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CBS: "The U.S. Secretary of Defense said Monday night that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. In an interview, Leon Panetta, said despite the efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less. Secretary Panetta spoke with us at the end of an overseas trip during which he reviewed strategy in Afghanistan and formally ended the war in Iraq. CBS News anchor Scott Pelley caught up with Secretary Panetta on his tour last week of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. On the way home, he boarded the jet nicknamed 'The Doomsday Plane.' This is the command post where he and the president would direct a nuclear war. In an interview for '60 Minutes,' we sat down in the compartment where he would execute the commander-in-chief's orders. Panetta told CBS News that Iran needs only one year to build a nuclear weapon." http://t.uani.com/s4hYuO
NYT: "Iran's veneer of stoicism toward the Western sanctions that have disrupted its economy showed some new strains on Monday, as the deputy oil minister acknowledged a decline in domestic petroleum production because of dwindling foreign investment, and four-year-old talks between the Iranians and Poland's biggest natural gas developer collapsed. The Iranians also suffered an embarrassment after prematurely announcing that a Russian oil company had committed $1 billion to help revive a dormant oil field in Iran's southwest. Hours later, the Russian company, Tatneft, denied on its Web site that a deal had been signed. And there were signals that Saudi Arabia, which Iran had confidently predicted last week would not increase oil production to compensate for any Iranian shortfall caused by the sanctions, was becoming increasingly irritated with Iran. Together, the developments portrayed Iran, with the world's fourth-largest oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves, as struggling more than it had admitted from the effects of the Western sanctions, despite its official denunciations of them as desperate measures doomed to fail or backfire." http://t.uani.com/rMR0do
BBC: "The US has asked Iran to free 'without delay' a US man of Iranian descent described by Tehran as a CIA spy. Amir Mirzai Hekmati confessed he had been sent to infiltrate Iranian intelligence services on state TV. A spokeswoman for the State Department told the BBC the US had requested access to Mr Hekmati through the embassy of Switzerland, which serves as an intermediary between the countries. His family denied their son was involved in espionage. 'My son is no spy. He is innocent. He's a good fellow, a good citizen, a good man,' Ali Hekmat told ABC News. 'These are all unfounded allegations and a bunch of lies.' A state department spokeswoman told the BBC: 'The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent foreigners for political reasons.'" http://t.uani.com/v9JpBA
Nuclear Program & Sanctions AFP: "The United States and Japan put on a united front after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il's death but the allies showed differences elsewhere with the Asian economic giant refusing to stop oil imports from Iran... But the two sides differed on Iran. The United States is drumming up pressure around the world against the Islamic regime over accusations it is developing nuclear weapons. Gemba pointed to Japanese sanctions on Iranian institutions but said: 'I conveyed my view that there is a danger of causing damage to the entire global economy if the imports of Iranian crude oil stop.'" http://t.uani.com/s2rPkG
Reuters: "Spanish refiner Repsol sees no problem finding alternative crude oil supplies for its Spanish plants if Europe follows through on a threat to ban imports of Iranian crude, its chairman said on Tuesday. 'For us it is not very difficult to move from Iran to Saudi Arabia to even Russia. It depends on the quality of the crude and the needs of our system,' Chairman Antonio Brufau told reporters in Moscow, where he signed a deal to form a joint venture with mid-sized Moscow-based producer Alliance Oil . European Union Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said EU countries agree on a need to exclude Iranian crude from Europe as part of a response to a U.N. watchdog's report suggesting Iran has worked to design an atom bomb." http://t.uani.com/rE4uhw
Human Rights
AP: "The U.N. General Assembly has approved a resolution denouncing serious human rights violations in Iran ranging from flogging and amputations to frequent use of the death penalty. Iran's U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee tried to prevent a vote on the nonbinding resolution Monday but the attempt was soundly defeated. The resolution, sponsored by Canada, cites torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as examples of 'serious ongoing and recurring human rights violations' in Iran. It also notes the targeting of human rights defenders, inequality and violence against women, and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. The 193-member world body adopted the resolution by a vote of 89-30 with 64 abstentions." http://t.uani.com/uesSut
Domestic Politics
AP: "The Iranian president says his administration will do everything it can to save the national currency from plunging further out of control. The semi-official Mehr news agency is quoting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying this is possible with the 'huge reserves' of hard currency that Iran has. The report offered no details. The rial hit a record low on Tuesday, with the U.S. dollar selling for 15,050 rials in foreign currency exchange offices. The dollar sold for about 10,500 rials last December and in 1979 - the year an Islamic revolution toppled the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi - it was 70 rials against the dollar." http://t.uani.com/uMjhr5
Foreign Affairs
Reuters: "The United States believes that increasingly warm ties between Venezuela, Iran and Cuba do not benefit the Venezuelan people, U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview published on Monday. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have expanded the two OPEC nation's close business and political relations in recent years, exacerbating tensions between Caracas and Washington. In May, the United States imposed sanctions on Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA for defying U.S. law by sending at least two tankers carrying $50 million in oil products to Iran... 'Sooner or later, Venezuela's people will have to decide what possible advantage there is in having relations with a country that violates fundamental human rights and is isolated from most of the world. The Iranian government has consistently supported international terrorism.'" http://t.uani.com/vGY236
Opinion & Analysis
Hagai Segal in The Guardian: "Debate of late has intensified concerning the possibility of an impending military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. This is a vital debate, however it continues to be dominated by misconceptions that cloud judgments. Dominating discussions is the presumption that those considering military action, notably Israel and the US, fear that a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran - a country that has actively sought to 'export the revolution' and calls for Israel's destruction - would actively seek to launch a nuclear attack. This has led to a stark, black-and-white debate. On one side, those who subscribe to this view demand that Iran be stopped before it is in a position to wage this nuclear war; on the other, grave doubts of the existence of a nuclear weapons programme in disbelief that this could be Iran's true intent. Neither position, however, reflects the true dynamic. It may surprise many that an Iran intent on nuclear conflict is not what is most concerning these states. Israel and the US, for example, are well aware that Iran's agenda is not apocalyptic, and that its decision-making is informed by a logic - if an extreme and frightening one. Iran certainly desires Israel's future dissolution or collapse and to establish hegemony in a Middle East currently dominated by its political adversary, the United States, and her regional allies. Yet equally it has no desire to seek such outcomes in a manner that would result its own annihilation, as a nuclear war would guarantee. To this end, it has placed economic and military support for the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as actively supporting insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere, at the forefront of its foreign policy. It is a long-term strategy of 'war by proxy'. And here, it is feared, is also where the logic behind seeking nuclear weapons has emanated - with the bomb a level of regional strategic balance is achieved allowing Iran to pursue its regional objectives with unprecedented vigour, comfortable in the knowledge that its nukes have isolated it from the international policing system and most external avenues of pressure. This, paradoxically, would allow Iran to pose a far greater conventional military threat across the whole region." http://t.uani.com/uujjRW |
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