New threat in Asia/Pacific/Khalj Fars region from australia, thanks to Spanish business

I recently obtained images of the new Amphibious Assault Ships Spain has built for the australian navy.  While officially called Amphibious Assault Shipsthese ships are based on the Spanish Aircraft Carrier/Amphibious Assault Ship Juan Carlos I, and therefore can be readily converted to an Aircraft Carrier.  Below is a link to specifications of the ships from the australian navy so one can see the true nature of these ships
 http://www.navy.gov.au/Canberra_Class
Despite the timetable work is progressing fast on these ships as the images I have uploaded below show.  Here is a recent satellite image of hmas canberra
 http://www.myspace.com/zendransnavalimages/photos/2655324
Here is a recent satellite image of hmas adelaide
http://www.myspace.com/zendransnavalimages/photos/2655325
These ships and other nato projects have helped keep Spain's economy afloat until recently, as many countries in Asia, particularly Iran, have been the target of aggression, and the australians have been notorious troublemakers in Asia and the Pacific.  Remember, the missile frigate hmas adelaide was detained by Iranian Fath class Fast Attack Craft after provoking an incident with Iran, and a few months later was decomissioned.  Plus the british monarch is head of australia's military, and with the new british Supercarrier's still under construction, the ex-hms ark royal being scrapped in Turkey where Iranians can study the design, and the canadians still debating whether to acquire 2 French Mistral class Amphibious Assault Ships and 2 Dutch Joint Support Ships the australians may test these ships out by provoking a conflict with Iran.

More american aggression against Syria and Iraq

This news shows that america still has a presence in Iraq, otherwise Tariq Aziz would be free like his colleague Mohammad Said. Also notice the news about Syria, america wants war and must be stopped. Peter Khan Zendran Obama plans war on Syria 31.05.2012 16:02 by Stephen Lendman Obama plans war on Syria. 47231.jpeg Guilty of war crimes multiple times over, Obama plans more death, destruction, conquest, colonization, resource control, exploitation, and dominance. Syria is target one, then Iran, then other nations. It follows Washington's longstanding pattern of waging war on humanity. Iran's peaceful nuclear program is pretext for post-November war. Syria's Houla massacre draws it closer against Assad. Since early last year, thousands of Syrian civilians and security forces died. Daily body counts mount. Western-enlisted insurgents bear most responsibility. Assad is wrongfully blamed for their crimes. Houla represents the largest incident so far. At least 109 deaths were reported. Most were killed at point blank range. According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) spokesman Rupert Colville, over 80% "were summarily executed in two separate incidents." "What is very clear is that this was an absolutely abominable event that happened in Houla and at least a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, including women and children." Entire families "were shot (in cold blood) in their houses," or murdered other ways. Western-enlisted death squad assassins, not Assad, bear full responsibility. Spurious accusations blamed pro-Assad Alawites. Claims about tanks and artillery "pounding" Houla were exaggerated. Bodies found were intact. Bullet, stab, and other wounds reflect close-range killing. Insurgents went house to house. Victims had no place to hide. Nonetheless, Washington, Britain, France, and rogue partners reacted as expected. Ambassadors were expelled. Syria hasn't had one in Washington since last year. Its charge d'affaires got 72 hours to leave. A White House statement condemned Assad for killer gang crimes he tried to stop, saying: "These acts serve as a vile testament to an illegitimate regime that responds to peaceful political protest with unspeakable and inhuman brutality." Since violence erupted last year, Washington orchestrated events on the ground. Obama officials bear full responsibility for mass murder, destruction, mayhem and instability. America is directly or indirectly involved in virtually all regional conflicts. It's the world's leading human rights abuser. Longstanding war plans target Assad. Houla may be used as trigger to launch it. Inflammatory scoundrel media reports make war more likely. It wouldn't be the first time. Former New York Times writer Judith Miller fell from grace. She was directly complicit in promoting war against Iraq. Her daily front page features read like Pentagon handouts. She sacrificed journalism for warmongering. Times editors let her. She's gone, but they're still at it. Last year they targeted Gaddafi. This year they promote war on Iran and Syria. Shameless propaganda encourages what they should oppose. Times' correspondents, op-ed contributors, and editorial writers comprise a virtual Noah's Ark of scam artists. Journalistic ethics aren't tolerated. Subservience to wealth and power is mandated. So is lying for a living. On May 30, several featured articles and one inflammatory editorial targeted Assad. One headlined "Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Envoys," saying: On Tuesday, Washington "joined with 10 nations...." They expelled Syrian diplomats. Fingers pointed the wrong way. Heated rhetoric substituted for truth. War drums were clearly audible. Journalism is support to accurately inform, agenda-free. Advocacy shouldn't be tolerated. Taking sides veers far from good reporting. Too often it's featured on Times pages. Calling Houla "a tipping point" comes dangerously close to advocating war. Blaming Assad for insurgent killings draws it closer. No publication has more global influence than The Times. Government officials follow its articles, commentaries and editorials. Agendas they advocate affect policies. Promoting war makes it more likely. The Times strayed far from June 13, 1971. It became the first broadsheet to begin publishing the top secret Pentagon Papers. At the time, publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said, "What was revealed, had to be revealed....people had the right to know." In a 1996 article, The Times said: The Pentagon Papers "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public, but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance." Did misreporting about nonexistent Iraq WMDs matter less? Were lies about Gaddafi acceptable? Was getting the Afghanistan wrong good journalism? Are rule of law principles unimportant? Is sanitized news without truth and full disclosure proper on Times' pages? Obvious questions go answered. Another headline read "Romney Calls for Action on Syria, but His Party Is Divided," saying: He and other congressional hawks want war on Syria. John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are especially belligerent. They bluntly support air strikes. Romney stops short of their rhetoric but not their agenda to topple Assad. Most others in Congress support it. So does Obama. Romney wants faster action. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey said: "Of course, there is always a military option....It may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities." He added that Friday's massacre made intervention more likely. War plans were prepared months ago. They're also ready against Iran. Key NATO partners and regional allies support it. So do the Turkish-based Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Syrian National Council (SNC). Another Times article headlined "Israel's Defense Minister Calls for More Action Against Assad," saying: Houla "compel(s) the world to take action - not just talk, but action," he said. He stopped just short of urging war, but imagine what's said privately. Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said: "The West must intervene, either directly, or indirectly." He added that Israel must get involved. These type comments suggest war draws closer. When rhetoric gets this heated, bombs away usually follows. At this point, it looks almost certain. Whether Russia and China can prevent it remains to be seen. On May 30, a Times editorial headlined "The Massacre at Houla," saying: Expelling Syrian diplomats stops short of tougher measures needed. Russia remains a "roadblock." Fingers pointed solely at Assad. Houla "was just the latest evidence that he never intended to" pursue peace. The editorial suggested "shabiha, or government thugs" did "at least some of the killings by shooting people - including entire families - at close range." The most obvious question went unanswered: Cui bono? Clearly not Assad. Like previous hostile editorials, this one stopped short of urging war. Given its tough rhetoric, it's just a matter of time. Calls overall grow louder. On May 29, a Washington Post editorial headlined "Time for US leadership on Syria," saying: Body counts mount. An "illusory cease fire" exists. Houla wasn't unique. It's "just better documented than (other Assad) crimes....in towns and cities across Syria." "The Obama administration persists, too, in declining to exercise the U.S. leadership that would be required to stop the massacres. For the past two months it hid behind Mr. Annan. Now....his plan has become an embarrassment...." "The reality is that the killing in Syria will continue, and the threat to vital U.S. interests across the Middle East will grow...." The Washington Post also barely stopped short of urging war. At issue is how much longer? Harsh commentaries and political rhetoric suggest what peace advocates fear most. A hawkish Haaretz article intensifies it. Headlined "On Syria, the world prattles on," saying: "The Syrian threat doesn't just hover over Syrian cities and towns; it is also warming up the engines of Israel's fighter jets" to attack Iran. Full of misinformation, it feigned concern for regional security and stability. When irresponsible commentators and political officials promote wars, spurious reasons are given. Deception substitutes for truth and reason. Bad policies usually follow. Only imperial interests gain. People on both sides lose. One conflict begets others. Endless turmoil and violence persist. Advocating them is unconscionable. Calls for war grow louder. A large-scale false flag attack blamed on Syria could cinch it. It wouldn't be the first time America manipulated events to wage war and won't be the last. Odds look like it's coming. A Final Comment For months, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been under house arrest in London. Sweden wants him extradited on spurious charges. They include unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape. Allegedly it's for having sex without a condom. Since when is condomless or consensual sex illegal? A honey trap snared him. At issue isn't sex. Washington wants him extradited to stand trial for whistleblowing. Obama officials want him put away and silenced. Sweden is a way station. On May 31, Britain's Supreme Court ordered Assange extradited to Stockholm. Its 5 - 2 decision rejected his argument about an invalid European arrest warrant. His lawyers got two weeks to contest. Earlier, two lower courts ruled for extradition. Washington exerted pressure and got what it wanted. Summary judgment awaits Assange in America. Maybe Guantanamo or Bradley Manning-style. Kid gloves treatment won't await him. Claims about putting lives at risk are spurious. At issue is silencing whistleblowers. Assange and Manning are best known. Assange may appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Doing so could delay extradition for months. Per Samuelson, one of his lawyers, said whether he'll appeal isn't decided. At the same time, he believes he'll be cleared in Sweden. Whether true or not won't matter if authorities there order him extradited to America. At this point, it looks likely, but resolution may be months away. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War" http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. Дмитрий Судаков Copyright © 1999-2012, «PRAVDA.Ru». When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors. Tareq Aziz: A Son's Plea 30.05.2012 23:13 by Felicity Arbuthnot Tareq Aziz: A Son's Plea. 47227.jpeg Source: AsiaNews.it "We don't need spectators to witness our suffering and tell us they feel with us. We need help to put a stop to it." (Raja Shehadeh, 1951-: "When The Birds Stopped Singing.") "Madam Felicity, when I was ten years old, I was handing out leaflets on the streets of Baghdad, putting them through people's doors, to stop the British getting hold of our oil. I am not about to give up on Iraq now." (Tareq Aziz in an interview, 1999.) Iraq's former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Tareq Aziz (76), who largely ignored his already ailing health before the illegal 2003 invasion of his country in order to travel and argue eloquently against the embargo's crippling toll on the population, and later to attempt to avert invasion, has now been imprisoned - in the country he loves and for which he fought verbally, with passion and tenacity - for nine years. His son Ziad, who with his family, in addition to the pain of his father's incarceration, now bears the burden of exile, has fought tenaciously for his father's release, but very rarely speaks publicly of the family's ongoing grief at his plight. It is a measure of his fears for Tareq Aziz that he has sent a letter expressing deep fear and concern for his father, following his family's visit to Iraq to see him, to a group affiliated with the Brussels Tribunal (i) including human rights, legal and medical organizations, asking for all possible assistance in resolving the situation. His words are quoted with permission: "I just want to update you on my father's health condition. My mother and sisters visited him last Friday (25th of May) in the Iraqi prison in which he is being held in Khadimiyah." ( Khadimiyah is part of Baghdad Old City, on the eastern side of the Tigris.) "They thought he had deteriorated since their last visit, he has a strange cough and he is still not able to walk on his own. He asked to be seen by a doctor about the cough, but the prison officials have yet to decide on that." "The heat is not an easy thing for him to endure, it really worsens his health condition and lowers his spirits." (This is May. Baghdad's sweltering Augusts can bring temperatures of 140 farenheit - 60 celsius.) " ... time is not on our side (ii.) I am afraid that his deteriorating health condition won't last him the summer with the suffocating heat and lack of medical attention. "Time is of the essence" and speedy resolution critical. "I realize these things take time, but as I said earlier, time is not on our side. My family and I are ready to help in any way we can, if there is anything we can do. "Respectfully yours, Ziad Tareq Aziz." It is a measure of the precarious health of a proud man, from a proud family of the proudest of nations that his son should near plead to those of us from nations responsible for the destruction of his. The letter ended graciously: "Lastly, I would like to thank you again for all your efforts." Tareq Aziz and his incarcerated colleagues never did give up on Iraq, never fled as they could have, before the impending invasion. They are paying a terrible price, meted out in kangaroo courts. The vengeance and lawlessness of the liberators and their puppet government, equals - and indeed largely exceeds - those they decry as tyrants and dictators. Sadly, the West's paper thin, sham democracies, nevertheless make all their nationals of conscience equally culpable. i. http://www.brussellstribunal.org/ ii. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31055 Prepared for publication by: Lisa Karpova Pravda.Ru Дмитрий Судаков Copyright © 1999-2012, «PRAVDA.Ru». When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors.

Iranian cyberattacks ordered by the nigger

This is only more proof that the nigger in the white house wants war with Iran. This is an attack and every Iranian is justified in doing anything to any ameircan government member anywhere as reprisal. Peter II, Khan-e-Mazendaran June 1, 2012 Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised. “Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room. Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium. This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day. These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment. Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue. Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back. The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication. It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible. A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack. Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks. “We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice. If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region. A Bush Initiative The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so. Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results. For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before. The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges. The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail. Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort. Breakthrough, Aided by Israel It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground. Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within. The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program. Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot. Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant. “Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data. “Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said. Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.” In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code. The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said. The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said. Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw. “The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.” Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz — which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between visits — showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had previously appeared to be working well. But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice. The Stuxnet Surprise Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room. What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously. “From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.” But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden. An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users. “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.” Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.” In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error. The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose. “I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues. Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on. A Weapon’s Uncertain Future American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said. Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran. This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” to be published by Crown on Tuesday.