Iranian Alert -- January 30, 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.

'Iran may host US congressional delegation'

Friday, January 30, 2004
IranMania News

WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (AFP) - Iran is mulling the possibility of hosting a US congressional delegation for the first official US visit since the 1979 Islamic revolution that sent relations into a deep chill, a newspaper reported Friday.

USA Today, quoting guests at a dinner this week for Iran's UN ambassador, said discussions included the dispatch of congressional aides as early as February 11 to prepare for the trip by members of Congress.

The Iranian ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif, told the daily that no firm dates had been set but said "I hope to be able to see this happen."

The Iranian foreign ministry in Tehran confirmed Friday that Zarif met with several members of the US Congress on Wednesday, delivering a speech and then having dinner and talks on "regional and international questions."

There was no immediate official confirmation in Washington of the proposed visit. But the news follows several signs of a possible thaw in relations after the United States provided relief assistance to the Iranian city of Bam, devastated by an earthquake in December.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi met last Friday with US Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"He came to us and told us he wanted to talk, informally," Kharazi told a news conference in Tehran.

Biden, asked about the meeting two days later by AFP, responded with a frosty "no comment."

http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=22124&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs

Smart bunch
Iranian-Americans reported among most highly educated in U.S.

By Phyllis McIntosh
January 26, 2004
iranian.com
Source: Washington File

Iranian-Americans are far more numerous in the United States than census data indicate and are among the most highly educated people in the country, according to research by the Iranian Studies Group, an independent academic organization, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The group estimates that the actual number of Iranian-Americans may top 691,000 -- more than twice the figure of 338,000 cited in the 2000 U.S. census. According to the latest census data available, more than one in four Iranian-Americans holds a master's or doctoral degree, the highest rate among 67 ethnic groups studied.

With their high level of educational attainment and a median family income 20 percent higher than the national average, Iranian-Americans contribute substantially to the U.S. economy.

Through surveys of Fortune 500 companies and other major corporations, the researchers identified more than 50 Iranian-Americans in senior leadership positions at companies with more than $200 million in asset value, including General Electric, AT&T, Verizon, Intel, Cisco, Motorola, Oracle, Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, and eBay. Fortune magazine ranks Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of the board of eBay, the wildly popular online auction company, as the second richest American entrepreneur under age 40.

Iranian-Americans are also prominent in academia. According to a preliminary list compiled by ISG, there are more than 500 Iranian-American professors teaching and doing research at top-ranked U.S. universities, including MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California system (Berkeley, UCLA, etc.), Stanford, the University of Southern California, Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, California Institute of Technology, Boston University, George Washington University, and hundreds of other universities and colleges throughout the United States.

The Iranian Studies Group (ISG), founded in 2002 by a group of Iranian Ph.D. candidates enrolled at MIT, analyzes social, economic, and political issues involving Iran and Iranians. The group began compiling statistics on the Iranian-American community at the request of Iranian associations and community leaders in the United States who do not have the time or capacity to conduct such research.

The ISG arrived at its population estimate of 691,000 Iranian-Americans by assembling a list of 100 family names from the national university examination database in Iran, then conducting a computer analysis of U.S. white page telephone directories to count households with those names. They then multiplied that total by 2.83, the average number of individuals per Iranian-American household as reported in the 2000 census.

Overall census counts of Iranian-Americans may be low in part because many people are reluctant to identify their country of origin due to troubled relations between the United States and Iran over the past 25 years, says Ali Mostashari, one of the founders of the Iranian Studies Group.

http://www.iranian.com/Diaspora/2004/January/USA/index.html

Pakistan's Unraveling Nuclear Secrets

January 30, 2004
The Washington Times
Arnaud de Borchgrave

Over the past two years, Pakistan's culture of denial had produced a surreal nuclear theater of the absurd. Any suggestion Pakistan's nuclear establishment was less than a paragon of nonproliferation probity was deemed beyond contempt. The father of the country's nuclear arsenal, Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQK), had been elevated to the Islamic equivalent of sainthood.

After the Prophet and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of the Pakistani state 55 years ago, AQK was a nonpareil. AQK and his team of nuclear scientists are devout Muslim fundamentalists. But this, in turn, led AQK to pursue a hidden agenda. Even though a Sunni, AQK was nonetheless awed by the politico-religious revolution in Iran in 1979. The late President Zia ul-Haq who ruled Pakistan as a military dictator for 11 years (1977-88), also wanted his country to live under strict Islamic law (Sharia) and gave orders AQK and his team of scientists and engineers at the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) were to be given top priority for anything they required.

In early 2001, U.S. intelligence began suspecting AQK and President Pervez Musharraf were not on the same page. In March that same year, Mr. Musharraf relieved AQK and his top scientist of direct control of the nuclear facilities. They were made nuclear advisers to the office of the president. But the nuclear horse had long bolted the Pakistani barn, surreptitiously crossing the Iranian border in 1988 to help the ayatollah's theocracy develop another Islamic bomb.

For the past two years, Mr. Musharraf suspected AQK was free-lancing his nuclear assets, but the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency kept assuring him nothing was amiss. That was hardly surprising. ISI and AQK have worked hand in glove since the very beginning of Pakistan's secret nuclear weapons program.

The Libyan dictator's decision to take the secret wraps off his own nuclear weapons program and dismantle it under international inspection was a boon to IAEA's nuclear inspectors. Suddenly, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, suitably impressed by U.S. military capabilities in Iraq, had no compunction about leaking secrets that led to a Pakistani and Iranian connection. Libya over the years had given Pakistan about $100 million for know-how — and international nuclear black market connections — on centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade quality. The technology, according to IAEA, was the same in Libya and Iran, which in turn had obtained it from AQK and his team. AQK had stolen the entire plan for a centrifuge facility where he had worked in the Netherlands.

Pakistan's transfer of nuclear secrets to North Korea did not come under the rubric of an Islamist bomb. It was a straight exchange for the Korean missiles Pakistan needed as delivery vehicles for its nuclear weapons.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Mr. Musharraf conceded what he had long denied. Pakistan's top nuclear scientists had provided nuclear assistance to Iran's nuclear ambitions. The reaction in Pakistan was predictable. "Busharraf," as his legions of Pakistani detractors and enemies mock him, had buckled yet again under U.S. pressure.

Pakistan's secrets were unraveling like a knitting ball of wool that falls to the floor. A former army chief of staff, Gen. Aslam Beg, and a former ISI chief, Gen. Hamid Gul, are fundamentalists who have backed AQK's nuclear grand design.

Mr. Musharraf's inclination is to pick up the ball and rewind the wool. Trials for treason of AQK or any of his top nuclear scientists would not only trigger a nationwide upheaval by MMA, a coalition of six politico-military parties that now govern two of Pakistan's four provinces, but dangerous splits in ISI and the all-powerful military establishment.

Mr. Musharraf had trouble making himself heard in parliament last month when MMA and other parties jeered him throughout his 40-minute plea to moderates "to wage jihad against extremism." He warned lawmakers against an "intolerant society" that is giving Pakistan "a negative image." His blunt language was music only to American and Indian ears.

The army engineered the ouster of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister in 1990 because she tried to get a handle on Pakistan's nuclear program. Since Mr. Musharraf took over in October 1999, much clandestine nuclear activity by the country's Islamist scientists and engineers has been carried out by giving the president plausible deniability.

He did not know, for instance, prior to the ouster of the Taliban by U.S. forces in October 2001, that two nuclear experts had traveled to Kandahar to confer with Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief, and Osama bin Laden. When the story leaked, the government quickly explained they were in Afghanistan to offer expertise for an agricultural project. And when journalists tried to interview them, they were suddenly on temporary duty in Burma — and therefore beyond anyone's reach. The scuttlebutt in Islamabad is they went to Kandahar to teach al Qaeda how to engineer "a dirty radiation bomb," conventional explosives wrapped around fissionable material.

Even though Pakistani authorities detained a dozen nuclear experts for extensive "debriefings," the temptation for time-tested, but not time-proven, denials resurfaced at week's end. The blame was now assigned to an international black market in nuclear bomb-making technology — and one or two Pakistani experts let filthy lucre get the better of them. Muhammad Farooq, AQK's top assistant in charge of foreign procurement, was assigned the fall guy role. But Mr. Farooq wasn't prepared to do the honors. He, in turn, fingered AQK — and the country gasped.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nukes, is worshipped by most Pakistanis, but Mr. Musharraf has now begun chipping at the pedestal. The Pakistani president has survived six assassination plots and two recent attempts on his life within 11 days. He has now authorized leaks about AQK's nuclear free-lancing in Iran and Libya. The leaks even suggested the saintly figure of AQK had filled his own pockets, too. Whether Mr. Musharraf is fearless or foolhardy remains to be determined.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20040129-082817-6075r.htm

US mission to Iran confirmed
From correspondents in Washington
31jan04

A GROUP of US congressional aides is to go to Iran in February on the first official US visit there since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, today said the visit could set the stage for a later mission by US lawmakers.

The senator, who met the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Wednesday said: "The delegation is confirmed, they are going next month." He gave no exact date.

"The Iranian government is not willing to have government to government talks but they feel comfortable with a step at a time," he added.

"They are skittish about going too far and we have gotten to the point where they will accept a small delegation of staffers.

"I think that will set the stage for meetings with parliamentarians and I think we are laying the groundwork for trying to improve relations with Iran, which would be a big boost."

The United States severed relations with the Islamic government in Iran in 1980 following a crisis over hostages seized from the US embassy in Tehran. Only two years ago President George W. Bush said that Iran was part of a weapons proliferating "Axis of Evil" along with Iraq and North Korea.

But while the United States has expressed concern about Iran's suspected nuclear weapons research, relations have shown signs of a thaw.

The United States provided relief assistance to the Iranian city of Bam, devastated by an earthquake in December, and proposed sending a high-level humanitarian delegation to Tehran.

While appreciative of the US earthquake aid, Tehran said the visit of a delegation, that would have been led by Senator Elizabeth Dole and could have included a member of the Bush family, was best delayed.

Specter was among a group of US lawmakers who met Iran's UN ambassador on Friday. Dennis Hastert, the leader of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, was also present.

Specter said the discussions were "fruitful".

"We talked about terrorism, we talked about co-operation against al-Qaeda. We talked about their nuclear programme."

Zarif's appearance in Washington was a significant gesture. He is basically confined to New York, where the United Nations has its headquarters, and was refused past requests for permission to travel outside the city.

Last Friday, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi met Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The State Department said today that the Bush administration would not oppose any trip by US lawmakers to Iran.

"In general, we've always encouraged people-to-people exchanges with Iran," spokesman Richard Boucher said.

"We certainly encourage congressional travel in general. It sounds like it would be fine with us, if that's what they decide to do."

A senior State Department official said later that if such a delegation did travel to Iran, the administration would expect the lawmakers to raise US concerns about Tehran's support for anti-Israel groups, its opposition to the Middle East peace process, human rights and its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In Tehran, the Iranian foreign ministry confirmed that Zarif had met several members of the US Congress, delivering a speech and then having dinner and talks on "regional and international questions".

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,8544443,00.html

Iran hardliners revoke a third of poll bans
By Parinoosh Arami

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's hardline Guardian Council on Friday lifted bans on only a third of the candidates it barred from next month's parliamentary polls and refused demands to postpone an election some reformists are calling a sham.

The council's decision could help split the reformist camp and still not give President Mohammad Khatami's allies enough candidates to be able to win another majority in the assembly.

The 12-man conservative watchdog had banned almost half of the 8,200 hopefuls for the February 20 vote, most of them Khatami allies and 80 of them deputies in the 290-seat parliament.

"More than 1,160 were reinstated," said a Guardian Council statement read out on state television. Some 3,300 out of 3,600 candidates banned by the council had appealed the decision.

Parliamentarian Ali Tajernia said none of the well known liberal firebrands had been cleared to run. "Those who have been approved are those who will not aid a competitive election," he told Reuters.

Reformist deputies have kept up a nearly three-week sit-in protest at parliament, cabinet ministers, vice-presidents and provincial governors have threatened to resign en masse and the Interior Ministry called for the polls to be postponed.

But the unelected council's six clerics and six Islamic lawyers were unmoved.

"The issue of postponement was discussed and was not agreed," Guardian Council chief Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati wrote on the watchdog's Web site.

Many reformists say they will settle for nothing less than the re-instatement of all candidates, but the moderate Khatami who has always stepped back from confrontation with the powerful conservatives, said he still believed compromise was possible.

Influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called for a quick end to the dispute to stop enemies such as the United States making political capital out of it.

"If we hold a successful election with a large turnout they will be disappointed and step back," he told worshippers at Friday prayers, broadcast live on state radio.

But analysts say the hardliners are unconcerned about international opinion as they move to convert their implicit control of the levers of power in Iran to explicit rule.

The Guardian Council has vetoed most of Khatami's reforms passed by his supporters in parliament, while the conservative judiciary has jailed dozens of dissidents and shut down scores of liberal publications.

Students, a powerful political force in a country two-thirds of people are under 30 years-old and the minimum voting age is 15, have kept out of the fray wary of again being drawn into street protests only to be left high and dry by top reformers.

The public also has appeared largely unimpressed by the row, disenchanted by years of broken promises by reformers seemingly unable to bring about social and economic change.

Turnout in local council elections last year was down to as low as 15 percent in major cities and analysts say may not creep much higher in next month's polls either.

http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp;:401b0d3a:51dea486ff1581e8?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4253863

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