Mar 10, 2016

Three conclusions and a surmise: Pravda, Iran and the US Judiciary

by Vaska

Scanning my Facebook this morning, I came across a startling Pravda item someone had shared on my wall. The reaction I had on seeing the posted headline was immediate: “that’s it, Pravda’s making things up! It’s a brazen propaganda organ, after all, as some of my acquaintances accuse it of being.” To make sure I’d got this right at last, I went on the Internet to check if there might have been a speck of truth somewhere in the whole thing on which Pravda then based its outrageous piece…
… only to find that Pravda’s report is entirely factual.
Bloomberg, NewsMax, JewishPress, Singapore Business Times, and MINA have also reported that a New York district court judge has ruled that Iran is to pay $10.5 billion in damages and compensation for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Pentagon: $7.5 billion to the estates and families of the victims, plus $3 billion to insurance companies including Chubb Ltd. for the property damage, business interruption and other claims they’ve paid out.

Judge George B. Daniels, Yale University and UC Berkeley Law School.

As the Jewish Press article, based on Bloomberg’s initial report, puts it:
“The judge said that Iran had given active support to the terrorists who brought down the towers and killed close to 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. He also found that Iran had failed to defend claims that it aided the September 11 hijackers and was therefore liable for damages tied to the attacks.”
There are three logically inescapable conclusions and one speculation I draw from this extraordinary legal ruling. First, the conclusions:
1. In its reporting on the USA, Pravda’s as innocent of deception and invention as I had previously held it was. These days, the folk in charge of “anti-American propaganda” are the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, and the US judiciary.
2. The American corporate-owned mainstream press is so embarrassed by this travesty of justice, which it cannot or doesn’t wish to critique, that it can’t bring itself to inform the public about it, with only Bloomberg reporting on Judge Daniels’ ruling yesterday.
3. The American judiciary lost its independence decades ago and is now, evidently, an arm of the Deep State.
What I now surmise based on these conclusions and on Judge Daniels’ criminally unjust, rapacious ruling – after all, if applied, it would literally rob the people of Iran of over $10 billion as compensation for something their country had no part in – is that the American Deep State is planning an attack on Iran at some point in the relatively near future (2-5 years from now, say) and is already laying the ground for it with legal fictions such as this one. When the time comes, its mainstream media will trot out this ruling as “additional” evidence of Iran’s treacherousness and its hostility to the United States, and the American public, fully invested as it remains in the myth of America the Good, will ask no further questions either of its politicians or its press.
This speculation is bolstered by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign promises/threats to bomb Iran should her backers ask her to (for which she and the media will provide suitable pretexts in the form of lies similar to the one just issued by the New York District Court – see her statements on Iran here, here, and here).

That Obama had put a Hillary Clinton/Madeleine Albright insider in charge of his administration’s negotiations with Iran – as Breitbart’s headline puts it, Emails Show Hillary Clinton OWNS The Iran Nuclear Deal – may either lead one to marvel at the White House exceptionalist’s cynicism or provide a smidgen of hope the deal will hold if Hillary should return to the White House as POTUS. [Personally, I tend to the former view.] Whether Bernie Sanders, who’s never been a particular friend of Iran, would resist the party’s neocon push for a war against it is most uncertain as his foreign policy statements have been fully in line with the Clinton-Obama School of Liberal/Humanitarian Warmongering.
Understandably, Putin’s last-minute decision on March 8 to cancel Russia’s delivery of long awaited S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Iran has Tehran very unhappy. [According to The Diplomat, and despite its promises to the contrary, Teheran’s been caught red-handed supplying Hezbollah with Russian state-of-the-art weaponry.] If the mullahs are apprehensive and nervous about what the future holds for Iran, they have every reason to be.