US returns to Iran ancient Persian artifact seized at a US airport from an Arab antique dealer in 2003.

(A 2,700-year-old silver drinking cup, looted from a cave in Iran and seized by U.S. Customs officials a decade ago, was returned to Iran this week. Its value is estimated at a million dollars or more)US returns to Iran ancient Persian artifact seized at a US airport from an Arab antique dealer in 2003 (TAZ/OTHER) The United States has returned to Iran an ancient Persian artifact known as the Griffin.Iran's vice president Mohammad-Ali Najafi unveiled the artifact in Tehran's Mehrabad airport after returning from a trip to the United States, the Fars News Agency reported.Najafi, who is also the head of the cultural heritage and tourism organization, said the US State Department returned the artifact as a sign of good faith in a bid to improve cultural relations between Tehran and Washington. Najafi said American authorities told him the ancient artifact was seized at a US airport from an Arab antique dealer in 2003. The griffin is a legendary creature with the body, tail and back legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The US officials believe the relic dates back to 700 years before Christ when the Achaemenid Empire ruled Persia.

Iran close to finalizing uranium deal with Zimbabwe

you can't buy lunch with a Zimbabwe dollar, the people are starving because they chased the white farmers out of the country... but the government can still sell things that go boom! If you want to see a warning of what happens with the left in power then just look to Mugabe. The people have no work and they can't afford to buy their children food, but they still have hate... hate of the Jews... hate of the first world that they will use to project the troubles that their own government made with it's leftist plans. And Iran is the vehicle of their hate. When your people are starving... why try Capitalism that creates jobs for the future when you can bomb Israel.

Iran has had a shortage of a critical component for its nuclear weapons for a long time: Uranium. Now, Iran is on the verge of signing a natural resources agreement with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe that would give it preferential access to Zimbabwe's 455,000 tons of uranium over the next five years. Given that Iran currently has access to mostly depleted uranium from South Africa from the 1970's, that's a huge deal.
Ilan Berman argues that it's also a deal that has been largely ignored by western sanctions. It's time to change that.

Over the past three years, Western chancelleries have marshaled considerable diplomatic efforts to dissuade potential uranium suppliers such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Brazil from providing Tehran the raw material needed for its nuclear program. For all of their concern, however, Washington policy makers have not yet given serious thought to penalizing countries for their uranium sales to Iran, or crafted a legislative framework that makes it possible to do so.
They should. By identifying and then punishing Tehran's current suppliers of uranium ore, the U.S. and its allies can slow its acquisition of the raw material necessary to realize its nuclear ambitions-and send a clear signal to potential future sources of uranium for Iran's atomic effort, like Zimbabwe, that their involvement with the Islamic Republic's nuclear program will come at a steep economic and political cost.
In its ongoing bid to derail Iran's nuclear drive, Capitol Hill is now said to be contemplating new sanctions aimed at further tightening the international noose around Tehran. Iran's flirtation with Zimbabwe strongly suggests that lawmakers would do well to focus less on trying to stop Iran's centrifuges from spinning and more on making sure that Iran's nuclear machinery is running on empty.

Hmmm.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

What's a little mustard and nerve gas among friends?

US and Israeli intelligence agencies have tracked the WMD consignments from eastern Libya as far as Sudan in convoys secured by Iranian agents and Hizballah and Hamas guards. They are not believed to have reached their destinations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, apparently waiting for an opportunity to get their deadly freights through without the US or Israel attacking and destroying them.  Word of the capture touched off a scramble in Tehran and among the terrorist groups it sponsors to get hold of their first unconventional weapons.  According to our sources, the rebels offloaded at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells for cash payment amounting to several million dollars.  It is also not clear whether the shells and gases were assembled upon delivery or were travelling in separate containers. Our sources report that some of the poison gas may be intended not only for artillery use but also for drones which Hizballah recently acquired from Iran.

NO GAS MASK FOR JEW: Homefront Commander Yair Golan told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that there are only enough of a budget for kits against unconventional warfare to cover 60 percent of the population. The general said that 12 percent of the gas masks have been distributed and the rest will be distributed by the end of 2011.

 

Senior Libyan rebel “officers” sold Hizballah and Hamas thousands of chemical shells from the stocks of mustard and nerve gas that fell into rebel hands when they overran Muammar Qaddafi’s military facilities in and around Benghazi, debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources report.

Tehran threw its support behind the anti-Qaddafi rebels because of this unique opportunity to get hold of the Libyan ruler’s stock of poison gas after it fell into opposition hands and arm Hizballah and Hamas with unconventional weapons without Iran being implicated in the transaction.

Why, it was just about a month ago that

A senior administration official said ... that the White House had no reason to believe the current turmoil in Libya has made its chemical weapons stockpiles more vulnerable to

theft....
.... “We believe that whatever they have at this point is not in weaponized form,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

Two weeks later Crowley was forced to resign... for calling Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning "stupid and counterproductive."  You decide.

DEBKA reports: via bokertov.typepad.com

The Gas-Mask Community

image via ahrcanum.wordpress.com
via afana.org  via growabrain.typepad.com

Iran executes Jewish-Armenian couple in secret

On Monday, March 13th, the Iranian regime executed, in secret, a Jewish-Armenian (Orthodox Christian) couple along with three other individuals in Tehran’s Evin prison.  Ms. Adiva Mirza-Soleiman was of the Jewish faith who along with her Armenian husband, Varouzhan Petrossian, was executed. The Iranian regime has refused to disclose the specific charges against the five, that lead to their execution.

Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reports that though Iranian court part 28  confirmed that the five were in fact executed, they refused to surrender their bodies to their relatives for burial. The families of the couple who had planned to bury each of them according to each of their faith’s funeral customs have been threatened and arrested.

via pajamasmedia.com

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Iran's Flying Saucer

They illustrate the article with this picture.
Looks cool!!!
...Also, surprisingly fake!
I'm bummed.
I was hoping that Iran's leaders
were getting some
alien anal probes
in exchange for the nifty flying
saucer technology. 
After all, Iran has said publicly
that it shot down several
UFOs in 2009. Really.

It turns out that the actual device looks like this

From FARS News:  TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran unveiled a home-made unmanned flying saucer as well as a light sports aircraft in an exhibition of strategic technologies.  The unmanned flying saucer, named "Zohal", was unveiled in a ceremony attended by Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.  Zohal, designed and developed jointly by Farnas Aerospace Company and Iranian Aviation and Space Industries Association (IASIA), can be used for various missions, specially for aerial imaging. The flying machine is equipped with an auto-pilot system, GPS (Global Positioning System) and two separate imaging systems with full HD 10 mega-pixel picture quality and is able to take and send images simultaneously. via elderofziyon.blogspot.com

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Iran - Woman hanged amid international protests

NCRI - A female nurse, Shahla Jahed, 40, was hanged this morning in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison after eight years prison, accused of homicide.

The criminal sentence was carried out amid extensive efforts to save her life in recent years by women’s rights and human rights activists. Even the family of the person who was allegedly killed by her disapproved of her hanging. As a result of campaigns to save her life and following a reassessment of the case, her death sentence was dropped. However, the regime’s judiciary head Sadeq Larijani reaffirmed her sentence.

Ms. Sarvnaz Chitsaz, Chair of the NCRI’s Women’s Committee, deplored such barbaric punishments and said, “For as long as the inhuman and misogynist regime is in power, stoning, executions, whipping and other medieval punishments against people will continue.”

via ncr-iran.org

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Deadly Fictions - The classified diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks are the Pentagon Papers of the pro-Israel right - by Lee Smith

When Hillary Clinton and Obama plaid Poker with Israel, along came the WikiLeak. the hypocrisy is glaring. America was spying on it's ally and I doubt we will see Roger Cohen owe up that the Arab states are terrified of Iran. Free Jonathan Pollard now! America should do the right thing. 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has positioned himself as a left-wing whistleblower whose life mission is to call the United States to task for the evil it has wreaked throughout the world. But after poring through the diplomatic cables revealed via the site yesterday, one might easily wonder if Assange isn’t instead a clandestine agent of Dick Cheney and Bibi Netanyahu; whether his muckraking website isn’t part of a Likudnik plot to provoke an attack on Iran; and if PFC Bradley Manning, who allegedly uploaded 250,000 classified documents to Wikileaks, is actually a Lee Harvey Oswald-like neocon patsy.
With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right.

Here are eight of the most obvious examples from the initial trove of documents that has appeared online: the rest of the exposure via tabletmag.com

some commentators like at the news hour by Soros funded PBS had it's regular Israel bashing analysis... (and this had me cackling) had ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI allude that Israel or a hostile party to Turkey was behind the Wikileak.  One can easily see that the Wikileak will evolve in the Arab world into another variation of 911Troof.  Too many of Israel's enemies were really hurt by these cables... and it is very hard to spin that this didn't help Israel's survival away from a Holocaust.
 The news that terrorists were using the ambulances in Israel was revealing... but no more as revealing as the responses by the Israel bashing media

Iran steadily smuggled arms to Hizballah using various means including in ambulances and medical vehicles during the 2006 war - Wikileaks Confirm Our Analysis of U.S. Policy and Middle East Politics

1. Iran steadily smuggled arms to Hizballah using various means including in ambulances and medical vehicles during the 2006 war. This violates the laws of war. At times, the media has condemned Israel for attacking ambulances though it showed Hamas was also using such vehicles for military and arms-smuggling operations. Moreover, the postwar UN force proved consistently ineffective in stopping smuggling while the U.S. government did not denounce Iran, Syria, and Hizballah for breaking the ceasefire arrangements.

2. Israeli leaders have repeatedly made clear in diplomatic discussions their acceptance of a two-state solution but warned that the Palestinian leadership sought Israel’s destruction.

3. Arab states have constantly been warning the United States about the threat from Iran as their highest priority, even urging the United States to attack Iran itself.

4. Iran and North Korea cooperated to provide Tehran with long-rang missiles that were shipped to Hizballah.

5. One week after President Bashar al-Asad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hizballah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group. Yet the U.S. government did not take strong action.
(Reminds me of how Bashar promised the Bush Administration that he would stop buying oil from Iran in violation of UN sanctions but continued doing so; and how Yasir Arafat promised that he had nothing to do with terrorism and arms smuggling from Iran and then was shown to have lied. Is there a pattern here?)

6. Israel has been warning the United States about how Iran obtaining nuclear weapons would destabilize the region, not just create a danger of an Ian-initiated attack on Israel.

7. U.S. Officials in Turkey think that the current government is in fact an Islamist one, though the U.S. government (and media) keeps insisting it is some kind of democratic-reform-minded centrist regime.

Here are some sources for the raw materials:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/240364
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40405218/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/209599
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2010/11/wikileaks-bombshells-get-early-release.html  

via rubinreports.blogspot.com

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Green Revolution is Dead - Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of Iran's opposition green movement was involved in the massacre of more than 10,000 political prisoners in 1988, according to a report.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Iran opposition leader Photo: REUTERS

Mr Mousavi, the defeated candidate in last June's presidential election, served as Iran's prime minister when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime's spiritual leader, issued a fatwa that sentenced thousands of political prisoners to death without trial, according to the report by one of Britain's leading human rights lawyers.

Mr Mousavi is one of several prominent Iranian politicians who are accused of implementing the order. According to a detailed report published by Geoffrey Robertson QC, who specialises in human rights law, the prisoners were executed for refusing to recant their political and religious beliefs.

via telegraph.co.uk

if Bret Stephens is right, what Mousavi did is irrelevant to Iran's future: The 'green revolution' is dead.

Suppose that in the days following last year's fraudulent election in Iran, the U.S. and its Western allies had warned Tehran's leaders that their repression at home would be met, swiftly and severely, with consequences abroad. For every Neda Soltan shot dead in the street, an Iranian diplomat posted abroad would be expelled. For every foreigner put on trial in Iran, a Western firm doing business in the country would close its doors. For every opposition activist hanged, deliveries of imported gasoline would be curtailed.
And for every call to wipe Israel off the map, the U.S. would supply the Jewish state with 100 bunker-busters suitable for use against Iran's nuclear facilities.
Had any of that happened, it's just possible that Iran's leaders might have hesitated before moving ahead with their bloody crackdown and, in hesitating, given Iran's democratic opposition the opening it needed to sustain itself. But it didn't happen. In those critical June days, as the regime wobbled, the Obama administration opted to ease the regime's fears instead of multiplying them. And instead of creating leverage for himself, the president conceded it preemptively in hopes of currying favor for a nuclear deal.
A year on, we are living with the consequences of his failure.
...
Worst of all, the Green movement is, if not extinguished completely, little more than a flickering ember. The three million Iranians who marched for freedom last June may have to wait another generation for a similar opportunity.
...
Revolutions are also a question of luck and circumstance. In Berlin in 1989, a befuddled East German Politburo member misread his instructions and announced that East Germans were henceforth free to travel to the West. Thus—thus!—did the Wall come down. Two years later in Moscow, some visibly nervous coup plotters took to a stage to announce Gorbachev's early retirement. Their shaky performance allowed Boris Yeltsin to rally Russians against them. It helped that Yeltsin didn't have, in George H.W. Bush, an American president who refused to "meddle" in the country's internal affairs.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

"They were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the stage of the prison assembly hall," the report states. "Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks, and buried by night in mass graves."

In an interview given to Austrian television in December 1988, Mr Mousavi tried to defend the mass executions of the prisoners, many of whom were members of the Marxist "Mojahedin Khalq" organisation, which opposed the Islamic regime established by Khomeini following the 1979 Iranian revolution.
"We had to crush the conspiracy," said Mr Mousavi. "In that respect we have no mercy."

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