Iran accuses US, Britain, Israel of deadly suicide bomb attack
English.news.cn 2010-12-16 02:21:52
TEHRAN, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- Iran on Wednesday accused the United States, Britain and Israel of involving in the deadly suicide bomb attack in the country which left 39 killed and more than 50 others wounded.
The attack occurred in front of the Imam Hussein mosque in southeastern port city of Chabahar on Wednesday when people gathered for a mourning ceremony on the religious occasion of Tasua, local satellite Press TV said.
Tasua is commemorated by Shiite Muslims, marking the eve of the day when Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, was killed. According to media, the Pakistan-based Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God' s soldiers) has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack.
Chief of Iran's Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi accused the United States and Britain of involving in the attack, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported.
"The experience from the past incidents indicate that the U.S. and U.K. intelligent services are behind the crimes like the Wednesday morning bombing in Chabahar," Boroujerdi was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Ali Abdollahi told official IRNA news agency that the equipment and facilities nabbed on Wednesday revealed that the bombing agents were supported by the intelligent services of the region and the United States.
Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said Wednesday that such terrorist acts "are funded by the U.S. and Israeli intelligent services," according to local Mehr News agency.
"In the past, the United States recruited some in Afghanistan to create discord among Shiite and Sunni Muslims (by carrying out terrorist acts)," Larijani was quoted as saying.
Chabahar is the Iranian port city on the coast of Oman Sea situated in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province with the majority of ethnic Baluchis and Sunni Muslims.
"Israel and the U.S. intelligent services are behind these terrorist acts and they should know that such behaviors will receive response from the Iranian nation," Larijani said.
According to the official IRNA news agency, Director General of Sistan-Baluchestan provincial Forensic Medicine Office Fariborz Ayati said some women and children were among the victims.
An unidentified police commander of Sistan-Baluchestan province was quoted as saying by ISNA that four policemen were among the victims as well.
According to an earlier report by ISNA, the explosion occurred at 10:30 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) in front of the governor's office building of Chabahar in Sistan-Baluchestan province close to an emergency car of the Red Crescent Society.
Over the past three days, there had been threats of bomb attacks against mourners in Sistan-Baluchestan, and the emergency staff has been on alert, Iranian Red Crescent Society chief Mahmoud Mozaffar was quoted as saying by ISNA, adding that among the injured, six were emergency workers.
Meanwhile, the state IRIN TV said three suicide bombers were involved in the attack. Only one of them succeeded, the second was shot dead, and the last was arrested.
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.
Whether the bombing is ordered by the named foreign services, intel money has gone to groups that conduct armed attacks in Iran. Terror attacks are part of the package. One may wonder which of these groups would exist without the covert operations funding. There's a covert war, except it's not covert, but in that grey area where it is sometimes announced with pride and sometimes denied at the pleasure of the sponsor governments. This activity has subverted and tainted the civil opposition in Iran, and ends up strengthening the most repressive elements there, which suits the hardliners on this side.
May 24, 2007: ABC News reports on Bush regime finding for secret CIA action to undermine government in Iran as alternative to Cheney-backed plan for direct military action. Called a "non-lethal" finding authorizing propaganda and infiltration, but mention is made of proxy war via longstanding ties to mujahedeen forces inside Iran. See the reporters joke at the end if the CIA isn't actually happy to have them reveal the operation as a form of "rattling the cage." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wg3r2YSM9g
July 7, 2008: Seymour Hersh expose in The New Yorker on efforts authorized by Congress to destabilize Iran. A decentralized or parapolitical dimension is clear: "Operations outside the knowledge and control of commanders have eroded 'the coherence of military strategy,' one general says." But they enhance plausible deniability! Article has been discussed here before, some excerpts:
Preparing the Battlefield The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran. by Seymour M. Hersh July 7, 2008
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003.
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Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
Former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has distributed 400 million dollars inside Iran to evoke a revolution.
In a phone interview with the Pashto Radio on Monday, General Beig said that there is undisputed intelligence proving the US interference in Iran.
“The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election,” he added.
Pakistan’s former army chief of joint staff went on to say that the US wanted to disturb the situation in Iran and bring to power a pro-US government.
He congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re- election for the second term in office, noting that Pakistan relationship with Iran has improved during his 4-year presidency.
“Ahmadinejad’s re-election is a decisive point in regional policy and if Pakistan and Afghanistan unite with Iran, the US has to leave the area, especially the occupied Afghanistan,” Beig added.
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline: I am by virtue of its might divine, The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
Yes JR, though as always we can only speculate on the point of origin of the enabling of these horrible events, I think the Iran government is on the right track. Good background links, thanks.
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.
