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AFP: "Activists vowed on Monday to greet Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with angry protests when he visits New York for this week's United Nations General Assembly. United Against Nuclear Iran, an advocacy group, has demanded that managers of the upscale Warwick Hotel refuse to host Ahmadinejad and his delegation and have urged a boycott of the international hotel chain. 'Ahmadinejad is not welcome here. His visit to Manhattan is offensive given Iran's heinous track record and its alliance with Al-Qaeda,' UANI executive director David Ibsen said in a statement on Monday. The group also announced that it was launching a mobile billboard, to be driven by truck near the UN and the Warwick hotel for the next several days, that will contain an anti-Ahmadinejad message. The mobile billboard, which is similar to a stationary billboard that UANI has placed near Times Square, shows Ahmadinejad and says: 'As we remember 9/11 ten years later, Al-Qaeda's silent partner is coming to New York.'" http://t.uani.com/rgfean
AP: "The lawyer for two Americans jailed as spies in Iran was back in court Tuesday seeking a second judge's signature on a bail deal that could free them after more than two years behind bars. The official explanation for the latest snag was that a second judge whose signature is required on the bail papers was on vacation until Tuesday, their Iranian attorney has said. Masoud Shafiei told The Associated Press Tuesday he was back in court awaiting the judge's return. 'After what I was told two days ago, I went to the court again today, but the judge who should sign has not turned up yet,' Shafiei said... A delegation of U.S. Christian and Muslim leaders returned from Iran Monday disappointed they could not immediately secure the release of the two Americans still in custody. However, they were optimistic their release was imminent." http://t.uani.com/ou1j9u
AP: "A colleague of a nuclear scientist shot dead recently in Tehran is being investigated by Iranian security services who suspect him of leaking information leading to the killing, says an intelligence summary shared with The Associated Press. The report by an International Atomic Energy Agency member nation identifies the colleague as Mojtaba Dadashnejad. It says he worked with the victim, Darioush Rezaeinejad, on suspected Iranian attempts to make a component used in nuclear weapons. Rezaeinejad was shot in July. An official from a member nation of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said at the time the victim helped develop high-voltage switches, a key element in setting off the explosions needed to trigger a nuclear warhead. An abstract seen by the AP on such switches bears the names of both Rezaeinejad and his co-author, Dadashnejad." http://t.uani.com/nY2mVX
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Reuters: "Iran's nuclear energy chief accused British spies on Monday of shadowing him around the world -- even to the 'back door' of his university office -- to gather information ahead of a failed assassination attempt on him last year. Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, subject to U.N. sanctions because of what Western officials said was his involvement in suspected atomic arms research, also blamed Israel and the United States for attacks on him and other Iranian scientists. Western countries have previously dismissed allegations of this nature from the Islamic Republic, which they suspect of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability. The Foreign Office in London declined to comment on the allegations. Abbasi-Davani's comments on the sidelines of the annual member state gathering of the U.N. nuclear agency in Vienna underlined steadily deteriorating ties between Iran and the West in the row over Tehran's nuclear work." http://t.uani.com/qk5ZBM
ABC: "Harkening back to the days of the Soviet Union, some U.S. officials are reportedly considering establishing an emergency 'hotline' between the U.S. and Iran, but one senior defense official told ABC News those kinds of discussions are, at this point, premature. The Wall Street Journal reported today several U.S. officials were weighing the establishment of a direct line between the U.S. and Iranian militaries after a series of 'near-miss' encounters between the two in the Persian Gulf that could have potentially led to a broader conflict. 'There may or may not be advocates for establishing a naval hotline at some point,' the senior U.S. defense official told ABC News, 'but discussion of it is very premature. There are no proposals for opening up such a channel currently in front of either the Secretary of Defense or the President.'" http://t.uani.com/p811MY
Human Rights
NYT: "Judicial authorities in Iran have arrested six people, accusing them of working covertly for the British Broadcasting Corporation's Persian-language service and supplying it with content, including films, that depict the country in a negative way, the state-run press in Iran reported on Monday. The BBC denied that the six Iranian defendants - five men and a woman - were employees, describing them instead as independent filmmakers whose work had been screened abroad. The BBC said it had bought the broadcast rights to their work. 'No one works for the Persian service inside the country - either formally or informally,' the BBC said on its Web site. The arrests were reported a day after the BBC's Persian-language service, which is officially banned in Iran but is said to be highly popular, broadcast a documentary on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. The BBC said its signal was disrupted during the broadcast." http://t.uani.com/pEoAGA
AFP: "Iran on Tuesday publicly hanged a convicted murderer at a square in the capital Tehran, local media reported. The convict, Sajad Karimi, had confessed to shooting a doctor outside his practice in a populous eastern neighbourhood of Tehran a year ago. The doctor, a cardiologist and university lecturer, died shortly afterwards of his wounds. Karimi had said he planned the revenge attack on the cardiologist, who had been his mother's surgeon, following her death. 'I believed the doctor had made a mistake,' Karimi was quoted as saying by Fars news agency moments before going to the gallows. The hanging brings to 201 the number of executions reported in Iran so far this year, according to an AFP tally based on media and official reports." http://t.uani.com/r9wbgC
Domestic Politics
WashPost: "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement last week that he would pardon two jailed American hikers, only to be overruled the next day by his own judiciary, has caused him international embarrassment at a time when he is seeking better relations with the West. But Iranian political analysts say the episode is a carefully planned political move aimed at helping Ahmadinejad domestically by exposing his rivals in the Islamic republic's clerical establishment as stubborn and reactionary - while portraying him as reasonable. 'Ahmadinejad is trying to change the perception the middle classes have of him inside Iran,' said Amir Mohebbian, a political strategist who has good relations with Iran's leaders. 'He's telling them: I am not radical like the clerics. I am like you.' The controversy over the hikers was the dominant backdrop as Ahmadinejad headed to New York on Monday to participate in the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting at U.N. headquarters, where he is scheduled to speak Thursday." http://t.uani.com/qLN1Ki
AFP: "Tehran's forces will finish off armed Kurdish rebels who are based in Iraq in the 'coming days', a top commander said Monday, while the separatist group claimed it was now located in Iranian territory. Tehran has since July been carrying out a major offensive against the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), halting only during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, while the rebel group called for a truce two weeks ago. 'The scroll of the terrorist group PJAK will be rolled up in the coming days and full security shall be restored to the border areas,' Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, Iran's ground forces commander, told Vatan Emrouz newspaper. PJAK rebels 'are now in a weak position and their activities have been greatly reduced,' Pourdastan said, adding the group was no longer considered a 'threat.'" http://t.uani.com/qMUAw8
FT: "Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the Iranian president, is being drawn into a scandal over a $2.8bn bank fraud allegedly perpetrated by his political allies. The alleged fraud, described as the biggest in the country's history, is an embarrassment for Iran's populist president, who swept to power in 2005 on an anti-corruption platform. It comes against the backdrop of an intensifying power struggle between Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and his allies and conservatives supporting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. The president was implicated in a letter printed by Iranian news agencies last week, in a move widely seen as an attempt by Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's political opponents to weaken him and his allies ahead of parliamentary elections in March and a presidential poll in 2013." http://t.uani.com/nAD4PY
Foreign Affairs
Reuters: "Russia has agreed to develop an Iranian zinc deposit that is among the largest in the world in a deal involving an Iranian bank that faces international sanctions, the Russian business newspaper Kommersant reported on Tuesday. The agreement to develop the Mehdiabad zinc and lead deposit was reached at a trade meeting on Sept. 11 that brought Russia's Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko to Iran, Kommersant reported. Citing a source close to the talks, it said the project's cost was estimated at $1 billion-$1.2 billion. Shmatko's office did not immediately comment on the report. Kommersant said the deal, shepherded by powerful Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, calls for a joint venture linking state conglomerate Russian Technologies with Iran's Saderat Bank, which faces U.S. and U.N. sanctions." http://t.uani.com/psV2UT
Opinion & Analysis
WT Editorial Board: "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returns Thursday for his annual New York gala performance. The Iranian president is renowned for anti-Western antics at the opening session of the United Nations, but this time will be different. Concrete advances in Tehran's nuclear program over the past year move the threat level from theoretical to immediate. Absent tangible evidence of the will to check an overt menace within its midst, the world body purportedly devoted to peace faces its own existential danger: irrelevance. In an incongruent prelude to the annual feel-good confab this week, the chief of the U.N. nuclear agency admitted last week that he is 'increasingly concerned' that Iran is working on a nuclear warhead. In a report issued Sept. 12, Yukiya Amano said member states were providing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with 'extensive and comprehensive' information about a military application for the mullahs' atomic program. Details of the incriminating evidence are likely to be published in November. If other countries are beginning to funnel intelligence on Tehran's nuclear designs to the U.N., international bemusement with the Islamic theocracy has hardened into genuine fear that a nuclear-armed Iran could pose extreme danger to nations beyond its stated enemies of Israel and the United States... More ominously, Tehran has begun installing uranium-enrichment centrifuges in a hardened underground bunker beneath a military installation near the holy city of Qom, according to the IAEA. Such actions, taken in concert with Mr. Ahmadinejad's repeated threats against the nearby Jewish state, belies his claims that Iran's nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes only. In word and deed, all signals emanating from the Islamic republic point to a violent application for its newly achieved nuclear capability... Iran's history of dissembling about the true nature of its nuclear designs has made a mockery of the United Nations' founding charter 'to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace.' Unless the world body suddenly remembers its mission and acquires the fortitude to halt Tehran's aggression, the likelihood mounts for a Mideast conflagration." http://t.uani.com/qXXSZs
Karim Sadjadpour in WashPost: "The media circus generated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annual visit to the U.N. General Assembly in New York is a source of great frustration for many Iranians, who wish Western journalists would ask tougher questions about Ahmadinejad's domestic practices. The following questions are culled from Iranian democracy and human rights activists who don't have a chance to query the president directly: Your boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was selected by a few dozen clerics more than 20 years ago. Do you believe that he - as his office has asserted - is the prophet's representative on Earth? Khamenei hasn't left Iran since 1989. Nearly half of Iran's population was born after 1989. Do you think this provides him with a good understanding of the modern world in which they live? One of your key clerical backers, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, proclaimed after your contested reelection in 2009 that obeying you was akin to obeying God. More recently he has asserted that you are under the influence of Satan. What explains Mesbah Yazdi's, or God's, fickleness? There is evidence that your chief adviser, Rahim Mashai, helped secure loans for the leading suspect in a $2.6 billion bank fraud case, the largest embezzlement scandal in Iranian history. You came to office vowing to 'cut off the hands' of the corrupt; how will you deal with Mashai? Your opponents in 2009, Mir Hossein Mousavi, 69, and Mehdi Karroubi, 73, have been held incommunicado for nearly a year. On what basis are they confined? If they have no influence, as you have said, why are they under house arrest? Somayeh Tohidlou, a 32-year-old female sociology PhD student, recently received 50 lashes in prison for having 'insulted' you by campaigning for Mousavi in 2009. Do you believe that men lashing women for their political views is an appropriate form of punishment?" http://t.uani.com/qUYgfG
Dorian Jones in Radio Farda: "Surveying the scale of an embezzlement scandal that has rocked Iran, the head of the country's judicial investigation unit called it 'the most unprecedented financial corruption case in the history of Iran.' But with $2.6 billion believed to have been defrauded from several Iranian banks, says Iran watcher Jamshid Assadi of France's Burgundy School of Business, investigative head Mostafa Pour Mohammadi is being modest in his claims. 'This scandal has been really exceptional,' says Assadi. 'You cannot find any similar -- proportionally, if you consider GDP -- financial scandal, banking scandal in any country.' The alleged fraud, which is thought to date back to 2007, involved a series of banks loans including from one of Iran's top financial institutions, Bank Saderat. Those loans, in turn, were used to purchase privatized companies which were then used as collateral for further larger loans. Despite the magnitude of the claimed fraud, Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar of MEEPAS, an Israel-based think tank, says what is more remarkable is the fact that the scandal ever came to light. 'This is the first time this kind of news is being made public in Iran,' says Javedanfar. 'Because I don't think this is the first time there has been fraud in Iran. I think it is possible that fraud bigger than this has been carried out before and we did not know about it because the government wanted to keep it quiet. But I think the reason now we are hearing about this kind of fraud is because political score-settling between different factions in Iran.' The revelations of the scandal are seen as an oblique attack on President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, carried out through his key allies. The Iranian state media on September 12 reported that the assets of Iranian billionaire tycoon Amir-Mansour Aria have been frozen as part of the investigation into the fraud. Aria is reported to have close links with Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, Ahmadinejad's chief of staff. Mashaei has been a target of the ruling clerics, with the hard-line 'Kayhan' newspaper describing him as a 'deviant current' of Ahmadinejad allies. Dozens of Ahmadinejad supporters have been arrested in the past few months. The timing of the fraud revelation is also crucial to understanding the motivations behind the investigation, according to Assadi... The problem of corruption has dramatically worsened since Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, according to the international anticorruption watchdog Transparency International. In its annual index on corruption, Iran has fallen 58 places since 2005, to 146 out of 180 countries." http://t.uani.com/rmjrZF
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