Posted by: Frozen Al ||
08/12/2009 13:39 ||
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#1
This reminds me of the T62 and T72 tank sales to Iraq. When we hit the tanks sand poured from the turrets. Now Iran is buying and building a missile that hit at a 70% best rate, un jammed. Hell an open sighted .50 cal would be a better ADA weapon.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/12/2009 15:30 Comments ||
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#2
ION CATHAY, WMF > CHINA FEARS INDIA'S BRAHMAPUTRA DAM PROJECT ["Water War"]; + CHINA READY: ALL MISSLES AIMED AT NEW DELHI/ ANDREI PINKOV: CHINA, INDIA MILITARILY BUILDING UP FOR FUTURE/NEW WAR.
VARIOUS > FUTURE SINO-INDIAN WAR = CHIN is likely to preemptively strike and destroy India's largest cities, + perm takeover NORTH KOREA, TIBET, BHUTAN, ARUNUSCHAL PRADESH + SIKKIM, etc. disputed regions. INDIA anticipated by most analysts to come out the loser.
IOW, it'll be a war for TOTAL DOMINATION = CONQUEST OF SOUTH ASIA + DISPUTED SOVEREIGNTIES, including fighting outside of CHIN andor INDIA proper. CHIN is repor reorganizing its MILREGIONS to wage = fight SEVERAL REGIONAL ASIAN WARS AT ONCE???
#3
OOOOPSIES, forgot to add WAFF > TURKEY'S POPULATION IN THE YEAR 2025 ESTIMATED TO BE 90.0MILYUHN/TURKEY OVERBROUGHT BUT DEMOGRAPHICALLY IN GOOD LONG-TERM PLAY.
Turkey is and likely to remain the WORLD'S MOST MODERN, DIVERSE MILECON MUSLIM POWER for a long while yet. Add to the so-called Year 2050-or-so "EURABIA/MUSLIM POPULATION BOMB".
Via JihadWatch
In a dramatic session before the revolutionary court this past weekend, documented by Elam Ministries, Maryam Rustampoor (27) and Marzieh Amirizadeh (30) were told to recant their faith in Christ. Though great pressure was put on them, both women have refused to give in. Maryam and Marzieh were originally arrested on March 5, 2009 and have suffered greatly while in prison, suffering ill health, solitary confinement and interrogations for many hours while blindfolded. In a dramatic court room, the deputy prosecutor, Mr. Haddad, questioned Maryam and Marzieh about their faith and told them that they had to recant in both verbal and written form. They responded, "We will not deny our faith."
As the questioning continued, Maryam and Marzieh made reference to their belief that God had convicted them through the Holy Spirit. Mr. Haddad told them, "It is impossible for God to speak with humans." Marzieh asked him in return, "Are you questioning whether God is Almighty?" Mr. Haddad then replied, "You are not worthy for God to speak to you." Marzieh said, "It is God, and not you, who determines if I am worthy."
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Posted by: ed ||
08/12/2009 11:35 ||
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The speaker of Iran's parliament has dismissed claims by a defeated presidential candidate that opposition protesters were raped in detention.
"Based on parliament's investigations, detainees have not been raped or sexually abused in Iran's Kahrizak and Evin prisons," Ali Larijani said.
"Lies! All lies!"
"Such claims are totally baseless," state television quoted him as saying.
"No, no, certainly not!"
Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi called on Sunday for an inquiry into alleged rapes of male and female detainees. In a letter to former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, now the head of a powerful adjudicating body, Mr Karroubi said some of the detainees had been seriously injured.
On Tuesday, Iran's authorities said 4,000 people had been detained during the mass protests that broke out in the wake of the 12 June presidential poll, which the opposition says was rigged.
The number was much higher than previous figures, although the authorities said 3,700 of them had been released within a few days of arrest.
Opposition leaders say 69 protesters died in the post-election violence - more than double the official figure of about 30 fatalities.
The conditions under which detained protesters have been held has been controversial, with damaging claims forcing authorities to act. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, closed the notorious Kahrizak detention center saying it had failed to "preserve the detainees' rights".
Police officials have admitted that some of those held since June might have been tortured.
Both the Iranian parliament and judiciary have established committees to investigate the post-election unrest and the government's response.
Iran is currently trying more than 100 detainees over their alleged involvement in the protests. The trials - of leading opposition figures, activists, journalists, lawyers, workers at foreign embassies and two people with foreign nationalities - have been criticized by several foreign powers, opposition groups and human rights campaigners.
But authorities insist their legal proceedings are completely legitimate and conform to international standards of justice.
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#1
Police and prison guard must belong to the same union as the Obama supporters. The step between this democracy and our is not a big one. We must be vigilant, always.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
08/12/2009 11:23 Comments ||
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#2
This is not what Larijani was saying 24 hrs ago. He must have found a horse's head in his bed.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
08/12/2009 13:20 Comments ||
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[Iran Press TV Latest] The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sends a congratulatory message to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his second term in office.
"The letter went out yesterday," said UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe. Okabe stated that Ban's letter was a "customary letter on occasion of inauguration," but added that the text would not be made public, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The UN routinely releases the content of such congratulatory messages, according to Reuters.
Following the presidential election held on June 12 official results gave Ahmadinejad a second term in office. Defeated candidates and their supporter rejected the veracity of the official results, and the simmering discontent, sporadic street protests and televised mass trials of protesters and opposition figures still dominate Iran's political life.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
08/12/2009 00:00 ||
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Iran's Judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi says about 4,000 people were arrested during post-election protests in country.
"4,000 people were detained in relation with the recent incidents, but thanks to the round-the-clock efforts of judges, 3,700 of them were released soon," the Mehr news agency quoted Jamshidi as saying.
He stressed that Iran's Judiciary was closely following the post-election developments in the country to ensure the observation of detainees' rights.
After Iran's June 12 presidential elections, supporters of defeated opposition candidates dismissed official results that returned incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office as 'fraudulent' and took to the streets in protest to press for a re-run.
A number of the detained protesters and other dissidents have appeared in televised mass trials in the past 2 weeks.
Amid reports of prisoner abuse following the events that ensued Iran's disputed presidential election, head of the Assembly of Experts Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani demands officials to respect the rights of the detainees.
The issue of the alleged torture and abuse of protesters, who had been detained after the vote, took a new turn after defeated presidential candidate and leading Reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi raised questions about sexual abuse at a detention center.
In a letter to Rafsanjani, Karroubi urged a probe into "jail rape" reports, according to which the male and female Kahrizak detainees are said to have fallen victim to sexual abuse.
"The people who informed me about these events hold sensitive positions in the country ... these officials told me of the things that happened in the detention centers that even if one count is true, it would be a tragedy for the Islamic Republic... and it would whitewash the sins of many dictatorships including that of the deposed shah," Karroubi said in the letter.
The letter prompted Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani to call for an investigation into the allegations.
Ayatollah Rafsanjani, in a meeting with judiciary lawyers on Tuesday, touched upon the issue by insisting that respecting detainee rights is a vital necessity for passing a fair and just verdict.
"Judgment and proxy as well as (protecting) the rights of the accused can provide guarantees for the presence of justice in the final verdict," Rafsanjani was quoted as saying by the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA).
His remarks come as Iran is trying hundreds of opposition figures, protesters and journalists on charges of plotting to topple the government in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election on June 12.
The vote result was met by an outpouring of anger by supporters of defeated presidential candidates Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi in massive protests.
The crackdown on the demonstrations, which were held despite bans by the Interior Ministry, led to the arrests of thousands of protesters, many of whom have been released.
According to Iranian officials, at least 30 people were killed in the post-vote unrest. The opposition, however, puts the number at 70.
[Al Arabiya Latest] French embassy staffer Nazak Afshar, on trial on charges related to post-election protests in Iran, has left the Tehran prison where she was being held, the French presidency said Tuesday, as opposition leaders say 69 people were killed in protests after the disputed June election.
President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke to the French-Iranian dual national after she was released from the prison where French lecturer Clothilde Reiss, also on trial, is still being held, it said.
Reiss, who is allowed to live in the French embassy during the case, and Afshar were among defendants tried on charges related to huge protests across Iran after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared re-elected in June.
Meanwhile the opposition said more than double the official toll of 26 protestors had been killed during the June protests and parliament has promised to investigate, pro-reform newspapers said.
Many conservatives have joined an outcry led by reformist opponents of Ahmadinejad over the treatment of more than 4,000 people officials say were detained throughout Iran during demonstrations after the vote.
The opposition says the poll was rigged, a charge denied by Iran's authorities, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has accused Western powers of inciting the unrest.
[Iran Press TV Latest] Iran's top nuclear official says it is not yet determined when the Bushehr nuclear power plant will become operational, saying that the country has focused on the plant's safety.
"The date for the inauguration of the Bushehr nuclear plant is not determined and we do not declare a definite date for that," the Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said on Tuesday.
"The plant will be launched in proper time, after reviewing various aspects of its safety," Salehi told reporters while visiting the plant on August 11.
He said that that nearly a quarter of the 50,000 metric tons of equipments used in the nuclear plant were produced in Germany and date back to '35 years ago', Mehr news agency reported.
"Bushehr nuclear power plant is a combination of the technologies of the West and the East and its operation and maintenance would need special supervision," Salehi said.
The head of the AEOI stressed that Russian experts have taken necessary measures to ensure the safety of the nuclear plant.
Iran and Russia signed an agreement on nuclear cooperation in 1992, and Russia's Atomstroyexport signed a contract in January 1995 to finish building Iran's first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr by 1999.
The Bushehr nuclear power plant was started back in the mid-1970s by Siemens of Germany, but work on it was suspended as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Western suppliers then were prevented from completing the plant by politically-motivated restrictions against trade with Iran.
Iran then turned to Russia for help, but the joint project has been dogged by repeated delays.
Iranian and Russian officials had earlier declared that the power plant would be operational in 2009, but Salehi's latest statement seems to cast doubt on that forecast.
[Al Arabiya Latest] Israel will hold Lebanon responsible for any future Hezbollah attack should the Iranian- and Syrian-backed group be brought into Beirut's incoming government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
"If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for any attack -- any attack -- from its area on the state of Israel," Netanyahu told reporters.
"It cannot hide and say: 'It's Hezbollah, we don't control them.'"
Though U.S.-backed Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri bested Hezbollah in a June ballot, he is holding talks on a new coalition expected to include the Shiite group and its allies. Hezbollah has a minister in the outgoing cabinet.
Israel fought Hezbollah in its southern Lebanese bastions in a 2006 war but has accused the armed group of rearming under the noses of U.N. peacekeepers and plotting attacks on Israelis to avenge the assassination of a top militia leader last year.
Israeli warnings
Some analysts believe that Israel, which has hinted it could attack arch-foe Iran's nuclear facilities, also wants to blunt Hezbollah's ability to serve as a retaliatory arm of Tehran.
Triggered by Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, the 2006 summer war exacted a heavy toll on Lebanese infrastructure. Some 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 158 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed.
Israel credits the offensive with keeping the border largely quiet since, but Hezbollah said it is ready to fight again and is determined to hit back for the Feb. 12, 2008 killing of its military mastermind, Imad Moughniyeh, in a Damascus car-bombing.
Israel denied involvement in that slaying, and warned that Hezbollah and Lebanon would bear the consequences for any reprisals against Israelis abroad.
[ADN Kronos] Iran's most senior dissident cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, has compared the mass trials of government opponents and public confessions to the tactics of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and other authoritarian rulers.
Hossein Ali Montazeri, an historic figure in Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979, was once the designated successor to the revolution's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini but fell out with Khomeini in 1989 over government policies, which he believed challenged human rights.
The Islamic scholar is now making headlines again, amid claims that protesters have been tortured, even killed in prison. Others have claimed that confessions were extracted under torture.
Montazeri currently lives in the holy city of Qom, and remains politically influential in Iran, especially upon reformist politics at a time of unusual upheaval in the country.
They say that history never repeats itself, but the similarities between what happened in Moscow's courts in the third decade of the 20th century and what is happening today in the courts of Tehran suggest a grotesque similarity.
Police and judiciary officials on Sunday tried to calm the outrage in Iran over the deaths of detained protesters in prison, by acknowledging abuses and calling for those responsible to be punished.
Iran's prosecutor-general Ghorban Ali Dorri Najafabadi called for those responsible for mistreating detainees to be punished and said that the protesters were never meant to be taken to Kahrizak prison which has been at the centre of abuse claims.
"Unfortunately, negligence and carelessness by some officials caused the Kahrizak incident, which is not defendable," he told the state news agency.
"During early days, it is possible there were mistakes and mistreatment due to overcrowding in the prison."
But a senior commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard, which led the crackdown after thousands took to the streets to protest the June 12 election, was unrepentant and said that the three top opposition figures instead should be put on trial.
Lubyanka was the home of the first Soviet secret service Ceka created in 1918. This is where enemies of the state were taken and became synonymous with torture and severe interrogation methods which identified spies, enemies of the state, economic sabotage and other so called crimes.
Now in Iran there are three trials underway and it appears that confessions have been extracted from the accused inside Kahrizak prison, methods that are once again reminiscent of the "Stalinist" regime.
Police chief General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam acknowledged protesters were beaten by their jailers at the same facility and that the prison has since been closed down.
However he maintained that the deaths in the prison were not caused by abuse.
"This detention centre was built to house dangerous criminals. Housing people related to recent riots caused an outbreak of disease," the official news agency quoted Moghaddam as saying. Protesters "died of viral illness and not as a result of beating."
But outrage about what happened at Kahrizak has extended far beyond the political opposition, and influential figures in the clerical hierarchy have condemned the abuse of detainees and the three deaths known to have taken place there.
On Monday a defeated opposition candidate in Iran's presidential election called for an investigation into allegations some protesters were raped in prison.
In a letter to former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mehdi Karroubi said senior officials had informed him of the "shameful behaviour" occurring in prisons.
Karroubi wrote that both male and female detainees had been raped, with some suffering serious injuries.
About 200 people arrested during the mass protests provoked by June's disputed election, which saw president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returned by a huge margin, are still in detention.
Four deputy ministers were dismissed by Ahmadinejad on Monday for allegedly sympathising with election protesters.
Hezbollah has warned Israel that waging war against the Lebanese resistance movement could bring Tel Aviv larger losses than those of 33-day war in 2006.
Hezbollah's Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem on Monday said the recent Israeli saber-rattling is intended to restore the spirits of the Israeli population after their failure in 2006 Lebanon war. "From the beginning of the year the Israeli media has been trying to portray the failed invasion (in summer 2006) as a success to restore Israeli army and nation's lost spirit," he explained.
He made the remarks after Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak hinted at Tel Aviv's intention to launch another offensive against Lebanon, claiming the war would be more devastating than the one in 2006. Sheikh Naim Qassem however cautioned that the remarks could be aimed at paving the ground for a possible Israeli offensive against Lebanon "in future".
The Hezbollah official interpreted a possible future Israeli attack on Lebanon as an inseparable feature of Israel's 'usurper nature' but said he believed it would not occur at this point. Tel Aviv also attempts to coerce its foreign opponents and send a message to the international and regional sides, voicing its intolerance of Hezbollah's increasing power, he added.
Sheikh Qassem stressed the resistance movement's determination to respond to any Israeli incursion is neither an option of the political moment nor a momentary reaction, but a fortification of independence. "Whenever Israel increases its pressure on us, we will become stronger, and whenever they increase their threats against us, our determination will increase," he said.
The Lebanese cleric emphasized Hezbollah's attachment to the UN Resolution of 1701 and its cooperation with the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Israel has accused the Lebanese side of violating the resolution.
Tel Aviv's accusations against hezbollah come while the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon have repeatedly warned about Israel's daily violation of Resolution 1701. "We have daily air violation of Lebanese territory (by Israeli planes), we have repeatedly asked the Israeli government to refrain from breaching the UN resolution," Andrea Teneti, UNIFIL Deputy Spokesman said.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
08/12/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
May have something to do woth the 40,000 rockets amassed at the border.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
