Mikeand I were right: we came a hairsbreadth from war with Iran

This makes my blood boil. 

Back in 2012 I was angrily dismissed by the head of CollapseNet because Mike Ruppert and I both insisted on sounding the alarm on the danger of war with Iran on the spurious grounds that it wouldn't happen "because Obama needn't need it to win the election".

Turns out that Mike and I were absolutely right in our assessment and Wes Miller was wrong, wrong, wrong.

We were closer to war back then than we knew.

The only thing between us and Armageddon back then turns out to be Shimon Peres if Israel, and, later on, Vladimir Putin for his intervention over Syrian chemical weapons.

Peres bombshell: I stopped an Israeli strike on Iran

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak were pushing ahead with their plans to attack Iran."

Jerusalem Post,

30 Septermber, 2016

If not for Shimon Peres’s intervention, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to bomb Iran, the former president revealed confidentially to The Jerusalem Post over two years ago.

In a meeting at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa on August 24, 2014, Peres dropped the bombshell in a conversation with me and Jerusalem Post Managing Editor David Brinn.

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I have thought long and hard about whether to publish it, and reached the conclusion that he wouldn’t have told us if he didn’t want us to.

I was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post at the time and had established a close relationship with Peres, who had retired a month earlier as president.

During the course of the conversation (in which just the three of us sat and chatted over coffee), Brinn asked Peres what he considered the greatest achievement of his presidency. He responded by saying that he had personally intervened to stop Netanyahu from ordering a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The following is based on my notes:

Peres: I stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran.

Me: Can you tell us more?

Peres: I don’t want to go into details, but I can tell you that he was ready to launch an attack and I stopped him. I told him the consequences would be catastrophic.

“Can we report this?” I asked.

“When I’m dead,” Peres replied, with a wry smile.

Almost a year later, on June 7, 2015, I moderated a security panel at The Jerusalem Post Fourth Annual Conference in New York in which Senior Contributing Editor Caroline B. Glick got into a heated argument with former IDF chief Lt.-Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi and the late Mossad director Meir Dagan, charging that they had refused an order from Netanyahu to prepare for an attack against Iran.

In 2010, Glick said, citing a report from the investigative journalism TV program Uvda, “we learned that two of the gentlemen on this panel were given an order to prepare the military for an imminent strike against Iran’s military installations and they refused.”

While pointedly not denying that the order had been given, Dagan insisted: “It was an illegal order. We were always willing to obey any legal order by the prime minister. We never refused an order.”

“You were ordered by the security cabinet,” Glick retorted.

“You were not there. You don’t know what happened there,” said an indignant Dagan.

“There was never a decision about it,” Ashkenazi added, although he acknowledged that he had opposed a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran.

At the Herzliya Conference the following day, Maariv columnist Ben Caspit raised the issue with Peres.

“That journalist [Glick] wasn’t there! How would she know?” Peres raged. “These are issues that should be discussed in the cabinet, not in the media and not in public.”

“Peres had good reason to be angry,” Caspit later wrote on the Al-Monitor media site. “He was one of the key players in that drama, which played out between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2011. These were some of the tensest times for Israel’s defense establishment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak were pushing ahead with their plans to attack Iran, while the IDF, headed by Ashkenazi, and the heads of the other defense establishments opposed the move. Ashkenazi and Dagan had the support of none other than the president at the time, Peres, who joined their efforts to thwart the attack.”

Was it in fact Peres, the architect of Israel’s nuclear program, who ultimately foiled an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites? He thought so, although he didn’t say how he did it.

This is what I wrote back then.

CollapseNet

Today I have found that my 'lifelong' subscription to CollapseNet has been blocked.

I therefore feel freed up to reveal some of the thigns I have kept silent about for some time.

….

I first encountered Michael C Ruppert in 2010 when I found some of his talks on the web and watched the movie Collapse Very soon I joined Mike's new site CollapseNet.

Immediately I found a resonance with what he was saying and its rock-hard logic.

I started sometime early in 2011 to collect stories myself and to put this on this very blog.

Because (due to health constraints) I had plenty of time to research and have the advantage of the time zone I often found stories before CollapseNet and sent these stories on, usually to Mike and his Facebook page.

Mike approached me asking me to join CollapseNet and I started contributing stories to the website every day.

After a month or so after coming on board with the company there was a sudden shock. I started reading criticism of Mike Ruppert for his adoption of the views of Greg Brayden and others.

This quickly led to the resignation of Mike from CollapseNet.

It became clear that Mike was tired after 30 years of battling and wanted to move on to other things. This, however does not change the fact that this was a pretty nasty, backroom coup.

There was some rejoicing in (some of) the ranks at Mike's departure.

  

CollapseNet could be remolded into a company witout Mike Ruppert.

I will not repeat some of the things that were said about Mike Ruppert, but they shocked me at the time.

However, I stayed on, contributing as normal to the daily Newsdesk.

Very soon there were criticisms (that I thought quite valid) from members who did not like the change and whose emails were left unanswered. The response was always that these were troublemakers.

They along with many others seem to have disappeared (or been removed) from the site

At some stage I had a particularly nasty email interaction with one individual from the company who responded to something I had offered by economist Steve Keen with an email saying that Steve Keen was a 'total fake' and he was 'outing' him. When I challenged him on this and later on, some time later compounded my sin by disagreeing with him a second time he became quite abusive and even accused me of being a 'plant'

Being a fair-minded person, sitting at the bottom of the planet, I am not accustomed to such paranoia.

Basically I faded away and stopped my daily contributions to concentrate my energies on this site.  

Since then, I have not heard anything from the editorial board, but I have continued to check up with CollapseNet.

I have been noticing of late that the editorial policy had changed and was completely ignoring the geopolitical events that so bothered and unnerved me.

Indeed the line went that a war with Iraq was off the table because “Obama does not need it to win the election”. Anybody who thought there was going to be a war was a 'fearmonger'. Behind this was a deep criticism of Mike Ruppert who, back last northern winter was concerned about war and then changed his mind based on changing conditions.

This is the well-thought-out position of CollapseNet;

"Am I going to fall for the psy-op and propaganda games the Israelis and neo-cons would like us to bite into? No. And I won't help them promote their fear products, either.

When the Big "E" comes home and gets de-commissioned, CollapseNet's credibility will still be intact, too. The same won't be said of all of the wolf-criers out there."

I take it I am a 'wolf-crier'
 

….

One Sunday a couple of weeks ago I was sufficiently alarmed at the news that was pointing towards war, that I posted articles on Mike Ruppert's Facebook page.

This was the email that I received as a result from Wesley Miller, CEO of CollapseNet.

"I do not appreciate the attempt to back-door us on Iran with Mike. I am right, and CollapseNet's editorial position will not change change unless real information changes, regardless of what you or Mike want to think about it. You appear to want to scare people, and that's not what we're about.

Please be careful what you post on our website and stop wasting my time and effort needed to undo your injections of unnecessary fear. This is a proprietary website not owned by you, and this is your last conduct warning."

Well, you know what I post because it is no different to what I post onto this site.

My response was I am a free agent and will post on Mike's Facebook page if I like but would not post that material on CollapseNet.

…..

After making a positive response to another member's post supporting Mike Ruppert and it seems I'm out!

"Login denied! Your account has either been blocked or you have not activated it yet. Did you not get an activation e-mail and follow the validation link?"

I'm not sure what you call it when you are warned off for posting articles from the world media, albeit if it contradicts a strongly-held view.

I suspect it's called censorship.

I thought that debate was good. Apparently not in some circles. Apparently it is troublemaking and any information that challenges those strongly-held views is mis-information.

If these are the attitudes those who would lead us through a transition away from the infinite growth paradigm then I hold grave fears for our future.

....

My position is that I continue to support Mike Ruppert in what he does although I do not always agree with everything he says - I continue to hold him in great esteem and respect.

I continue to appreciate the work of CollapseNet, especially that of Rice Famer and J.O. who spend many hours selflessly to filter the news and bring the stories that matter.

I have observed that the headlines posted on CollapseNet increasingly do not reflect the importance of stories contributed.

CollapseNet has completely distanced itself from the name Michael Ruppert.

I do not appreciate attempts to stifle criticism and mild dissent - "proprietory" company or not?