[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

House Calls For Stopping Iran's Nukes By All Means

May 10, 2004
Middle East Newsline
MENL

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives has called on the United States and the rest of the international community to stop Iran's nuclear weapons programs by any means.

House members said the resolution was meant to pave the way for a more aggressive U.S. stance toward Iran's secret development of nuclear weapons. They said this could include additional sanctions on nuclear suppliers to Iran as well as military options.

The nonbinding House resolution, passed 376-3, was said to have endorsed the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive war in the case of Iran's nuclear weapons. The resolution called on the United States and other members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to "use all appropriate means to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, said similar wording was used by the Bush administration to justify its decision to launch war against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Kucinich voted against the resolution.

http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/may/05_10_2.html

[DoctorZIn]

Army Keeps Tehran's New Airport Shut

May 09, 2004
AFP
Siavosh Ghazi

TEHRAN -- The Iranian army kept Tehran's new airport shut Sunday in a row over a foreign operator that saw the military take control of Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) after a maiden commercial flight.

The facility will remain closed until the armed forces have "seen the cancellation of the contract with the Turkish company and a new contract (signed) with Iranian firms", said armed forces commander General Alireza Afshar.

He told the Mehr news agency that Saturday's shutdown was enforced for "security reasons" and had the approval of President Mohammad Khatami.

Just hours after an Emirates plane touched down from Dubai, army vehicles were deployed on the tarmac to prevent any further landings, although the aircraft owned by the southern Gulf emirate was allowed to return home.

An Iran Air plane, however, was diverted to Isfahan, some 500 kilometres (300 miles) away. The aircraft was even warned of anti-aircraft fire and two warplanes were scrambled to escort it to Isfahan, according to the reformist daily Shargh.

Soldiers and elite Revolutionary Guard troops sealed off the airport, according to various sources.

Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV), an Austrian-Turkish consortium, has been at the centre of problems which delayed the opening of IKIA, which is designed to replace the congested and ageing Mehrabad International closer to Tehran.

The army has launched a campaign in the pages of Iran's conservative newspapers against the awarding of the licence to TAV, which it says has business interests in Israel, arch-foe of the Islamic republic.

"The granting of contracts to Turkish and Emirati companies poses a security problem at the airport," said Afshar.

He said the armed forces had delivered a report to the Supreme National Security Council, which is headed by Hassan Rowhani, who had in turn asked the transport ministry to scrap the contract with TAV.

The civil defence authority, meanwhile, was on the defensive Sunday.

There has never been a contract with the Turkish company. It was simply a memorandum and we have asked the company's agents to leave the airport," civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told AFP.

"For the time being, the situation is normal at the airport, which is in the hands of civil aviation. But there will be no flight until the problem has been fully sorted out," he said.

IKIA, in the middle of the desert about 45 kilometres (30 miles) south of the capital, was built at a cost of 350 million dollars with a capacity of 2.5 million international and four million domestic passengers a year.

Officials had said the airport -- a project first launched three decades ago -- would eventually be able to handle 40 million passengers a year as a regional transport hub.

Khatami inaugurated the airport's Terminal 1 with much fanfare on February 1 -- the 25th anniversary of the return from exile of the founder of the Islamic republic, the late Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

It was due to start handling international flights at the end of March but has been hit by a series of delays.

Air transport is one of several areas of confrontation between thadvocates of a liberal economy, especially inside Khatami's pro-reform government, and their opponents.

http://www.iranmania.com/news/090504g.asp

[DoctorZIn]

Our enemies know the weaknesses of the Western mind.

Our Weird Way of War
Our enemies know us only too well.

By Victor Davis Hanson
May 07, 2004, 8:32 a.m.
National Review Online

The wars since September 11 have once more revealed the superiority of Western arms. Afghanistan may be 7,000 miles away, cold, high, and full of clans, warlords, and assorted folk who have historically enjoyed killing foreign interlopers for blood sport, but somehow a few thousand Americans went over there and took out the invincible Taliban in eight weeks. What followed was not perfect, but Mr. Karzai offers far more hope than a Mullah Omar — and without half of Afghanistan ceded over as a terrorist sanctuary to plan another September 11.

Iraq is a long way away too. And the neighborhood is especially eerie, with the likes of hostile Syria and Iran, and triangulators on the dole like Jordan and Egypt. When we become ecstatic because a megalomaniac like Khaddafi says he's taken a hiatus from nuclear acquisition, you can see that good news over there is rare indeed.

Add in the hysteria over oil, three decades of the Baathist nightmare, and a potpourri of terrorists, and the idea of even getting near Iraq seems crazy. Yet we defeated Saddam in less than three weeks — in far less time than the 125- to 225-day conflict originally predicted by many Pentagon planners. True, the year-long reconstruction has often been depressing and bloody; but here we are a year later with some hope for a government better than Saddam set to take power. Success, remember, need not be defined as perfection, but simply by leaving things far better than they were.

Despite the tragedy of nearly 600 American combat dead, we did not see thousands of American fatalities, millions of refugees, burning oil wells, and the other assorted Dante-esque scenarios that were promised before the war. In other words, distance, climate, weather, the foul nature of the enemy — all those and more challenges were predictably trumped by the U.S. military, which cannot be defeated on the field of battle by any present force in existence.

Yet will we always see political successes follow from our military triumphs? Hardly — and for a variety of reasons. We are confronted with the paradox that our new military's short wars rarely inflict enough damage on the fabric of a country to establish a sense of general defeat — or the humiliation often necessary for a change of heart and acceptance of change. In the messy follow-ups to these brief and militarily precise wars, it is hard to muster patience and commitment from an American public plagued with attention-deficit problems and busy with better things to do than give fist-shaking Iraqis $87 billion.

Still, we must give proper credit to our enemies for our present problems in Iraq and indeed in the so-called war against terror in general. The fundamentalists and holdover fascists are as adroit off the conventional battlefield as they were incompetent on it. If Middle Eastern fanatics cannot field tens of thousands to meet the United States in battle, they can at least offer up a few hundred spooky assassins, car bombers, and suicide killers seeking to achieve through repulsion what they otherwise could not through arms.

Thus while hundreds of thousands of Saddam's soldiers ran — as Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians did from the Israelis in five wars — hundreds most certainly did not once the rules of war changed to the protocols of peace. Recently we were within hours of smashing the resistance in Fallujah once we accepted war anew. But when the mujahedeen, Gollum-like, decided to slither out in the open, then in terror scampered to safety, then remerged on all fours defiant and barking when we stopped firing, our forbearance and fear of global-televised condemnation handed them a victory they did not earn. In short, we should have listened to Sam and strangled the creep on the spot.

But our problems are not just with the paradoxes of the fourth-dimensional, asymmetric warfare that the United States has dealt with since the fighting in the Philippines and knew so well in Vietnam.

No, the challenge again is that bin Laden, the al Qaedists, the Baathist remnants, and the generic radical Islamicists of the Middle East have mastered the knowledge of the Western mind. Indeed they know us far better than we do ourselves. Three years ago, if one had dared to suggest that a few terrorists could bring down the Spanish government and send their legion scurrying out of Iraq, we would have thought it impossible.

Who would have imagined that Americans could go, in a few weeks, from the terror of seeing two skyscrapers topple to civil discord over the diet and clothing of war in Guantanamo, some of whom were released only to turn up to shoot at us again on the battlefields of Afghanistan? Our grandfathers would have dubbed Arafat a gangster, and al Sadr a psychopathic faker; many of us in our infinite capacity for fairness and non-judgementalism deemed the one a statesman and the other a holy man.

So our enemies realize that the struggle, lost on the battlefield, can yet be won with images and rhetoric offered up to alter the mentality and erode the will of an affluent, leisured and consensual West. They grasp that we are not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place.

The one caveat they have learned? Do not provoke us too dramatically to bring on an open shooting war, in which the Arab Street hysteria, empty threats on spec, and silly fatwas nos. 1 through 1,000 mean nothing against the U.S. Marines and Cobra gunships. Instead, their modus operandi is to push all the way up to war — now provoking, now backing down, sometimes threatening, sometimes weeping — the key being to see the struggle in the long duration as a war of attrition, if you will, rather than a brief contest of annihilation.

These rules of the strategy of exhaustion are complex, and yet have been nearly mastered by the radicals of the Middle East. First, shock the sensibilities of a Western society into utter despair at facing primordial enemies from the Dark Ages. The decapitation of a Daniel Pearl; the probing of charred bodies with sticks, whether in Iran in 1980 or Fallujah in 2004; the promise of torturing Japanese hostages — all this is designed to make the Western suburbanite change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, "How can we fight such barbarians" or — better yet — "Why would we wish to?"

If, on occasion, an exasperated and furious West sinks to the same level — renegade prisoner guards gratuitously humiliating or torturing naked Iraqi prisoners on tape — all the better, as proof that the elevated pretensions of Western decency and humanity are but a sham. A single violation of civility, a momentary lapse in humanism and in the new world of Western cultural relativism and moral equivalence, presto, the West loses its carefully carved-out moral high ground as it engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism.

For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and his sons shooting prisoners for sport — moral equivalence lapped up by the state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and incinerating of Western civilians in its midst.

Key here is our own acceptance of such moral asymmetries. Storming the Church of the Nativity is a misdemeanor in the Western press; shelling a minaret full of shooters is a felony. Blowing up Westerners in Saudi Arabia or Jordan is de rigueur; asking Muslims to take off their scarves while in French schools is a casus belli. If Afghanistan has roads, a benevolent man as president, and al Qaedists on the run, call it a failure because Mr. Karzai has not been able, FDR-like, to tour the countryside in a convertible limousine waving to crowds.

Institutionalized cowardice plays a role as well in this weird way of war: Call the few dozen dead in a West Bank town the wages of Jeningrad or the fire-fighting in Fallujah an atrocity, but don't utter a peep about the 80,000 dead in Chechnya or the flattening of Grozny. The Russians are not quite folk like the Israelis or Americans. They really don't care much if you hate them; they are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them; they don't have too much money to shake down; they don't put you on cable news to yell at their citizenry; and you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship anyway.

The moral of all this? The West can defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but in distant and much-caricatured wars on the dirty ground it can only win when it has leaders who can convince a fickle public into sacrificing, being ridiculed, and putting up with inevitable short-term disappointment that is the price of long-term security and stability — a sacrifice that in turn will never be acknowledged as such by the very people who are its beneficiaries both here and abroad.

How weird is our way of war! When we embrace Clintonian bombing — in Kosovo, Serbia, or in Iraq — and kill thousands, America sleeps: few of our guys killed, so who cares how many of theirs? Out of sight, out of mind. Yet when we take the trouble to sort out the messy moral calculus and go in on the ground shooting and getting shot, then suddenly the Left cries war crimes and worse — so strong is this Western disease of wishing to be perfect rather than merely good. Such is the self-induced burden for all those who would be gods rather than mere mortals.

What then are we to do when choices since September 11 have always been between bad and worse? We at least must have enough sense not to stand down and let Iraq become Lebanonized, Talibanized, or Iranicized, even though when all is said and done Americans will be blamed for bringing something better to the region. And yes, we need more democracy, not less, in Iraq and the surrounding Middle East in general.

We have to return to an audacious and entirely unpredictable combat mode; put on a happy, aw-shucks face while annihilating utterly the Baathist remnants and Sadr's killers; attribute this success to the new Iraqi government and its veneer of an army for its own 'miraculous' courage; ignore the incoming rounds of moral hypocrisy on Iraq from Europe (past French and German oil deals and arms sales), the Arab League (silence over Iraqi holocausts, cheating on sanctions), and the U.N. (Oil-for-Food debacle); explain to an exasperated American people why other people hate us for who we are rather than what we do; and apologize sincerely and forcefully once — not gratuitously and zillions of times — for the rare transgression.

Do all that and we can really complete this weird peace in Iraq.

http://nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200405070832.asp

[DoctorZIn]

Tehran’s Hidden Hand - Iran’s mounting threats in Iraq

National Review - By Jonathan Schanzer
May 10, 2004

The State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued earlier this month, complete with its usual hit parade of terrorist groups, state sponsors and emerging trends. Predictably, Iran was singled out for the "planning of and support for terrorist acts," as well as assistance to "a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals." The report also fingers Iran for pursuing "a variety of policies in Iraq aimed at securing Tehran's perceived interests there, some of which ran counter to those of the Coalition." A statement castigating Iran for such activities was long overdue. However, Washington must now challenge Iran over this growing list of nefarious activities in Iraq that have been plaguing coalition reconstruction efforts.

Conventional Fighting. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat ran this headline on March 16, 2004: "American and Iranian Forces Exchange Fire on the Border." American officials claimed that one Iranian border guard was killed, and other reports indicated that three Iranians were killed, but Tehran denied that any such incident took place. This was not the first time that open hostilities were reported. Coalition officials indicated in January and February that Abu al-Khasib, the port just below Basra on the Shatt al-Arab, has been the scene of Iranian violence against Iraqis. Iranian Revolutionary Guards have opened fire upon Iraqi water patrols along the estuary separating their two countries. Iranian fighters are also inside Iraq, and they may or may not be sanctioned by Tehran. On February 14, when a number of guerrillas attacked a police station in Fallujah, it was learned that two of the slain guerrillas were Iranian. An insurgency attack the week before, according to U.S. sources, was an attempt to free a number of Iranians who had only recently been arrested in Fallujah.

Hezbollah & IRGC. In February 2004, during a Washington Institute fact-finding mission to Iraq, one Coalition official reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) offices were spotted in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Moreover, officials noted an immense amount of Hezbollah activity in the city of Karbala. Most of the activity was "intimidation and threats of intimidation...Mafia-type stuff." During our delegation's one day in Basra, we spotted a building that openly advertised the offices of Hezbollah. Members of this organization insisted that their Hezbollah was not tied to Tehran, and that the name, which means "Party of God," is a common one. According to one report in the Arabic paper al-Hayat, Iran sent some 90 Hezbollah fighters into Iraq shortly after Saddam's Iraq fell. The group now receives financing, training and weapons from Iran, and has a rapidly growing presence in the Shi'a south. Western intelligence officials also allege that the man who planned the recent suicide attacks in Basra is Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah operative responsible for bombing the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the early 1980s.

Propaganda. Even before the U.S.-led war on Iraq, Iran had begun beaming in Arabic-language television programming in an effort to gain a strategic propaganda foothold in the country — and it has not stopped. Indeed, American labors to win hearts and minds through the television station, al-Iraqiyya, and Radio Sawa have been steadily undermined by these efforts. In April 2003, an Iranian journalist reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guards brought into Iraq radio-transmission equipment, posters, and printed matter for the militia known as the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps is a militia that has not yet challenged the U.S., but it is run by SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), which is known to have close ties to the Iranian regime.

Ansar al-Islam. Not enough attention has been given to the established ties between Iran and Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish al Qaeda affiliate. Before the war, Iran allowed Ansar al-Islam to operate openly along its borders in the extreme northeast mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, just shy of the Iranian border. Kurdish intelligence, with corroboration from imprisoned Ansar fighters, has established that Iran provided logistical support to the group by allowing the flow of goods and weapons. During periods of conflict with Kurdish militia units, the Peshmerga, Iran further provided a safe haven for these Islamist fighters. One Turkish newspaper also notes that Ansar al-Islam militants actually checked cars going into Iran (rather than coming into their stronghold), indicating close security coordination with the Islamic Republic. When the U.S. struck the Ansar al-Islam enclave in March 2003, Iran permitted many Kurdish fighters to flee across the border. They were later assisted back over the border — with the help of Iran's Revolutionary Guards — so that they could fight against American soldiers in the heart of Iraq. Kurdish intelligence has since intercepted between three and ten foreign fighters crossing Iranian border each week.

Moqtada al-Sadr. Iran sent a delegation to Iraq in mid-April to mediate between the rogue cleric and the U.S. administration. However, at the same time, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, an Iranian agent, has been supporting al-Sadr's anti-American efforts. A source from ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates that Iran may have provided al-Sadr some $80 million in recent months. Further, Sadr's Mahdi army may now be getting training from Hezbollah, according to new intelligence reports. One Iranian source told ash-Sharq al-Awsat that Iran created three training camps along the Iran-Iraq border to train fighters from Sadr's militia.

In sum, Iran may be spending up to $70 million per month in Iraq. This pales in comparison to the billions spent by the U.S. Still, it is enough to undermine U.S. efforts. As such, Washington needs not only to better patrol the Iranian border, but also to confront clandestine Iranian activity within Iraq itself. Failure to do so will only encourage Iran to redouble its efforts to destabilize Iraq.

— Jonathan Schanzer recently took part in a 12-day fact-finding mission to Iraq, sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

http://nationalreview.com/comment/schanzer200405100900.asp

[DoctorZIn]

Iran Says Has Evidence of Worse Abuses in Iraq

TEHRAN (BGNES)- Revolutionary Guards spokesman Brigadier Massoud Jazayeri said he would shortly make public the documents, which would show that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was still taking place.

"There are documents obtained via a certain channel which show that this (abuse) has been practiced since long ago and is far worse than what has been leaked," Jazayeri told the ISNA students news agency.

"American officials, particularly the defense secretary (Donald Rumsfeld) have expressed their remorse about the incident. Nevertheless, such tortures are still taking place," he said.

The United States has been rocked in recent days by a series of graphic images showing prisoners being humiliated and mistreated.

Britain, Washington's main ally in the occupation, is also investigating reports its troops have abused Iraqi prisoners.

Jazayeri said it was clear that U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been fully aware of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

"Bush must be tried as the head of the American torturers in Iraq," he said.

Iran and the United States have been arch enemies since shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution when radical Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 hostages for 444 days. /Reuters
/bnn/

http://www.bgnewsnet.com/story.php?sid=4953

[ZULU]

"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."

The LAST thing in the world the left-wing, anti-American media wants is a successful overthrow of the Ayatollahs in Iran by a popular revolution. It might just look as though Bush's intervention in Iraq was a good thing.

Besides, they would rather see the Iranian people suffer under a regime that oppresses its people than witness that regime replaced by one which might look more favorably upon the nation they detest so much, i.e. the United States.

[DoctorZIn]

A U.N. Whitewash for Iran

May 10, 2004
The Washington Times
Editorials/Op-Ed

One of Sen. John Kerry's central foreign policy complaints is that President Bush has refused to give the United Nations more responsibility in Iraq. But Mr. Bush has good reason to be wary because the United Nations has become a dysfunctional institution.

One example that deserves more attention than it has received to date is that of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR). On Tuesday, the United States walked out to protest a decision by the United Nations Economic and Social Council to give Sudan, one of the world's worst human-rights violators, a third term on the UNHCHR. Last month, the commission backed a resolution submitted by European countries calling for a death-penalty moratorium — an implicit slap at the United States. Members passed five resolutions condemning Israel and took several hours out of their busy schedule to mourn the assassination of Hamas terrorist boss Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

But when it came to the Iranian government's brutal treatment of its own citizens, the UNHCHR stood mute. At this year's session, which concluded in Geneva late last month, the organization declined to rebuke the Iranian government for violating human rights, despite a large body of evidence that it has engaged in summary executions, torture, and arbitrary arrests and detention.

In January, U.N. special investigator Ambeyi Ligabo, a Kenyan diplomat, issued a report documenting the cases of journalists and intellectuals who have received severe punishment for criticizing the Islamist government and clerical leadership that controls the country. Mr. Ligabo noted the case of Hashem Aghajari, a history professor in Tehran, who was arrested in August 2002 for a speech given two months earlier titled "Islamic Protestantism." Last November, Mr. Aghajari was sentenced to 74 lashes and death on charges of insulting Islam, apostasy and heresy. A journalist named Abbas Abdi was sentenced to eight years in jail after his November 2002 arrest following publication of a poll indicating that Iranians overwhelmingly support a resumption of relations with the United States. Journalist and film historian Siamak Pourzand, 75, has been chained to his bed at Modares Hospital in Tehran. Mr. Pourzand, who is barely able to walk following a March heart attack, is in jail for "undermining state security" by consorting with "monarchists and counterrevolutionaries."

But even though Mr. Ligabo documented these and other cases in his report, the UNHCHR has ignored his findings and refused to condemn the Iranian government. Given the abysmal performance of U.N. institutions like the Human Rights Commission in advancing the cause of freedom in places like Iran, why is Mr. Kerry so confident that they'll function any better in Iraq?

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040509-103920-1079r.htm

[DoctorZIn]

Austria's Haider, Vice Chancellor In Iran For Trade Talks [Excerpt]

May 10, 2004
Dow Jones Newswires
The Associated Press

VIENNA -- Austrian rightist Joerg Haider and Vice Chancellor Hubert Gorbach, a senior member of the ultraconservative Freedom Party, were heading to Iran Monday for meetings with Iranian leaders.

The visit by Gorbach and Haider, the governor of the Austrian province of Carinthia and a former Freedom Party leader, comes three weeks after the pair visited Libya.

Gorbach was to meet with Iran's minister of transportation, Ahmad Khorram, and also planned to meet with Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, Austrian media said. Gorbach and Haider were leading a 45-member delegation of Austrian businessmen hoping to explore trade possibilities in Iran, with the focus on helping Iran improve its roadway system.

The delegation said Austria, as a small, politically neutral country, was in a unique position to capitalize on Iran's desires to cement closer ties to Europe.

http://framehosting.dowjonesnews.com/sample/samplestory.asp?StoryID=2004051007420010&Take=1

[DoctorZIn]

Iran Critic Faces Death Penalty

May 10, 2004
BBC News
BBCi

The death sentence imposed on liberal Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari has been confirmed, his lawyer has said. Saleh Nikbakht says he has been officially told of the re-imposition of the death penalty originally passed on his client in 2002.

Mr Aghajari was charged with blasphemy for saying that Muslims should not blindly follow religious leaders.

The Supreme Court later annulled the sentence and sent the case back to the provincial court for review.

The provincial court, in the western city of Hamedan where Mr Aghajari made his comments, re-imposed the death penalty earlier in May.

Mr Nikbakht was quoted by the Iranian news agency as saying that the judge in the case had failed to clear any of the shortcomings pointed out by the Supreme Court.

He said that his client refuses to appeal, in protest at the re-imposition of the sentence.

Protests

The original imposition of the death sentence prompted protests by students and the intervention of influential reformists, including the Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami.

Mr Aghajari is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran, where he is serving a four-year sentence imposed in place of the death penalty by the Supreme Court.

Mr Aghajari, a history professor at a Tehran college, made a speech in August 2002, which was a seen as an attack on the country's Islamic establishment and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Khamenei.

He said that Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" the clerics.

As well as the death sentence for apostasy and insulting the early imams, he received further sentences of a 10-year ban on teaching, eight years in jail and 74 lashes for lesser offences.

After student protests, Ayatollah Khamenei was forced to step in and order a review of his verdict.

Hashem Aghajari is a war veteran who lost a leg in the 1980-88 war with Iraq. He belongs to a left-wing reformist political group, the Islamic Revolutionary Mujahidin Organisation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3699961.stm

[DoctorZIn]

Iran Denies Illegal Meetings at Embassy in Kuwait

May 10, 2004
AFP
Khaleej Times

KUWAIT CITY -- Iran’s embassy did not host meetings between Iranian officials and Kuwaiti Muslim Shiite representatives, Teheran’s charge d’affaires said here Monday, adding that the ”misunderstanding” was over.

“We strongly deny these reports... It had not taken place at all. We respect Kuwait’s sovereignty and have no plans to interfere in Kuwait’s internal affairs,” Abulkassem Shaashae told AFP.

He was summoned by the emirate’s foreign ministry on Sunday to hear a protest over such meetings, reported to have involved envoys from Iranian supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ministry undersecretary Khaled al-Jarallah demanded “an explanation from Iranian authorities over these contacts which Kuwait believes do not serve the friendly relations between the two neighbours.”

“He asked me to convey (the protest) to authorities in Tehran and I did. I am waiting for a response,” Shaashae said.

Local newspapers have reported that the meetings with Kuwaiti Shiite politicians, which took place several months ago, focused on patching up “serious” disputes between various Shiite factions.

But Shaashae said all the Iranian officials arrived in Kuwait after obtaining visas from the Kuwaiti embassy in Tehran and were received as VIPs in the emirate.

Iranian ambassador Jaafar Musawi, who is currently outside Kuwait, hosted a dinner banquet in their honour, with several Kuwaiti personalities, and the function was not secret, Shaashae said.

“We never had secret visits. I believe the issue is over because we never had any intention to interfere in Kuwait. The issue is over because our position is very clear and have nothing to hide,” he added.

The reports claimed that senior members of the National Islamic Alliance, a political group with alleged ties to the international fundamentalist Shiite group Hezbollah, took part in the meetings.

But the alliance categorically denied in a statement Sunday that any of its members had taken part.

Shiites make up about one third of Kuwait’s indigenous population of 900,000. Their ancestors hailed from Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2004/May/middleeast_May276.xml&section=middleeast&col=

[DoctorZIn]

Federal Reserve Fines UBS $100 Million

May 10, 2004
The Associated Press
Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve fined Switzerland's largest bank, UBS AG, $100 million Monday for allegedly sending dollars to Cuba, Libya, Iran and Yugoslavia in violation of U.S. sanctions against those countries.

UBS operated a trading center for dollars in its Zurich headquarters under contract with the Federal Reserve of New York, to help the circulation of new U.S. notes and the retirement of old ones. A condition for the Swiss bank was not to deliver or accept dollar notes through the depot to or from banks in countries under U.S. trade sanctions.

In an announcement, the Fed said that UBS had violated the agreement and that some former officers and employees of the bank, whom it did not name, intentionally concealed the transactions by falsifying UBS' monthly reports to the U.S. central bank. The individuals were not part of the order issued Monday by the Fed, in which UBS agreed to pay a $100 million civil fine without admitting to the allegations.

The bank said Monday that some employees have been dismissed and disciplinary measures were taken against others. employees.

The Swiss Federal Banking Commission has reprimanded UBS and will inspect its operations to ensure that corrective actions are effective, the bank said.

"UBS recognizes that very serious mistakes were made, accepts the sanctions and expresses its regret," the bank said in a statement. "It has already instituted corrective and disciplinary measures and has decided to exit the international banknote trading business."

The New York Fed terminated its contract with UBS last October.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1203&e=1&u=/ap/20040510/ap_on_bi_ge/fed_ubs_fined&sid=95609868

[DoctorZIn]

U.S. Resolution Highlights Standoff Over Iran

May 10, 2004
The Media Line
Stephen Foye

The never-ending confrontation between Washington and Moscow over Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran was back in the news last week following the approval by the U.S. Congress of a resolution condemning Iran's nuclear program. The document, passed on May 6 by an overwhelming 376-3 vote, accused Iran of "continuing deceptions and falsehoods" involving the development of nuclear weapons. In addition to urging Europe and Japan to cut commercial and energy ties with Iran, the resolution called on Russia "to suspend its nuclear cooperation with Iran and refrain from making an agreement on supply of nuclear fuel to the reactor in Bushehr" until Iran halts "finally and verifiably all activities designed to ensure creation of its own nuclear arsenal" (AP, May 6; Pravda.ru, May 7).

Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry (which is to be reorganized as the Federal Atomic Energy Agency) reacted sharply to the U.S. resolution. One ministry spokesman said on May 7 that "We see no reason why we should end our nuclear energy cooperation with Iran." He insisted that "Moscow will fulfill its obligations to Tehran to the end." Another ministry representative said on the same day that Iran is in full compliance with demands laid down by the International Atomic Energy Agency and that Moscow's own nuclear activities in Iran likewise conform to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. "Russia has international obligations," the representative added, "and to discontinue nuclear cooperation with Iran without any legal basis or in the absence…of a decision by the IAEA or the UN Security Council would be illegal" (AFP, Russian Agencies, May 7).

On the same day, a high-ranking Iranian government official was quoted in Tehran as saying that Iran wants to team up with Russia and European countries to produce enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear power reactors. Hossein Mousavian, the secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said that "We could…start talking about setting up a consortium, which would include European countries and Russia, to work together on this program." He suggested that a joint effort of this sort would help to remove fears that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. (Reuters, May 7).

The resolution passed by U.S. lawmakers and the comments made in Moscow and Tehran come as the international battle over Iran's nuclear program approaches a crucial juncture. Later this month Iran is to make a declaration of its nuclear-related activities to the IAEA, and the agency's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, will follow that up with a report on Tehran's progress. The key event is a June meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, but analysts are suggesting that the June meeting could prove a disappointment for both Tehran and Washington. They say that the Iranian government is unlikely to get what it wants - that is, removal of the issue of its nuclear activities from the IAEA's agenda - while the United States may be unable to provide sufficient proof of Iran's noncompliance with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That would frustrate Washington's hopes of getting the issue transferred to the UN Security Council (Arms Control Today, May, 2004; AFP, May 6; Reuters, May 7).

Moscow's role in this drama will likely become clearer later this week, when the Russian government is scheduled to host a visit by a high-ranking Iranian delegation. Russian-Iranian nuclear cooperation has been a regular irritant in relations between Washington and Moscow since the mid-1990s, and the May 6 U.S. Congress resolution is but the most recent manifestation of American efforts to get Russia to terminate the US million dollar nuclear project (some Russian sources put the value at more than US billion) at the Bushehr site.

Late last year there were hints that Russia might be prepared to seek an accommodation of some sort with Washington on the issue (RFE/RL, September 26, AP, November 6, 2003). But positions on both sides seem to have hardened since that time as bilateral relations more generally have turned chilly. And Moscow probably has less incentive now to cooperate with Washington: The post-September 11 rapprochement between the two countries is mostly a thing of the past and, against a background of mounting U.S. difficulties in Iraq and Arab outrage over Washington's backing for Israel, Moscow increasingly has reasons to seek better relations with the Arab world.

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Stephen Foye is with the Jamestown Foundation.

http://themedialine.org/news/News_detail.asp?NewsID=5813

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