THE HANDSTAND |
FEBRUARY-MARCH2010
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IRAN
updated:
Secret CIA-Mossad meeting ?;
Preparation for new war?
Mon, 01 Feb 2010
A secret meeting between the Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli
officials has reportedly centered on Iran's nuclear
program. In a flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the
head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran's nuclear issue
in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. The
trip, which was originally scheduled to take place in May,
follows a recent wave of developments in the Middle East
that are strongly imply preparations for a possible new
military conflict in the region.
Israel has allegedly increased the scope of its
undercover operations in the region, particularly against
Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian resistance
movement, Hamas. The extent of this could be seen in
recent remarks by Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled,
in which the former army general explicitly said that
another confrontation with Lebanon's resistance movement
Hezbollah was almost inevitable. Lebanon's Prime Minister
Saad Hariri responded to the claims on Thursday, saying
that Israel's threats against Hezbollah are perceived as
threats against Lebanon. "We consider the Israeli
threats on Lebanon to be a threat to the Lebanese
government as a whole, rather than to one particular
person," said Hariri during a joint news conference
with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Reuters
reported.
Meanwhile, Hamas officials say they have concrete
evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad,
staged the recent assassination of a senior Hamas
commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on January 20.
Their claims have been somewhat supported by Dubai Police
Chief Dhahi Khalfan. "It could be Mossad," AFP
quoted police chief Dhahi Khalfan as saying on Sunday.
To add to the controversy, sources in Turkey's ruling
party told Russia's Mignews on Saturday that Israeli spy
agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from
the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on
communication networks in Iran and Syria. According to
the sources who were speaking on condition of anonymity,
the Signals Intelligence station was solely managed by
Israeli intelligence personnel and had become off-limits
for members of the Turkish government.
For years Israeli politicians have masterminded a wave of
undercover operations and terror plots in numerous
countries, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran,
Switzerland, and the US. However, much of Israel's
espionage operations have lately been focused on the
Tehran government, largely because of Iran's uranium
enrichment activities, which Tel Aviv has been seeking to
portray as a mortal threat.
Tel Aviv, which is reported to have an arsenal of 200
nuclear warheads itself, accuses Iran of developing
nuclear weapons and routinely threatens to reduce the
country's enrichment sites to rubble. This is while Iran,
unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty and has opened its enrichment facilities to UN
inspection.
On Saturday, US presidential aid James Jones rejected
prospects of an Israeli attack against Iran. Although US
officials normally deny having any plans to stage new war
in the region, there have recently been strong hints to
the contrary. The New York Times reported Saturday
that Washington will further increase its military
presence in the Persian Gulf allegedly to soup up
its defense against possible Iranian missile attacks.
Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has approved the
deployment of new combat equipments, including advanced
missile systems and special warships, to the region.
SBB/DTPress TV http://www.presstv.com/detail/117579.htm?sectionid=351020202
'West using Israel
as proxy to dominate Mideast'
Wed, 13 Jan 2010
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slams the US,
Britain and Israel for what he calls instigating another
war in the region.
Speaking to thousands of people in the southwestern city
of Ahvaz, Ahmadinejad said that the fabrication of Israel
and the sending of arms to the Middle East were aimed at
dominating the region and maintaining Western interests.
"The Zionist regime [of Israel] has been fabricated
for the sake of dominating the Middle East region,"
he said. "Realizing the fact that they cannot
achieve their goal through deception, they have resorted
to military expeditions, launching wars and occupation."
President Ahmadinejad said that even the 9/11 attacks are
believed by many experts to have been a US-Israeli plot
to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Iranian president slammed Saudi Arabia's involvement
in the Yemen war, saying that Riyadh had better used its
weapons against the Zionists.
"The arms sold by the West to Saudi Arabia are being
used against the people of the region and Muslims instead
of protecting them against the Zionists,"
Ahmadinejad said, urging the Saudi government to
contribute to the establishment of peace in Yemen.
The Iranian president also urged Yemeni parties to
resolve the crisis through negotiation, be wary of the
plots hatched by the enemies and protect the region from
insecurity.
"Insecurity will help the arrogant powers of the
world to interfere in regional affairs and we should
hamper the opportunistic objectives of the enemies."
The president also urged the Pakistani government and
nation to maintain their unity and be vigilant in the
face of US plots.
"The US is only thinking of its own interests and
the Pakistani people and government should not trust the
United States," President Ahmadinejad said.
Addressing the global arrogance, the Iranian president
said that they have faced a deadlock and the people of
Iran and the region have today realized their schemes and
will resist their conspiracies.
"You have no choice but to end your inhumane actions
and respect the rights of the Iranian people and the
region," he said, emphasizing that they would not be
able to harm the people of Iran in any manner.
TE/HGH/MMN
Report Ties Dubious
Iran Nuclear Docs to Israel
by Gareth Porter
IPS
June 5, 2009
A report on Irans nuclear programme issued by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month generated
news stories publicising an incendiary charge that U.S.
intelligence is underestimating Irans progress in
designing a nuclear warhead before the halt
in nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.
That false and misleading charge from an intelligence
official of a foreign country, who was not identified but
was clearly Israeli, reinforces two of Israels key
propaganda themes on Iran that the 2007 U.S.
National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong, and that
Tehran is poised to build nuclear weapons as soon as
possible.
But it also provides new evidence that Israeli
intelligence was the source of the collection of
intelligence documents which have been used to accuse
Iran of hiding nuclear weapons research.
The Committee report, dated May 4, cited unnamed
foreign analysts as claiming intelligence
that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003
because it had mastered the design and tested components
of a nuclear weapon and thus didnt need to work on
it further until it had produced enough sufficient
material.
That conclusion, which implies that Iran has already
decided to build nuclear weapons, contradicts both the
2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and current
intelligence analysis. The NIE concluded that Iran had
ended nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 because of
increased international scrutiny, and that it was
less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we
have been judging since 2005?.
The report included what appears to be a spectacular
revelation from a senior allied intelligence
official that a collection of intelligence
documents supposedly obtained by U.S. intelligence in
2004 from an Iranian laptop computer includes
blueprints for a nuclear warhead.
It quotes the unnamed official as saying that the
blueprints precisely matched similar
blueprints the officials own agency had
obtained from other sources inside Iran.
No U.S. or IAEA official has ever claimed that the so-called
laptop documents included designs for a nuclear
warhead. The detailed list in a May 26, 2008 IAEA
report of the contents of what have been called the
alleged studies intelligence documents
on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work made no
mention of any such blueprints.
In using the phrase blueprints for a nuclear
warhead, the unnamed official was evidently seeking
to conflate blueprints for the reentry vehicle of the
Iranian Shehab missile, which were among the alleged
Iranian documents, with blueprints for nuclear weapons.
When New York Times reporters William J. Broad and David
E. Sanger used the term nuclear warhead to
refer to a reentry vehicle in a Nov. 13, 2005 story on
the intelligence documents on the Iranian nuclear
programme, it brought sharp criticism from David Albright,
the president of the Institute for Science and
International Security.
This distinction is not minor, Albright
observed, and Broad should understand the
differences between the two objects, particularly when
the information does not contain any words such as
nuclear or nuclear warhead.
The Senate report does not identify the country for which
the analyst in question works, and the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee staff refused to respond to questions
about the report from IPS, including the reason why the
report concealed the identity of the country for which
the unidentified senior allied intelligence
official works.
Reached later in May, the author of the report, Douglas
Frantz, told IPS he is under strict instructions not to
speak with the news media.
After a briefing on the report for selected news media
immediately after its release, however, the Associated
Press reported May 6 that interviews were conducted in
Israel. Frantz was apparently forbidden by Israeli
officials from revealing their national affiliation as a
condition for the interviews.
Frantz, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times,
had extensive contacts with high-ranking Israeli military,
intelligence and foreign ministry officials before
joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He
and co-author Catherine Collins conducted interviews with
those Israeli officials for The Nuclear
Jihadist, published in 2007. The interviews were
all conducted under rules prohibiting disclosure of their
identities, according to the book.
The unnamed Israeli intelligence officers statement
that the blueprints for a nuclear warhead
meaning specifications for a missile reentry
vehicle were identical to designs his agency
had obtained from other sources in Iran suggests
that the documents collection which the IAEA has called
alleged studies actually originated in Israel.
A U.S.-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the
alleged studies intelligence documents
closely says he understands that the documents obtained
by U.S. intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored
on the laptop on which they were located when they were
brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as U.S.
officials have claimed to U.S. journalists.
The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says
the documents were collected by an intelligence network
and then assembled on a single laptop.
The anonymous Israeli intelligence officials claim,
cited in the Committee report, that the
blueprints in the alleged studies
collection matched documents his agency had gotten from
its own source seems to confirm the analysts
finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.
German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq or
MEK, the Iranian resistance organisation, brought the
laptop documents collection to the attention of U.S.
intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008.
Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the
National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back
to the early 1990s and include assistance to the
organisation in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.
The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz
uranium enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that
and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli
intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear
Sphinx of Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar,
revealed that Western intelligence was
laundered to hide its actual provenance by
providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially
NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.
They cite U.S., British and Israeli officials as sources
for the revelation.
New Yorker writer Connie Bruck wrote in a March 2006
article that an Israeli diplomat confirmed to her that
Israel had found the MEK useful but declined
to elaborate.
Israeli intelligence is also known to have been actively
seeking to use alleged Iranian documents to prove that
Iran had an active nuclear weapons programme just at the
time the intelligence documents which eventually surfaced
in 2004 would have been put together.
The most revealing glimpse of Israeli use of such
documents to influence international opinion on
Irans nuclear programme comes from the book by
Frantz and Collins. They report that Israels
international intelligence agency Mossad created a
special unit in the summer of 2003 to carry out a
campaign to provide secret briefings on the Iranian
nuclear programme, which sometimes included
documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.
The alleged studies collection of documents
has never been verified as genuine by either the IAEA or
by intelligence analysts. The Senate report said senior
United Nations officials and foreign intelligence
officials who had seen many of the documents
in the collection of alleged Iranian military documents
had told committee staff it is impossible to rule
out an elaborate intelligence ruse.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and
journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy.
The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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