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Further background on Sterling's version of The Trial can be found in the blanket, contemporaneous coverage Consortium News gave to it five years ago. Later, (on March 2, 2018) Consortium published what is by far the most trenchant and instructive analysis of the entire code-named Operation Merlin caper to trap Iran an article by award-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter entitled "How 'Operation Merlin' poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran."
Porter's piece is far more than just an "inside baseball' account of some of the personal and structural disasters befalling U.S. intelligence over the past two decades. Rather, it is a well-documented indictment of the ambitious clowns running the CIA in those times and their pandering to powerful interests like the Israel Lobby in trying to manufacture the image of an Iranian "mushroom-cloud" counterpart to the one conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq.
Indeed, it is fairly well known that Israel wanted President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to "do Iran" first, before attacking Iraq. Bush's neocon advisers were beating their chests, shouting, "Real men go to Tehran."
In my view, the miscreant intelligence chiefs, who kowtowed to that braggadocio and tailored "intelligence" to help, are the ones that should have been put in prison not patriots like Sterling, who tried to expose the foolishness. Porter's findings with regard to the "poisoning of U.S. intelligence on Iran" have huge implications today. Can we afford to take at face value the "intelligence" served up to justify U.S. hostility to Iran? Porter's piece is a must read in these days of dramatic confrontation with Teheran.
Sterling's trial included elements of farce as well as drama. In an example of both, the CIA released original cables carefully selected to prove that Sterling was guilty of leaking the gory details to Risen of the Iran-targeted Operation Merlin, a CIA plot to use a Russian cutout to pass a flawed design for a nuclear weapon, intended to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
The cables were heavily redacted, of course. But, alas, not enough to hide what seems to be an important aspect of the Merlin story namely, that Iraq, as well as Iran, was in the cross-hairs of the Merlin covert action. Unsurprisingly, the media missed this, but Swanson, who attended some of the trial, closely scrutinized one of the cables introduced as evidence and found it to be amateurishly redacted. Inspector Clouseau, himself, could have figured out some of the key words beneath the redaction.
Swanson published his findings under the title: "In Convicting Jeff Sterling, CIA Revealed More Than It Accused Him of Revealing." Swanson's piece is revealing.
Only those seeking the truth about Operation Merlin took notice. All it required for Swanson was (1) to care about whether justice, or an abortion of justice, was about to occur, and (2) to apply some rudimentary trade-craft common to detective work and intelligence analysis.
Those with strong stomachs who have not yet read the Operation Merlin chapter in Risen's State of War, are strongly encouraged to do so. Risen's chapter will provide readers with a strong flavor for why the pro-active ringleaders of CIA's well funded covert operations were so upset with the revelations and so obsessed with the notion that additional leaks were likely unless someone -- anyone -- could be framed, blamed, and imprisoned.
Kafka Shadows "The Trial" of Sterling
With the play-by-play regarding the charges against Sterling, the reasons behind them, and how the government could imprison him on metadata-sans-content and other background readily available to those interested in more detail, let me add some color regarding the grotesque ambiance of the trial itself the trial's metadata, if you will.
The scene was surreal. The trial began on Jan. 14, 2015 with witnesses speaking from behind a 12-foot-tall screen, a kind of metaphor for the smoke and mirrors to which we were about to be exposed. It was not possible to get The Trial by Kafka out of my mind. In Kafka's unnerving novel the protagonist, "Joseph K.," has a profound sense of being trapped -- of being a helpless pawn in the hands of a mysterious "Court." (Kafka had been a government employee in Hapsburg Austria with ample opportunity to observe bureaucracy in action, an aspect that looms large in the novel.)
The Trial depicts the legal, bureaucratic, and social forces controlling individual freedom. "Joseph K." is innocent of any wrongdoing; despite this, he is arrested and executed. Worse still, all the characters in the novel including eventually Mr. K., bow their heads in resignation, assuming this to be the normal, if unfortunate, state of affairs.
How would one interpret The Trial for high school or college students? I thought to myself. A Google search found a teaching guide to the book from Random House.
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