William Lowther and Colin Freeman, writing for the Sunday Telegraph, tell us what we knew more than a year ago: the United States is fomenting terrorism in Iran. “America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program,” reports the newspaper. “In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.”

As should be expected, the Sunday Telegraph, as a neocon newspaper formerly associated with Baron Black of Crossharbour, aka Conrad Black, has sugar-coated this terrorism against the Iranian people, dismissing it as “pressure” against the “Islamic regime” the neocons accuse of working feverishly on nuclear weapons, an allegation completely devoid of any evidence, that is beyond the Brothers Grimm fairy tales invented by the neocons. Moreover, the “failure of diplomatic initiatives” is entirely the fault of the United States, as Iran has, on several occasions, attempted diplomatic overtures, only to be rebuffed. In other words, no matter what Iran does it will be shocked and awed, that is after MEK and other terrorist groups blow up a few more buses.

“The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime,” the newspaper continues.

Controversial? In fact, they are illegal under international law. No doubt Iran would be completely justified in attacking New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, etc., in response to these violations of its national sovereignty. Nothing “impair[s] the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs,” stipulates Article 51, Chapter VII of the United Nations charter in respect to “action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression,” not that we can expect the United Nations to support Iran’s self-defense.

“In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.”

Imagine the outrage if Iran flamed the fans of “unrest” in the “ethnic minority border areas” of the United States. Every yahoo in the country would be calling for the U.S. to turn Iran into a glass parking lot. Imagine the response if Iranian terrorists engaged in “bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials” here in the United States.

“Funding for [the] separatist causes [of Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis, and Azeris] comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is now ‘no great secret’, according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.”

No kidding. For those of us doing our homework, such behavior is a no-brainer, as the CIA has engaged in such for decades in far-flung places around the world, including Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, Greece, Zaire, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, El Salvador, Haiti, Panama, Yugoslavia, on and on and on, ad infinitum, resulting literally in the murder of more than a million people.

Not only did the CIA and the Pentagon hatch Operation Gladio, Operation CHAOS, MK-ULTRA, engage in drug trafficking, money laundering, and create the “the mighty Wurlitzer” propaganda machine that long ago penetrated the very core of the corporate media, they staffed their various “intelligence” (covert murder and mayhem) organizations with former Nazis, employing lovelies such as General Reinhard Gehlen, Klaus Barbie (”the Butcher of Lyon”), Otto von Bolschwing (Eichmann collaborator) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, a personal friend of Hitler.

Naturally, we shouldn’t expect the Sunday Telegraph to provide such a frame of reference.

Lowther and Freeman continue:

“Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long claimed to detect the hand of both America and Britain in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces. Last Monday, Iran publicly hanged a man, Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, for his involvement in a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan. An unnamed local official told the semi-official Fars news agency that weapons used in the attack were British and US-made.”

Washington may “officially” deny such involvement, but the neocons, led by the universal fascist Michael Ledeen—”a fixture of Washington’s neo-conservative community for more than 20 years,” according to journalist Jim Lobe—have advocated such “operations,” i.e., common terrorism, for quite some time now. Ledeen, “who divides his time among National Review Online, JINSA, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),” Scott Thompson wrote back in 2003, “is stirring up [U.S. private foundations and think-tank] networks in Congress and the press, and lining up tainted intelligence to justify war on Iran…. His efforts should be understood as reflecting the immediate intentions of the Administration neo-conservatives.”

Ledeen and company have been putting this operation in place for some time. In 2001, Ledeen founded the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), with a call for regime change in that country. One of his partners in founding the coalition was Dr. Rob Sobhani, a professor at Georgetown University and president of Caspian Energy Consulting. Support for the CDI also comes from the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney, former Rep. Jack Kemp, Joshua Muravchik of AEI, and former CIA director James Woolsey, who sits on the Defense Policy Board. Woolsey has also worked for the Doug Feith/Abram Shulsky “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon, which cooked the intelligence to push through the Iraq War. One of CDI’s policies, as spelled out in the June 15 Washington Post, is to support Brownback’s call for an Iran Liberation Act, similar to the 1997 one for Iraq.

Thus it should not be surprising Plan Iran Attack is unfolding in similar fashion to Plan Iraq Attack, the latter moving along quite nicely for the neocons, who are dedicated to destroying Arab and Islamic culture and society, a strategy for human misery long ago sketched out by Zionist Israelis, indeed before the establishment of a “Jewish state” on confiscated land, depopulated through terrorist methods.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, the current CIA—and we must assume, Pentagon covert ops—”policy is fraught with risk,” as many “of the groups share little common cause with Washington other than their opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose regime they accuse of stepping up repression of minority rights and culture.”

The Baluchistan-based Brigade of God group, which last year kidnapped and killed eight Iranian soldiers, is a volatile Sunni organization that many fear could easily turn against Washington after taking its money.

A row has also broken out in Washington over whether to “unleash” the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian regime.

The group is currently listed by the US state department as terrorist organization, but [John Pike, head of the “influential” Global Security think tank in Washington] said: “A faction in the Defense Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian regime but they might cause a lot of damage.”

Not a big deal, of course, as the CIA organized and unleashed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, its “Arab” faction, almost exclusively Sunni of the reactionary Wahhabi sort, soon enough to be reformulated into the eminently useful “al-Qaeda,” taking the “jihad” into Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Chechnya. Likewise rag-tag terrorist gangs, as equally demented, as MEK certainly is with its Marxist flavor of Islam (never mind the big time discrepancies), are now being unleashed against Iran, not for the purpose of liberating the Iranian people from the admittedly medieval and undemocratic mullahocracy, but rather with the idea of causing “a lot of damage” in the lead-up to a full-scale shock and awe attack.