*Written by Rob Rimes.

I’m not going to sit here and type up some bullshit scare piece about how American society is ripping apart at the seams. However, I am going to point to the fact that the actions of our military and the words of several of our political elite in this country have come off as pretty disgusting the last few days. This has been a weird week full of strange happenings and none of it really paints a positive picture as to where this is all going. Tensions in Iran are at an all-time high and the truth is, we are at war, it just hasn’t been declared yet. I mean, between drone attacks, assassinations and secret sabotage attempts, what else would someone call it? Over in Afghanistan, tensions are also pretty high, if not even higher than they were a few days ago.

You see, two incidents have happened recently that are a bit unsettling. The first incident involves United States Marines pulling their dicks out and pissing on dead Taliban soldiers. Now while I understand that these dead men are pretty much dead dogs and terrorists, it doesn’t excuse this immature and classless act. A lot of people are really upset about this and there are also a good amount who are praising these servicemen for emptying their bladders on these slain bastards. Now while I am not a person who is easily offended by things, I do find this to be disturbing because of the message it sends.

Now I understand that war is hell and outsiders can’t necessarily put themselves in the mind frame of a soldier in the heat of battle but regardless of that, this is still inexcusable. When a man or woman wears that uniform they are representing all of us and to partake in such actions makes our country, as a whole, look like a bunch of assholes. It’s also going to just piss the Taliban off even more, as their dead are being disrespected. Granted, I could care less about showing them any respect but what this incident really does is it disrespects the United States and what it is we are supposed to stand for. This sort of behavior just paints a really clear picture of reality, that we are an evil empire toppling regimes and milking resources all over the globe. It’s obvious that this isn’t about fighting terrorism anymore considering that the guy we went in there to get, we got. Realistically, even though we just snuffed Osama bin Laden last year, it doesn’t mean that we didn’t lose sight of our purpose before that. In all honesty, I think our leaders were completely dishonest about the real reason as to why we went over there to begin with.

As for the soldiers pissing on dead people, I understand that they may have been high on adrenaline and disgusted by the evil fucksacks that they had just killed but if they are incapable of maintaining the behavior and decorum of an American man in uniform, then they need to be dealt with. In this case, they obviously weren’t able to do the right thing and not succumb to their sophomore antics. What these soldiers failed to understand, in the heat of the moment, is that America needs to be the country setting the example across the globe. If we’re going to preach all the things we preach to people, then what are they going to think when they see our military personal pissing all over their fresh kills. Just because the Taliban beheads dead American soldiers and parades them around in the streets, doesn’t make it right for us to disrespect them in a tasteless fashion. Truthfully, if you were to commit an act like this, you shouldn’t take pictures or video for fuck’s sake! On stupidity alone these guys should be court marshaled.

Needless to say, the Pentagon is pissed. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said:

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable. Those found to have engaged in such conduct will be held accountable to the fullest extent.

Former Marine and U.S. Congressman Michael Grimm said:

This actually hurts me. This is painful. There’s no excuse for this ever happening. They were trained, and they know better, and they disgraced their country.

Former Army lieutenant colonel and U.S. Congressman Allen West said this in a letter to the Weekly Standard:

I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

I agree with West, for a change, but do find myself at odds with his last sentence. The people don’t need to shut their mouth, they need to hold their leaders and their military accountable for their actions, whether he thinks that we can wrap our heads around war or not.

The point of all this is that when you are in the military you take an oath to serve and protect this country. With that oath comes the responsibility of carrying yourself in a certain manner, with a certain attitude and a certain set of principles. These four men who urinated on these dead Taliban soldiers did not carry themselves in such a way and should be punished for their actions. The world already sees us as a giant bully and now we’ve given them more reason to think that. In fact, we’ve probably ignited even more hatred within the hearts of our enemies and the repercussions of that could just be more of our servicemen sent back home in body bags as we continue on this pointless conquest.

All the pundits praising these guys are assholes. Then again, those same pundits want perpetual war in an effort to combat this fictitious “War on Terror”. These pundits are even praising the assassination of Iranian scientists as well, which brings me to my next point.

Just yesterday, an Iranian scientist was assassinated when men on motorcycles put a magnetic bomb on his car and detonated it. Several other people, besides this scientist, were injured in the blast. Now it is suspected that Israel was behind the attack, which means that the United States was involved or most likely knew about it. So, why was the scientist killed? Well, he was working on Iran’s nuclear program. Apparently, just because of that, he deserved to be murdered and the innocent people around him deserved to be maimed.

Now this attack wasn’t the first one like this. A similar assassination happened a few months back and that one took the lives of two people. Of course, the American mainstream media praised the attack and completely ignored the reality of the situation. With this latest attack, the mainstream media followed the exact same formula and condoned this action as well.

In fact, Sean Hannity on his radio show, just after the attacks, said:

Whoever is involved in the killing of these Iranian nuclear scientists, God bless them.. ..I wish we were involved.

You can hear him for yourself at this link.

So not only is Hannity condoning murder, he is condoning terrorism, YES terrorism. I guess where Mr. Hannity sits it is only terrorism when it is someone else doing it to us. How would he react if the roles were reversed and Iranians killed either Israeli or American scientists, not to mention innocent bystanders? Hannity and every mainstream shitcock like him would be outraged and calling for war! Hell, we’d hear about how the dead scientists were just patriots doing their duty for their country and now their children have to grow up without their mom or dad. When you flip the fucking coin, this bullshit is absolutely transparent and it is sickening! To steal an old overused cliché adage: what has America become?

I can’t just point the gun of reason at Sean Hannity, I’ve also got to point it at my favorite punching bag, the big bag of dicks himself.. Rick Santourm! Of course this piece of crap asshole had to open his mouth in regards to all this. Here’s what the bastard said:

On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly. I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe. And people say ‘well, you can’t go out and assassinate people.’ Well tell that to al-Awlaki. Okay, we’ve done it. We’ve done it to an American citizen, so we can certainly do it to someone who is producing a nuclear bomb that can be dropped in the state of Israel or provides a nuclear shield for a country which spreads terrorism with impunity and changes the face of the world.

Hey, here’s the video!

God, I hate this guy. Santorum is so quick to fight abortion yet so quick to murder anyone he can paint as a fucking boogeyman and he does it while carrying the cross. This sanctimonious fucksack is the worst kind of evil and the fact that people would vote for this guy just blows my goddamned mind! The fact that the people in the room when he said this didn’t throw the closest objects they had next to themselves at Santorum’s head is a fucking travesty. Guys like Santorum, with comments like that, are just terrorists themselves. Rick Santorum will never let the crusades end, he won’t stop until he drowns in the blood of Islam as he is blinded by faith in a God he thinks he understands. The difference between Rick Santorum and the crusaders of the past is that Mr. Santorum is a fucking coward. He would never fight this perceived evil himself, he’d rather just send countless kids over there to die for his archaic vision and just like Sean Hannity, he would condone all acts of terrorism by our guys and our allies because we are on the right side of this bullshit holy war.

So while condoning all these evil deeds, these guys keep trying to sell us on the idea that Iran is either building a bomb or already has one. Funny, considering Leon Panetta was caught on tape admitting that Iran has no immediate plan for nuclear weapons. That came directly from the mouth of our Defense Secretary yet these establishment conservative cockpuppets continue to ignore facts and preach insanity. These are the same vile dickbags that are high-fiving each other over soldiers pissing on terrorists, even if they don’t publicly support that action. The fact is, we’re a nation lead by and preached to by cowards who would never pick up arms themselves. Fuck these cockroaches.

To be frank, America’s behavior is becoming deplorable in the realm of the military, politics and the media. At least there are us sane people that can see through this sort of bullshit and not succumb to its influence. Then again, guys like O’Reilly and Hannity have consistently high ratings and the attendance at patriotic organizations like Tea Party events has been overtaken by Fox News drones and Newt Gingrich supporters instead of real constitutional conservatives and libertarians who are willing to look passed party politics and promote liberty. I guess I have to wait for that third group to emerge that bridges the gap between the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement and is strictly made up of the best from both groups not the joiners and sycophants. I don’t think this country can wait on that however.

Now I know that this is probably coming off as negative but I do think that there are enough of us that see the forest for the trees. In fact, I know that our numbers grow by the day and even if we have to ride out this storm awhile longer, we are still going to come to a point where enough is enough and the sort of actions and rhetoric that taint the image of our unique society will no longer be effective. The mainstream media and the horrible politicians and the bully military will no longer have a hold on the free minds of the public and they will lose their power. “Live free or die” used to mean something and even if it seems like some overused throwaway slogan from a few hundred years ago, the truth in those words will mean something incredibly significant again.

TEHRAN, Iran — Two assailants on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to the car of an Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility, killing him and wounding two people on Wednesday, a semiofficial news agency reported.

The attack in Tehran bore a strong resemblance to earlier killings of scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program. It is certain to reinforce authorities’ claims of widening clandestine operations by Western powers and allies to try to cripple nuclear advancements.

The bomb killed Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported. Natanz is Iran’s main enrichment site, but officials claimed earlier this week that they are expanding some operations to an underground site south of Tehran with more advanced equipment.

Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorcycle fix a bomb to the car.

“The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and is the work of the (Israelis),” Fars quoted Tehran’s Deputy Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying. “The terrorist attack is a conspiracy to undermine the (March 2) parliamentary elections.”

‘Our path is irreversible’
Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said the country’s nuclear path would not change despite the killing, which it branded a “heinous act”.

CONTINUED at MSNBC.

Meet Sara Nodjoumi and Till Schauder. They’re husband and wife documentary filmmakers currently finishing a project called The Iran Job, waiting to hear about their film festival submissions and obsessively checking Kickstarter to track the progress of their campaign to raise money needed for the film’s final touches. All in all, it’s an exciting, nerve-wracking time of anticipation in their household. Sara and Till’s four year old has even gotten into the spirit of things, randomly yelling out words like Kickstarter and Facebook.

The Iran Job follows Kevin Sheppard, an American basketball player from St. Croix who is recruited to play for the Iranian Super League. Judging from the trailer, the film’s a winner. Till describes Kevin as smart, warm and funny. You can see from his interactions in the film that Kevin’s got a quick humor and is a sharp observer. He becomes friends with three Iranian women and this unlikely friendship coincides with the Green Movement in Iran. It’s basketball that brought Kevin to Iran and the arena fills with cries of “Kevin, Kevin.” At the same time, the streets are filling with Green Movement protesters calling out “Where is my vote?”

This is all great stuff. But the story behind the story is great too. For Sara and Till, the post-production process has them on pins and needles. Till had this to say about Kickstarter: “The Kickstarter campaign is the first time anyone is seeing the film outside of our circle and it’s really exciting because it’s [just been a few days now] and we’re getting incredible traction. We’ve done some research on these campaigns and we’re doing well. We’re getting pledges and backers and Facebook Likes. We were expecting that in the beginning it would just be family and friends in our own network, but already on the second day people started pledging that we don’t know, from all over the world.”

They showed a fantastic amount of self-control in not sneaking to check the Kickstarter website to see if they’d gotten any new backers while we were talking. But it’s hard not to hit the Refresh button and hope the numbers change. It’s addicting. I’m not sure how I’ve gotten sucked in to compulsively checking a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary film about basketball in Iran, but that’s what makes my job fun.

Sara and Till have gotten some pretty fine attention since the film’s appeal crosses over from basketball to global politics to women’s right. Supporters include Abigail Disney (Executive Producer), Christane Amanpour, Maz Jobrani, Karim Sadjapour and Gloria Steinem. The Kickstarter campaign is one more piece in making the film.

In case you aren’t familiar with Kickstarter, it works like this: Submit your project (check the guidelines first). Once it’s up on the Kickstarter site, you’ll have a specified time period to get pledges for your project. If you don’t reach your targeted funding amount, no monies are paid. But if you reach or exceed your goal, you get your funding. Now for the people who have pledged, not only is there the supreme satisfaction of lending support to a cool project, but depending on the dollar amount kicked in, they’ll walk away with a DVD, poster or other expression of gratitude.

By pledging $25 to The Iran Job, you’ve pre-ordered a copy of the DVD. So it’s a good deal for you and for the filmmakers. With pledges coming in from all over the world and for varying amounts, you can see why Sara and Till are glued to the Kickstarter website.

There’s more to this story than just fundraising. Till traveled in and out of Iran with a small cache of recording equipment and mailed footage to his mother in Germany to ensure it would safely make it out of the country. Germany has better relations with Iran than America does. His mother then sent it on to the U.S. and everyone kept their fingers crossed that nothing went wrong during the process.

Of course, there was the time Till was detained in Iran while Sara was home with one child and 5 months pregnant. I asked him if the Iranian authorities knew he was making the film. “We still don’t know. The guy at the airport didn’t speak English. He just swiped my passport and said Blacklist. And then I was taken to this room for 24 hours and sent back on the next plane out. Nobody there gave me any explanation, but then I wrote a letter to the Iranian embassy in Berlin. Having entered as a German citizen, that embassy was in charge and I never got any response. I tried again, calling and nothing. It’s possible that they generally sort of crack down on people in the media in the wake of the election, but we haven’t found out. I’d love to know.”

So you see, documentary filmmakers lead exciting lives. There’s creativity in shooting, storytelling, funding and smuggling. And now the 50-day game show atmosphere of the Kickstarter campaign. Please join in the fun. Click here for The Iran Job Kickstarter campaign and Like them on Facebook. And watch for the film to come out in 2012.

Well, that didn’t last long.

Less than 12 hours after opening, the Obama administration’s “virtual embassy” in Iran was blocked by Tehran’s digital gatekeepers on Wednesday.

Instead of seeing a welcome message from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Iranians trying to reach the site were directed to an Iranian government Web page. It warned that visiting the American site was “against the law.”

The Iranian government’s move to block the site nearly as soon as it was launched illustrates the problems the Obama administration will have as it tries to keep the resource available to all Iranians.

The State Department has said that it anticipated that Tehran would block the site, just as it does with millions of others sites — among them, CNN, Gawker and Playboy.

Officials say they think they will be able to get the site back up.

That “the Iranian government would attempt to block access to a site that … does nothing more other than offer information about how to travel to the United States and opportunities for travel to the United States, as well about our policies, in a very transparent and straightforward manner, speaks volumes about their trust in their own citizens and then — and closing them off to the outside world,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.

Toner added that Iranians with “virtual private networks” — software that allows users to reach blocked content through portals in other countries — can still see the site. Some of the content from the site is also being read on social media sites such as Facebook, Toner said.

Based on early indications in Tehran, some Iranians with access to the site remain a bit underwhelmed.

“Why can’t we apply for visas at this embassy?” asked Sohrab, a nanotechnology student who declined to provide his full name. “Now it is more of a propaganda tool, telling us about U.S. culture — but we can see that on the satellite channels.”

Source: The Washington Post.

At an Iranian military base 30 miles west of Tehran, engineers were working on weapons that the armed forces chief of staff had boasted could give Israel a “strong punch in the mouth.”

But then a huge explosion ripped through the Revolutionary Guard Corps base on Nov. 12, leveling most of the buildings. Government officials said 17 people were killed, including a founder of Iran’s ballistic missile program, Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam.

Iranian officials called the blast an accident. Perhaps it was.

Decades of international sanctions have left Iran struggling to obtain technology and spare parts for military programs and commercial industries, leading in some cases to dangerous working conditions.

However, many former U.S. intelligence officials and Iran experts believe that the explosion — the most destructive of at least two dozen unexplained blasts in the last two years — was part of a covert effort by the U.S., Israel and others to disable Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The goal, the experts say, is to derail what those nations fear is Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons capability and to stave off an Israeli or U.S. airstrike to eliminate or lessen the threat.

“It looks like the 21st century form of war,” said Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington think tank. “It does appear that there is a campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage.”

CONTINUED at LA Times.

*Taken from Reuters.

Iranian protesters stormed two British Embassy compounds in Tehran Tuesday, smashing windows, hurling petrol bombs and burning the British flag in a protest against sanctions imposed by Britain, live Iranian television showed.

Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency said protesters took six British diplomatic staff hostage from an embassy compound in the north of the city but it withdrew the story from its website minutes later without giving any explanation.

The attacks followed the rapid approval by Iran’s Guardian Council of a parliamentary bill compelling the government to expel the British ambassador in retaliation for the sanctions. A lawmaker had also warned Sunday that angry Iranians could storm the British Embassy as they did the U.S. mission in 1979.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson.

Barack Obama has told America’s allies that the United States will attack Iran before fall 2012 unless Tehran halts its nuclear program, a time frame that suggests Obama is willing to use war as a re-election campaign tool to rally the population around his leadership.

A subscriber-only report by DebkaFile, the Israeli intelligence outfit which has been proven accurate in the past, reveals that shortly after the end of NATO operations in Libya at the start of this week, “President Barack Obama went on line to America’s senior allies, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Israel and Saudi Arabia, with notice of his plan to attack Iran no later than September-October 2012 – unless Tehran halted its nuclear weaponization programs.”

According to the report, the window of opportunity for an attack before Iran moves the bulk of its nuclear processing underground is quickly evaporating.

Obama’s directive contributed to the flurry of reports this week about NATO powers putting their Iran war contingency plans on standby.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from the Excavator.

Richard Silverstein, publisher of the blog Tikun Olam, wrote an important article yesterday, July 5th, called ‘September Surprise: Israel Attack on Iran?’about the very real possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran in September when the United Nations is expected to officially recognize Palestinian statehood.

*Taken from the Guardian.

A bin blazes behind Iranian protesters at an anti-government protest in Tehran last month. Photograph: AP

*Taken from yNet.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacked Barack Obama on Friday, saying the American president “doesn’t even know how to spell his own name properly.”

During a visit to Bushehr ahead of a scheduled rally in support of his regime, the Iranian leader said, “Obama wants to rule the world, but he can’t even control his own emotions.”

Thousands of Iranians are expected to take to the streets after Friday prayers to show their support for the regime in Tehran and protest against opposition leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi Mehdi Karroubi.

A statement issued by the regime in Tehran said, “The public will unite and express hatred toward the barbaric crimes of the incitement leaders and their hypocritical allies.”

Iranian lawmakers called for opposition leaders to be tried and executed as punishment for the protests that took place in Tehran on Monday and after the disputed 2009 presidential elections.

“Mousavi and Karroubi should be executed,” lawmakers chanted at Tuesday’s open parliament session. “Death to Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami!” they shouted, the state-run news agency IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency) reported.

“We believe the people have lost their patience and demand capital punishment” a statement signed by three-quarters of the lawmakers read.

Despite the threats, messages posted on the Internet have urged opposition supporters to continue the protests.

On Monday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US stands with Iranian opposition supporters. She called on Tehran to grant its citizens the same freedoms that were recently won by protests in Egypt.

“Let me, clearly and directly, support the aspirations of the people who are in the streets in Iran today,” Clinton told reporters after meeting with the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner.

“What we see happening in Iran today is a testament to the courage of the Iranian people, and an indictment of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime — a regime which over the last three weeks has constantly hailed what went on in Egypt,” Clinton said.

“We wish the opposition and the brave people in the streets across cities in Iran the same opportunities that they saw their Egyptian counterparts seize.”

Clinton spoke after an Iranian opposition website said dozens of people were arrested on Monday while taking part in a banned rally in Tehran to support popular uprisings which toppled the governments in Egypt and Tunisia in recent weeks.

The rallies amounted to a test of strength for the reformist opposition, which had not taken to the streets since December 2009 when eight people were killed.