Free Republic

Commercial satellite imagery showed that Israeli airstrikes hit buildings during an attack on Saturday that Iran used for mixing solid fuel for ballistic missiles, according to separate assessments by two American researchers. The judgments were reached by David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security research group, and Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at CNA, a Washington think tank. They told Reuters separately that Israel struck Parchin, a massive military complex near Tehran. Israel also hit Khojir, according to Eveleth, a sprawling missile production site near Tehran. Reuters reported in July...

My, but Iran must have a lot of defective “industrial gas tanks” lying around. A week after Iranian officials tried to explain away a massive explosion at Parchin as a civilian-area accident, a large fire at Natanz might prove more difficult to dismiss. Natanz, like Parchin, is a site where the US alleges that Iran has performed work on their nuclear-weapons program, and experts believe that uranium-enriching centrifuge work might have been the target this time: Iran says there has been an “incident” at one of its nuclear facilities.Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi did not...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An explosion that rattled Iran’s capital came from an area in its eastern mountains that analysts believe hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites, satellite photographs showed Saturday. What exploded in the incident early Friday that sent a massive fireball into the sky near Tehran remains unclear, as does the cause of the blast. The unusual response of the Iranian government in the aftermath of the explosion, however, underscores the sensitive nature of an area near where international inspectors believe the Islamic Republic conducted high-explosive tests two decades ago for nuclear weapon...