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Reuters: "Iran could have nearly $5 billion of cash trapped in South Korea by the end of the year as sanctions stop it repatriating money from oil sales, Korean government sources with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters on Wednesday. Sanctions do not penalize non-U.S. refiners from buying Iranian crude, but they make it hard for foreign banks to pay the Islamic Republic the hard currency that makes up around 50 percent of government revenue. Just this week, Indian refiners began paying around $5 billion of oil debts after struggling for seven months to find a way to get money to Tehran. Washington wants to isolate Tehran over its nuclear program, which it believes Iran is using to develop weapons. Tehran says it needs nuclear power. South Korea is one of Iran's top crude buyers, importing around 230,000 barrels per day on average, based on total imports in the first half of the year. Its refiners are paying Iran for oil into bank accounts in South Korea. The trapped cash pile has already reached up to 4 trillion won ($3.82 billion), according to one of the sources, who could not be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. That could reach 5 trillion won ($4.76 billion) by the end of the year, the source added." http://t.uani.com/qjzVWu
Reuters: "Iran's parliament approved President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's candidate as oil minister on Wednesday, putting a military commander who is under international sanctions in charge of production in the world's fifth biggest crude exporter. A huge majority -- 216 of the 246 lawmakers present -- voted in favour of Rostam Qasemi, a Revolutionary Guards commander, a rare victory for Ahmadinejad who has been severely criticised by parliament in recent months. Qasemi takes control of the oil ministry as Iran holds the rotating presidency of OPEC where it has strongly resisted calls by more Western-friendly producers to increase output quotas. His most important task will be to stem declining output from Iran's mature oil fields and develop vast gas resources where sanctions have restricted foreign investment. As head of Khatam al-Anbia, the Guards' engineering and construction company -- a position he now relinquishes -- Qasemi drew the attention of Western countries that believe the Revolutionary Guards and affiliates are involved in efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran denies having any such goal." http://t.uani.com/p2OFSP
Reuters: "India and Iran's mechanism to end a seven-month-old stalemate over oil payments could keep U.S. pressure at bay long enough for the two countries to work out a long-term separation that would change oil routes through Asia and the Middle East. Refiners, which have been importing oil from Iran without paying since India's central bank scrapped a clearing mechanism in December 2010, have started to clear over $5 billion of debts for 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) through Turkey's Halkbank. But analysts are sceptical over the durability of the new system in the face of a slew of global sanctions on Iran and Washington's continuing drive to isolate Tehran over its nuclear programme. 'The durability depends on to what extent the U.S. government can be open on its support for a mechanism,' said Samuel Ciszuk, senior Middle East & North Africa Energy analyst at IHS Energy... Indian refiners had already started making arrangements in July and August to replace lost barrels from Iran with supplies from its Middle East neighbours and further afield such as South America, and there are signs these efforts will continue. U.S. ally and Iranian rival Saudi Arabia has sold three million barrels of extra crude to India for August after 2.7 million barrels sent in July." http://t.uani.com/nqRC7J
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
UPI: "Beijing was offered an engineering and equipment procurement contract for the natural gas pipeline planned from Iran to Pakistan, a source said. Pakistan and Iran are moving closer to finalizing plans for a natural gas pipeline from the South Pars gas complex in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians say their half of the pipeline is has been completed. A Pakistani delegation led by Federal Water and Power Minister Naveed Qamar 'sought investment and offered the engineering and equipment procurement contract for the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline to China,' sources close to the delegation told Pakistani newspaper The Nation." http://t.uani.com/rdfiu2
Human Rights
Guardian: "Nobel-prize winning scientists have thrown their support behind an international campaign calling for the release of a pioneering Aids doctor imprisoned in Iran. Brothers Arash and Kamiar Alaei, whose work on HIV treatment and prevention programmes earned international recognition, were arrested in June 2008 for allegedly trying to overthrow the Islamic regime. Kamiar Alaei, 37, a Harvard University alumnus, was released in October after serving a three-year prison term but his brother Arash, 42, remains in Tehran's Evin prison to complete his six-year sentence. The brothers fell foul of the Iranian authorities because they participated in several international HIV treatment programmes and conferences held in the US. 'We were never involved in politics. We were simply doctors trying to serve our people good, our arrests came as a surprise,' Kamiar Alaei told the Guardian by phone from the US." http://t.uani.com/p79cdE
Opinion & Analysis
Azadeh Moaveni in TIME: "The embarrassment just doesn't stop for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's beleaguered President. Even before this past weekend, when a third Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered in as many years, gunned down in front of his house in what critics are calling a major security failure, the President's prospects were dimming rapidly. Weakened by a number of bizarre scandals - including allegations that aides used sorcery and invoked jinn on his behalf - humiliated by the arrest of several advisers and isolated from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose favor once clinched his political future, Ahmadinejad now limps toward the end of his second term, his prospects uncertain. There seems little hope that the President can save himself even with his signature brand of politics, a messianic, nativist-tinged populism that the clerical regime once found handy but has come to consider toxic. In the West - which cares most of all about Iran's behavior on the nuclear front - Ahmadinejad's reversal of fortune is being regarded by some with schadenfreude for a leader so troublesome. It is also, however, being viewed with concern by others who feel that he is the best hope for a nuclear deal. In reality, the chastening of Ahmadinejad makes virtually no difference to Iran's nuclear stance. Ahmadinejad has used the nuclear issue to stoke nationalist sentiment and increase his popularity at home and in the Muslim world, but in reality the matter has always been in steadier hands. Khamenei has ultimate control over both Iran's long-term nuclear goals and the incremental agreements it feigns interest in at the negotiating table. If that hasn't always seemed clear from the outside, it's because Iranian domestic politics are often confusing. For years after taking office in 2005, Ahmadinejad turned 'Nuclear power is our absolute right' into the slogan of his presidency, defiantly announcing controversial strides in the country's nuclear program at every turn. Then, in 2009, Saeed Jalili, an Ahmadinejad confidante, brokered a breakthrough agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to transfer Iran's low-enriched uranium to a third country, prompting some in the West to conclude that Iran was keen to make a larger concession to downsize its uranium stockpile. Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, the President's controversial chief of staff, encouraged this speculation with a series of public gestures out of character for the sidekick of an Islamic fundamentalist. He said Iranians were friends to Israelis, spoke of an 'Islam without the clerics' and fawned publicly over the country's pre-Islamic past, an era usually derided or denied outright by the clergy." http://t.uani.com/rprdEm
Wesley Martin in the NYPost: "Some 3,400 innocent Iranian dissidents now living in a camp in Iraq are in imminent danger of being slaughtered. These men, women and children -- members of Mujahedin-e Khalq, or People's Mujahedin, a longtime Iranian opposition movement -- trusted America's promise to protect them. But the gradual US withdrawal from Iraq leaves that promise in doubt. As a former base commander of Camp Ashraf, the official name of the MEK's besieged refuge, I'd like to make one thing clear: Despite charges that the MEK is a terrorist organization, these people are American allies. It would be foolish, as well as wrong, to abandon them. As America pulls back, Iranian influence is on the rise in Iraq -- notably in Diyala Province, where Camp Ashraf is located. As Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Iran's President Mahomoud Ahmadinejad grow closer, the MEK's situation becomes more critical... Sadly, the State Department even now continues to list the MEK as a terrorist group -- a listing made 14 years ago to placate the rulers in Tehran in yet another failed diplomatic outreach. (A court has now ordered State to review the listing.) As the former antiterrorism/force protection officer for all of Iraq, I know the 'factual' basis for the listing is false. For example, Hoshyar Zebari, now Iraq's foreign minister and the longtime head of international relations for the Kurdistan Democrat Party International Relations, has repeatedly confirmed that the MEK did not attack the Kurds in the 1990s. Yet State still cites such supposed attacks in its annual report on terrorism. And just last month, State's point man on Ashraf, Ambassador Lawrence Butler, repeated the canard again in a New York Times interview. The real benefactors of the fall of the MEK will be Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime -- which has long sought custody of these refugees in order to eliminate them as enemies of the state. The MEK surrendered to the US military without firing a shot, turned over all its weapons, accepted consolidation at Camp Ashraf, formally renounced terrorism, accepted protected-person status under the Fourth Geneva Convention and provided the Free world with crucial intelligence, including vital data on Iran's development of a nuclear weapons program. They met every requirement we placed on them... The MEK has fulfilled its end of commitments. The United States has come up very short, and the residents of Camp Ashraf are paying the price. It is long past time for us to make things right. For starters, that means removing the MEK from the US terrorist list and moving Ashraf residents to third countries where their safety can be guaranteed." http://t.uani.com/omfI4y
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