WarSclerotic

via U.S. Says Iran Regime Split on Nuclear Arms – WSJ.com.

By ADAM ENTOUS

WASHINGTON—A new classified U.S. intelligence assessment concludes that Iran’s leaders are locked in an increasingly heated debate over whether to move further toward developing nuclear weapons, saying the bite of international sanctions may be sowing discord.

The new national intelligence estimate, or NIE, says Tehran likely has resumed work on nuclear-weapons research in addition to expanding its program to enrich uranium—updating a contested 2007 estimate that concluded the arms program had all but halted in 2003.

But it doesn’t conclude that Iran has relaunched a full-blown program to try to build bombs. According to the assessment, Iran’s debate over whether to do so suggests international sanctions may be causing divisions in Tehran, U.S. officials said.

The new assessment, which was shared this week with key congressional committees, comes as protesters in Tehran ramp up pressure on Iran’s leaders, amid a wave of popular revolts sweeping the Mideast. Tehran took steps Wednesday to stifle passions inflamed by the killings of two students during protests.

Adding to tensions, Israel Wednesday said the deployment of an Iranian warship to Syria via the Suez Canal was a “provocation” by Iran that Israel couldn’t ignore.

The NIE’s findings suggest that, in the U.S. view, at least some Iranian leaders are worried that economic turmoil fueled in part by international sanctions could spur opposition to the regime—though officials acknowledge it is impossible for outsiders to determine the precise effect of sanctions on decision-making in Tehran.

Iran’s government has also taken steps to stifle any possible unrest in response to its own economic measures, after Tehran significantly cut subsidies for fuel, electricity and basic food items in late December.

An NIE is considered the consensus view of all the various U.S. intelligence agencies, and, as a result, carries more weight than an analysis coming from any one part of the intelligence community.

The new assessment is the first full, new analysis by the intelligence community since the 2007 estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapon design and weaponization work, as well as its covert uranium enrichment-related activities. Those findings were disputed by some European spy agencies. Iran denies it is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

U.S. officials say at least some of those 2007 assertions have been revised in the new NIE. But the new assessment stops short of rejecting the earlier findings.

“The bottom line is that the intelligence community has concluded that there’s an intense debate inside the Iranian regime on the question of whether or not to move toward a nuclear bomb,” a U.S. official said. “There’s a strong sense that a number of Iranian regime officials know that the sanctions are having a serious effect.”

Such conclusions are likely to stiffen the resolve of Obama administration officials to tighten sanctions further. The White House declined to comment on the new intelligence assessment.

U.S. officials pointed to Iran’s violent crackdown on protests this week as a sign the regime is concerned about its vulnerability after the fall of longtime leaders in Tunisia and Egypt.

President Barack Obama has voiced support for the rights of protest leaders in Iran, whom the regime has threatened with execution. The State Department has been tweeting messages expressing support for the rights of Iranians to hold protests.

The new intelligence findings also reflect a growing consensus among the U.S. and its allies that Tehran’s suspected effort to obtain a warhead has been significantly slowed by the combination of sanctions and problems at its nuclear facilities.

Senior Israeli officials said last month that Tehran may be at least four years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon because of technological difficulties, a notably longer timeline than Israelis had used previously. Soon after, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington believed Iran’s nuclear program faced mounting “technical” problems.

In a separate threat assessment presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said the U.S. believes Iran should be capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon “in the next few years,” provided Tehran makes the decision to do so.

Officials in the U.S., Europe and Asia credit, in part, an international campaign that they say has restricted Iran’s ability to procure the raw materials needed to build an atomic bomb.

Officials say Iran has had difficulty acquiring carbon fiber and a particular high-strength steel, two critical components for making machinery used in producing enriched uranium.

Iran’s nuclear program also appears to have been slowed by problems in the computer system used to run its enrichment equipment, officials said.

Officials say Tehran is encountering problems deploying advanced centrifuge machines that could drastically accelerate the production of highly enriched uranium, which is needed for a nuclear bomb.

Experts attribute equipment failures among such machines at Iran’s main uranium-enrichment plant to a computer worm known as Stuxnet. Iran has acknowledged the computer attacks. Experts speculate that Stuxnet was developed by Israel or the U.S., or both, though neither government has confirmed any role.

A report issued on Wednesday by David Albright, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, said it is increasingly accepted that a successful Stuxnet attack in late 2009 or early 2010 destroyed about 1,000 Iranian centrifuges out of about 9,000 at the site.

“The effect of this attack was significant,” Mr. Albright said in the report. “It rattled the Iranians, who were unlikely to know what caused the breakage, delayed the expected expansion of the plant, and further consumed a limited supply of centrifuges to replace those destroyed.”

Mr. Clapper, in testimony to Congress, said the intelligence community believes Iran is “keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 17, 2011, 11:05 AM (GMT+02:00)

Young Iranian protester dies of bullet wound

Tanks rolled into Pearl Square, Manama, early Thursday, Feb. 17, personally commanded by King Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa in full military regalia, hours after his police firing live ammunition and tear gas failed to break up the tent city set up by protesters against his rule. At least four protesters were killed and dozens injured.

The monarch has divided his small 9,000-strong army into three parts, one for Pearl Square, a second to guard the Bahrain Petroleum Co. refinery which produces 267,000 barrels of oil a day and forms the backbone of the Bahraini economy; and a third placed around the royal palace and the residential districts of the ruling elite.

Al-Khalifa has two major difficulties to crack: For the first time, the king’s biggest Shiite party, al-Wefaq has joined up with all 10 opposition parties to coordinate their protest action. The Shiite party leader, Sheik Ali Salman, says he is not seeking to establish an Islamic regime in Manama like the one in Tehran.  debkafile‘s sources say he is after one-man rule for himself and his words are about as reliable as the pledges of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to eschew a role in government.

But the Bahraini ruler’s most acute problem is that while the Arabic and world media lump the protest movement in his kingdom with the pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it is not the same in that it does not just represent genuine people power fighting an autocratic regime for reforms, but is fomented from Tehran.

Iran’s objective is to overthrow the Al-Khalifa regime and replace it with the first pro-Iranian government in the Arabian Gulf region. A Shiite regime in Manama will stir the Shiite minorities to revolt in other oil-rich Gulf states – and especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where they make up around one-fifth of the population.

In Tehran itself, meanwhile, debkafile‘s Iranian sources report that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad early Thursday conferred with Revolutionary Guards and Basij leaders on ways to further crack down on opposition protests after two days of harsh measures. Since Monday, 1,400 protesters have been arrested and their whereabouts are unknown. At least two died of bullet wounds.

The leaders of Iran’s Islamic regime fear that the youngsters in Iranian cities will catch fire from the uprisings in Arab countries and be willing to fight for its overthrow.
As a key deterrent, an increase in the number of executions of dissidents was agreed between Ahmadinejad,

most of his aides, Prosecutor General  Mohseni-eEjehee, the commander Internal Security Forces, Mohammad Reza Radan Mohammad Reza Naghdi, and the ultra-radical Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Chairman of the Constitution Committee.
This measure later won the support of Ali Larijani, Speaker of the Majlis, who on Wednesday led 200 deputies in shouting for the two opposition Green Movement leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi to be put to death.
debkafile‘s sources report: In the coming days, the world will be shown millions of young Iranians pouring into the streets of Tehran and other cities shouting pro-government slogans – alongside the executions of dozens of young Iranian democracy-seekers.

By killing them, the regime will try and break the back of the Mousavi-Karroubi opposition movement. Judging on past form, they will not be deterred by international condemnation.

US seeks to tighten sanctions against Iran.

WASHINGTON – As protesters take to the streets in Tehran and the Obama administration heightens its rhetoric against Iran, the US Congress is also looking to turn up the heat on the regime.

A new bill introduced on Wednesday seeks to tighten the American sanctions regime by requiring publicly traded companies and their affiliates to report their Iranian links to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The legislation comes as the intelligence community has reportedly prepared a new version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that toughens the US assessment of the country’s nuclear activities from its estimate in 2007.

So far, the new, classified version has been circulating among designated members of Congress, but not made public.

At the same time, new International Atomic Energy Agency revelations on Wednesday suggested that Iran quickly revived its nuclear program after it suffered setback from a computer virus earlier this year.

Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, one of the co-sponsors of the new sanctions proposal, welcomed a revised version of the National Intelligence Estimate, calling its 2007 incarnation a “complete mistake.”

Kirk noted that he hadn’t read the new version, first reported by Foreign Policy, and could therefore speak freely without worrying about violating classified restrictions.

Obama administration ‘more realistic about threat’

Still, Kirk told reporters he hoped the Obama administration made the key findings public, since “it appears to be much more realistic about the growing threat.”

Kirk said he was also hoping the administration would step up the enforcement of sanctions, which had only resulted in the sanctioning of one company since being implemented in the mid-1990s and strengthened last summer.

“I have been very frustrated with the lack of enforcement,” he said. “My hope is that with this bipartisan legislation we can upgrade the enforcement.”

Kirk was joined in sponsoring the legislation by Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Republican Rep. Dan Burton and Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch.

Deutch said the new bill would increase enforcement because companies would be required to self-report their involvement with Iran rather than the administration needing to obtain information and then decide to open an investigation.

“One of the reasons that this legislation is so important is because once the company identifies that they are doing business [with Iran], it will require the investigation to start and will pressure that company to make the decision to place national security interests first,” he said.

Law forces companies to disclose Iran dealings

“The hardest part has been trying to find out exactly what these companies are actually doing,” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said in explaining the difficulties with the current sanctions regime. “The brilliance of this law is that it forces these companies themselves to disclose” their Iran dealings.

Dubowitz’s organization has already identified two dozen US companies or international companies with US subsidiaries that would have to disclose such ties.

Meanwhile, according to IAEA surveillance cameras operating at Iranian nuclear sites last year, Iranian workers were observed hauling away crates of broken equipment, or some 10 percent of the 9,000 centrifuges at the Natanz plant.

Soon afterward, hundreds of new machines arrived at the plant to replace the ones that were lost.

IAEA records show Iran struggling to cope with a massive equipment failure just at the time its main uranium enrichment plant was under attack by a computer worm known as Stuxnet, according to Europe-based diplomats familiar with the records.

But the IAEA’s files also show a feverish – and apparently successful – effort by Iranian scientists to contain the damage and replace broken parts, even while constrained by international sanctions banning Iran from buying nuclear equipment.

An IAEA report due for release this month is expected to show steady or even slightly elevated production rates at the Natanz enrichment plant over the past year.

“They have been able to quickly replace broken machines,” said a Western diplomat with access to confidential IAEA reports. Despite the setbacks, “the Iranians appeared to be working hard to maintain a constant, stable output” of low-enriched uranium, said the official, who like other diplomats interviewed for this report, insisted on anonymity in discussing the results of the UN watchdog’s data-collecting.

The IAEA’s findings, combined with new analysis of the Stuxnet worm by independent experts, offer a mixed portrait of the mysterious cyber-attack that briefly shut down parts of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear infrastructure last year. The new reports shed light on the design of the worm and how it spread through a string of Iranian companies before invading the control systems of Iran’s most sensitive nuclear installations.

Attack curbs Tehran’s nuclear ambition

But they also put a spotlight on the effectiveness of the attack in curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. A draft report by Washington-based nuclear experts concludes that the net impact was relatively minor.

“While it has delayed the Iranian centrifuge program at the Natanz plant in 2010 and contributed to slowing its expansion, it did not stop it or even delay the continued buildup of low-enriched uranium,” the Institute for Science and International Security said in the draft, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post.

“If nothing else, it hit their confidence, and it will make them feel more vulnerable in the future,” said David Albright, ISIS’s president.

Iran’s centrifuges are notoriously unreliable, but over a period of a few months last year the flow of broken machines leaving the plant spiked far beyond normal levels. Two European diplomats with access to the agency’s files put the number at between 900 and 1,000.

IAEA inspectors who examined the machines could not ascertain why the centrifuges had failed. Iranian officials told the agency they were replacing machines that had been idled for several months and needed refurbishing. Whatever the reason, the plant’s managers worked frantically to replace each piece of equipment they removed, the two European diplomats confirmed. “They were determined that the IAEA’s reports would not show any drop in production,” one of the diplomats said.

While US officials declined to comment on the massive equipment failure at Natanz, the speed of Iran’s apparent recovery from its technical setbacks did not go unnoticed.

“They have overcome some of the obstacles, in some cases through sheer application of resources,” said US Ambassador Glyn Davies, Washington’s representative to the IAEA in Vienna. “There’s clearly a very substantial political commitment.”

Albright and other nuclear experts discounted media reports suggesting that the worm posed a serious safety threat to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant. But the ISIS and Symantec reports noted that parts of the malware’s operating code appeared to be unfinished, and Stuxnet has been updated with new instructions at least once since its release.

IAEA inspectors were unable to determine whether Iran’s efforts to erase the worm from its equipment had succeeded, raising the possibility that subsequent attacks could occur.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.