NEW EUROPE ON LINE – By Paulo Casaca MARCH 19, 2012
Quoting undisclosed sources of the US State Department, two US official media entities, NBC and Foreign Policy, recently made slur attacks insulting Israel, the main Iranian opposition movement and a group of US personalities that have been challenging the US appeasement policy towards Tehran, and/or revealing the truth about Iraq.
NBC mimicked Iranian official propaganda, which stated that the recent spate of terrorist bomb attacks – carried out with the same sorts of devices and techniques that targeted a dissident nuclear scientist in Tehran and targeted Israeli diplomats or diplomatic facilities in Tbilisi, Delhi and Bangkok – were totally or partially the result of a conspiracy between Israeli Mossad and Iranian PMOI.
The NBC report’s content was as disgusting, but technically less effective, than what we witnessed directly in the English language Iranian official channel’s Press TV (recently banned in the United Kingdom for its role in promoting terrorism) and, in itself, is only relevant as a symbol of the slide of the US press and diplomacy’s ethical standards into the gutter.
Foreign Policy sets the tone for another conspiracy – this one quite literally a garbage conspiracy, which claimed the appalling conditions suffered by the Iranian PMOI refugees in the camp where they were forced to move were actually not actually exist in the first place, but were the result of the sabotage of the camp, made in tandem with retired senior US officials in Washington.
The Foreign Policy slur corresponds factually to what some diplomats have been directly accusing the Iranian refugees of, and repeating in bilateral meetings in the UN and the EU institutions.
In brief, the issues are basically the following:
1. Following intense pressure from the US, Iran and Iraqi authorities, the UN set in motion a relocation plan of Iranian refugees from camp Ashraf to camp Liberty, publicly announced at the end of 2011.
2. Several US personalities publicly criticized the relocation plan for the following two main reasons: a) It forced the Iranian refugees to live side by side with the very same military officials that have been murdering them (over 50 refugees were assassinated by bullets or run over by Humvees in the last couple of years). b) The facilities had been looted by Iraqi forces after the US departure and did not offer the proper conditions to house the Iranian refugees.
The request of these US officials to observe the camp was flatly refused by the US and UN, which instead decided to promote a publicity campaign of fabricated technical certifications, panoramic photos and, as we can see, defamation of the Iranian opposition members and US officials promoted by an unscrupulous media.
While this sordid campaign goes much further than the issue of rubbish and sludge published by FP, this is perhaps the best symbol of the both unscrupulous and incompetent nature of the State Department’s undisclosed sources, and is worthy of analysis.
1. If the US State Department’s undisclosed sources thought that the group of US former high ranking officials was conspiring with the Iranian opposition to tarnish the image of the Iraqi run Camp Liberty, why did it not:
a) Allow a public presence of independent observers into the camp instead of closing it from observers and ordering a publicity campaign?
b) Promote an official act of transfer between the certifying authority and the incoming residents. I am not familiar with US law, but in the country where I live, Belgium, the simple renting of a flat implies this type of procedure?
2. For the Iranian refugees, to have planted the mountains of garbage shown in their photos taken upon their arrival there would only have been possible by smuggling this garbage inside the camp. However, the Iranian refugees were searched for hours both before they left Ashraf and when they arrived at camp Liberty. No smuggled garbage was reported at the time.
The accusation of the State Department’s undisclosed sources is therefore a lie, and we challenge them to make an independent investigation of the facts on the ground.
This is what the world is accustomed to seeing in totalitarian states. This is what those of us who were brought up thinking of the US as the land of freedom could never have imagined we would witness in the United States of America.
Paulo Casaca, director of Alliance to Renew Co-operation among Humankind, a research institute in Brussels, is a former MEP from Portugal.
