Thursday, February 16, 2012

WW III, Oops, A Prequel

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WW III, Oops, A Prequel

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Thursday, February 16, 2012

News

February 14, 2012, 10:03 pm

Access to Google Sites Returns in Iran, as Mysteriously as It Disappeared

By JENNIFER PRESTON
After a disruption of access in Iran to Google’s e-mail services and other international Web sites starting last Thursday, access appeared to be restored on Monday, raising questions about whether it was a censorship test by the government for coming elections or an effort to quell possible street protests.
It was a year ago on Feb. 14 that the Green movement leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest for contesting the results of the disputed 2009 presidential vote. Observers of Iran questioned whether the recent disruption may have been an effort to restrict encrypted communication before the parliamentary elections on March 2, prevent demonstrations on behalf of the imprisoned leaders or perhaps conduct a test for a widely anticipated government-run internet.
Since Iranians turned to social networks and the streets during the disputed election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, the government has blocked access to YouTube.com and other sites. Over the last two years, people have reported that Twitter and Facebook and other major social networks have also been largely inaccessible, according to data collected by Herdict.org, a project by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard that examines access to the Internet around the world.
The recent disruption affected international sites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which displays addresses beginning with HTTPS, allowing users the ability to send and search encrypted messages and avoid government scrutiny.
“Last fall Google switched to encrypted search by default, and the situation in Iran might represent a focus on restricting encrypted traffic — information that’s more difficult for the government to eavesdrop upon,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center.
Twitter and Facebook have moved in the last year toward using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol to increase security for their users.
Since the Iranian government has not assumed responsibility for the outage, Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said it was impossible to say precisely what was behind it. He said Iranian leaders had spoken in recent months about creating a “clean internet, safe for the moral values they hold.”
“They want to nationalize the internet,” said Mr. Deibert, who is also one of the principals behind the Open Net Initiative. “This may have been a test to prepare the groundwork.”
Many people in Iran are able to get around government blockages, however, using proxies and VPN.
Amin Sabeti, a blogger and researcher who writes about Iran from Britain, said the Iranian government wanted to create its own version of the internet because it viewed the Internet as an enemy. He said that government leaders began to attack Google more aggressively two or three months ago, claiming it was “a spy tool.”
“Today, one of the members of Iran’s Internet filtering council said Google is using SSL and we cannot monitor it, therefore we’ve blocked Gmail and Google’s services,” Mr. Sabeti said.
On Global Voices, the international blogging platform, some bloggers said they suspected the disruption was aimed at limiting communication in the weeks ahead of the election and among people supportive of the Green movement. “This blocking can be considered as the regime’s attempt to stop Green activists from informing people to take part in demonstrations in the final days of February,” said a writer for the blog, Azadi-Esteqlal-Edalat.
Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Technology has denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.
“Everything is up now and running as normal,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based company that analyzes global Internet traffic.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 15, 2012
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Ronald Deibert.

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  1. Talk about censorship. US government, under her able Democratic party president, Mr Barack Hussein Obama, has done more censorship in his short (three years going on four) than any Chinese, Pakistan, Iran, India censorship in the history of the Internet.
    Pressured Amazon, pressured PayPal, pressured, VISA, Master Card to deny supporting Julian Assange’s unique drive against US war in Afghanistan and US diplomatic (confidential) correspondence.
    Not to forget the recent episode, wherein, the US Congress doing even better, in creating two acts, SOPA and PIPA which have so much more power that they may, ultimately, if enacted, as they are, without any regard for the privacy of a person or persons and free speech of any person or persons, no matter which country they live, work and hold residencies.
    Talk is cheap.
    …and I am Sid Harth@sidileak.com

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UPDATED DEC. 12 The Syrian government called Monday for voters to turn out for local elections it portrayed as good-faith reform efforts, but activists said that most citizens, observing a second day of a general strike, rejected the polls as irrelevant. Opposition groups reported at least 18 deaths in clashes between security forces and army defectors in several regions.
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UPDATED DEC. 9 Egypt’s military rulers on Friday night appeared to withdraw a plan for extending their influence over the writing of a new constitution, evidently bowing to a chorus of criticism just days after the proposal was unveiled. The withdrawal leaves the task of selecting a panel that will write a constitution in the hands of a newly elected Parliament expected to be dominated by Islamists.
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Iran urges expanding ties with Pakistan

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Iran urges expanding ties with Pakistan
Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has called for the expansion of Tehran-Islamabad trade and economic ties to a level worthy of the two “friendly and neighboring” countries. In a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad on Thursday, Salehi stressed the need for Tehran and Islamabad to increase their cooperation in construction, energy and power transmission sectors. The Iranian foreign minister also called for the swift implementation of the bilateral gas pipeline project. The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline aims to export a daily amount of 21.5 million cubic meters (or 8.7 billion cubic meters per year) of the Iranian natural gas to Pakistan. Iran has already constructed more than 900 kilometers of the pipeline on its soil. Salehi arrived in Pakistan for a two-day tripartite summit due to open on Friday with the presence of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari. Salehi once again reiterated Iran’s readiness for talks with the P5+1- Britain, China, France, Russia and the US plus Germany.

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Israeli PM: Iran is ‘world’s greatest terror exporter’

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Published on Feb 15, 2012 by
http://www.euronews.net/ The Israeli prime minister has described Iran as the world’s greatest exporter of terror in response to Tehran’s claims over its nuclear prowess.
He was speaking after a series of bomb attempts targeting diplomats in Thailand, India and Georgia – that Israel blames on Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
On Tuesday in Bangkok, a man carrying an Iranian passport lost both legs after a bomb he was carrying went off.
Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli Knesset that Iran’s terror tactics had been revealed to the world.
  • 11 likes, 27 dislikes

Top Comments

  • I thought Israel was happy building illegal settlements and killing Palestinians, but I guess it’s not enough. Now, they are blood hungry for Iranians. It’s time for the US to cut foreign aid, bring all of troops home, and mind our own business! Israel you’re on your own.
    TheNova1960 9 hours ago 6
  • Israel , with it’s US and UK lapdogs, is the biggest terror threat in the world.
    DeltaNordicAdvance 11 hours ago 6
see all

All Comments (62)

Add a channel now to post a comment!
  • @JimQualls It’s not about hating jews , or anyone else for that matter. It’s just about calling a spade a spade. I don’t feel any ‘hatred’ when I say that Israeli lobbies and geopolitical interests are the biggest threat to global stability. It’s almost like saying that gravity is an attractive force with a conservative field. I don’t “hate gravity” for making me feel too heavy either. That’s just a clear statement of fact, like it or not.
    DeltaNordicAdvance 16 minutes ago
  • @jacquar100 What does the Bible have to do with this video? I’ve read the old testament and the new testament….have you read Judges? :)
    TheNova1960 20 minutes ago
  • jacquar100 29 minutes ago
  • @rm02px
    where is that stated; totally new for me. Israel is God’s eyeapple; that’s what I read in the bible. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem…
    jacquar100 30 minutes ago
  • @herosminos
    Only God is in control. Evidence needed ??? See what God has done and still will do for his people. His eyeapple.
    jacquar100 42 minutes ago
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  Next »
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Anti-government protestors run from tear gas in Senegal's capital Dakar, February 15, 2012. Senegal riot police used teargas, truncheons, and a water cannon on Wednesday to disperse hundreds of people in the capital Dakar protesting at President Abdoulaye Wade's decision to seek a third term in office. The clashes in the West African state erupted after demonstrators shouting "Wade step down" gathered at a downtown square near the presidential mansion, shrugging off a state ban on protests in the run-up to the Feb. 26 vote. REUTERS/Joe Penney

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Iran “shadow war” intensifies, crosses borders

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Three men suspected to be involved in three blasts in Bangkok in still images taken from closed-circuit television footage on February 14, 2012. REUTERS/TPBS via Reuters TV
By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Peter Apps
BANGKOK/LONDON | Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:31pm EST
(Reuters) – The loudest noise that Thongma Danoi had ever heard was followed 20 minutes later by the strangest sight: a dazed and bloodied Iranian carrying two wire-adorned devices through the usually sleepy Bangkok neighborhood.
“He was losing a lot of blood,” said Thongma, 68, who saw the Iranian man, later identified as Saeid Moradi, fleeing a rented house blown apart by a massive explosion on Tuesday. “People were shouting, ‘He’s got a bomb!’ I tried not to look at him.”
Minutes later, he heard another explosion, as 28-year-old Moradi reportedly threw a second bomb at a taxi that wouldn’t pick him up. His rampage ended nearby, outside a school, with a third explosion that ripped off one of the bomber’s legs and damaged the other so badly it had to be amputated.
Israel said the Bangkok blasts were evidence of an “attempted terrorist attack” and blamed Iran. Tehran denied involvement.
As bombings go, this week’s trio of apparent attempted attacks on Israeli targets — which also included an attack on a car carrying the wife of an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi and a bomb found attached to an Israeli diplomatic vehicle in the Georgian capital Tbilisi — seemed unusually inept.
But security experts believe they sent a clear message, the first serious retaliation for a quietly waged but increasingly bloody campaign of sabotage waged against Iran’s nuclear program.
At least four Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in recent years in attacks believed to have been carried out by or for Israel’s intelligence services. While Israel invariably refuses to comment, some security analysts also suspect it has been involved in a string of major explosions at military and nuclear facilities in Iran, such as one in November that killed more than a dozen, including a senior Iranian general.
Tehran denied any involvement in this week’s attacks, accusing Israel of staging them itself. But there are widespread suspicions that the real intent may have been to warn the Jewish state that Iran is prepared to retaliate in kind.
“I see in what happened a message to the effect of: ‘Anything you can do, I can do too,’” said Gad Shimron, a former Mossad field officer who writes on intelligence matters. “In other words, if Israel uses terror for its security needs, it can expect reprisals from the other side.”
In an environment of growing tension, paranoia and fear, there is a risk of escalation fuelled by worries over Iran’s nuclear program, a potential Israeli strike on Iran and a devastating wider conflict in the Gulf.
“There is more and more pressure on all sides,” says Anthony Cordesman, a former senior U.S. intelligence and defense official and now chair of strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington D.C.-based think tank. “All of them are interacting now in ways that make it harder and harder to anticipate the actions of each other.”
MIRROR IMAGE ATTACK
While some Western officials say it is too soon to blame Tehran for this week’s attacks, security analysts point to growing circumstantial evidence. Thai authorities said similar magnetic bombs were used in New Delhi, Tbilisi and Bangkok.
While they did not blame Iran directly, they said the two other men arrested in relation to the Bangkok blasts — one in the Thai capital and the other in Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia as he bought a ticket to Tehran after fleeing Thailand — were also Iranian.
The attack in Delhi — in which a motorcycle attacker attached a magnetic or “sticky” bomb about the size of an iPad to an Israeli diplomatic vehicle — appeared to be a virtual mirror image of the lethal January 11 attack on Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan in Tehran traffic.
Indian police say they have yet to track down the young man in a leather jacket riding a red motorcycle who eyewitnesses said attached the device before racing away. But they said they were investigating phone calls made to foreign numbers from the immediate area just after the attack, particularly four calls made to Iran, Lebanon and Pakistan.
Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of Israel’s defense attache to Delhi was injured in the attack. If the bomber had attached the device to the side of the car with the petrol tank, its occupants would have been less likely to survive, police said.
Iran has long used proxy groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories to attack its enemies overseas, and intelligence experts believe they may have done so again in this case. Tehran’s relationship with Hamas has frayed in recent years, but Iran remains close to Hezbollah.
Other analysts believe the culprits may be members of Tehran’s hardline Revolutionary Guard, perhaps from the Quds Force, believed responsible for “extraterritorial operations”.
Conspiracy theories are rife . Some even point to the possibility that Israel itself might have orchestrated the attacks to damage Iran’s relationship with key Asian powers particularly India, a current main purchaser of Iran’s oil.
“The situation is getting worse and worse and it of course provides a good excuse for anyone who wishes to engage in real hostilities,” said Farhang Jahanpour of Oxford University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies.
SHADOWY PROXY GROUPS
For most analysts, however, these attacks plus an alleged plot last year to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States — which U.S. authorities say they thwarted — suggest Iran is now taking new risks or has signaled its proxies may do so.
“We are now seeing evidence of Iranian willingness to go after foreign targets in a way that has not been that much in evidence before,” says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), now at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Whether we’re talking about the Iranians themselves or proxies such as Hezbollah, it is very difficult to know. It’s also not clear whether they are acting on direction from the top or have simply been given the impression they (now) have greater flexibility.”
The relative ineptitude of the attacks suggests Tehran wanted to send a message rather than inflict heavy casualties.
“The Iranians aren’t interested in a truck-bomb-level attack on an Israeli embassy because that could provoke a conflict,” said Paul Quaglia, director of security consultancy PSA Asia and a 20-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“But they’re upset about having … nuclear scientists hit. Farming out these low-level bomb attacks against diplomats is the next best thing.”
Israel too is also suspected of using a range of shadowy local resistance groups in Iran. Some of their members may not be aware of who they are ultimately working for, a technique known as “false flagging”.
Several reports suggest Israeli agents may have impersonated their US counterparts in recruiting or directing members of the People’s Mujahideen of Iran — often known by its initials MEK — or Jundallah, a group sometimes linked to al Qaeda that is based largely in the province of Baluchistan.
“There is some evidence that this has been happening,” said former MI6 deputy chief Inkster. “It may be one of the things that has soured the relationship between Israel and the US. The “false flag” issue always makes things more complicated.”
LESSONS OF HISTORY
The United States denies any involvement in the lethal attacks within Iran — even issuing a rare condemnation of the January car bomb killing.
One Gulf security source told Reuters he believed U.S. agencies were directly involved in some attacks, working alongside MEK. U.S. officials have denied such suggestions, saying they would never work with the resistance groups partly because they were suspected to have been infiltrated by Iranian intelligence.
Former and serving U.S. and other Western officials say the CIA does not have the authorization — or “finding” — from the White House to conduct lethal attacks within Iran, although few doubt they are involved in a wide range of other intelligence operations.
While the emerging “shadow war” might escalate in the months to come, not everyone believes it heightens the risk of a wider conflict that the United States, Iran and Israel are keen to avoid.
But the lesson of history — particularly 1914, when the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in a Sarajevo sidestreet sparked a world war — is that mistakes can happen.
“Everyone here is used to playing the long game,” says former U.S. official Cordesman, saying he believed outright war was still likely to be avoided. “But you can still have someone on a street corner in the middle of nowhere… who sparks something that changes the course of history.” (Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Mark Hosenball and William Maclean in London, Sinsiri Tiwutanond in Bangkok, John Chalmers and Satarupa Battacharjya in New Delhi)
(Reporting By Peter Apps, editing by Rosalind Russell)
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We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Reuters. For more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/
Comments (5)
thebruce wrote:
it’s all conspiracy isn’t it ‘Free-speech’?I mean mossad must have worked this whole false-flag operation down to a tee to make the iranians look so clumsy and downright hate-filled and vengeful. Yes, yes – it’s the iranians who should definitely have a nuclear bomb, right? that would bring peace to the whole middle east.
Feb 16, 2012 12:16pm EST  –  Report as abuse
ccharles wrote:
The lack of professionalism in several so call Iran orginated attacks… this puts them in poor light. If that is the best they could do.. they would only last about 30 minutes in a strike.
Are these the same people that brought down a drone?
Feb 16, 2012 12:23pm EST  –  Report as abuse
Popsiq wrote:
Hothing odd about the Thailand bombings. Patriotic Iranians parading around Bangkok with wads of Rials, noising it abroad they were Iranian. Then blowing themselves up, and threatening a recalcitrant cabbie. That’s as about as unprofessional as the RG killer force is going to get.After all they’ve been supporting terror everywhere and running two insurgencies – in Iraq and Afghanistan – without a credible clue so far. It’s about time they got sloppy. Can you spell ‘patsies’? But who’s running them?
Feb 16, 2012 12:30pm EST  –  Report as abuse
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Other Columns

Standing up to the boss
Rajiv Arora, Hindustan Times
February 16, 2012
First Published: 22:23 IST(16/2/2012)
Last Updated: 22:27 IST(16/2/2012)
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After unveiling Iran’s nuclear progress on Feb 15, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that “the era of bullying nations has past.” Here’s a look at his many other controversial statements.
Call me naïve, but on some basic level, you have to give it to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his ability to put even the most powerful countries in a tight spot. On Wednesday, while making an overjoyed statement on his country’s “very big new achievement” of successfully building
faster uranium enrichment centrifuges and the loading of domestically made fuel rods, Ahmadinejad once again rattled America’s cage by saying, “The era of bullying nations has passed. The arrogant powers cannot monopolise nuclear technology.” Huzzah!
It’s not the first time we have heard the man voice his stand on the West’s stand on his country’s nuclear programme. Each time Iran blurts the N word, America gets its knickers in a twist while Israel simply wets its pants. This is despite Ahmadinejad’s constant reiteration that Tehran’s nuclear programme is intended for peaceful civilian purposes — not that anyone has to believe him, but because till now, that’s what it is.
The president in a journalist’s jacket and loaded with immense chutzpah (a Hebrew word meaning ‘shameless audacity’) has even proposed to modify Iran’s reactors in such a way that they would shut down as soon as enrichment levels go beyond the permissible limit. But let’s not get swayed by his ‘Oh, why can’t you trust me?’ line. Those in the know of such matters realise that allowing Iran under Ahmadinejad, who loves to play the bad guy, to attain self-sufficiency in things nuclear could one day prove deadlier than giving a flame-thrower to a child.But that’s beside the point. What really lies at the core of this disputation is this: in a world where almost every head of State crawls when Washington asks him to bend, Ahmadinejad derives pleasure in asking America to take a hike. That, in pure pop cultural terms, is the sign of the underdog whom we all love to love.
If we overlook Wednesday’s developments in Iran for a moment and consider the big picture, we’ll find that deep inside, every world leader knows that the odds of Iran nuking Israel are significantly smaller than America or Israel rushing in where non-fools fear to tread. In other words, another resource-rich nation in the West Asian neighbourhood at a time when power stems from a barrel of oil with a price tag above $100. But will anyone ever dare to say it out loud? I bet Ahmadinejad will. In his characteristic unsubtle manner.

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Showing 4 comments


  • SiDevilIam
    WW III, Oops, A Prequel 16/02/2012
    Nobel Prize (for peace) winner, president of these United States
    of America, honorable Mr Barack Hussein Obama, is on the verge of
    getting his boot straps tied down, his gun loaded, his determination,
    Oops, definition of war redefined for a more stronger, surely, more
    longer next war.
    Could it be in Iran? Perhaps, China? Maybe, in some small African country?
    I bet my silver dollar, the next war is being cooked, right now, even as we speak, in Pentagon.
    WW III. The everlasting war (on terrorism).
    …and I am Sid Harth@sidileak.com


  • Knightruler
    So Your an Iranian fanboy. It’s also that last time I read anymore of your garbage!!!


  • It may be simpler – and intellectually more honest – for Iran to withdraw from the NPT, on grounds of supreme national interest, and then do in holy matrimony what it has been doing out of wedlock.


  • Shamir
    Bravo Iran carry on the good work and continue to show your middle finger to the big bully of the world and its zoinist crony .I wish more nations in the world particularly some of the spineless nations of the middle east have the courage to face the bully .

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Drudge_Report REID: Rubio ‘supposedly’ represents Hispanics… drudge.tw/yEchLK 25 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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HuffingtonPost Is the Snickers king-size bar about to go extinct? huff.to/w0DZNa 30 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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ABC Keep your shoes on, hassle-free flights returning abcn.ws/xqW2Fd 30 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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Slate Did Mitt Romney’s dog defecate himself in terror like the Google tells us? We talked to a vet: slate.me/zaHVP1 34 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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HuffingtonPost And the most expensive city in the world is… huff.to/xfncJq 35 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
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FoxNews President Karzai says US, Afghanistan have begun talks with the Taliban in effort to end war, Fox News confirms fxn.ws/xwzrXy 36 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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