Ismail Salami

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was bitterly right when he said US President Barack Obama “seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem” and aptly described him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Under the pretext of combating terrorism, Obama has followed in the footsteps of former President George Bush and even intensified the killer drone attacks in different parts of the world, a move which has terminated in the unfortunate deaths of multitudes of innocent people. President Obama argues that the drone strikes are focused efforts to exterminate people who are on a list of active terrorists and that they have not caused huge human losses.

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in US killer drone strikes, says, "Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him]." In a similar strain, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK has said:

"So many people who spoke out against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them. So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true, this is a lie."

Only in Pakistan, Obama has authorized over 300 drone attacks and has killed innocent civilians. A new study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law shows that the killer “drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective.” Besides, the study calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low - about 2%. The report says Washington is misrepresenting drone strikes as "a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer," saying that in reality, "there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."

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Ismail Salami

A politically incorrect wave of labyrinthine madness is casting its heavy shadow over Syria as the country is being surrounded left and right by Zionist plots thickening beyond control.

The complicated situation in Syria is ever more obfuscated by myriad forces at work to destroy the friend of Iran and the foe of Israel.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned on Sunday that Syria has become the target of imperialist foreign conspiracy and that the country is facing a real war waged from the outside.

In an address to the new parliament in Damascus, Assad said,

“We are not facing a political problem because if we were this party would put forth a political program. What we are facing is (an attempt) to sow sectarian strife and the tool of this is terrorism."

The Syrian leader also slammed the perpetrators of the Houla massacre as "monsters". The carnage claimed the lives of 108 people, including 49 children and 34 women.

"What happened in Houla and elsewhere (in Syria) are brutal massacres which even monsters would not have carried out."

As an act of character assassination and in order to portray Assad as an illogical person, the media only broadcast a select part of his speech, cutting his speech only to those parts which could be easily misinterpreted or interpreted out of context instead of giving every listener or viewer the chance to judge everything in its proper context.

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Ismail Salami

Washington is widely blamed for bloodbath in
Iraq and Syria.

From the recent massacres happening in Iraq and Syria, one can gather that Washington has adamantly trodden on a path which is to be seen as a way to redefine the war in Iraq, an effective stratagem to bring the regime of Assad to its doom and recalibrate a comprehensive plan to topple the Islamic government of Iran.

Immediately coinciding with the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, a coordinated string of deadly explosions gripped Iraq, leading to the massacre of dozens of civilians. On December 22, 2011, multiple bomb explosions happened simultaneously in Baghdad, claiming the lives of tens of innocent civilians. Another series of explosions targeted Shia Muslim pilgrims on Friday (January 6) and killed at least 71 people.

Most of the explosions which targeted the Shia Muslims are maliciously meant to inspire the feeling and doubt that it is a matter of sectarian violence, a plot devised by the US and its allies to justify that the Iraqi politicians are intent to provoke a 'communal bloodletting' which is gradually tearing the country asunder.

In fact, Washington is capitalizing on tension in the country and playing the sectarian card on the one hand and sending a message that Iraq is not capable of maintaining security and stability in the country.

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Ismail Salami

In what seems to be nothing but US-style barefaced arrogance, President Barack Obama has demanded the return of a spy drone which violated the airspace of the Islamic Republic but which was to the humiliation of the US officials downed by the Iranian army.

The top-secret RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which was used by Washington as part of the covert operations the US officials have already vowed to conduct inside Iran, was hunted down by an electronic ambush and landed with a minimal degree of damage over the city of Kashmar about 140 miles inside Iran.

Consciously blind to the realities of Washington's abysmal policies, the Western media treated the report with a predilection for suspicion and disbelief and used the somewhat innocuous-sounding term 'reconnaissance drone'. However, when Pentagon later acknowledged the “mysterious loss of a surveillance drone”, they had no choice but to face the truth.

What strikes as bizarrely ridiculous is the fact that Washington has demanded the return of the drone which they have confessed was sent on a secret mission for gathering information.

''We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond,'' Mr. Obama has said.

Nonetheless, Iran says that it has no intention of returning the drone and that Washington should compensate Tehran for violating the country's airspace.

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Ismail Salami

What seemed at first to be a simplistic effort by the US to corner Iran into political isolation has begun to branch out into ramifications of Kafkaesque proportions.

Despite its evidently make-believe facade, the cooked-up story of the Saudi envoy assassination plot does not seem to be something which can be easily banished from the minds of the American powers that be.

The heat over Iran in the US government is growing rapidly. Some Republican congressmen have expressed their interest in waging an all-out war against Iran, a threat they keep refreshing every time they have an excuse. They have clearly stated that Washington should not dismiss the idea of resorting to military force against Iran, an idea which is being strengthened in Congress.

“I don't think you should take it off the table,” Michigan Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has said.

It is quite natural that he was vehemently supported by the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, who have always maintained an antagonistic approach towards Iran.

Hawkish Gingrich said on CNN, “Our goal should be the replacement of the Iranian dictatorship, and we have done nothing of consequence to systematically undermine the regime.”

The US government keeps preaching at others and talking of dismantling this or that regime which they term as 'dictatorial' or 'sponsor of terrorism'. Now that the lot has fallen to the US government itself, they are at a loss and appear despondently desperate. The implosive voice that is eroding the American system from within cannot be easily smothered or contained.

Therefore, the US has to find a way to divert international attention from what is going on in the country and zoom in on Iran. This can be one simple reason but it is very plausible. However, a bigger scenario is at work in collaboration with the Mossad and other intelligence services.

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Ismail Salami

Ali Ardashir Larijani is an Iranian philosopher, politician
and the chairman of the Iranian parliament. (Wikipedia)
Larijani said on Wednesday that the "fabricated allegations"
aimed to divert attention from Arab uprisings that Iran says
are inspired by its own Islamic revolution that toppled the
Shah in 1979. "[O]ur neighbours in the region are very well
aware that America is using this story to ruin our relationship
with Saudi Arabia." (Al Jazeera)

In a 'united against Iran campaign,' the US government has accused Tehran of orchestrating an assassination plot against the Saudi envoy in Washington, a move which is to be seen as part of a US stratagem to carry on with its plan of demonizing and isolating the Islamic Republic of Iran.

US Vice President Joe Biden said on "The Early Show" on Wednesday that "It's critically important that we unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians. That's the surest way to be able to get results."

Obviously, the US officials will use the fabricated occasion to press for new international sanctions as they say that Iranian agents have sought to hire a purported member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi envoy on American soil.

Regardless of the impertinence and hollowness of the claim, one should not disregard the influence of the powerful Zionist lobby in the new mudslinging plan which is, as Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani puts it, a 'tactless and childish game.”

To add more fuel to Iranophobia, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on other countries to work together against what is becoming a clearer and clearer threat" from Iran and said, “This really, in the minds of many diplomats and government officials, crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.”

Washington, once again, went on a labeling spree and called Iran “the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.”

There is well-grounded speculation that the new move is meant to stir up dissension in the region so that the US may bolster its waning influence among the Middle Eastern countries as Iran wields a great amount of political muscle in the region. In other words, the US will then be in a position to fish in troubled waters.

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