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Diplomats of the five permanent U.N. Security Council member countries and Germany are to confer by telephone Thursday in another try at agreeing on further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. U.S. officials say chances for a third sanctions resolution by year’s end are nil.  

VOA’s David Gollust reports from the State Department. A general view shows reactor building of Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran (file) The State Department says Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns will hold a conference call with counterparts from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany Thursday in another effort to finalize terms of a third sanctions resolution against Iran.

The United States has been in negotiations with the other veto-wielding Security Council members and Germany, the so-called P5-plus-1, on new sanctions since Iran ignored the 60-day deadline to halt uranium enrichment contained in the last sanctions measure, adopted in late March. The P5-plus-1 political directors held an inconclusive 90-minute conference call on Tuesday last week. Officials here concede that even if remaining issues are resolved in Thursday’s conference, there is no chance of submitting a new resolution to the council before January. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week the United States has tactical differences with Russia and China over a new resolution, but she also said the need for further sanctions has not been obviated by the December 3 U.S. intelligence report which said Iran stopped a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003.

State Department Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey said Tuesday the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate should in some ways raise the level of concern about Iran, which has denied ever seeking a nuclear weapons capability. “It is clear by the assessment that’s been made that there has been or was an active nuclear weapons program that Iran was engaged in,” he said. “The fact that it has been set aside in terms of the effort to make a warhead or make a specific nuclear device, does nothing to take away from the fact that they continue to work full-tilt towards two of the other key components necessary for having a weapon. That’s its very active and continuing missile program, and efforts to master the fuel cycle.” The Bush administration supports a two-track strategy of increased sanctions against Iran if it refuses to halt enrichment, but diplomatic and other benefits if it complies with the Security Council, including aid for its nominally-peaceful nuclear power program.

Russia this week began delivering fuel to the nuclear power plant it has completed for Iran at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf under terms mandating the return of all spent fuel to Russia. The Bush administration this week reaffirmed support for the arrangement, which Casey said shows Iran doesn’t really need a complete nuclear fuel cycle: “The fact that Iran has a guaranteed source of fuel that’s economically-viable, that would allow it to achieve its supposed objectives through its civilian nuclear program makes it pretty clear to most of us that there really isn’t a need for them to be moving forward with these kinds of activities, again, unless their ultimate intention is to use it to build a nuclear weapon,” he added. The Russian Foreign Ministry Monday expressed a similar view, saying the Bushehr deliveries mean Iran has “no objective need” for its own uranium enrichment program. Tehran however said it would not stop its enrichment drive and that it has begun construction of a second power reactor in southwestern Iran.

News reports say the new sanctions measure being discussed by the P5-plus-1 would be much broader in scope than the resolutions of March and December 2006. The Washington Post said last week the new measures under discussion would call for asset freezes and travel bans against Iranian individuals and entities believed engaged in nuclear proliferation, including the Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Source: Voice of America

It is no secret in Iran: Authorities have gone out of their way to publicize a crackdown against thugs and smugglers that has also enveloped academics and women whose dress is deemed “un-Islamic.” 

Masked police dressed like black-clad storm-troopers have been arresting, humiliating, and parading criminals. Cameras follow cops on nighttime raids against drug dealers that net hundreds in a single night.

But analysts say that what appeared to be just another cleanup when it began last spring is proving to be a strategic effort to protect the regime from “vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by archenemies such as the United States. Picking up criminals and intimidating all potential opponents of clerical rule, they say, aims to prevent a repeat of history by preempting violence that could spin out of control.

“The girls are not the target,” says an Iranian journalist, noting that many women still deliberately flout the rules. “The core reason is dealing harshly with thugs. Now they are preempting – they are keeping a potential threat from growing,” says the journalist. “They are looking at modern history [and] going onto the Internet.”

That history shows how the CIA in 1953 staged a coup against Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. A crucial factor in its success were mobs organized by CIA-paid agents to rampage and take over the streets; others soon joined the rioters.

And on the Internet, Iran’s security services have become familiar with American regime-change neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, who has argued that with US support, “we could liberate Iran in less than a year.”

The Iranian journalist paraphrases those ideas – and the threat perceived from them – this way: “In the war with Iran, the US will not be the foot soldiers,” but will “just provide the trigger” for Iranians to rise and topple the government.

In Iran, anticriminal measures against those called “knife-pullers” in Farsi are widely lauded. Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, has told police that they “must strongly continue with the ’social security plan’ … so that its goals are institutionalized in society.”

But in one of the most far-reaching drives since the 1979 Islamic revolution, enforcement has spread far beyond criminal offenders to young women showing too much hair and Western-educated academics accused of being “agents” for US-inspired regime change.

This past weekend, 24 Internet cafes and coffeehouses were shut down in a sweep of 435 such locales, Reuters reported. Police said they were shut for “using immoral computer games [and] storing obscene photos.” A fresh “winter” crackdown was announced last week on un-Islamic dress, which includes women’s high boots.

“Their vulnerable spot is these ‘Westoxicated’ Iranians – the threat is not military attack, but Iranians who ‘live differently from us,’ who listen to the West,” says a veteran analyst who asked not to be named. “Many would follow those [thugs] who are willing to attack.”

Iran’s new Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, said in late September that the “main responsibility” of his forces is to counter “internal threats.” One vigilante newspaper has railed against the risks of “freedom.”

The morality enforcement is a reversal in some ways. For years, conventional wisdom held that conservatives would not risk a serious social crackdown, fearing a popular backlash that could threaten their grip on power. But women and labor activists have been arrested as well as students who have staged protests against the president and government policies in the past year. Three who have been in prison for eight months – their fate sparking a number of demonstrations – are to be released Saturday, acquitted of “insulting religious values” and other charges.

Amnesty International notes that the number of executions has risen from 177 in 2006 to more than 210 so far this year. The UN General Assembly Tuesday approved a draft resolution noting “very serious concern” with human rights violations in Iran, including cases of “torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations.”

The steps being taken hark back to the earliest years of the revolution, when “securing the system” was deemed the highest obligation, like prayer. Experts note, however, that unlike in both 1979 and 1953, the regime now has many loyal security forces and vigilante groups whose job is to protect the system and ensure, in the words of one Farsi slogan often applied by critics, “victory through creating fear.”

“The US planned two wars against us, a hard war and a soft war,” says Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Abolhasan Navvab, an influential cleric. “The hard war, it is only intimidation and slogans. But the soft war, it goes more toward reality [by provoking] social, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts.”

“It is not a flood, but this is a very slight rain that is continuous, and when it washes away it has a ruinous effect,” says Mr. Navvab. “If you take it seriously, the level of danger drops. If you don’t take it seriously, the danger is there and it is firm.”

Noting the months-long arrests of several dual US-Iran citizens earlier this year, Navvab charged that some academics “turned out to be agents of foreigners.” The impact of such beliefs has been widely felt.

“I have never seen Iran like this in 28 years,” says one political analyst, who has been warned about contact with Westerners. “Early in the revolution, there was mass jubilation, and repression was very targeted against [armed opposition]. If you were not a member, you had no reason to fear. Now it’s a systematic intimidation, and they are very good at it.”

US expenditures of $75 million on “pro-democracy” efforts, most of it on broadcasts into Iran from outside, has helped provide a pretext. “The whole security environment is intended to really suffocate or torpedo any possible change from within. They believe this mass conspiracy [of regime change],” says the analyst. The result is a “sense of fear, and making engagement in politics at any level a high-risk endeavor.”
 

Last week, parliamentarians angry about the book crackdown called for moderation. “A Muslim woman wearing high boots with a coat and other coverings does not contradict Islam,” said Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, a member of parliament and cleric who was quoted in the Iranian press, according to Agence France-Presse.

One focus has been “Westoxicated” youths, and women showing too much hair or wearing tight manteaus that by law must hide the shape of the body. Morality police park at malls and take photos for criminal files of “bad hijab” violators. Some women have been warned that a third infraction will cause banishment from Tehran.

Presidential aide Mehdi Kalhor, who famously called for much greater social openness in 2005, has also asked for limits on police zeal. “I wrote a letter to the head of law enforcement and asked him to refrain from extremism, [to] execute the [minimum] level of the law,” he said in an interview. “It’s the right of each citizen to have an ordinary life, without being disturbed and agitated.”

Iranian academics have received directives to halt all contacts with foreigners. Civil society efforts – even cultural events hosted by Western embassies in Tehran have dried up, since attendees were harassed, sometimes physically. “There is a genuine concern in the regime that we in the West would like the regime to change, and they are right, for some people,” says a European diplomat. “Some think we are not going to do it with bombs and missiles, but through a velvet revolution.”

That means special attention paid to civil-society activists. At a recent meeting to express solidarity with Emadedin Baghi, the founder of Society for Protecting Prisoners’ Rights who was arrested in October, some spoke out. “A regime that can’t respect such a soft-spoken, moderate person is a cause for concern,” says Ezatollah Sahabi, a reformist editor who has done prison time. “No reformist wants to go beyond [limits] – just respect the rights of the citizens. We don’t want to push the regime into a critical situation.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

White House officials have now admitted that President George W Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear program might change in August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment.

That evasion is necessary, it now appears, to conceal the fact that Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007.

The White House evasions began on the day the “key judgments” in the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were released. At his December 3 press conference, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was asked, “So was it recent weeks that this intelligence came in?” Hadley answered, “What the intelligence community has said is in the last few months.”

In fact, no intelligence official had commented on when the crucial intelligence had first been obtained.

Then a journalist asked, “Steve, when was the first time the president was given the inkling of something? … Was this months ago, when the first information started to become available to intelligence agencies?” This time Hadley responded, “You ought to go back to the intelligence community.”

The evidence now available strongly suggests, however, that Hadley dodged the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not wish to reveal that Bush had been informed about the new intelligence months before the August meeting with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

The key development that altered the course of the NIE on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer, citing a “senior US official”, reported on March 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defense for eight years under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to US intelligence.

The senior official told Linzer, however, that Asgari was not being questioned about Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that Asgari certainly had significant knowledge of policy decisions, if not technical details, of the program. That incongruous denial that Asgari had anything to say about Iran’s nuclear program suggested that the information being provided by Asgari on that subject was considered extraordinarily sensitive.

Intelligence officials have kept any reference to Asgari out of the discussion of the NIE. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer Philip Giraldi has told Inter Press Service (IPS), however, that, according to intelligence sources, information provided by Asgari was indeed a “key component” of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although it was corroborated by other sources.

Giraldi says Asgari had been recruited by Turkish intelligence in 2003, and defected to Turkey after he had picked up indications that Iranian intelligence had become suspicious of him. Giraldi said his sources confirm press reports that Asgari came out with “bags of documents”. Intelligence officials have confirmed that papers on military discussions of the nuclear program were part of the evidence that led the analysts to the new conclusion about the Iranian nuclear program.

Equally important to the NIE’s conclusion, according to Giraldi, was the information provided by Asgari about the Iranian defense communications system that allowed US intelligence to gain new access to sensitive communications within the Iranian military. That was crucial to the intercepted electronic communications which also played a role in the analysis that led to the estimate’s conclusion.

Gary Sick, who was the principal White House aide on Iran during the Jimmy Carter administration and is now a senior research scholar at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, says he believes Asgari’s knowledge of the debate in Tehran’s defense establishment also may have allowed the intelligence community to identify which intercepted communications were most important.

“There are zillions of pieces of evidence, and what you look for is defined by what you know,” says Sick. “What Asgari gave them was a new way of looking at the evidence.”

There are other indications that, by April 2007, the intelligence community was already intensively reviewing new evidence provided by Asgari and old evidence that the new information suggested could corroborate it. Thomas Fingar, chair of the National Intelligence Council, who was directing the whole NIE process, gave an exclusive interview to National Public Radio’s Mary Louis Kelly on April 27 in which he dropped hints of the new phase of the NIE process.

Fingar referred to “some new information we have” and declared, “We are serious about reexamining old evidence …” Fingar even said that the estimated time frame for Iran’s obtaining a nuclear weapon “might change”, because “we are being completely openminded and taking a fresh look at the subject.”

It now seems clear that these were references to the search for corroboration of the basic intelligence obtained from Asgari about the Iranian nuclear program. But Fingar misled listeners about the direction of the intelligence community’s investigation by seeming to suggest that advances in Iranian uranium enrichment announced earlier that month might cause analysts to shorten the minimum time frame within which Iran might have sufficient fissile material for a bomb.

Fingar said the evidence that Iran was beginning to enrich on an “industrial scale” was “one of the questions we have got to weigh the new information to see what it does to our judgment”. He also referred to International Atomic Energy Agency reports on the Iranian program, allowing listeners to infer that the delay in the NIE was due to new evidence that would lead to a more alarmist estimate on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Fingar interview suggests that the process of seeking corroboration of the 2003 change in nuclear policy in Iran was already well underway in April.

The intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program obtained as a result of the US debriefing of Asgari, however, would have been made available to Bush as soon as it was evaluated as important by intelligence officials. The debriefing of a high-ranking defector represents very important intelligence, and summaries of the most important information from such a debriefing would normally go into the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), the summary of key intelligence developments that is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)each night and given to the White House the first thing the next morning.

“It is inconceivable to me that the PDB did not included whatever information Asgari gave us on the nuclear program,” says Ray McGovern, a 26-year veteran of the CIA who once presented the daily briefing to Richard Nixon. Furthermore, every major new development in the collection of intelligence obtained as a result of Asgari’s debriefings would have been included in the PDB, according to McGovern.

Contrary to Hadley’s suggestion that he didn’t know when Bush had first received the new intelligence, moreover, McGovern points out that the national security adviser has received the same PDB as the president for decades. The former CIA analyst told IPS that Hadley certainly would have known when the new intelligence regarding the covert Iranian nuclear weapons program was presented to the president.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.