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Top Stories
Reuters: "Now
a Reuters investigation has uncovered new evidence of how willing some
foreign companies were to assist Iran's state security network, and the
regime's keenness to access as much information as possible. Documents
seen by Reuters show that a partner of China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd
offered to sell a Huawei-developed 'Lawful Interception Solution' to
MobinNet, Iran's first nationwide wireless broadband provider, just as
MobinNet was preparing to launch in 2010. The system's capabilities
included 'supporting the special requirements from security agencies to
monitor in real time the communication traffic between subscribers,'
according to a proposal by Huawei's Chinese partner seen by Reuters...
The proposal to MobinNet for the Huawei lawful-intercept system states
that it includes technology from a German company called Utimaco Safeware
AG. Utimaco says Huawei is one of its worldwide resellers but that
neither MobinNet directly - nor Huawei on behalf of MobinNet - purchased
or licensed its products... The other Iranian telecom isn't named but
Malte Pollmann, Utimaco's chief executive officer, confirmed that in
2006, Nokia's German unit had purchased Utimaco software for MTN
Irancell, Iran's second-largest mobile phone operator which has a major
contract with Huawei. He said the product hadn't been maintained for
several years and that Utimaco believes it no longer is being used. MTN
Irancell is 49 percent owned by South Africa's MTN Group, Africa's
largest telecom carrier. It declined to comment about the Utimaco
product. Interviews and internal MTN documents reviewed by Reuters show
that prior to MTN's launch, Iranian intelligence authorities took a keen
interest in the capabilities of its lawful-intercept system, and pushed
to make it more intrusive... The terms of MTN Irancell's license
agreement stipulated that Iran's security agency could record and monitor
subscribers' communications, including voice, data, fax, text messaging
and voicemail, the internal MTN documents show. 'At least 1 percent of all
subscribers' could be targeted, and authorities wanted access to their
location - 'within 10 to 20 meters' - as well as billing information,
according to the documents." http://t.uani.com/VCN27R
WSJ:
"The recent battle between Israel and Islamist forces in the Gaza
Strip revealed not only the Palestinian militants' new arsenal, but also
shed light on the potentially greater military capabilities of another
nemesis of the Jewish state: Hezbollah, the Shiite political and militant
group in Lebanon... Iran's role in helping fund and arm militant
movements fighting Israel also became more crystallized during the recent
conflict. Iranian and Palestinian military officials last week publicly
acknowledged for the first time that Tehran provided Hamas and Islamic
Jihad with Fajr-5 rockets, which have a range of about 50 miles. The
commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohamad Ali Jaffari, said
last month that Iran has exported the missiles' manufacturing technology
into Gaza." http://t.uani.com/YNxWAT
AP:
"The White House and its allies are weighing military options to
secure Syria's chemical and biological weapons, after U.S. intelligence
reports show the Syrian regime may be readying those weapons and may be
desperate enough to use them, U.S. officials said Monday... U.S.
intelligence officials also intercepted one communication within the last
six months they believe was between Iran's infamous Quds Force, urging
Syrian regime members to use its supplies of toxic Sarin gas against
rebels and the civilians supporting them in the besieged city of Homs, a
former U.S. official said." http://t.uani.com/SxE37p
Nuclear
Program
Reuters: "A nuclear-armed Iran
would cause a regional arms race and make Tehran more isolated and
vulnerable, according to a former Iranian negotiator who argues that the
Islamic state is not seeking to build nuclear bombs... Former nuclear
negotiator Hossein Mousavian, now a visiting scholar at Princeton
University in the United States, said Iran recognizes that if it were to
become a nuclear weapons state Russia and China would join the United
States and 'implement devastating sanctions that would paralyze the Iranian
economy.' ... 'Based on Iranian assessments, the possession of nuclear
weapons would provide only a short-term regional advantage that would
turn into a longer-term vulnerability,' Mousavian wrote in the National
Interest, a foreign policy journal. 'It would trigger a regional nuclear
arms race, bringing Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia into the fold sooner
or later,' Mousavian, added." http://t.uani.com/VCIHS3
Reuters:
"Iran has obtained data from a U.S. intelligence drone that shows it
was spying on the country's military sites and oil terminals, Iranian
media reported its armed forces as saying on Wednesday. Iran announced on
Tuesday that it had captured a ScanEagle drone belonging to the United
States, but Washington said there was no evidence to support the
assertion... 'We have fully extracted the drone's information,' Iran's
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement on
Wednesday, according to Iran's English-language Press TV. The drone was
gathering military information and spying on the transfer of oil from
Iran's petroleum terminals, the IRGC statement said, according to Press
TV. Iran's main export terminal is at Kharg Island." http://t.uani.com/Vmpr9b
Sanctions
Reuters:
"Doctors in Iran are trying to fend off a creeping health care
crisis caused by medicine shortages, due in part to Western economic
sanctions but exacerbated by government mismanagement and abuse of the
system. Government hospitals and pharmacies report a widespread lack of
drugs to treat cancer, multiple sclerosis, blood disorders and other
serious conditions. Iranian media highlighted the shortages earlier this
month through the case of a teenager who died of hemophilia after his
family failed to find his medicine... Health officials have accused the
government of compounding the shortages by failing to provide billions of
dollars of vital funds earmarked for drugs and medical supplies." http://t.uani.com/SG7XYs
Reuters:
"Essar Oil has more than halved oil imports from Iran in November
and aims to reduce purchases further, a source with direct knowledge of
the matter said, strengthening New Delhi's hopes of a continued waiver
from U.S. sanctions. Privately-owned Essar was Iran's top Indian client
in April to October, temporarily replacing state-run Mangalore Refinery
and Petrochemicals Ltd, according to data available to Reuters, taking
more than its term deal's average quantities... In November, Essar
imported about 265,000 tonnes or about 64,500 barrels per day (bpd) crude
from Iran, a decline of about 55 percent from the previous month and
about a third of its imports a year ago, the source said. In October, the
refiner imported 144,800 bpd and about 180,800 bpd in November last year,
the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue,
added." http://t.uani.com/Vk2Fiy
FT:
"Last March, Iran's Kanoon Towlid Iran textile factory let go almost
half of its 130 workers amid a grim economic outlook. Suddenly the
company has seen a silver lining as the drop in the rial, along with new
restrictions on imports and an official drive for self-sufficiency, boost
the prospects of some Iranian manufacturers... Domestic producers in
textile, furniture, petrochemical, agriculture, food and mining sectors,
all of which can secure a large proportion of raw materials locally and
import technologies from regional and Asian countries, are seeing their
fortunes improve as sanctions take hold and President Mahmoud
Ahmadi-Nejad has been forced to reverse a number of economic policies...
However, there are challenges. The dramatic fall of the rial, which has
dropped by more than 50 per cent this year, has aggravated producers'
liquidity problems, making imports of technology and raw materials - both
hit by banking sanctions - more difficult and expensive... Despite the
improvements, domestic manufacturers and exporters face a number of
challenges, including uncertainty because of currency fluctuations,
annual inflation of at least 25 per cent, and a sharp fall in production
of some big industries, notably car production. In addition, a bloated
bureaucracy, abrupt changes to laws and corruption that allows
businessmen with political connections to sabotage private businesses all
add to concerns that the new opportunity may be wasted." http://t.uani.com/THNvX5
Human Rights
NYT:
"An
imprisoned human rights lawyer serving a sentence for 'acting against
national security' ended a 49-day hunger strike on Tuesday after judicial
authorities acceded to her demand to lift a travel ban imposed on her
12-year-old daughter, her husband said. The lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, 49,
who until her imprisonment in 2010 was one of the last lawyers taking on
high-profile human rights and political cases in Iran, decided in October
to go on the hunger strike out of fear of increasing limitations imposed
on her family. She fell into fragile health during the hunger strike, in
which she would drink only water mixed with salts and sugar. Her weight
dropped to 95 pounds. It was the second time that Ms. Sotoudeh felt
compelled to quit eating. She declared her first hunger strike in 2010,
after her family was forbidden to visit or make phone calls. In that
case, the authorities capitulated after four weeks, allowing her husband
and two children to visit weekly." http://t.uani.com/QHgjzk
Opinion &
Analysis
David Feith in
WSJ: "Is promoting genocide a human-rights
violation? You might think that's an easy question. But it isn't at Human
Rights Watch, where a bitter debate is raging over how to describe Iran's
calls for the destruction of Israel. The infighting reveals a peculiar
standard regarding dictatorships and human rights and especially the
Jewish state. Human Rights Watch is the George Soros-funded operation
that has outsize influence in governments, newsrooms and classrooms
world-wide. Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran's regime for
inciting genocide. 'Sitting still while Iran claims a justification to
kill all Jews and annihilate Israel... is a position unworthy of our
great organization,' Sid Sheinberg, the group's vice chairman, wrote to
colleagues in a recent email. But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who
runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees. Asked in 2010 about Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel 'must be wiped off
the map,' Mr. Roth suggested that the Iranian president has been
misunderstood. 'There was a real question as to whether he actually said
that,' Mr. Roth told The New Republic, because the Persian language lacks
an idiom for wiping off the map. Then again, Mr. Ahmadinejad's own English-language
website translated his words that way, and the main alternative
translation-'eliminated from the pages of history'-is no more benign. Nor
is Mr. Ahmadinejad an outlier in the regime. Iran's top military officer
declared earlier this year that 'the Iranian nation is standing for its
cause that is the full annihilation of Israel.' Mr. Roth's main claim is
legalistic: Iran's rhetoric doesn't qualify as 'incitement'-which is
illegal under the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948-but amounts
merely to 'advocacy,' which is legal. 'The theory' to which Human Rights
Watch subscribes, he has written in internal emails, 'is that in the case
of advocacy, however hateful, there is time to dissuade-to rebut speech
with speech-whereas in the case of incitement, the action being urged is
so imminently connected to the speech in question that there is no time
to dissuade. Incitement must be suppressed because it is tantamount to
action.' Mr. Roth added in another email: 'Many of [Iran's] statements
are certainly reprehensible, but they are not incitement to genocide. No
one has acted on them.' Really? What about the officials, soldiers and
scientists behind Iran's nuclear program? Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was a
senior nuclear scientist until his death in a car explosion this year.
His widow afterward boasted: 'Mostafa's ultimate goal was the
annihilation of Israel.' Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group founded by
the Tehran regime, is also unabashed about its motivations. Its leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, has said: 'If all the Jews gathered in Israel, it will
save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.... It is an open war
until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on
earth.' Then there's Hamas, the Tehran-backed Palestinian terror group whose
founding charter declares that 'Israel will exist and will continue to
exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others
before it.' If building nuclear weapons and deploying Hezbollah and Hamas
aren't 'action' in Mr. Roth's view, what is?" http://t.uani.com/VjvfAF
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
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