Iranian Revolutionary Guard murdered Iran nuke scientist, blamed Israel
An Iranian nuclear scientist who was gassed to death in 2007 was
murdered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and not assassinated by Israel as was claimed at the time (Hat Tip:
Honest Reporting). The reason for his murder was his refusal to cooperate in Iran's nuclear weapons program.
When Iranian scientist Dr. Ardeshir Hosseinpour was killed in February
2007, the cause of death was reported to be “gassing” and most presumed
the act was carried out by Israel. That belief stood, largely because of
Iranian accusations to that effect; and because of Israeli policy to
neither confirm nor deny such acts. But now, seven years later,
Mahboobeh Hosseinpour has come forward with the claim that the IRI was
behind her brother’s death because of his refusal to be involved in
Iran’s nuclear enrichment program whose use was for atomic purposes.
If Hosseinpour’s account can be confirmed, it could have impact on the
next round of between Iran and the P5+1 -- the five permanent members of
the U.N. Security Council and Germany.
Speaking to The Media Line from Turkey via Skype in a conversation
arranged by the Iranian opposition group The New Iran, 52-year old
Mahboobeh Hosseinpour said that she learned through her sister-in-law,
Sara Araghi, of her brother’s secret research, and particularly about a
DVD which contained research and formulas for building an atomic bomb 12
times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and methods for
neutralizing it.
Mahmoobeh Hosseinpour learned that her brother was contacted in
November 2004 by three special agents of IRI’s Defense Department with a
personal message from IRI’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
enlisting him to work on increasing IRI’s uranium enrichment
capabilities for the purpose of building atomic weapons; and with a
secondary goal of teaching and supervising Russian and North Korean
scientists in order to accelerate the project. Speaking about her
brother, Hosseinpour said that “he was offered a two star rank in the
revolutionary guard and ownership of factories,” if he agreed.
Mrs. Hossenpour told The Media Line that Israel did not kill her
brother but the IRI did, allegedly because he would not co-operate with
them, claiming those projects would result in serious financial damage
for the people of the Iran as well as the international community.
Read the whole thing. It's been clear all along that Iran is after nuclear weapons. This makes it even clearer.
Labels: Iranian assassination plots, Iranian nuclear threat, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, nuclear scientists, nuclear weapons
Hmmm.... Nothing to do with the nuke program?
Iranian Deputy Minister of Industry Safdar Rahmat Abadi was shot and killed in Tehran on Sunday night. Thus far, at least, it is being claimed that he had
no connection to the Mullahcracy's nuclear program.
"Investigations show that two shots were fired from inside the vehicle," the agency quoted a police official as saying.
"That
two shells were found inside the car shows a strong likelihood that the
assailant was inside the car and in conversation with Mr. Abadi. There
was no sign of struggle at the scene of the killing."
The student
news agency ISNA said a special homicide investigator and criminal
prosecutor were at the scene. It cited a judiciary source as saying no
arrests had yet been made.
There has been a surge of attacks
against Iranian military and provincial officials in recent weeks, but
Abadi's killing appeared to be the first reported fatal shooting of a
senior central government official in years.
Iranian Sunni
Islamists claimed responsibility for the killing of an Iranian
prosecutor in Sistan Baluchistan province last week. They said it was
revenge for the hanging of 16 prisoners carried out by judiciary
officials after an attack by the Jaish ul-Adl group of Sunni Islamist
militants in which 14 border guards were killed.
...
There was no immediate indication that the killing had anything to do with Iran's nuclear dispute with the West.
Hmmm....
Labels: Iran, Iranian assassination plots, Iranian nuclear threat
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Tuesday, May 29.
1) Iran vs. the world
The Washington Post reports U.S. officials among the targets of Iran-linked assassination plots:
The threat, many details of which were never made public, appeared to recede after Azerbaijani authorities rounded up nearly two dozen people in waves of arrests early this year. Precisely who ordered the hits, and why, was never conclusively determined. But U.S. and Middle Eastern officials now see the attempts as part of a broader campaign by Iran-linked operatives to kill foreign diplomats in at least seven countries over a span of 13 months. The targets have included two Saudi officials, a half-dozen Israelis and — in the Azerbaijan case — several Americans, the officials say.
In recent weeks, investigators working in four countries have amassed new evidence tying the disparate assassination attempts to one another and linking all of them to either Iran-backed Hezbollah militants or operatives based inside Iran, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials. An official report last month summarizing the evidence cited phone records, forensic tests, coordinated travel arrangements and even cellphone SIM cards purchased in Iran and used by several of the would-be assailants, said two officials who have seen the six-page document.
Strikingly, the officials noted, the attempts halted abruptly in early spring, at a time when Iran began to shift its tone after weeks of bellicose anti-Western rhetoric and threats to shut down vital shipping lanes. In March, Iranian officials formally accepted a proposal to resume negotiations with six world powers on proposals to curb its nuclear program.
That last paragraph is bewildering. The arrests mentioned occurred in the middle of March. Couldn't that have accounted for the attacks halting "abruptly," rather than, as the "officials" suggest, that Iran was softening its stance?
How does the United States react to this apparent "clenched fist?"
The Obama administration has declined to directly link the Azerbaijan plot to the Iranian government, avoiding what could be an explosive accusation at a time when the two governments are engaged in negotiations on limiting Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. officials say they are less convinced that top Iranian and Hezbollah leaders worked together to coordinate the attempted hits, noting that both groups have a long history of committing such acts on their own, and for their own purposes.
“The idea that Iran and Hezbollah might have worked together on these attempts is possible,” said a senior U.S. official who has studied the evidence, “but this conclusion is not definitive.”
2) ????? vs. Iran
A new computer threat against Iran has been discovered. The Washington Post reports, Newly identified computer virus, used for spying, is 20 times size of Stuxnet:
Flame contains 20 megabytes of code. Though malware’s size is not per se a measure of sophistication, Schouwenberg said, in this case “its size shows that it’s taken a lot of time and work to create.”
So far Kaspersky, which has clients around the world, has identified Flame infections primarily in Iran, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries but none in Europe or North America. The infections have hit computers belonging to individuals, educational institutions and state- related organizations, Kaspersky said.
The virus’s creators seemed interested in general intelligence — e-mails, documents, even instant messages, Kaspersky said. But the lab has no evidence so far to document any data stolen.
Kaspersky is a Russian anti-virus firm. I guess (but can't be certain) that they're in the employ of Iran.
Wired has more (via Instapundit):
Symantec, which has also begun analyzing Flame (which it calls “Flamer”), says the majority of its customers who have been hit by the malware reside in the Palestinian West Bank, Hungary, Iran, and Lebanon. They have received additional reports from customer machines in Austria, Russia, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates.
Researchers say the compilation date of modules in Flame appear to have been manipulated by the attackers, perhaps in an attempt to thwart researchers from determining when they were created.
“Whoever created it was careful to mess up the compilation dates in every single module,” Gostev said. “The modules appear to have been compiled in 1994 and 1995, but they’re using code that was only released in 2010.”
3) Jenin and nation building
The Washington Post reports on the Drama in West Bank city of Jenin shows cracks in Palestinian nation-building project:
The Jenin events have alarmed the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, where officials are divided on the strategy of building state institutions as a step toward nationhood, and even defenders of the idea say its credibility has a limited shelf life.
“The calm and stability that you achieve in the occupied territories cannot be maintained for a long period of time without any sort of political progress toward a final agreement,” said Qais Abdul-Karim, a Palestinian lawmaker who said he never supported the state-building project. Today, he said, “there is a lot of unrest in the security services.”
What's frustrating about this way of portraying the security issue is that it ignores other factors.
One is that it is Abbas who has refused to negotiate. The lack of political progress is the fault of the Palestinians.
Two, even as Abbas insists that he is interested in peace with Israel, he seems a lot closer to Hamas. The New York Times reports, Hamas Takes Step Toward Palestinian Unity Government:
Mr. Haniya began talks with officials from the Central Elections Commission, a group appointed by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to begin registering voters in preparation for an election.
Hamas — among its many disputes with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party and the Palestinian Authority — had banned the elections commission from operating in Gaza. That move had delayed a deal that Qatar brokered in February between Hamas and Fatah that envisioned the appointment of a transitional government that would rule both the West Bank and Gaza in preparation for elections.
Hanna Nasser, the head of the elections commission, told reporters after the meeting that Mr. Haniya had “blessed” its role in Gaza. “Now, the C.E.C. works in complete confidence,” he said.
This will likely amount to nothing as neither Hams nor Fatah seems willing to subordinate its will to the other. But Hamas should be beyond the pale if Fatah is interested in peace. Time after time, though, Abbas seeks agreements with Hamas without insisting that it change its official position regarding Israel.
Finally, the complaint that the security cooperation has a "shelf life" would be more convincing if the official Palestinian media wasn't regularly calling for the destruction of Israel.
Contrary to the Palestinian Authority's claim that it recognizes Israel's right to exist, PA TV and official cultural events continue to reinforce the message of non-recognition of Israel by depicting all of Israel as "Palestine."
This month marked the 27th broadcast by official PA TV of a song that presents all of Israel's land as Palestinian land. The song was originally performed at a Fatah event last year in the presence of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and many other senior PA officials. The Palestinian singer declares that "my land" and "our coast" span from Rosh Hanikra in Israel's north to Rafah in the Gaza Strip in the south, and from Haifa on Israel's western coast to Beit Shean on Israel's eastern border.
Nation building isn't the only obligation of the Palestinian Authority. Rejecting terror and promoting coexistence are parallel obligations that the PA still seems reticent to fulfill.
4) Not Jordan
Last week I wrote about Sen. Mark Kirk's efforts to have Palestinian refugees accounted for. I wrote that Jordan was against the effort.
An alert reader pointed out that I didn't read carefully enough:
An intensive background set of discussions took place between Leahy, the State Department, Kirk's office, and the Jordanian Embassy, two congressional aides told The Cable. Initially the Jordanians were inclined to oppose the amendment and agreed with Leahy, but after being given the final text, decided not to weigh in on what is essentially an internal U.S. government reporting requirement.
"The government of Jordan has informed congressional staff they do not oppose the Kirk amendment," one senior GOP Senate aide said. "That is definitely the correct decision for a foreign government, as this is simply a request for info on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer to the U.S. state department."
Labels: Abu Mazen, computer virus, Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, Iranian assassination plots, Iranian nuclear threat, Jenin, Jordan, Middle East Media Sampler, Palestinian Authority Television, Soccer Dad
Mossad warns Turkey
The Mossad has warned Turkey that
Iranian Revolutionary Guards plan to attack Israeli diplomats in Turkey.
Israel’s main intelligence service has warned Ankara the diplomatic missions of Israel in Turkey could face “bomb attacks,” according to a story aired yesterday on NTV news channel.
A letter was sent from Mossad to the National Intelligence Agency (MİT) claiming the “Iranian Revolutionary Guards-Quds Force” is preparing to attack Israeli targets on Turkish soil. Contacted by the Hürriyet Daily News, MİT sources neither confirmed nor denied the story. NTV said four individuals have “entered Turkey from Iran” with weapons and materials to be used in the alleged attacks.
You have to wonder what the Mossad thinks that Turkey is going to do with this information. It's possible that the Turks might even help the Iranians - that can't be discounted with the AKP in charge.
It's time to bring Israel's diplomats home from Turkey as Turkey has brought its diplomats home from Israel. The relationship is over.
Labels: Iranian assassination plots, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mossad, Turkey
Bumbling Iranian bombers cavorted with Thai prostitutes before it all blew up
Remember pictures came out after 9/11 of the terrorists out on the town with prostitutes? Well, look at
this:
The three bungling Iranian bombers detained in Bangkok after they accidentally set off their explosives cavorted with prostitutes at a beach resort days before the botched attacks.
A photograph has emerged of the trio cosying up to sex workers, surrounded by hookah-pipes and drinks, in a bar in the notoriously sleazy city of Pattaya.
The revelation comes as it emerged police are now hunting for two more suspects, including a possible bomb expert, they think helped the trio as they set about targeting Israeli diplomats.
Targeting Israeli diplomats. What a shock.
Labels: Iranian assassination plots, Islamic terrorism, Thailand
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Friday, November 18.
1) Why do rational people make irrational decisions?
If you follow baseball, like I do, you've probably noticed that baseball has changed a bit in the past 20 years. Whether it is the way teams evaluate player or reporters cover the game, statistical analysis is playing a bigger role in baseball. Bill James, who spurred this revolution in baseball, wrote the following observations:
“Baseball men, living from day to day in the clutch of carefully metered chance occurrences, have developed an entire bestiary of imagined causes to tie together and thus make sense of patterns that are in truth entirely accidental,” James wrote. “They have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings. It includes ‘momentum,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘seeing the ball well,’ ‘slumps,’ ‘guts,’ ‘clutch ability,’ being ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ ‘not being aggressive’ and my all time favorite the ‘intangibles.’ By such concepts, the baseball man gains a feeling of control over a universe that swings him up and down and tosses him from side to side like a yoyo in a high wind.” It wasn’t just baseball he was writing about, James continued. “I think that the randomness of fate applies to all of us as much as baseball men, though it might be exacerbated by the orderliness of their successes and failures.”
The letter quoted here, was written to Amos Tversky. Tversky and his colleague, Daniel Kahneman described thought processes that explained why people would make bad decisions even if they seemingly had all the necessary information and expertise to make good ones.
Michael Lewis (of "Moneyball" fame) caught up with Dr. Kahneman and got him to describe his conclusions. Writing for Vanity Fair, Lewis explained (h/t Rob Neyer):
Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.
What does this have to do with the Middle East?
Read Barry Rubin's latest column:
I’ve come to realize a hitherto hidden dimension of why it is so hard for Western establishment figures (policymakers, journalists, and academics) to understand the Middle East. It is the conflict between the thirst for good news and the reality of bad news.
Being optimists (based on the relatively good course of their own societies?) and believing that positive change is really easy if people only put their minds to making it happen (ditto and also liberal thinking), they exaggerate any sign that things are getting better.
Moreover, contemporary thinking trembles in horror about saying anything critical about Third World peoples (racism, Islamophobia) while it is considered noble to criticize “ourselves.” On top of that is the assumption that no one can really be radical. They are just responding to past mistreatment and will revert to being moderate the minute the oppression is corrected.
So constantly we are led to an artificial optimism that ignores threats or even converts them into benefits.
Prof Rubin is effectively describing a collective of "System 1" thinkers dominating field of Middle East studies, diplomacy and journalism.
2) Family reunited
Ten years ago, then PM Ariel Sharon gave a wonderful speech at the Gruenewald Railway Station in Germany
Here at Gruenewald railway station, on these platforms, on 39.11.42, three children of the Bobkar family - Maly, Hala and Abraham - stood here by themselves. Perhaps the two older sisters held their seven-year-old brother by the hand.
They stood here without mother or father and the train came. The transport number was #23, the destination was Auschwitz, they were among the first. The Wansee Conference had taken place not long before, on the other side of the forest.
The Bobkar children, as Sharon told, were on the way to their deaths.
I was reminded of Ariel Sharon's speech when I read, Long lost cousins unite in Israel thanks to family photo uploaded to online Holocaust database. The stories have a common element: young children alone facing the Nazis. But in the case of Nahum and Yaakov Korenblum, they survived. Though they never met again, now their children have.
In 1958, shortly after Yaakov moved to Israel, he and his wife filled out a page of testimony at Yad Vashem commemorating his dead parents. Nahum had meanwhile settled in Ukraine, where his surname was mangled into Koramblyum. For the rest of their lives, the brothers searched for each other in vain, the paper trail often coming to a dead end because of the differing spellings of their names.
In 2006, Yaakov’s daughter, Bracha Fleishman-Korenblum, updated the online entry, attaching an old black-and-white photo of her grandparents and four of their children — including Nahum and Yaakov.
Two months ago, one of Nahum’s American grandchildren stumbled upon the entry and was shocked to recognize his grandfather in the picture. He reached out to the Korenblum clan in Israel and a reunion was put into motion.
3) The Iran Mexico axis
A few weeks ago it was reported that a couple of Iranians had plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Iranians were intending to enlist a Mexican drug ring to carry out the hit. But what was the connection.
This week the London Times reported (h/t Honest Reporting) that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were engaged in the international drug trade. A shorter version of the article appears to have been published in the Australian.
Iranian sources, including a former IRGC intelligence officer, have named two senior figures within the Guard involved in the drug trade. Abdullah Araghi, the IRGC commander for Greater Tehran, is alleged to have extensive connections with gangs in Eastern Europe. Mohsen Rafighdoost was head of the IRGC in the 1980s and has maintained close contact with the organisation since retiring.
Sajjad Haghpanah, a former investigator with the IRGC's domestic intelligence division, said drug trafficking was endemic within the unit.
"There are several commanders involved in smuggling narcotics. Raw opium or morphine is smuggled in from Afghanistan and developed in labs inside Iran," said Mr Haghpanah. "They work with criminal gangs to move it overseas. They have their own ships, aircraft and haulage companies, everything needed for import and export. Their power is limitless."
Is this where the suspects first came into contact with drug gangs?
4) NGO proliferation
In a recent article about NGO legislation in Israel, Professor Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor is cited:
Gerald Steinberg, the group’s president, said, however, that he opposed the two new bills under consideration. He added that he suspected they would not survive.
... He said that European governments spend more per year on left-wing Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups than their total contributions to nonprofit human rights groups in other countries in the Middle East.
“We estimate that together, this amounts to between $75 and $100 million from European governments to Israeli and Palestinian groups annually, far exceeding funding for human rights and democracy organizations in the rest of the region,” he said.
That's a pretty ridiculous focus on Israel. Daled Amos provides (NGO Monitor's) chart. It looks like a number of people are well paid for digging up damaging information against Israel and then being a primary source for news stories.
Regarding the last item, recall
this.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Holocaust survivors, Iranian assassination plots, mainstream media, Mexico, Middle East Media Sampler, NGO Monitor, Soccer Dad
This should have been done a long time ago
The Los Angeles Times reports on Friday that Iran's
failed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and to blow up with Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington (although for some reason they mention Argentina rather than Israel), has convinced the Obama administration to consider sanctioning Iran's Central Bank. For once, it sounds like these sanctions
could actually do something.
David Cohen, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the Senate Banking Committee that officials were "looking very actively" at such a step and might carry it out if other nations could be persuaded to follow suit.
The blacklisting is the first specific step the administration has identified as a possible response to the alleged plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's envoy to the United States and to attack embassies in the U.S. and Argentina.
Such sanctions would aim to isolate the Bank Markazi, or central bank, from the world economic system by barring any firm that deals with it from doing business with U.S. financial institutions. That would make it far more difficult for Iran to sell crude oil, which funds much of the government's activities.
Some Iranian officials have warned that they would look on such a move as an act of war.
...
Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said the administration's sanctions so far hadn't been enough to dissuade Iran from continuing its nuclear program or sponsoring terrorism. He called on the White House to "move quickly to implement the most effective nonmilitary response: cutting off the central bank of Iran and collapsing the Iranian currency." The move would "economically cripple" Iran, his office said in a statement.
Mark Dubowitz, a specialist on sanctions at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said a so-called designation of the bank would not halt all of Iran's crude oil sales, but it would sharply raise the cost of such transactions and thus "drain the Iranian treasury." He said Iran, the third-largest OPEC oil exporter, is a "one-crop country" that derives 50% to 75% of its government revenue from crude oil.
Congress last year slapped sanctions on Iranian banks involved in the energy sector to bar them from contact with the U.S. financial system. But U.S. officials say these banks have continued to conduct oil business because the central bank has secretly carried out the transactions on their behalf.
In his testimony, Cohen said U.S. officials were also considering another proposal many lawmakers favor: halting all sales of oil products made from Iranian crude to the U.S. market. Americans use gasoline that is refined from Iranian crude by international oil companies, which then distribute it in the United States. Cohen said Treasury economists were studying that proposal to evaluate its effect on oil markets.
Both these steps are long overdue. I find it incredible that Americans are buying gasoline that's being made from Iranian crude oil.
Labels: Iranian assassination plots, Iranian central bank, Israeli embassy, Saudi embassy
