rigorousintuition.ca

following the wikileaks news and this came up on bbc world. haven't seen it mentioned here yet, so.



BBC 29 November 2010 Last updated at 13:32 GMT
Iranian nuclear scientist killed in motorbike attack


The scientists were targeted in separate attacks on their way to work


An Iranian nuclear scientist has been killed and another wounded in two separate but similar attacks in the capital, Tehran.

The scientists were targeted by men on motorbikes who attached bombs to the windows of their cars as they drove to work, officials said.

The scientist killed has been named as Majid Shahriari.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused "Western governments" and Israel of being behind the killing.

Another scientist was killed in a bomb blast at the beginning of the year.

Dr Shahriari was a member of the nuclear engineering department of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. His wife is said to have been injured in the attack.

The nuclear scientist injured in the second attack was named as Fereydoon Abbasi. His wife was also wounded.

'Isotope specialist'
According to the conservative news website Mashregh News, Dr Abbasi is "one of the few specialists who can separate isotopes" - a process that is crucial in the manufacture of uranium fuel for nuclear power stations and is also required for the creation of uranium-based nuclear weapons.

Dr Abbasi has also been a member of the Revolutionary Guards since the 1979 revolution, the website said.

At a news conference, President Ahmadinejad accused Western powers and Israel of being behind the murder.

"One can undoubtedly see the hands of Israel and Western governments in the assassination which unfortunately took place," he said, without specifying which Western governments.

He said the assassination would not stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear programmes.

Earlier, state television reported a similar claim by Iran's Interior Minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, who accused US and Israeli intelligence services of killing the scientist.

"Mossad and the CIA are the enemies of Iranians and always seek to hurt this nation. They particularly want to stop our scientific progress," he said.

The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, who went to visit the surviving scientist in hospital, said he had a message for the country's enemies: "Do not play with fire".

Controversial programme

Masoud Ali Mohammadi died in a bomb blast in January as he left his home
The Iranian scientist killed in January this year, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, was said to be a nuclear scientist assassinated by counter-revolutionaries, Zionists and agents of the "global arrogance", Iranian media said at the time.

But scientists in the UK and the US said that, from his substantial body of published research, Dr Mohammadi was unlikely to have been working on Iran's nuclear programme, and that his expertise was in another field of physics altogether - quantum mechanics.

There has been much controversy over Iran's nuclear activities.

Tehran says its nuclear programme is for peaceful energy purposes, but the US and other Western nations suspect it of seeking to build nuclear weapons.

On Saturday, Iran said its first atomic power plant in the southern city of Bushehr had begun operations, ahead of a new round of talks with Western powers over the country's nuclear drive.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11860928

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Iranian nuclear scientist killed in bomb attack

AP
Monday, 29 November 2010

Motorbike-riding bombers killed a leading Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded another by planting explosives on their cars as they drove to work today.

State TV swiftly blamed Israel for the attacks. At least two other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in recent years in what Iran has said is part of a covert attempt by the West to damage its controversial nuclear programme.

Head of the country's nuclear operation Ali Akbar Salehi, issued a stern warning as he rushed to hospital to see the surviving scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi.

"Don't play with fire. The patience of the Iranian nation has limits. If it runs out of patience, bad consequences will await enemies," he said.

Mr Salehi, one of Iran's vice presidents, was apparently referring to Israel and the US, which Iran alleges are trying to damage its nuclear programme.

Tehran's uranium enrichment program is at the centre of a bitter row between Iran on one side and the US and its allies on the other. Uranium enrichment is a process that can be used to produce both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

Some countries suspect Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, an allegation the government denies. Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment has brought on multiple rounds of UN sanctions against the country.

Several active armed groups oppose Iran's ruling clerics, but it is unclear whether they could have carried out the apparently co-ordinated bombings in the capital. Most anti-government violence in recent years has been isolated to Iran's provinces such the border with Pakistan where Sunni rebels are active and the western mountains near Iraq where Kurdish separatists operate.

The attackers, who escaped, drove by their targets on motorcycles and attached the bombs as the cars were moving. They exploded shortly afterwards.

The attacks bore close similarities to another in January that killed Tehran University professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a senior physics professor. He died when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded near his car as he was about to leave for work.

In 2007, state TV reported that nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, died from gas poisoning. A one-week delay in the reporting of his death prompted speculation about the cause, including that Israel's Mossad spy agency was to blame.

Iran has continued to portray its nuclear programme as being under constant pressure from the West and its allies. These include alleged abductions of nuclear officials and, more recently, a computer worm known as Stuxnet that experts say was calibrated to destroy uranium-enrichment centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 46488.html

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Given the incessant threats to Iran over their nuclear program, it is not unreasonable to conclude that those originating the threats were behind the assassination/bombings.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101129/wl_afp/irannuclearunrest

Iran accuses CIA, Mossad of nuke scientist killing

Iranian leaders accused the US and Israeli intelligence services, the CIA and Mossad, of killing the two who were also professors at Tehran's prestigious Shahid Beheshti University.

"One can undoubtedly see the hands of Israel and Western governments in the assassination which unfortunately took place," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a news conference.

Ahmadinejad's office said in an earlier statement that "the Zionist regime this time shed the blood of university professor Dr. Majid Shahriari to curb Iran's progress."

Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said the "Mossad and the CIA are the enemies of Iranians" whose "desperate terrorist act against the two academics shows their weakness and inferiority."

Israel's foreign ministry declined to comment on the reports. Shahriari was "in charge of one of the great projects" at Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, the Islamic republic's nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

He was also a member of the so-called SESAME project on nuclear cooperation in the Middle East.
The other scientist, Abbasi Davani, was targeted by UN Security Council sanctions under Resolution 1747 adopted in March 2007. He was identified as a senior defence ministry and armed forces logistics scientist.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101202/wl_mideast_afp/irannuclearunrest

Iran makes arrests over nuclear scientist killing

AFP/Fars News Agency
– Thu Dec 2, 2:47 pm ET

TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran said on Thursday it has arrested "some elements" working with Western spy agencies and connected to the murder of a senior nuclear scientist, amid claims Tehran's scientists were the targets of "terrorists."

"The three spy agencies of Mossad, CIA and MI6 had a role in the (attacks) and, with the arrest of these people, we will find new clues to arrest other elements," Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi was quoted as saying on state television's website.

Moslehi did not say how many people were arrested or what specifically they are accused of. He only said they were a part of a "major group" that took part in the killing and that planned to carry out "widespread missions."

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.

That “chief” was Meir Dagan, the outgoing head of Mossad. On his first day in office eight years ago, Mr Dagan had stood on a table in the organisation’s canteen and promised to support any operation against any of Israel’s enemies, with every means he had — legal or illegal.

He could allow his field agents to use prescribed nerve toxins, dumdum bullets and methods of killing that even the Russian or Chinese secret services would not use.

“We are like the hangman, or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection,” he said, as – by his own account – his agents listened, enthralled.

“Our actions are all endorsed by the state of Israel. When we kill we are not breaking the law. We are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

Earlier this month, “the chief” and a small team of specialists — analysts, weapons experts and psychologists – met in a conference room adjoining his office. With them was a brigadier-general, the head of the kidon. Named after the Hebrew word for bayonet, the kidon is a unit with 38 elite assassins at its disposal, including five women.

Operating out of a military base in the Negev Desert, all are in their twenties, and trained both as expert killers and as expert linguists: a number are fluent in Persian.

Last Monday, a thousand miles further east in the Iranian capital, Tehran, it appears that the kidon put both of those skills into practice, killing a top nuclear scientist and critically injuring a second as they drove through the rush-hour traffic.

Both were key figures in the Iranian nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is for civilian use only, but which Mossad has long perceived as the ultimate expression of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map”.

In one car was 45-year-old Majid Shahriyari, Iran’s leading expert in designing nuclear switches, a key part in the construction of nuclear weapons. Ali Alker Saler, an Iranian nuclear official, has described Shahriyari’s work as “only handling the big projects”.

The week before he was assassinated, the nuclear scientist had returned from North Korea. Intelligence sources in Seoul have suggested that Mr Shahriyari had gone to Pyongyang to discuss a co-production deal over nuclear centrifuges.

Claims have also emerged that on his flight home via Syria, a Mossad deep cover agent had spotted Mr Shahriyari at Damascus International Airport as he waited for a connecting flight to Tehran.

In another quarter of Tehran, another top nuclear scientist, Fareydoun Abbasi-Davani, was also on his way to work at his laboratory at Shahid Beheshti University.

A world expert on isotope separation, he was routinely driven around by a member of the Revolutionary Guards and, like Mr Shahriyari, had a phone link on his car to Tehran’s security headquarters. That, however, was the only protection the car had.

To assist in the attack, Persian-speaking Mossad deep cover agents have been steadily infiltrating Iran for years. How exactly they helped the hitmen flit in and out of the country remains a secret.

But clues to their methods have been provided by Hossein Sajedina, Tehran’s police chief. He confirmed last week how Shahriyari was killed and Abbasi-Davani seriously injured. “Two motorcyclists had approached their cars and attached bombs on the vehicle which exploded at once,” he said.

There have been unconfirmed reports that the bombs had suction pads fitted to them which had enabled them to be attached to the windscreen of each car.

Within hours Mr Sajedina had accused Mossad of the crimes. In Tel Aviv a government spokesman said Israel had not been involved.

When the news reached Mossad headquarters, the high-fives started, I am told. Yet the day the attack was carried out had also been chosen by “the chief” to formally announce his resignation.

For despite enjoying the admiration and loyalty of his agents, Mr Dagan’s leadership of Mossad had been as controversial as it had been effective.

From that same Tel Aviv office last February, he had sent a hit squad into Dubai carrying fake British passports to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas commander.

The mission had succeeded. But the use of the faked passports had led to a diplomatic row with Britain, culminating in Mossad’s station chief in London being expelled.

Then, in May, Mossad intelligence officers based in Turkey failed to warn that a “peace flotilla” bound for Gaza with goods and medicines, was not carrying arms. Israel’s Flotilla-13 of sea-borne commandos attacked the ships, killing nine activists.

Mr Dagan offered to resign back then, but was told by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, to remain in post and help to devise a plan to stop Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear bomb.

In Geneva tomorrow, Baroness Ashton, the EU’s top diplomat, and members of the UN Security Council will meet Iranian officials in an attempt to kick-start nuclear talks after a halt of more than a year.

Yet while the talks themselves are hailed a sign of progress, many believe Tehran is playing for extra time. It has continued its proscribed uranium enrichment programme regardless, and the suspicion is that Iranian hardliners believe they are now so close to having nuclear weapons that the threat of increased international sanctions can simply be ridden out.

During the weeks that Mr Dagan was hatching the Tehran operation, Tamir Pardo, his deputy, was told by Mr Netanyahu that he had been chosen to take over.

Last weekend, with the Tehran operation set at “go”, Mr Pardo had been in the office with Mr Dagan, where a photograph on the wall reflected his outgoing boss’s style over the past eight years.

It showed an SS officer aiming his rifle at an old man’s head. Mr Dagan had once explained what the picture meant to him.

“The old Jew was my grandfather,” he said. “He represents my own philosophy of Jewish self-defence and survival. We should be strong, use our brains and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust never happens again.”

A Mossad source said last week that Mr Pardo had cited the moment captured in that photograph as sufficient justification for continuing to use all means possible to defend Israel against Iran.

Mr Pardo is now 57 and a grandfather, having played a part in the 1976 operation to rescue Jewish hostages on the hijacked Air France plane in Entebbe, Uganda.

Last week, as he contemplated taking over the top job in protecting Israel from its most serious threat, Mr Pardo remarked: “I have big shoes to fill and a lot of work to do.”

Gordon Thomas is the author of Gideon’s Spies, The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service — The Mossad, published by JR Books

From what I know of the Holocaust era, I find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone would be able to pinpoint a specific picture that showed their grandfather about to be shot by the SS. So it seems likely to me that Dagan is using the photo as an archetypal Jewish morality lesson: “You see, this is what we are as a people. This is what we must ensure never happens again.” But the fact that Dagan is likely making a fraudulent personal claim in order to dramatize the lesson is instructive: after all he is Mossad chief and one of his stock in trades is deception and fraud for a “higher” national purpose.

But even more importantly, this story shows us how the Holocaust continues to infect Israeli consciousness and contributes to pathological behavior. If we are to believe Dagan and the Times reporter, he killed al-Mabouh because he was little different than that SS officer holding a gun to his “grandfather’s” head. You see where this leads? It leads to every enemy Israel has being no different than the Nazi genocidaires. It leads to many Israeli critics being labelled Kapo (as I have regularly been) or collaborator with Nazis.

We must finally put a stake through the heart of the Holocaust as justifier of Israeli policy. This historical event should be precisely this and nothing more. It must not be allowed to become a template for current or future Israeli behavior. To the extent it does, Israel will never become a normal nation and always live within a nightmare of its own making. Link

semper occultus wrote:On his first day in office eight years ago, Mr Dagan had stood on a table in the organisation’s canteen and promised to support any operation against any of Israel’s enemies, with every means he had — legal or illegal.

He could allow his field agents to use prescribed nerve toxins, dumdum bullets and methods of killing that even the Russian or Chinese secret services would not use.

“We are like the hangman, or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection,” he said, as – by his own account – his agents listened, enthralled.

“Our actions are all endorsed by the state of Israel. When we kill we are not breaking the law. We are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

It doesn't take a crack team of "elite assassins" to kill unarmed people, but terrorists, which is what Dagan and his crack team of bumbling assholes are. Like all bullies, the Israelis are cowards: they specialize in killing the helpless, the weak, civilians, scientists, political leaders, professors, poets, peaceful demonstrators, women and children. They drop one-ton bombs on residential buildings from the sky to kill one resistance fighter. They drop phosphorous bombs on captive populations using unmanned drones. The state of Israel has more deadly weapons than all the other countries of the Middle East combined, the unconditional political support of the world's sole superpower, a bottomless well of funding from American taxpayers and the most advanced high-tech killing tools on earth, yet they were sent crying home by a few thousand resistance fighters in one of the weakest states of the region, Lebanon.

On a level playing field, if Israel's enemies were permitted the same impunity that Israeli mass murderers are, these assholes wouldn't be strutting and boasting, they'd be pissing their pants in the brief time they had left. Similarly, if they didn't have that strange immunity from any law but their own, they'd all be in prison, where they belong.

Neocon's Iran plan: Assassinations, human rights
Washington Post scribe calls for United States to kill civilian scientists -- while also prioritizing human rights
BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT

The Washington Post's new neoconservative blogger, Jennifer Rubin, is up with a big post laying out four steps for a "reset" of America's policy toward Iran.

Rubin's four-point plan contains this remarkably unselfconscious juxtaposition of ideas:

Second, we should continue and enhance espionage and sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program. Every nuclear scientist who has a "car accident" and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran's nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction.

Third, we need to make human rights a central theme in our bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding Iran. The spotlight on the noxious regime helps to undermine the regime's legitimacy at home and emboldens the Green Movement. We should test the theory that the most effective disarmament strategy is a robust human rights policy, one that includes the EU and other nations exerting diplomatic pressure on the regime.

To summarize: Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy -- and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.

The "car accident" line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists' cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.

No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It's also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.


http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_ ... index.html

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Every nuclear scientist who has a "car accident" and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran's nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction.

Perish in fire, Jennifer Rubin.

Jennifer Rubin wrote:Second, we should continue and enhance espionage and sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program. Every nuclear scientist who has a "car accident" and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran's nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction.

Third, we need to make human rights a central theme in our bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding Iran. The spotlight on the noxious regime helps to undermine the regime's legitimacy at home and emboldens the Green Movement. We should test the theory that the most effective disarmament strategy is a robust human rights policy, one that includes the EU and other nations exerting diplomatic pressure on the regime.

That's simply unbelievable.

That's just insane.

She is calling for the US government to "continue and enhance espionage," in order to arrange more "car accidents" for Iranian scientists. What a glaring admission of her belief in her own government's authorship of terrorist attacks. She must be one of them conspiracy theorists just like Ahmadinejad;

The Beeb wrote:President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused "Western governments" and Israel of being behind the killing.

Then again, this does seem to be the era of revelation of the method. Folk can read, understand, and then forget. It's an exercise in double think, of which Rubin is clearly a master. It is also a revelation of how "human rights policy" is simply a hypocritical and self serving means of internationally isolating countries, in order to bring them to heel, or even worse, a means to bring about revolutions to overthrow any governments which are seen as not suited to the perceived interests of "the USA."

US and Israel use sabotage and assassinations to thwart Iran’s nuclear program
By Keith Jones
14 December 2010

Last week’s talks between Teheran and the P5 + 1 (representatives of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members, plus Germany and the European Union) began with the Iranian delegation condemning the recent assassination of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist—part of a widening covert campaign targeting the country’s nuclear program.

“A week ago on this day terrorists targeted two Iranian scientists and one of them was martyred,” reportedly said Saeed Jalili, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and its chief negotiator at the Geneva talks.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other top Iranian officials had previously charged the US, Israel and other Western powers with orchestrating the assassination of Dr. Majid Shahriari. “These wicked people,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear program, “wanted to show their hideous side, which demonstrates their carrot-and-stick policy in the run-up to the nuclear talks.”

On the morning of November 29, Shahriari was killed while on his way to work. In what was a highly sophisticated operation, motorcycle-borne assailants affixed a magnetic bomb to Shahriari’s car, then quickly detonated it.

At almost exactly the same time, a second Iranian scientist, Fereidoon Abbasi, narrowly averted assassination in a like manner. Aware that something had been placed on his car, Abbasi fled the driver’s seat and was attempting to get his wife out of the car when the magnetic bomb exploded. The couple suffered only minor injuries.

Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University in Teheran, co-authored several reports and journal articles with Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI). Following the assassination, Salehi was widely quoted as saying that Shahriari was in charge of “one of the biggest” AEOI projects. According to the Manchester Guardian, “Shahriari had no known links to banned nuclear work, but was highly regarded in his field”—theorizations of nuclear-chain reactions.

Abbasi is also employed at Shahid Beheshti University. Iranian authorities were quick to note, following the November 29 attempt on his life, that Abbasi had been publicly named as “involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities” in a 2007 UN Security Council resolution targeting Iran.

In response to the statement from the Iranian delegation to the P5 + 1 condemning the coordinated attacks of November 29, the EU foreign policy and security representative, Catherine Ashton, reportedly made a pro forma statement on behalf of all the other delegations regretting the attack.

But all the participants in last week’s talks are well aware that the US, Israel, Britain and allied Western powers are waging a campaign of sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program. John Sawers, the head of Britain’s MI6, called in late October for “intelligence-led operations” against Iran’s nuclear program to be stepped up.

In what was billed as the first-ever public address by the head of Britain’s overseas spy agency, Sawyer sought to justify such actions, saying, “The longer international efforts delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons technology, the more time we create for a political solution to be found.”

Shahriari and Abbasi are far from the first Iranian nuclear scientists to be targeted for assassination. Last January, nuclear physicist Dr. Masoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed in a bomb attack on the streets of Teheran. And in 2007, another nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, died of what was reported to be gas poisoning. At the time, Stratfor, a strategic-intelligence research company with close connections to the US security establishment, said Hosseinpour’s death had all the hallmarks of an Israeli security operation.

Teheran has also accused the US and Israel of kidnapping several of its scientists who have disappeared. Opponents of the Teheran regime have argued the missing scientists defected.

This sabotage campaign is in addition to US-led United Nations and Western sanctions, aimed at starving Iran’s energy sector of vitally needed investment and undermining its banking system, as well as escalating military pressure. Not only does the US have massive military deployments in the Persian Gulf-Arabian Sea and in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which border Iran, the US and Israel have repeatedly threatened to wage war in the name of thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Three days before the twin bombings in Teheran, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said the Pentagon has plans for military action aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and has been preparing for war with Teheran “for a significant period of time.”
Britain’s defence minister, Liam Fox, issued his own threat of military action in the run-up to last week’s two-day negotiating session in Geneva. “We want a negotiated solution, not a military one,” declared Fox. “But Iran needs to work with us to achieve that outcome. We will not look away or back down.”
The London Telegraph has baldly asserted the November 29 attacks were organized by Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, commonly known as Mossad.

On December 5, the Telegraph reported that personnel at the headquarters of Mossad celebrated news of the bomb attacks on the Iranian nuclear scientists by dubbing them “The Chief’s Last Hit”—a reference to the fact that November 29 was Meir Dagan’s last day as the head of Mossad.

Mossad is notorious for summarily executing perceived enemies of the Israeli state. One such assassination in Dubai last February—that of top Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mahbouh—caused a diplomatic furor because the Mossad hit squad had left such an obvious trail, including its use of fake British passports to get in and out of the UAE.

But Washington is as likely an organizer of the current assassination campaign, whether working on it own or in collaboration with Mossad and other intelligence agencies.

Under Barack Obama, Washington has expanded drone attacks in Pakistan against alleged Al Qaeda, Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders and asserted the right of the president to order the execution of US citizens who have been labeled terrorists without any judicial process whatsoever.

In its report on the November 29 events, the New York Times signaled that the US national security establishment endorsed the twin bombings. After acknowledging that Israel and the US are “widely believed” to be using covert methods to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, the newspaper cited an unnamed US official declaring that the “targets of the attacks are bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb.”

Only a few days earlier, a Times article about reports from International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that Iran had temporarily suspended operation of thousands of centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment plant said the suspension might have been the result of sabotage. American officials, the Times added, “say the Obama administration has stepped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

Over the past year, unnamed US intelligence operatives have been quoted in the Times and Washington Post boasting that US-led covert operations have resulted in delays and disruptions of Iran’s nuclear program. While no details have been provided, US officials claim that on several occasions covert operatives have ensured that equipment procured by Teheran for its nuclear program was defective.

In recent weeks there have been many reports claiming that Iran’s nuclear program has been disrupted by a computer worm, whose sophistication makes it all but certain that it was developed and deployed by one or more foreign intelligence agencies.

The Stuxnet worm is said to have contained two “warheads.” The first was aimed at surreptitiously seizing control over the functioning of centrifuges at Iran’s uranium enrichment center in Natanz. The second targeted control of the turbine at the Russian-built, soon to be fully functional nuclear power station at Bushehr.

On November 23, AEOI head Salehi told an Iranian news agency that the country’s nuclear program had been the target of a cyber attack for the past year, although he claimed that “the country’s young experts stopped the virus exactly at those points that enemies intended to infiltrate.”

Speaking to reporters following the November 29 bombings, Iranian President Ahmadinejad said that saboteurs “had succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they installed in electronic parts. They did a bad thing. Fortunately, our experts discovered that and today they are not able [to make the centrifuges malfunction] anymore.”

The US campaign against Iran is utterly hypocritical and reactionary and fraught with grave dangers for the people of the Middle East and the entire world.
While Washington denounces Iran as a “state sponsor” of terrorism for providing support to Hamas and Hezbollah, bourgeois nationalist-Islamicist movements that arose in response to Israeli aggression and expansionism, it practices state terrorism. The US government orchestrates assassinations, bombings and sabotage campaigns and arrogates the right to do so in all parts of the globe. Meanwhile, the corporate media acts as its accomplices, covering up for and excusing these crimes and demonizing their targets.

Last week, a bipartisan group of US senators, including John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, Jon Kyl, Bob Casey Jr. and Kirsten Gillibrand, sent a letter to Obama saluting him for “the cascade of measures” his administration has taken against Iran. The letter then implored him to remain steadfast in seeking to deny Iran rights to a full-cycle civilian nuclear energy program—rights accorded it and all other signatories of the NPT.

In its relations with Iran, as in so many other areas, the Obama administration has not just continued the reactionary policies of the Bush administration, it has intensified them.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec20 ... -d14.shtml

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Covert war against Iran's nuclear aims takes chilling turn
Sophisticated cyber-worms, motorcycling assassins: but who is behind the increasingly sinister campaign against the Iranian energy programme?

Julian Borger and Saeed Kamali Dehghan
The Observer, Sunday 5 December 2010

Tehran's streets at the height of the morning rush hour resemble a vast, sprawling car park. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, much of it stationary, the acrid steam of a thousand exhausts hanging in the cold winter air. If you wanted to kill someone, this would be the moment to do it: when they are stuck in their cars – sitting targets.

At 7.40am last Monday, in north Tehran's Aghdasieh district, a motorcycle threaded its way through the long lines of cars on Artesh Boulevard. It edged up to a silver Peugeot 405, hesitating alongside for moment, before moving off into the maze of vehicles. A few seconds later there was a bang from the side of the Peugeot, as a small bomb stuck on to the window detonated, killing one of the men inside. The driver and a woman passenger were wounded.

At the same time, a few kilometres to the west, an identical attack was under way. A motorcycle came up beside another Peugeot and then moved on, but this time a man immediately jumped out of the car, ran around to let a woman out on the other side, and both of them managed to scramble a couple of metres from the car before the bomb went off. They were bloodied, but survived.

The dead man was Majid Shahriari, a senior Iranian nuclear scientist. The head of Iran's nuclear programme, Ali Akbar Salehi, who attended his funeral, said Shahriari had been "in charge of one of the great projects" at Iran's atomic energy agency – a project he did not describe any further.

The wounded man, Fereydoun Abbasi, was a 52-year-old nuclear scientist working for Iran's defence ministry, one of "Iran's few experts on fissile isotopes and the ministry's laser expert". He is also named in a UN security council sanctions resolution as working on "banned nuclear activities" with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist suspected by inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency of running Iran's secret nuclear weapons programme. The wives of both scientists were wounded in the attacks.

The attacks had clear echoes of the unsolved assassination in January this year of one of their colleagues, particle physicist Masoud Alimohammadi. He was killed in north Tehran on his way to work, at about the same time of the morning, by a bomb strapped to a motorcycle. After his death, to the surprise of many of his students, it was reported that he also had links with Iran's nuclear programme.

If there were any doubts after Alimohammadi's killing back in January, there could be none after last week's double attack. Someone is trying to kill nuclear scientists linked to Iran's defence establishment – the people most likely to be involved in the covert side of Iran's nuclear programme, the making of nuclear weapons.

In the febrile atmosphere of Iranian underground politics, speculation quickly spread that the dark forces of the state were at work against would-be dissidents, leakers or defectors, but those rumours quickly evaporated. The Islamic Republic has many other ways of taking people it suspects out of circulation. It has little to gain by sacrificing the nation's must strategic asset – its nuclear know-how, the teachers of a new generation of atomic scientists. After last week, that new generation must be wondering whether to change career.

The Tehran regime itself had little doubt over who was to blame. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quickly pointed the finger at "western governments and the Zionist regime".

Ahmadinejad blames almost every national setback on the same culprits, but in this case there were no snorts of derision from the security analysts and intelligence experts in the west, but rather murmurs of assent.

There is general agreement that the nature of the simultaneous attacks was too sophisticated to be entirely home-grown – the work of the handful of groups who harry the Islamic Republic around its ethnic edges, like the Sunni Jundullah group, the Kurdish rebels in the north-east, or the People's Mujahedin (which has vowed to give up violence to win removal from the US state department's list of terrorist organisations).

The assassination had the hallmark of well-practised professionals. The explosives were shaped to focus the blast and fire a hail of projectiles into the car at an individual target, with minimal "collateral damage". The targets were obviously carefully chosen and the attack would have required weeks of surveillance. So even if local assassins were involved, the questions of who trained and funded them and assigned the targets would remain.

Time magazine last week claimed to have been given details of the attack from "a western intelligence expert with knowledge of the operation" and asserted that it "carried the signature of Israel's Mossad".

It is certainly true that, while the discovery of any involvement in the killings of civilian scientists would be career-endingly embarrassing for the CIA or MI6, the Mossad is known for such exploits. It is widely believed to have killed scientists working on Iraq's nuclear programme in the 1980s.

The outgoing Mossad director, Meir Dagan, has stepped up the use of assassinations against Israel's enemies, and has won plaudits for doing so. The Israel Hayom news website remarked on the occasion of Dagan's retirement: "[He] will be leaving an organisation that is far sharper and more operational than the organisation he received, and all of the accusations from Tehran yesterday are a good indication of that. Iran will be the focal point for the next Mossad director, too."

If it does indeed turn out that the Mossad was involved, the bloodshed in the middle of Tehran represents a bloody episode in a secret war over Iran's nuclear programme that has been under way for years.

It has come at a time when diplomacy is at a standstill. Officials from six major powers – the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – are due to meet Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva tomorrow for the first time in more than a year. But expectations are low. Iran has shown no interest in complying with UN demands to cease the enrichment of uranium, despite four sets of sanctions. Tehran has also turned down a deal to swap some of its stock of low-enriched uranium for ready-made fuel rods it urgently needs for a medical research reactor.

Military action has been contemplated for years, in Washington and Tel Aviv, but both have concluded that air strikes on nuclear sites would have an uncertain and far from fatal impact on Iran's programme, would unleash years of unpredictable, painful reprisals, and would probably spur Tehran on in the quest to develop nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon has contingency plans, but there is no real likelihood of the US starting a third war in the region any time soon. Israel is another matter. Israeli officials say they are well aware of the downsides of military action, but they insist that none compares with the "existential threat" posed to their country by a nuclear-armed Iran.

Without giving a green light, the US has supplied the tools Israel would need to do the job. One of the US cables made public by WikiLeaks describes a meeting of a US-Israeli joint political military group in November last year. It said: "The GOI [Government of Israel] described 2010 as a critical year – if the Iranians continue to protect and harden their nuclear sites, it will be more difficult to target and damage them. Both sides then discussed the upcoming delivery of bunker-busting bombs to Israel, noting that the transfer should be handled quietly to avoid any allegations that the US is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran."

The bombs duly arrived a few months later. The WikiLeaks cables also underpin a prediction made by western military officials earlier this year, that if Israel flew above Saudi Arabia to reach Iranian targets Saudi radar operators would somehow "fail to see them".

Yet Israel has hesitated. It is not the first time a year it deemed "crucial" has come and gone. Iran has now accumulated 3,000kg of low-enriched uranium – enough for two weapons, if further enriched. And this year Iranian scientists have stepped up the level of enrichment they are working on to 20%, which in terms of the technical obstacles that need to be overcome, is well on the way to 90% weapons-grade purity.

With each milestone passed, Iran has flaunted its achievements, yet Israel's sword has remained sheathed. It is clear that war is the last resort. Given diplomacy's ineffectiveness and the unknowable but terrible consequences of air strikes, it is easy to see why covert action is the least bad option; most of the successes and failures in this war will remain unsung, but some have made news.

In September last year, Barack Obama announced the discovery of a secret enrichment plant burrowed into a mountain near the city of Qom. It had been under satellite surveillance for some time. Western officials say that it was information from defectors and agents on the ground that confirmed the nature of the facility. Iran subsequently allowed IAEA inspectors into the site, but withheld blueprints which would have given away more of its ultimate purpose.

In June 2009, an Iranian nuclear scientist called Shahram Amiri disappeared while making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Three months later, the Iranian government claimed he was being held by the US – a claim echoed by several western reports that Amiri had defected and was living somewhere in America under a new identity. However, in July this year the scientist turned up at the Iranian interests section of the Pakistani embassy, claiming he had been held against his will and wanted to go home. Amiri returned to a hero's welcome in Iran, while back in the US he has been portrayed as a defector who lost his nerve.

Ahmadinejad admitted last week that Iran's uranium enrichment plant had been affected by the Stuxnet computer worm, which targeted the industrial management software that Iran uses to run its centrifuges. Like most computer viruses and worms, Stuxnet does not bear fingerprints, but a western military source recently told the Observer that it was an Israeli creation.

Ahmadinejad claimed that the damage caused by Stuxnet had been overcome, but the enrichment programme clearly has major problems that cannot be easily fixed. The IAEA reported last week that enrichment ceased altogether in mid-November. The centrifuges at the Natanz plant continued to spin, but no uranium gas was fed into them, a very rare stoppage that suggested there was a fault in the system.

The main centrifuge the Iranians are using, known as the P-1, is rudimentary and outdated and prone to crash, so that may be part of the problem.

But the US, Israel and other western spy agencies have also spent years slipping faulty parts into black market consignments of equipment heading to Iran – each designed to wreak havoc inside the delicate machinery requirement for enrichment.

Last week's events suggest that, as Iran continues to built up its stock of enriched uranium despite such difficulties, finesse is giving way to more brutal methods in this secret war.

Its first victim may have been Ardeshir Hassanpour, another top nuclear scientist, who co-founded Iran's nuclear technology centre in Isfahan. Officially, Hassanpour died from radiation poisoning in 2007. But some reports, yet to be confirmed, claimed he was killed by the Mossad. If that is true, the toll so far is three scientists dead, one wounded.

The front line in the war of Iran's nuclear project is not where most expected it to be drawn – at the enrichment plant in Natanz, or the mountain cavern at Qom, or the Revolutionary Guard bases where Iran tests its missiles. Instead it runs through university faculties and the leafy suburbs of north Tehran where Iran's academic elite make their homes. It is a covert war, with very high stakes, in which civilians are the primary targets, and Majid Shahriari is unlikely to be the last victim.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... s-killings

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Links in original to stuff in Hebrew:

Bergman: Bibi Will Send Israeli Bombers on Their Way[to Iran]

More bragging from Mossad sources and their journalist friends in the Israeli media about the proficiency with which they have attacked both Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its nuclear program. It’s very hard to know whether this report is part of Israeli intelligence psyops campaign or whether the hints, allusions and claims in this report are correctly attributed to the Mossad (or both). In some places, the report either spins tales I’ve never heard before, thus making them suspect; or it is downright wrong (e.g. in claiming we don’t know how Stuxnet infected Iranian computers not even connected to the internet). But despite the breathless, and frankly offensive self-congratulatory tone of the report (e.g. the most recent Teheran assassination was a “parting gift” from outgoing Mossad director, Meir Dagan), along with lots of scary mood music (including the requisite Arabic music), I find some of the material suggestive and worth addressing.

Among the insinuations is that a massive Israeli intelligence campaign against Iran resulted in four major Revolutionary Guard plane crashes in a single year (2003), a 2005 explosion at an Iranian nuclear site, and “disappeared” nuclear scientists. This Nana report acknowledges claims made here and elsewhere that Ali Reza Asgari was kidnapped by the Mossad in 2007. It notes that in the same year another Iranian nuclear scientist died of inhaling poison gas. In 2008, Iran further claimed it had exposed a spy ring run by the Mossad. It also notes the two other Iranian nuclear scientists assassinated in the past few months in Teheran. The one scientist who survived these attacks did so, the report trumpets, “by dint of a miracle.” Part of this campaign was the explosion at the Imam Ali missile base in which tens of military personnel were killed. The final coup de grâce is Yossi Melman’s claim that Iran reported the Mossad had outfitted squirrels with transmitter chips and located the animals in sensitive areas from which the intelligence agency could monitor these sites. Melman snickers at the preposterousness of the claim, but also notes that it could be true.
israeli war planes

Ronen Bergman predicts Bibi will send Israeli jets 'on their way' to Teheran

Correspondents interviewed like Ronen Bergman, Melman and former Mossad personnel paint a picture of an Israeli sabotage campaign striking almost at will at Iranian military infrastructure and even the heart of its brain trust. Allusions are made to Hollywood spy movies like James Bond and claims made that Israel’s derring-do even surpasses them. Melman points to an Iranian intelligence apparatus allegedly beset by paranoia (with no proof offered of course) ”to the point of ridicule” for years due to these attacks. A former Mossad operations officer practically brags at Israel’s ability to “turn” key Iranian figures or else “conclude their lives in ways that are unanticipated.” How’s that for Israeli spy jargon?

There is a suspect claim that Stuxnet is the first computer worm which has caused actual physical damage in the real world. Perhaps there are others with more experience in these matters who can tell us whether this is a false or true claim. Further, the TV news story makes a claim I’ve never heard before, the virus was “controlled” from two computers in Malaysia and Denmark “under cover of the websites of local soccer clubs” in those places. Thousands of other computers throughout the world were hijacked and each new computer strengthened the worm’s capacity to infect and sabotage the Iranian systems.

Another suspect claim is that thousands of Iranian documents fell into the hands of the west in 2002, which convinced the world that Iran was pursuing a nuclear bomb. In fact, these documents were likely frauds concocted by the Mossad to prove a claim that they wished the world to believe. The news report makes no mention of the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which states “with a high degree of probability” that Iran stopped any WMD program it may have conducted in 2003.

The Nana correspondent notes a meeting exposed in a Wikileaks cable, between Meir Dagan and Bush-era State Department official Nicholas Burns in which Dagan urged the U.S. to join Israel is pursuing regime change in Iran. Dagan declared that one of the ways to do this was to support dissident ethnic minority groups like Jundallah, Beluchis, and Kurds, and political opposition like Mujahadeen e-Khalq. The report does great damage to the Green Movement by implying that the June Iranian elections almost led to the type of revolution advocated by Dagan (with the unspoken implication that Israel somehow may’ve played a role). A Mossad source further adds that George Bush allocated $400 million to sabotage the Iranian regime “from within.” Again, there is a hint that the U.S. may’ve been funding the Iranian opposition. All of these accusations are ones made by the Iranian authorities themselves at the time. So either the TV journalist is insinuating that Iran was right, or he’s talking out his rear-end. Take your pick.

The former Mossad operations officer makes the claim that Iran is so riven by ethnic division that this alone could facilitate the disintegration of the current regime:



This is fertile ground for making a lot of noise [with the implication that the Mossad is facilitating some of the "noise"], and it’s happening.



The TV reporter declares the efforts to topple the Iranian regime are “without precedent.” Can someone correct me if I’m wrong–I thought most of the world was on the same page and that we weren’t doing regime change. Did this guy miss the memo or does he know something we don’t?

Ronen Bergman, near the conclusion of the report makes a startling prediction, made more so by the fact of his known closeness to Mossad sources:



If the U.S. and the west does not institute far heavier pressure on Iran [to end its nuclear program or topple the regime], at the end of the day Benjamin Netanyahu will be left with no choice, and despite the deeply troubling consequences of such a process, but to order [Israeli] bombers on their way [to their Iranian targets].



The report closes by noting that Iran’s nuclear program is one of the greatest threats of the 21st century. They’ve been reading too many Mossad press releases–oh that’s right, Mossad doesn’t do press releases. I guess it has other ways of insinuating itself and its views into Israeli consciousness. Frankly, this report seems at least in part a love letter to the incoming Mossad director, Tamir Pardo: you’ve done well, keep up the good work.

It’s precisely what is wrong with the Israeli approach to Iran. Israel believes it is capable of doing whatever it wishes and that it will succeed in doing so whatever the odds. It ascribes to itself almost superpowers to achieve such results. There is no sense of contemplation or caution or pragmatism in the Israeli approach. It is all-out hand to hand combat with the adversary regardless of consequences. Again, it reminds me of Samson in the Philistine temple. To get his revenge he topples the pillars of the building thus killing himself and everyone in it. Is that what the world wants?

The rest of the world, especially Barack Obama, will have to understand that Ronen Bergman is no fool. He knows whereof he speaks. He’s telling Obama that Bibi will attack Iran. And what will Obama do about it? What will he do to prevent it? Of course, there is always the possibility that Bergman is telling us precisely what the Mossad wants us to hear (and not necessarily what the Israeli government will actually do). Frankly, it’s hard to know who to believe. But one thing’s for sure, reports like this full of bravado and serious-sounding nonsense, both reflect Israeli attitudes and highlight the danger they represent to stability in the Middle East and the world. Link

As usual, Israel accuses others of terrorism yet boasts of its own terrorist murders. Israel warns about the nonexistent "Iranian nuclear threat" when it is Israel that is a rogue war criminal state armed with nuclear weapons. Israel accuses Iran of making aggressive threats to attack it when it is Israel that is openly threatening Iran, and it is Iran that has been asking for UN protection against the crazed bloodthirsty Israelis, to no avail.

cogit8 December 4, 2010 at 3:23 am
09TELAVIV1098
¶1. (SBU) Organized crime (OC) has longstanding roots in Israel, but
in recent years there has been a sharp increase in the reach and
impact of OC networks. In seeking a competitive advantage in such
lucrative trades as narcotics and prostitution, Israeli crime groups
have demonstrated their ability and willingness to engage in violent
attacks on each other with little regard for innocent bystanders.
The Israeli National Police (INP) and the courts have engaged in a
vigorous campaign against organized crime leaders, including the
creation of a new specialized anti-OC unit, but they remain unable
to cope with the full scope of the problem. Organized crime in
Israel now has global reach, with direct impact inside the United
States. Post is currently utilizing all available tools to deny
Israeli OC figures access to the United States in order to prevent
them from furthering their criminal activities on U.S. soil. End
Summary.

Crime War Hits the Streets of Israel
————————————-

¶2. (SBU) In November 2008, Israeli crime boss Yaakov Alperon was
assassinated in broad daylight in a gruesome attack on the streets
of Tel Aviv, only about a mile away from the Embassy. According to
several media accounts, a motor scooter pulled up alongside
Alperon’s car and the rider attached a sophisticated explosive
device with a remote detonator to the car door. The bomb killed
Alperon and his driver, and injured two innocent pedestrians. The
hit was the latest in a series of violent attacks and reprisals, and
indicated a widening crime war in Israel.
=====================================================

“a motor scooter pulled up alongside car and the rider attached a sophisticated explosive device with a remote detonator to the car door.”


keep moving, nothing to see here

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90 Sumud December 4, 2010 at 5:28 am
a motor scooter pulled up alongside car and the rider attached a sophisticated explosive device with a remote detonator to the car door.

Anyone know if this is a common method of assassination? I hadn’t heard of it until I read that cable on organised crime in Israel, then just a day or so later I read the 2 Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in the same way..

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91 Richard Parker December 4, 2010 at 4:52 am
Israeli agents have been using adhesive car bombs since forever; it’s quicker to kill someone and perhaps a few others than to go through all that painful business of capture and trial. Let’s accept it; they’re just basic thugs.

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92 lareineblanche December 5, 2010 at 11:23 am
In the Guardian today :

Time magazine last week claimed to have been given details of the attack from “a western intelligence expert with knowledge of the operation” and asserted that it “carried the signature of Israel’s Mossad”.

and :

The Israel Hayom news website remarked on the occasion of Dagan’s retirement: “[He] will be leaving an organisation that is far sharper and more operational than the organisation he received, and all of the accusations from Tehran yesterday are a good indication of that. Iran will be the focal point for the next Mossad director, too.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... s-killings

As for the “thug” epithet :

As recently as March 2009, Zvika Ben Shabat, Yaacov Avitan, and Tzuri Roka requested visas to attend a ‘security-related convention’ in Las Vegas.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010 ... influence/

Now, it seems to me that there is little difference between :
1 : setting up a highly sophisticated car window bomb plot
2 : any mafia-style assassination
3 : terrorist activities

In other words, I fail to see the distinction between any secret service targeted assassination activities, mafia targeted assassination activities, and terrorism. It’s all birds of the same feather.

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93 Richard Parker December 4, 2010 at 5:08 am
I didn’t know anything about attachable bombs, so I googled it, and found:

http://www.gatekeepersecurity.com/why-l ... -a-vehicle

It’s fun to read; especially the bit where they detail the facilities they propose to protect: royal palaces, embassies, petroleum facilities, nuclear stations and 5-star hotels (just to name a few).

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/12/wikileaks ... ent-254628

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Alice, let us know when you decided if its real or psyops (the ISraeli news article by bergman), with the reasoning pls

Re Bergman's job....it reminds me of something real that happened to me this weekend. A friend of mine asked me for legal advice on a legal matter, he was sued by his phone carrier in court, and he thought they were not being in the right, or fair. He was furious and so he planned all kinds of complaints against the huge telecommunication corporation's law firm. I told him with all honesty that if he does that he better prepare his testament soon, cause this lawfirm is ruthless. The next day he tells me he wrote something to the court, for the next hearing and he quoted "death threats" he received from the law firm. I asked him what death threats is he referring to, and he said "you told me they will kill me".

....

hava1 wrote:Alice, let us know when you decided if its real or psyops (the ISraeli news article by bergman), with the reasoning pls

FWIW, the accounts of Mossad terrorism and subversive activities in Iran are almost certainly true, with a lot of help from zionist agents in Iran and in the US and Europe. The oft-repeated claim that Netanyahu is straining at the leash to attack Iran alone, are almost certainly bullshit.

Israel wouldn't initiate a military attack against Iran because it would have unpredictable and probably devastating consequences for Israel. Israel's true heart's desire is an exact replay of Iraq, this time siccing the US and a US-led coalition against Iran, but things have changed a lot since 2003, not only in the region, but in the US, and this dream has become unrealistic for a number of reasons. Plan B, Israel's current objective, is to get the US and the US-dominated "international community" to fatally cripple Iran by isolating it internationally while Israel continues its campaign of sabotage internally.

I think Israel has been using an Overton window-type strategy to compensate for the fact that there is no legal pretext for imposing such sanctions against Iran, and no particular eagerness to do so even in Western Europe, given the number of countries that have a lot more to gain by doing business with Iran than by boycotting it for its nonexistent infractions of the NPT or international law. Israel is making all those threatening noises and acting all crazy to make sanctions, no matter how severe, seem like a reasonable compromise to avert a catastrophic and very costly war that nobody has the stomach for, especially that Iran has explicitly said that if it were militarily attacked it would close the Strait of Hormuz and severely disrupt fuel exports from the Persian Gulf, something that would hit the Europeans hard.

Iran: 'Nuclear' scientist shot dead in Tehran

23 July 2011 Last updated at 20:47

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14263126

An Iranian scientist believed to have links to the country's nuclear programme has been shot dead outside his home in Tehran, Iranian media say.

Isna news agency named him as Daryoush Rezaei, 35, adding that his wife was wounded and rushed to hospital.
In 2010, nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by a remote-controlled bomb in Tehran.

Iran blamed that attack on Israeli secret service Mossad. Israel has long warned about Iran's nuclear programme.
Some reports said the latest attack involved assailants on a motorcycle, who shot him in the neck in front of his house.

Mr Rezaei was said to be a physicist at a Tehran university, where media reports described him variously as a teacher, researcher and student.
Several have linked him to the country's nuclear programme.

Isna said that Mr Rezaei was an expert with links to the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

'New provocation'

The US, Israel and many Western nations have opposed Iran's atomic programme, fearing it may be a front to creating a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is for purely peaceful purposes.

This week, Iran said it was installing newer and faster centrifuges at its nuclear plants, with the goal of speeding up its uranium enrichment process.
Enriched uranium can be used for civilian nuclear purposes, but also to build atomic bombs.
The French government condemned the move as a "new provocation".