US and Israel accused of cyber attack on Iran
I am pleased to post here a story published in eurasiareview.
This is one of the proofs that United States and Israel were involved in cyber attack
on Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant. The time has come to initiate
investigations against these two countries for committing war crimes.
A group of 20 law and technology experts has unanimously
agreed that the Stuxnet worm used against Iran in 2009-2010 was a cyber attack.
The US and Israel have long been accused of collaborating on the virus in a bid
to damage Iran’s nuclear program.
While those accusations against Washington and Tel Aviv have
never been confirmed by either government, a NATO Commission has now confirmed
it as an “act of force.”
Last year anonymous government officials came forward to
tell The New York Times that researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory,
which is overseen by the US Department of Energy, passed technical information
to Israel regarding vulnerabilities in cascades and centrifuges at Iran’s
Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
That information, it is believed, was used to design the
Stuxnet worm that set Iran’s nuclear program back an estimated two years.
“Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage
objects are unambiguously uses of force,” according to the Tallinn Manual on
the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, which lead author Michael N.
Schmitt said was written to outline “how does existing law apply to
cyberspace.”
Schmitt told The Washington Times that “according to the UN
charter, the use of force is prohibited, except in self-defense.” Under the
guidelines detailed in the Manual, the concept of self-defense could include
“anticipatory self-defense,” which would allow a nation an act of aggression in
the event that it perceives a threat as imminent.
The 20 experts were drawn from around the world and took
three years to complete the 300-page manuscript, which they were careful to
note was not an official policy decision by NATO.
They disagreed over whether the Stuxnet attack qualified as
an “armed attack,” which would constitute the beginning of wartime aggression
that, under the Geneva Convention, could be followed by the use of force.
“We wrote it as an aid to legal advisers to governments and
militaries, almost a textbook,” Schmitt told The New York Times. “We wanted to
create a product that would be useful to states to help them decide what their
position is. We were not making recommendations, we did not define best
practice, we did not want to get into policy.”
US officials have continued to deny American involvement in
the attack, but the timing specified by the anonymous sources coincides with an
order from President Bush authorizing an increased information exchange with
Israel over Iranian nuclear facilities.
During a 2009 conversation with The New York Times, an
American official said any secret action against Iran would classify officially
as “science experiments.”
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