Posts Tagged ‘Iran’
U.S. spy agencies see no move by Iran to build a nuclear bomb
Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.
Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.
…There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes…
Not that fact has the slightest effect on the ideology of American chickenhawks.
TV documentary crew rescue sailors from burning ship
Several sailors have been rescued from a fire on board a ship in the Persian gulf by a TV crew who happened to be filming in the area.
Iranian state television reported the ship was carrying fuel to Iran’s Bandar Abbas port when a large blaze broke out on board.
All nine crew members were able to escape onto the TV documentary makers’ small boat.
Great timing – and an exclusive.
Uzbekistan joins the heartless banning Valentine’s Day
Authorities in the country have virtually canceled Valentine’s Day by nixing planned concerts and other events, according to the Associated Press, citing a report by Russian news agency RIA-Novosti.
Instead, Uzbeki lovers will have to content themselves with a government-organized reading of poems by medieval Mughal emperor Babur, who wrote about monuments, flora and fauna, wine parties and battle strategy…
Uzbekistan’s unofficial ban on romantic celebrations isn’t new. Last year, news agency Turkiston described Valentine’s Day as the work of “forces with evil goals bent on putting an end to national values.”
Other Muslim countries feel equally as frigid toward the amorous holiday, which is a nominally Christian one.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have both banned celebration of the day, Voice of America reports. Iranian officials last year said they would take action against amorous citizens who ignored the ban. Saudi Arabia prohibits the gifting of red on V-day — including chocolates, bears, or roses, according to the Saudi Gazette.
In India, right-wing group Sri Rama Sena warned in 2010 that it would take action against educational institutions, restaurants and theaters if they encouraged Valentine’s day celebrations. Some adherents of the group even burned Valentine’s Day cards…
Malaysia joined in the spoil-sporting last year when it announced it would crack down on “immoral acts” during the holiday as part of a wider campaign for its citizens’ lifestyles to be “sin-free.”
The head of the Malaysian Islamic Development Department told state media: “In reality, as well as historically, the celebration of Valentine’s Day is synonymous with vice activities.”
Is there no end to bureaucrats on this planet with no heart for love?
Jewish publisher apologizes for suggesting Obama’s murder
The U.S. Secret Service is looking into a controversial column by an Atlanta Jewish newspaper publisher that mulled the assassination of an American president.
Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote a January 13 column about the threat of Iran to Israel. He posed three options for the Jewish state to counter the Iranian regime.
One of them called for a “hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.”
“Give the go-ahead for U.S. based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”
U.S. Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie told CNN Saturday, “We are aware of it. We are taking the appropriate investigative steps…”
“The suggestion by anyone, in this case a Jewish newspaper publisher, that Israel should consider assassinating President Obama is shocking beyond belief,” said Dov Wilker, director of the American Jewish Committee in Atlanta.
“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s [eventual] apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Wilker. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”
The White House declined to comment Saturday on the column.
I guess this proves that fundamentalists needn’t be Christians to be nutballs.
Iran cracks down on the moral peril of Barbie dolls
The ideal
Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.
As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences…
Iran’s religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences.” Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.
The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police…
Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: “We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls.”
Iran has fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television.
Just to give you an inkling of what lies ahead for any nation that decides that theocracy is needed to “improve” society. There truly ain’t anything as foolish as some silly git who thinks puritan life was so wonderful in the good old days.
Iran’s fuel test won’t hasten nuclear weapons – bluster on both sides of the question is farce!
Bushehr nuclear power plant – loaded with Russian fuel rods
Iran’s latest claim of a breakthrough in its nuclear program appears unlikely to bring it any closer to having atomic bombs, but serves rather as another defiant message to the West…
“The development itself doesn’t put them any closer to producing weapons,” said Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.
It could be a way of telling Tehran’s foes that time is running out if they want to revive an atomic fuel swap deal that collapsed two years ago but is still seen by some experts as offering the best chance to start building badly needed trust.
Not if the response from the Obama White House is any indicator.
Diplomats believe Iran has in the past overstated its nuclear progress to gain leverage in its standoff with Western capitals, and the testing of domestically made fuel does not mean the country is about to start using it to run reactors.
“It is a step in the direction of no longer needing supply from other countries,” said Associate Professor Matthew Bunn of Harvard University’s Kennedy School…But it will be a good number of months or years before it will be at the point where they no longer need supply from other countries…”
Has Obama brought us to a new beginning for Iraq?
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Barack Obama
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Iraq is today a shattered society, shaped by two major international wars, bombings, debilitating sanctions, civil war, emigration of millions of its best-educated people, deadly insurgency and counterinsurgency and foreign occupation over 20 years.
While Iraq never achieved full unity after it was cobbled together by the British in 1920 from three large and mutually alien communities — the Sunni Muslim Kurds in the northern highlands, the Sunni Muslim Arabs in the central plains and the partly Farsi-speaking Shia Muslim Arabs in the southern lowlands — Iraq had made great social and economic progress. By 1990, it was the most advanced of the Arab countries. Now that is all gone.
Yet, even today, there is a memory of collective statehood, or Iraqiyah. Some of us who have lived among the Iraqis believe they have a chance to invigorate a new beginning of Iraqiyah but that the return to something like the state that existed before will take years.
How is the American withdrawal regarded? My hunch, from having known Iraq and Iraqis of all persuasions for more than half a century, is that most will be happy to see us leave. But, at the same time, they have learned to fear one another, so their politically effective attitudes will vary from one community to the next.
Drone crash uncloaks U.S. spying effort in Iran
The crash of a CIA drone in Iran has brought into the open what U.S. intelligence agencies would prefer kept secret: intense spying efforts in a country where the United States has no official presence.
Iran on Thursday aired with great flourish footage of the captured drone, which appeared largely intact. Pentagon and CIA spokesmen would not comment on whether it was the missing U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aircraft. A person familiar with the situation confirmed that the drone that crashed was on a surveillance mission over Iran. [This is how the Pentagon admits their screw-ups]
It is believed to have crashed because of a malfunction and not from being shot down or computer-hacked by the Iranians, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. [More on this in my comment below]
Although there are risks that Iran could attempt to reverse engineer the technology, or sell it to other countries, like China, U.S. officials believe that Iran will not be able to mine the drone’s computer systems to learn details of the U.S. surveillance mission.
U.S. surveillance of Iran through various means has been going on for years, U.S. officials and others with direct knowledge of the situation say…
Drones in the class of the RQ-170 are supposed to have a homing pigeon software module onboard. If contact is lost, the critter has the capability of flying itself back to the base where it was launched. So, that didn’t work.
That still allows for the sort of self-destruct mechanisms included in military and civilian launch vehicles for satellite placement. They leave the ground and screwup, threaten to come down somewhere unplanned – they are blown up either by ground command or software command when it is certain the critters ain’t behaving as programmed.
So, what happened? Eh?
Pizza Hut blunders set up CIA informants for execution
More than a dozen CIA informants in the Middle East are thought to be facing execution after being caught by Iran and Hizbollah, due to a string of embarrassing failures by US spies.
Agents working for the US in Lebanon and Iran are said to have been outed after their handlers used trackable mobile phones and used the code-word “pizza” when agreeing to meet at a Pizza Hut.
The breaking of the two spy rings – one in the Beirut-based militant group that has killed hundreds of Americans, the other looking into the Iranian nuclear programme – amounts to a serious setback to US security. It may also make it difficult for US spies to recruit local informants in future…
Hizbollah counter-intelligence detected several mobile phones in Beirut that “were used rarely or always from specific locations and only for a short period of time”, according to the Associated Press.
Two Hizbollah double-agents, meanwhile, discovered the pizza restaurant where genuine informants were being met by pretending to work for the CIA, according to ABC News.
The leader of Hizbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, alleged in June that two high-ranking members of his group had been caught spying for the CIA, but the claims were denied by the US embassy. Iranian authorities also claimed to have discovered 30 Israeli and US agents in May.
The apparent blow comes almost two years after a suicide bomber posing as an informant killed seven CIA employees and wounded six others by gaining entry to a US base in Khost, Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on operations.
What could he say other than offering up the usual crap arguments for slithering around in the Middle East. Historically, the CIA’s essential political function in the region has been to assure safety for Western oil companies by impeding any moves towards removing rulers-by-birthright and instituting democracy.
American generally aren’t aware of that – folks in the Middle East never forget.
Obama OK’d the secret delivery of bunker buster bombs to Israel
U.S. Air Force F-15E drops a GBU-28 “Bunker Buster” 5,000-pound Bomb
President Obama secretly agreed to sell Israel 55 bunker-busting bombs, according to a Newsweek report…
With the sale of deep-penetrating bombs called GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators, Obama is satisfying a weapons request Israel first made during the Bush administration.
Israel’s request for bunker-busters in 2005 was denied. At the time, the Defense Department had frozen most military sales to Israel because of concerns Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China. Pentagon officials apparently had a change of heart…
Even some of the hawks from the George W. Bush administration grudgingly give Obama credit…”If you say to the White House, ‘Obama has been very unfriendly to Israel,’ they say, ‘What do you mean? It’s the best military-to-military relationship ever.’ And that part is true,” says Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle East policy at the National Security Council. “If you look at the trajectory from Clinton to Bush to Obama, the military relationship has gotten steadily stronger. I don’t think Obama changed the trajectory, but he certainly didn’t interfere with it, and it continued under him.”
The bunker busters were a significant breakthrough. The Israelis first requested the sale in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. In 2007, Bush informed then prime minister Ehud Olmert that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010.
The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the secret decision.
Secret decisions stroking the Israeli government are nothing new in any White House. One can only hope that the promises of change – someday – will mean our government is turning away Israel’s quest for Lebensraum. Who knows? That might even include being honest with all American voters, as well?
