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The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, otherwise known as the Mossad, has been appointed by the State of Israel to collect information, analyze intelligence, and perform special covert operations beyond its borders."Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety"
Proverbs XI/14.

Over the years, the Mossad has expanded into many fields, the most prominent of which are:
  • Covert intelligence gathering beyond Israel’s borders.
  • Preventing the development and procurement of non-conventional weapons by hostile countries.
  • Preventing terrorist acts against Israeli targets abroad.
  • Developing and maintaining special diplomatic and other covert relations.
  • Bringing Jews home from countries where official Aliya agencies are not allowed to operate.
  • Producing strategic, political and operational intelligence.
  • Planning and carrying out special operations beyond Israel’s borders.
 
 
 
 
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Report: Mossad bolsters activity in Tunisia

Israeli intelligence agency collaborating with CIA to revive spy network after revolution, Tunisian journal reports
Roi Kais
Published:02.14.12, 17:05 / Israel News
 

The Mossad has bolstered its activity in several Tunisian cities since the start of the revolt that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last January, a Tunisian magazine reported.

According to the Al-Musawar, the Israeli intelligence agency has been working with its US-based counterpart, the CIA, to revive its spy network in post-revolution Tunisia. The journal cited a report compiled by the Egyptian Yafa Research Center, which found that the Mossad's intelligence net is spread across several Tunisian metropolises – each branch with its own speciality.

Related stories:
"לאחר הדחתם, התחיל המוסד להגביר פעילותו". בני הזוג בן עלי (צילום: AFP)
Ousted leader Ben Ali with wife (Photo: AFP)

The branch stationed in Tunis, for example, tracks targets in Alegria. The one placed in Djerba, an island located 500 kilometers southeast of the capital, traces Libyan targets. The Sousse office deals with Tunisian internal affairs, the report claimed.
 

According to the Tunisian journal, the Mossad has three primary goals for its activity in the north African country; to form spy rings for sabotage and incitement purposes, to follow the development of events in neighboring Algeria and Libya, and to track what is left of the Palestinian groups in Tunisia as well as Islamic and Salafi movements that are active there.
Another goal that the Mossad has assigned its agents, Al-Musawar reported, is to shadow the opposition groups in Tunisia – especially those who oppose the peace process with Israel, while also protecting the interests of the Jewish communities in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.




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Mossad gauges US reaction to Iran strike

Tel Aviv
February 15, 2012

THE head of Israel's foreign intelligence service made a secret trip to Washington this month to gauge the likely US reaction to a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The content of Mossad chief Tamir Pardo's discussion with his American counterparts has been revealed in a Newsweek article titled ''Obama's Dangerous Game With Iran''.
Unnamed US officials claim that Mr Pardo's line of questioning to David Petraeus, the CIA chief, ran: ''What is our [US] posture on Iran? Are we ready to bomb? Would we [do so later]? What does it mean if [Israel] does it anyway?''
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Mr Petraeus told a Senate select committee in a public hearing last month that he had met Mr Pardo to discuss Israel's growing concern over Iran's nuclear aspirations. When asked if Israel intended to strike, James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said he would prefer to answer the question behind closed doors.
US sources quoted in the Newsweek report added that Israel had refused to share with the US a ''significant'' amount of intelligence regarding its military preparations. Israeli officials refused to respond to the article.
According to Yehuda Ben Meir, a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, full US backing was by no means a prerequisite for an Israeli strike. ''It's a matter of degrees of grey,'' he said.
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rense.com

Mossad - The Israeli
Connection To 911
 By Christopher Bollyn
Exclusive to American Free Press
4-14-5
 

U.S. investigators and the controlled media have ignored a preponderance of evidence pointing to Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, being involved in the terror attacks of 9/11.
 
From the very morning aircraft smashed into the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, news reports have indicated Israeli intelligence being involved in the events of 9/11 - and the planting of "false flags" to blame Arab terrorists and mold public opinion to support the pre-planned "war on terror."
 
Shortly after the destruction of the twin towers, radio news reports described five "Middle Eastern men" being arrested in New Jersey after having been seen videotaping and celebrating the explosive "collapses" of the WTC.
 
These men, from a phony moving company in Weehawken, N.J., turned out to be agents of Israeli military intelligence, Mossad. Furthermore, their "moving van" tested positive for explosives.
 
Dominic Suter, the Israeli owner of Urban Moving Systems, the phony "moving company," fled in haste, or was allowed to escape, to Israel before FBI agents could interrogate him. The Israeli agents were later returned to Israel on minor visa violations.
 
The Assistant Attorney General in charge of criminal investigations at the time was Michael Chertoff, the current head of the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chertoff, the son of the first hostess of Israel's national air carrier, El Al, is thought to be an Israeli national.
 
One of the Israeli agents later told Israeli radio that they had been sent to "document the event" - the event which took the lives of some 3,000 Americans.
 
Despite the fact that the Israelis arrested in New Jersey evidently had prior knowledge or were involved in the planning of 9/11, the U.S. mainstream media has never even broached the question of Israeli complicity in the attacks.
 
ISRAELIS FOREWARNED
 
On September 12, 2001, the Internet edition of The Jerusalem Post reported, "The Israeli foreign ministry has collected the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack."
 
Yet only one Israeli was killed at the WTC and two were reportedly killed on the "hijacked" aircraft.
 
Although a total of three Israeli lives were reportedly lost on 9/11, speechwriters for President George W. Bush grossly inflated the number of Israeli dead to 130 in the president's address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
 
The fact that only one Israeli died at the WTC, while 4,000 Israelis were thought to have been at the scene of the attacks on 9/11 naturally led to a widespread rumor, blamed on Arabic sources, that Israelis had been forewarned to stay away that day.
 
"Whether this story was the origin of the rumor," Bret Stephens, the Post's editor-in-chief wrote in 2003, "I cannot say. What I can say is that there was no mistake in our reporting."
 
ODIGO INSTANT MESSAGES
 
Evidence that Israelis had been forewarned several hours before the attacks surfaced at an Israeli instant messaging service, known as Odigo. This story, clear evidence of Israeli prior knowledge, was reported only briefly in the U.S. media - and quickly forgotten.
 
At least two Israel-based employees of Odigo received warnings of an imminent attack in New York City more than two hours before the first plane hit the WTC. Odigo had its U.S. headquarters two blocks from the WTC. The Odigo employees, however, did not pass the warning on to the authorities in New York City, a move that could have saved thousands of lives.
 
Odigo has a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others based on certain demographics, such as Israeli nationality.
 
Two weeks after 9/11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, reportedly said, "It was possible that the attack warning was broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the message."
 
The Internet address of the sender was given to the FBI, and two months later it was reported that the FBI was still investigating the matter. There have been no media reports since.
 
Odigo, like many Israeli software companies, is based and has its Research and Development (R&D) center in Herzliya, Israel, the small town north of Tel Aviv, which happens to be where Mossad's headquarters are located.
 
Shortly after 9/11, Odigo was taken over by Comverse Technology, another Israeli company. Within a year, five executives from Comverse were reported to have profited by more than $267 million from "insider trading."
 
Through Israeli "venture capital" (VC) investment funds, Mossad spawns and sponsors scores of software companies currently doing business in the United States. These Israel-based companies are sponsored by Mossad funding sources such as Cedar Fund, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners, and others.
 
As one might expect, the portfolios of these Mossad-linked funding companies contain only Israeli-based companies, such as Odigo.
 
Reading through the strikingly similar websites of these Israeli "VC" funds and their portfolio companies, one can't help but notice that the key "team" players share a common profile and are often former members of "Israel's Intelligence Corps" and veterans of the R&D Department of the Israel Air Force or another branch of the military. Most are graduates of Israel's "Technion" school in Haifa, Mossad's Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, or a military program for software development.
 
The IDC, a private, non-profit university, is closely tied to the Mossad. The IDC has a "research institute" headed by Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Mossad from 1989 to 1996, called the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.
 
The IDC also has a "Marc Rich Center for the Study of Commodities, Trading and Financial Markets" and a "Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy." The cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder, who is a supporter of Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his far-right Likud Party, founded the Lauder school.
 
Lauder, president of the Jewish National Fund and former chairman of New York Governor George Pataki's Commission on Privatization, is the key individual who pushed the privatization of the WTC and former Stewart AFB, where the flight paths of the two planes that hit the twin towers oddly converged. Ronald Lauder played a significant, albeit unreported, role in the preparation for 9/11.
 
Pataki's wife, Libby, has been on Lauder's payroll since at least 2002 and reportedly earned $100,000 as a consultant in 2004. According to The Village Voice, between 1994 and 1998, Gov. Pataki earned some $70,000 for speaking to groups affiliated with Lauder.
 
THE PTECH CUTOUT
 
Ptech, a mysterious software company has been tied with the events of 9/11. The Quincy, Massachusetts-based company was supposedly connected to "the Muslim Brotherhood" and Arab financiers of terrorism.
 
The firm's suspected links with terrorism resulted in a consensual examination by the FBI in December 2002, which was immediately leaked to the media. The media reports of the FBI "raid" on Ptech soon led to the demise of the company.
 
Ptech "produced software that derived from PROMIS, had an artificial intelligence core, and was installed on virtually every computer system of the U.S. government and its military agencies on September 11, 2001," according to Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness (FTW) website.
 
"This included the White House, Treasury Dept. (Secret Service), Air Force, FAA, CIA, FBI, both houses of Congress, Navy, Dept. of Energy, IRS, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Enron and more," FTW reported.
 
"Whoever plotted 9/11 definitely viewed the FAA as the enemy that morning. Overriding FAA systems would be the most effective way to ensure the attacks were successful," FTW reported. "To do this, the FAA needed an evolution of PROMIS software installed on their systems and Ptech was just that; the White House and Secret Service had the same software on their systems - likely a superior modified version capable of 'surveillance and intervention' systems."
 
But did the U.S. government unwittingly load software capable of "surveillance and intervention" operations and produced by a company linked to terrorism onto its most sensitive computer networks, or was Ptech simply a Mossad "cutout" company?
 
Oussama Ziade, a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1985, founded Ptech in 1994. But the company's original manager of marketing and information systems was Michael S. Goff, whose PR firm, Goff Communications, currently represents Guardium, a Mossad-linked software company.
 
And Goff comes from a well-to-do line of Jewish Masons who have belonged to Worcester's Commonwealth Lodge 600 of B'nai Brith for decades. So, why would a recently graduated Juris Doctor in Law leave a promising law career to join forces with a Lebanese Muslim's upstart company sponsored with dodgy funders in Saudi Arabia?
 
"As information systems manager [for Ptech], Michael handled design, deployment and management of its Windows and Macintosh, data, and voice networks," Goff's website says. "Michael also performed employee training and handled all procurement for software, systems and peripherals."
 
AFP asked Goff, who left the Worcester law firm of Seder & Chandler in 1994, how he wound up working at Ptech. "Through a temp agency," Goff said. Asked for the name of the agency, Goff said he could not remember.
 
Could it be Mossad Temps, or maybe Sayan Placement Agency?
 
Goff, the original marketing manager for Ptech software, said he did not know who had written the code that Ptech sold to many government agencies. Is this believable?
 
Goff leaves a legal practice in his home town to take a job, through a temp agency, with a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who is selling software, and he doesn't know who even wrote the code?
 
AFP contacted the government agencies that reportedly have Ptech software on their computers, and IBM, to ask if they could identify who had written the source code of the Ptech software.
 
By press time, only Lt. Commander Ron Steiner of the U.S. Navy's Naval Network Warfare Command had responded. Steiner said he had checked with an analyst and been told that none of the Ptech software has been approved for the Navy's enterprise networks.
 
Finis

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Israel accuses Iran over co-ordinated bomb attacks on its diplomats

Israel's prime minister yesterday accused Iran of masterminding two near-simultaneous bomb attacks on its diplomats in India and Georgia in an apparent act of retaliation for the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

Israel accuses Iran over co-ordinated bomb attacks on its diplomats
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Photo: REUTERS/Baz Ratner

and Dean Nelson in New Delhi
7:30AM GMT 14 Feb 2012

Benjamin Netanyahu launched a ferocious condemnation of Iran after the attempted bombings - 2,000 miles apart, but apparently co-ordinated - left the wife of an Israeli diplomat in a serious condition and raised concerns over a new wave of attacks against the country's envoys.
The method used yesterday appeared to mirror that used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist last month - an act for which Iran blamed Israel.
In both cases, a magnetic bomb was apparently attached to the side of a diplomatic car by a motorbike rider, fuelling claims that the bombings were a tit-for-tat strike by the Iranian regime against its sworn adversary.
"Iran is behind these attacks; it is the largest exporter of terrorism in the world," Mr Netanyahu told members of the Likud Party. "Iran and its proxy Hezbollah were behind all of these attempted attacks. Today we have witnessed two additional attempted terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, the first against an Israeli woman who was wounded in New Delhi and the second against a local employee of the Israeli Embassy in Georgia."
The attacks came just days after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, warned that Tehran was prepared to use all its "tools" against Western interests, including the "cancerous tumour" of Israel, and will only serve to further escalate tensions between the two countries.
"From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this," he had said.
An Iranian diplomat last night rejected responsibility for the attack however.
"Any terrorist attack is condemned (by Iran) and we strongly reject the untrue comments by an Israeli official," said Mehdi Nabizadeh, Iran's ambassador to New Dehli said."These accusations are untrue and sheer lies, like previous times."
Indian police last night said they were looking for a motorcyclist who was seen throwing a device at the diplomatic car, which was travelling just a few hundred meters from the prime minister's residence as the diplomat's wife was heading to the American Embassy School to pick up her children,
An eyewitness told a local television channel he had the car being followed by a young man on a motorbike, who leaned out and attached "a device" as the vehicle approached a crossing.
The car drove a short distance, there was a loud sound and then an explosion and the car caught fire. The woman - Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of a Defense Ministry official based in New Delhi, suffered moderate shrapnel wounds and was being treated at a local hospital by Israeli doctors. Her driver, Manoj Sharma 42, and two people in a nearby car had minor injuries.
The other attempted bombing in the Georgian capital Tblisi, was foiled however.
Israeli officials confirmed the bomb had been found in the car belonging to one of the embassy drivers based in Tblisi, but that it had been safely defused before it could detonate.
Shota Utiashvili, spokesman for the Georgian Interior Ministry, said the driver noticed a package attached to his car's undercarriage and called police.
A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry said that the attacks were one of a number of incidents involved Iran or its allies in recent weeks. Earlier this year the Thai government arrested and deported members of Hizbollah, the Lebanese terror group, for plotting attack on Jewish targets in Bangkok.
Authorities in Azeribaijan uncovered a plot to assassinate the Israeli ambassador just days after the Iranian press alleged that Israel was using Iran's Caspian neighbour as a base to stage attacks on its nuclear programme.
The New Dehli attack bore the hallmarks of attacks within Iran that has killed five leading figures working at the highest level of its nuclear development programme.
Israel is widely reported to be at the forefront of a campaign, also involving the US and other western powers, to disrupt Iran's nuclear ambitions through targeting key scientists, defections and cyber warfare.
Last month, a director of Iran's main uranium enrichment site was killed in a blast from a magnetic bomb placed on his car. The official, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was at least the fifth member of Iran's scientific community killed in apparent targeted attacks in the past two years.
However the foreign ministry spokesman said the impression that Iran and Israel were engaged in a two-party confrontation was misleading. "It you look at what is being said publicly there is a great of concern from a large number of countries but if you look at what is being attributed to Israel in terms of direct action, I'm not sure we are capable of doing all of it," he said.
Mark Sloman, the director of India programmes at The Israel Project, said that the historical and trade ties between India and Iran ran deep. Experts in New Dehli said Iran would put a lot of its interests in danger by backing an attack its capital. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has resisted US and EU pressure to curtail trade with Iran over its nuclear activities.
B Raman, a former senior Indian intelligence office, said it was unlikely Iran was behind the attack because it would not want to risk its close and long-standing relationship with India, but it was not impossible. "It seems unlikely because it would not be in their interests to carry out an attack on Indian soil. But their intelligence often acts as a rogue elephant. I would not rule out the possibility that they [Iran's intelligence service] did it without the sanction of its political leadership," he said.
Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, Israel's military chief, warned that Iranian backed groups were shifting from direct action on Israel's frontier to proxy attacks. "During this period of time, when our enemies in the north avoid carrying out attacks, fearing a harsh response, we are witnesses to the ongoing attempts by Hizbollah and other hostile entities to execute vicious terror attacks at locations far away from the state of Israel."
Iran's Islamic regime has long targeted Israel's overseas operations. A bomb attack at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people in 1982. Two years later, a bombing at a Jewish community centre in the same city killed 85 people.

India vows to track down Israel attack suspects

Indian investigators were searching on Tuesday for the motorcycle assailant who attached a bomb to an Israeli diplomatic car in the heart of New Delhi in an attack the Jewish state blamed on Iran or its proxies.

India vows to track down person behind Israel attack
Image 1 of 2
Investigators take a closer look at the vehicle that exploded near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi Photo: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images



8:51AM GMT 14 Feb 2012

Iran has denied responsibility for the attack, as well as a foiled bombing in Georgia, which appeared to mirror the recent killings of Iranian nuclear scientists that Tehran blamed on Israel.
The blast in New Delhi set a car ablaze and wounded four people, including an Israeli Embassy driver and a diplomat's wife, who was in critical, but stable, condition.
Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said the strike appeared to be a terror attack carried out by a "very well-trained person".
Israel has blamed Iran and the Lebanese group Hizbollah for the attack and the failed strike in Georgia, which have ratcheted already heightened tensions between Tehran and the Jewish state.
Iran is a strong Indian ally and a steady oil supplier to the energy-starved country.
India declined to cast blame for the attack in the heart of its capital, just a few hundred yards (meters) from the prime minister's residence.
"At the moment, I am not pointing a finger at any particular group or any particular organisation. But whoever did it, we condemn it in the strongest terms," Chidambaram said.
Israel sent forensic scientists from its police force to New Delhi to search for clues as to who carried out the attacks, an Israeli government official said.
The embassy declined to provide details of the investigation.
"There is day-to-day co-operation between Israeli authorities and Indian security authorities. Very close co-operation," Israeli Embassy spokesman David Goldfarb said.
Israeli officials said they expected the attacks would not be isolated.
"No doubt we face a wave of terror," Cabinet Minister Dan Meridor told Israel Radio on Tuesday.
The attack took place just after 3pm on Monday, when Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of a defence ministry official based in New Delhi, was heading to the American Embassy School to pick up her children, police said.
A single person on a motorcycle rode up behind her minivan as it was stopped at a red light and attached a bomb to the rear door, Chidambaram said. The motorcycle then sped off and the bomb blew up four or five seconds later.
The driver of the van and two people in a nearby car suffered minor injuries. Yehoshua-Koren underwent surgery to remove shrapnel from near her spine and was in critical, but stable condition on Tuesday morning, according to Dr. P.K. Sachdeva, a neurosurgeon treating her at Primus Hospital.
"She is responding to verbal commands. Her husband has met her. There is partial paralysis of the legs, but we are hoping that with time she will improve," he said.
Source: AP

'Iranian' injured in Bangkok blasts

An Iranian man carrying explosives blew off his own legs and wounded four other people in two blasts Tuesday in Bangkok, Thai authorities said.




9:51AM GMT 14 Feb 2012

Security forces found more explosives in the assailant's rented house in the capital, but it was not known what targets they might have been meant for, Police Gen. Pansiri Prapawat said.
A day earlier, an Israeli diplomatic car was bombed in New Delhi, and Israel blamed Iran for that attack. Authorities did not immediately say if a link was suspected, but Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said in Jerusalem, "we can't rule out any possibility."
One of the blasts in Bangkok damaged a taxi, and a grenade detonated as the assailant carried it down a sidewalk outside a Thai school, said Col. Warawut Taweechaikarn, a senior police officer in the district.
Photos of the wounded Iranian man showed him covered in dark soot on a sidewalk outside the school strewn with broken glass. A dark satchel nearby was investigated by a bomb disposal unit.
The (pixelated) body of a man lies on the pavement after having been injured by a bomb in central of Bangkok (EPA)
Pansiri said a passport found at the scene indicated the man was Saeid Moradi from Iran. Authorities in Tehran could not immediately be reached for comment.
Three Thai men and one Thai woman were brought to Kluaynamthai Hospital for treatment of injuries, Suwinai Busarakamwong, a doctor there, said.
A third blast occurred inside a rented house on the same road, busy with businesses and apartment blocks, but it injured no one.
Last month, a Lebanese-Swedish man with alleged links to pro-Iranian Hezbollah militants was detained by Thai police. He led authorities to a warehouse filled with more than 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms) of urea fertilizer and several gallons of liquid ammonium nitrate.
Israel and the United States at the time warned their citizens to be alert in the capital, but Thai authorities said Thailand appeared to have been a staging ground but not the target of any attack.
A bomb disposal expert checks a backpack that was left at the scene by the bomber (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)
Pansiri said that "so far, we haven't found any links between these two cases."
He said Moradi had been renting the house in Bangkok with two other unidentified foreigners. Immigration police are trying to trace Moradi's movements, but initial reports indicated he had at least travelled to Bangkok from the southern Thai resort town of Phuket on Feb. 8.
Bangkok's blasts came one day after bombs targeted Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia. The attack in India wounded four people, while the device found in Georgia did not explode. Iran has denied it was responsible.
In Jerusalem, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said there was not yet any sign that any targets in Bangkok were Israeli or Jewish.
Israeli police have increased the state of alert in the country, emphasizing public places, foreign embassies and offices, as well as Ben-Gurion International Airport.
Thailand has rarely been a target for foreign terrorists, although a domestic Muslim insurgency in the country's south has involved bombings of civilian targets.

Iran set to unveil nuclear 'achievements' on Wednesday

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to unveil several unspecified nuclear "achievements" on Wednesday, his government's website said.

HIV created by West to enfeeble third world, claims Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Israel has threatened to possibly unleash air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities Photo: AP


2:58PM GMT 14 Feb 2012

"Several completed nuclear projects will be unveiled tomorrow in the presence of the president," the official website said on Tuesday.
"Experts believe these achievements will show the world the extraordinary capability and knowledge of Iranians."
It added that the progress will underline Iran's scientific adherence to "nuclear power for all and nuclear weapons for none," the website said.
The announcement confirmed a vow made by Ahmadinejad on Saturday to inaugurate "important nuclear projects" within "days," in a speech marking the anniversary of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.
Iran's progress in its nuclear programme has deeply unsettled the West and Israel, which see it masking a drive for atomic weapons. A report by the UN nuclear watchdog in November also expressed strong suspicions in that sense.

Tehran, though, has repeatedly said its nuclear activities are exclusively peaceful in nature.
The international showdown over Iran's nuclear programme has deepened in recent months, with the United States and the European Union slapping unprecedentedly tough economic sanctions on the Islamic republic to pressure it to halt its activities.
Israel has threatened to possibly unleash air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, while the United States has intimated it, too, could take military action if it thought it necessary.
Iran has reacted defiantly, beginning uranium enrichment in a fortified bunker under a mountain in Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, and promising soon to insert its first domestically made nuclear fuel plates into its Tehran research reactor.
It has also claimed to be ready to resume stalled talks with world powers over its nuclear programme but has yet to formally reply to a letter sent by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton nearly four months ago offering negotiations.
Source: AFP
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Telegraph.co.uk

Israel blames Iran for Bangkok blasts

Israel's defence minister has accused Iran of being behind a bombing that rocked a crowded residential area of Bangkok on Tuesday.



By Ian MacKinnon in Hua Hin, Thailand
2:00PM GMT 14 Feb 2012

An Iranian man was critically injured by his own bomb in a series of blasts, raising fears he and two countrymen accomplices had planned an attack just a day after operations against Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia.
Ehud Barak said Tuesday's explosion "proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to perpetrate terror".
He said that Iran and its Lebanese ally Hizbollah are "unrelenting terror elements endangering the stability of the region and endangering the stability of the world".
"We know who carried out the terror attacks, we know who sent them, and Israel will settle the score with them," he said.
The man blew both his legs off when he tried to escape police by throwing a grenade at pursuing officers, but it bounced off a tree and he was caught by the full force of the blast.
Two other Iranian fled the on foot and one was arrested later at Bangkok’s international Suvarnabhumi airport as he tried to leave the country. Thai intelligence and security forces continued their hunt for the third man.
Four Thais, three men and a woman, were injured in the explosions which took place in a rented house and on a busy road in the south-east of the city shortly after lunchtime.
Thailand’s foreign minister is to ask the Iranian embassy to investigate the identities of the three men to discover what they were doing in the country and whether they had any links to terrorist groups.
Last month Thai police arrested a Swedish-Lebanese man with links to pro-Iran Hizbollah militants following warnings from the US and Israel about a possible terrorist attack in Bangkok.
The (pixelated) body of a man lies on the pavement after having been injured by a bomb in central of Bangkok (EPA)
The man led police to a cache of bomb-making materials, 4,000kgs of urea and several litres of ammonium nitrate, but government officials said they were content with his assurances the material was being transported to a third, unspecified country, and was not planning an attack in Thailand.
Tuesday’s first blast happened at about 2pm in a house off the busy Sukhumvit Soi 71 road that the Iranian men had rented for some months. The explosion blew off part of the roof.
Neighbours saw two of the men fleeing the house, with a third man covered in blood emerging shortly afterwards carrying a black bag.
The first two men disappeared and the injured man attempted to flag down a taxi, but the driver seeing his bloodied condition refused the fare.
Outraged, the man threw a grenade at the taxi damaging the vehicle and injuring the driver.
About 100 metres along the road police who responded to the blasts tried to stop the man but he threw another grenade at officers. It hit a tree and severed his legs, leaving his black bag near a shattered telephone booth.
A bomb disposal expert checks a backpack that was left at the scene by the bomber (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)
Bangkok’s deputy police commissioner Maj Gen Pisit Pisutsak said a passport found in the bag identified the man as Saeid Moradi, 50, an Iranian. He was being treated at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn Hospital where doctors amputated his other leg.
A second Iranian man suspected of involvement in the blasts, Mohammad Hazaei, 42, was arrested at the airport. He was planning to board an Air Asia flight to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Thai police said they had found more explosives inside the house where the first explosion occurred and they were now trying to trace his movements, though so far they had only discovered he travelled from the southern holiday island of Phuket on February 8.
On Monday four people were injured when a motorcyclist attached an explosive device to an Israeli diplomatic car in New Delhi. Another device targeting Israeli diplomats in Tiblisi failed to explode. Israel blamed both operations on Iran, which denied involvement.
Britain urged its nationals in Bangkok to exercise caution in the light of the bombs. “You should remain vigilant, follow the advice of Thai authorities and monitor the local news,” the British embassy website warned.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012
...and I am Sid Harth@mysistereileen.com
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