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Top Stories
NYT:
"The proposed cabinet of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani,
survived its confirmation hearings largely intact on Thursday after four
days of grilling by the conservative-dominated Parliament, which accused
some nominees of corruption or sympathies with the outlawed opposition.
At the end of the process, which amounted to Mr. Rouhani's first domestic
test, the Parliament rejected three nominees - for the ministries of
education, science and sports. Several members of Parliament had accused
them of having been close to the 2009 Green Movement that held months of
protests against Iran's leaders. But all of Mr. Rouhani's key nominees
were approved, most notably the foreign minister, an American-educated diplomat
known for his understanding of the West, which suggested that Mr. Rouhani
was moving forward in his campaign pledge to seek a more constructive
engagement with the United States than his predecessor did... Vocal
hard-line members of Parliament, supported by the conservative state
newspaper Keyhan, said they were worried that some of Mr. Rouhani's
cabinet choices had supported the Green Movement, which sprung up in 2009
after Mr. Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election to a second term." http://t.uani.com/1cSgUIN
Times of India:
"Refusing to buy Tehran's contention that the Indian oil tanker it
detained was causing pollution, India has told Iran that it had no
business to force the ship into entering Iranian waters. Confirming that
there was continuing 'illegal coercion' by Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC) in holding back the ship in Iranian waters, sources here
said the government sees this as 'an unfriendly act''. After almost 24
hours of negotiations with Iranian authorities, the government said though
it is still hoping that MT Desh Shanti, a medium-size tanker carrying
140,000 tonnes of crude from Iraq, will be released soon from its
'illegal detention'. While the shipping ministry said there was no
provocation for such an act by Iran, MEA remained tight-lipped except to
say it is in touch with Iran over the issue through diplomatic channels
in both New Delhi and Tehran. Iran has also demanded an anti-pollution
undertaking from the ship's captain and owner, Shipping Corporation of
India, for releasing the vessel... 'What prompted such an action by IRGC
to take such coercive and illegal actions against the rights of a
merchant tanker of friendly country remains a mystery,' said a
source." http://t.uani.com/14PBFTk
Reuters:
"Arab insurgents blew up a gas pipeline in Iran last week and
dedicated the attack to their brothers in arms in Syria, highlighting how
the Syrian civil war is spreading into a region-wide proxy conflict that
could blow back onto Iran. The blast, two days after new President Hassan
Rohani took office, hit a pipeline feeding a petrochemicals plant in the
city of Mahshahr in Iran's southwest, home to most of its oil reserves
and to a population of ethnic Arabs, known as Ahwazis for the main town
in the area. The Ahwazi Arabs are a small minority in mainly ethnic
Persian Iran, some of whom see themselves as under Persian 'occupation'
and want independence or autonomy. They are a cause célèbre across the
Arab world, where escalating ethnic and sectarian rivalry with Iran now
fuels the wars in Syria and Iraq and is behind political unrest from
Beirut to Bahrain." http://t.uani.com/12akVT5
Nuclear Program
Reuters: "Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani appointed outgoing Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi to
head the Atomic Energy Organization on Friday, state media said,
replacing a hardliner with a pragmatist to take charge of Tehran's
nuclear program... The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
(AEOI) is not directly involved in nuclear negotiations with world
powers, but is in charge of operating Iran's nuclear facilities. He also
represents Tehran at the annual member state gatherings of the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna each September. Salehi,
Iran's foreign minister under Ahmadinejad from 2011 until Thursday when
parliament approved his replacement, returns to his previous job as head
of the AEOI. He takes the place of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani who survived
an assassination attempt in Tehran in 2010... A new head of the Supreme
National Security Council, who has traditionally acted as Iran's chief
nuclear negotiator, has yet to be appointed. The delay has led some
Iran-watchers to speculate Rouhani may want to the bring the job of
nuclear negotiator under the foreign ministry, giving an even stronger
signal that he wants to streamline the talks process." http://t.uani.com/19xOKCv
Syrian Civil War
Reuters:
"The United States and Iraq agreed on Thursday to boost cooperation
to keep Iran from flying weapons over Iraq to Syria, and to curb the
radicalization of young Iraqis and other spillover effects from the
Syrian conflict... The senior U.S. official said that in the six months
prior to Kerry's trip, there were no Iraqi inspections of overflights to
Syria from Iran. 'From March until now, the record has been quite
different and we have seen a disruption in the flow of what we suspect is
cargo going from Iran to Syria,' said the official. However, the official
acknowledged that while the frequency of suspected Iranian overflights of
Iraq was down, the Iraqis had not actually intercepted any weapons and
much work still needed to be done." http://t.uani.com/1dd7ZR1
Domestic Politics
WashPost:
"Discussion of Internet censorship usually focuses on China and its
'Great Firewall.' But the Chinese Communist Party isn't the only regime
that censors its Internet. Iran does too. Little is known about Iran's
censorship system because Iranian citizens who probe the network from
inside the country risk reprisals from the government. But earlier this
year, two anonymous Iranians teamed up with Alex Halderman, a computer
science professor at the University of Michigan, to conduct one of the
first systematic studies of Iranian Internet censorship to be published
outside Iran. Halderman presented his findings at a Tuesday talk at the
Usenix Security conference in Washington, D.C... What gets censored? To
find out, the researchers attempted to visit the sites on Alexa's top 500
lists in various categories. Almost half of the 500 most popular sites on
the Internet are censored... The Iranian Internet is also configured to
discourage the use of certain encrypted protocols. Web traffic is allowed
through at full speed. Traffic that uses the encrypted SSH protocol,
which can be used to 'tunnel' other types of traffic out of the country,
run at less than 20 percent of the network's full speed. Traffic the
Iranian firewall doesn't recognize is throttled even more dramatically,
and gets cut off altogether after about 60 seconds." http://t.uani.com/1cShUN6
Foreign Affairs
Times of India:
"The seizure of an Indian oil tanker by Iranian authorities on
Wednesday has once again put the spotlight on the strained ties between
the two countries. The families of 19 Indian fishermen detained in Iran
for crossing the maritime boundary have been repeatedly petitioning the
authorities there. These fishermen have been held in an Iranian jail for
more than seven months now despite intervention by the Indian consular
staff and the fishermen's employers in Saudi Arabia... The 19 fishermen,
all from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, had set sail in four fishing boats from
the Saudi port city of Jubail and entered Iranian waters. They were
detained by Iranian authorities for breaching the maritime border between
the two countries." http://t.uani.com/144MiyY
Opinion &
Analysis
Amb. Jaime
Daremblum in The Weekly Standard: "In late June, the
State Department issued a controversial report on Iranian activity in the
Western Hemisphere. Its most notable conclusion was that 'Iranian
influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is waning.' Critics
immediately pointed out that, just a month earlier, Argentine special
prosecutor Alberto Nisman had released a 500-page report showing that
Tehran has 'clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents'
scattered across the region. The obvious question was: Why hadn't Foggy
Bottom considered the Nisman dossier before publishing its
recommendations? In an August 1 letter to GOP senator Mark Kirk, State
Department official Thomas Gibbons explained that 'the Nisman report was
made public after our report was completed.' However, Gibbons assured
Senator Kirk that Foggy Bottom has asked the intelligence community to
review the Nisman findings in a timely manner. While they're at it, U.S.
officials might also take note of a front-page story in Sunday's
Washington Post, which describes an Iranian 'outreach' program that 'has
brought hundreds of Latin Americans to Iran for intensive
Spanish-language instruction in Iranian religion and culture, much of it
supervised by a man who is wanted internationally on terrorism charges'
(my emphasis). The terrorist supervisor is an Iranian cleric named Mohsen
Rabbani, whom Nisman has identified as the mastermind of a 1994 bombing
that destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building
in Buenos Aires, leaving 85 people dead and hundreds more injured. Since
2007, more than a thousand Latin Americans have received schooling in
Iran, 'mostly under Rabbani's supervision,' according to a report cited
by the Post. Predictably, the Iranian schooling includes a heavy dose of
anti-American and Islamist propaganda. A Mexican student who spent three
months in Iran told the Post that certain students were subjected to
'weeks of theological and political indoctrination.' Some of them, in his
words, became 'crazy-obsessed' with the Iranian revolution. Coming on the
heels of Nisman's report, the Post story should heighten concerns about
Iran's penetration of Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past
three decades, Tehran has deployed and cultivated agents throughout the
hemisphere, everywhere from Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago to Argentina
and Brazil to Chile and Colombia. These agents helped orchestrate both
the 1994 AMIA massacre and the 1992 bombing of Israel's Buenos Aires
embassy, which killed 29 and injured hundreds. They also plotted to bomb
New York City's JFK International Airport, a plot that was foiled by U.S.
authorities in 2007. A key player in the airport bomb scheme was Guyanese
national Abdul Kadir, an Iranian agent who, according to Nisman, 'had
repeated contacts with Mohsen Rabbani' prior to his arrest. (Rabbani is
still wanted by Interpol for his role in the AMIA attack.) Testimony from
an informant suggests that Kadir and his fellow terrorist operatives
'wanted to form an organization like Hezbollah in the Caribbean.'
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror group based in Lebanon, was
responsible for both the 1992 and the 1994 bombings in Buenos
Aires." http://t.uani.com/1cJGdhb
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