IAEA Condemnation of Iran: An Omen of New Sanctions or a Symbolic Slap on the Wrist?

(Juan Cole | Informed Consent | 28 November 2009) – The board of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency on Friday condemned Iran for secretly building a new nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo near Qom, and called on it to mothball the new site. The resolution was backed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including China and Russia, as well as Germany. Read the rest of this entry »

Iran’s new nuclear talks plan

Many observers see Iran’s new proposal package as a way to freeze the clock on further sanctions. Will Tehran in the end bow to growing international pressure? Would sanctions work? And will the proposal help end Iran’s isolation?

(Al Jazeera English | Inside Edition | 10 September 2009) - Manouchehr Mottakir, Iran’s foreign minister, has submitted his government’s latest proposals to the envoys of the six countries involved in nuclear talks. The proposal comes as Tehran has been threatened with harsher sanctions over its nuclear ambitions. Diplomats will be studying the Iranian message for signs that Tehran is really interested in taking up the offer of economic and political concessions in return for a halt to its uranium enrichment programme.  The proposal is not expected to lead to a breakthrough in the nuclear dispute.  Many observers see Iran’s new proposal package as a way to freeze the clock on further sanctions. Will Tehran in the end bow to growing international pressure? Would sanctions work? And will the proposal help end Iran’s isolation?

This episode of Inside Story airs from Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 1730GMT and 2230GMT, with repeats on Friday at 0430GMT and 1030GMT.

Iran’s internal affairs: Keep the U.S. out

Submitted by Shervin Boloorian on July 22, 2009 on the FORpeaceBlog.

As Congress prepares to consider more Iran sanctions, it should also consider that confrontational U.S. policies have come nowhere close to changing Iran’s behavior in the last 30 years. On the other hand, in reaction to a contested election, the Iranians have formed an unprecedented home-grown movement for political expression through their own resources, their own desire for democratic progress, and their own sacrifices. Read the rest of this entry »

So in less than 24 hours after seemingly – though not officially – winning the democratic nomination for president of the United States of America, Barack Obama stands in front of the largest pro-Israel lobby (read “bribery, extortion, and blackmail experts” for the Cliff Notes definition of “lobby” — at least as it is practiced in the US) in the world today, AIPAC, and tells the crowd that he will impose tougher and even more stringent sanctions against Iran if they continue to enrich uranium as a means to create nuclear energy to fuel their fast-growing country. Says the New York Times, “Mr. Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where, tacking to the right, he described a far tougher series of sanctions he would be willing to impose on Iran than he had outlined heretofore.”

Already starting to change colors right before our eyes? Well one isn’t quite sure yet. But how utterly and typically “political” this most recent stunt has made Obama appear. He failed to have either the knowledge or the courage – right now we aren’t sure which – to remind the crowd that Iran is legally entitled under international law to be working on researching nuclear energy under the Nuclear Proliferation Act – they currently have approximately one-hundred and twenty-thousand citizens employed and working at various plants around their country in this program – nor did he mention that they were given authorization from and originally purchased their nuclear energy knowledge and many materials to do so from the United States as far back as the Eisenhower administration.

How on earth can this man be talking about more sanctions against Iran and trying to stop them from enriching uranium when it is absolutely none of his business is the question that is begged to be answered here.

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Dunham/Associated Press
Reprinted from Original Article from New York Times here

LONDON — After a seven-year legal battle, Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled
Wednesday that the British government was wrong to include an Iranian
resistance group, the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, on its list of banned
terrorist groups. Lord Corbett, left front, urged celebrating People’s Mujahedeen backers to
sit down Wednesday.

Spokesmen for the group, whose name means People’s Holy Warriors, said the
ruling appeared to leave Britain’s interior minister, Home Secretary Jacqui
Smith, with no further legal recourse but to order Parliament to strike the
group from a list of more than 20 proscribed terrorist organizations under
Britain’s Terrorism Act.

The court’s ruling denied the government’s bid to carry the appeal further,
seemingly closing off recourse to Britain’s supreme appellate body, the
so-called Law Lords. But the British government did not say what it planned
to do.

The People’s Mujahedeen has roots that go back to the Iranian resistance to
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s rule in the mid-1960s. After the 1979
revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini turned against the group, executing
many of its members and driving others into exile. It regrouped in Iraq in
the 1980s and was listed as a terrorist group by the United States in 1997
and the European Union in 2002.
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By Robert Dreyfuss

At least 400 dissidents, activists and intellectuals--a number far larger than previously reported–were murdered in Iran during a wave of officially sanctioned, government death-squad activity that ended in 1999, according to Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Prize-winning human rights lawyer who is currently on a speaking tour in the United States. But Ebadi insists that US threats against Iran and rhetoric about regime change could make things worse, giving Iran’s leaders an excuse to intensify repression.

In an interview with The Nation, Ebadi said that she has documentation for one-third of those killings, and that information about the rest comes from the personal testimony of a man who admitted his role in the November 1998 murders of Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar, who were hacked to pieces in their Tehran home. The Forouhars, critics of the Iranian regime, were part of the coalition that supported Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist leader who was toppled by a CIA-backed coup d’état in 1953.

Ebadi, a Tehran-based attorney and former judge who has battled the government over human-rights abuses for years, says that what she calls the pattern of “chain murders” has halted since then. But she warns that the human-rights situation in Iran remains grave. On April 2, Ebadi herself received an anonymous threat in a letter delivered to her office that read: “Your death is near.”
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