Iranian Alert -- April 28, 2004 [EST]-- 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.” 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. I began these daily threads June 10th 2003. On that date Iranians once again began taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Today in Iran, most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy.

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.

Iran's Hard-line Judiciary Bans Use of Torture

April 28, 2004
Reuters
Paul Hughes and Parinoosh Arami

TEHRAN -- Iran's hard-line judiciary on Wednesday ordered a ban on the use of torture which human rights groups say the Islamic Republic's security organizations routinely use to extract confessions.

Iran's constitution specifically outlaws the use of torture of detainees. But several attempts by the reformist-dominated parliament to pass a bill banning torture have been blocked by a constitutional watchdog run by religious hard-liners.

"Any torture to extract confession is banned and the confessions extracted through torture are not legitimate and legal," judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi said in a 15-point directive to judiciary, police and intelligence officials obtained by Reuters.

Rights lawyers and political activists said the statement was a tacit admission that torture is still prevalent.

"If we want to see a real change in the judicial system it won't be by emphasizing what's already in the constitution," said student leader Abdollah Momeni.

Momeni, who said he was placed in solitary confinement for more than six weeks and forced to confess to acting against state security last year, said change would only come about if "the officials are fully committed to implementing the law."

There was no clear reason for the announcement's timing. Iran's rights record is routinely criticized by Western governments. But last week Tehran escaped a censure motion by the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission for a second year running.

The European Union has been involved in a human rights dialogue with Iran for about two years. But European officials privately acknowledge the talks have achieved little save a suspension on the use of stoning to execute women.

Shahroudi instructed officials that "blindfolding, restraining, pestering and insulting of detainees must be avoided during arrest, interrogation and investigation."

He emphasized that detainees cannot be deprived of their right to a lawyer, unnecessary detentions must be avoided and confessions must be written and verified by the accused.

RIGHTS LAWYERS UNIMPRESSED

His directive appeared to address most criticisms leveled at the judiciary and security forces by human rights groups and political activists. But rights lawyers were unimpressed.

"The fact that he has issued a directive cannot be justified from a legal point of view because all of these points have been mentioned as binding in the constitution," said Mohammad Sharif, a lawyer who has defended several political dissidents.

Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a close ally of President Mohammad Khatami whose reformist government has struggled to deliver on promises to improve human rights in the country, told reporters it was "important that this directive becomes effective in our judiciary and our prisons."

Ahmad Batebi, a student arrested in 1999 gave a grueling account of his treatment in prison.

"The soldiers beat my hands and secured them to plumbing pipes. They beat my head and abdominal area with soldiers' shoes," he wrote in a letter after his arrest.

"They held me under (a drain full of excrement) for so long I was unable to breathe and the excrement was inhaled through my nose and seeped into my mouth."

UK-based rights group Amnesty International, in its latest report on Iran, said: "Torture and ill-treatment ... continued to be used, usually in cases where judicial or security officials denied detainees access to lawyers and relatives."

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4968841

Failed Model

April 28, 2004
National Review Online
Michael Rubin

Coalition concessions will not bring peace.

“It's going to lead to war!" The Iranian student intercepted me near Palestine Square in central Tehran. "Turkey has just bombed Iran," he said. The incident was a shock to many in Iran. On July 18, 1999, the Turkish Air Force bombed the Iranian frontier town of Piranshahr, hitting the town, surrounding villages, and an Iranian border outpost. While the Turkish government denied that the strike into Iran was intentional, Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu defended Turkey's military. "Terrorists who carry out attacks on our territory escape to Iran, Iraq, and Syria," he said. Hamid Asefi, an Iranian foreign-ministry spokesman, called the bombing "unprovoked and unexplainable" and warned that Turkey "would have to shoulder its consequences."

Turkey did shoulder the consequence: success. In response to Turkey's quick and precise action, Iran cracked down on Kurdistan Worker party (PKK) terrorists it had previously sheltered and supplied. The PKK ceased to be an effective force inside Turkey. Today, the group, infamous for executing schoolteachers, is a shadow of its former self.

Unfortunately, in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has learned the wrong lesson. On April 23, CPA Administrator L. Paul Bremer went on Iraqi television and rewarded terror. In response to attacks on Coalition military and Iraqi civilians, Bremer eviscerated his May 15 order purging top-tier Baathists. His message was clear: The CPA would not stand by President Bush's rhetoric of liberty and freedom. Because of the violence of a vocal minority, the CPA would abandon the entire Shia and Kurdish communities, in addition to the vast majority of Sunni Arabs. Bremer's reversal was not sudden, however, but rather the culmination of an established pattern of State Department and Foreign Office appeasement which has undermined American policy Jay Garner first deployed to Iraq one year ago.

Confronted with terrorism, the CPA appeases. Take the case of Hawija, a small town southwest of Kirkuk. Since the Iraqi monarchy inaugurated the Hawija irrigation scheme seven decades ago, Sunni Arabs have dominated the district. Once attached to Tikrit, Saddam's Baathist government gerrymandered provincial boundaries to dilute the proportion of non-Arabs in oil-rich Kirkuk. Within weeks after liberation, Hawija became a hotbed of anti-Coalition activity. The CPA response? British diplomats initiated a "Sunni strategy" to pump money into the town. They diverted funds from aid projects in Kirkuk. The lesson learned? The CPA punishes peace and vindicates violence. Former Baathists in Hawija remain restive. The disenfranchised Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen in Kirkuk also learned the lesson. The level of violence in Kirkuk continues to increase.

Prior to the current standoff, diplomats in Fallujah signaled that violence is lucrative. On December 23, 2003, the Washington Post featured the exploits of Keith Mines, an American diplomat coordinating local governance in Fallujah. Mines solicited bids for a contract to tear down the ruins of the local Baath-party headquarters. He tossed aside the lowest bids, and instead awarded the contract to a tribal sheikh whose bid was $15,000 above the best. In other words, Mines offered a bribe for peace. "He's been very helpful to us. He's a force for stability in the area," Mines told the reporter. "The Sunnis are the spoilers. If they're not satisfied with how things go in the next six months, they'll take the whole project down," he explained. There are two problems with the State Department (and Central Intelligence Agency) strategy to buy tribal sheikhs, though. Firstly, tribal sheikhs can always go to a higher bidder; and secondly, payment for peace encourages bloodshed when money runs short.

The policy of General David Petraeus to appease recalcitrant elements has also failed. While commanding the 101st Airborne in Mosul, Petraeus held sway over security at the Syrian border. Petraeus reinstalled an Iraqi general and former high-level Baathist, Mahmud Muhammad al-Maris, to coordinate Iraqi Civil Defense Corps [ICDC] units guarding the border. In late January, I traveled out to the Syrian border without alerting CPA colleagues or the 101st Airborne. Despite the predominant Kurdish population in the area, al-Maris assigned only Sunni Arabs al-Shammar tribe members to the border guards. Consistent with the ethnic chauvinism and discrimination that characterizes Baathism, al-Maris demanded that Kurdish ICDC applicants "change" their ethnicity before they could be hired; few did.

Not only did Petraeus's decision lead to the disenfranchisement of the local population, but his appeasement of Baathists also undermined security. The al-Shammari were well known both for their support of Saddam Hussein and for the extent of their kin network on the Syrian side of the border. As I drove along an unguarded military road, I failed to see any ICDC patrols, and spotted several locations where tire tracks breached the single coil of barbed wire that delineates the Syrian-Iraqi border. Concessions do not bring peace.

It is a lesson the CPA should learn. While the journalists concentrate on Najaf and Fallujah, the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi militia is regrouping in Karbala. For three weeks, they have laid siege to the local CPA office, nightly raining machine-gun and mortar fire upon the compound. Residents of Karbala watch the assault and interpret CPA inaction as weakness. Their confidence is eroding. If the U.S. tolerates assaults on its own people, how can the Iraqis trust their lives to Bremer's whims and promises? As one CPA official based in southern Iraq wrote earlier this week, "Failure to make a decision is a decision."

In the war against terrorism, appeasement always fails. Concession in the face of terrorism will bring not gratitude, but terror. We should not replicate examples of failure, but rather models of success.

— Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/rubin/rubin200404280837.asp

Iran Court Orders U.S. to Pay $600 million

April 28, 2004
Reuters
AlertNet

TEHRAN -- An Iranian court has ruled the United States should pay $600 million in compensation for supplying ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons, the official IRNA news agency said on Wednesday.

IRNA said the money in the case, brought by Iranian war veterans and disabled, should be paid to survivors of attacks on the town of Sardasht which borders Iraq.

Iraqi gas attacks killed thousands of Iranians and Iraqi Kurds in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands died on both sides and Iran has thousands disabled by chemical arms.

No further details were available and Iranian officials were unavailable for any immediate comment.

"The court has ordered the American government to pay the money for furnishing Saddam with chemical weapons to attack Iran," IRNA reported.

The United States and Iran have been at odds since 1979 when more than 50 Americans were held hostage by Iranian student militants at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444 days after the Islamic revolution.

The verdict was submitted to the Swiss Embassy which has covered U.S. interests in Iran since Washington cut ties with Tehran in 1980.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/OLI848341.htm

Envoy: Iran Has No More Nuclear Secrets to Reveal

April 28, 2004
Reuters
Louis Charbonneau

VIENNA -- Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna said on Wednesday Tehran has no more secrets to reveal to the U.N. nuclear watchdog and dismissed as baseless fresh accusations it has a covert atom bomb program.

Iran is expected to make a full declaration of its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in mid-May. Asked if it would contain any new surprise disclosures of sensitive nuclear research, envoy Pirooz Hosseini said: "No."

"We will hand in the declaration as agreed," Hosseini told Reuters. "We are doing our utmost to cooperate with the IAEA."

After receiving a previous "full" declaration of Iran's nuclear program in October, IAEA inspectors learned that it failed to include research on a number of items that could be related to a weapons program. These included advanced "P2" centrifuges capable of making bomb-grade uranium.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei described the P2 revelations as a "setback" in cooperation with Iran and said he hoped Tehran had no more such secrets.

But allegations that it does have continued. An Iranian exile who has reported accurately in the past on Tehran's nuclear program said the Iranian military was now overseeing some 400 experts mobilized to develop an atomic bomb.

"These are baseless allegations. It is an attempt to disturb our very fruitful cooperation with the IAEA," Hosseini said.

IRAN GROWING IMPATIENT

Exiles from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which revealed in 2002 that Tehran was hiding a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy-water facility at Arak, gave more details of their latest allegations on Wednesday.

In a press release issued in Brussels, the group said Iran's leaders would stop at nothing to get the bomb and aimed to have one within one to two years.

The NCRI quoted what it said was an official review of progress in Iran's alleged secret weapons program as saying: "Those with nuclear weapons would be the masters of the world and others would be enslaved."

Last year the United States listed the NCRI, political wing of the People's Mujahideen which wants to topple and replace Iran's government, as a "terrorist organization" and shut down its Washington offices. But Western diplomats have privately praised the NCRI's atomic intelligence.

In June, the IAEA Board of Governors will meet to discuss the agency's inspections of Iran's nuclear program, which the United States charges is a front for developing atomic weapons. Tehran says the program is dedicated to the peaceful generation of electricity.

Hosseini said that after the June meeting, Iran wanted the IAEA board to stop listing it as a special case.

"We are doing our job. We should not be on the agenda of the IAEA board as a special case. We are like every other IAEA member. People in Iran are asking why we are on the agenda as a special case when we are cooperating in such a vast area?"

But one Western diplomat told Reuters Iran would remain on the agenda until it made "a strategic decision to abandon nuclear weapons."

On Tuesday, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton told a U.N. conference that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons. He said this would eventually have to be reported to U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4972719

Interesting....Iraq flares up...just after the Terror summit last February.

Jerusalem Post Article

Militants from some 40 countries across the globe are trekking to Teheran for a 10-day "revolutionary jamboree" in which "a new strategy to confront the American Great Satan" will be hammered out.

The event is scheduled to start on February 1 to mark the 25th anniversary of the return to Iran from exile of the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Revolution. It is not clear how many foreign militants will attend, but the official media promise a massive turnout to underline the Islamic Republic's position as the "throbbing heart of world resistance to American arrogance."

The guest list reads like a who's who of global terrorism.

In fact, most of the organizations attending the event, labeled "Ten-Days of Dawn," are branded by the United States and some European Union members as terrorist outfits. These include 17 branches of the Hizbullah, a worldwide militant Shi'ite movement created by Teheran in 1983.

Today, Teheran is a magnet for militant groups from many different national and ideological backgrounds. The Islamic Republic's hospitality cuts across even religious divides. Thus militant Sunni organizations, including two linked to al-Qaida - Ansar al-Islam (Companions of Islam) and Hizb Islami (The Islamic Party) - enjoy Iranian hospitality. They are joined by Latin American guerrilla outfits, clandestine Irish organizations, Basque and Corsican separatists, and a variety of leftist groups from Trotskyites to Guevarists. Teheran today is also the only capital where all the Palestinian militant movements have offices and, in some cases, training and financial facilities.

Iranian officials claim that the presence of these terror organizations in Iran is limited to "cultural and information activities." The militants' offices are known as daftar ertebat, which means "contact bureau," while the training offered by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards is presented as "courses in self-defense."

The war in Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, however, have shaken the traditional Khomeinist assumption that the US will never risk a direct confrontation with the Iranian regime.

THAT VIEW is expressed in a celebrated dictum of Khomeini that is painted on the walls of the conference center where the militants will meet. It reads: "America Cannot Do A Damn Thing!"

Now, however, many in Teheran believe that unless the Iranian regime modifies aspects of its behavior, notably in its relations with terrorist organizations, it might find itself in military conflict with the US.

"Anyone who ignores the presence of the American war machine all around us suffers from deadly illusions," says Imadeddin Baqi, a member of the outgoing Islamic Majlis (parliament).

Until at least last December, one idea was to either cancel the event or curtail it to a one-day prayer session in Khomeini's mausoleum in Teheran. That idea was vetoed by the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei, who believes that any show of weakness by the regime could encourage its numerous opponents inside and outside the country.

Thus Khamenei plans to use the global jamboree to show that Iran is still a revolutionary force and that he alone, and not the ineffective President Muhammad Khatami, calls the shots in Teheran.

Khamenei also hopes that the next elections, to be held 10 days after the revolutionary jamboree ends, will produce a new parliamentary majority that shares his strategy. His game plan is to unify the regime by cutting the so-called "reformists" down to size and adopting a wait-and-see tactic until after the American presidential election.

The militants who are going to Teheran this week are likely to be told that they must lie as low as possible for the next few months without abandoning any of their radical goals. The Teheran gathering is also expected to deepen the recent informal alliances made between Islamist militant groups and a variety of communist, anarchist and environmentalist militant groups against the "American common enemy."

The Khomeinist regime is prepared to change aspects of its behavior and even concede some tactical retreats to weather what many in Teheran call "the Bush storm." But the regime's strategy, which is aimed at driving the US out of the Middle East, destroying Israel, and replacing all Arab regimes with "truly Islamic" ones, remains unchanged.

It is no accident that two words are popular in Teheran these days. One is "detente," often used by Khatami and the so-called "reformists." The other is "hudhabiah," which is the name of a truce signed by the Prophet Muhammad with a Jewish tribe in Medina at a time Muslims found themselves in a weak position. At the end of the truce period, the prophet's army, having rebuilt its strength, attacked the Jews and massacred all the adult males, seizing women and children as war booty.

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