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“Hezbollah” members scouting for targets?
NSS staff During Donald Trump’s campaign, he frequently spoke ill of Iran and claimed that the country was the number one “state sponsor of terror.” At the time, and also today still, the main three terror organizations are Sunni Wahhabist, while Iran is Shiite, the theological antithesis of the Sunni religion. Americans had not heard of terror acts committed in the US or Europe by Iranians, so alert thinkers must have wondered how the Iranians could have earned this impressive terror title. Now we learn that 2 men allegedly associated with the Iran-supported Hezbollah have conspired to aid and abet that organization by “surveilling targets”. A real bonanza for warmakers. Since the beginning of 2017, at least 3 terror suspects were arrested in the US on charges related to aiding and abetting ISIS. The charges: attempting to join a terror organization, conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to ISIS I suspect that no one reading this remembers reading about these cases, which were not actual terror acts and no one was hurt. Yet the media are all over this latest arrest, even though no one was hurt and no trial has been held. The difference? We can finally nail a real live Iran-linked terror plot and splash it all over the news. The last Hezbollah related arrest in the US that we could find in an internet search was on Feb 1, 2016, when Mohammed Noureddine, a Lebanese (hence non-Iranian), was arrested for laundering money to be sent to fight ISIS. Yes, it is a crime in the US not only to join ISIS but also to fight ISIS (depending on how it's done). An internet search for Hezbollah attacks in Europe turned up numerous articles several years old warning that the group could at any time launch an attack somewhere, and a Burgas attack in 2012, which may have been committed by Hezbollah, though there is no proof. Quite a contrast to Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and quite inconvenient for a war sales campaign. Nonetheless, the US war hawks are building a case against Iran, which just happens to be seen as an enemy by the Saudis, whence Donald Trump just returned from a visit, which fired him up with valor to defend the kingdom against its enemies -- like Qatar and Iran. Meanwhile, there are regular reports of ISIS-related terror acts but none have received more attention than this lone arrest of two alleged Hezbollah associates. You will recall that GW Bush and his obedient media machine worked hard for months to build a case against Saddam Hussein, based mainly on the red line of WMDs. This art of the war deal should be a familiar pattern to Americans, and yet, it occurs to only a few of us somnolent Westerners that the same pattern is unfolding today. Many Americans seem incapable of believing that Trump, who was so critical of Bush, would be following the old Bush pattern of sneaky tricks. But as in the Bush administration, we have a country that does not want to fight us being portrayed as an enemy -- by the same people who brought us Russian "hacking." Rex Tillerson just delivered a scorching speech reminding us of what terrible people those Iranians are. Now if all this hype is just being used to impose new sanctions, then that is bad enough for a regime that has been successfully fighting ISIS in Syria almost since the get go, even as the US slumbered. But the pattern we are now seeing is not much different from the anti-Saddam rhetoric just before the Iraq War, and the missing ingredient this time as well is evidence. The trouble is, Iran is a Russian ally and Russia does not betray its allies -- and is not easily fooled by Western propaganda. And has nukes, and a rather broad blanket of sophisticated air defenses. Another feature of US war propaganda is that it gets more shrill when the US has just committed a major misstep, generally one that has taken the lives of people who are not fighting our troops. The information gathering site Airwars reported that in March, an “unprecedented” number of civilians had been killed by US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, more than Russia had killed that month, even as the Western media shrieked that Russia was killing civilians in its raids. The US outstripped the Russians. Bad press. The US under Trump has struck Assad’s forces three times in the past two months, despite Trump’s promise to fight only ISIS and not attempt regime change. They use the excuse that there is a “deconfliction” zone, but the legitimate Syrian government does not recognize it, and neither does anyone else. Besides, the Syrians were not attacking the US base at al-Tanf. Badly in need of a diversion after the latest irregular attack on Syrian and allied troops, the US just came up with the ticket: 2 men accused of siding with Hezbollah and arrested for allegedly “surveilling” Israeli and US targets in Panama and the US. The msm did not stress this, but the men are not Iranians. They are Arabs.
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