General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, interviewed by Fareed Zakaria of CNN. We’ll have an analysis on Monday:

Tags: CNN, David Petraeus, Fareed Zakaria, Iran

Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic:

The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, “The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge,” that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.

War on Terror Flashback: Bush’s Lawyer Yoo “Civilians Can Be Massacred”

The legal memos justifying torture aren’t very different in terms of reasoning–it’s clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.

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Tags: Adam Serwer, al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Dr Fadl, Fareed Zakaria, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Jose Padilla, Office of Legal Counsel, Osama bin Laden, Ronald Reagan, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, The Atlantic, Torture

Take this as you will, as Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki responds to the challenges of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

I do have to note that Mottaki needs to brush up on US politics — the disputed election of George W. Bush was in 2000, not 2004, and the Supreme Court that ruled in his favour was not appointed by him. He might also want to check the situation in his country — the Supreme Leader never held out the option of a full recount of the Presidential vote, and he might want to reconsider the claim that protesters were firing guns. And, as he holds on to the lifeboat claim of massive support on 30 December, three days after Ashura, I’m not sure that is boosted by compared Iran’s crackdown on protest to the response to demonstrators at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Tags: CNN, Fareed Zakaria, Iran, Iran Elections 2009, Manouchehr Mottaki

On Sunday CNN aired the second part of Fareed Zakaria’s interview with Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was freed after 118 days in detention on charges of “working with foreign governments” in the post-election conflict. (Part 1, as well as Bahari’s article in Newsweek, was posted on Enduring America last week.)

Beyond Bahari’s personal reflections, the most interesting parts of the interview are his framing of a Revolutionary Guard takeover of the Islamic Republic and his representation of the Iranian opposition. Bahari reduces the current Green movement to an uncoordinated, confused collections of groups which include “terrorists” and are becoming “militarised”. We’re so intrigued and concerned by this perception of the opposition, and whether it is shared by the Obama Administration, that we’ve posted a separate analysis.

Iran: How Washington Views the Green Opposition — The Next Chapter
Iran Video & Text: Maziar Bahari on His 118 Days in Detention
Iran Video: Maziar Bahari Tells CBS of His Detention and Post-Election Conflict

Video (1 of 2)

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Tags: CNN, Fareed Zakaria, Iran, Iran Elections 2009, Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Maziar Bahari

NEW Video: Ahmadinejad Interview with Time Magazine
NEW Transcript: Obama and Sarkozy Statements on Iran Nuclear Programme
NEW Iran: Obama’s “Get-Tough” Move for Engagement
Iran: Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad, and the Multi-Sided Chess Match
Latest Video: Full Speech of Ahmadinejad at UN General Assembly
Iran: English Text of Letters between Mousavi and Montazeri (13 and 22 September)

1835 GMT: Report that Azar Mansouri, deputy head of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, has been arrested after an interview with Norooz.

1735 GMT: Is Iran’s “Secret Nuclear Plant” Legal? The quick soundbite for Time from its interview with President Ahmadinejad is “”This does not mean we must inform Mr. Obama’s administration of every facility that we have.”

However, Ahmadinejad may have a point, one which is relevant to the current case. Iran notified the IAEA on Monday that it was constructing a new pilot enrichment plant. If Tehran has not put nuclear material into this facility, Iran is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Comprehensive Full Scope Safeguards Agreement, which requires it to a six-month notification period before nuclear material is put in the facility. (Iran withdrew from the more Subsidiary Agreement 3.1, which requires more detailed and timely notification, after the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran’s nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.

So the case to prosecute Iran under the Non-Proliferation Treaty is not clear-cut. Of course, the US can and will rely upon the U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease all enrichment. Whether other countries (China, Russia) take the same line remains to be seen.

1730 GMT: President Ahmadinejad may have backed out of an encounter with the New York media, but he did give a one-on-one video interview to Time magazine. We’ve posted in a separate entry.

1700 GMT: President Ahmadinejad has replaced his New York press conference with an interview with Press TV.

1500 GMT: We’ve just posted Chris Emery’s shrewd analysis of the politics of the US revelation of the “secret nuclear plant” and the Obama statement: “This high-profile initiative by Obama was designed to get movement on engagement.”

1425 GMT: Amidst the continuing chatter on the Obama statement — no additional information, just the theme of “He was Really Tough” — news services drop in this interesting twist “Ahmadinejad cancels his 5 pm EST (2100 GMT) speech in NYC [New York City]“.

1245 GMT: The Obama Line. The President has just made his statement on the Iran “secret nuclear plant”. The message? This demonstrates Iran’s “continuing unwillingness” to meets its “international obligations” on development of nuclear capability. This showed the “urgency” of resolution at talks with Iran on 1 October in Geneva.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has backed this up by saying “everything must be put on the table”, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proclaimed this “the most urgent problem” of today.

This feels more and more like a scripted play. The “West” has known for some time that Iran was constructing a second uranium enrichment plant but had not announced this to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Tehran figured out that the US had learned of the plant and was preparing a big setpiece, ahead of the 1 October talks, to reveal the Iranian duplicity. So Iran went to the IAEA on Monday to put its plans above-board. This, however, was  not going to deflect the US-UK-France scheme to put Iran on the defensive in advance of the first direct discussions between Washington and Tehran.

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Tags: Ann Curry, Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Azar Mansouri, David Sanger, Fareed Zakaria, Guardian Council, Hashemi Rafsanjani, International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Iran Elections 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, NBC, New York Times, Norooz, Nuclear Proliferation

The Latest from Iran (9 August): Once More on Trial

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An extract from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria:

Tags: CNN, Fareed Zakaria, Hillary Clinton, Iran

The Latest from Iran (27 July): A President Dangling in the Wind?

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UPDATE 0930 GMT: This video, now available on several Internet sites, is causing quite a fuss. There have been heated comments, with some criticism of Zakaria as well as Marandi, on a YouTube version. An Iranian website is featuring the “crushing” of the “pro-Government” Marandi.

Dr Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran was interviewed on CNN on Sunday about the post-election situation in Iran. Asked by Fareed Zakaria about the Government’s “brutal methods” to “maintain control”, turning it into “a military dictatorship”, Marandi replied, “Since Mr Mousavi’s people went to the streets day after day, it was causing trouble in Tehran so the police really felt they had to bring things back to normal,” while President Ahmadinejad acted provocatively in his speech immediately after the election. He predicted that, despite the violence and detentions, the situation would soon “return to normal”.

Tags: CNN, Fareed Zakaria, Iran, Iran Elections 2009, Seyed Mohammad Marandi

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, conducted earlier this week, was broadcast today. While the discussion has already been overtaken by events in Pakistan and Iraq, we’ll be commenting on important clues to the future course of Obama foreign policy in an analysis tomorrow.

ZAKARIA: Secretary Gates, thank you for doing this.

ROBERT GATES, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: My pleasure.
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Tags: Add new tag, Asaf Ali Zardari, Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, Barack Obama, CNN, Empire, Fareed Zakaria, Focused District Development, George W Bush, Nouri al-Maliki, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Robert Gates, Theodore Roosevelt, Yousuf Raza Gillani