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Top Stories
Fox News: "Washington diplomats and American nuclear experts suspect Iran's illicit quest for a nuclear weapon, still suffering from a cyberattack of unknown origins last year, has hit a new set of production and engineering troubles. At Iran's main nuclear facility in Natanz, home to cascading centrifuges required to make the enriched uranium needed for nuclear weapons, output has slowed dramatically, according to two new reports from the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS. For the first time, Iran's centrifuges have seen their average output decrease. David Albright, former United Nations weapons inspector at ISIS, said it's a sign that not only was Iran hurt by the computer virus known as Stuxnet, but that aggressive United Nations sanctions to block the flow of vital weapons-making material into Iran are starting to have a real impact." http://t.uani.com/n5RQgG
AFP: "The United States seized Tuesday on a UN report detailing fresh rights abuses in Iran to call for increased global condemnation of Tehran and to continue to demand change in the country. 'Officials continue to stifle all forms of dissent, persecute religious and ethnic minorities, harass and intimidate human rights defenders and engage in the torture of detainees,' said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. The new UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, said in a report due to be presented to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that the authoritarian regime had secretly executed hundreds of prisoners, among a raft of other abuses. Washington 'stands by the Iranian people who wish nothing more than to make their voices heard and hold their government accountable for its actions,' Toner said." http://t.uani.com/rl0SOL
Reuters: "Tackling Iran's nuclear program will become more urgent over the next year and the world must not be distracted from it by the focus on the Arab Spring popular uprisings, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday. Hague said U.S. allegations of an Iranian-linked plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington were separate from the dispute over Western suspicions Iran is covertly trying to develop atom bombs and would not stop efforts to resolve it. But he said Britain would seek to 'step up the pressure' on the Islamic Republic, which already faces extensive sanctions, if it did not change its nuclear policy... This was because Iran had stepped up its nuclear work by increasing the fissile content of its enriched uranium to the 20 percent level and moving centrifuge machines to a previously secret underground bunker near Qom, he said." http://t.uani.com/ouQVAw
Terror Plot
NYT: "Iran injected a new twist on Tuesday into the week-old American accusation of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, asserting that one of the defendants really belongs to an outlawed and exiled opposition group. The defendant, Gholam Shakuri, identified by the Justice Department as an operative of the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, is actually a 'key member' of the Mujahedeen Khalq, Iran's Mehr News Agency reported. The agency did not explain the group's possible motive but left the implication that the plot was a bogus scheme meant to frame and ostracize Iran... The opposition group itself dismissed the Mehr report as nonsense. Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman, said in an e-mailed response that 'this is a well-known tactic that has been used by the mullahs in the past 30 years where they blame their crimes on their opposition for double gains.'" http://t.uani.com/r18DwD
Reuters: "The government has frozen the assets of five men, including two central suspects in an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in the United States, matching sanctions taken by U.S. authorities. Foreign Secretary William Hague told Reuters that Britain was discussing action with its European Union partners and expected other nations to follow suit with sanctions. The five people targeted included Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised U.S. citizen, who was arrested in September over the plot which Iran has dismissed as a fabricated 'comedy show.'" http://t.uani.com/oo7Shg Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Bloomberg: "Former New York Representative and current congressional candidate Dan Maffei said he's giving $3,500 in political donations from Koch Industries Inc. to charity because the company profited from business in Iran. 'I not only will never take another cent from them, but I am giving their past donations away to charity,' said Maffei, a Democrat, in a statement e-mailed by his campaign. He said he would donate the funds received from Koch's political action committee to the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund, which helps children of the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks... Koch's general counsel, Mark Holden, said in an Oct. 14 statement that the company stopped all sales to Iran voluntarily several years ago and that Democrats 'are singling out Koch for political purposes.'" http://t.uani.com/niyIWO
Human Rights
AFP: "UN Human Rights Committee experts on Tuesday criticised Iran's failure to provide sufficient details on the use of the death penalty as well as policies surrounding issues like gay rights. French expert Christine Chanet noted that Iranian responses have been "partial and vague," and that the Iranian delegation failed to provide an exhaustive list of capital punishment carried out. She also slammed Tehran for failing to answer questions on the treatment accorded to homosexuals. 'I observe that the country is very embarrassed by this question. All this has been covered up in silence,' she said." http://t.uani.com/pHYI53
Domestic Politics
AP: "In the ongoing political skirmishes among Iran's leadership, it was the equivalent of bringing out the heavy ammunition: The country's most powerful figure warning that the post of elected president could someday be scrapped. Although no overhauls appear on the immediate horizon after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's comment - he spoke only vaguely about possibilities in the "distant future" - the mere mention of eliminating Iran's highest elected office shows the severity and scope of the power struggle between Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For months, the ruling theocracy has been piling pressure on Ahmadinejad and arresting his allies for attempts to challenge the near-absolute authority of the cleric-ruled system that has controlled Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The blunt words by Khamenei on Sunday suggest a twofold agenda: Further tightening the lid on Ahmadinejad and showing others in the wings that Iran's rulers are ready to take drastic measures to protect what's theirs." http://t.uani.com/qlKDl4
Opinion & Analysis
Roya Hakakian in WSJ: "On the night of Sept. 17, 1992, at 10:45, two darkly clad men burst in on a private dinner at a Berlin restaurant and stood over a table around which eight of Iran's leading opposition figures were seated. The taller of the two intruders shouted: "You sons of whores!" Then he thrust his gloved hand into the sports bag that hung on his shoulder. In the dimly lit air, sparks of fire flashed at the intruder's hip. Bullets, piercing the side of the bag, riddled the guests. After two rounds-26 bullets in all-the machine-gun barrage finally stopped. The eldest of the eight guests at the table, Sadegh Sharafkandi, Iran's most prominent Kurdish leader, was still in his chair, head slumped, blood tinting his white shirt. Another guest sat doubled over, breathing noisily, gasping for air, his face smashed into a mug of beer. The rest were strewn on the floor. Of the eight guests, four died that night at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant. The lead shooter, an Iranian named Abdulrahman Bani-Hashemi, also known as Sharif, flew to Turkey that night, got on a bus the next day and crossed the border into Iran. Two years earlier, he had attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Sweden. The Swedish authorities detained, then released, him. Three years before, he had assassinated an Iranian exile, a former pilot named Morad Talebi, in Switzerland. Nearly two weeks after the Mykonos restaurant murders, German authorities arrested several men in connection with the attack. Only one of them was Iranian. The rest belonged to a ring of small-time Lebanese crooks with histories of petty theft, forgery and other such violations... On April 10, 1997, a trial that had placed 176 witnesses on the stand in 246 sessions and cost $3 million finally ended. Chief Judge Fritjhof Kubsch pointed to Iran's ruling leadership as the architects of the crime: 'The orders for the crime that took place on September 17th, 1992 in Berlin came from Iran's Supreme Leader, president, foreign and intelligence ministers, and the chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards who make up the Committee for Special Operations.' The judgment caused every European Union member nation to withdraw its ambassador and cut off diplomatic ties with Iran for almost six months-an unprecedented international response. Many have said in the last few days that the recently disclosed bomb plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant could not have been ordered by Iran's regime-or, if so, only by rogue elements within it-because parts were planned incompetently, using non-Iranians. The staggering parallels between this and the Mykonos hit suggest otherwise." http://t.uani.com/mYRrkC
Jamsheed Choksy & Carol Choksy in The American Interest: "'It is not just a dangerous escalation. This is part of a pattern of dangerous and reckless behavior by the Iranian government', said President Barack Obama recently. Visibly angry and frustrated, Obama pledged that his Administration would take steps to ensure that Iran 'pays a price.' Secretary of State Hillary Clinton branded the most recent Iranian criminal scheme a 'threat to international peace and security.' White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters: 'We consider an effort to assassinate a diplomat in the United States to be a flagrant violation of international law. We are committed to holding the Iranians accountable.' Several Congressmen characterized the development as "an act of war" by Iran upon the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia. As is now widely known around the globe, on October 11, 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice charged an Iranian-American dual citizen named Manssor (also Mansour) Arbabsiar with planning to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to Washington. The plot apparently also included blowing up Saudi and Israeli embassies there and elsewhere. Some foreign affairs analysts and Middle East experts expressed skepticism about the plot's details-such as the purported hiring of a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the hit. However, the President of the United States, who is privy to classified intelligence that may never be made public, as well as to legal evidence that will come forth at trial, accused the Iranian government of masterminding a terror attempt on American soil. The latest allegation against the Islamic Republic of Iran can serve as a valuable measure of when and how the United States and its international partner countries should take action against Iran. Due to opacity of the Iranian regime's inner workings, we may never know how high up the political and military chains of command approval for this plot went. So balancing American reactions against Iranian threats, especially ones that have been forestalled, may be the best course of action. After all, the reactions by Americans and others are not merely about the assassination plot; they come from years of pent-up frustrations, primarily over Iran's intransigence on nuclear issues and transnational terrorism. The United States should have dealt with both sets of transgressions at their inceptions. Not having done so, the United States is now faced with exponentially graver problems that elude simple solutions." http://t.uani.com/nQhql4 |
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