The Latest from Iran (29 March): Questionable Authority

1755 GMT: "Expert" Speculation of the Day. Meir Javedanfar gets himself into The Huffington Post with this assertion:

Until recently, both Tehran and Jerusalem saw the health care debate as an item that could significantly weaken Obama's standing at home, which in turn would reduce his leverage abroad. They were hoping that a defeat would force Obama to focus on his troubles at home.

I'll check with Ali Yenidunya on the Israeli angle, but I have seen nothing to indicate that the Iranian Government was counting on the health care issue to limit and even damage the US President.

1525 GMT: Jailing Persian Cats. On the same day that we noted the drama-posing-as-documentary No Time for Persian Cats, its storyline of Iranians trying to evade the authorities to play music comes true: underground rap artist Sasi Mankan has been arrested.

Just trying to learn more about Mankan, but here's a sample of his music:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suqzMyBEZ8k[/youtube]

NEW Iran: A View from the Labour Front (Rahnema)
NEW Iran’s Nukes: False Alarm Journalism (Sick)
Iran’s Nukes: The Dangerous News of The New York Times
The Latest from Iran (28 March): Dealing with Exaggerations

1300 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. RAHANA claims that children's rights activist Maryam Zia Movahed, detained since 31 December, has been moved to a clinic in Evin Prison after starting a hunger strike on 17 March.


Peyke Iran writes that Azeri journalist and human rights activist Shahnaz Gholami has been given a prison sentence of eight years in absentia by a Tabriz court. Gholami is currently in Turkey and seeking asylum. The site also claims that Abdolreza Qanbari, a teacher from Pakdasht, has been sentenced to death for "mohareb" (war against God).

Rah-e-Sabz has published the names of 41 detained human rights activists.

1230 GMT: Parliament v. President. There's a sharp analysis by Hamid Takapu in Rah-e-Sabz of the debate over subsidy cuts since 2008. Takapu argues that the sword of a referendum, demanded by the President on his current proposals, could cut two ways: a successful challenge could reduce Parliament to a symbolic body (Takapu uses the analogy of the Russian Duma) but it could also strike Ahmadinejad if people ask for referendums on bigger issues.

0950 GMT: Labour Watch. We've posted a lengthy extract from an interview with Saeed Rahnema, a labour activist in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, analysing the state of the labour movement and, more broadly, of activism in the post-election conflict.

0655 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Professor Seyed Ahmad Miri of the Islamic Iran Participation Front has been arrested in Babol, while journalist Sasan Aghaei and women's rights activist Somaiyeh Farid have been released on bail.

0615 GMT: We begin this morning with a series of dubious attempts to claim authority in and about Iran. The New York Times' claimed reporting on the Iranian nuclear programme, which we criticised yesterday, is taken apart further by Gary Sick.

Inside Iran, President Ahmadinejad continued his campaign to overturn the Parliament's decision on his subsidy reforms and spending plan, using a marker and whiteboard to provide the truth to journalists. He thus proved beyond doubt that this will be another year of prosperity and "huge victories" for Iran.

The problem for the President is that not everyone believes him. While his supporter Mohammad Karim Shahrzad has challenged one of Ahmadinejad's leading Parliamentary critics, Ahmad Tavakoli, to a televised debate, legislator Seyed Reza Akrami says the President has taken an oath to implement the law and thus the decision of the Parliament.

Iran's Nukes: False Alarm Journalism (Sick)

Gary Sick follows up our Sunday analysis of the exaggerated "news" in The New York Times, penned by David Sanger and William Broad, of an impending threat from Iran's nuclear programme:

I was struck by two things in this newly breathless and alarmist front-page NYT report.

UPDATED Iran’s Nukes: The Dangerous News of The New York Times

First, it says its information is based on the word of officials who “insisted on anonymity because the search involves not only satellite surveillance, but also intelligence gleaned from highly classified operations.” Yet the only hard, new information is based on the public statement of the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization [Ali Akhbar Salehi] — all that ultra-classified stuff is by their own admission nothing more than pure speculation.


Second, the other revelation is that no new centrifuges have been added to the Natanz site, which may mean that these are destined for the two new “secret” (but publicly announced) sites. Let’s see, Iran has publicly declared its Qom facility, which is under inspection, and they say that they are going to install 3000 centrifuges there. But the site is not ready, so a less sensational interpretation would be that they are holding their new centrifuges to go there when the site is ready. It’s also not surprising that they are not adding new centrifuges to the Natanz site since more than 50% of the 9000 centrifuges installed at Natanz are not actually producing enriched uranium. Why add to the non-working total?

Why do Sanger and Broad insist on spinning a conspiratorial scenario when there are perfectly rational alternatives? I guess that doesn’t qualify as a scoop, so it doesn’t deserve front-page treatment, and it makes the word of unnamed officials with access to unmentionable intelligence look pretty foolish.

Given the NYT experience with faithfully reproducing sensational and highly selective leaks prior to the Iraq war, which proved to be false and which helped get the US into a war that was initiated on false premises, it is truly difficult for me to believe that the NYT editors still continue to put out this kind of unsourced, circular, prejudicial, and logically challenged reporting — and always on the front page!

Israel, Iran, and "Existential Threat" (Halpern)

Orly Halpern writes for Foreign Policy:

In February 2005 I sat in an intelligence briefing for Israeli Middle East and diplomatic affairs correspondents at the headquarters of the Israel Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. There were probably 15 of us around a long table. At the head, various researchers took turns speaking about the threat levels coming from different parts of the Muslim world.

When it came to Iran, the intelligence researcher told us in the most foreboding tone that Iran was very close to building a nuclear weapon. It was the same "and-that-will-be-the-end-of-us" tone that numerous Israeli politicians had been using in the media to warn Israelis following the Iranian announcement to develop nuclear energy.

At the time, I was serving as the Middle East correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and was a member of the Gulf2000 Project, a group led by former National Security Council member and presidential advisor Gary Sick and made up mainly of academics, journalists, diplomats and intelligence people from East and West with a professional interest in the Persian Gulf.  It exposed me to a wealth of information about Iran, including the problems it faces, its own security fears and the question of the nuclear threat. And it became clear to me that the Iranian regime was not crazy enough to push a would-be red button on Israel.



But I wanted to know how the Israeli intelligence people would answer the question: "So do you think that if the Iranian regime were to develop nuclear weapons some crazy mullah would press the red button?" So, I asked.

Before they could respond, Ayala Hasson, Israeli Channel One's diplomatic affairs correspondent, shouted across the table, "But of course they'll press the button!"

Harry Kney-Tal, director of the Foreign Ministry's Center for Diplomatic Research, paused before answering: "No, we don't think there is some crazy Iranian who is going to press the button." Nuclear weapons were a form of "insurance" against being attacked, he said.

For years now, official Israel has been scaring its people into believing Iran is near the ‘point of no return' and the day it reaches it will be doomsday for Israel (of course, Israel's estimated "point of no return" dates continuously pass, prompting it to make new ones). But the Israeli establishment knows that there is no existential threat, that the Iranian regime is radical, but not suicidal; that if it is building weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it is in self-defense.

So why all the hype?  Why the deception?  The reasons are many, but they come down to money, politics, and security.

After the briefing Kney-Tal shared with me that if Iran were to have nuclear weapons Israel would lose its role as the regional superpower. "We are afraid that it will give Iran more leverage to empower its clients, "he said, referring to Hizbullah and Syria.

In other words, Iranian nukes would prevent Israel from acting as the neighborhood bully and Israel would have to think twice before it attacked its neighbors.

Yet it wasn't until last month that a senior Israeli official, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, acknowledged that Israel did not fear an Iranian attack. The Iranian regime was "radical", he said in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but not "meshugeneh" (the Yiddish word for crazy).

As retired Brigadier General Uzi Eilam describes in his recently published book, Eilam's Arc, money and politics--not security--are the key reasons for the scare.  The "defense establishment is sending out false alarms in order to grab a bigger budget," said the former Director-General of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission.

Moreover, some Israeli politicians are using Iran to divert attention away from problems at home. Not only does it make them more popular among the population--Israelis understandably feel more at home in the role of victims--but it also focuses the attention away from the country's internal problems which are not being solved: poverty, racial strife, and lack of peace with its neighbors. Finally, the ‘Holocaust-is-around-the-corner' doomsday prophecy, putting Israel in the traditional Jewish role of the oppressed, gives Israeli leaders more clout when pushing for gestures from friendly countries abroad.

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