Final destination Iran?
Exclusive: Rob Edwards

Published on 14 Mar 2010

Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.

Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.

Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, it is used by the US as a military base under an agreement made in 1971. The agreement led to 2,000 native islanders being forcibly evicted to the Seychelles and Mauritius.

The Sunday Herald reported in 2007 that stealth bomber hangers on the island were being equipped to take bunker-buster bombs.

They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran Dan Plesch, director, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, University of London
Although the story was not confirmed at the time, the new evidence suggests that it was accurate.

Contract details for the shipment to Diego Garcia were posted on an international tenders’ website by the US navy.

A shipping company based in Florida, Superior Maritime Services, will be paid $699,500 to carry many thousands of military items from Concord, California, to Diego Garcia.

Crucially, the cargo includes 195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added.

The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision. He may decide that it would be better for the US to act instead of Israel, Plesch argued.

“The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely,” he added. “The US … is using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.”

According to Ian Davis, director of the new independent thinktank, Nato Watch, the shipment to Diego Garcia is a major concern. “We would urge the US to clarify its intentions for these weapons, and the Foreign Office to clarify its attitude to the use of Diego Garcia for an attack on Iran,” he said.

For Alan Mackinnon, chair of Scottish CND, the revelation was “extremely worrying”. He stated: “It is clear that the US government continues to beat the drums of war over Iran, most recently in the statements of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

“It is depressingly similar to the rhetoric we heard prior to the war in Iraq in 2003.”

The British Ministry of Defence has said in the past that the US government would need permission to use Diego Garcia for offensive action. It has already been used for strikes against Iraq during the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars.

About 50 British military staff are stationed on the island, with more than 3,200 US personnel. Part of the Chagos Archipelago, it lies about 1,000 miles from the southern coasts of India and Sri Lanka, well placed for missions to Iran.

The US Department of Defence did not respond to a request for a comment.

Just a note:

Specifically, it appears that the CIA and other of our security agencies absorbed lots o’ Nazi’s after the war.

Beyond this, I would guess that we have no idea what the NSA, et. al. have been up to…and little way of assessing their true power in determining key aspects of our government’s agenda.

“Fascism: A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, togther with a belligerent nationalism.”

Mussolini renamed his type of government “fascism.” The original word he used was “corporatism.”

“Once upon a time…………………”

*The nation’s leader knew that there were plans for a major act of terrorism against the country. Previous attempts had failed, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they’d succeed.

*Finally, in a a bold terrorist act, a major national symbol was destroyed, and the leader used the opportunity to declare “war on terrorism”…

*…and establish his legitimacy as a leader–even though he hadn’t won a majority in the previous election.

*He referred to the heinous act as a “sign from God” and declared an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors: …a people, who traced their origins to the Middle East and motivation for their “evil” deeds in their religion.

*Soon, the first prison was holding terrorist suspects.

*In a national outburst of patriotism, flags were displayed everywhere, even printed in newspapers.

*Within weeks of the terrorist attack–in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it–the nation’s now-popular leader pushed through legislation that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus

*Police could now intercept mail…and wiretap phones. Suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without acces to their lawyers.

*Police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

*Within the first months after the terrorist attack, instead of referring to the nation by its usual name, he began to use the term “homeland.”

*As hoped, people’s hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sown.

*Within a year of the terrorist attack, the leader’s advisors determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necesary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation. He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the nation, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single powerful leader.

*And, perhaps the most important, he invited his supporters in industry into the halls of government to help build his new detention camps, his new military, and his new empire which, he said, would ultimately herald peace. Industry and government worked hand-in-glove, in a new type of pseudo-democracy sustained by war.

*The time is 1933. The leader is Adolf Hitler.

*The Reichstag–Germany’s parliament building–was gutted by a fire started by a Dutch terrorist.

*Americans remember Hitler’s Office of Reich Security (the Reichssicherheitshauptam t) simply by its most famous agency’s (the Schutzstaffel) initials: the S.S.

*And you know the rest of the story.

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Sound familiar?

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From Thom Hartmann’s extraordinary, “We, the People.”

“But attached to this strength is a fatal flaw, a capacity to disregard significant feedback in favor of inner symbolic circuitry….A machine is free from everything but its program. A blind man is free from the blinding sun, a deaf man from the deafening thunder.

“Much of the time when we talk about freedom we mean freedom from messages – the ability to pay attention only to interior conceptual patterns.

“Much of our current pathology is based on an unfortunate human tendency to seek autarchy. If the species turns out to be a flop, it will probably owe its demise to this urge. By autarchy I mean self-sufficiency- the ultimate high tariff system in which nothing goes in and nothing goes out….”

— Philip Slater (ibid.)

“All the errors and follies of magic, religion, and mystical traditions are outweighed by the one great wisdom they contain – the awareness of humanity’s organic embeddedness in a complex natural system. And all the brilliant, sophisticated insights of Western rationalism are set at naught by the egregious delusion on which they rest – that of human autarchy.”

………………………………………………………………………….

“The notion that people begin as separate individuals, who then march out and connect themselves with others, is one of the most dazzling bits of self-mystification in the history of [our] species.”

………………………………………………………………………………

— Philip Slater, A Dream Deferred: America’s Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal

“With the invention of the scientific method and the depersonalized procedures of modern technics – cold intelligence, which has succeeded as never before in commanding the energies of nature, already largely dominates every human activity… [Currently] we find scientific ideation and technical skill…at the mercy of an infantile scheme of life, seeking extravagant, super-mechanisms of escape from the problems that [individuals and any] mature society must face.”

Mumford goes on to say:

“Never before was man so free from nature’s restrictions, but never before was he more the victim of his own failure to develop in any fullness, his own specifically human traits.

“This extreme state of post-historic rationalism [may very likely] carry to a further degree the paradox already visible…The more rationalized become the means of living – the more irrational will finally become the end product, man himself.

“In short, power and order, pushed to their final limit, lead [in our time] to their self-destructive inversion: disorganization, violence, mental aberration, subjective chaos.”

Too often, I think, we westerners exhibit an irrational faith in rationality. Similarly, we fail to apply a scientifically-founded skepticism to science itself. This kind of faith-based relationship to science leads to scientism, which, when we lack awareness, presents its own grave dangers.

Such an impulse would, I believe, tend to support more radical political movements whose goals are to supplant, not enhance, previous regimes. This has a close affinity to purity myths. One cannot change without purgation, purification, or cleansing. Any remnant of the old will only infect the new.

But this is not how human knowledge works. Human knowledge is evolutionary, building on the past, using proven methodologies for moving forward, methodologies that test new ideas. This process is not flashy, but seriously demanding, demanding concentration and discipline, and social participation.

Is it any wonder that a seriously stressed population might be given to bloody revolution, feeling overwhelmed by historical weight and circumstance?

Perhaps it is a wonder that this does not occur more often.