Latest Iran Video: More from 13 Aban & Today (8-9 November)

Iran Video: The Tribute to 13 Aban’s Protesters
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 4th Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 3rd Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 2nd Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 1st Set)

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Azad Uni Khomeini Shahr, Outside Isfahan (4 of 8 Videos from 9 November)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8byupFUrEas&feature=channel[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o30UQ23cTNI&feature=channel[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4SbeW2pcXE[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o30UQ23cTNI&feature=channel[/youtube]

Claimed Protest Against Former Minister Harandi, Gilan University, 8 November

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWM0XjytgwA[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UNreBuuao0[/youtube]

Filming Plainclothes Forces Attack, Shiraz

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

Tehran

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCYSn0lkTmc[/youtube]

Writing Slogans on the Police Cars

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRPrBFhh5us[/youtube]

Latest Iran Video: Tear Gas Attack Gone Wrong (4 November)

Latest Iran Video: More from 13 Aban & Today (8 November)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 4th Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 3rd Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 2nd Set)
Latest Iran Video: The 13 Aban Protests (4 November — 1st Set)

Iran: An Eyewitness on 13 Aban “Protest An Inseparable Part of People’s Lives”
The Latest from Iran (9 November): Assessing the Government

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eukCwQ-ljaE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Iran: An Eyewitness on 13 Aban "Protest An Inseparable Part of People's Lives"

Iran’s New 13 Aban: An Eyewitness Account “I Have Never Seen as Much Violence”
Iran’s New 13 Aban: A First-Hand Account from the Streets
Iran: Josh Shahryar on the Significance of 13 Aban
Iran Video: The Tribute to 13 Aban’s Protesters
The Latest from Iran (9 November): Assessing the Government

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My only disagreement with this e-mail from an EA source is the assertion, "Nothing left to say." As we see the unfolding outcomes of the marches of last week, the writer has a lot of importance to say:

I know that you are completely informed of all the news about 13th Aban demonstrations and there is nothing left to say but these are the important things that I have noticed.

First, the brilliant presence of women not only as the demonstrators, but as a safeguard to keep the men protected, they stood in front of the groups of demonstrators to impede the government forces to beat the men and this was the reason that this time the detainees are mostly women.

Second, the government forces enjoyed using a new tactic this time in which they hid themselves among the demonstrators, and from there they tried to beat people, in order to show that these are protesters who were fighting amongst themselves.

Third, the behaviour of the government forces were like 18th of Tir [9 July of this year] and 30th of Khordad [20 June], extreme brutality, with the only difference that at least they did not kill anyone. The protesters were surprised for they thought that everything would be like [the relatively peaceful occasion on] Qods Day.

Fourth, although lots of people were injured (even one of my colleagues), they are not without hope. It seems that protest has become an inevitable and inseparable part of people's lives. They live, they work, they laugh, and they do all the routine things of life, but at the bottom of it they wait for an opportunity to protest.

Fifth, those who participate in these protests are very mature. As long as the government did not suppress them brutally, they are silent and just say the mottoes which represent peace and calmness. At the moment that the security forces begin to crack down with all their force and instruments, then the mottoes and actions of protesters become extreme too, because they have no other choice to save their lives.

Sixth, the general belief of the protesters is that this movement is like a marathon, so those who are participating in it should have strong will, perseverance, patience, and tirelessness. They can not be hopeless and they should be happy patient till the result comes true.

Coming Soon to Your Country: US Government "Hit Squads"?

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On the surface this story from Danger Room seems overblown --- the US military has long had "snatch squads" to capture or kill bad guys, and they have been used extensively in Iraq in recent years. However, once the story develops, two important aspects emerge: 1) this proposal for an organised effort between US agencies has an utter disregard for the sovereignty of other countries, be they friend or foe; 2) this is no longer the snaring and/or assassination of wartime opponents but the disruption of any hostile "human network":

CIA director Leon Panetta got into hot water with Congress, after he revealed an agency program to hunt down and kill terrorists. A recent report from the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA didn’t go far enough (.pdf). Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a “National Manhunting Agency” to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state.

America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies already devote thousands of people and billions of dollars to tracking down top terrorists and insurgents. But even the most successful of these efforts — like going after Iraqi militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — have been “ad hoc” efforts, with units cobbled together from different corners of the government. Report author and retired Lt. Col. George Crawford instead would like to see a permanent group with clear authority, training, doctrine and technology to go after these dangerous individuals. These “manhunting teams would be standing formations, trained to pursue their designated quarry relentlessly for as long as required to accomplish the mission,” he writes.

Sometimes, that will mean operating “in uncooperative countries.” In those cases, the teams must be prepared “to act unilaterally, with no support or coordination with local authorities, in a manner similar to that employed by Israel’s Avner team in response to the Munich Olympics massacre.” (That was the controversial unit, fictionalized in Steven Spielberg’s movie, that allegedly roamed the world, assassinating Palestinian militants in response to the 1972 Olympic attack.)

The hit squads would only be one part of the manhunting agency, according to the Joint Special Operations University monograph, uncovered by Inside Defense. “Dedicated teams must be assembled, able to respond ‘on-call’ in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion,” Crawford notes.

Read rest of story....

Iran's Nuclear Programme: Washington's Unhelpful Misperceptions

The Latest from Iran (9 November): Assessing the Government

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In The New York Times this morning, David Sanger publishes an article, "Iran Is Said to Ignore Effort to Salvage a Nuclear Deal", which gives half the story on the current tangled state of the negotiations over uranium enrichment.

Half the story because Sanger's story is effectively a US Government press release. Here is the narrative of unnamed officials:

The Obama Administration...has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping....But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored....Instead....the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran....

That proposal had been rejected because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory would allow for the possibility that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment. That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months the country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons.

This version of events intersects not only with developments around El Baradei's latest proposal --- Turkey takes Iran's reprocessed uranium from Russia and reshapes it into metal plates --- but also the reports that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was in Tehran pushing a deal. The article is also notable for revealing the Kish proposal, which had not surfaced before.

The downside of the article, however, is that it misses the other half of the narrative. Yesterday Tehran's officials put out a counter-proposal for reprocessing outside Iran, in a two-stage delivery to Russia. Each shipment of uranium would be 400 kilogrammes; the total of 800 kilogrammes is about half of Iran's stock. That proposal, which could be a response to Ryabkov's intervention, may just be a case of the Iranian Government spinning out the discussions, but it is a far cry from an outright rejection.

Indeed, it is troubling that Sanger's article is riddled with distorting exaggerations. His claim that US officials "had now all but lost hope that Iran would follow through with an agreement reached in Geneva on Oct. 1 to send its fuel out of the country temporarily" overstates the situation --- Tehran's officials did not accept a plan but agreed to further technical talks in Vienna. Thus his follow-up, "Iranian officials told the energy agency on Oct. 29 that they could not agree to the deal that their own negotiators had reached", is an unhelpful simplification.

That would not be a major problem if this was just loose reporting. The worry is that this is also the perception of US officials:

“If you listen to what the Iranians have said publicly and privately over the past week,” one senior administration official said Sunday, “it’s evident that they simply cannot bring themselves to do the deal.”

Even the most casual of EA readers would have picked up by now that there is not a single Iranian view on the negotiations. Instead, there is a heated debate within the regime on how to conduct the talks with the US. The Washington narrative in Sanger's article misses this, ignoring for example that President Ahmadinejad is pressing for a continuation of discussions despite hostility from within the Iranian Parliament and possibly from the Supreme Leader's office.

If true, this misperception carries the consequence that it may be the Obama Administration rather than Tehran which breaks off the talks. This does not mean that it is giving up a likely agreement --- again, Ahmadinejad's primary objective may be to stay at the table rather than signing a deal --- but it will lead to Iran blaming Washington for the collapse (and there will be supporters for this view, such as Erdogan in Turkey) and undercut the possibility of China and Russia supporting the harsh sanctions that the US Congress will demand.

Yet even this is secondary to the wider significance of the Administration's fuzzy view. Simply put, if the statements in Sanger's piece are accurate, Obama officials have a poor understanding of the internal dynamics in Iran after 12 June, with little comprehension of the fault-lines within the Establishment. In the end, they fail to understand that the nuclear issue is, first and foremost, a pawn in a much bigger chess match inside Iran.