Iranian Alert -- DAY 48 -- LIVE THREAD PING LIST

The Iranian Student Movement Up To The Minute Reports ^ | 7.27.2003 | DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movment in Iran from being reported.

From jamming satellite broadcasts, to prohibiting news reporters from covering any demonstrations to shutting down all cell phones and even hiring foreign security to control the population, the regime is doing everything in its power to keep the popular movement from expressing its demand for an end of the regime.

These efforts by the regime, while successful in the short term, do not resolve the fundamental reasons why this regime is crumbling from within.

Iran is a country ready for a regime change. 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.

Please continue to join us here, post your news stories and comments to this thread.

Thanks for all the help.

DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

To find all the links to all 48 threads since the protests started, go to:

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Join Us at the Iranian Alert -- DAY 48 -- LIVE THREAD PING LIST

Live Thread Ping List | 7.27.2003 | DoctorZIn

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Iran MPs to Probe Death of Canadian Journalist

July 27, 2003
AFP
The Peninsula

TEHRAN -- Members of Iran's reformist-led parliament are to investigate the death in custody here of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, which has sparked a crisis in Tehran's relations with Ottawa, the student news agency Isna reported yesterday.

The inquiry will be held by a special parliamentary committee which is required under Article 90 of the constitution to give an "appropriate response" when it receives a written complaint against any branch of government, the news agency said.

The ministers of intelligence, interior, culture, health and justice, and Tehran's chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi are all expected to appear before the committee when it begins its proceedings Tuesday, Isna added.

Also present will be reformist Vice President Mohammad Abtahi, who on July 16 made the shock admission that Kazemi had died from a brain haemorrhage caused by a blow sustained while in custody, which he blamed on hardliners attempting to undermine the reformist administration.

On Wednesday, an angry Canada recalled its ambassador after Iran rejected its requests for the journalist's body to be repatriated.

Kazemi's death last month following her arrest while photographing protestors outside Tehran's Evin prison has sparked a storm of protest in Canada, particularly among the 250,000-strong Iranian emigre community.

Relations between Tehran and Ottowa have since further deteriorated after Iran drew a parallel with the case of an Iranian killed by Canadian police while brandishing a machete.

http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news_en.pl?l=en&y=2003&m=07&d=27&a=2

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[DoctorZIn]

Terrorism: Al Qaeda’s Men in Iran

By Mark Hosenball and Babak Dehghanpisheh
NEWSWEEK

Aug. 4 issue — As U.S. troops try to fend off “guerrilla” attacks in Iraq, American spies and diplomats are increasingly preoccupied with a scary group of Qaeda operatives in neighboring Iran. Last week Ali Younesi, Tehran’s intelligence minister, confirmed that a “large number” of Qaeda personnel are presently in his country. Younesi claimed the terror suspects were “in custody.” U.S. officials believe that the suspects include some of America’s Most Wanted: Saad bin Laden, Osama’s son and possible successor; Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti who surfaced as one of Al Qaeda’s top media “spokesmen” after 9/11; Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian alleged by Colin Powell to be a key link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and possibly Saif Al-Adel, once Al Qaeda’s military and security chief. Also believed to be in Iran are deputy leaders of two key Egyptian Qaeda affiliates, Islamic Jihad (headed by bin Laden side-kick Ayman Al-Zawahiri, still thought to be in hiding with bin Laden on the Afghan-Pakistani border) and Jemaah Islamiah, headed by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheik” held by the United States for plotting attacks in New York. Some U.S. officials believe that some of these suspects, including bin Laden Jr. and the Egyptians, really are in Iranian custody, but administration hard-liners believe Iranian authorities leave some of them free enough to hatch new terror plots.

THE UNITED STATES would love to get its hands on the suspects, but relations with Iran have been fractured since the 1979 hostage crisis. U.S. officials are now working quietly with allies on deals to transfer suspects to third countries and then eventually into American hands. In early July Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the head of Iran’s judiciary, visited Saudi Arabia, where he met with the king and crown prince. Around the same time, according to some sources, authorities in Riyadh decided to strip Saad bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship, making it easier for the Iranians not to turn him over to his native country. Meanwhile, Kuwait announced that it had declined an Iranian offer to turn over Abu Ghaith, who was stripped of his Kuwaiti citizenship after 9/11. These moves could pave the way for Iranians to expel the suspects to countries other than their homelands.
Any hush-hush diplomatic arrangements regarding the terror suspects could be sabotaged by hard-liners in either the United States or Iran. Some Washington activists with ties to administration conservatives last week alleged that Iranian officials may have been caught by authorities in Belgium and Germany trying to obtain nuclear material from the Congo. State Department officials say that because Iran is partly democratic, they don’t want to write off possible negotiations over terrorists. But hard-liners want the Bush administration to support political movements in Tehran that seek to overthrow the fundamentalists who control Iran’s security and intelligence agencies.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/944687.asp

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[DoctorZIn]

Random Checks on Iran Nuclear Sites Years Away

July 27, 2003
AFP
The Peninsula

TEHRAN -- Random inspections of Iran's nuclear sites are still years away even if Tehran accepted an additional Non-Proloiferation Treaty protocol, a parliamentary deputy told the student news agency Insa yesterday.

Reformist MP Mohsen Mirdamadi and head of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee said: "Accepting the protocol does not mean that we are obliged to execute it tomorrow, the negotiations over the acceptance of the protocol can take a long time, even several years.

"The countries that intend to accept the protocol must start negotiations with IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Authority) and reach agreement on its regulations. This is a complicated task and will take some time, for some countries it has taken up to three years," he added.

Mirdamadi defended the acceptance of the NPT protocol that allows spot checks and said: "Considering the present international situation, if we don't accept the protocol, the international pressures on us will increase seriously, this must be considered by the regime and the appropriate decision must be made".

Iran has asked the IAEA to send a team of legal experts, expected in Tehran in the next few days, to brief the authorities on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty protocol, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said.

On Monday, EU foreign ministers expressed "increasing concern" over Iran's nuclear programme and warned it would review relations with Tehran unless it cooperated fully with the UN's nuclear watchdog agency. Iran's foreign ministry rejected Tuesday any conditions or threats.

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Gulf%2C+Middle+East+%26+Africa&month=July2003&file=World_News200307271523.xml

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Report: 5 Suspects Arrested in Iran for Canadian Journalist's Death
VOA News
26 Jul 2003, 21:49 UTC


An Iranian news report says five people have been arrested in connection with the death of a Canadian journalist earlier this month.

A student news agency (ISNA) quoted the public prosecutor's office in Tehran as saying Saturday the five were being held in custody as the investigation into the death of Zahra Kazemi continues. Officials did not disclose the identities of those detained nor any other details related to the case.

Ms. Kazemi, a Canadian photojournalist of Iranian descent, died July 11 in a hospital run by Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards after spending time in custody. A Iranian government report listed the cause of death as a blow to the head that caused a cerebral hemorrhage. The report did not specify if the blow was deliberate nor who delivered it.

The 54-year-old photographer had been arrested for taking pictures outside a Tehran prison (Evin) during last month's student-led protests.

Canada has recalled its ambassador to Iran over Tehran's decision to bury Ms. Kazemi instead of returning the body to Canada, as her family had requested. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham said his government is considering trade sanctions against Iran as a means of retrieving the body.

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=A4618F1C-69AC-4873-A98C6E87378068EC

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http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/middleeast/view/45419/1/.html

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Three more journalists arrested in Iran -
07/26/03


Three more Iranian journalists have been arrested, press reports said Saturday. A wave of recent arrests has targeted the reformist press, since an outburst of virulent anti-regime protests in mid-June and July. The latest arrests bring to 27 the number of journalists believed currently to be detained in prison in Iran. Since 2000, Iranian authorities have suspended the publication of nearly 100 papers, most from the pro-reform camp.

http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/latest/fullnews.php?id=684

[F14 Pilot]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/editor/story/0,12900,1006209,00.html

[F14 Pilot]

At war for freedom

The former Director of the CIA says that America should make no apology for its robust response in the "war on terrorism". And if that makes other states nervous, so much the better

James Woolsey
Sunday July 20, 2003

America and the western world are at war with 'fascist' Middle East governments and totalitarian Islamists. The freedoms we stand for are loathed and our vulnerable systems under attack. Liberty and security will be in conflict as we line up behind the new march of democracy.
This is about the war we are in, whom it is with, how we have to fight it inside our own countries and how we have to fight it abroad. The war is, essentially, similar to the Cold War. This is the origin of the phrase World War IV, which Professor Eliot Cohen came up with in America shortly after September 11 2001, to characterise the parallels between this war and what he called World War III - the Cold War.

Those parallels are: that it will last a very long time - decades; that it will sporadically involve the use of military force, as did the Cold War in Korea for example; but that an important component would be ideological. I would add that, just as we eventually won the Cold War - and when I say 'we' here, I always mean Britain, the United States, the democracies, our allies - it was in no small measure because, while containing the Soviet Union and its allies militarily and with nuclear deterrence, we undermined their ideology.

We undermined it over a long period by convincing the Lech Walesas, the Vaclav Havels, the Andrei Sakharovs, the Solidarities, that this was not a clash of civilisations, not even a clash of countries, but a war of freedom against tyranny, and that we were on their side.

To exactly the same degree, we will surely be successful in this long war if we convince the hundreds of millions of reasonable and decent Muslims around the world who do not want to be terrorists, who do not want to live in dictatorships, that we are on their side and they on ours.

Fascists and Islamists

There are really three movements in the Middle East that are essentially at war with the west, with modernity, with western Europe and the United States and our allies. They are, first of all, the fascists, a term that I use advisedly because the Arab nationalist movements of Syria - until recently Iraq and Syria - and Libya and other such groups in the Middle East are effectively modelled on the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s. They are structured like them, and are similarly anti-semitic. They are fascists and there is no reason to mince words.

The other two movements are both Islamist, and I use that term to denote precisely totalitarian movements masquerading as portions of a religion. The mullahs in Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and those with him, and Al Qaeda and its supporters - one on the Shi'a side of the Islamic divide and the other on the Sunni side - are effectively totalitarian movements disguised as religions, in much the same way that Tomás Torquemada and the Dominicans around him who operated the Spanish Inquisition were a totalitarian movement in the guise of a portion of Christianity.

The Islamists on the Shi'a side of the divide, in Tehran, are massively unpopular in their own country. Even according to their official public opinion polls, a substantial majority of Iranians would like to have dealings with the US and, whenever given an opportunity to vote, have supported reformist candidates and President Mohammad Khatami.

From around 1996 to 1998 a number of us were optimistic about the possibility of internal reform in Iran as part of governmental procedures. However, beginning in 1998-1999, the murder of dissidents, and the imprisonment of newspaper editors and the rest, pushed the situation to one in which - though occasionally American spokesmen and those elsewhere call it a democracy - it is a democracy in exactly the same sense that the old Soviet Union was. Iran has a constitution, political parties, and elections; they just do not mean anything.

The struggle that is now going on is one in which the mullahs have lost the support of the students - and half of the country is aged nineteen and younger; the women; the reformers; the brave newspaper editors being tortured in prison; and, increasingly and importantly, their own clergy.

Ayatollah after ayatollah is turning against the mullahs who control the instruments of power; not only brave Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been opposed to them for years, but also conservatives, such as Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, the prayer leader in Isfahan, who denounced them last year as un-Islamic for sponsoring terror, torture and the rest. And of course, he is absolutely right.

Long-lasting

The third movement, the Islamists from the Sunni side of the divide - Al Qaeda and those who support them, fund them and provide their ideological fervour, which involves many who are encouraged by the Wahhabi religious conservatives in Saudi Arabia - is likely to be the longest lasting. In his new book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbit calls Al Qaeda a virtual state, and there is a good argument to that effect. It is a virtual state chiefly because of its access to resources. As long as it receives economic assistance from prosperous Saudis, from the wealth of the Gulf, and its intellectual sustenance from the Wahhabi sect, it will be with us for a long time.

If you put these three movements together, particularly the latter, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we will be in this war for many years, quite probably for decades. Eliot Cohen's original characterisation of this as World War IV - in the sense that it has certain parallels to the four and a half decade-long Cold War - is fair and accurate.

Hated for freedoms

If that is whom we are at war with, why? There are two reasons, an underlying one and a temporal one. The underlying one was best stated to me a little over a year ago by a taxi driver in the District of Columbia. I absolutely hate reading articles about public opinion polls, which I find intensely boring and a waste of time. Instead, since I spend a lot of time in taxis, I talk to the drivers, which in America at least I find a much better finger on the pulse of the country than opinion polls.

I was in a taxi a year ago last February, the day after former President Bill Clinton gave a speech in Washington in which he said that September 11 was a payback in part for American slavery and the treatment of the American Indian. I saw right away that the newspaper on the front seat was open at that article and that the driver was one of my favourite substitutes for polls - a black citizen of the District, wearing his Redskins cap, a guy of about my age, who had probably been driving a cab for a long time.

So I asked him what he thought about Clinton's speech. He said: 'Those people don't hate us for what we've done wrong; they hate us for what we do right.' I would submit that is the essence of the matter.

We and you are cordially loathed for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, open economies, equal - or almost equal - treatment of women, and so on. It is not what we have done wrong that is creating the problem; it is what we do right.

If that is true, then this is not a war that will end with an Al Qaeda Gorbachev; it will not end with an arms control agreement. It is a war to the death, like the war with the Nazis, and we should understand that it will have to be fought that way.

Kick me

The other side of this is why, temporally? Why did they choose to do this now? I cannot speak for Britain or other countries but in the case of America, for something like a quarter of a century, for all practical purposes we hung a 'kick me' sign on our backs in the Middle East.

First, we convinced many people there that we did not give a damn about the people in the region and that we cared principally about its oil; that it was a filling station for our large sport utility vehicles. Secondly, we convinced them that we were a wealthy, feckless country that would not fight.

Starting in 1979, when our hostages were seized in Tehran, we tied yellow ribbons around trees. In 1982-1983, our embassy and marine barracks were blown up in Beirut and we left. Throughout the rest of the eighties, there were various terrorist attacks against us, mainly sponsored by Iran, and we prosecuted a few terrorists here and there - we sent the lawyers, basically - and we would occasionally lob in a bomb or a cruise missile from afar.

In 1991 in the course of the Gulf war, we encouraged the Kurds and the Shi'a to rebel against President Saddam Hussein, then we signed a ceasefire agreement which left the Republican Guard and their armed helicopters intact, and the bridges intact. We stood back and watched the Republican Guard massacre the Kurds and Shi'a whom we had encouraged, thereby convincing all and sundry that once the Americans and their allies had secured the oil of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they did not give a damn about the people of the Middle East.

In 1993, Saddam tried to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. The best response that Clinton could come up with was to launch two dozen cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night, thereby presumably responding effectively to Iraqi cleaning women and nightwatchmen, but not particularly effectively to Saddam.

In 1993, our helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, our rangers were killed and again, as a decade earlier in Beirut, we left. Throughout the rest of the nineties, with the USS Cole and East Africa embassy bombings and the like, again we prosecuted a few terrorists and occasionally launched a cruise missile or a bomb at a tank or a surface-to-air missile site.

No doubt if you were in al-Qaeda, in Iraqi intelligence, or one of Khamenei's advisers assessing things at the end of the twentieth century, you would have had to say that the Americans - from this wealthy, feckless, spoiled country - would not fight. You would have had some evidence for that. Now, just as that was the assessment of us by the Japanese at the beginning of the 1940s, and just as they were somewhat surprised after Pearl Harbour, after September 11 both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and now the Ba'athists in Iraq, are somewhat surprised. However, there is still a long way to go.

Liberty and security

If that is who is at war with us and why, what do we need to do about it, both inside our own countries and in the Middle East? Inside the US, during the Cold War and the decade of the 1990s after it, we became very used to the proposition that liberty and security do not conflict, that we do not need to worry about that. Liberty we had plenty of, or as much as almost any reasonable, modern society could, and security was something that the navy, the Central Intelligence Agency and so on dealt with overseas. September 11 rather changed that.

The US at least has to understand that for a number of years we will have to face conflicts between liberty and security that did not occur before. We really did have people who were legally in the United States training in aircraft simulators to work out how to kill thousands of Americans. There really were terrorist cells in places like Lackawanna, Pennsylvania.

So we are going to do things that are effective against terrorism, and which may involve steps like special scrutiny of Wahhabi-backed charities, for example, that would not have happened prior to September 11. We also have to realise who we are. We are not a race or a culture or a language. We are creatures of fourth US President James Madison's Constitution and his Bill of Rights. We can never forget that.

These two conflicting concerns - security and liberty - are going to be with us for a long time. They will conflict in ways they did not appear to before September 11. We have to choose wisely and remember both. We cannot forget the need to be effective, not just politically correct, in the way we deal with the real threats to us. We also cannot forget the Bill of Rights.

Vulnerable networks

In addition - and this is what I spend most of my day job working on - we have to start looking at all the networks that serve our modern society so effectively: electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines, the Internet, food production and delivery, and so on. We have to realise that in the post-September 11 world, these networks have been put together - in Britain, Japan, Australia, the United States - by very bright and able people, business people, sometimes government regulators, engineers. They are constructed to be responsive to the public, to be open, easily accessed, easily maintained, fully utilised to spread overheads, and the like. All these characteristics are quite reasonable in the context of peace.

In the context of war on one's own soil, however, things look very different. Take 'just in time' delivery: many American factories have components for four or five days' work, which is fine in most circumstances. It means you do not have to maintain big inventories. You can change model characteristics quickly, whether manufacturing computers, cars or whatever. It saves costs.

It is an excellent idea, until someone puts a dirty bomb - say caesium or strontium packed around high explosives - inside a container shipped in from somewhere in South Asia, for instance. With a simple detonator it goes off in an American city and makes a large portion of that city effectively uninhabitable for a long time, because of the increased risk of cancer. This would not be a nuclear explosion but one that spreads radioactive material.

Then the fifty thousand containers a day that cross American borders will start having to be inspected. We now inspect two per cent. If we inspect them all, it will not be long before those four or five days' worth of components in factories are no longer there and they will have to begin shutting down.

The whole set of networks that we have constructed has the functional equivalent of flimsy cockpit doors. The flimsy doors made it possible for aeroplanes to be taken over and turned into giant cruise missiles to be flown into buildings killing thousands of Americans, rather than 'merely' blown up or crashed causing the death of the people on board.

Because of the doors, thousands more could be killed. There was a network vulnerability that could be exploited to turn a portion of it into a weapon. With respect to our electricity grids, oil and gas pipelines, food production and delivery, there are many such weak points that we need to work together to fix.

Democracy on the march

My most controversial point may be about what needs to be done to fight this war in the Middle East. We will have great difficulty bringing peace to the region without changing the nature of governments there - without bringing democracy.

If one starts out from the proposition that this is a task for America, Britain or others to accomplish principally with military forces, we will fail. We have to take a much longer view, and, for example, pay attention to the brave newspaper editors - such as one in Saudi Arabia who recently took on the religious police and got himself fired by the Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz. There are similar brave reformers in Egypt and other countries who are effectively the green shoots springing up through the pavement, indicative of a growing approach, a growing openness in much of the Muslim world to democracy and liberty.

Some people seem to think that this is a hopeless task. Two points: first, the substantial majority of the world's Muslims live in democracies - Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Mali, the Balkans. They may not be perfect democracies but they are democracies nonetheless. I am the Chairman of Freedom House, the oldest human rights organisation in America. Freedom House says that there are a hundred and twenty one democracies, eighty nine of them free - that is, they have parliamentary elections plus the rule of law. Another thirty two are partly free, like Russia or Indonesia, say, with substantial difficulties with respect to the rule of law, but nonetheless regular elections.

In the eighty-nine years since the guns of August 1914, the world has gone from ten or twelve democracies to over a hundred and twenty, and those ten or twelve in 1914 were democracies only for the male portion of the populations. Nothing like that has happened within a single lifetime in world history before. Anyone eighty nine years old has seen democracies multiply tenfold.

Most of those came about not through military force, but in all sorts of ways. During and after the Cold War, for example, in Iberia, the role of the German Social Democrats was important in working with their socialist colleagues to steer Spain and Portugal away from communism and totalitarianism and towards democracy. In the Philippines, it was people power. In Mongolia, Mali and countries all over the world, democracy has become a way of life.

These are places where, year after year, the smart, self-appointed experts have said, 'X will never be a democracy'. They said that the Germans would never be able to run a democracy, the Japanese would not, Catholic countries would not - because in the 1970s, Iberia and Latin America were non-democratic. They said it about people from a Chinese cultural background, yet the Taiwanese seem to have figured it out; maybe China will too. They said it about the Russians; after all, they missed the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment - how could they run a democracy? But they seem to be getting started.

All along, the smart money has been wrong on this subject. It is not that there are no retrograde steps. There are in Venezuela and elsewhere, and in the Arab world, a portion of the Muslim world, there are some two hundred-plus million Arabs who live without democracy. This is an area where the transition will be difficult for a series of historical, cultural and religious reasons, many to do with the influence of the Wahhabis.

Nonetheless, it is not hopeless. It is the best path to peace, since democracies do not fight one another. They fight dictatorships and dictatorships fight each other, and democracies sometimes preempt against dictatorships, but they do not fight one another.

If we want to be successful in this long war, we will have to take on this issue of democracy in the Arab world. We will have to take on the - and I would use the word 'racist' - view that Arabs cannot operate democracies. We will need to make some people uncomfortable.

As we undertake these efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, occasionally by force of arms but generally not, generally by influence, by standing up for brave students in the streets of Tehran, we will hear people say, from President Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt or from the Saudi royal family, that we are making them very nervous. And our response should be, 'Good. We want you nervous. We want you to change, but realise that now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, the democracies are on the march. And we are on the side of those whom you most fear: your own people.'
*
· James Woolsey is former Director of Central Intelligence. This is an edited version of his address to the Political Risk conference at Chatham House last month.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1001642,00.html

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A related article to Iran but with more focus on David Kelly's death in England.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1006699,00.html

[firewalk]

Thank you for the pings

[Valin]

Relations between Tehran and Ottowa have since further deteriorated after Iran drew a parallel with the case of an Iranian killed by Canadian police while brandishing a machete.

Lets see, a unarmed reporter and a man armed with a machete.
Why they are practically carbon copies of each other.

[Valin]

Iranians arrest five in Kazemi's death
Canadian government awaits confirmation. Security agents suspected of involvement in fatal beating of Montreal photojournalist

JACK AUBRY and BINDU SURESH
CanWest News Service; The Gazette


Five Iranian security agents have been arrested in the death of Montreal journalist Zahra Kazemi, who died in police custody on July 10, radio reports in Iran said yesterday.

Quoting a statement issued by Iran's judiciary, the state-run radio station said the officers were detained Friday after "comprehensive investigations" into Kazemi's death.

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham said the department was seeking confirmation of the reports but it was not expected until today. "If the minister is able to confirm the reports, it would be a development that we would welcome," said Isabelle Savard, Graham's aide.

Earlier in the day, Graham had met with Philip MacKinnon, Canada's ambassador to Iran, who had been recalled by the government in protest of the Iranian government's handling of the case.

In Montreal yesterday, more than 300 people signed a petition supporting Stephan Hachemi's plea to have his mother's body exhumed and returned to Canada.

Lucie Vachon, an artist who contributed to the same magazines as Kazemi, travelled from Quebec City to organize the petition. "We did this so Stephan can see that people from all over the world - pulled from Montreal's sidewalks - support him," she said. "It will hopefully give him the courage to continue."

"If my mother were dead, I'd want her to be close by," said Hachemi supporter Marie-Andrée Desrochers.

"Bringing her back is the only way to find out what happened," Montrealer Jennifer Warren said as she signed the petition.

Along with the apparent announcement of arrests in the Kazemi case, however, the Iranian government continued to pursue the case of an Iranian teenager who was shot to death in a Vancouver suburb on July 14.

In Tehran yesterday, the government summoned Canada's chargé d'affaires, Gilles Poirier, to further protest the death.

Graham has already sent a diplomatic note to the Iranian Embassy outlining the "open and transparent" fashion with which the Canadian investigation has been conducted, urging the same treatment in Iran in the Kazemi case.

The identities of the five officers and the name of the Iranian agency they worked for were not revealed in the radio report.

Kazemi died nearly three weeks after she was detained for taking photographs outside a Iranian prison.

Iran's vice-president had announced that Kazemi had died from a beating.

A presidential committee investigating her death said the photojournalist had complained of punishment by guards and had died of a fractured skull and the subsequent brain hemorrhage caused by a blow from "a hard object."

Savard said even if the arrest is confirmed, Canada remains "very determined" to retrieve Kazemi's remains, as requested by her family.

"We still want the body because, for one thing, we know how important it is to allow closure for the family," she said.

Keyvan Tabesh, an 18-year-old Iranian who had been living in Canada for about two years, was fatally shot by a plainclothes officer in Port Moody. Police said Tabesh, of Burnaby, B.C., was waving a machete and running at a police officer when he was shot.

Dr. Nasser Tabesh, the teen's father, told the Islamic Republic News Agency in New York that he plans to sue the officer who shot his son, adding that his son was "absolutely innocent" in the incident.

He alleged that his son was shot without warning from the undercover officer, who did not look like a police officer and did not identify himself before shooting.

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi accused Canadian police of criminal action and demanded an investigation into the death.

Ottawa Citizen

© Copyright 2003 Montreal Gazette
http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=216FB8BA-4F90-4460-A2F1-56719AFE5B45

[TigerLikesRooster]

Parallel intelligence services alarmed by Iranian President

Iranmania ^ | July 26 2003 | AFP

Posted on 07/27/2003 8:54 AM CDT by knighthawk

TEHERAN, July 26 (AFP) - Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has expressed alarm over the treatment of political activists by unofficial intelligence agencies, the country's main reformist party told state media Saturday.

Khatami issued a formal complaint to the office he set up after his election in 1997 to record violations of constitutional rights, said the reformist party Iran Participation Front (IIPF), lead by the president's brother Mohammad Reza Khatami.

The president's written complaint claims that around 60 political radicals have been arrested by unofficial intelligence agencies, kept in isolation and subjected to psychological abuse to extract forced confessions, official news agency IRNA reported.

The office called on the IIPF secretary general to submit evidence so that the allegations could be investigated, IRNA added without elaborating.

Iranian officials are starting to acknowledge the existence of unofficial intelligence agencies, supported by certain elements in the Islamic republic, which are becoming increasingly active and influential.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/953330/posts

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Sunday, 27 July, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK

BBC News: Iran official backs nuclear protocol

Iran's representative on the United Nations nuclear watchdog has urged his government to sign up to closer inspections of its nuclear sites.
Ali Akbar Salehi said signing the additional protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would help ease the pressure Tehran faced from the international community.

Last week foreign ministers from the EU joined the United States, Russia and Australia in voicing concerns over Iran's nuclear programme and urged Tehran to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In an interview in Sunday's state-run Iran newspaper, Mr Salehi said Tehran should take a "positive view" of the protocol, which allows IAEA experts to conduct more rigorous visits to nuclear sites at short notice.

"We can use it to close the book on the politicised issue of our nuclear activities," Mr Salehi said.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for peaceful purposes.

Opposition in parliament

Mr Salehi said he thought the protocol had "not been properly introduced to our society".
"The protocol has not been drawn up only for Iran or Third World countries. This is an international protocol and all the countries of the IAEA will accede to it sooner or later."

Mr Salehi said he hoped Tehran would take measures to satisfy international concerns before September.

The IAEA board of directors meets then to discuss Iran's progress since June, when an initial report came out.

However, the BBC's Miranda Eeles in Tehran says observers believe the September date to be unlikely.

Any move on the protocol would have to be passed in parliament, then ratified by the supervisory body, the Guardian Council, she says.

In addition, some members of parliament have suggested that instead of signing up to tighter inspections, Iran should pull out of the treaty altogether.

A group of IAEA legal experts has been invited to Iran to discuss the implications of signing the protocol and are expected in early August.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3100819.stm

[F14 Pilot]

IPS-
"THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT ARE LIARS"

PARIS, 26 July. (IPS, with reports from Nicholas Read and Petti Fong of the Vancouver Sun) The family of Keyvan Tabesh, a young Iranian shot and killed by a Port Moody police officer on 14 July, expressed shock at the attitude of the Iranian government trying to use the incident as a mean to cover up the death of Ms. Zahra Kazemi, the 54 years-old Iranian-Canadian photojournalist.

On Friday, Iran's Foreign Affairs Minister Kamal Kharrazi said that his ministry has launched an immediate probe into the killing of the young Tabesh and injuring a friend, Amir Aqa’i by the Canadian police.

Family members say they had no idea the Iranian government was going to use the death of their 18-year-old son and brother to deepen a diplomatic incident with Canada.

"We were surprised", said Keyvan's sister, Rita, in an interview from Burnaby. "We never talk to the government".

"The problem is between Keyvan's family and the police", she said softly, but with emotion. "It is a social problem, not a political problem".

Keyvan, 18, was shot by a Port Moody police officer when he approached the officer with a machete in his hand.

Amir, who has recovered from his wound, was not available to comment Thursday, but his father, who declined to give his first name, said he agreed with the Tabeshes that what happened to his son was a matter for Canadian, not Iranian, authorities.

"The Iranian government are liars", Aqa’i’s father said. "This is not Iran's business. This happened in Canada, not Iran and It's a Canadian problem, not an Iranian problem".

Aqa’i said he and his wife were "very, very upset" when they heard the news about the Iranian government involvement. "You have to know we will solve this problem in Canada", he said. "We love Canada".

But Kharrazi stressed that Iranian foreign ministry would employ all its capacity and implement all diplomatic instruments to clarify the bitter incident and safeguard the rights of all Iranian nationals.

Tehran had also accused Ottawa to order the press not to report the "murder" of the young Iranian. The Foreign Affairs spokesman had said that the "horrifying killing" has created "fear and horror" among the Iranian community in Canada.

The Tabeshes, arrived in Canada on 2000 and are landed immigrants with family members still in Iran.

Kharrazi, reported by the official news agency IRNA, returning the table against Canada, said that Iran found incomprehensible the comparisons made by the Canadian department of foreign affairs between the deaths of Zahra Kazemi and Keyvan Tabesh.

Iranian jurists and observers noted that Iranian statements concerning the killing of Keyvan was "quite similar" to those used by Ottawa with Tehran in the case of the death of Ms. Kazemi while in the custody of the authorities.

Canada recalled its Ambassador from Iran following the burial of Ms. Kazemi in her hometown of Shiraz, in southern Iran, in spite of demands by her son, Stephen Hachemi and the Canadian government to have the body transferred to Canada for autopsy.

The Foreign Affairs Minister further stressed that the preliminary and hasty comments made by Ottawa officials in this regard was not a clear explanation but rather a justification for the indefensible act of Canadian police in murdering the Iranian national.

Asked why Tehran waited more than a week to raise the issue with the Canadians, Kharrazi accused the Canadian government for having failed to carry out its diplomatic duty to immediately notify the Islamic Republic of the incident.

"Noting that Iran was waiting for clear and convincing explanations in this regard, Kharrazi voiced his ministry's insistence upon having detailed, speedy and just investigations into the bitter case and having the person or persons responsible for it tried and punished", the Agency quoted the Minister.

Ken Taylor, a former Canadian ambassador to Tehran between 1979 and 1980, said the Iranian government's call for transparency is "outrageous".

"It's total mischief and absolute nonsense to try and link the two cases together", said Taylor, adding "It weakens their own case by taking this step".

Taylor said the police investigation into the Port Moody shooting is going to be transparent and will follow a set of procedures because the course of justice in Canada is subject to rules of law.

Rejecting Iranian claims, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham expressed Saturday the hope to see the Iranians carrying "same thorough and open" investigations in the case of Ms. Kazemi as the Canadians are offering in the case of the late Keyvan.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Reynald Doiron invited Iran on Friday to send observers to Canada to oversee the police investigation into Tabesh's death.

"We are ready to offer them complete and unfettered assistance in communicating with the authorities", he said.

Rita and Keyvan's father, Nasser, a surgeon, both said Keyvan's death was not the business of the Iranian government, and they didn't want what happened to him to be used for political purposes. "We don't want the government to use our family", Rita said. "We just want to know why the police killed our brother.

"We just want justice for our son," said Nasser. "We are not a political family. We are living in Canada now and we want justice in Canada".

Keyvan's mother, Forough Jabalameli, has been quoted as saying her son did not know he was being confronted by a policeman because the officer was dressed in civilian clothes and driving a vehicle without police markings.

Pari Sa’idi, a spokeswoman with the Iranian-Canadian Community of Western Canada, said the Iranian government's comments are in direct retaliation for the Canadian government's demand for answers in Zahra Kazemi's death.

"This is bullying and the Canadian government should not buy it. They're covering their crime. Whatever happened here will be thoroughly investigated", she said Thursday.

Sa’idi, who left Iran in 1985, said she remains too fearful to return to visit her family. Relatives and friends still living in Iran tell her the country remains a virtual prison. "You can close your eyes, shut your mouth and go back to see your family. And if you do see something or say anything they don't like, they'll torture you", she said.

"The Iranian government's suggestion that the investigation into the Port Moody shooting may not be transparent shows poor knowledge of how the Canadian justice system works", Inspector Chris Beach, who is in charge of the Vancouver Police Department's major crimes section told journalists.

Port Moody Police Chief Paul Shrive said the homicide investigation is continuing into Tabesh's shooting and witnesses are still being interviewed. "The attempts by any individuals whether in this country or outside to put any political spin will just not be entertained by us", he added.

The unidentified officer who fired the shots joined the force two years ago from the RCMP and has 25 years of policing experience. He is on leave.

Police say Keyvan had earlier struck another vehicle with a machete and that the police officer followed the car in which he was riding into the Port Moody cul-de-sac where the shooting occurred.

http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2003/Jul-2003/iran_canada_relations_26703.htm

[nuconvert]

So now, according to Newsweek, it's Bush and his "hardliners" against Iranian "hardliners".

How they think there's some kind of equivalency in using that term is (almost) bewildering . Apparently it's due to their belief that it's just one "hardline" regime against another. They never overlook an opportunity to use a pejorative term against Bush.

[nuconvert]

I was thinking a very similar thing, myself.

[nuconvert]

Thank you. I haven't seen much on this aspect of Mr. Kelly.