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DEBKAfile Special Report April 14, 2012, 10:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

Wendy Sherman leads US delegation at Istanbul

The only real action at the resumed nuclear negotiations between Iran and the six world powers in Istanbul Saturday, April 14, was played out on the sidelines. The Obama administration’s intense effort to put relations with Tehran on a new, more amicable footing, was thrown back in its face by the head of the Iranian delegation, Saeed Jalili, who gave the senior US delegate, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, a humiliating runaround after she was reported in Tehran as having invited him to a bilateral meeting during the lunch break.
First, Iranian officials first announced there would be no meeting. Next, third-party efforts, especially by Russian and Turkish officials, to arrange one were spurned. Then, the American side publicized Sherman’s invitation to Jalili, calculating that the Iranian delegation leader could hardly break every rule of diplomatic propriety by turning her down. Nonetheless, after issuing conflicting reports – some claiming Jalili had accepted the US delegate’s invitation – the official Iranian news agency IRNA announced: “The Iranian delegation rejected the request of Wendy Sherman, the representative of the American delegation, for a bilateral meeting.”

To drive the snub home, Tehran played up Jalili’s meetings with heads of the Russian and European delegations. According to some diplomatic sources, Tehran took it amiss that Sherman is junior in rank to Jalili who is head of Iran’s National Security Council and therefore decided against the meeting.

The session ended with May 23 being set as the date for the next round of talks. They will take place in Baghdad.  Accepting this venue was another American concession for the sake of keeping up a friendly dialogue with Tehran.
debkafile summed up the opening session of the nuclear talks with Iran in an earlier report April 14.

At Istanbul, US puts better ties with Iran ahead of nuclear issues

European diplomats close to the nuclear negotiations which Iran and six world powers launched in Istanbul Saturday, April 14 praised the first session as “constructive” because all the participants agreed that it laid the ground for a follow-up meeting in a month or six weeks. debkafile: For this modest “concession,” Tehran won its first advantage, time for advancing its nuclear weapons program and a substantial delay for any US or Israel military action to preempt this advance – up until mid-summer.
At around the same time, in July, President Barack Obama is committed to declare the next round of sanctions against Iran – a tight clampdown on its banks and oil exports.
It is doubtful if then Tehran will consent to go back to the “everything is on the table” policy it pursued surprisingly for the first time in Turkey. Until now, the Iranians refused to allow its nuclear activities, especially in the military field, to be aired at international forums.  Yet at the Saturday session, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator avoided mention of sanctions and, as debkafile predicted on April 11, did not demand the lifting of penalties as a precondition for negotiations.
His statement to the meeting was not released. European diplomatic sources only quoted him as saying generally that he was ready “to seriously engage on the Iranian nuclear issue.”
US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman is quoted as saying that “relations between Washington and Tehran need not be so bad.”
During the break for lunch, when informal meetings traditionally take place among the delegates, Sherman is reported by Western sources to have asked to talk to Jalili, but whether or not they met was not stated. Shortly after, sources in Tehran denied that the US and Iranian delegation leaders had met separately but later said Jalili had accepted her invitation.

Diplomatic circles in the West including Israel were surprised at the choice of Wendy Sherman as US delegation leader. She is reputed to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest and most influential adviser. This is taken as a signal from Washington to Tehran that the Obama administration is more interested in improving the climate of relations with Iran at the diplomatic level than reaching understandings on the nuclear issue.
On April 7, debkafile’s Washington sources disclosed that this goal was underscored in the message from President Obama to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan delivered on March 29.

The president expressed the hope that Iranian leaders would abandon their hostile rhetoric and stop referring to the United States as their enemy. Erdogan was directed to inform the supreme leader that statements from Tehran crediting Obama’s policy for this improvement in tone would be welcomed, for example, Khamenei’s remark on March 8 in which he welcomed comments by US President Barack for “for pushing forward diplomacy and not war as a solution to Tehran’s nuclear ambition.”
This initial US approach and the absence from the American delegation of any important expert on Iran’s nuclear program have raised concern among some of America’s Western allies as well as Israel about the prospects of the Istanbul talks getting anywhere in their avowed objective of reining in Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

Saturday’s nuclear talks ‘an Iranian trick,’ warns Israel’s last envoy to Tehran | The Times of Israel.

Uri Lubrani, now a top adviser to the vice prime minister, says US is being duped

By Mitch Ginsburg

“I am very, very skeptical about this meeting,” Uri Lubrani, a senior adviser on Iran to Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, told The Times of Israel.

“It’s just another trick in a package of tricks meant to buy time,” said Lubrani, who served as Israel’s head of mission in Tehran, with the rank of ambassador, from 1973-1978, the final years of Israel’s warm relations with Iran before the fall of the Shah.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council along with a German representative, collectively known as the P5+1, are to conduct negotiations with Iranian representatives this Saturday in Istanbul. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that Israel would find acceptable an arrangement in which the regime ceases to enrich uranium, all previously enriched material is removed from the country and a facility in Qom is opened to inspectors. Low-grade uranium, for non-military purposes, could be imported into Iran.

“If Iran does all of these things then it will truly seem that it intends to cease its nuclear program,” Netanyahu said in a recent interview with Maariv. The prime minister has also indicated, however, that time is running out on diplomacy and sanctions, and that the moment of truth on possible military intervention is only months away.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stated that Iran is “logically, religiously and theoretically” opposed to the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons – a stance belied by many of the covert elements of the program and one that the fractured group of powers will attempt to pin down with firm commitments.

Lubrani related to these American-led efforts when he said, “The Americans don’t understand the Iranians. They have not even understood that it is possible to stop talking.” Lubrani was apparently indicating that the US has failed to see through Iran’s stalling tactics, and should have already recognized that the diplomatic route was leading nowhere.

Lubrani, whose career extends back to a stint as an adviser on Arab affairs to prime minister David Ben-Gurion and an ambassador to Iran with close ties to the Shah during the late seventies, also said that Israel is “too weak and too poor” to do anything non-military in terms of regime change in Iran. The Americans, who do have the capacity, have been sending the wrong signals.

Iran’s dissatisfied citizens “look at Syria, and they see that the people there (rising up against the regime) are being shot and that nothing is being done” by the outside world to help them, Lubrani said. If they attempt to rise up, the Iranian people “understand that this will be their fate as well.”

The State Department’s Jerusalem syndrome.

Caroline Glick

I went to the US Consulate this week to take care of certain family business. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I think it is ironic that two days after my extremely unpleasant experience at the consulate, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to say what the capital of Israel is. It was ironic because anyone who visits the consulate knows that the US’s position on Jerusalem is in perfect alignment with that of Israel’s worst enemies.

Last time I went to the consulate was in 2007. At that time the building was located in the middle of an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. It was unpleasant. In fact it was fairly frightening. Once inside the building I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Americans had gone out of their way to make Israeli-American Jews feel uncomfortable and vaguely threatened.

But then, I was able to console myself with the thought that the US has been upfront about its rejection of Israel’s right to assert its sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem. By treating Jews as foreigners in their capital city and behaving as though it belongs to the Arabs by among other things hiring only Arabs as local employees, the US officials on site were simply implementing a known US policy. True, I deeply oppose the policy, but no one was asking me, and no one was hiding anything from me. 

The new consulate is much different, and much worse. The State Department opened its new consulate in Jerusalem in October 2010. It is located in the Jewish neighborhood of Arnona. It was built on the plot that Israel allocated for the US Embassy after Congress passed Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995 requiring the US government to move its embassy to Jerusalem. I read that construction began in 2004. I haven’t been able to find out whether when construction began it was to build the embassy or a new consulate so I don’t know yet whether the Bush administration thought it was building an embassy that the Obama administration turned into a consulate or if the Bush administration thought it was building a consulate that the Obama administration completed. 

Whatever the case, the fact that the building that was supposed to be an expression of US recognition of Israel’s capital in Jerusalem is being used as the consulate is an unvarnished act of aggression against Israel and Congress. 

If I am not mistaken, the US Consulate General in Jerusalem is the only US consulate in the world that is not subordinate to the embassy in the country where it is located. When it was located in a hostile Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, the fact that it was not subordinate to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv was upsetting. But it was also easily justified in light of US policy of not recognizing Israeli sovereignty in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. 

But Arnona is in western Jerusalem. It is a Jewish neighborhood that even the most radical Israeli leftists don’t envision transferring to the Palestinians in any peace deal. Putting the consulate in Arnona – and on the site reserved for the embassy no less – is the clearest expression of American rejection of all Israeli sovereign rights to Jerusalem imaginable.

And the fact that it is located in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood is far from the only problem with the building. 

Israelis who live in Jerusalem and need US consular services are required to go to the consulate in Jerusalem. You can’t just go to Tel Aviv to avoid the unpleasantness. This again is due to the fact that the US does not recognize ANY Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. From the State Department’s perspective, people who live in Jerusalem — even in Arnona and Rehavia and Ein Kerem etc. — live in a DIFFERENT COUNTRY from people who live in Tel Aviv and Netanya. We can no more receive services from the embassy in Tel Aviv than we can receive services from the embassy in Amman.

I will be writing more about the US’s adversarial treatment of Israel as embodied in its treatment of Jerusalem in next week’s Jerusalem Post column. But suffice it to say here that Victoria Nuland’s statement to AP reporter Matt Lee, (posted below in case you missed it), is a true depiction of America’s policy on Jerusalem – and though it, on Israel.

It would be useful for someone to get Mitt Romney on record discussing his position on Jerusalem. Assuming that he says – like every other Republican presidential candidate – that he supports transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem, he should further be asked to explain how, if he is elected president, he will force the State Department to change its policies towards Israel and respect US law by treating Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

UPDATE from Yisrael Medad:

The following is an email I received from Yisrael Medad from the Begin Center. He writes an excellent blog www.myrightword.blogspot.com

Yisrael follows the US Consulate in Jerusalem far more closely than I and here is what he was to say:

I am old enough to recall pre-1967 when the Consulate in “West Jerusalem” was where it always was for some 150 years – at Agron Street.  The library was great.  And by the way, the building you mention is the offices of the consular section. Political, economic and other matters are still at Agron, where the Consul-General lives.

But to the politics:  A rather disturbing pattern of behavior has emerged from the US Consulate-General in Jerusalem over the past years that would point to a need for Congressional review and oversight.

Except for matters of passports, visas and birth registration, all other activities whether social, educational, scientific, sports, etc. are blatantly discriminatory in that no Jewish American citizen, who lives in the area supervised by the Consulate, can benefit from or take part in.  They are intended for Arabs solely.  

Jews resident in the area of Judea and Samaria face a policy of exclusion and that, we maintain, would seem to be unconstitutional and illegal.  In the same geographical area under the jurisdiction of the Consulate there exist two separate and not equal populations: Jewish and Arab, whether Muslim or Christian.

Is what they are doing legal by American law?  Is it in the spirit of the democratic foundations of American democracy?  Can the Consulate adopt exclusionist policies that separate between peoples based on race in the same geographic area?  Can it create the “state of the West Bank”?

There are almost 350,000 Jewish residents in the communities located in the territory for which the C-G is responsible (the almost 300,000 Jews in the newer Jerusalem neighborhoods and within the Old City is another matter).  Almost 15,000 are American citizens.  They do not benefit from any of these cultural, social or funding outreach activities and other programs and monies.  Jews don’t count, other than deserving consular needs like birth registration, visas, etc. 

I think it would be a helpful for the House Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on the manner in which the US Consulate in Jerusalem is run. Jewish US citizen residents of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria should be brought in to give testimony.

Russia Planning Troops Deployment On Iran’s Northern Border And Waiting For A Western Attack.

Saturday, 14 April 2012 13:16

By F. Michael Maloof

April 12, 2012 “Information Clearing House“

WASHINGTON – The Russian military anticipates that an attack will occur on Iran by the summer and has developed an action plan to move Russian troops through neighboring Georgia to stage in Armenia, which borders on the Islamic republic, according to informed Russian sources.

Russian Security Council head Viktor Ozerov said that Russian General Military Headquarters has prepared an action plan in the event of an attack on Iran.

Dmitry Rogozin, who recently was the Russian ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, warned against an attack on Iran.

“Iran is our neighbor,” Rogozin said. “If Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security.” Rogozin now is the deputy Russian prime minister and is regarded as anti-Western. He oversees Russia’s defense sector.

Russian Defense Ministry sources say that the Russian military doesn’t believe that Israel has sufficient military assets to defeat Iranian defenses and further believes that U.S. military action will be necessary.

The implication of preparing to move Russian troops not only is to protect its own vital regional interests but possibly to assist Iran in the event of such an attack. Sources add that a Russian military buildup in the region could result in the Russian military potentially engaging Israeli forces, U.S. forces, or both.

Informed sources say that the Russians have warned of “unpredictable consequences” in the event Iran is attacked, with some Russians saying that the Russian military will take part in the possible war because it would threaten its vital interests in the region.

The influential Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper has quoted a Russian military source as saying that the situation forming around Syria and Iran “causes Russia to expedite the course of improvement of its military groups in the South Caucasus, the Caspian, Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.”

This latest information comes from a series of reports and leaks from official Russian spokesmen and government news agencies who say that an Israeli attack is all but certain by the summer.

Because of the impact on Russian vital interests in the region, sources say that Russian preparations for such an attack began two years ago when Russian Military Base 102 in Gyumri, Armenia, was modernized. It is said to occupy a major geopolitical position in the region.

Families of Russian servicemen from the Russian base at Gyumri in Armenia close to the borders of Georgia and Turkey already have been evacuated, Russian sources say.

“Military Base 102 is a key point, Russia’s outpost in the South Caucasus,” a Russian military source told the newspaper. “It occupies a very important geopolitical position, but the Kremlin fears lest it should lose this situation.”

With Vladimir Putin returning to the Russian presidency, the prospect that he again would order an attack on Georgia as he did in August 2008 also has become a possibility, these informed sources say.

The Russians believe that Georgia would cooperate with the United States in blocking any supplies from reaching Military Base 102, which now is supplied primarily by air. Right now, Georgia blocks the only land transportation route through which Russian military supplies could travel.

Fuel for the Russian base in Armenia comes from Iran. Russian officials believe this border crossing may be closed in the event of a war.

“Possibly, it will be necessary to use military means to breach the Georgian transport blockade and establish transport corridors leading into Armenia,” according to Yury Netkachev, former deputy commander of Russian forces in Transcaucasia. Geography of the region suggests that any such supply corridor would have to go through the middle of Georgia approaching Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi given the roads and topography of the country.

In September, the Russian military plans to hold its annual military exercises called Kavkaz 2012. However, informed Russian sources say that preparations and deployments of military equipment and personnel already have begun in anticipation of a possible war with Iran.

These sources report that new command and control equipment has been deployed in the region capable of using the Russian GPS system, GLONASS for targeting information.

“The air force in the South Military District is reported to have been rearmed almost 100 percent with new jets and helicopters,” according to regional expert Pavel Felgenhauer of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

In 2008, Felgenhauer pointed out, Kavkaz 2008 maneuvers allowed the Russian military to covertly deploy forces that successfully invaded Georgia in August of that year.

Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov already has announced that new Spetznaz, or Special Forces units, will be deployed in Stavropol and Kislovodsk, which are located in the North Caucasian regions.

Russian sources say that the Russian military believes that if the U.S. goes to war with Iran, it may deploy forces into Georgia and warships in the Caspian Sea with the possible help of Azerbaijan, which since has stated that it will not allow its territory to be used by Israel to launch an attack on neighboring Iran.

There had been speculation that given the improved relations between Israel and Azerbaijan, the Jewish state may use bases from which to launch air attacks on neighboring Iran’s nuclear sites. Israel recently agreed to sell Azerbaijan $1.6 billion in military equipment.

A further irritant to Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili is the prospect that Russian assault airborne troops, or VDV units, with helicopters could be moved into Georgia’s two breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These two provinces were taken by the Russian military during the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war. Initially they were declared by Moscow to be independent countries, but now the Kremlin is indicating they may be annexed to Russia.

Similarly, Lt. General Vladimir Shamanov, commander of the VDV, has announced that Russian troops in Armenia will be reinforced by paratroopers, along with attack and transport helicopters.

“The Russian spearhead (from the Transcaucasia region) may be ordered to strike south to prevent the presumed deployment of U.S. bases in Transcaucasia, to link up with the troops in Armenia and take over the South Caucasus energy corridor along which Azeri, Turkmen and other Caspian natural gas and oil may reach European markets,” Felgenhauer said.

“By one swift military strike, Russia may ensure control of all the Caucasus and the Caspian states that were its former realm, establishing a fiat accompli the West, too preoccupied with Iran, would not reverse,” he said.

“At the same time, a small victorious war would unite the Russian nation behind the Kremlin, allowing it to crush the remnants of the prodemocracy movement ‘for fair elections,’ and as a final bonus, Russia’s military action could perhaps finally destroy the Saakashvili regime.”

Putin has made no secret that he despises Saakashvili and with his return to the presidency, he may consider taking out the Georgian president as unfinished business. Just as in 2008, Putin will not have much to worry about if he sends Russian troops into Georgia, since there was muted reaction from the U.S. and the European countries to the Russian invasion and subsequent occupation.

F. Michael Maloof, staff writer for WND’s G2Bulletin, is a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He can be contacted at  mmaloof@wnd.com.

Lebanon news – NOW Lebanon -October Surprise.

Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program resume in Turkey this weekend, attended by delegates from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany. Not much is likely to happen.

The big obstacle is this: The Iranians want a pocketful of nuclear weapons. Or, more to the point: The Iranians have always aspired to be the major power in their region. Several of the region’s powers—Israel, Pakistan, and India—have nukes, so Iran wants some too.

(…)Even so, it’s extremely unlikely that a nuclear-armed Iran would one day, out of the blue, start dropping bombs or firing missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For one thing, whatever the status of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program, they are probably years away from turning an explosive device into a weapon, miniaturizing it to fit inside a warhead, and installing the warhead on top of a missile heavy enough to deliver it over a long distance with accuracy.

For another thing, Israel is believed to possess up to 200 nuclear weapons. It’s a reasonable guess that they are dispersed, heavily protected, some of them mobile, perhaps at sea, and connected to redundant command-control networks so that, even if the capital is destroyed, the surviving weapons can still be launched. In other words, if Iran lobs some nukes at Israel, Israel can be counted on to blow Iran to smithereens. The Iranian leaders surely know this: They may sponsor suicide bombers, but they’re not suicidal themselves.

Some have inferred from this argument that an Iranian bomb is nothing to worry about. This inference is wrong, for several reasons. First, nuclear weapons are good not just for deterring but also for brandishing. They can provide cover for conventional aggression or intimidation. For instance, if Saddam Hussein had possessed some nukes before invading Kuwait, it’s unlikely that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker could have assembled or sustained the vast coalition that pushed Iraq’s army out of Kuwait. Or, during that same war, when Baker declared that a chemical or biological attack on Israel would be treated the same way as a nuclear attack against the United States, his threat might have been less credible if Saddam had had his own nukes to bargain with.

Similarly, a nuclear-armed Iran may push or condone the more militant factions within Hezbollah and other proxies to step up their aggression and take greater risks.

Second, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to maintain a “balance of terror” for several decades of Cold War tensions, without pushing the button, in part because both sides learned—and applied—the lessons of deterrence as they went along. They put missiles in blast-hardened silos and untargetable submarines. They set up early-warning radars and a hotline for managing crises. They installed coded locks (“permissive action links” or PALs) on their missiles, to minimize the chance that some loony general might launch a first-strike on his own. There is no assurance that the Iranians will do any of these things with their arsenal.

Third, there is the matter of geography. Moscow and Washington are 5,000 miles apart. If they were 900 miles apart (as Tehran and Jerusalem are), there probably would have been a nuclear war at some point in the last 50 years. It takes a half hour for an ICBM to fly from Moscow to Washington; that’s just barely enough time for the president to decide what to do if a blip on the radar screen suggests an attack is underway. It takes about five minutes for a short-range missile to fly from Tehran to Israel. That’s probably not enough time.

(…)The bad news is that, for the Iranians to give up such a high-profile trump card, they need to get something in return—a suspension of sanctions, a guarantee of security, something that’s tangible and valuable. Is there some deal—even hypothetically—that is, at once, worthwhile to the Iranians and acceptable to the Israelis? That’s the key question; it’s hard to envision such a thing.

Fred Kaplan is Slate’s “War Stories” columnist and a senior Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.

The above article was published in slate.com on April 12th, 2012 (6:14 p.m. ET).

‘Iran rejects US request for bil… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By REUTERS

04/14/2012 20:20

Official Iranian media reports Tehran’s delegation to nuclear talks in Istanbul turns down request from US delegation head Wendy Sherman to meet with chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Photo: REUTERS

ISTANBUL – Iran turned down a request by the United States for a rare bilateral meeting on the sidelines of nuclear talks between the Islamic republic and six world powers in Istanbul on Saturday, the official IRNA news agency said.

There was no comment from US diplomats, whose country has not had direct ties with Tehran for more than three decades.

IRNA’s report followed contradictory accounts from two other Iranian news agencies on prospects for a meeting between Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and the head of the US delegation, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman.

The United States and Iran broke off diplomatic ties after the 1979 Islamic revolution which toppled the US-backed shah and both sides view each other with deep mistrust.

“The Iranian delegation rejected the request of Wendy Sherman, the representative of the American delegation, for a bilateral meeting,” IRNA said.

The semi-official Fars news agency had earlier quoted an “informed source” as denying a report by a third agency, ISNA, that Jalili accepted a request for a meeting with a US envoy.

Non-Iranian diplomats attending the talks in Istanbul had questioned the ISNA report but still said Saturday’s meeting between Iran and the six powers – the United States, Russia, France, China, Germany and Britain – had started well.

IRNA said Iranian diplomats in Istanbul did hold bilateral meetings on Saturday with Russian delegates and with EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, the main representative of the negotiating group of international powers, as well with the Turkish hosts, who are not party to the negotiations.

The West accuses Iran of trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Iran says its programi s peaceful.

Tehran agreed to resume talks with the six – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany – after more than a year of escalating rhetoric and tensions.

UN Security Council unanimously agrees to deploy Syria cease-fire monitors – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

( 30 unarmed observers is the “civilized” world’s answer to Assad’s butchery of over 10,000 of his own civilians.  – JW )

Russia, China join other UNSC members to approve deployment of up to 30 unarmed observers who will monitor ceasfire in effect since Thursday; seventeen reportedly killed in Syria on Saturday.

By Reuters, DPA and Haaretz

The UN Security Council on Saturday unanimously authorized the deployment of up to 30 unarmed observers to Syria to monitor the country’s fragile ceasefire, which came into effect Thursday.

Russia and China joined the other 13 council members and voted in favor of the Western-Arab draft resolution. Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, however, made clear that there were limits to the kind of UN action Moscow could support.

	A screen grab of a video Syrian opposition activists claim was filmed in Homs on Saturday, April 14, 2012.
	Photo by: AP

“Out of respect for the sovereignty of Syria we have cautioned against destructive attempts at external interference or imposing any kind of illusory fixes,” he said.

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said on Saturday that Moscow was satisfied with the latest Western-Arab draft resolution authorizing the deployment of the first batch of unarmed UN observers to Syria to monitor its fragile truce.

“Having reported to our capital we are now satisfied we can vote on the resolution,” Churkin told reporters.”

Syrian forces shelled two central districts in the battered city of Homs throughout the night and into Saturday morning, a resident activist as well as a human rights group said, the first bombings since a ceasefire took hold on Thursday.

“There was shelling last night in the old part of the city, in Jouret al-Shiyah and al-Qaradis. And I have heard eight shells fall in the past hour,” Karm Abu Rabea, a resident activist who lives in an adjacent neighborhood, said on Saturday morning. Seventeen people were reportedly killed on Saturday.

An estimated 3,000 Syrian refugees have fled to Jordan since the ceasefire went into effect in Syria, according to Jordanian authorities and relief agencies. On Saturday alone some 1,000 Syrians crossed over into Jordan, said charitable associations, adding that they have witnessed a sudden rise in the number of refugees over the last three days.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report April 14, 2012, 6:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

Wendy Sherman leads US delegation at Istanbul

European diplomats close to the nuclear negotiations which Iran and six world powers launched in Istanbul Saturday, April 14 praised the first session as “constructive” because all the participants agreed that it laid the ground for a follow-up meeting in a month or six weeks. debkafile: For this modest “concession,” Tehran won its first advantage, time for advancing its nuclear weapons program and a substantial delay for any US or Israel military action to preempt this advance – up until mid-summer.
At around the same time, in July, President Barack Obama is committed to declare the next round of sanctions against Iran – a tight clampdown on its banks and oil exports.
It is doubtful if then Tehran will consent to go back to the “everything is on the table” policy it pursued surprisingly for the first time in Turkey. Until now, the Iranians refused to allow its nuclear activities, especially in the military field, to be aired at international forums.  Yet at the Saturday session, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s senior nuclear negotiator avoided mention of sanctions and, as debkafile predicted on April 11, did not demand the lifting of penalties as a precondition for negotiations.
His statement to the meeting was not released. European diplomatic sources only quoted him as saying generally that he was ready “to seriously engage on the Iranian nuclear issue.”
US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman is quoted as saying that “relations between Washington and Tehran need not be so bad.”
During the break for lunch, when informal meetings traditionally take place among the delegates, Sherman is reported by Western sources to have asked to talk to Jalili, but whether or not they met was not stated. Shortly after, sources in Tehran denied that the US and Iranian delegation leaders had met separately but later said Jalili had accepted her invitation.

Diplomatic circles in the West including Israel were surprised at the choice of Wendy Sherman as US delegation leader. She is reputed to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest and most influential adviser. This is taken as a signal from Washington to Tehran that the Obama administration is more interested in improving the climate of relations with Iran at the diplomatic level than reaching understandings on the nuclear issue.
On April 7, debkafile’s Washington sources disclosed that this goal was underscored in the message from President Obama to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan delivered on March 29.

The president expressed the hope that Iranian leaders would abandon their hostile rhetoric and stop referring to the United States as their enemy. Erdogan was directed to inform the supreme leader that statements from Tehran crediting Obama’s policy for this improvement in tone would be welcomed, for example, Khamenei’s remark on March 8 in which he welcomed comments by US President Barack for “for pushing forward diplomacy and not war as a solution to Tehran’s nuclear ambition.”
This initial US approach and the absence from the American delegation of any important expert on Iran’s nuclear program have raised concern among some of America’s Western allies as well as Israel about the prospects of the Istanbul talks getting anywhere in their avowed objective of reining in Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

Iranian double agent working for Israel planted Stuxnet in nuclear facility, report says — Government Computer News.

• By Kevin McCaney
• Apr 13, 2012

An Iranian double agent working for Israel used a memory stick to plant the Stuxnet virus that disrupted Iran’s nuclear program, according to a published report quoting current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

Richard Sale, writing for ISSSource, said the agent, probably a member of an Iranian dissident group, used a corrupt memory stick.32 to implant the virus at the Natanz nuclear facility, according to the sources.

Iranian proxies, dissidents acting as double agents, also have been involved in assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists, the sources reportedly told Sale.

Stuxnet, likely the first example of weaponized malware, was already known to have spread via memory sticks, or key drives. Introduced in late 2009, it spread quickly to systems around the world, although it was designed for only one purpose: to attack a specific version of a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) that was used in centrifuges for uranium enrichment at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The worm, which used four zero-day exploits in its attacks, disrupted the rotational frequency of the centrifuges, and ultimately damaged Iran’s nuclear program, according to an International Atomic Energy Agency report.

Uranium enrichment at the Natanz plant was shut down for seven days in November 2010. Reuters reported in February that engineers had finally succeeded in scrubbing Stuxnet from their systems.

Because of its complexity and its specific target, Stuxnet has been thought to be the work of a nation-state, and the United States and Israel have often been mentioned as possibly being behind it. ISSSource — or Industrial Safety and Security Source, a site that reports on manufacturing security and safety issues — has reported that Stuxnet was part of a joint U.S.-Israeli effort aimed at Iran. (The sources who told Sale about the assassination of Iranian scientists said, however, that the United States was unaware of those operations.)

Stuxnet’s success in disrupting nuclear processing in Iran has raised fears about what similarly designed malware could do if it attacked facilities in the United States and elsewhere.

In January, Kaspersky Labs said its researchers determined that Stuxnet and Duqu, a close variant that has been found gathering information on industrial systems in Europe, are likely part of a much larger family of malware, and that future Stuxnet-style attacks are likely.

That type of malware could be used to attack power grids, water processing plants and other critical infrastructure facilities. The Homeland Security Department in November confirmed earlier research showing that prisons, which use PLCs to control doors, video systems, alarms and intercoms, are vulnerable to a Stuxnet-like worm.

The fact that much of the infrastructure in the United States in privately owned, rather than government-owned as in Iran, also could complicate the response to such attacks.

About the Author

Kevin McCaney is the managing editor of Government Computer News.

EU calls initial nuke talks with… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

Photo: REUTERS/Tolga Adanali/Pool

ISTANBUL – World powers and Iran held talks on Tehran’s nuclear program in Istanbul on Saturday in a “constructive atmosphere”, a European Union spokesman said after the first session.

The six world powers – the United States, Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain – met senior Iranian officials for the first time in 15 months for talks aimed at calming deepening tensions over Tehran’s nuclear work.

“They met in a constructive atmosphere,” said Michael Mann, spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the powers in dealings with Iran. “We had a positive feeling that they did want to engage.”

A second session of talks was scheduled later in the day. Diplomats expect Tehran to lay out “new initiatives” to push forward negotiations.

The atmosphere at the opening session of Saturday’s nuclear talks was “completely different” from that of previous meetings, a diplomat said, describing it as “a good morning”.

The diplomat said Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili had not stated the kind of preconditions that he had in the last meeting in early 2011, when the two sides failed to agree even on an agenda.

“He seems to have come with an objective to get into a process which is a serious process, which is about what we want to talk about,” said the envoy, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I would say it has been a useful morning’s work.”

The diplomat suggested the Iranian side had signaled a readiness to enter a serious engagement on the dispute over its nuclear program and that this could pave the way for a second meeting.

Western diplomats and officials had said in the run-up to the meeting in Istanbul that they hoped for enough progress to be able to schedule a new round of negotiations, perhaps in Baghdad next month.

But, the diplomat cautioned: “We could go backwards this afternoon.” He said he did not expect serious negotiations to take place already during Saturday’s talks, for example on the West’s demand that Tehran cease higher-grade uranium enrichment.

But the diplomat added that Iran had indicated “openness on all those issues”, in contrast to the last time when Iran refused to talk about its nuclear program, which it says is peaceful but the West suspects has military links.

“Not only are the atmospherics and the atmosphere completely different from what they were previously but more importantly he (Jalili) is not coming with the same preconditions and what we would consider obstacles that we saw previously,” the diplomat said.

He said Jalili’s tone in his opening statement was “calm and constructive”, even though there had been elements of “defiance and disagreement” in a second intervention during the talks with the six powers and their main representative, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.