http://www.businessinsider.com/iran-threatens-to-close-strait-of-hormuz-in-response-to-foreign-agression-2013-1
The United States has nothing left to pressure Tehran over its nuclear programme except for war, and if it chooses conflict Iran could close a key energy chokepoint, its envoy to Baghdad told AFP on Thursday.
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/01/23/dominance-not-deals-why-diplomacy-with-iran-has-failed/
http://beforeitsnews.com/iran/2013/01/russia-helping-iran-accelerate-nuke-program-scientists-establish-2-laser-sites-for-enrichment-work-2436040.html
Today’s allegations, however, get right to the core of Algeria’s policy interests, claiming that they have confessions from the handful of captured attackers that they were involved in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
The transport planes began flying missions into Mali last week, according to officials, something which had been reported but until today not confirmed. Pentagon officials were mum on whether US drones were deployed and said there had been no decision yet on ground troops for the war.
Iran Threatens To Close Strait Of Hormuz In Response To Foreign 'Aggression'
AP
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Ambassador Hassan Danaie-Far insisted in an interview that Tehran retained the right to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of the world's traded oil passes, in response to any aggression, military or otherwise.
"What else (US President Barack) Mr. Obama can do?" Danaie-Far said through an Iranian embassy translator.
"The only remaining card on the table is war. Is it to their benefit? Is it to the benefit of the world? Is it to the benefit of the region?"
The diplomat said that if it faced a "problem," Tehran would be within its rights "to react and to defend itself."
Asked if it could try to close off the strait, Danaie-Far replied: "If there is some movement and action from our enemies, including US, against us, as a part of natural reaction, that may happen."
"Everybody would be a loser in that case," he added.
On whether only military or other types of pressure could spur Iran to make such a move, he said: "It can include all of them."
Iran frequently conducts missile tests and manoeuvres to underline its military muscle, and has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker traffic should it be attacked.
Washington has warned Tehran that any attempt to close the strait would be viewed as a "red line" -- grounds for US military action.
Iran regularly denounces the regional presence of foreign forces, including American, particularly those stationed in the Gulf. It says the security of the region must be ensured "by regional countries."
Arab monarchies across the Gulf from Iran are worried by what they see as the territorial ambitions by Islamic republic, which frequently stresses Persia's historic dominance over the waterway.
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/01/23/dominance-not-deals-why-diplomacy-with-iran-has-failed/
Dominance, Not Deals: Why Diplomacy With Iran Has Failed
John Glaser, January 23, 2013
The Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program is in shambles. In the broadest terms, this is because the so-called diplomatic opening Obama initiated upon coming into office never actually happened; Washington has been more apt to continue to bully Iran diplomatically while using draconian economic warfare to squeeze the Islamic Republic, despite Washington’s inability to identify any substantive Iranian transgressions.
But there is another, more specific detail to this story that is obstructing any political deal between Iran and the US (the P5+1 are there only to repel the impression that the US is actually engaging with Iran). And that detail is the obsession that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has with the Iranian military site Parchin.
Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist and professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, writes about this absurdity in Foreign Policy:
Following two days of talks last week, officials from Iran and the IAEA threw in the towel, failing again to clinch a deal on access to sites, people, and documents of interest to the agency. The IAEA’s immediate priority is to get into certain buildings at the Parchin military base near Tehran, where they suspect Iran may have conducted conventional explosives testing — possibly relevant to nuclear weaponry — perhaps a decade or so ago. There is no evidence of current nuclear work there (in fact, the agency has visited the site twice and found nothing of concern). But by inflating these old concerns about Parchin into a major issue, the agency risks derailing the more urgent negotiations that are due to take place between Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany).The IAEA again wants access to the site because of secret evidence, provided by unidentified third-party intelligence agencies, implying that conventional explosives testing relevant to nuclear weaponization may have taken place a decade or so ago at Parchin. The agency has not showed Iranian officials this evidence, which has led Iran to insist that it must have been fabricated. (This could well be true, given that forged documents were also passed on to the IAEA before the 2003 Iraq war.) As Robert Kelley, an American weapons engineer and ex-IAEA inspector, has stated: “The IAEA’s authority is supposed to derive from its ability to independently analyze information….At Parchin, they appear to be merely echoing the intelligence and analysis of a few member states.”
Olli Heinonen, the head of the IAEA’s safeguards department until 2010, is also puzzled at the way the IAEA is behaving: “Let’s assume [inspectors] finally get there and they find nothing. People will say, ‘Oh, it’s because Iran has sanitized it….But in reality it may have not been sanitized….I don’t know why [the IAEA] approach it this way, which was not a standard practice.” And Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, weighed in, stating, “Any country, I think, would be rather reluctant to let international inspectors to go anywhere in a military site. In a way, the Iranians have been more open than most other countries would be.”This last point is corroborated by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in their new book Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in which they report current “agency [IAEA] officials have told us they have better access to these [Iran's nuclear] facilities than to analogous sites in some Western countries.” These inside accounts by experts in the field run in stark contrast to the media hype that Iran is somehow blocking IAEA access to facilities that could be hiding work on nuclear weapons.But this isn’t the case. The IAEA doesn’t have jurisdiction over military sites like Parchin. They are being insistent on the Parchin issue despite having full access to all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities and confirming time and again the non-diversion of Iran’s nuclear material.
And anyways, the allegations of weapons development at Parchin are that Iran was conducting work there a decade ago. Not only is that irrelevant to whether Iran is currently conducting weapons development, but even if it were true (which, again, is highly questionable) “Iran would not have violated its IAEA safeguards agreement,” Butt writes.That said, the IAEA’s peculiar approach, under the self-described pro-US chief Yukiya Amano, is not the only roadblock. Most of Obama’s so-called diplomacy with Iran has been “predicated on intimidation, illegal threats of military action, unilateral ‘crippling’ sanctions, sabotage, and extrajudicial killings of Iran’s brightest minds,” writes Reza Nasri at PBS Frontline’s Tehran Bureau. This, despite a consensus in the military and intelligence community that Iran is not currently developing nuclear weapons and has not even made the political decision to do so.Two experienced academics and diplomats, writing in Foreign Affairs back in October, also found the so-called diplomatic opening Obama brought was anything but: “for the past three years, the United States and Europe have stubbornly refused to seek a negotiated solution with Iran.”Rolf Ekéus, Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq from 1991 to 1997, and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, write that “calling for war while intensifying pressure on Iran, without also clearly defining steps Tehran could take to defuse the tension, removes any incentives for Iran to change its behavior.”The last carrot the US offered Iran was spare parts for civilian airplanes, a pathetic offer they must have known Iran would (justifiably) balk at.As Butt notes, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has pointed out that the sanctions are “designed to fail.” Congress’s legislation links the sanctions to a long list of Iranian policies not at all related to their nuclear program. This makes lifting them really difficult in the context of nuclear negotiations.After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Harvard professor Stephen Walt has written, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.” Paul Pillar has concurred, arguing that Iran has “ample reason” to believe, “ultimately the main Western interest is in regime change.”
In their Foreign Affairs article, Ekéus and Braut-Hegghammer say explicitly that they think the sanctions have “the long-term objective of regime change,” not a diplomatic settlement. Back in the 1990s, when the US-led sanctions regime was killing millions of innocent people, Saddam’s regime actually met the Security Council requirements to get the sanctions lifted, but the US refused to provide any sanctions relief. When the sanctions were imposed, Washington insisted they were about blocking Iraq’s nuclear program. Then, “In the spring of 1997,” the authors write, “former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.”This is why a deal with Iran has not been forthcoming. Tehran knows and understands this. As Ayatollah Khamenei said in August 2010, “If they [the US] do not resort to bullying and step down from the ladder of imperialism…we will not have problems with negotiations. But negotiations are impossible as long as they behave like this.”
http://beforeitsnews.com/iran/2013/01/russia-helping-iran-accelerate-nuke-program-scientists-establish-2-laser-sites-for-enrichment-work-2436040.html
Reza Kahili * WND
Iranian scientists – with Russian help – have set up two sites to use laser technology to enrich uranium for the regime’s nuclear bomb program, according to a source in the Revolutionary Guards intelligence unit.
The Russians had argued that due to IAEA monitoring and Western countries’ lurking satellites, it would be wise to use lasers to enrich uranium as, the source added, it is 16 times more productive, requires less space and energy, and is much easier to hide.
In 2010, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted that Iran possessed laser enrichment technology, but the regime refused to respond to demands by the International Atomic Energy Agency to explain its laser program.
The IAEA in a visit to a laboratory in Lashka Abad, Iran, in 2003 had noticed work on laser isotope separation but could not determine the full extent of Iran’s research and development with laser enrichment technology.
Hans Ruhle, the German nuclear weapons expert, in a commentary published in the daily Die Welt last May, argued that Iran can enrich uranium using laser technology, which would be more difficult to detect. He also stated that American spy agencies in 2000 discovered a pilot program for laser enrichment between Iran and the Russian D.V.-Efremov Institute in St. Petersburg.
The laser technology SILEX (separation of isotopes by laser excitation) is used to separate uranium isotopes and refine fuel-grade uranium to weapons grade in fewer steps and, since it produces no distinctive chemical or thermal emissions, make nuclear proliferation easier.
“Laser enrichment technology provides the Iranian nuclear weapons program with a highly efficient means of producing weapons grade uranium (WGU) using a process that is relatively easily concealed and yet potentially can deliver more WGU faster than the now-public gas centrifuge enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow,” said Clare M. Lopez, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/russia-helping-iran-accelerate-nuke-program/#EBmYhHDwG6PFVzkr.99
War watch - tying Libya to Mali and Algeria........
Algerian Officials Claim Benghazi Ties to Hostage Siege
Captured Attackers Confess to Benghazi Under Dubious Circumstances
by Jason Ditz, January 22, 2013
Algerian officials have been trying to push a myriad of narratives on last week’s hostage crisis, including claims that the attackers planned to blow up the entire facility with everyone within as an attempt to ameliorate their own air strikes against the compound, which killed many hostages.
Today’s allegations, however, get right to the core of Algeria’s policy interests, claiming that they have confessions from the handful of captured attackers that they were involved in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
“This is the result of the Arab Spring,” one official noted, adding “I hope the Americans are conscious of this.” The confessions were thrown into immediate doubt by the fact that they were likely obtained under duress by Algeria’s notoriously brutal security forces.
Algeria is one of the many nations where a brutal dictatorship is seen under threat of popular uprising, and its neighbors Tunisia and Libya were two of the most high profile cases where rulers were ousted by uprisings, albeit in two very different circumstances.
So while tying the attacks to the Mali invasion would be easier, since the attackers openly admitted that was why they did so, the Algerian government sees making this about the Arab Spring as another chance to press the international community to come on board and openly oppose pro-democracy revolutions as a threat to their interests in Africa.
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/01/22/is-us-involvement-in-mali-war-really-limited/
Is US Involvement in Mali War Really ‘Limited’?
John Glaser, January 22, 2013
Washington claims its only direct involvement in France’s military intervention in Mali includes the US Air Force flying in French soldiers and 124 tons of equipment. Beyond that, the Pentagon will only admit vaguely to “intelligence support.” Whether the US is flying drones in Mali, whether Special Operations teams are secretly conducting operations inside Mali, and whether the CIA is covertly involved – the Pentagon has no comment.
[George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman] wouldn’t discuss any unarmed U.S. surveillance drones reportedly considered for use over Mali at French request. Nor would he discuss the use of any special-operations forces in the conflict. Since 9/11, unconventional forces and surveillance aircraft have often been a vanguard for a direct U.S. role in campaigns against terrorist organizations that relocate to areas where they perceive they won’t be pursued.But the emerging line from the Pentagon is that, for now at least, the Mali war isn’t going to be like that. U.S. troops are “not contributing” to a training effort for African forces that France wants to conduct ground operations in Mali, Little said. The Pentagon is still considering a French request for midair refueling aircraft. And outside a handful of Air Force communications specialists who helped direct traffic at an air base near Bamako, U.S. personnel haven’t been on the ground in Mali.“Our support of French operations in Mali does not involve what is traditionally referred to as boots on the ground,” Little told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. There’s a caveat: “We don’t have any plans to put on the ground at this time in support of French operations.” And Little wasn’t speaking to any possible CIA involvement in Mali; it’s worth noting that the CIA has placed operatives on the ground in places where the U.S. has publicly stated it wouldn’t send ground troops.
There has already been some evidence that in the months preceding the French intervention, the US had been flying drones over Mali and secretly conducting special operations inside the country. They didn’t tell us about that; I’m not sure why they’d tell us whether it was going on now.
http://news.antiwar.com/2013/01/22/us-military-transport-planes-shipping-french-troops-supplies-to-mali/
US Military Transport Planes Shipping French Troops, Supplies to Mali
Pentagon Mum on Other Plans for Military Involvement in Mali
by Jason Ditz, January 22, 2013
The first officially confirmed direct US military involvement in the French invasion of Mali today, saying US C-17 Globemasters have been deployed to Barmako, the capital city of Mali, to ferry French troops back and forth into the country.
The transport planes began flying missions into Mali last week, according to officials, something which had been reported but until today not confirmed. Pentagon officials were mum on whether US drones were deployed and said there had been no decision yet on ground troops for the war.
Pentagon spokesman George Little insisted that the US would not seek payment for the flights to Mali, apparently attempting to quiet rumors that had fueled angry criticism from French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
C-17s have been deployed by several nations besides the United States, with both Britain and Canada providing them as their initial involvement in the French invasion, which apparently came without much consideration from French military officials on how to ferry their troops from France into the African nation.
As for Syria , the campaign has bogged down , Assad still hanging in there ..... what's the next plan of attack since the rebels are floundering ?
http://blogs.aljazeera.com/liveblog/topic/syria-153
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