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why Israel supported the sale of WMD to Iran...

Piper | 01.03.2007 14:03

The build-up of events in the Middle East point to an American attack on Iran. The question remains as to why Israel supported the sale of weapons of mass destruction to Iran. Perhaps one could wonder, was it not to just create a pretext for waging a war against Iran?

The US government apparently continues to prepare for war against Iran. A second aircraft carrier is on its way to the Persian Gulf. The options, how to destroy the Iranian alleged nuclear facilities, are being considered. Israel is pressurising the US for a speedy attack.

The major question, "what happens afterwards", just like in the Iraq war, is not even being considered. This may be another serious mistake as the quagmire in Iraq has proved.

Iran has had weapons of mass destruction for 13 years now, thanks to Israel, Germany and the UK.

These countries supplied Iran from 1991 to 1993 with raw materials and "know-how" for the production of nerve gases Sarin and Mustard, which were bought in China and shipped to Iran's Bandar e Abbas.
Sarin is one of the worst weapons of mass destruction. It was invented by Adolf Hitler's chemical industry in 1937, however it was never used in World War Two.
It was, however, used in a horrific terrorist attack in the subway of Tokyo in 1995. These weapons of mass destruction can easily be filled into medium range rockets. If Iran is attacked it may be left with no option but to fire such rockets into Israel.

The Iranians may be tempted to use the chemical weaponry at their disposal. It is not farfetched to imagine Israel retaliating by dropping atomic bombs over Iran. The events would lead to a whole Middle East-wide war. Iran's military capability has been assisted by the West's support. This was when Iran was seen as an ally albeit a short-term one of the West.

Israel supplied Iran with weapons for decades, most prominently during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986, in which the Pentagon with its colonel Oliver North and in cohort with the international arms dealer Khashoggi, was selling weapons to Iran via Israel and the profits were used to sponsor a right wing terror group, the Contras, fighting the government of Nicaragua.

Even before, more so after this scandal, the weapons supply from Israel to Iran was in full swing during the Iran-Iraq war. Israel and the West preferred a victory by Iran. After the Iran-Iraq war was over, and after Iraq was later on defeated in the first Gulf war in 1991, Israel started to supply one of its arch-enemies not only with regular arms, but with weapons of mass destruction, raw materials and "know-how" for the production of the nerve gases Sarin and mustard.

Involved on the Iranian side was a Dr Majid Abbaspour Tehrani Fard, Head of Department 105 (Iran defence industry) and a close friend of former Iranian President Rafsanjani. Equally involved was Hossein Maher.
The buyers had a subsidiary in Vienna, run by an Iranian man by the name of Farschi. Farschi had a number of names; Farshchiha, Hashemi Bari, and was sometimes called Masoud.

An Austrian engineer, Manfred Felber, who was married to an Iranian woman, assisted him. Felber sometimes lived in Tehran, the Iranian capital. In 1994 Felber was sentenced to four years in prison by an American court for money-laundering and illegally buying gas masks and a gas detector in the US.
Farschi was running the import/export company Bandaran. Bandaran, an Iranian company with its head office in Tehran, was selling surplus oil that exceeded Iran's OPEC quota, on the black market at a discount. The proceeds were being used to buy weapons, including weapons of mass destruction.

The two groups were buying the raw material in China and selling it to Iran. They were working independently from each other. One group comprised the Israeli arms dealer Nahum Manbar, a big supporter of Israel's Labour Party. At functions he was regularly seated at the top table next to Israel's former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Manbar sold, amongst other things, T75 tanks from the former Eastern Bloc countries to Iran. The tanks were modernised with Israeli electronic systems.

In 1991, he started to supply Iran with weapons of mass destruction in conjunction with the Israeli secret service Shin Bet and in cohort with the British Mi6. The British Mi6 was represented by the agents Joy Kiddie and Richard Tomlinson.

The second group comprised the former Israeli air force colonel Moshe Regev alias Regenstreich and the German Gerhard Eugen Merz. Their company Mainway was operating from the town of Bad Homburg, 15km north of Frankfurt.
Apparently the German Secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst was aware of these dealings, possibly involved as well. While chemical weapons were being supplied to Iran by the West, the West had weapons inspectors in Iraq apparently searching for WMD.

The government of Israel ordered a stop to the Iran dealings when weapons, once sold to Iran, were handed over to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon by the Iranians.
Regev/Merz stopped immediately, Manbar continued for another year to honour the contract with Iran. He was apparently afraid, of what might happen, if he did not follow the contract to its final conclusion. Apparently because of not obeying these new stipulations by the Isreali government, only Manbar and not Regev was arrested in 1997 during a visit to Israel. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison after a scandal-riddled trial. The presiding judge Ammon Shtrasnov, started a love affair with one of Manbar's defence lawyers, Pninat Yanai. Despite this, Shtrasnov did not recuse himself from the further proceedings.

The question remains as to why Israel supported the sale of weapons of mass destruction to Iran. Perhaps one could wonder, was it not to just create a pretext for waging a war against Iran?

Piper

Additions

Article republished without the authors authority

05.03.2007 19:49

This article was written by me and was published in the Botswana daily MMEGI on 28 February 2007.
I have not been asked, neither has the MMEGI been asked to republish it here, let alone not even mentioning the source and the author/

Dr. Alexander von Paleske
Head, Department of Oncology
Princess Marina Hospital
Gaborone/Botswana
Ex Barrister-at-Law. High Court Frankfurt /M, Germany

Dr. Alexander von Paleske


Source

10.03.2007 13:19

The source of this article is here:  http://www.mmegi.bw/2007/February/Wednesday28/27.php

As the comment above states it's been published here without attribution or permission so it's going to be hidden.

admin


Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

Iran Iraq war

01.03.2007 14:44

'Even before, more so after this scandal, the weapons supply from Israel to Iran was in full swing during the Iran-Iraq war. Israel and the West preferred a victory by Iran.'

A victory for Iran? Not likely.

See  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_iraq_war#The_Tanker_War_and_Direct_U.S._Support_for_Iraq

I don't think so


Win-Win For Zionist Extremism

01.03.2007 15:13

Israeli Fascists make money, while maximizing the number of dead Arabs. From their point of view, it's a win-win.

Sad


Re: Iran Iraq War

01.03.2007 16:51

Actually, almost every nation with an arms industry at the time was selling weapons to both Iran and Iraq. It was essentially a testing-ground for new weapons and weapon technologies. Us arms dealers made a killing. America, Israel, Russia, and Germany (to name a few) had all sold weapons to both Iran AND Iraq during that war.

Arms Dealer


Arms to Iraq

01.03.2007 18:03

supplies of arms to Iraq:
Suppliers in Billions (1985 $US) % of total
Soviet Union 19.2 61
France 5.5 18
People's Republic of China 1.7 5
Brazil 1.1 4
Egypt 1.1 4
Other countries 2.9 6
Total 31.5 98.0

No Arms Dealer


...

01.03.2007 21:38

"Ted Koppel of ABC Nightline reported the following, however, on June 9, 1992: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush Sr., operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into [an aggressive power]" and “Reagan/Bush administrations permitted — and frequently encouraged — the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq.”

According to New Yorker, the Reagan Administration began to allow Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt to transfer to Iraq American howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons. [34] Reagan personally asked Italy’s Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.[35]

The United States, United Kingdom, and Germany also provided "dual use" technology (computers, engines, etc.) that allowed Iraq to expand its missile program and radar defenses. The U.S. Commerce Department, in violation of procedure, gave out licenses to companies for $1.5 billion in dual-use items to be sent to Iraq. The State Department was not informed of this. Over 1 billion of these authorized items were trucks that were never delivered. The rest consisted of advanced technology. Iraq's Soviet-made Scuds had their ranges expanded as a result.[36]"


Those 'chemicals' later became chemical weapons. These were being encouraged into Iraq by the US, even when they knew they were being used to gas the Kurds in Hallabja.

Hermes


Iran-Contra

03.03.2007 14:42

"Arms Dealer", the difference is that the US was using Israel as a third party to ILLEGAL sales to Iran, at the same time that it was supporting Saddam Hussein in the war.

That's what "Iran Contra" was all about.

Most of the people involved them are part of the Bush/PNAC Regime now ...

US Gets Money, Zionists Get To Slaughter Arabs


ISRAEL'S DOUBLE GAME IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: ARMING TERRORISTS WITH KHMER ROUGE WEAPO

03.03.2007 17:31

March 2, 2007 -- ISRAEL'S DOUBLE GAME IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: ARMING TERRORISTS WITH KHMER ROUGE WEAPONS

WMR's report yesterday on the U.S. naval buildup in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia, coincides with a major Israeli intelligence and weapons smuggling operation in the region.

Israel has been a major, albeit covert, player in Southeast Asia since Israeli multi-billionaire tycoon Shaul Eisenberg began supplying weapons to Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Eisenberg, a close business partner of China's military, was also an early arms supplier to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. Eisenberg was active with Asia's Jewish community during World War II, not as an compatriot of the Allies but as a close intelligence and business partner of Japan's Imperial government, which was allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Axis Alliance. Escaping Nazi-controlled Europe, Eisenberg settled in the Far East, making his primary bases of operation Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Japan itself. In Shanghai, Eisenberg, along with Imperial Japanese military intelligence units, formed units of future Jewish terrorist groups -- the Irgun and the Shanghai Betar (Betar was founded in the 1930s by the Polish Zionist Yakob Jabotinsky, a supporter of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, to battle the British for control of Palestine and the ideological godfather of later neoconservative oracle Leo Strauss). The Japanese taught the Jewish paramilitary forces in Shanghai, including some who escaped from Joseph Stalin's Jewish Autonomous Region creation in the Soviet Far East on the Chinese border, how to disrupt colonial occupiers' logistics and command and control elements, strategies that had been successful against the British, Dutch, French, and American colonial authorities in Asia. The Irgun and Betar gangs would eventually use the knowledge gained from the Japanese in their terror campaign against British and Arab forces in Palestine following World War II. Eventually, Irgun and Betar veterans would form the present-day Likud Party, now headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, a noted extreme right-winger.

After the war, Eisenberg began selling war surplus material, including iron and steel scrap. Married to a Japanese woman, Eisenberg established the Israel Corporation, a huge holding company , which, during the 1970s, began to secretly export Israeli military equipment and weapons to China. Under a Panama-based company called United Development, Inc., Eisenberg also began exporting weapons to Central America's most insidious dictatorships, including that of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Eisenberg's vast holdings eventually included Israel Aircraft Industries and Zim Israel Navigation Company.

As the United States faced imminent defeat in the Indochina War at the hands of the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian communist-nationalist forces, Eisenberg wasted no time in cashing in on America's defeat and the new power alignments in Southeast Asia. He began selling weapons from his new business partner - China - to the Cambodian forces of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. After the defeat of the U.S.-backed military government of General Lon Nol, installed after Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Eisenberg, ordered the CIA to overthrow Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia fell victim to a bloody civil war between Vietnamese troops backing Pol Pot's one-time ally Hun Sen and the Chinese-backed "Democratic Kampuchea" government of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

It was no mistake that the Gerald Ford administration and Secretary of State Kissinger backed the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Ford's long-time Michigan financial backer, industrialist Max Fisher were both financially and ideologically linked to Eisenberg. Ford's supposed "grand moment" -- the repatriation in 1975 of the crew of the U.S. "merchant" (spy) ship, the SS Mayaguez, from Khmer Rouge forces was a Kissinger- and Eisenberg-designed ruse designed to build up Ford's support in the face of the American military defeat in Southeast Asia. That ruse came at the cost of 41 Marines and countless Cambodian military forces and civilians.

Kissinger authorized Eisenberg to begin a discreet program to modernize China's armed forces with $10 billion in Israeli and U.S.-designed weapons, re-exported through Israel. The reason -- neoconservative to its roots -- was to have China counteract Soviet military power in Asia and beyond.

As a result of Eisenberg's Israel-China military alliance, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces were amply supplied by Israel and China. Logistics were no problem since Eisenberg's Israel Corporation owned a 49 percent share in Zim Shipping, the world's third largest shipping company. Although Eisenberg died from a sudden heart attack in Beijing in 1997, the weapons smuggling activities of his friends in Mossad and Zim Shipping continue to plague Southeast and South Asia.

Under a United Nations, European Union, and Cambodian government weapons buy-back program, Cambodia is striving to eliminate the proliferation of small arms, including AK-47s and grenade launchers and mortars, from the Cambodian population. However, the storage program for the collected weapons has been an ongoing problem for the Cambodians, as cited in an EU report that stated there were four major problems with the program:

1. No formal mechanisms for registering numbers, types and condition of weapons;
2. No records of any of the above;
3. Weapons stored alongside various types of explosives including mines, mortars, grenades and ammunition;
4. Weapons stored in buildings without adequate security.

Storage facilities with so-called "enhanced security" were constructed in Phnom Penh (several facilities), Battambang, Pailin, Banteay Meanchey, Siem Reap, Banteay Srei, Preah Vihear, and Kampong Thom. The suspicions about Israeli involvement in smuggling stored Khmer Rouge and other weapons were heightened in 1999 after a mysterious fire destroyed the Cambodian military weapons storage facility at the Ream Naval Base near Sihanoukville. According to a New Zealand intelligence officer in Cambodia, the depot was destroyed by an Israeli squad after it was revealed they were smuggling weapons from the facility to guerrilla groups throughout Southeast Asia, including the small "Free Vietnam Movement" battling Vietnam's central government and Hmong guerrillas battling Laotian government forces. The Vietnamese became even more suspicious about the role of the depot after weapons from the Ream warehouse were seized by Cambodian and Vietnamese police at the Bavet border checkpoint. The weapons were destined for guerrillas of the Free Vietnam Movement.

WMR visited Phnom Penh, Cambodia and discovered that the Mossad and Cambodian criminal syndicate allies continue to obtain bought-back Cambodian weapons from Cambodian government warehouses and are selling them to guerrilla groups throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, anti-Laotian Hmongs, the small anti-communist Free Vietnam Movement, and Burmese tribal guerrilla groups.

WMR photographed a number of Zim shipping containers portside along the Mekong River in Phnom Penh. From this and other port facilities, including the port of Sihanoukville, bought-back Cambodian weapons , some originally provided to the Khmer Rouge by Eisenberg and the Chinese, are making their way to insurgent groups around Asia, possibly including Iraqi guerrillas battling U.S. forces in Iraq.

Not far from Zim's Mekong port facilities in Phnom Penh sits a quiet and unassuming Mossad surveillance station. From this vantage point, Israeli operatives keep a close eye on Mekong river traffic and any "new players" who arrive into town. With new oil deposits being discovered in contested waters of the Gulf of Thailand, border skirmishes in the region are likely to increase, driving up the demand for small arms in the region. The cached weapons in Cambodia stand to make Israeli intelligence a handsome profit.

Recently, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, Robert Blake, was injured in a Tamil Tiger mortar attack on a Sri Lankan military helicopter transporting him and other Western envoys. In addition to Blake, Italian ambassador Pio Mariani was also injured in the attack. Although Israel has been supplying weapons and training to Sri Lanka's government to be used against the Tamil Tigers, it has been playing a double game in also supplying Cambodian weapons to the Tamils.

On September 28, 2005, the Zim Asia collided with a Japanese fishing vessel, killing seven Japanese sailors aboard the fishing vessel. The collision occurred 25 miles off the Nosappu Cape in northern Japan. What followed was the arrest in Haifa of the Zim Asia's captain, Moshe Ben David, and the Serbian second captain and Bulgarian lookout man for negligence and failure to save the lives of the Japanese fisherman, a violation of international maritime law. Israeli police confiscated documents from Zim's headquarters. The presence of a Zim ship in northern Japanese waters near North Korea once again heightened concerns about the activities of the shipping company in weapons smuggling.

If Cambodia is any measure of Israel's true intentions, it is clear that Israel's double game seeks to destabilize world and regional peace by selling to adversarial sides in civil and other wars and reaping huge profits as a result.

 http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Wayne Madsen