Iranian Alert -- March 7, 2004 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD --Americans for Regime Change in Iran

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

US, Europe Divided Ahead of UN Meeting

March 07, 2004
Dow Jones Newswire
The Associated Press

VIENNA -- Disputes over Iran's nuclear intentions - and what to do about them - left the U.S. and key European nations struggling for compromise Sunday, the eve of a key meeting of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency.

Convinced that Tehran at one point wanted to make nuclear weapons, Washington wants tough language to dominate in any resolution adopted by the board of governors meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency that opens Monday.

Germany, the U.K. and France, however, seek emphasis on the progress Iran has made in revealing nuclear activities and cooperating with IAEA inspectors since the discovery last year of a secret uranium enrichment program and covert tests that could be applied toward making nuclear weapons.

Even as negotiators met Sunday in an attempt to find common language, a senior Iranian official demanded an end the board's scrutiny of its nuclear activities, insisting in that they were never geared toward making arms.

"Iran's dossier has to be completely taken out of the IAEA board of governors' agenda," said Hasan Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator who also chairs the powerful Supreme National Security Council. The other goal is to have Iran recognized globally as having the right to enrich uranium, Rowhani told senior officials in Tehran.

While insisting it is interested in enrichment only to generate power and not to arm warheads, Iran has suspended its enrichment program to defang criticism and ease months of international pressure. Still it insists it has every right to resume such activities, despite international demands that Iranian enrichment be scrapped instead of only suspended.

Tehran has also allowed IAEA inspectors broad access to its nuclear programs and has handed over materials requested by IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei in his investigation of nearly two decades of covert activities, including purchases from the nuclear black market that also supplied Libya and North Korea.

Still, an IAEA report prepared for Monday's meeting of the 35-nation board faults Tehran for continuing to hide evidence of nuclear experiments unearthed by agency inspectors and urges it anew to come clean. Made public last month, the dossier dealt the Islamic Republic a setback in its efforts to convince the world that its nuclear program is peaceful and that it is fully cooperating with the U.N. agency.

The report mentioned finds of traces of polonium, a radioactive element that can help trigger a nuclear chain reaction, but which Iran says it was interested in for generating electricity. And it expressed concerns over the discovery of a previously undisclosed advanced P-2 uranium centrifuge system - a finding that the U.S. administration said raises "serious concerns" about Tehran's intentions.

The IAEA report also said that Iran's "omission ... of any reference to its possession of the P-2 centrifuge design drawings and associated research, manufacturing and mechanical testing activities is a matter of serious concern."

At the same time, it described Iran as "actively cooperating with the agency," and said it had made "good progress" in verifying some of its explanations for suspect activities.

Reflecting the stance of hawks in the U.S. administration, Undersecretary of State John Bolton said Thursday that Iran was exhibiting a "a continuing pattern of deception and concealment.".

"We think the Iranians are still trying to conceal a clandestine weapons program and that's why the Iranians remain a great concern to the United States," he said in Lisbon, Portugal. "We're absolutely determined ... that we're not going to ease pressure on Iran."

The Germans, French and British, feel, however that too much pressure could backfire, particularly at a time of domestic political struggle between Iran's moderates and hardliners.

"While not ignoring the problems that remain, they want to emphasize progress," made by Iran in opening past and present nuclear activity to IAEA scrutiny, said one diplomat familiar with the stance of the European three.

Another diplomat said the Americans and Europeans were discussing a draft resolution "that is a blend of the positive and the negative," but emphasized that discussions remained in flux.

A third diplomat said the Americans received instructions from Washington over the weekend to "toughen things up a little bit."

"They're still not on the same sheet as the French, Germans and English," he said. All the diplomats spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. still feels that Iran violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But after previous failures at earlier IAEA board meetings, it recognizes that it does not have enough support in Vienna to have the country dragged before the U.N. Security Council - which could impose sanctions.

Instead, said the diplomats, it has signed on to a resolution cosponsored by Libya and the U.K. praising Tripoli for voluntarily revealing and pledging to scrap its nuclear weapons program late last year but asking the Security Council to take note of the issue.

That would open the way for a new push for Security Council action on Iran at the next board meeting in June, should new revelations strengthen suspicions that it was trying to make weapons, they said.

http://framehosting.dowjonesnews.com/sample/samplestory.asp?StoryID=2004030715280001&Take=1

Iran's Nuclear Menace

March 07, 2004
The Washington Times
Mansoor Ijaz

The myth of protection offered by global antiproliferation regimes — including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty — was shattered last month when investigators for the International Atomic Energy Agency began unraveling a clandestine nuclear black market network run by a Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Iran, Libya and North Korea were primary recipients of Pakistan's nuclear technology. Other countries and terrorist groups may yet be exposed as clients of Mr. Khan's network.

But nowhere has the damage done by Mr. Khan's illicit activities been more apparent than in Iran, where sham elections two weekends ago returned hard-liners to power, and where now the real possibility exists of nuclear tests being conducted without political opposition.

Iran's mullahs have longed for nuclear bombs since coming to power in 1980. Their pacifying statements and superficial compliance with IAEA inspection teams are masking an unrelenting drive to buy time for their scientists to complete work on the first Shi'ite Islamic bomb.

There is not a minute to waste in stopping them. With centrifuge technology far more advanced than previously believed, Iran's scientists have been frantically working away on obtaining critical bomb fuel with as many as three separate programs. The first employs the P-1 centrifuges transferred by Mr. Khan's network, as well as the far more sophisticated P-2 centrifuges recently revealed to be in Iran's possession.

The second track makes use of Belarus-Russian filtering and high-temperature melting technologies for uranium enrichment. These facts were revealed by Ahmad Shirzad, a member of Iran's Parliament representing Isfahan, in late 2003 as he passionately argued Iran's children were starving while the mullahs processed uranium at secret underground facilities near Parchin (southeast of Tehran) and in the mountains between Qazvin and Karaj (northwest of Tehran).

The third program, in its early stages of development, uses Chinese chemical separation formulas to separate plutonium from Russian-supplied spent uranium fuel rods. Add to these three parallel enrichment programs recently uncovered evidence Tehran possesses Polonium, a key catalyst for fissionable reactions, as well as blueprints to build Chinese-style implosion nuclear devices and that the mullahs are hosting a large contingent of Georgian atomic scientists (first revealed by deposed President Eduard Shevardnadze late last year) and it becomes difficult to believe Iran's nuclear program is for "peaceful purposes only."

Strong measures are needed urgently to deal with the growing threat posed by rogue nations and nonstate actors to deal with the proliferation of radiological materials, or worse, when combined with sophisticated plastic explosives — miniaturized "dirty" bombs.

We should start immediately by pressuring Pakistan, where all this started, to provide a fuller picture of Tehran's current nuclear capabilities.

CIA Director George Tenet's recent secret visit to Pakistan, reported in the press last week, to begin applying such pressure was a good start. We can only hope his interrogation of Mr. Khan filled in important blanks about who exactly bought what from Pakistan's brazenly glitzy nuclear brochures.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf had promised complete transparency when his scientists were caught red-handed in their nuclear mischief. He has good reason to comply with U.S. requests to smoke out the Iranian program because ironically, it was Iran's mullahs who first revealed the extent of Mr. Khan's illegal transfers to IAEA inspectors.

Mr. Tenet and others in the business of preventing proliferation need to urgently find out from Pakistan whether other vital components for building atomic weapons (detonation switches, spherical bomb casings, simulators to model implosion data, testing software, etc) also were transferred by Mr. Khan's network to Iran's scientists.

The Pakistani data, if made fully available, would enable U.S. diplomats, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, to demand intrusive inspections in Iran of the type Col. Moammar Gadhafi was forced to accept when faced with undeniable evidence of Libya's nuclear guilt last December. It could also empower the U.S. to build a coalition of nations to bring sufficient diplomatic, economic and military pressure to bear upon Tehran's mullahs to totally dismantle their nuclear program.

The Powell doctrine of endlessly negotiating and maneuvering with Iran's clerics is a recipe for nuclear disaster. He approved the January visit of Iran's ambassador to the United Nations to speak at a Washington think-tank.

He encouraged Britain's Prince Charles to make a goodwill visit to Tehran and Bam, the earthquake site. He has thus far futilely negotiated for the hand-over of senior al Qaeda operatives hiding in Iran or being sent back into Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the atomic clock keeps on ticking.

To prevent Iran's ascension into the nuclear club, each of the important countries in a joint U.S.-European-led diplomatic coalition could freeze select Iranian government assets as an insurance policy against potential nuclear tests until dismantling was agreed to and completed.

European Union states could quietly pressure Tehran with economic and trade sanctions, as perhaps Germany did in December when its citizens were kidnapped in Iran and later freed. At the first indication any atomic bomb tests were beyond initial planning stages, the U.S. could move the A2 carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.

To ensure the mullahs understand how near the end of their nuclear vision might be, visibly positioning several B-2 stealth bombers in Qatar might also send a clear message.

Iran is on the verge of becoming perhaps the world's most dangerous nuclear state, one capable of proliferating without regard for international agreements and standards of state behavior. This is precisely what Mr. Khan had in mind when he first envisioned the metastasis of his nuclear cancer — contaminate one cell and let others infect the rest.

The disarray and confusion over Iran policy in Washington, Paris, London and Berlin must not allow nuclear tests to take place that could forever change the course of history.

Mansoor Ijaz, a nuclear scientist, is chairman of Crescent Investment Management in New York; his father was an early pioneer in Pakistan's nuclear program. Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (U.S. Air Force retired) was Air Force assistant vice chief of staff.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040306-102129-4558r.htm

'Persian Arts' expo attracts over one million European viewers
Director of National Museum of Iran Mohammad Reza Kargar said in Madrid on Sunday that more than one million viewers have so far been attracted to the '7,000-Year Persian Art Expo' across Europe, IRNA reported.

Kargar told IRNA that the exposition was earlier held in Austria, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain in the past three years; adding that it is scheduled to be held in the American continent in future.

The three-month exhibition opened in the city of Saragossa in northern Spain last week. A set of unique historical artifacts of high value consisting of 178 pieces of handicrafts and other art objects are showcased in the ongoing exposition.

The objects currently on show date back to the period between the seventh millennium BC and the ninth century AD.

"The exhibition has exposed the Europeans, particularly the scholars and people of culture to a different aspect of Iran and has contributed to development of a new approach towards Iran among the people of Europe to make them interested in visiting the country," added Kargar.

He said that the people in the southern Spanish city of Seville, where the exhibition was held earlier, were so keen to view it that they had formed long queues.

The museum director referred to the call by various European and American countries to host such an exposition, release of almost 300 reports on it in their press, dozens of hours of programs and films about Iran broadcast on European televisions, including a 16-hour program in Austria, and their deep interest in Iran's culture and civilization as among the effective impacts of the specified exposition.

"Over 30,000 volumes of a 300-page catalog introducing the culture and civilization of Iran in various languages along with a number of related films have so far been sold," he noted.

According to him, the exposition presented in Europe for the first time in the post-revolutionary era introduces Iran's culture and civilization to the West in a most lively, real and firmly-documented approach.

Kargar said that one of the objectives of the event is to strengthen proper grounds for the issue of Iranology in European universities.

"In line with the same objective, an Iranology institute has been established in Austria and similar measures are also underway in other countries," he added.

Turning to change of European's approach towards Iran as another objective for organizing the art event, he said that a large number of officials visiting the exposition have admitted that they have no option than bow to the might and grandeur of the ancient Iranian civilization.

"The entire associated expenses of the exhibition are covered by the hosting country. Iran has so far undergone no expenses in this respect, but has even gained a revenue of rls 10 billion.

"The artifacts on show are under insurance coverage by authorized international insurance companies and their exchange has taken place in accordance with the current international laws and regulations," he added.

Turning to the fact that the the cabinet has authorized holding the ongoing exposition overseas, he said that the objects currently on display have been transferred abroad under tight security measures.

He underlined that fortunately, so far no damage has been inflicted on the objects in question.

The current exposition has been held in the cities of Valencia and Seville in eastern and southern Spain respectively in the past six months. It was transferred to Saragossa last week.

The '7,000-Year Persian Art Expo' is scheduled to be held in the Spanish city of Santiago de Compotsela, once the current display is over.

http://www.payvand.com/news/04/mar/1047.html

UN weighs Iran's nuclear project

BBC News, UK
8 March, 2004

The UN watchdog is set to consider Iran's controversial nuclear programme in the light of a critical report.
The International Atomic Energy Agency may table a resolution noting its findings that Iran failed to declare activities possibly linked to weapons.

Iran has insisted its programme is purely peaceful and has asked the UN to halt its monitoring.

The US has called for pressure to be maintained on Iran, which it says does not need to develop nuclear power.

The 35-nation board of governor is gathering at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna for talks which may continue until the end of the week, a representative said.

The IAEA report on Iran, details of which were revealed last month, notes that Iran failed to reveal sensitive research involving advanced centrifuges which could be used in the production of bomb-grade material.

The BBC's Bethany Bell in Vienna says diplomats are unlikely to send Iran's case to the United Nations Security Council but they are considering a draft resolution noting the discovery of the omissions.

The IAEA board meeting will also hear a report on the dismantling of Libya's nuclear weapons programme.

Libya is expected to sign up to the agency's additional protocol, which allows tougher inspections of its atomic sites.

'Clandestine weapons'

A senior Iranian official urged the IAEA on Sunday to close its files on the country's nuclear programme and accept that it is a peaceful project.

Hassan Rowhani, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said the international community must recognise Iran as a civilian nuclear power.

He said Iran had an inalienable right to continue its nuclear programme which had been shown to be peaceful.

"That means Iran be recognised as a country having the nuclear fuel cycle, and enriching uranium," Mr Rowhani said.

Iran halted its enrichment programme last year under international pressure but Mr Rowhani stressed that the move was only temporary.

"When to resume is in the hands of our system," he said.

US Undersecretary of State John Bolton said last week that America was "absolutely determined not to reduce the pressure on Iran".

"We think the Iranians are still trying to conceal a clandestine weapons programme and that's why the Iranians remain a great concern to the United States," he said while in Lisbon, Portugal.

However, European states led by Germany, France and the UK have favoured a more conciliatory approach to Iran, pointing to the complicated political situation within the Islamic republic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3541881.stm

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