Iran insists Israel not behind blast that killed missile expert – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Explosion at a military base near Tehran that killed 17 Revolutionary Guards was an accident, says Iranian Parliament Speaker, contrary to media speculation.

By Yossi Melman

Iran reiterated yesterday that the explosion at a military base near Tehran that killed 17 members of the Revolutionary Guards was an accident. It says that contrary to media speculation, the blast, which also killed a missile expert, was not carried out by Israel or the United States.

“Whatever the enemies say about the IRGC base incident is fiction and therefore not important,” Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani told Fars news agency.

But Time Magazine and other Western media quoted a Western intelligence official saying “don’t believe the Iranians” and speculating that Israel was behind the Saturday blast in an ammunition depot at a base west of Tehran.

According to the British newspaper The Guardian, an Iranian source said the explosion was not an accident but the act of a foreign intelligence organization.

Media reports have focused on Gen. Hassan Moqaddam, a high-ranking IRGC commander and chief of the logistic research unit, who was killed in the blast. Moqaddam was involved in Iran’s missile program.

A number of senior Iranian officials, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attended Moqaddam’s funeral. In an unusual move, pictures from the funeral were broadcast on Iranian television.

Iran’s Shahab-3 and Zelzal missiles reportedly can reach any part of Israel. Iran has repeatedly warned that if its nuclear sites were attacked by Israel, its missiles would be used against Israel.

While praising Moqaddam as “one of the shining members of the IRGC,” Larijani said that “there are tens of thousands who would continue the way of martyr Moqaddam.”

Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, also denied yesterday that Israel was involved in the blast.

“This recent … blast has no link to Israel or America but [is] the outcome of the research of which the incident happened as a consequence,” Firouzabadi was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA.

The International Atomic Energy Agency will host a forum next week among its member states, including Israel and Arab countries, to consider setting up a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

Iran, which was asked in September whether it would attend, has not yet replied and is unlikely to take part, said diplomatic sources at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna.

The forum, initiated by IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, is part of the agency’s efforts in recent years to persuade Israel to open its nuclear facilities to IAEA supervision and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The idea of a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East came from Arab states headed by Egypt, which have been raising this demand at every international forum for years.

The forum in Vienna next week will consider the experience of the five existing nuclear-weapons-free zones in Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia.

Today the IAEA governors are to start debating the agency’s report last week on Iran’s nuclear arms program. The United States and its Western allies are urging the IAEA to issue a strongly worded statement that would advance their demand for harsher sanctions on Iran in the UN Security Council.

But such a resolution is doubtful due to the Russian and Chinese opposition in the Security Council.

With reporting by Reuters

As anxiety over Iran grows, Canada forges stronger defence ties with Israel.

Canada’s National Defence Minister Peter MacKay (L) and Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak take part in a news conference in Ottawa November 16, 2011.

Israel’s Secret Iran Attack Plan: Electronic Warfare – The Daily Beast.

Israel has been building stealthy, multibillion-dollar electronic weapons that could be deployed if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear sites, U.S. intelligence officials tell Eli Lake.

by Eli Lake  | November 16, 2011 6:28 PM EST

For much of the last decade, as Iran methodically built its nuclear program, Israel has been assembling a multibillion-dollar array of high-tech weapons that would allow it to jam, blind, and deafen Tehran’s defenses in the case of a pre-emptive aerial strike.

A U.S. intelligence assessment this summer, described to The Daily Beast by current and former U.S. intelligence officials, concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

For example, Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to “sleep,” effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.

In a 2007 attack on a suspected nuclear site at al-Kibar, the Syrian military got a taste of this warfare when Israeli planes “spoofed” the country’s air-defense radars, at first making it appear that no jets were in the sky and then in an instant making the radar believe the sky was filled with hundreds of planes.

IAEA seeks Iran mission to addre… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    The UN nuclear watchdog wants to send a special high-level mission to Iran to address mounting concerns the country may be seeking to design nuclear weapons, its head said on Thursday.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano said he had written to the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization earlier this month to suggest the visit, which would air issues raised by the IAEA’s latest report on Iran.

Last week’s report presented the agency’s clearest findings to date that Iran has been conducting research and experiments relevant to developing a capability to build nuclear bombs, and that some activities may continue.

Iran denies that it is seeking atomic weapons, dismissing intelligence information in the IAEA report as fabricated.

“I hope a suitable date can be agreed soon. It is essential that any such mission should be well planned and that it should address the issues contained in my report,” Amano told an IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna.

“I ask Iran to engage substantively with the Agency without delay and provide the requested clarifications regarding possible military dimensions to its nuclear program,” he said, according to a copy of his statement to the closed-door meeting.

Western diplomats said six world powers were close to finalizing an agreement on a draft resolution at the two-day IAEA meeting expressing concern about Iran’s activities and calling on it to cooperate with the IAEA.

The fact that the six major powers were set to agree on a joint text will be welcomed in the West after the IAEA report prompted Russia to complain that it was politicized and dimmed chances of a negotiated solution to the Iran nuclear dispute.

Moscow’s stance exposed big power divisions over how to best to resolve it.

“It (resolution) will maintain pressure on Iran,” one Western diplomat said.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.
DEBKAfile Special Report November 17, 2011, 11:21 AM (GMT+02:00)

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose Wednesday, Nov. 16 that none of the experiments Iran was conducting was based on a neutron source.  “It’s always simultaneous explosions on heavy metals and certain other activities which cannot be explained,” he said.

DEBKAfile‘s military sources note his stress on the lack of evidence that Iran was trying to develop tactical neutron bombs. Tehran, he said, was experimenting with uranium- and plutonium- based explosives, meaning large nuclear bombs rather than small, tactical warheads.

Barak slammed former IAEA director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, who is now running for election as Egyptian president, accusing him of concealing the truth about Iran’s nuclear development. He praised the incumbent director, Yukiya Amano, for leveling on what his experts had found.

Barak offered the opinion that if the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had not relinquished his nuclear program in 2003 but attained a nuclear bomb instead, the March 2011 NATO operation against him would not have been ordered either by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or British Prime Minister David Cameron.
As to Iraq’s Saddam Hussain: Had he possessed “a few crude nuclear devices when he invaded Kuwait in 1990,” said Barak,  the US-led coalition could not have pushed him out of the emirate in the first Gulf War.
In the interview, Barak warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would touch off a Middle East nuclear arms race drawing in Egypt and less responsible regimes headed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“You could wake up one morning,” he said, “to find Iran had occupied Bahrain or Qatar. Who then would come and liberate them?”

Barak declined to answer questions about the feasibility of totally destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

He also offered no opinion on the view that a military operation against Iran would gain no more than a three-year breathing space before Tehran rebuilt its nuclear weapons program, a view recently articulated by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

He was far from optimistic about international sanctions stopping Iran in its nuclear tracks.

The defense minister went on to warmly praised President Barack Obama and his administration’s commitment to Israel’s security and said “Under this administration we have advanced still further into a clear, deep, deep commitment to the security of Israel and beyond.”

He also praised the administration’s policy of combating terrorism, such as the targeting of Osama bin Laden.
Wednesday night, debkafile reported:  A short statement was read out to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament by cabinet member Michael Eitan Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 16. It read: “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu informed the full Knesset plenum that all options are on the table when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program. The prime minister and the authorized bodies are acting to stop the nuclear armament of Iran. The efforts are ongoing and we will do everything possible to enlist states in the international community, “he continued “because the Iranian threat is adanger not only to the State of Israel but to world peace.”

The Knesset was due to devote a special session to the question of an attack on Iran.

debkafile‘s military sources report that this is the first statement of this nature the prime minister has ever delivered to Israel’s parliament. It was phrased notably in the present tense. “The authorized bodies” are thought to refer to the Israeli Defense Forces and its intelligence community.

Also worth noting is that Netanyahu sent a minister to read out his message. He himself absent from this key debate and so was the defense minister. For the first time too, there was no reference to sanctions which have figured hitherto in all Israeli official statements on the Iranian nuclear controversy.

The implication is that an operation against a nuclear Iran may be in the works. If so, a response from Tehran is to be expected shortly.
Earlier Wednesday, the supreme commander of Iran’s armed forces Gen. Hassan Firouz-Abadi said Israel’s cries of alarm about Iran’s nuclear development bespeak shock and fear. But nothing will save the Zionist regime from its bitter fate – a hint at Iran’s nuclear capability.
Firouz-Abadi said the massive explosion which killed Iran’s missile chief Saturday “had nothing to do with Israel or America.” It took place during “research on weapons that could strike Israel,” adding that the blast had delayed by only two weeks the development of an undisclosed military “product.”

The two statements together aroused lively speculation in the tense climate left by the latest nuclear watchdog agency’s evidence of Iran’s work on a nuclear weapon. Linking them might suggest that the Israeli prime minister had decided to refute the Iranian general’s claim. By stating that “efforts are ongoing” to stop Iran’s nuclear armament, he may have been implying that  the explosion at the Guards base Saturday was indeed a covert Israeli operation in line with those efforts.