WarSclerotic

Syria violence surges as UN calls for international protection – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says urgent and effective measures need to be taken to protect Syrian civilians; November was deadliest month of uprising so far.

By The Associated Press Tags: Syria Bashar Assad Arab Spring UN Security Council

Bill Carmichael: We must get tough with Iran – Columnists – Yorkshire Post.

Published on Saturday 3 December 2011 02:00

Iran is a rogue state that threatens not just the stability of the Middle East, but of the entire world. The medieval bigots who run Iran have never been exactly rational or stable, but this week’s carefully orchestrated mob attack on the British embassy in Tehran has ratcheted up the tension by several notches.

Don’t for a moment imagine that this was a “spontaneous” expression of anger by excitable students as the Iranian authorities have risibly maintained. Spontaneous demonstrations just don’t happen in Iran.

No, the riots and fire bombings this week were in all likelihood carried out by paid government goons, many of them members of the feared Basiji militia – Iran’s equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo. This militia has been a key weapon used by the Iranian despots to maintain their grip on power with a combination of brutal repression at home, allied to a belligerent foreign policy.

The mullahs who have seized control in Iran have never had much time for the civilised niceties of the Vienna Convention, and this week’s attack was eerily reminiscent of the 1979 siege of the US Embassy in Tehran when American diplomats were held hostage for 144 days.

The big difference this time around is that many experts believe that Iran is close to producing a viable nuclear weapon.

If that is allowed to happen, disaster will ensue. Iran’s unstable and fanatical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed several times to wipe Israel off the map. So clearly Israel would be forced to act to defend itself, as it is entitled to do.

But even if a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was successful, the resulting conflagration could engulf several of Iran’s neighbours and send oil prices rocketing to even higher levels with ruinous consequences for the world economy.

If this nightmare scenario is to be avoided it is important that the international community acts in concert to curb Iran’s aggression. Luckily, after a failed and naïve policy of “engagement” with Iran under President Barack Obama, the US has finally come to its senses and is now ready for much tougher action.

Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague also seems ready to tighten the screw on Tehran. Yesterday the focus turned on our so-called allies and partners in the European Union. Mr Hague was in Brussels for a meeting of EU foreign ministers where he asked for an intensification of economic and diplomatic pressure against Iran.

France and Germany in particular have heavy investments in refining Iran’s oil to supply its domestic need for petrol and diesel. If these and other EU countries join in tough sanctions it will seriously weaken the Iranian regime and curtail its capacity for making mischief. Even with the eurozone collapsing, this should still command Europe’s attention. It is probably our last chance to avoid a new Middle Eastern war.

And it is time for Germany and France to do the decent thing for once.

Fake Soccer Websites ‘Key’ To Iran Cyber-Attack | mideastposts.com.

Written by James M. Dorsey

Two fake soccer websites helped the creators of the Stuxnet computer virus that last year attacked computers used in Iran’s nuclear program mislead authorities as they launched their assault as part of a covert campaign involving assassinations of nuclear scientists and mysterious blasts at Iranian nuclear and military facilities.

The creators used the websites, http://www.mypremierfutbol.com and http://www.todaysfutbol.com, as fronts to communicate with Stuxnet-infected Iranian computers in a bid to make Iranian authorities believe that related traffic originated with soccer fans, according to a Reuters news agency story.

The story discloses details of how Stuxnet was developed and deployed based on research conducted by cyber warfare expert John Bumgarner, a retired U.S. Army special-operations veteran and former intelligence officer, who is chief technology officer of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit group that studies the impact of cyber threats.

The Stuxnet virus created havoc in computers that control Iranian centrifuges designed to enrich uranium in the Islamic republic’s underground Nantaz nuclear facility and is believed to have set the program back by several months. It reportedly affected 1,000 of Iran’s estimated 8,000 centrifuges.

In a second cyber war incident, Iran said last month that it had discovered traces of the Duqu virus on which Stuxnet was based but had developed software to stop it before it created damage. Security software company Symantec Corp said in October that it had noticed a virus with a code similar to that of Stuxnet. Unlike Stuxnet, which is designed to take out control systems, Duqu is intended to collect data in advance of a cyber-attack.

Stuxnet is widely believed to have been developed by Israel and the United States as part of a covert effort to prevent Iran from acquiring the capability to build nuclear weapons.

An enhanced upgraded version of the virus is reported to be close to completion.

It is difficult to see the virus attack on the Iranian computers independent of the assassination of at least three key Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years as well as a series of explosions in Iran.

A blast last month at the Bid Ganeh Revolutionary Guards base 48 kilometers west of Tehran killed 17 people, including General Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a key figure in the Islamic republic’s missile development program. Iran’s assertion that the explosion was an accident has widely been greeted with scepticism. Iranian officials acknowledged that the explosion happened as scientists were working on weapons that could be used in an attack on Israel.

Iranian officials however denied that a second blast in Isfahan days after the Bid Ganeh incident involved a nuclear facility in the city where raw uranium is believed to be converted to uranium hexafluoride, the gas used in centrifuges in the initial phase of the process to enrich yellow cake.

The officials initially said the blast was related to a military exercise but later denied that any explosion had occurred. At least two more unconfirmed explosions are reported to have happened at facilities that host Iranian Shahab-3 medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Two Iranian nuclear scientists, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davan and Majid Shahriari, were targeted in bombings in Tehran late last year in separate attacks. Mr. Abbasi-Davan survived the attack and was subsequently appointed as head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization while Mr. Shahriari was killed. The modus operandi in both attacks was the same: a motorcyclist who attached a bomb to the vehicles that they were travelling in.

In related incidents, nuclear scientist Darioush Rezaie was killed in Tehran by gunmen in Tehran in July of last year while Massoud Ali Mohammadi died in a bombing in the Iranian capital in January 2010. A Tehran court convicted in August Majid Jamali Fashi to death on charges of having been involved in the murder of Mr. Mohammedi on behalf of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

The incidents are believed to be part of a covert campaign designed to complement ever tougher sanctions imposed on Iran and make a military strike against Iranian nuclear targets less likely.

Cyber warfare expert Mr. Bumgarner told Reuters that the fake soccer websites were part of a far larger effort to create a smoke screen behind which the Stuxnet virus attack could be launched undetected. Mr. Bumgarner said that an earlier virus, Conficker, that infected millions of computers in 2008 and was still dormant in many of those computers across the globe enabled the creators of Stuxnet to launch another attack with an improved version of the virus whenever they were ready.

While such an attack is likely, it is less likely to employ soccer as a deception.

Column One: The real war in Iran – JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

    Something is happening in Iran. Forces are in motion. But what is happening? And who are the forces that are on the move? Since this week’s bombing in Isfahan, the world media is rife with speculation that the war with Iran over its nuclear weapons program has begun. But if the war has begun, who is fighting it? What are their aims? And what are their methods and means of attack? On Wednesday the Times of London published a much-cited article about this week’s blast in Isfahan. The article referred to the bombed installation as a “uranium enrichment facility.”

But there is no uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan. Rather there is a uranium conversion facility.

As the news analysis website The Missing Peace explained, a UCF is an installation where yellowcake is converted into uranium hexafluoride, or UF6. In Iran, the UF6 from Isfahan is sent to Natanz, where it is enriched.

While Isfahan’s UCF may be a reasonable target in an all-out attack on Iran’s nuclear program, it is not a vital installation. According to American military analyst J.E. Dyer, it would not be a priority target for Western governments whose primary goal is to neutralize Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

As Dyer put it in a blog post at Hot Air, “Western governments make their targeting decisions based on criteria that would put the Isfahan UCF several notches down the list of things that need to be struck in November 2011. It’s a workhorse facility in the fissile-material production network, and it’s already done what needs to be done to assemble an arsenal of multiple weapons. Uranium conversion is also ‘mastered technology’; Iran can reconstitute it relatively quickly.”

Dyer concludes that due to the site’s low value to Western governments, “It is extremely unlikely that a Western government” perpetrated the attack.

If Dyer is right, and the Isfahan site is not critical to Iran’s nuclear project and was therefore not attacked by a Western government, who attacked it and why? Dr. Michael Ledeen, an Iran expert from the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote Monday at PJ Media that the attack at Isfahan, like the attacks two weeks ago at the Bidganeh Air Force base and two other Revolutionary Guards bases were conducted by members of Iran’s anti-regime Green Movement. In those attacks, Revolutionary Guards Maj.-Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam was killed and some 180 Shahab 3 ballistic missiles were destroyed.

Speaking to The Missing Peace, Daniel Ashrafi, an Iranian anti-regime activist living in Canada, claimed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was scheduled to visit the Bidganeh base at the time of the explosion, but he was delayed.

If true, this would mark the second time that a facility was bombed when one of Iran’s senior leaders was scheduled to visit the site. In May, the Abadan oil refinery was bombed during a site visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Given the shroud of secrecy that covers all operations in Iran, any attempt to assess what is happening on the ground is necessarily speculative.

But speculation can be useful if it is grounded in a reasoned assessment of the differing goals of various actors and the probability of their willingness to act alone or in concert with others to achieve their goals.

In the case of the Green Movement, what began as a protest movement after the regime stole the 2009 presidential elections, morphed in the ensuing months of protests and regime repression into a full-blown revolutionary movement.

No longer content to demand that Ahmadinejad step down and fair elections take place, the Green Movement began calling for and working towards the overthrow of the regime as a whole. And since last year, regime installations as well as key members of the Revolutionary Guards have been targeted on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported last week, since 2010 there has been a fivefold increase in the number of explosions at Iranian oil pipelines and refineries. Whoever is behind the blasts is clearly targeting Iran’s high value economic assets.

And now they have moved on to military installations and nuclear sites.

THIS ESCALATION in the war of sabotage against the Iranian regime provides two important lessons for Western policy-makers assessing Western options for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It tells us the popular Western belief that a US or Israeli or coalition strike on Iran’s nuclear installations would provoke the Iranian public to rally around the regime is utter nonsense. In the case of the Isfahan bombing, for instance, there are two possible scenarios for who is responsible.

First, it is possible, as Ledeen argues and Dyer infers, that the attack was the work of regime opponents acting on their own. Second, it is possible as Israeli officials quoted by the media have hinted that it was a collaborative effort between local regime opponents and foreign forces.

In either case, what is clear is that at least some Iranians are willing to target their country’s nuclear installations if doing so will harm the regime.

At the height of the 2009 Green Movement protests against the regime, US President Barack Obama justified his decision not to side with the anti-regime protesters by claiming that if the US were to support them, they would lose popular credibility. In his words, it would be counterproductive for the US “to be seen as meddling” in Iran’s domestic affairs, “given the history of US-Iranian relations.”

And yet, what we see is that no one is rallying around the regime. The attacks on Isfahan and Bidganeh, which the regime was quick to simultaneously deny and blame on foreign governments, did not cause the people to rally to the side of the mullahs. So, too, the repeated bombings of petroleum facilities are not fomenting an upsurge in public support for the regime. To the contrary; domestic disgruntlement with the regime continues to rise as the standard of living for the average Iranian plummets.

And this brings us to the “students” who raided the British Embassy on Tuesday. On Thursday the regime released from jail all the “students” arrested for raiding and torching the embassy and briefly holding British personnel hostage.

Their release is yet further proof that the embassy attackers were neither students nor angry at Britain. Rather, as British Foreign Minister William Hague and others have alleged, they were regime goons who belong to the same Basij force that massacred, tortured and raped the anti-regime protesters from the Green Movement in 2009.

According to the official Iranian press agencies, the “students” raided the British Embassy because they were furious that Britain announced it was cutting its ties with Iran’s Central Bank. If Obama were right, and Western anti-regime actions were counterproductive, then we could have expected real students, like the ones who called for the overthrow of the regime in 2009 to protest outside the British Embassy. But the fact that they stayed home while their attackers turned their truncheons on the British is clear proof that Obama simply didn’t know what he was talking about.

AND AS Obama’s statements in the wake of the assault on the British Embassy made clear, he still fundamentally misunderstands the situation in Iran. Responding to the attack, Obama said, “I strongly urge the Iranian government to hold those who are responsible to task.”

That is, the US president opted to pretend that “those responsible,” were separate from the regime, which they are not.

Obama’s response is of a piece with his non-response to Iran’s plan to bomb targets in Washington.

It is also in line with his refusal to contemplate sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank and its oil sector. Moreover, Obama’s continued insistence on working through the UN Security Council to ratchet up sanctions on Iran despite the fact that Russian and Chinese support for Iran has blocked that venue make clear that he is not at all serious about using US power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Thankfully, Obama’s abandonment of the traditional US role as the leader of the free world has not prevented Western governments and regional forces for freedom from acting in their common interests. Britain and France have responded to the regime assault on the British Embassy by rallying Western European nations to escalate the EU’s campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unlike the Obama administration, which continues to falsely characterize Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to Israel alone, the Europeans are increasingly willing to acknowledge that the program and the regime constitute a grave threat to European security and to global security as a whole.

Whereas the Obama administration peevishly argues that an embargo on Iranian oil will raise world oil prices, this week the British openly called for an embargo on Iranian oil. In truth such an embargo would harm Iran far more than it would harm the global economy. Europe buys 20 to 25 percent of Iran’s oil exports, but Iranian oil makes up only 5% of European oil imports. At least in the short run, Saudi Arabia could pick up the slack, thus ensuring stability in global oil prices.

In the absence of US leadership, a coalition and a strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and continuing to terrorize the West has emerged. First, we have the Iranian opposition which is apparently actively involved in sabotaging with the aim of overthrowing the regime. Second, we have Israel which is completely committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And finally we have leading European states that are increasingly determined to take practical steps to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

There are many opportunities for collaboration between these forces. In an interview with The New York Times following the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s report exposing Iran’s nuclear weapons program last month, Jean-Jaques Guillet, who published a report on Iran for the French National Assembly, said the goal of these forces should be to overthrow the regime. In his words, “If we press the regime strongly, there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime’s implosion, not more talk.”

Guillet suggested that France could cut off satellite service to Iran. Iran’s television networks are broadcast through the Frenchowned Eutelsat.

Cutting off regime broadcasts, placing an embargo on Iranian oil exports, and actively assisting anti-regime forces in sabotaging regime installations, including nuclear installations, have the potential of achieving the goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and facilitating the empowerment of pro-Western democrats in that country.

Clearly, US participation in such a collaborative strategy would be helpful. But between the explosions in Isfahan and Bidganeh, and the surge in attacks on other regime targets; and Europe’s notably robust response to Iran’s attack on the British Embassy, it is possible that these goals can be accomplished even with the US following far behind.

caroline@carolineglick.com

Activists: Overnight clash in north Syria … JPost – Middle East.

    BEIRUT – Overnight clashes between security forces and army defectors in northern Syria left 12 soldiers and defectors and three civilians dead early on Saturday, activists said.

Fighting has become more intense as rebels increasingly often confront security forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad who are trying to suppress the eight-month-old protest movement against his rule.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting broke out around midnight in the northern city of Idlib, near the Turkish border.

“Seven were killed from the army and regime security forces, including an army officer,” the group said. “Three civilians and five defectors were also killed.”

More than 4,000 people have died since protests broke out in March against the Assad family’s 41-year rule, according to the United Nations, which says the violence in Syria looks like civil war.

Syria faces mounting international and regional isolation as organizations such as the Arab League and the European Union, and the United States, demand that Damascus stop the bloodshed and talk to its opponents, and impose increasingly tough sanctions when it does not do so.

Syrian authorities say they are fighting foreign-backed “terrorist groups” trying to spark civil war who have killed some 1,100 soldiers and police since March.

The head of the main group of army deserters who have joined the opposition, the Free Syrian Army, told Reuters that his forces were switching their tactics from seizing equipment and hitting security checkpoints to attacking the military directly.

He said this was a necessary response to an increasing use of violence in Damascus’ military crackdown on protests.

On Friday, the United Nations top human rights forum strongly condemned Syria for “gross and systematic” violations by its forces, including executions, that it said may amount to crimes against humanity.

The 47-member forum adopted a resolution put forward by the European Union (EU) by a vote of 37 states in favor, four against including China and Russia, with six abstentions. The text called for the “main bodies” of the United Nations to consider a UN report which found that crimes of humanity had been committed and “take appropriate action.”

Blog: Iran: The plot thickens.

Jerry Philipson

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

From the Iranian anti-Semitic film “Sabbath Hunter”

Amid international and Israeli controversy over whether or not to attack Iran’s nuclear program, the rulers of the Islamic Republic have just “upgraded” their strategic objective of wiping Israel off the map and extended it for the first time to the more ambitious one of annihilating the Jews worldwide. They are using the age-old weapon of anti-Semitism to promote their new goal.

Two weeks ago, as their nuclear bomb moved menacingly up the pipeline, the ayatollahs in Tehran and Qom unleashed a virulent campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda in their sermons. A new book and a film were released for wide distribution on orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They draw heavily on the infamous Elders of Zion fiction to accuse the Jews and their rabbis of conspiring to corrupt and rule the world.
Under the title “How Israel should be destroyed,” this book was awarded the best book prize at the Khorassan book fair when it was first displayed there on Thursday, Dec. 1.

The authors of its seven chapters, identified only as “seminary students of the Holy City of Qom,” set out tactics for destroying Israel and the Jews of the world. They quote the Qoran as well as the Protocols of Zion on “the Jewish world view,” asserting that the persecution of Jews through the ages – including the Nazi Holocaust – was “just punishment for their crimes.”

The Qoran is cited as urging Muslims to keep their distance from Jews because of their “perfidious and deceitful nature.”
The book quotes extensively from the views of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, under the heading, “Israel Must Be Destroyed.” The book’s editor Hojjat-ol-Eslam Mohammad Ebrahim-Nia stresses that this prescription has the force of a fatwa (religious edict) and is binding on every Muslim.

He adds: Notwithstanding every effort to destroy this “criminal” people, it continues to exist and in the guise of Zionism continues its wicked assault on Islam.

The anti-Semitic film, “The Sabbath Hunter,” has been circulating for some time but was a flop with Iranian movie audiences. Now the Supreme Leader has ordered it to be screened at every university in the land. The Basij students who rampaged through the British embassy in Tehran this week were made responsible with getting it widely shown.