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Top Stories
AP:
"A drawing based on information from inside an Iranian military site
shows an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear
arms-related tests that U.N. inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted
there. Iran denies such testing and has neither confirmed nor denied the
existence of such a chamber. The computer-generated drawing was provided
to The Associated Press by an official of a country tracking Iran's
nuclear program who said it proves the structure exists, despite Tehran's
refusal to acknowledge it. That official said the image is based on
information from a person who had seen the chamber at the Parchin
military site, adding that going into detail would endanger the life of
that informant. The official comes from an IAEA member country that is
severely critical of Iran's assertions that its nuclear activities are
peaceful and asserts they are a springboard for making atomic arms. A
former senior IAEA official said he believes the drawing is accurate.
Olli Heinonen, until last year the U.N. nuclear agency's deputy director
general in charge of the Iran file, said it was 'very similar' to a photo
he recently saw that he believes to be the pressure chamber the IAEA
suspects is at Parchin." http://t.uani.com/Kj76s3
WashPost:
"Increasingly hard-pressed to find buyers for its petroleum, Iran
has been routinely switching off satellite tracking systems on its
sea-bound oil tankers for more than a month, in what U.S. officials and
industry analysts describe as a cat-and-mouse game with Western governments
seeking to enforce sanctions on Iranian exports. The unusual tactic was
begun in early April and affects a quarter of Iran's tanker fleet,
according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has been
monitoring the practice. The move, a violation of maritime law, is only
modestly effective in cloaking 1,000-foot-long tankers as they ply the
oceans in search of open ports and willing buyers. But it underscores
Iran's precarious position as it faces ever-tighter Western restrictions
against its oil industry, which provides the bulk of export and
government revenue... One key impact of recent sanctions has been to
choke off shippers' access to maritime insurance, nearly all of which is
underwritten in Europe, Sen said. That has made Iran ever more dependent
on its own fleet of 39 tankers, including 25 super-tankers, according to
IEA figures." http://t.uani.com/LH5APN
AFP:
"The UN nuclear agency pressed Iran for greater cooperation Monday
in their first meeting since a 'failed' visit in February, with world
powers watching closely ahead of their Baghdad talks next week. 'We are
here to continue our dialogue with Iran in a positive spirit,'
International Atomic Energy Agency chief inspector Hermann Nackaerts said
as he went into two days of talks with Iran's envoy, Ali Asghar
Soltanieh. 'It is important now that we can engage on the substance of
these issues and that Iran let us have access to people, documents,
information and sites,' he told reporters outside Iran's embassy in
Vienna. In particular Nackaerts wants Iran to address claims made in an
extensive IAEA report in November that at least until 2003, and possibly
since, there were activities which could only conceivably be aimed at
developing the bomb. He also wants access to the Parchin military base
near Tehran where the IAEA report -- which cited foreign intelligence,
its own sources and Iranian information -- said Iran had conducted
explosives tests in a metal container." http://t.uani.com/J4lxBb
Nuclear
Program & Sanctions
CNN: "Ahead of upcoming nuclear talks,
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad downplayed the threat Israel poses
to Iran, comparing it to an annoying bug. 'Israel is nothing more than a
mosquito which cannot see the broad horizon of the Iranian nation,' he
said Saturday in northeastern Iran's Khorassan province, according to the
semi-official Fars news agency... 'With the force of God behind it, we
shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,' he
said then, according to another IRNA report." http://t.uani.com/K8OdUo
Reuters:
"A senior U.N. nuclear official said Iran must give his inspectors
access to information, people and sites as he began a two-day meeting
with Iranian officials on the Islamic state's disputed atomic activities
on Monday. The meeting in Vienna will test Iran's readiness to address
U.N. inspectors' suspicions of military dimensions to its nuclear
programme, ahead of high-stakes talks on the programme in Baghdad next
week between Iran and six world powers. Two meetings in Tehran this year
with U.N. inspectors failed to make any notable progress, especially on
the inspectors' request for access to Parchin, a military site where the
watchdog believes nuclear weapons-relevant research may have taken place.
'The aim of our two days (of talks) is to reach agreement on an approach
to resolve all outstanding issues with Iran,' Herman Nackaerts, deputy
director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told
reporters as he arrived at an Iranian diplomatic mission in a smart area
of Vienna. 'In particular, clarification of the possible military
dimensions remains our priority ... It is important now that we can
engage on the substance of these issues and that Iran let us have access
to people, documents, information and sites.'" http://t.uani.com/JOmN7F
Reuters:
"An exiled Iranian opposition group said on Saturday that Iran has
some 60 scientists and engineers involved in a concerted and expanding
programme to develop nuclear weapons under defence ministry auspices.
However, diplomats say the National Council of Resistance of Iran has had
a spotty record with allegations about Iran's nuclear work since exposing
a secret uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in 2002. A top U.S. nuclear
expert said the NCRI report, like previous ones, should be treated with
great scepticism... 'Information ... shows that the clerical regime has
expanded the organisation responsible for nuclear weapons development,'
the report said. 'This finding reveals a complete and elaborate, and
highly ... secret research structure and a network for procurement of the
required parts and equipment.'" http://t.uani.com/L0c49D
NYT:
"The lead negotiator for the six-nation group bargaining with Iran
over its contentious uranium enrichment program said Friday that she
hoped to achieve 'the beginnings of the end' of the dispute at the next
meeting, to be held in Baghdad on May 23. The negotiator, Catherine
Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, did not offer
specifics about the substance of the next meeting, the second since Iran
and the so-called P5-plus-1 nations - the five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council plus Germany - announced on April 1 that
they were resuming discussions after a lapse of more than a year. Both
sides described the first meeting in Istanbul on April 13 and 14 as
constructive." http://t.uani.com/Jc7hkI
Reuters:
"The European Union will impose tougher sanctions on Iran if it
fails to take concrete steps to allay international concerns over its
nuclear programme, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on
Monday. Six world powers, including Britain, are due to meet Iranian
officials for another round of negotiations over the nuclear issue in
Baghdad on May 23. Hague said the EU wanted to see evidence that Tehran
was now taking specific steps to reassure the world that its nuclear
programme does not have a military dimension as many countries suspect.
'Now we wait to see some concrete steps and proposals from Iran,' Hague
told reporters before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in
Brussels." http://t.uani.com/K9KLZz
Bloomberg:
"An Iranian organization that insures ships against risks such as
spills and collisions has been approached by Asian tanker operators about
covering their vessels, the group's managing director said. Chinese and
Taiwanese companies that manage tankers have inquired about obtaining
insurance for tankers hauling crude oil, refined fuels or chemicals from
the Kish Protection & Indemnity Club, Mohammad Reza Mohammadi Banayi,
managing director, said today. The club, which covers 43 Iranian ships,
isn't authorized to insure foreign vessels, he said. 'We are in a
position to step in but we are not authorized to do so,' Banayi said by
phone from Tehran. 'We have been contacted by lots of people in different
parts of the world.' Asian shippers are seeking new sources of insurance
for Iranian cargoes because the European Union's embargo extends to 95
percent of the world's tankers that are covered by the 13 members of the
London-based International Group of P&I Clubs." http://t.uani.com/Jbk9OB
Terrorism
AP:
"An Indian police team will visit Tehran this month as part of an
investigation into the role of three Iranians suspected of carrying out a
bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat's car in New Delhi in February, a
police official said Thursday. The three-man team will seek information
on the suspects' movements, 'when they left the country, when they
returned, where they went, their phone records and financial
transactions,' said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. 'We have some
information here. We will get what the Iranian officials will provide. It
will help us connect the dots.'" http://t.uani.com/J3Ud6u
Human Rights
BBC:
"Political cartoonists, like other journalists in Iran, have to
tread a fine line - taboo subjects change with the ebb and flow of the
political power play among the ruling factions, making it difficult for
commentators to determine the lines they cannot cross. For example, the
lampooning of the clerical classes is generally not acceptable, but
cartoons of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, himself a man of
the cloth, go unpunished. Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not
immune either - cartoons ridicule his looks and prominent nose. His
falling out with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may have something to do
this. So it came as a surprise when a cartoonist was recently sentenced
to 25 lashes for publishing a caricature of a right-wing MP from Iran's Central
Province." http://t.uani.com/Jc8uZn
Daily Beast:
"A German-based Iranian is in hiding after his single was deemed an
insult to a Shia imam. In an interview, the artist says Tehran is
instigating outrage-and he fears a fatwa. Just days after the release of
a song that led to heated reactions in Iran and a bounty on his head,
German-based Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi told The Daily Beast that he is
not going to apologize for his provocative work, as he does not see it as
an insult. He accused Tehran's 'ruling system' of stirring up religious
outrage." http://t.uani.com/LHd0m8
Domestic
Politics
AFP:
"Iran's telecommunications ministry has barred local banks,
insurance firms and telephone operators from using foreign-sourced emails
to communicate with clients, a specialist weekly said on Saturday. 'The
telecommunications minister has ordered the use of domain names ending
with .ir' belonging to Iran, Asr Ertebatat reported. The order prohibits
banks, insurance firms and telephone firms using foreign hosts for their
sites or to inform their clients using foreign providers such as Yahoo,
Gmail, Hotmail or MSN, it said. The weekly said that individuals seeking
to communicate with such firms must now use email addresses ending with
iran.ir, post.ir or chmail.ir." http://t.uani.com/JbfR7Q
Foreign Affairs
Independent:
"Iran spurned a previously undisclosed American offer from President
George W Bush of talks aimed at reaching a 'grand bargain' over
long-standing differences between Washington and Tehran, a leading figure
in the country's theocratic regime has revealed. The proposal was made in
2004 - before the controversy over Tehran's suspected nuclear plans
reached a crisis point resulting in sanctions - and passed on to Hassan
Rowhani, head of Iran's supreme national security council at the time, by
the then director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), Mohammed el-Baradei. It was rejected on the orders of Iran's
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic system's most powerful
cleric who has the final say over all state matters. 'The decision was
taken by the nezam [system] that that we shouldn't at that point
negotiate with America,' Mr Rowhani, who led Iran's nuclear negotiating
team under the reformist former President Mohammad Khatami, told an
Iranian magazine, Mehrnameh." http://t.uani.com/JvbseW
NYT:
"As the top spiritual leader in the Shiite Muslim world, Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has instructed his followers on what to eat and
how to wash, how to marry and to bury their dead. As a temporal guide, he
has championed Iraqi democracy, insisting on direct elections from the
earliest days of the occupation, and warned against Iranian-style
clerical rule. Frail at 81, he still greets visitors each morning at his
home on a narrow and sooty side street here, only steps from the
glimmering gold dome of the Imam Ali Shrine. But the jockeying to succeed
him has quietly begun, and Iran is positioning its own candidate for the
post, a hard-line cleric who would give Tehran a direct line of influence
over the Iraqi people, heightening fears that Iran's long-term goal is to
transplant its Islamic Revolution to Iraq... Iran's candidate, Ayatollah
Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, 63, is an Iraqi-born cleric who led the
Iranian judiciary for a decade and remains a top official in the
government there. With Iranian financing, his representatives have for
months been building a patronage network across Iraq, underwriting
scholarships for students at the many seminaries here and distributing information."
http://t.uani.com/KVGUk5
Opinion &
Analysis
David Ignatius in
WashPost: "Let's assume the signals from the White
House and Tehran are reliable, and that Iran is serious about an
agreement to remove its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium from the
country and stop producing more. What happens then? This question of
'next steps' in the Iran nuclear talks is important, because neither side
is likely to commit to the first set of 'confidence-building measures'
unless it knows where the process is heading. Iran believes that it has
been tricked in the past by Western peace feelers that didn't lead
anywhere; the United States has the same wary suspicion. Both sides need
more clarity. A compelling framework for future talks has been prepared by
analysts from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The authors
are George Perkovich, a leading U.S. scholar on proliferation issues, and
Ariel Levite, a former deputy director of the Israel Atomic Energy
Commission. In preparing the plan, the Carnegie team has had quiet
discussions with U.S. and Iranian experts. The basic idea of the Carnegie
proposal is to create a 'firewall' between Iran's civilian nuclear
program, which it could pursue, and a military bomb-making program, which
it couldn't. Along with separating permissible from impermissible, the
Carnegie authors propose special procedures for dual-use technologies
that are near the dividing line... So how could Iran fulfill this pledge
in a way that reassures Israel and other nations that fear a
nuclear-armed Iran? The Carnegie experts propose a red-yellow-green
system, like a nuclear traffic light. In the 'green' approved category
would be nuclear power plants, medical research reactors and basic
academic and scientific research. Forbidden 'red' activities would be
those directly related to weaponization, such as warhead design and
procurement of items used in making and testing bombs. The 'yellow'
dual-use activities would be the trickiest problem, and the firewall
would have to be carefully constructed. Some enrichment of uranium might
be permitted, for example, if it were verifiably limited below 5 percent
- so it could be used for only peaceful purposes. So-called 'neutron
triggers' would be banned, since they could be used to initiate a bomb's
explosion, except for those configured for oil exploration, which would
be supplied to Iran." http://t.uani.com/JySkfA
Yuval Porat in
WSJ: "In the high-stakes international discussions
surrounding Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Iran's 80 million people
are often forgotten. So I, along with a small team of Israelis, decided
to explore the driving forces of Iranian society. There have been signs,
on the streets and over the Internet, of a battle raging between the
country's Islamic fundamentalists and the proponents of freedom. The
question we set out to explore is where the majority of the people stand.
Soon we were joined by leading experts in the fields of social
psychology, cross-cultural research, the Shiite Muslim religion,
statistics, and dozens of Farsi-speaking volunteers. Circumventing Iran's
'electronic curtain'-as President Obama described the Iranian
government's efforts to control contact with the outside world-our
research team conducted telephone interviews in late 2011 and earlier this
year with nearly a thousand Iranians. The latter constituted an accurate
representative sample of Iranian society, including all of Iran's 31
provinces as well as a representative distribution of all ethnic groups,
ages and levels of education. The interviews were conducted anonymously
and the country the calls came from was concealed in order to ensure the
safety of the respondents. To overcome the challenge of measuring the
potential for freedom and democracy in an autocratic country like Iran,
we had to innovate. Typically, researchers use questionnaires that
include questions such as 'are you for or against democracy?' Or 'have
you ever signed a petition?' However, citizens in authoritarian countries
are often afraid to respond to such explicit questions, and if they do
respond their answers are likely to be distorted by fear. Therefore we
used a psychological questionnaire that measures the basic values of
society without posing a single question in political terms. The
questions described the views of a figurative third person and then asked
the Iranian interviewee to what extent that person was similar to them.
The third person was described in sentences such as 'It is important to
him to make his own decisions about his life,' 'thinking creatively is
important to him,' and 'it is important to him to be the one who tells
others what to do.' ... Conducting the interviews in Iran, we were amazed
by how forthcoming the Iranian people were. An analysis of the Iranian
sample showed that alongside conservative values, such as conformity and
tradition, Iranian society is characterized by strong support for
pro-liberal values such as a belief in the importance of self-direction
and benevolence. For example, 94% of the respondents identified with the
sentence 'freedom to choose what he does is important to him,' and 71% of
the respondents identified with the sentence 'being tolerant toward all
kinds of people and groups is important to him.' ... Our findings
demonstrate that Iranian society as a whole is characterized by a
pro-liberal value structure that is deeply at odds with the
fundamentalist regime. This presents considerable potential for regime
change in Iran and for the development of liberal democracy." http://t.uani.com/JyPC9Y
Laura Secor in The
New Yorker: "In February 29th, two days before
parliamentary elections in Iran, I joined a few dozen foreign
correspondents-along with official handlers-in the parking lot of the
Laleh, a formerly five-star Tehran hotel with tatty rooms, an ornate
lobby, and a surfeit of eyes. We had come to Iran to cover the election,
but we were told upon arrival that there would be a compulsory program.
Its first order of business was a bus trip to the Alborz Space Center,
where we would learn about Iran's new remote-controlled satellite... We
were here to waste our time, and the Iranians didn't care who knew it.
The last time that most of the world peered inside Iran was in June,
2009, when, for two searing weeks, the Islamic Republic cracked open. In
what came to be known as the Green Movement, a series of mass protests
contested the official results of the Presidential election, which
granted a second term to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has held the office
since 2005. The Basij, a state-sponsored militia, crushed the demonstrations;
photographs and furtive cell-phone footage captured young people in green
fleeing down broken sidewalks, motorcycles at their heels. By the time of
the Arab Spring, in early 2011, Ahmadinejad's election-year rivals, Mir
Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, had been placed under house arrest,
their mid-level operatives imprisoned and forced to confess on television
to international conspiracy, their movement dubbed fetneh-'the sedition.'
As the regime silenced the country's internal press and shunned Western
reporters, the world lost sight of Iran's domestic life and focused
instead on its nuclear program. Iran reopened its doors to the foreign
press for the March 2nd elections, but the moment was an especially
sensitive one. International tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions were
at a peak, a European embargo of Iranian oil was set to take full hold in
four months, and Israeli officials were threatening to strike Iran's
nuclear facilities. 'You are in a small box this time,' an Iranian
journalist cautioned me. My visa was for only five days. Yet Iran, vast
and restive, had a way of revealing itself, even in bad times." http://t.uani.com/JURJns
Ilan Berman in WT:
"Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has made
cybersecurity a major area of policy focus. The past year in particular
has seen a dramatic expansion of governmental awareness of cyberspace as
a new domain of conflict. In practice, however, this attention is still
uneven. To date, it has focused largely on network protection and
resiliency (particularly in the military arena) and on the threat
potential of countries such as China and Russia. Awareness of what is
perhaps the most urgent cybermenace to the U.S. homeland has lagged
behind the times. That threat comes from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Iranian regime - increasingly
isolated as a result of mounting international sanctions and facing
growing socioeconomic malaise - isn't an immediate danger to America in
the cyberrealm. But those same factors have dramatically increased the
potential for conflict in that domain between Washington and Tehran. So
has Iran's expanding exploitation of cyberspace, which is driven by two
principal strategies. The first is domestic repression. In his March 2012
Nowruz message to the Iranian people, President Obama alluded to the
growing efforts of the Iranian regime to isolate its population from the
outside world when he noted that an 'electronic curtain has fallen around
Iran.' That digital barrier has grown exponentially over the past three
years and now includes the construction of a new national Internet, which
will effectively sever Iran's connection to the World Wide Web; the
installation of a sophisticated Chinese-origin surveillance system for
monitoring phone, mobile and Internet communications; restrictive
governmental guidelines forcing Internet cafes to record the personal
information of customers and keep video logs of all customers accessing
the Web; and movement toward the formation of a new government agency
responsible for the 'constant and comprehensive monitoring over the
domestic and international cyberspace.' The second is the quiet conflict
already under way with the West over its nuclear ambitions. Since the
fall of 2009, Iran has suffered a series of sustained cyberattacks on its
nuclear program. The best known of these is Stuxnet, the computer worm
that attacked the industrial control systems at several Iranian nuclear
installations between 2009 and 2010. But at least two other cyberattacks
aimed at derailing Iran's nuclear development have targeted the Islamic
republic as well. And while the origins of those intrusions are still
hotly debated in the West, Iranian authorities already are convinced that
conflict is under way - and are mobilizing in response. Thus, in recent
months, Iran has launched an ambitious $1 billion governmental program to
boost its national cybercapabilities." http://t.uani.com/IT41Lw
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear
Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the
Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive
media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with
discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please
email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
United Against Nuclear
Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a
commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a
regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an
issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own
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