PM – Iranian assassination bears all the hallmarks of Mossad 13/01/2012

Suzanne Hill reported this story on Friday, January 13, 2012

BRENDAN TREMBATH:An United States intelligence and security expert says it’s unlikely the US was involved in this week’s assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Iran has blamed both the US and Israel.

Iranian news reports say Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was killed on his way to work in Tehran. A motorcyclist attached a bomb to his car.

Dr Joseph Fitsanakis is an Iran watcher, and coordinator of the Security and Intelligence Studies programme at King College in Tennessee. He’s told Suzanne Hill that the assassination is probably the work of Israel’s spy service.

JOSEPH FITSANAKIS: The assassination fits the character of the Mossad, going back all the way to 1960s with Operation Damocles when the Israelis actually went so far as assassinating German scientists working with Egypt in Egypt’s nuclear program.

Some people mention that there are other agencies that have similar operational character like the Russians, for instance, the Russian secret services but the Russians are allies of Iran.

The Chinese have been mentioned as well but, again, even though they’re pretty capable, they don’t have that type of operational character.

SUZANNE HILL: When we talk about operational character, are you referring only to Mossad’s predisposition to assassinate as we assume they have or are you referring to other things to do with the assassination itself in which we can see hallmarks of Mossad?

JOSEPH FITSANAKIS: I think both. In particular, assassination operations are very, very risky. They’re very complex, involve a large number of individuals, they’re very carefully planned.

‘Big Atomic Bomb Will Come Out’: Ahmadinejad and Chavez Joke About Nuclear Strike Against U.S

(The Blaze/AP)– President Hugo Chavez defended his close ally Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday and warned of “U.S. warmongering threats” amid tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program.

chavez-mahmoud

The two leaders met in Caracas on the first leg of a four-nation tour that will also take Ahmadinejad to Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador. Their conversation reportedly often focused on anti-U.S. rhetoric, which according to the Daily Mail included Mr Chavez saying that:

“he was hiding a bomb under a grassy knoll before the steps of the presidential palace, saying: ‘That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out. The imperialist spokesmen say Ahmadinejad and I are going into the basement now to set our sights on Washington and launch cannons and missiles… It’s laughable.”

The leaders were apparently serious, however, when discussing the threat they believe the U.S. poses.

“We are very worried,” Chavez said of the pressures being put on Iran by the United States and its allies, which he accused of being a threat to peace.

“They present us as aggressors,” Chavez said as he received Ahmadinejad at the presidential palace.

“Iran hasn’t invaded anyone,” he added. “Who has dropped thousands and thousands of bombs … including atomic bombs?”

Ahmadinejad’s visit comes after the U.S. imposed tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, which Washington believes Tehran is using to develop atomic weapons. Chavez and his allies back Iran in arguing the nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes.

Both leaders joked that their relationship shouldn’t cause any concern.

chavez-mahmoud microphones

Ahmadinejad said if they were together building anything like a bomb, “the fuel of that bomb is love.”

North Korea from 30,000 feet | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

By Niko Milonopoulos, Siegfried S. Hecker, and Robert Carlin | 6 January 2012

Article Highlights

In the January/February issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Siegfried S. Hecker and Robert Carlin assessed North Korea‘s nuclear developments in 2011. That assessment preceded the death of Kim Jong-il on December 17. This article supplements the Hecker/Carlin piece with detailed overhead imagery, additional analysis of Pyongyang’s march toward a more threatening nuclear weapons capability, and brief commentary on how the accession of Kim Jong-un to leadership may influence North Korea’s nuclear trajectory.

The first publicly available overhead imagery that suggested North Korea was constructing a new nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon complex appeared on November 4, 2010. Charles L. Pritchard, a former special envoy for negotiations with North Korea and the president of the Korea Economic Institute, along with a delegation from the institute provided the first confirmation of this construction after a visit to Yongbyon that week. The following week, Yongbyon officials told PDF Stanford University’s John W. Lewis and two authors of this article (Hecker and Carlin) that the reactor was designed to be an experimental pressurized light water reactor (100 megawatts thermal, or 25-30 megawatts electric) to be fueled with low-enriched uranium fuel produced in a newly constructed centrifuge plant at the nearby Yongbyon fuel fabrication plant. The new reactor is being constructed on the former site of a cooling tower for a now-disabled, 5-megawatt electric, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor that had been used to produce plutonium; the tower was demolished in 2008 as a step toward an eventual denuclearization agreement.

The Yongbyon construction site that Pritchard, Hecker, Carlin, and Lewis saw was essentially at the stage of development captured in the overhead image in Figure 1. The foundation slab had been poured, and the steel-reinforced concrete containment structure was about one meter high, on its way to a final height of 40 meters. Additional excavation was visible along with the construction of several new buildings that looked like storage sheds.

Figure 1

Overhead image that provided the first evidence of the construction
of a new reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Overhead imagery tracks construction progress during the past year — from September 26, 2010, to November 3, 2011 — as shown in Figure 2. Early images indicated that the construction of this new light water reactor began in late September 2010, near the site of the destroyed cooling tower.

Figure 2

A time sequence of overhead images of the light water reactor
site tracking its development from September 2010 to November 2011.

The images show the rapid rate of construction of the reactor’s exterior, including the development of the reactor containment structure and the adjacent turbine generator hall. As the photos indicate, not much progress was made between December 2010 and April 2011, likely because of the harsh North Korean winter.

The September 23, 2011, annotated image shown in Figure 3 demonstrates that much has been done since May. The dashed lines represent underground cooling pipes running from a newly constructed pump house to the Kuryong River (as seen in a May 22 overhead not shown here). The reactor building containment dome is partially complete, and construction has begun on the turbine generator hall. Construction trucks can be seen in the right-hand corner of the image. On the north side of the reactor is the skeleton of a structure for transferring equipment into the reactor hall during annual maintenance outages.

Figure 3

Annotated diagram of the new reactor site, shown in a photo indicating
significant progress in construction.

The latest available close-up overhead image, taken on November 14, 2011 (Figure 4), shows that many of the reactor’s external components are almost complete. Much progress has been made on the turbine generator hall; a traveling crane rail is already visible. The structure of the turbine pedestal inside the turbine building is already apparent. This is significant; it indicates that North Korea has a turbine design and possibly the ability to manufacture a turbine generator set that will fit within the dimensions of the turbine pedestal now under construction. The reactor building containment dome on the east side of the reactor’s containment structure is complete and will be placed on top of the containment structure once the large internal components of the reactor’s core have been inserted. For the first time, we see the appearance of small cylindrical components near the dome; these are likely parts of the pressure vessel that will go inside the containment structure.

Figure 4

Close-up overhead image of the new reactor site. This is the most
up-to-date image publicly available.

Using overhead images from Figure 4, we constructed a 3-D model (Figure 5) of the light water reactor using the open-source program Google Sketchup. Based on the model, it is obvious that the reactor’s exterior is almost complete. The model also provides perspective on the size of the reactor, which will be 40 meters tall when completed and stretch 20 meters in diameter.

Figure 5

Three-dimensional model of the light water reactor based on the
latest satellite images.

Our analysis confirms Pyongyang’s plan to use this experimental reactor for electricity production. The rapid progress of construction also demonstrates that North Korea still has impressive manufacturing capabilities, in spite of the last two decades of economic downturn. However, we view this progress with alarm. Was the seismic analysis of the reactor site sufficiently rigorous? Did the regulatory authorities have the skills and independence required to license this reactor in such a short time period? And do Yongbyon specialists have sufficient experience with the very demanding materials requirements for the internal reactor components, including the pressure vessel, steam generator, piping, and fuel-cladding materials?

From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

A serious split is developing within Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard. The West must leverage that split in support of regime change before the Islamic Republic successfully tests nuclear weapons.

Members of Iran’s paramilitary Basij force, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, attend a rally in front of the former US Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 25, 2011.
(AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

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By Reza Kahlili
posted January 4, 2012 at 11:56 am EST

Los AngelesA serious split is developing within Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, with one faction favoring the overthrow of the dictatorial regime. This presents a window of opportunity for the West to support regime change before the Islamic Republic successfully tests nuclear weapons. Once the regime has those nuclear bombs, that opening will be much narrower.

Iran has tried hard to show strength in the face of sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to quit its suspected nuclear-bomb and missile development programs. Iranian leaders are now flexing their military muscles in the strategic waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to shut it down and choking off a major part of the world’s oil supply.

The regime has long tried to scare the West from taking any action against it, by threatening the world’s security and stability. However, behind its mask of strength and unity, big cracks are beginning to show.

Next Year’s Wars – By Louise Arbour

Ten conflicts to watch in 2012.

BY LOUISE ARBOUR DECEMBER 27, 2011

What conflict situations are most at risk of deteriorating further in 2012? When Foreign Policy asked the International Crisis Group to evaluate which manmade disasters could explode in the coming year, we put our heads together and came up with 10 crisis areas that warrant particular concern.

Admittedly, there is always a certain arbitrariness to lists. This one is no different. But, in part, that serves a purpose: It will, hopefully, get people talking. Why no room for Sudan — surely a crisis of terrifying proportions? Or for Europe’s forgotten conflicts — in the North Caucasus, for example, or in Nagorno-Karabakh? You’ll see also that we have not included some that are deeply troubling yet strangely under-reported, like Mexico or northern Nigeria. No room, too, for the hardy perennial standoff on the Korean Peninsula, despite the uncertainty surrounding the death of Kim Jong Il.

No reader should interpret their omission as meaning those situations are improving. They are not. But we did feel it is useful to highlight a few places that, to our mind, deserve no less attention. What follows is our top 10. At the end — and just to remind ourselves that progress is possible — we’ve included two countries for which we, cautiously, feel 2012 could augur well.

SYRIA

Many in Syria and abroad are now banking on the regime’s imminent collapse and assuming everything will get better from that point on. The reality could turn out to be quite different. As dynamics in both Syria and the broader international arena turn squarely against the regime, many hope that the bloody stalemate finally might end. But however much it now seems inevitable that President Bashar al-Assad will leave the stage after his regime’s terrifying brutality over recent months, the initial post-Assad stages carry enormous risks.

On the one hand, the emotionally charged communal polarization, particularly around the Alawite community, has made regime supporters dig in their heels, believing it is “kill or be killed,” and their fears of large-scale retribution when Assad falls are very real. On the other, the rising strategic stakes have heightened the regional and wider international competition among all players, who now view the crisis as an historic opportunity to decisively tilt the regional balance of power. In that explosive mix, the first cross-border concern is surely Lebanon: The more Assad’s ouster appears imminent, the more Hezbollah — and its backers in Tehran — will view the Syrian crisis as an existential struggle designed to deal them a decisive blow, and the greater the risk that they would choose to go for broke and draw to launch attacks against Israel in an attempt to radically alter the focus of attention. “Powder keg” doesn’t begin to describe it. The danger is real that any one of these issues could derail or even foreclose the possibility of a successful transition.

IRAN/ISRAEL

Even if Iran and Israel somehow manage to sail safely past the rocks of the Syrian crisis, the enmity between them over the nuclear issue could blow them very dangerously off course. Though sanctions against Iran and saber-rattling all around intensified at the end of 2011, some may see this as merely the continuation of a long-term trend in the epically poor relations between Iran and Israel.

Year In Review: Highlights In Science And Technology

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A graphic shows a collision at full power at the Compact Muon Solenoid experience control room of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin.

By Richard Solash

The most intriguing breakthrough in the world of science this past year may have taken place in a 27-kilometer-long tunnel deep below the border of Switzerland and France.

That’s where researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) say they moved one possible step closer to solving one of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Their groundbreaking experiments in particle physics were the highlight of 2011′s notable scientific and technological advances.

The group’s director-general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, revealed on December 13 that he and his team had found “intriguing hints” that an elusive subatomic particle, theorized to be a basic building block of the universe, actually exists.

Japan Probe Finds Nuclear Disaster Response Failed

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr

By YURI KAGEYAMA Associated Press

TOKYO December 26, 2011 (AP)

Japan’s response to the nuclear crisis that followed the March 11 tsunami was confused and riddled with problems, including an erroneous assumption an emergency cooling system was working and a delay in disclosing dangerous radiation leaks, a report revealed Monday.

The disturbing picture of harried and bumbling workers and government officials scrambling to respond to the problems at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was depicted in the report detailing a government investigation.

The 507-page interim report, compiled by interviewing more than 400 people, including utility workers and government officials, found authorities had grossly underestimated tsunami risks, assuming the highest wave would be 6 meters (20 feet). The tsunami hit at more than double those levels.

The report criticized the use of the term “soteigai,” meaning “outside our imagination,” which it said implied authorities were shirking responsibility for what had happened. It said by labeling the events as beyond what could have been expected, officials had invited public distrust.

December 20, 2011 – Full Report – Iran Daily Brief

International Affairs

Majlis Speaker sends condolence message to North Korean government, nation over “the tragic news” – Ali Larijani, in a message to his North Korean counterpart, expressed condolences over the death of Comerade Kim Jong Il. The message reads: “I have received with great sorrow the tragic news of the demise of His Excellency Kim Jon Il, the supreme Leader of the brotherly Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

Minister of Defense: “We must spread the values of Islam and pure Islamic culture around the world” – Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi stated that the leaders’ most important role today is maintaining “pure Islam” and added that if Islam is weakened, there will be no need for leaders and heads of state. Therefore, everyone is obliged to be careful and remain alert. He contended that cultural activity is the main underpinning of Iran’s activity and added, “If we want to establish Islamic culture and distinguish ourselves from the West, we must spread Islam around the world, together with the pure Islamic culture.” He further noted that there have been attempts to resolve the tension with the US and establish ties, but relations with the US would contradict pure Islam.

Basij Commander: Days of capitalism are numbered, and a new world order relying on Islam as its foundation is now emerging – Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi said while referring to the popular uprisings in the Islamic Middle East, North Africa, parts of Europe and the US against their tyrant leaders that capitalism is on the verge of collapse. Recent developments in the world prove that tyrannical systems have no room in the hearts of people. Islam and its lofty teachings would be a good option in the absence of capitalism.

Iran remains unequivocally on the side of Syria, but stresses the need for reform; Secretary of the Expediency Council: “Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas are a red line for Iran” – In a live interview with Hezbollah’s Al Manar network, Secretary of the Expediency Council, Mohsen Rezaei, said that Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas are a red line for Iran. Furthermore, “No problem could possibly be created for them. They are the frontline of the Islamic world against Israel.” He related to US accusations that Iran intended to assassinate the Saudi ambassador and said that the US and Zionist regime are currently facing dead-ends created by both the Islamic Awakening and internal events, and they will do anything to escape. Therefore, they contrived a new plot against Iran, in order to save themselves and create tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He advised the Saudi government not to fall into the trap, which might have unforeseen results. “The best thing would be for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to join forces to find solutions for issues facing the Islamic world.” In response to a question about possible US or Zionist military action against Iran, Rezaei answered that any action taken against the national security of Iran would be met with a serious, decisive response. Our response to the US and Zionists will be severe, and they know very well what we will do to them.

Iran says invites UN nuclear agency to visit

Image via Wikipedia

The letter, Soltanieh said, renewed an Iranian invitation from October for a team of senior International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials to travel to the country.

“I have also had discussions with the officials of the agency and we are planning for the visit,” Soltanieh said.

Western diplomats tend to see such invitations as attempts by Iran, which is facing tightening sanctions, to buy time and ease international pressure.

Amano has made clear that any new visit to Tehran by senior IAEA officials must address its growing concerns about potential military aims of the nuclear programme, which Iran says is strictly peaceful.

Asked whether Iran would be willing to discuss such issues, Soltanieh said: “We are going to discuss any questions and to work towards removing the ambiguities and resolving the issue.”

A senior Western diplomat earlier said Iran’s offer of talks

included no promise that discussions would cover issues raised in the November 8 IAEA report, which suggested Iran had worked on developing the means to build a nuclear weapon.

“Apparently the Iranians have invited agency officials, but the offer is clearly just part of their amateurish charm offensive,” the diplomat said. There is “no commitment to talk substance … same old movie.”

Western countries seized on the IAEA report last month to ratchet up economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, one of the world’s largest oil producers.

US “Withdrawal” In Iraq Paves Way for US-Israeli Strike on Iran

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18 decembrie 2011 de mihaibeltechi

Global elite maneuver into position for final leg of Middle East campaign, one year into “Arab Spring,” one step closer to global hegemony.
by Tony Cartalucci

December 18, 2011 - Nearly every option described within the Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report in regards to US-initiated regime change in Iran has been carried out to the letter. From proposals to fund and arm terrorist organizations like the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), to fomenting foreign-backed “color revolutions” in the streets of Tehran, to carrying out covert US-Israeli military operations within Iran itself, it is clear that the Brookings Institution either was writing the playbook on conquering Iran or was reading from it when compiling “Which Path to Persia?” The only remaining options left are airstrikes and invasion.

The report extensively details using Israel as a US-proxy in attacking Iran in an attempt to cripple its nuclear program as well as destroy much of its security apparatus while maintaining “plausible deniability” for the attack’s US architects. It is also hoped that the airstrikes incur a sufficient Iranian retaliation (or at least the opportunity to stage a false flag operation in Iran’s name) to allow Israel and the United States to carry out a more extensive follow-up military operation against the Islamic Republic.

The primary hurdle described throughout the report’s examination of using a “unilateral” Israeli strike, however, was a US-occupied Iraq and the complications an Israeli airstrike would cause passing through the nation’s airspace on its way to bombing Iran. However with the US’ recentrushed “exit” from Iraq, this complication is no longer an issue.