To Listen to broadcast version (22 min) with clips from many speakers & sound effects:
Just click the TITLE above (“4 Plots to Nuke Iran”)
————————————————————————————–

According to Seymour Hersh, in April’s New Yorker magazine, a faction in the Bush administration has plans to use nuclear bombs against “targets” in Iran. The pretext is to stop the Iranians from developing a nuclear bomb. The precedent breaks sixty years of nuclear peace, to drop the first atomic weapon in anger since the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sixty years of marches, lobbying, and struggle by people all over the world, opposed to nuclear weapons, might come undone. The President who brought you secret detention camps, torture, spying, and unprovoked invasion of other countries, has plans for a new atomic age of terror.

In a world of conspiracy and violence, we’ll cover four major theories of why America will nuke Iran.

First: the Jewish people are worried that Iran will wipe out Israel with nuclear missiles, a horrible second Holocaust.

Then there are stories that Vice President Cheney has plans to nuke Iran following ANY 911-type incident in America, whether Iran did it or not.

Third, we’ll look at the hidden plotline of oil – how Iran is threatening America’s passion to control Middle East oil, and the American dollar itself.

Finally, the neo-cons from the Council on Foreign Relations think America shouldn’t stop with a nuclear attack on Iranian atomic plants and labs. These intellectuals, and their banking friends, see a great opportunity. Thinking they now have nuclear supremacy, America should just nuke every atomic weapons site in the world, including the Russians and the Chinese. Total victory, total domination, all published in the March/April issue of the magazine “Foreign Affairs.” We’ll get to that.

———
Let’s begin with Seymour Hersh, speaking with ABC Radio in Australia:

[Clip Seymour Hersh from ABCau:

“If you really want to guarantee that you’re going to get rid of the major underground facility in Iran that’s believed to be tied to nuclear activity, a place called Natanz, which is seventy five feet underground, if you want to be sure, the only way to be sure is with a tactical nuke. This is one of the options given in a paper by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Whitehouse. Nobody was advocating it, they were just saying 100 percent guarantee.

Where it becomes interesting, the Joint Chiefs, in one of its subsequent papers, wanted to withdraw that option, because of course it’s madness. A nuclear weapon in the Middle East to an Arab Muslim country, my God, – and the White House wouldn’t withdraw [it].
And that’s the issue, that the White House, some people there, still wanted to have this option.”

[interview ABC National first week of April, 2006]

Mr. Hersh also revealed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal – not to mention his Pulitzer Prize revelations of the Mai Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

Hersh quotes his insider sources saying high level military men are so opposed to any plan to nuke Iran, they will fight it, and possibly resign if unsuccessful.

You can find more in Slate Magazine, an article by Fred Kaplan, April 10th, titled “Are We Really Going to Nuke Iran?”

This is not labeled a “pre-emptive war,” but a “preventative war.”

Fred Kaplan wonders it this is another version of Richard Nixon’s “let them think I’m a madman” strategy in Vietnam. We saw how successful that was.

Iran isn’t buying it, and they have a president who also qualifies as a madman. Madmen are threatening the Earth. This nuclear bravado, perhaps purposely leaked, is meant to hammer on Europe, to make them consider sanctions seriously. We saw how well sanctions worked in Iraq.

Meanwhile, alleged high-level sources within the U.S. military say there is active resistance to the idea, and that some Generals will resign if the government moves toward the nuclear option. In the event an order is given to drop a nuclear weapon for the first time since Hiroshima, we may all hope a military coup will displace Bush and his neo-con gang. Are times already so desperate, that the world prays the military men will revolt, as they did against Hitler in 1944?

Of course, the nuclear story may be a cover to makes us all feel better when the Bush Boys attack Iran with conventional weapons. We’ll be relieved they didn’t start a nuclear war, yet.

Others, including Kaplan, worry this may be a juggernaut of planning, long in the works, just like the attack on Iraq, that cannot be stopped.

The theory “it’s just another bomb” tosses nuclear weapons into the military tool-kit, as just another weapon. The future result would be incinerated cities, or perhaps an inhabitable radioactive planet.

[music clip]
————

According to Hersh, the Navy is already been flying simulated nuclear bombing missions for more than a year, launching from aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea. They are practicing delivery of weapons of mass destruction. Top British politicians and military men have already met to plan their part, although they publicly call for a diplomatic solution.

———
[clip: ABC Drop the Bomb to Stop the Bomb]

[PLOT NUMBER ONE]

[1] Let’s start with Israel.

In 2002, Bush declared Iran to be part of the “axis of evil” – a phrase coined by Canadian speechwriter David Frum.

News about a nuclear attack on Iran has been brewing since the start of 2005.

In March 30, 2005, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector in Iraq, wrote “Sleepwalking to Disaster in Iran.” It was published in the Arab news agency, Al Jazeera (http://english.aljazeera.net)

Contacted by “someone close to the Bush administration” Ritter claims he was warned of a plan to attack Iran in June 2005 – because the Israelis were worried about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Now, that enrichment program has produced it’s first batch of weapons-grade uranium.

Since the Iranian President said Israel should be wiped off the map, while questioning the Holocaust, and pushing Jew-hatred, the Israelis, and Jewish people everywhere, have plenty of cause for sleepless nights. The Iranians have already demonstrated a missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload to Israel, or even to Southern Europe.

Israel’s Defense Minister of the day, Shaul Mofaz, said that “under no circumstances would Israel be able to tolerate nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.”

Israel is thought to have at least 200 nuclear weapons. Contemplating the possibility that a few nuclear missiles could render the Holy Land into atomic dust, being such a small country – Israel loudly announced they had refitted conventional submarines with underwater nuclear missile launch capabilities. Obviously, if Israel was struck by Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Jewish state would respond by wiping out the largest Muslim cities, and Holy Places, in the Middle East.

We have a precedent for an Israeli first strike against Muslim atomic power. In the mid-1980s, the Israeli air force used modified American planes to bomb a nuclear power facility in Iraq, built by France, just days before the reactor was due to start up. The Bush administration may be in a forced race with Israel, to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities – before the Israelis do. According to Scott Ritter, Israel had a plan to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities since 2003.
These relationships are so complex, they may be moving beyond anyone’s control. When nuclear fear sets policy, policy goes mad.

Ritter said “The American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran.” He has no doubt that “the Bush Administration intends to bomb Iran.”

[clip from No Known Unknowns by CrashMagnet]
———–
[“PLOT NUMBER TWO” with music]

[2] Our second nuke’em plot is not based on Israel, but arises from American internal needs. The Project for a New America Century (www.pnac.com) already described the need for a new Pearl Harbor to instigate a stronger state. Now the President, and his gun-toting buddy, are so low in the polls, they may think only another 911-type attack can bring back public support.

We know that the Bush insider gang plotted an attack on Iraq even before they came into office. 911 allowed them to do it, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 911. If there is another attack, says intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi, Vice President Cheney has nuclear battle plans ready to attack Iran, whether they were guilty or not. They are waiting for an excuse to seize total control of Middle East oil, and to repay the Iranians for seizing the American Embassy in 1979.

We hear more about the Cheney nuke mousetrap from right wing sources, people you would expect to be Bush supporters. For example, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute, at www.justinlogan.com, reprints key paragraphs from Philip Giraldi’s article in American Conservative magazine (which is not available online.)

In print, Giraldi says, quote:

“The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in
response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites.

Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually
being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”

end quote.

Some of these “hardened targets” are right in the capital of the country, Tehran. Shall we nuke the capital of Iran?

This would please the Osama Bin Laden crowd – as Sunnis, they loathe the Iranian Shiites almost as much as the Americans. If Sunni radicals can stage another 9-11 incident, the American goliath will nuke their enemies for them.

[clip: You just leave a lot of dead people behind…]

Let’s hear from Giraldi himself, speaking with Scott Horton, an anti-war activist on anti-war.com, speaking on the quite conservative Republican Broadcasting Network, on July 26, 2005.

“[Scott Horton] I’m talking with Phil Giraldi. He’s a former CIA counter-terrorism official who now writes “Deep Background” for the American Conservative magazine. And Sir, you were saying before the break…

[Phil Giraldi] Well basically, some officers in the Air Force are talking about a contingency plan that is being drawn up at the instructions of the White House, more specifically the Office of the Vice President, and the plan essentially is for a nuclear response against Iran, if there is another terrorist incident within the United States, something along the lines of 911. [Edit]

[Garaldo continues] The thinking, the scary thing about this, the Doctor Strangelove aspect of it, is the thinking that is going down here, is basically that you would use the opportunity of a terrorist attack to take out Iran as basically a threat in that region. [Edit]

[Giraldo continues] I don’t have to explain to you that the policy in that region has been insane, right from four years ago.”

[clip from “Cheney has a gun”]

This “Cheney has a plan” chatter became intense LAST summer, in 2005. Now it’s back. Why?

[continues with PLOT 3 and PLOT 4 in the next post]