Iran. That two consecutive chiefs of Mossad say the same thing about Iran can not be overlooked by any politician, whether Israeli or American.

This comes less than a year after Netanyahu himself declared to the US Congress that Israel can defend themselves and therefore they do not need the US to defend them. The context of his speech should have made it clear to his American listeners that there is no threat from Iran that needs any large scale military action. In addition to it, an unclassified report by the Pentagon reveals that the regime in Tehran has no thoughts of attacking anyone but is rather concerned with its own survival. Other reports by intelligence experts, with CIA at the head, show that Iran is not even close to developing a nuclear bomb, and that there is no threat. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the oldest and most popular newspaper in Israel, also ran an editorial saying that even if Iran had nuclear weapons, they would act rationally.

In the face of all these opinions by the experts, the American political class – of both parties – continues to bang the war drums as if nothing hasn’t been said. Suspiciously, most commentaries published on the “nuclear threat from Iran” have for authors members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the elitist organization that somehow always recommends policies in favor of more government control at home and UN dominance abroad. None of the commentators have any intelligence credentials – nothing even close to the experts who say otherwise. The banging of the war drums is strictly political, based on political agendas, not on any real data or analysis. Obama’s Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, is openly calling for declaring war on Iran because of their development of a nuclear weapon, without even consulting the experts. On the Republican side, almost all of the presidential candidates based their political career or the “Iran scare,” and some of them openly promised their supporters that if they get elected, they will bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The idea that Iran is engaged in peaceful research only – shared by all the experts in the intelligence circles – is considered ”dangerous” and “kooky.” In fact, the experts are deliberately ignored.

All this leads to the obvious conclusion that the war drums are simply a tool for a political agenda. And that political agenda is not the national security of the US or the defense of Israel as American ally, but the destruction of the Constitutional liberties in America by the political class. The laws that came out of the “security scare” in the last 10 years are all aimed at one or another of our liberties as guaranteed in the Constitution. The Patriot Act is a good example of it, with its monstrous child, the TSA. The latest act by both Republican and Democrat Senators – the law for indefinite detention of American citizens by the military – is another example of using “foreign threat” to deprive Americans of their liberties. The experts agree: the threat is not real. But the opinion of the experts does not match the intentions of the political class. Therefore the experts are ignored.

We will discover one day that the experts were right, and the politicians were lying. Hopefully, we will still have enough liberty left to oppose the agenda of the politicians.