On Friday, January 13, Eli Lake posed a question on Newsweek's web site, The Daily Beast:
Has Israel Been Killing Iran's Nuclear Scientists?
Lake does not have hard evidence to answer his question. But he speculates, using the old reliable "circumstantial evidence," to point to Israel's Mossad "for a string of slayings of Iran's nuclear experts."
The most recent Iranian to die is nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, killed in his automobile in Tehran Thursday.
Eli Lake writes, "at the very least Israel's defense establishment would like its allies to believe its spies have pulled off these 'events that happen unnaturally.'" To take credit for their dark deeds, Israel's narrative shapers put out the word in their usual sly fashion:
Six weeks ago in Washington, on the sidelines of a major U.S.-Israeli meeting known as the "strategic dialogue," Israeli Mossad officers were quietly and obliquely bragging about the string of explosions in Iran. "They would say things like, 'It's not the best time to be working on Iranian missile design,'" one U.S. intelligence official at the December parley told The Daily Beast.
Michael Adler reports on the anti-Iran campaign in his Daily Beast report.
"While no one will confirm that a covert campaign is being waged, many see such a strategy as just the sort of thing one would want to use against an Islamic Republic believed to be seeking the bomb.
"The campaign would include the Stuxnet computer virus, allegedly unleashed in 2009 to destroy about a fifth of the centrifuges turning at Iran's main uranium-enrichment plant in Natanz, and booby traps on equipment Iran buys abroad that ensure the equipment malfunctions once put to use.
"And then there are assassinations. The facts from Wednesday: 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan (pictured below with his son) was killed when a motorcyclist attached a magnetized bomb to his car as he was driving to work. Roshan was director of commercial affairs at the Natanz plant. The attack was the fourth of its kind on an Iranian scientist in two years, with three of the men killed and the fourth surviving to become the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization."
Israel is obviously doing its best to push for a war with Iran which it wants to be "provoked" by Iran. Israel wants absolute hegemony over the region, which is why it developed its own nuclear arsenal decades ago, and it is also why it insists it will not tolerate nuclear arms in the hands of its neighbors.
From at least one surprising corner, support for this Israeli war scenario has slipped. At the New York Times, reader complaints poured in after the Times and other media outlets promoted the Israeli reading of an assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran's nuclear program had a military objective. The Israeli reading of the report was a distortion of the facts.
The Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane agreed that the complaints about this distortion were legitimate. He called on his own paper to "correct the story."
Robert Naiman reported on Brisbane's response to the complaints in his Truthout news analysis:
"I think the readers are correct on this. The Times hasn't corrected the story but it should because this is a case of when a shorthand phrase doesn't do justice to a nuanced set of facts. In this case, the distinction between the two is important because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli.
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