Iran: US Raid led to Hostage Crisis

Independent: The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis
by Patrick Cockburn

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

IRAN: Coincidence? Iranian Hostage released

Tvnz.co.nz: Iranian hostage released in Iraq

An Iranian diplomat who was kidnapped in Iraq in February has been released and has returned home, Iran's official news agency has reported.

Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms kidnapped the diplomat in February and Tehran blamed the US military for his abduction.

"Jalal Sharafi, second secretary of Iran's embassy in Baghdad, who was kidnapped in Baghdad on February 4, was released on Tuesday," IRNA reported, adding that he arrived back in Tehran where he was welcomed by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

IRAN CRISIS

Asia Times: British pawns in an Iranian game
by Pepe Escobar

This correspondent has been to the Shatt-al-Arab. It's a busy and tricky waterway, to say the least. Iraqi fishing boats share the waters with Iranian patrol boats. From the Iraqi shore one can see the Iranian shore, flags aflutter. These remain extremely disputed waters. In 1975, a treaty was signed in Algiers between the shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein. The center of the river was supposed to be the border. Then Saddam invaded Iran in 1980. After the Iran-Iraq War that this sparked ended in 1988, and even after both Gulf wars, things remain perilously inconclusive: a new treaty still has not been signed.

The British are adamant that the sailors were in Iraqi waters checking for cars, not weapons, being smuggled. It's almost laughable that the Royal Navy should be reduced to finding dangerous Toyotas in the Persian Gulf. Some reports from Tehran claim the British were actually checking Iranian military preparations ahead of a possible confrontation with the US.

IRAN: Oil Currency Switch

Int. Herald Tribune: Iran presses oil customers to pay in currencies other than dollars

BEIJING: Iran is pressuring its oil customers to start paying in currencies other than U.S. dollars and many have begun to comply, people in the oil industry here with knowledge of the practice said.

Zhuhai Zhenrong Trading, a Chinese state-run company that is the biggest buyer of Iranian crude oil worldwide, began paying for its oil in euros late last year as Tehran moved to diversify its foreign exchange reserves away from U.S. dollars. The company, which buys more than a tenth of the oil exports from Iran, has changed the payment currency for the bulk of its contract of roughly 240,000 barrels per day, the people said.

IRAN CRISIS

RIA Novosti: Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border

MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

"The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran," the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran "that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost."

He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

IRAN WAR

Rense: Operation Bite - April 6 Sneak Attack By US Forces On Iran Planned - Russian Military Sources Warn
by Webster Tarpley

The long awaited US military attack on Iran is now on track for the first week of April, specifically for 4 AM on April 6, the Good Friday opening of Easter weekend, writes the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly "Argumenty Nedeli." Uglanov cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account.

The attack is slated to last for twelve hours, according to Uglanov, lasting from 4 AM until 4 PM local time. Friday is a holiday in Iran. In the course of the attack, code named Operation Bite, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories.

Iran: New Proposal

Asia Times: Iran, the EU and the Swiss way out
by Pepe Escobar

The United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment is only one week away. While for the White House escalation hysteria is the name of the game, Europe once again has nothing better to do than to demonstrate its paralysis over bottles of Bordeaux.

"Top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, at the sidelines of the Munich security conference this past Sunday, told Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign-policy diplomat, that "Tehran is ready to unite all its nuclear activities in a consortium with other countries". Larijani could only have made this offer under instructions by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Solana admitted publicly that the meeting was "constructive"."

Iran: US Propaganda Debunked

Asia Times: US's smoking gun on Iran misfires
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The first major effort by the administration of US President George W Bush to substantiate its case that the Iranian government has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shi'ites who oppose the occupation undermines the administration's political line by showing that it has been unable to find any real evidence of an Iranian government role.

"US intelligence had proof of Iranian government responsibility for the supply of such weapons, the unnamed officials who briefed the media on Sunday admitted that the claim is merely "an inference" rather than based on a trail of evidence. Although it was clearly not the intention, moreover, the briefing revealed for the first time that the Iranians and Iraqis detained by US forces in recent months did not provide any evidence implicating either the Iranian government or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in the acquisition of armor-piercing explosive devices and other weapons by Iraqi Shi'ite groups."

IRAN: Propaganda Watch

AFP: Iranian bombs have killed 170 Iraq coalition troops: US

AGHDAD (AFP) - Sophisticated Iranian-built bombs smuggled into
Iraq have killed at least 170 US and allied soldiers since June 2004 and wounded 620 more, senior US defence officials have said.

The allegation, made Sunday at a background briefing in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, comes as Washington steps up its criticism of
Iran and will feed a fierce debate over relations with the Islamic republic.

"Iran is involved in supplying explosively formed projectiles or EFPs and other material to Iraqi extremist groups," a senior official from the US-led multinational coalition told journalists.

As the Shiites still do not kill U.S Soldiers en masse, Iran must be delivering his arch foe i.e the Sunni Guerilla Movement with those mean devices...c'mon get real.

IRAN: U.S Propaganda War in full Swing

AP: US: Iraq roadside bombs came from Iranian gov't

The US military has detected a significant increase in the number of sophisticated roadside bombs appearing in Iraq and believes that orders to send components for them came from the "highest levels" of the Iranian goverment, a senior intelligence officer said Sunday.

The officer, briefing reporters on condition he not be further identified, that that between June 2004 and last week, more than 170 Americans had been killed by the sophisticated bombs, referred to by the military as "explosively formed projectiles."

The officer said American intelligence analysts believe the EFPs are manufactured in Iran and smuggled into Iraq on orders from the top of the Iranian government. He did not elaborate.

Watch out for more Propaganda by unnamed intelligence/goverment officials in the next few weeks

IRAN: Brzezinski: Bush seeks pretext to Attack Iran

WSWS: A political bombshell from Zbigniew Brzezinski

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

Most stunning and disturbing was his description of a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” [Emphasis added].

This was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.

IRAN: The Path to War

Toronto Sun: Fight against Iran too familiar
by Eric Margolis

While the Bush/Cheney administration seems hell-bent on provoking war with Iran, Americans appear far more alarmed by the dangers of global warming. Many of them must regret not voting for "Ecological Al" Gore in 2000.

While icebergs melt, the U.S.-Iran confrontation is getting very dangerous. The heaviest concentration of U.S. naval strike forces since the 2003 war against Iraq is concentrating off Iran.

IRAN: Nuclear Scientist assassinated by Mossad

Sunday Times: Iranian nuclear scientist ‘assassinated by Mossad’

A PRIZE-WINNING Iranian nuclear scientist has died in mysterious circumstances, according to Radio Farda, which is funded by the US State Department and broadcasts to Iran.

An intelligence source suggested that Ardeshire Hassanpour, 44, a nuclear physicist, had been assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli security service.

Hassanpour worked at a plant in Isfahan where uranium hexafluoride gas is produced. The gas is needed to enrich uranium in another plant at Natanz which has become the focus of concerns that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons.