Iran On The Burner

[Annie]

UPI Op-Ed

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051118-040721-3491r

Walker's World: Iran's alarming regime

By MARTIN WALKER
UPI Editor

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- New evidence of Iran's secret nuclear weapons program emerged Friday as senior American and European diplomats tried to keep alive their strategy to block Iran by peaceful means.

But the diplomatic path is looking less hopeful as the new Iranian government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being seen each week as more hard-line and less rational, after his threat to "wipe Israel off the map."

Even the Old Guard of Iran's Islamic revolution is openly appalled by the new regime's ultra-conservative policies, with former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in an unprecedented public warning that the new government and its purges are damaging Iran at home and abroad.

"Today some are calling into question the actions of the past, and are enacting a policy of purges, a policy of general banishment and the sidelining of competent people," said Rafsanjani, who was defeated in this summer's election for the presidency, but remains head of the powerful Expediency Council, the body that is supposed to arbitrate between the government and the clerical leadership.

"These people are muddying others, and if we let them do so, they will call into question the achievements of the regime and the revolution," Rafsanjani told a gathering of clerics, according to the official IRNA news agency. "Such attitudes will allow the enemies to reach their objectives."​

Western diplomats have now also been startled by reports of President Ahmadinejad's cabinet being required to sign a formal pact of loyalty to the 12th Imam Mehdi, who disappeared into the Jamkaran well 1,300 years ago. To ratify the pact, the signed cabinet document was then solemnly entrusted to the well, posted on top of many thousand petitions and letters dropped there by worshippers over the centuries.

President Ahmadinejad is a member of the Hojatieh sect, seen by many Shiite Muslims as verging on the lunatic fringe of Islam, and thought to be so extreme by Ayatollah Khomeini whose 1979 revolution overthrew the shah that it was driven underground in 1983. The Hojatieh sect is now very much back in favor with the new Iranian government, and the new president is a fervent admirer of its spiritual leader, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, known in secular circles in Tehran as "the crazed one."

The new president has purged senior figures from the Iranian Foreign Ministry and Oil Ministry, to replace them with his own loyalists, many of them from the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard). In recent speeches, some of these newly powerful supporters of President Ahmadinejad have denounced any talk of compromise with the United States and the West in speeches that have been reported in the Iranian press and media.

General Mohammad Kossari, who runs the Revolutionary Guard's Security Department, has announced that "Iran intends to become a superpower and will drive all foreign forces out of our region."

"We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization," declared Hassan Abbasi, formerly director of the Revolutionary Guard's Center for Security Doctrines Research, and now chief foreign policy adviser to the new President. In Tehran, he is spoken of as "the Kissinger of Islam."

In a recent lecture at a Teachers Training College in Karaj, west of Tehran, and reported by the veteran Middle East journalist Amir Taheri, Tehran's top foreign policy adviser claimed that the U.S. was playing "a game of chicken" with Iran, and Iran would not back down.

"The Western man today has no stomach for a fight. This phenomenon is not new: All empires produce this type of man, the self-centered, materialist, and risk-averse man," Abbasi is quoted as saying.​

European Union officials, whose diplomats in Tehran are sending alarming cables about the militancy and religious fervor of the new government, now say privately that they are losing hope that even the most skilful diplomacy could succeed with the hard-line zealots who now run Iran, even less so now that have launched a bitter power struggle with the old guard of the revolution.

U.S. under-secretary of State Nicholas Burns has arranged meetings with the group of British, French and German diplomats known as the EU3, who have taken the lead in the diplomatic effort to persuade Iran back into compliance with the inspection regime of the IAEA.

A new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran had received technical data on how to enrich uranium from the black market operation of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan as early as 1987. The documents were provided to the IAEA by Iran, which claims it had not sought the data nor had the technical advice been used.

Uranium enrichment is a critical process in the building of a nuclear weapon, but is also required in significantly less concentrated form to provide fuel for nuclear power stations.

The IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, says Iran's cooperation has improved, but says more openness and transparency from Iran is "indispensable and overdue," particularly on dual-use equipment, and on visits to sites whose existence Iran had long kept secret.

"These documents open new concern about weaponization that Iran has failed to address," U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte told reporters in Vienna. "Iran owes the board an explanation of why it had these documents, what it has done with them and why it didn't disclose them in the past."​

The IAEA governors are scheduled to meet again next week in what promises to be a contentious session that could see a battle over proposals to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions. China, with its own important energy deals with Iran, and Russia, which supplied Iran's Busheir nuclear reactor, have discreetly resisted the idea of sanctions in the past, but the growing alarm about the rationality of the new Iranian regime is helping push the case for a rethink.

Or as Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair put it to this month's European summit at Hampton Court: "Can you really imagine a regime such as this getting hold of nuclear weapons?"

 

[Annie]

When even the Guardian is getting it, there is a problem here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1646220,00.html?gusrc=rss

Iranians admit receiving nuclear warhead blueprint from disgraced Pakistani expert

Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Saturday November 19, 2005
The Guardian

International suspicion of Iran's nuclear programme heightened yesterday when it was revealed that Tehran had obtained a blueprint showing how to build the core of a nuclear warhead.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told diplomats that his inspectors had recently obtained documents from Tehran showing that the Iranians had been given various instructions on processing uranium hexafluoride gas and casting and enriching uranium. These had been obtained via the black market in nuclear technology headed by the disgraced Pakistani scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. This may also be helpful http://www.usmessageboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1628&highlight=Abdul+Qadeer+Khan

Informed diplomats said the blueprint for casting uranium was required in making the core of a nuclear warhead, although that alone was not enough for the manufacture of a weapon. On the flipside, Iran has had the plans for over 7 years and has probably figured the rest out by now.

United Nations inspectors had long suspected that the Khan network had helped Iran, but this was the first time the Iranians had come clean on the issue. They told the inspectors they had not sought the information, but that the Khan network had supplied the documents anyway.

This claim stretched credulity among diplomats and nuclear experts, and reinforced their conviction that Tehran is determined to acquire the capacity and knowhow for nuclear weapons.

Dr ElBaradei's disclosure came in a five-page confidential report to diplomats, ahead of a meeting of the 35-strong IAEA board on the Iranian dispute next week. It comes a day after the Guardian reported that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had conducted a purge of his opponents in key ministries - drawing accusations of a coup.

Iran, meanwhile, displayed further defiance of the IAEA yesterday by announcing it had started processing more uranium for its nuclear programme.

Dr ElBaradei, the recent Nobel peace prizewinner, criticised Iran for continuing to withhold information on the project, demanding access for his inspectors to two Iranian military sites and to personnel involved in the programme.

He reiterated that Iranian "transparency" was "indispensable and overdue". Sound like any other WMD investigation he was involved in? Amid frantic behind-the-scenes diplomacy aimed at building a broader international consensus on how to respond to the Iranian nuclear challenge, Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator announced that more uranium ore was being processed into gas for nuclear fuel purposes at the conversion complex in Isfahan.

While the Iranian move was no surprise, its timing was seen as a signal of intransigence, less than a week before the IAEA board session.

In the run-up to next week's Vienna session, the US, Russia, Britain and other main European players have been working with Dr ElBaradei to finalise an offer to the Iranians that would leave them with a civil nuclear power programme but deny them the capacity to manufacture weapons-grade uranium.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, has asked Dr ElBaradei to travel to Iran to put the proposal to the Iranians - a mission in which, informed diplomats say, the Russians are the linchpin.

US, European, and Russian officials were meeting in London yesterday to discuss the proposals and also to try to come up with a common strategy on Iran.

The deal on offer would leave the Iranians processing uranium ore at the Isfahan plant, but forfeiting their proposed uranium enrichment complex at Natanz, where they want to build a large underground facility to process uranium gas into nuclear fuel.

The offer has the support of the Europeans, the Americans, the Russians and of Dr ElBaradei - placing Tehran under increased pressure.

In September, the IAEA board resolved to report Iran to the UN security council for breaches of its international nuclear commitments. But it did not set a date for such referral.

Backstory

Iran's game of nuclear cat and mouse with the west and UN nuclear inspectors goes back to early 2003 when Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA chief, visited the planned uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and was staggered by what he found. Iran had been covertly building and planning its nuclear projects for 18 years undetected. Since then, IAEA inspections have been the main subject of 13 reports by Dr ElBaradei to his board. The disclosures led, in turn, to the uncovering later in 2003 of the international trafficking in nuclear and weapons technology headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, seen as the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. But the UN inspections of Iranian sites have yet to provide conclusive evidence to show whether Tehran's nuclear projects are designed solely for energy or also for weapons.

 

[Annie]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051121/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iran

Exiled Iranian Says Nation Hides Materials

By BARRY SCHWEID, Associated Press WriterMon Nov 21, 6:28 PM ET

Iran has expanded the tunnels it uses to hide a major part of its nuclear weapons program to a network covering a large area of southeastern Tehran, an Iranian exile who opposes that nation's Islamic government said Monday.

Alireza Jafarzadeh said the secret construction of missiles extends well beyond Parchin, a military zone 20 miles southeast of the Iranian capital. Jafarzadeh told reporters in September about the Parchin tunnels.

On Monday, Jafarzadeh said that on orders of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian defense ministry has taken over an area in eastern and southern regions of Tehran.

Jafarzadeh is credited with having aired Iranian military secrets in the past, but U.S. officials consider some of his assertions to have been inaccurate.

Despite accusations from the United States and the European Union, Iran denies any nuclear weapons ambitions, saying its nuclear program is purely for civilian needs. It has rejected new inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, and expressed opposition to a proposal by European countries to have reprocessing of Iran's nuclear material done in Russia.

North Korean experts have cooperated with Iran in the design and building of the complex, producing blueprints, for instance, Jafarzadeh said.

A leading Iranian aerospace group, Hemmat Industries, is located in the area and is building three versions of Shahab and Ghadar missiles, he said.

The Shahab 3 has a range of 1,300 to 1,900 kilometers and Ghadar, still in the production stage, 2,500 to 3,000 kilometers, he said.

Some of the tunnels are located in Kahk Sefid Mountain, he said.

In an interview, Jafarzadeh said the most significant development was that Iran was concentrating its work on missiles and nuclear warheads all together in tunnels underground in the Tehran area.

"I think the United States should be doubly worried about this because President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sped up its nuclear weapons program and the revolutionary guards are now dominating all three branches of power — executive, legal and judicial," Jafarzadeh said.

"It's a nightmare," he said.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack agreed that Iran has a covert nuclear program. "It's hidden from sight and it's hidden through a variety of means," he said.

However, McCormack said he did not know about Jafarzadeh's latest disclosures. And there's been "a very mixed record in terms of some of these groups in talking about so-called revelations about Iran's nuclear programs."

Negotiations between the European Union and Iran are stalemated.

Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private watchdog group, criticized the Bush administration for trying to defuse the standoff by endorsing a Russian proposal to let Iran enrich its own uranium so long as the enrichment is done in Russia.

"The United States has stepped onto a slippery slope," he said, and given Iran's record of concealment and deception, "this is an approach that invites serious trouble for the future."

 

[Gunny]

Iran On The Burner

That is NOT me fanning the flames ...... honest.