Clinton: Russia sees Iran threat
BBC news
Wrapping up a European tour in Moscow, Mrs Clinton said Russian leaders had in private said they were ready to act if Tehran did not meet its obligations.
But Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, on a visit to China, said it was too early to talk about sanctions on Iran.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that threats of sanctions were counter-productive.

Iran denies allegations by the US, EU and Israel that it is trying to build the bomb under cover of a civilian nuclear energy programme.

Mrs Clinton told the BBC on Wednesday that Russia in the past six months had "moved tremendously" to acknowledge the threat of Iran's programme...
(14 Oct 2009)

Another setback on Iran
Andrea Mitchell, msnbc
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today expressed skepticism about sanctioning Iran over its nuclear program. Putin made his comments in Beijing, in what will be widely viewed as a diplomatic rebuke to the U.S. and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton just wrapped up a two day trip to Russia and is now flying back to DC.

"There is no need to frighten the Iranians," Putin told reporters in Beijing after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organizatin, the AP writes. "And if now, before making any steps [towards holding talks] we start announcing some sanctions, then we won't be creating favorable conditions for them to end positively. This is why it is premature to talk about this now," he said.

Clinton had her own difficulties over Iran on the trip, as Russia's hardline Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov restated his opposition to sanctions yesterday. Later yesterday, she met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who did not publically disagree with his Foreign Minister.

Privately, according to State Department officials traveling with the Secretary, Medvedev repeated assurances that he'd given President Obama at the UN: that sanctions would be unavoidable if Iran did not disclose its nuclear program...
(14 Oct 2009)

Iran’s nuclear threat is a lie
John Pilger, The New Statesman
In 2001, the Observer published a series of reports that claimed an "Iraqi connection" to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media "revelations", the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. "Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant", declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown" is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years". An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq". Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian "plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

The official jargon for this kind of propaganda is "psy-ops", the military term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall, it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its “nuclear threat": a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as objective news. And it is fake...
(1 Oct 2009)
from the paper:
John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."