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by Simulist » Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:15 pm
The US, Israel and many Western nations have opposed Iran's atomic programme, fearing it may be a front to creating a nuclear bomb.
by elfismiles » Wed Jan 11, 2012 1:23 pm
Magnetic bomb kills nuclear scientist in Iran; Israel accused
'Western powers and their allies appear to be relying on covert war tactics to try to delay and degrade Iran's nuclear advancement,' security expert says
TEHRAN, Iran — Two assailants on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to the car of an Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility, killing him and wounding two people on Wednesday, a semiofficial news agency reported.
The attack in Tehran bore a strong resemblance to earlier killings of scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program. It is certain to reinforce authorities' claims of widening clandestine operations by Western powers and allies to try to cripple nuclear advancements.
The bomb killed Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported. Natanz is Iran's main enrichment site, but officials claimed earlier this week that they are expanding some operations to an underground site south of Tehran with more advanced equipment.
•Iran eyes US, Israel in killing of nuke expert (on this page)
Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorcycle fix a bomb to the car.
"The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and is the work of the (Israelis)," Fars quoted Tehran's Deputy Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying. "The terrorist attack is a conspiracy to undermine the (March 2) parliamentary elections."
'Our path is irreversible'
Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said the country's nuclear path would not change despite the killing, which it branded a "heinous act".
."Our path is irreversible," Arabic language al-Alam TV quoted an agency statement as saying.
The U.S. and its allies are pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment, a key element of the nuclear program that the West suspects is aimed at producing atomic weapons. Uranium enriched to low levels can be used as nuclear fuel but at higher levels, it can be used as material for a nuclear warhead. Iran denies it is trying to make nuclear weapons.
•Ahmadinejad, Chavez joke about 'big atomic bomb'
Tehran has accused Israel's Mossad, the CIA and Britain's spy agency of engaging in an underground "terrorism" campaign against nuclear-related targets, including at least three slayings since early 2010 and the release of a malicious computer virus known at Stuxnet in 2010 that temporarily disrupted controls of some centrifuges — a key component in nuclear fuel production. All three countries have denied the Iranian accusations.
But Israeli officials have hinted about covert campaigns against Iran without directly admitting involvement.
On Tuesday, Israeli military chief Lt. Gen Benny Gantz was quoted as telling a parliamentary panel that 2012 would be a "critical year" for Iran — in part because of "things that happen to it unnaturally."
Fars via AFP - Getty Images
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was reportedly in charge of purchasing and supplying equipment for the Natanz enrichment facility. Roshan, 32, was inside the Iranian-assembled Peugeot 405 car together with two others when the bomb exploded in north Tehran, Fars reported.
Roshan was a graduate of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.
•Iran sentences US man to death for spying
Roshan was involved in building polymeric layers for gas separation, which is the use of various membranes to isolate gases. He was also deputy director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, in central Iran, for commercial affairs. According to conservative news website, mashreghnews.ir, Roshan was in charge of purchasing and supplying equipment for the Natanz enrichment facility.
A similar bomb explosion on Jan. 12, 2010, killed Tehran University professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a senior physics professor. He was killed when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded near his car as he was about to leave for work.
In November 2010, a pair of back-to-back bomb attacks in different parts of the capital killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another.
The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, was a member of the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran and cooperated with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. The wounded scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, was almost immediately appointed head of Iran's atomic agency.
And in July 2011, motorcycle-riding gunmen killed Darioush Rezaeinejad, an electronics student. Other reports identified him as a scientist involved in suspected Iranian attempts to make nuclear weapons.
Rezaeinejad allegedly participated in developing high-voltage switches, a key component in setting off the explosions needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.
The United States and other countries say Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons technology. Iran denies the allegations, saying that its program is intended for peaceful purposes.
..Video: War of words with Iran escalates (on this page)
The latest blast is certain to bring fresh charges by Iran that the U.S. and allies are waging a clandestine campaign of bloodshed and sabotage in attempts to set back Iran's nuclear efforts.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45953703/ns ... _n_africa/
by Nordic » Wed Jan 11, 2012 2:41 pm
More murder of Iranian scientists: still terrorism?
BY GLENN GREENWALD
In this photo provided by the semi-official Fars News Agency, people gather around a bombed car in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012 (Credit: AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Mehdi Marizad)
(updated below – Update II)
Several days ago I referenced a controversy that arose in 2007 when the law professor and right-wing blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds criticized President Bush for not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and then advocated that the U.S. respond by murdering that nation’s religious leaders and nuclear scientists. “We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists . . . ,” he argued. The backlash against Reynolds’ suggestion was intense, especially among progressive writers.
Back then, I wrote about Reynolds’ suggestion several times, but I was far from alone. Law Professor Paul Campos wrote a column in the Rocky Mountain News denouncing Reynolds for publicly advocating “murder,” which, he pointed out, is exactly what this would be given that the U.S. is not at war with Iran (he went on to suggest that targeting civilian religious leaders and scientists would still be murder even if the U.S. were at war with Iran); Campos added: “government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.” Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller documented with absolute clarity that such assassinations would be illegal in the absence of a formal war.
But the angriest reactions came from progressive bloggers, who widely denounced Reynolds as “contemptible” for suggesting this; one progressive writer, Lindsay Beyerstein, was horrified that one could even suggest such a thing, explaining that she ”despair[s] for our society when it’s necessary to supply a rigorous analytical exposition of why our government shouldn’t have scientists and religious leaders whacked.” Scott Lemieux railed against what he called Reynolds’ “kooky scheme for illegal death squads” as “crackpot,” “dumb” and “nuttier than a Planters factory.” And Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, went the furthest of all — in a post he entitled “Terrorism” — branding the killing of Iran’s scientists as “Terrorism”:
I imagine a lot of people agree with [Reynolds], but his recommendation really demonstrates the moral knot caused by George Bush’s insistence that we’re fighting a “war on terror.” After all, killing civilian scientists and civilian leaders, even if you do it quietly, is unquestionably terrorism. That’s certainly what we’d consider it if Hezbollah fighters tried to kill cabinet undersecretaries and planted bombs at the homes of Los Alamos engineers.
If you think Iran is a mortal enemy that needs to be dealt with via military force, you can certainly make that case. But if you’re going to claim that terrorism is a barbaric tactic that has to be stamped out, you can hardly endorse its use by the United States just because it’s convenient in this particular case.
What is most amazing about all this is that, a mere three years later, some combination of Israel and the U.S. are doing exactly that which Reynolds recommended. Numerous Iranian nuclear scientists are indeed being murdered.
In January, 2010, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle killed Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, who “taught neutron physics at Tehran University.” In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten; Rezaei “did his doctorate in neutron transport – which lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in reactors and bombs” and “was a member of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the country’s official atomic energy commission.”
And now, yet another Iranian scientist has been killed. According to Iranian media, a 32-year-old university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, died when an assailant riding on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car, which then detonated and killed him. According to The Washington Post‘s Thomas Erdbrink, a conservative news outlet in Iran reported that the young scientist “was believed to be involved in procuring materials for Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz.”
What’s most remarkable here is to compare the boisterous, furious denunciations of the mere suggestion by a blogger on the Internet that Iranian scientists be killed, versus the relative silence in the face of its actually being done in real life, now that the corpses of murdered Iranian scientists are beginning to pile up. Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.
I have no doubt that Professors Campos and Heller would apply the same legal rationale now that it’s actually being done, but what about the progressives who so stridently denounced Reynolds? Does Lemieux still believe that whoever is responsible — Israel, the U.S., or some combination — is guilty of dispatching “illegal death squads”? Does Beyerstein still “despair for our society” that such acts could even be contemplated? Does Drum still believe that whichever political leaders are responsible for these killings are Terrorists; specifically: if, as is widely assumed, the Israelis are responsible, does that mean that Israel is a Terrorist state, and if U.S. agencies are complicit in some way, does that mean President Obama is a Terrorist, a state sponsor of Terrorism or, at the very least, a supporter of Terrorism?
In general, the American covert war against Iran is extraordinarily dangerous and probably illegal (it’s certainly unauthorized), but in particular, the assassination of Iran’s scientists is just reprehensible. Now that it’s actually happening, one wishes the reaction to it were even partially as aggressive as it was when a right-wing blogger suggested it.
* * * * *
Three other brief noteworthy items: (1) yet again, the New York Times’ Public Editor admonishes that newspaper for baseless reporting about Iran that overstates the threat it poses (specifically for overstating the IAEA’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program); FAIR first raised objections to the offending article last week; (2) here is a telling scene from Tom Friedman’s current field trip to Cairo; and (3) a sixth-grader named Wolf writes a nice little school report for his civics class on the presidential race.
UPDATE: This morning, Haaretz has a timeline of what it calls “Mysterious deaths and blasts linked to Iran’s nuclear program” — and by “linked to,” they mean: “aimed at” (h/t James Carter). It includes the murder of these scientists as well as various explosions killing many people. If you removed the proper nouns from this timeline (Iran, Ahmadinejad, Natanz), very few people would have any doubt that this is Terrorism.
UPDATE II: The right-wing religious extremist Rick Santorum said previously: ”On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly”; he added: “I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.” This is how he justified all that:
If people say, “well, you can’t go out and assassinate people” — well, tell that to Awlaki. OK, we’ve done it. We’ve done it to an American citizen, so we can certainly do it to someone who’s producing a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on the state of Israel . . . .
We better hope and pray Rick Santorum never becomes President or else the legal prohibitions against assassinations will simply be ignored and that will become standard American policy — oh, wait. Meanwhile, long-time commenter DCLaw1 poses this question:
Even for people who don’t believe the US has anything to do with the assassination of Iranian scientists, just flip the scenario: how would they react to news that Israeli scientists were being systematically murdered, and Iranian officials just smiled and acted coy when asked about it? What would they say about that, and what would they say the US and Israel would be justified to do in response?
To answer that, just consider the consensus outrage that spewed forth when it was claimed (ridiculously) that Iran was sponsoring a Terror plot on U.S. soil to have a failed Texan used car salesman to hire Mexican drug cartels to kill the Saudi ambassador: Terrorism!
by MinM » Sat Sep 22, 2012 7:06 pm
semper occultus wrote:Mossad's Press Officer is back on duty :
Mossad: was this the chief's last hit?
A personal insight into Mossad and the murder of a top Iranian nuclear scientist
By Gordon Thomas 9:44AM GMT 05 Dec 2010 www.telegraph.co.uk
Meir Dagan, the outgoing head of Mossad; and Fareydoun Abbasi-Davani's damaged car Photo: AP
Inside a secret bomb-proof building in a Tel Aviv suburb, which Google Earth does not include on its website, some of the occupants last week exchanged high-fives at their work stations. According to insiders, several sent each other the same message: The Chief’s Last Hit...
Iran: “We Lied!” — not really
By Cyrus Safdari | Iran Affairs | September 21, 2012
Naturally, the New York Times seized on this — the story that an official in charge of Iran’s nuclear program, Fereydoon Abbasi, has “admitted” that Iran occasionally tried to mislead on its nuclear program:
Iran’s top atomic energy official said in an article published Thursday that because of foreign espionage, his government had sometimes provided false information to protect its nuclear program.
Note the crucial bit of missing information here, left out by the NY Times in order to spin this sentence as some sort of “confession” by Iran of having hidden nukes: WHO WHOM? TO WHOM has he said Iran provided false information – to the IAEA or to Western spies?
Because that’s a real crucial bit of difference! Needless to explain: There’s generally no obligation on a country to allow foreign spying, especially when its scientists are being assassinated. However the NY Time’s simply runs with the assumption that this official is saying “We lied to the IAEA because we’re making nukes” rather than “We tried to mislead foreign intelligence agencies so they would not assassinate us”. Go back and read it again, better yet read the original Arabian news report. Or translate it. You won’t see him saying “We lied TO THE IAEA because we’re hiding nukes” Instead, he’s referring to foreign intelligence agencies. But that’s not how the NY Times spins it.
The bottom line is, as much as the NY Times and friends would like to exploit this sentence, there is still no evidence of any nuclear weapons program, and Iran has never diverted nuclear material for non-peaceful uses, and all of this is verified by regular, intensive IAEA inspections. So what precisely is it that Iran has been lying about to the IAEA? Because the IAEA would sure like to know.
Of course the NY Times has to raise the suspicions by referring to a list of events in a one-sided way. For example, the Times repeats the lie that Iran “hid” its enrichment facilities until 2002 — but in fact Iran had simply not officially declared them to the IAEA since legally it wasn’t obligated to do so yet, and in any case Iran’s enrichment program was in fact never a secret. Or, the lie that Iran was “hiding” Fordo and only disclosed it when it had found out that the US knew about it? What a sad attempt to distort the true facts: Iran is not legally obligated to disclose a facility until 180-days prior to the introduction of nuclear material into the facility. If the US “beats them to the punch” and makes the site publicly known, it wasn’t because Iran was “hiding” it – it was simply not within the 180-day time limit yet. And aside from that, the IAEA went to Fordo and investigated it, and the IAEA director said bluntly that it was nothing more than a hole in a mountain and nothing to be concerned about. That’s another crucial bit of fact left out by the Times. Or the lie that Iran is not cooperating with IAEA efforts about the infamous “Alleged Studies” — leaving out the crucial fact that Iran has responded to them, to the best degree possible, especially considering that the IAEA has not been permitted by the US to actually show the evidence to Iran, that Iran is expected to rebut – something the former IAEA director complained about in his book where he also recounted that some of the documents cited as proof of Iranian nukes were in fact so obvious forgeries that in one case he simply returned the document to the Israelis who had provided it to him. (I’m too tired to find all the links verifying what I’ve written here – google it.)
So what’s really going on here? Why is the NY Times putting this spin on the story? Because for the longest time they’ve been looking for a way to kill the US National Intelligence Estimate, which has been saying for a while now that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and has shown no interest in one either. Boy when that NIE came out, it went off like a bomb. Bush ran off to Israel and disassociated himself from his own intelligence agencies. There was talk about intelligence agencies having carried out a “coup” and gone rogue. The Israelis were steaming. They’ve been pressing ever since to either get that NIE rewritten, or to somehow find a way around it, even if it means denigrating US intelligence analysts. Well, here you go! Here’s an Iranian official saying “We lied”. How much hay can you make out of that?!
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2012/09 ... ot-really/
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