To avoid restating the obvious, or repeating what others have already established, I take these facts as givens: that the main perpetrator of the assassination of Iranian scientists has been the Israeli spy agency Mossad, assisted by various covert operations agencies of the United States and its allies; that the claim of Iran's possessing or pursuing a nuclear arms program is false; and that, therefore, the assertion that Iran poses an "existential" threat to Israel is, likewise, a fiction designed to justify plans of war and regime change in that country.

I would also like to make it clear at the outset that while the imperial powers of the West and their allies, including the Iranian expats collaborating with them, certainly pursue their own nefarious objectives in hunting for regime change in Iran, the focus of this essay is primarily on Israel, and its motives for trying to overthrow the Iranian government.

There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents' logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations - the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts - to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM - Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement - or front groups acting in the name of the movement - to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this "reformist" to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement's core aims through the electoral process.

The EPA plans to cut $10 million in grants it gives annually. Water quality advocates worry that swimmers and surfers will be at even greater risk of illness.

Health testing at beaches in California and across the nation is at risk of being cut under a plan to eliminate federal funds for monitoring whether the water is too contaminated to swim in.

Citing the "difficult financial climate," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in its budget request this week that it would do away with $10 million in grants it gives each year to state and local agencies in coastal and Great Lakes states to test for tainted water.

"While beach monitoring continues to be important to protect human health and especially sensitive individuals," the EPA said in an emailed statement, "states and local governments now have the technical expertise and procedures to continue beach monitoring without federal support."

But state and local officials have struggled to pay for health testing along California's busy coastline in recent years, and water quality advocates worry that swimmers and surfers will be at even greater risk of getting sick if the federal funds evaporate.

Although the armed clashes are not completely over in the beleaguered district of Homs and that the Syrian and Lebanese authorities have yet to inform public opinion of their recent actions, Thierry Meyssan appeared Monday night on the leading Russian television channel to make an initial assessment of the operations, providing first-hand information which he is sharing with the readers of Voltaire Network.

For eleven months, the Western powers and the Gulf States have lead a campaign to destabilize Syria. Several thousand mercenaries infiltrated the country. Recruited by agencies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar within the Sunni extremist community, they came to overthrow the "Alawite usurper" Bashar al-Assad and impose a Wahhabi-inspired dictatorship. They have at their disposal some of the most sophisticated military equipment, including night vision systems, communication centers, and robots for urban warfare. Supported secretly by the NATO powers, they also have access to vital military information, including satellite images of Syrian troop movements, and telephone interceptions.

This has been falsely portrayed to the Western public as a political revolution crushed in blood by a ruthless dictatorship. Of course, this lie has not been universally accepted. Russia, China and the Latin American and Caribbean member states of ALBA repudiate it. They each have a historical background that allows them to readily grasp what is at stake. The Russians are thinking of Chechnya, the Chinese of Xinjiang, and the Latin Americans of Cuba and Nicaragua. In all these cases, beyond ideological or religious appearances, the methods of destabilization by the CIA were the same.

As a journalist, there's a buzz you can detect once the normal restraints in your business have been loosened, a smell of fresh chum in the waters, urging us down the road to war. Many years removed from the Iraq disaster, that smell is back, this time with Iran.

You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. CNBC's house blockhead, the Goldman-trained ex-finance professional Erin Burnett, came out with a doozie of a broadcast yesterday, a Rumsfeldian jeremiad against the Iranian threat would have fit beautifully in the Saddam's-sending-drones-at-New-York halcyon days of late 2002. Here's how the excellent Glenn Greenwald described Burnett's rant:

It's the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn't dare go this far because you'd want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran's long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

Like Greenwald, I was particularly struck by Burnett's freak-out about Iran's nuclear program, about which she said, "No one buys Iran's claim that [it is] for peaceful purposes." She then cited remarks by Director of Intelligence James Clapper, which, she said, "drove that message home." But then she ran a clip with Clapper's quote, which read as follows:

Iran's technical advances . . . strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.

In other words, "If Iran were to decide to be capable of making nuclear weapons, it would be capable of making nuclear weapons." Unless I'm missing something, that's a statement that would be true of almost any industrialized country, wouldn't it?

Worried that the US government might be able to read your emails? Don't be - they already can! The American Civil Liberties Union is asking the feds to come clean on why - and what - they do with the personal correspondence of its citizens.

The ACLU has filed request under the US Freedom of Information Act in hopes of learning more about the powers the government has granted itself to snoop through the emails, texts and instant messages of Americans. Being able to browse through correspondence without a warrant is a power that the government has had for ages, but with the Internet making sending mail as easy as a click of a button, the ACLU says it is about time the feds fix their current policies.

The organization writes in a recent press release that they are going after the FBI, US Justice Department, IRS and US Attorneys Offices around the country with the intent of figuring out why the government is so interested in sticking its nose in the inboxes of millions of Americans. They have sent FOIA requests to all of those agencies in which they ask "about the government's policies, procedures and practices for accessing the content of private electronic communications."

In the long run, the ACLU hopes for a law change.

Grenoble, France - A French court trying a Swiss conductor for conspiracy to murder heard allegations on Wednesday that Swiss police bungled a 1994 probe into the deaths of 48 members of the Order of the Solar Temple cult, failing to prevent further mass suicide pacts.

Michel Tabachnik went on trial on Tuesday, on charges stemming from his involvement in the doomsday sect, thought to be responsible for 74 deaths.

The court in Grenoble, in the French Alps, is examining the death of 16 cult members, including three children, whose charred bodies were found, laid out in a star pattern, in December 1995 in a forest in the remote Vercors region.

"If the Swiss investigation had been properly conducted, we would not be here today," lawyer Jacques Barillon told the Swiss police officer who led the 1994 probe and who is appearing as a witness in the French trial.

That's a pretty startling headline, isn't it? Yet, that was the conclusion reached by study of 400 foreclosure files commissioned by San Francisco County assessor-recorder Phil Ting. You can read the data in a report authored by the auditors called "Foreclosure in California- A Crisis in Compliance." It's only 21 pages long and written in plain language. You should read it, if only for common sense language like this:

Given these well-documented and widespread origination and servicing issues, it is not implausible that there are homeowners who are alleged to have defaulted on loans to which they never fully agreed to and, further, are being foreclosed upon by lenders that might not even own such loans. The fact that these homeowners borrowed something, on some terms, from someone should not be enough to rob them of their due process right.

Gretchen Morgenstern at the New York Times is all over this story. She writes:

In a significant number of cases - 85 percent - documents recording the transfer of a defaulted property to a new trustee were not filed properly or on time, the report found. And in 45 percent of the foreclosures, properties were sold at auction to entities improperly claiming to be the beneficiary of the deeds of trust. In other words, the report said, "a 'stranger' to the deed of trust," gained ownership of the property; as a result, the sale may be invalid, it said.

Wow, let that sink in for a minute, "a stranger to the deed of trust gained ownership of the property." Maybe I should have used that for the headline.

Even as Iran has signaled its readiness to return to international nuclear talks in a letter this week, the United States announced new sanctions on Iran Thursday.

The Treasury Department announced Thursday it is sanctioning Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security [MOIS], accusing it of sponsoring human rights abuses in both Iran and Syria, as well as being a sponsor of terrorism.

"Today we have designated the MOIS for abusing the basic human rights of Iranian citizens and exporting its vicious practices to support the Syrian regime's abhorrent crackdown on its own population," Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen said in a Treasury Department press release Thursday. "The action came as key Washington lawmakers pressed for additional measures to further cut the Islamic republic off from the global financial network.

At a time when it's become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation's political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court's 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they're just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.