Iranian Alert - October 1, 2004 [EST]- IRAN LIVE THREAD - "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

The US media still largely 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.” As a result, 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. In fact they were one of the first countries to have spontaneous candlelight vigils after the 911 tragedy (see photo).

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.

Most Israelis Oppose Strike on Iran for Now -Poll

Fri Oct 1, 2004 03:14 AM ET

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Most Israelis want to await the outcome of international pressure on Iran over its nuclear program rather than consider a pre-emptive military strike on their arch-foe's reactors, a poll published on Friday said.

Israeli officials say Iran could produce atomic weapons by 2007, fueling speculation the Jewish state may strike first, as it did in 1981 against Iraq by bombing its Osiraq reactor.

Iran says its nuclear program is being pursued solely to meet civilian energy needs.

A poll in Israel's Maariv newspaper found only 38 percent of Israelis think the country should now consider a military option, while 54 percent favor letting diplomatic scrutiny and threats of sanctions on Iran run their course. The remaining eight percent of 530 Israelis surveyed were either undecided or did not give an opinion. The poll's margin of error was 4.5 percent.

Tehran, which rejects Israel's right to exist, last month defied calls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to suspend uranium enrichment -- a process that can be used to make atomic bombs.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz signaled this week that Israel was not ruling out a military option although it supported U.S.-led efforts to step up inspections on Iran's nuclear facilities and threaten it with United Nations sanctions.

"The important thing is to stop the current (Iranian) regime reaching a nuclear option," Mofaz told Yedioth Ahronoth daily. "All options for preventing this will be considered."

Tehran has vowed to retaliate against Israel, widely assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power, for any strike on its soil.

Defense experts believe Iran could step up support for Lebanese and Palestinian militants fighting the Jewish state or use other proxy forces to attack U.S. interests in the Gulf.

I KNOW WHAT HE'S GOING THROUGH.. I WAS A HOSTAGE

Oct 1 2004

By Roger Cooper

THE one thing that should give Ken Bigley hope is that he is worth more alive than dead. This thought gave me a straw to clutch at in prison in Iran.

The governor of Evin jail, a decent man, told me the court had sentenced me to death - plus 10 years.

My legs turned to jelly, but I asked him which would be carried out first. He promised to put a note in my file that I must serve the jail sentence first. Some of my jailers were friendly young men, but there were sadistic ones too. One numbskull said if the order ever came to free me he would hang me in my cell and make it look like suicide.

When I'd been to court to have my sentence confirmed, one of the guards drew his pistol and said he was going to shoot me and say I'd tried to jump out of the prison van. "How could I do that when I'm handcuffed like this?'' I asked. "Don't be stupid,'' he said, "I'll take the handcuffs off afterwards.''

So I looked down the barrel as he pulled the trigger, to make sure he wouldn't be believed. The pistol was empty or the safety catch was on.

The worst of being under a death sentence is thinking of the method of execution. My first day in Evin I heard a firing squad, but later hanging was introduced. To me that was worse. But nothing can compare with the way Ken's captors behead victims.

The question remains: Should Tony Blair lift a finger to help Ken Bigley? I believe he could and should.

I wouldn't object if £1million were spent on securing his release. Public hand-wringing won't achieve a thing.

Iran Barbarity Aired By Court

BY JAMIE DETTMER - Special to the Sun
October 1, 2004

WASHINGTON - As reports mount of a harsh crackdown in Iran on dissidents, journalists, and minorities, an international panel of nine eminent jurists, diplomats, and human-rights activists is urging the International Red Cross and the United Nations to demand access to the country's prisons and judicial proceedings.

The call made by the International Moral Court came after it held three days of hearings in Paris last week and heard hours of bleak testimony about systematic human-rights abuses in Iran and the use of torture in the country's jails. The panel was set up by a committee of prominent Iranian exiles eager to highlight the excesses of their homeland's clerical regime.

Experts and victims of torture told the panel that barbaric punishments are being meted out, not only to dissidents or suspected political opponents of the regime, but to anyone who offends the austere moral and social codes imposed by the regime, and are being enforced with renewed vigor.

Among the witnesses testifying before the panel, whose chairman is a former U.N. deputy secretary-general, Eric Suy of Belgium, was a Kurdish woman. She testified that after being arrested for suspected ties to an opposition group, she was hanged naked, upside down, and repeatedly raped with a bottle. Other witnesses told the panel of floggings and amputations and public executions of minors.

The panelists also viewed hours of videotapes smuggled out of Iran depicting the application of medieval style punishments imposed by Islamic courts.

One tape showed a male offender on a stretcher having his eyes plucked out.

Another video recorded a male prisoner having his fingers cut off.

A third documented a man, buried up to his chest, being stoned to death, to cries of "Allah Akbar!" - "God is Great!" The panel concluded: "There is sufficient material evidence to determine that gross and systematic violations of international human rights standards have taken place, and are still being perpetrated in the Islamic Republic of Iran. These violations concern, in particular, the civil and political rights, minority rights, torture and other inhumane treatments such as stoning, amputations, and rape. It will be for a court of law to determine if these findings constitute a crime against humanity."

The founding organizer of the Committee to Pursue the International Crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a driving force in assembling a broad cross-section of Iranian exiles to help set up the International Moral Court, is Dr. Manouchehr Ganji.

"By hearing from the immediate families of those killed and from many torture victims of the Iranian regime, the Paris Tribunal should help arouse the global conscience and seek to shame governments and multinationals into taking actions in support, and not against, the people of Iran," he said.

A former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, Dr. Ganji told The New York Sun that the International Moral Court, which was modeled on the famous Russell and Sartre Tribunal on Vietnam of the 1960s, plans to present the testimony it heard and the panel's findings to the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, and to the European Union, in an effort to persuade the international community to take a tougher stand on Iran's human rights abuses.

The idea to set up the court came to him two years ago, he said, when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which then had a chairman from Libya, dropped the post of special rapporteur on human rights in Iran. The panel's American members are the chancellor of Gonzaga University, Bernard Coughlin, and the feminist writer Betty Friedan, who was absent from the Paris hearings.

The testimony heard by the panel is in line with the findings of the recent Human Rights Watch report, "Like the Dead in Their Coffins," which documented extensive physical and psychological abuse of political and other detainees in Iranian prisons. Human Rights Watch, an independent organization, accused the Iranian judiciary of being at the center of the extensive human-rights abuses.

According to Western diplomats, there is now a renewed drive by the Iranian authorities to crush dissent and to roll back the limited liberalization pressed by reformists before they lost control of the Iranian Parliament in February. Many reformists were blocked from standing in the parliamentary elections. They say that not only are newspapers being closed by the government, but that there is a tighter approach to public morality, which involves a larger presence of Basij Islamic militiamen on the streets to enforce dress codes.

"The clampdown on political expression and dissent involving the use of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, solitary confinement, and torture is increasing," a Western diplomat based in Iran told the Sun.

Human-rights groups have increasingly been criticizing the U.N. and the European Union for being too timid with Iran when it comes to abuses. In the summer a delegation to Tehran from the E.U. received short shrift from the Iranian authorities.

"They have tried the back-door channel and it is not working," said the executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, Sarah Leah Whitson.

"The E.U. must publicly condemn the crackdown that is currently under way," she said. "Given the human rights climate in Iran right now, a timid 'dialogue' with Tehran sends the wrong message."

A Middle East expert with the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, has expressed the same view. He has assailed the U.N. for failing to condemn Iran strongly enough for human-rights abuses, noting that a U.N. delegation that visited Tehran in the summer complained about the protracted use of solitary confinement in Iranian prisons but "failed to denounce the more terrible practices such as torture and arbitrary executions."

While Iranian exiles and human rights groups have endeavored to highlight the abuses, the international press has taken little notice, they complain. In August, the public hanging of a 16-year-old girl, Ateqeh Rajabi, in the northern Iranian city of Neka generated only 11 reports in the English-language press, with only two American newspapers - one of which was the Sun - reporting on the execution. The girl's crime was having sex out of wedlock.

Separately, the Iran Freedom Support Act was introduced into Congress yesterday. The bill amends the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, and calls for the strengthening of sanctions on Iran, and for the aiding of pro-democracy groups and independent broadcasts in Iran. One of the bill's sponsors, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said: "Iran must cease its aggression. Our allies must stop abetting this aggression, and the people of Iran must be free from the regime's terror and abuse. The Iran Freedom Support Act will help on all three fronts."

Iranian cleric says atomic programme will continue

Friday, 1st October 2004
Reuters
By Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN - Iran is determined to press ahead with its atomic programme even if its nuclear dossier is sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, a leading cleric said on Friday.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran that possible U.N. sanctions on Iran would make the Islamic republic stronger than ever.

"Iran will never yield to international pressure to abandon its home-grown nuclear technology," said Jannati, who heads Iran's hardline Guardian Council -- a powerful, unelected supervisory body.

"Americans should know that it is just impossible. You will take this wish to the grave," Jannati said.

The United states and some other countries accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear arms under cover of a civilian atomic programme. Iran denies this, saying its ambitions are peaceful.

"We have no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons," he said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has urged Iran to stop its uranium enrichment programme and threatened to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible economic sanctions at its November meeting if Tehran continued to ignore the call.

Although Iran promised Britain, Germany and France last year it would freeze all enrichment-related activities, it has begun processing raw uranium to prepare it for enrichment, a process that can be used to make a nuclear bomb.

In a move diplomats said could lead to Russia backing the U.S. drive to send Iran to the U.N. Security Council, a source close to a deal to smooth the launch of the Russian-built $800 million Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran said Moscow may call off next month's planned signing of the accord.

The deal would pave the way for Russia and Iran to start up the plant after years of delays.

SANCTIONS

In a speech broadcast live on state radio, Jannati said Iran had no fear of sanctions since it was familiar with those imposed by the United States on the country.

"Americans should know that implementing sanctions by the security Council will make us stronger," Jannati told worshippers at Tehran University campus.

Washington slapped a trade and investment embargo on Iran in 1995, which among other things prevents U.S. companies from investing in OPEC's second-largest producer or trading in Iranian oil.

"Such sanctions enabled us to build our Shahab-3 missile," Jannati said, referring to Iran's medium-range ballistic missile which military experts say could strike Iran's arch-foe Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.

Iran and the United States have not had diplomatic relations since hardline students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took hostage 52 Americans for 444 days after the 1979 Islamic revolution which toppled the U.S.-backed Shah.

Iran at the tipping point
Jonah Goldberg (archive)

October 1, 2004 | printer friendly version Print | email to a friend Send

I'm ashamed of myself. I haven't written a word about Iran in years, and Iran may be the most important story no one is talking about.

I shouldn't say no one. Michael Ledeen, my colleague at National Review Online and the holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, has been writing about Iran with a constancy his fans call Churchillian and his enemies call deranged. Ledeen is convinced, as are numerous Iranian activists and exiles, that Iran is poised for a democratic revolution.

Tehran, the nation's capital, as well as several other cities have been wracked in recent days with widespread anti-government protests and violent crackdowns by government forces. Buildings have been set ablaze, and exiles are calling for revolution. According to reports on Activistchat.com, a Web site dedicated to freeing Iran from the oppressive rule of the mullahs, numerous protestors have been killed. Ledeen - who has many sources inside Iran and out - reports that the roundups and executions of young men have picked up at a terrific pace. Iran has staged 120 public hangings since March alone, according to the government's own news agency.

The unpopularity of the mullahs, primarily with the younger, Western-oriented generation, is causing panic inside the regime. The appeal of revolutionary theocracy has been bled dry. The Christian Science Monitor reported - some would say "reluctantly reported" - that discontent with the regime and a desire for "change" according to various "polls" equals 90 percent. And we all remember those famous soccer games where Iranian fans chanted "USA! USA!"

Even if this weren't such a powerful human interest story, it would still be appalling how completely the mainstream media have downplayed what could be one of the most important news stories of our lives. If Iran were to throw off the shackles of the mullahocracy in favor of anything like a sane, decent and democratic regime, it would be the most significant advance for freedom and decency since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would be a national security victory of staggering proportions.

So here's why we should all be ashamed we haven't paid more attention to this situation: The only way Iranian regime change will ever come about is if we - Americans, Europeans, the West - want it to. By ignoring the story, the press is in effect lending its support to the corrupt theocrats ruling Iran. One can't help but think this story is particularly inconvenient to those who think no good could ever come, even as a partial result, of the president's foreign policy.

That's especially the case for our enemies and "friends" in the Middle East who are invested in the continuation of tyranny, terrorism and the status quo. It's not that the Iranian Shiite regime is particularly popular with Arabs or Sunnis or its neighbors in general. But the collapse of that theocracy at the hands the Iranian street would deal a crippling blow to Islamists everywhere, proving that what normal Muslims want is freedom, prosperity and normalcy, not righteous totalitarianism.

Moreover, Iran is Al-Qaida's best friend - and probably the Iraqi insurgency's, too. The Iranians have been sowing discord in Iraq since before Saddam's ouster, and an end to their mischief would go a long way toward stabilizing Iraq. It would also have a profound teaching effect on the entire region that democratic change is inevitable and that everyone should get onboard the freedom train.

There's no end to the potential upside to a democratic transition - even a bloody one - in Iran. The Iranians could no longer give safe harbor to leaders of Al-Qaida or support terrorist attacks on U.S. interests. And, oh yeah, it might stop Iran from procuring nuclear weapons.

It may be necessary to use military force to remove the nuclear threat from the Iranians, but it would be a colossal mistake for America to see the nuclear issue as the only thing driving American policy - or, for that matter, to regard military force the best tool of American policy. Critics of the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq war complain, almost entirely disingenuously, that Iran and North Korea were bigger threats to America than Iraq. That's debatable at best. What is irrefutable, however, is that Iraq was an easier target than either Iran or North Korea.

When the rebels attacked the Death Star in "Star Wars," there was a reason they attacked at the battle station's weakest point. Iraq was the Axis of Evil's weakest point. The hope for many of us was that toppling Saddam would set off a chain reaction that would bring the whole thing down.

That can still happen. Critics who lament "instability" in the Middle East miss the point entirely. Instability - the right kind of instability - is exactly what we want. The signs are that the Iranian regime is coming apart. Whether it's inches or miles from the tipping point is impossible to tell. But what is obvious is that without the West's active pressure on the mullahs, and even more active support of the freedom fighters, the tipping point may never come.

So please, start paying attention. I will.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

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Most Israelis Oppose Strike on Iran for Now -Poll

I KNOW WHAT HE'S GOING THROUGH.. I WAS A HOSTAGE

25 rockets found in imported scrap at Indian steel factory

Iran Barbarity Aired By Court

Iranian cleric says atomic programme will continue