Top Stories
Daily Telegraph: "Iran has begun secret negotiations on proposals to surrender a substantial part of its uranium stockpile and suspend enriching nuclear fuel in return for an end to sanctions that have crippled the country's economy. The Turkish-led deal calls on Iran to ship about 1,000 kilograms of its low-enriched uranium, as well as its entire 30 kilogram stockpile of 20-per cent enriched uranium, to a safe location. In return, France and Russia will supply ready-made fuel rods for the medical isotope reactor for which Iran says it has been enriching uranium to 20 per cent - a level which halves the time needed to manufacture weapons-grade material. 'We think the deal is doable,' an official involved in the negotiations said, 'but there's still a lot of detail to be worked through.' Turkish and Iranian negotiators, diplomatic sources say, have met several times to discuss the contours of the deal, which they hope to bring to the table next month at a meeting with an international consortium called the P5+1 - the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany." http://bit.ly/gRkhWQ
Reuters: "Egypt's spy chief told U.S. officials last year Iran was trying to recruit Bedouin in the Sinai Peninsula to help smuggle arms into the blockaded Gaza Strip, a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable said. U.S. ally Egypt was frightened by the spread of Iranian influence in the Middle East and the possibility Iran could obtain nuclear weapons, the April 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks said. In April, Egypt convicted 26 men it said were linked to Lebanon's Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, accusing them of planning attacks in Egypt. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the verdicts 'political and unjust.' Iran says its backing for Hezbollah is political. '(Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman) has expressed concern over Hezbollah's first attempt to stand up a cell within Egypt, and noted to us that Iran was also trying to recruit support from the Sinai Bedouins, he claimed, in order to facilitate arms smuggling to Gaza,' the cable said." http://bit.ly/gRuhNk
Daily Telegraph: "Iran is threatening to ban airlines from landing in the country unless they acknowledge the stretch of water that separates it from its neighbours is called the Persian Gulf. This is likely to be met with fierce resistance by the other countries which surround it, all of which are Arab and for which it is the Arabian Gulf. It may also pose problems for other countries who have no vested interest in what it is called - and as a result have given no thought to how it is described in on-board maps and diagrams. The conventional compromise for those not involved - just calling it 'The Gulf' - may no longer be enough to avoid offence. The battle over the name has escalated since the countries of the Islamic world, often in dispute with each other as much as with non-Islamic countries, decided to hold a friendly mini-Olympics this coming April. The 'Islamic Solidarity Games' were cancelled after the Iranian hosts used the term 'Persian Gulf' on the medals and, when the Arab states objected, refused to back down." http://bit.ly/ezIcmO
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
AFP: "Gambia rejected Thursday claims that it was the intended recipient of a cargo of weapons from Iran that was intercepted in Nigeria, and accused neighbour Senegal of a campaign of 'hatred' over the case. Nigeria last month reported to the UN Security Council its find of 13 containers of weapons, including rockets and grenades, shipped from Iran. The incident is a possible violation of international sanctions against Tehran. Senegal has alleged the weapons were destined for Gambia, which the Gambian government strongly denied in a statement broadcast on television that accused Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade of being behind the claims." http://bit.ly/ebQ4b7
Reuters: "Three people were charged on Thursday with conspiring to defraud the United States and launder money in a scheme that prosecutors said sent $1.8 million to Iran. Married couple Hossein Lahiji, 47 of McAllen, Texas and Najmeh Vahid, 35 of San Antonio Texas, along with Ahmad Iranshahi, 53, of Tehran, Iran were charged in the two count indictment, according to an announcement. 'These defendants are charged with going to extraordinary lengths to conceal the transfer of large sums of money in violation of the trade restrictions with Iran that have been in place for well over a decade,' Dwight Holton, U.S. Attorney in Portland said in a statement... The indictment alleges that the defendants transferred $1.8 million in supposed donations to a Portland charity called The Child Foundation from 1995 to at least 2008. The funds were then invested in Iran in violation of the embargo of Iran." http://reut.rs/dV9XHv
Commerce
WSJ: "South Korea's DK Tech Corp. (105740.KQ) has signed a small deal for projects in a giant Iranian natural gas field, the oil and gas equipment maker said in a corporate filing Thursday, as Asian suppliers replace U.S. and European companies amid mounting sanctions. In a disclosure to the Korean stock exchange, DK Tech said it had signed a contract worth EUR598,000 to supply phases 17 and 18 of the South Pars field until July 15, 2011. The operators of the world's largest non-associated gas field, which Iran shares with Qatar, have struggled to source technologies after Western companies stopped supplies to comply with sanctions over the country's nuclear program. DK didn't disclose what equipment it would sell to Iran but it normally sells valves and tube fittings for the oil and gas sector, among other industries." http://on.wsj.com/eeSyDD
JPost: "The Austrian Chamber of Commerce's decision early this month to hold a workshop in Vienna to expand trade with Iran has sparked criticism from Austria's Jewish community and the European NGO Réalité EU. 'The Chamber of Commerce is advising firms on how to circumvent the sanctions against Iran,' the Jewish community said on its website. 'Michael Tockuss, of the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, the most important lobbyist of the Holocaust- denying regime in Teheran,' was invited, the Jewish community said. Austria has contributed to 'the diligent construction of commemorative plaques and memorials since the Shoah,' but the Chamber of Commerce does not shy away from trade with Iran, the 7,500-member Jewish community said." http://bit.ly/h3VMmm
Human Rights
AP: "An opposition website says Iranian authorities have released family members of an imprisoned documentary filmmaker after briefly detaining them. The kaleme.com website said late Thursday the wife, son, two daughters, parents and brothers of filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad were freed hours after they taken into custody. They were picked up after inquiring about Nourizad's reportedly failing health. The website said Nourizad's wife was taken to the hospital because she felt sick immediately after being detained. Nourizad is serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for spreading propaganda against the government and insulting the country's leaders." http://wapo.st/ecQKmc
Domestic Politics
AP: "Iranian security forces have arrested nine suspects in connection with a double bombing near a mosque in the country's southeast this week that killed 39 people, state television said Thursday. The armed Sunni militant group Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, has claimed responsibility for Wednesday's bombing outside the Imam Hussein Mosque in the port city of Chahbahar near the Pakistan border. The group, which has carried out attacks on military and civilians in southeastern Iran in the past, said the bombing was an act of revenge for the June execution of its leader, Abdulmalik Rigi." http://wapo.st/eWRkmL
Opinion & Analysis
Scott Peterson in CSM: "Iranians today marked the most powerful event on the Shiite religious calendar, Ashura, which has come to symbolize resistance against tyranny and oppression... Yet for the opposition, this day also marks one year since they last showed any significant presence on the streets - a final moment when the hope of millions of Iranians for democratic reform was plainly visible. Now forced underground and facing severe restrictions, where is the Green Movement today? 'The opposition that exists now has turned into an ideology,' says one young Iranian professional, who last year witnessed security forces shooting and killing demonstrators, and asked not to be named. 'It will be less expressive but more dangerous [for the regime]. It will breed in people's homes; children will be fed with this resentment.' In the last year the Green Movement has 'had time to think about things,' says the young man from Tehran, contacted outside Iran. 'This means if they were against the regime with their heart because they had seen the election being stolen and people being killed, now they believe it with their head.' Ashura last year marked a watershed for the regime, which saw its annual commemoration of Imam Hussein's 'resistance' hijacked by an opposition certain that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been reelected by fraud." http://bit.ly/i85scN
Mehdi Khalaji in The Syndicate: "Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never been happy about the status of the Iranian presidency - neither during his own tenure, from 1981-1989, nor during the terms of his three successors. Tension between the president and the Supreme Leader is built into the Islamic Republic's core. The Supreme Leader has absolute authority and can veto decisions made by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. At the same time, the president emerges from an electoral process with an agenda and ambitions of his own. During a president's second term - which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now begun - the tensions inevitably emerge into public view. Khamenei has never been willing to tolerate a president with a large independent power base. In the past, he clipped the wings of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had strong ties to the merchant class, and of Mohammad Khatami, a reformer whose support came from Westernized middle-class professionals. Though Ahmadinejad received the Supreme Leader's support in the face of large-scale protests against his re-election last year, Khamenei does not appear hesitant about limiting the president's power. In fact, it appears that the massive demonstrations against Ahmadinejad delayed their confrontation, since both the Supreme Leader and the president rallied publicly to defend the legitimacy of the election. But Ahmadinejad's radical Islamist views and his support among religious, lower middle-class Iranians have not protected him from Khamenei." http://bit.ly/fqyMh9
Benjamin Weinthal in The Weekly Standard: "Germany's journalists, human rights activists, and taxpayers are paying a painful price for its country's woefully flawed 'critical dialogue' policy with the Iranian regime. Last month, Iran's rulers paraded two German journalists, Marcus Hellwig and Jens Koch of the Bild newspaper, on an Iranian state-controlled television station, claiming that the two journalists admitted to being hoodwinked into travelling to Iran by Mina Ahadi, a German-Iranian human rights activist. Ahadi, who lives in exile in Germany, is leading an international campaign against stoning in the Islamic Republic. She is deeply aware of the critical situation of the two journalists, saying, 'They have been in prison for a month...no contact with their family, no phone contact, only once have German diplomats visited these journalists. They are under pressure.' Both journalists were arrested in Iran in mid-October for merely interviewing family members of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a woman who was sentenced death by stoning for alleged adultery. This is only the latest chapter in the Iranian regime's history of doing what it can to crush dissent domestically and at the same time force Western European countries to recoil from their human rights criticisms of Iran's ruthless behavior. So what's Germany trying to achieve by engaging in its 26-year-old policy of 'critical dialogue' with the mullahs? Well, the running joke about Germany's former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who commenced the policy with Iran in 1984, was the real purpose of German-Iranian cooperation was to engage in 'critical dialogue' about U.S. foreign policy." http://bit.ly/i0sOAH
Jonathan Kay in The National Post: "When the case is made for bombing Iran's nuclear sites, a word that often comes up is 'Osirak' - the name of the Iraqi reactor successfully attacked by Israeli F-16s in 1981. If a pre-emptive bombing run worked 30 years ago, the reasoning goes, it will work today. But many analysts draw the opposite conclusion from Osirak - including Iran expert Ken Pollack, who spoke on the subject at last week's Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) forum in Washington D.C. 'The Osirak strike did not turn off the Iraqi nuclear program,' he told the audience. 'Instead, it caused Saddam to redouble his efforts. He went from a small, actually quite backwards program that most estimated would take about 10 to 15 years to create a weapon, to a much more aggressive, much more extensive, much better concealed program, going from a single track to six different tracks across the country - at least three of which, the IAEA concluded afterward, could produce a bomb. What prevented the Iraqis from acquiring that capability wasn't Osirak. It was Desert Storm.' This was a sobering insight, and it came at an interesting time in the FDD conference. Many of the previous speakers - including Uzi Rubin, whose presentation on Iran's apparent quest for a nuclear ICBM I described in Thursday's National Post - had gone into great detail about the massive threat that Tehran's theocracy poses to the world. And the audience was primed for the follow-up panelists to make a vigorous case for a pre-emptive military strike. But the views I heard were more cautious. Pollack, in particular, made a strong case for the proposition that bombing Iran would only make the Iranian threat more intractable." http://bit.ly/h9P1HL |
Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.
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