Top Stories
WashPost: "Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are using more sophisticated weapons than in the past to target U.S. troops and military installations in Iraq, according to senior U.S. officials. James F. Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said Tuesday that fresh forensic testing on weapons used in the latest deadly attacks in the country bolsters assertions by U.S. officials that Iran is supporting Iraqi insurgents with new weapons and training. 'We're not talking about a smoking pistol. There is no doubt this is Iranian,' Jeffrey said in an interview. 'We're seeing more lethal weapons, more accurate weapons, more longer-range weapons,' Jeffrey added. 'And we're seeing more sophisticated mobile and other deployment options, and we're seeing better-trained people.' In some cases, insurgents made no effort to remove from the weapons identification numbers suggesting that they came from Iran, 'which in itself is troubling' Jeffrey said." http://t.uani.com/p57Ygq
Reuters: "Western intelligence circles believe the foreign military intervention in Libya has led to a secret alliance between Iran and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, the French newspaper Le Monde reported on Tuesday. The report said that last month, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei instructed the Al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to provide military assistance to Gaddafi. The instructions included the transfer of arms, including surface-to-ground and ground-to air missiles, as well as grenade launchers, to be used against Libyan opposition forces, the report said." http://t.uani.com/pU244r
Bloomberg: "The United Arab Emirates joined Saudi Arabia in offering a multibillion dollar economic assistance package to Egypt as it seeks to block the way for Iranian influence in post-Mubarak Egypt, analysts said. With Egypt's first elections since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak due in September, members of the interim government are touring the Persian Gulf to get support for their country's ailing economy. The benefit of aiding Egypt is twofold for nations including Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Kuwait: They can assert claims that Iran is meddlesome while benefiting from opportunities in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation." http://t.uani.com/nkt6Sq
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
The National: "Tightening global sanctions against Iran are threatening the UAE's links with one of its biggest export markets and risk choking its economic growth. 'This is a serious issue. Any negative impact [on trade] will have an impact on the economy of Dubai,' says Mohamed Lahouel, the chief economist of the Dubai Department of Economic Development. Traders say they are struggling to secure finance for even the most basic exports such as timber and foodstuffs that are not listed as sanctioned goods. Iran is the UAE's fourth-biggest trading partner, with US$10.4 billion (Dh38.19bn) of goods exchanged last year. It is the second-largest trading partner for Dubai, the UAE's base for non-oil exports... The Export Credit Insurance Company of the Emirates, the UAE's main export credit agency, does not offer credit to Iran." http://t.uani.com/pjvp6q
Foreign Affairs
AFP: "Bahrain has sentenced one of its citizens and two foreigners to 10 years in prison for spying for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Akhbar Al Khaleej newspaper reported on Wednesday. Bahrain's high criminal court sentenced 'three defendants to 10 years in prison for spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, one of them a Bahraini and two others' who worked as diplomats in Iran's embassy in Kuwait and were sentenced in absentia, the daily reported. The prosecution said the three 'spied from 2002 until April 2010 in the Kingdom of Bahrain and abroad,' and gave the Guards economic and military information, including the locations of military, industrial and economic installations, Akhbar Al Khaleej said." http://t.uani.com/q2ojKX
Reuters: "The United States on Tuesday dismissed an Iranian threat to try U.S. officials in absentia on human rights charges as a clumsy attempt to deflect international attention from Tehran's own rights record. Iranian lawmaker Esmail Kosari told Iranian newspapers on Monday that some 26 U.S. officials would be tried in absentia and their files passed on to international tribunals. He did not identify the officials, but it appeared likely they would include the same people listed on a parliamentary bill to be subjected to Iranian sanctions. They include former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and military commanders at U.S. detention centers Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said on Tuesday that Washington had seen the reports but saw them as nothing more than a diversion." http://t.uani.com/mXEmTt
Opinion & Analysis
Amb. Mark D. Wallace in LAT: "Why not Iran? Egypt and Tunisia have overthrown repressive regimes. Citizens in Syria, Yemen and other Middle East countries are demanding change. Yet in Iran, where a wave of 2009 demonstrations helped spark the movements we are now witnessing elsewhere in the Middle East, the populace is strangely silent. What accounts for the relative quiet in Iran? The answer, at least in part, is that one of the great human rights tragedies of the modern era is underway in Iran. From the moment the first protesters hit Tahrir Square in Cairo, Iran's leadership has cracked down hard, instituting a brutal campaign of terror against its own people. The most gruesome manifestation of this repression has been a wave of public executions. Since January, Iran has been on an execution binge. In February, the United Nations reported that the rate of executions in Iran had increased threefold in 2011 over the previous year. Amnesty International reported that Iran is the only country this year known to have executed juvenile offenders, a violation of international law. And though exact numbers are difficult to come by, it is now estimated by human rights organizations that more than 140 people have been executed in Iran so far this year, a rate that, if continued, would push the number far past the total for 2010. What is perhaps most disturbing, and provides clear evidence of Iran's effort to intimidate and terrorize its own population, is the growing number of executions in Iran taking place in public. Amnesty International estimates that as many as 13 people had been hanged in public by the end of April, compared to a total 14 in all of 2010. In a number of instances, those executed have been left hanging high in the air on construction cranes for all to see. As an Amnesty official noted in an April report: 'It is deeply disturbing that despite a moratorium on public executions ordered in 2008, the Iranian authorities are once again seeking to intimidate people by such spectacles, which not only dehumanize the victim but brutalize those who witness it.' Only a month later, Iran Human Rights, a leading human rights group on Iran, reported that the regime put 54 people to death in May, with 15 of the executions carried out publicly. The international community needs to call for an end to this kind of barbarism and highlight more broadly the deteriorating human rights situation in Iran. In response to Iran's brazen attempts to intimidate and terrorize its own people, United Against Nuclear Iran has launched a Cranes Campaign. The goal is to educate crane manufacturers worldwide about the Iranian regime's clear misuse of their products and how such use can tarnish their brand image." http://t.uani.com/oxBkzR
Eli Lake in WT: "The foundation of Iran's nuclear program can be traced to extensive Chinese and Russian cooperation in the 1990s, according to a former U.S. intelligence official who specialized on Tehran's program. 'Russian and Chinese cooperation in the 1990s with Iran created the foundation of the Iranian nuclear program today,' said Susan Voss, a former nuclear engineering analyst with Los Alamos National Laboratory who has worked closely with the U.S. intelligence community. Many analysts in recent years have focused on how Iran obtained the centrifuge technology used at the Natanz nuclear plant and declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2002. That design, known as a P1 centrifuge, came from the illicit smuggling network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. But much of Iran's program, including the design of its uranium hexaflouride facility and the reactor used in its Arak heavy water facility to produce plutonium, can be traced to cooperation in the 1990s with China and Russia. Ms. Voss said Chinese cooperation began in 1987 and continued for about 10 years. It provided Iran with a uranium mining capability by providing specialists as well as the design for its uranium hexaflouride plant. In the case of Russia, many of Iran's engineers were trained at Russian nuclear labs in the 1990s as well, she said. An element of Russian cooperation with Iran was disclosed first in 2009 by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) when the private group wrote a technical paper describing how the Iranian Arak facility contained an element of its structure that appeared to be a copy of the Soviet-era fuel rod system used in a heavy water reactor to make plutonium. 'ISIS put out a document where they pulled together everything that shows the Arak facility must have been built with Russian support,' Ms. Voss said. However, she also pointed out that officially the Russian government at the time denied providing that support to Iran, leading her to conclude that the cooperation was carried out covertly." http://t.uani.com/oqM1nR
Fredrik Dahl in Reuters: "Expanding uranium enrichment, a new atomic energy chief said to have military expertise, missile tests -- Western analysts see fresh signs that Iran may be seeking to develop the means to build nuclear warheads. Iran's determination to press ahead with a nuclear programme it says is for purely peaceful purposes suggests that tougher Western sanctions are so far failing to force the Islamic state to back down in the long-running dispute over its atomic aims. 'Although developments elsewhere in the Middle East have dominated media attention, Iran has been working hard in several ways to advance a nuclear weapons capability,' London-based proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick said. 'It needs fissile material, weaponisation expertise and a delivery vehicle. On each of these, it has been making progress,' Fitzpatrick, a director at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank, said. But even if Tehran decided to make such weapons it could still be years away from having nuclear-armed missiles, possibly giving diplomacy more opportunities to resolve a row which has the potential to spark a Middle East conflict. World powers failed to make any progress in two rounds of talks with Iran half a year ago and no new meetings have been announced, leaving the diplomatic track apparently deadlocked. 'While difficult, Western capitals need to redouble their diplomatic effort to dissuade Iran from taking the nuclear weapons path,' Daryl Kimball, director of the Washington-based research and advocacy group Arms Control Association, said. Kimball said Iran was closer to a capability to make atomic weapons but it 'apparently has not yet made a strategic decision to do so and is still years, not months, away from building a deliverable nuclear arsenal.' ... The decision to boost 20 percent uranium output was announced by Iran's new atomic energy chief, who has been subjected to U.N. sanctions because of what Western officials said was his involvement in suspected atomic weapons research. A nuclear scientist, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani was named head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation in February, after he was wounded in a 2010 bomb attack which Tehran blamed on Israel. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a U.S.-based think tank, said Abbasi-Davani's extensive scientific background was 'more suited to researching nuclear weapons' than building nuclear power reactors. 'Abbasi-Davani has regularly been linked to Iran's efforts to make the nuclear weapon itself,' ISIS said." http://t.uani.com/qkRs8z
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