whut?

[click image]

I've been ducking around, trying to restore some of the umpteen videos YouTube ripped down in my Led Zeppelin section over to Zhaozhou's Mistress... and the one thing that is working excellently well on my sexy new machine that is being replaced by the manufacturer are the speakers. So I'm drinking my last slug of brandy that I've been threatening for a few weeks to consume, and rock and roll is wafting out my windows into the night.

Earlier I'd been at ISIS, and couldn't muster the vitality to read this PDF, let alone try to run down all the assertions there, because I'm about puking of having been trying to warn off WWIII for a few years, and stolidly losing friends in my efforts to help put the skids on this filthiness since at least June. I'm low on spit from all this, and the frustration of seeing supposedly antiwar people so busily still flipping about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Teabaggers and ACORN, but now that Reuters has picked it up, well, uhm, I guess I should at least mention it:

Report says Iran has data to make atom bomb
03 Oct 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A confidential analysis by staff of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has concluded that Iran has acquired "sufficient information to be able to design and produce" an atom bomb, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The Times report was posted on its website hours after Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived in Tehran for talks on a timetable for inspectors to visit a newly disclosed unfinished nuclear enrichment plant.

Iran, which rejects Western charges that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons, held talks with six world powers in Geneva on Thursday. Western officials said that in the talks, Iran had agreed "in principle" to ship out most of its enriched uranium for reprocessing in Russia and France.

The analysis, according to the Times, says the IAEA "assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device" based on highly enriched uranium.

The Times said unnamed senior European officials had described the document's conclusions to the paper. It said the report was written earlier this year and had since been revised, and quoted one official as saying the text was "not ready for publication as an official document."

It said the report, titled "Possible Military Dimensions of Iran's Nuclear Program," described a complex program run by Iran's Defense Ministry "aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system."

The report said the program apparently started in 2002. It suggested "the Iranians have done a wide array of research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads," the Times said, but it did not say how much progress they made.

"The agency's tentative analysis also says that Iran 'most likely' obtained the needed information for designing and building an implosion bomb 'from external sources' and then adapted the information to its own needs," the Times said.

The paper said a dispute had erupted in recent months over the report between the IAEA's senior staff and ElBaradei, the agency's outgoing director who opposes adopting a "confrontational strategy" with Iran.

"In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press Dr. ElBaradei into releasing it," the Times said.

So I'm not the only one with it turned all the way up to eleven here.

If you have not listened to this half-hour interview yet, you might not be clear enough on what is going on, and why you need to be ultra-suspicious of this development in the news. Here, again:

AND, LISTEN, GODDAMMIT!


AntiWar's Scott Horton interviews Gareth Porter on the big lie taking us into WWIII....

There is reason to believe this is just an ultra-intense job of cutting off Iranian testicles, making them scream "uncle!" and not the intro to WWIII, but it is slim, and I can't fathom Obama being this willing to lie his fucking head off, freak us out so badly we can't sleep, whip America into the anti-Iranian frenzy the "Green Revolution" primed us for, if he doesn't mean to force a start to the conflagration. There's just got to be a limit to his audacity. He can't be doing this just to please Israel. There's much more he intends to get than this dumb nukes thing.

Oh, and...

Congress poised to act swiftly on Iran if needed
By JIM ABRAMS (AP) – 5 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Congress is poised to act swiftly on new penalties against Iran if international talks on Tehran's nuclear program show signs of faltering. And this time lawmakers are talking about trying to block gas and refined petroleum exports to Iran, possibly causing serious disruptions in the lives of ordinary Iranians.

"If we want to get their attention, we have to do something real: sanction Iran's gasoline imports," said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, in a speech on the House floor. "That's where Ahmadinejad is vulnerable," he said, referring to Iran's president.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, is one of several lawmakers working on plans to expand current penalties.

"Congress must equip President (Barack) Obama with a full range of tools to deal with the threats posed by Iran," said Dodd, D-Conn., who said his bill would include extending current restrictions on Iran's financial institutions, imposing new trade bans and exacting penalties for entities exporting certain refined petroleum products to Iran. His committee plans a hearing on the subject Tuesday.

Obama said talks Thursday in Switzerland between Iran and six world powers, where Iran indicated it would open its newly disclosed nuclear plant to U.N. inspectors, were "a constructive beginning." But he said Iran must match its words with actions.

The president said his administration, in conjunction with Congress, is crafting plans that could target Iran's energy, financial and telecommunications sectors. The hope is to gain a united international front that includes China and Russia, countries reluctant in the past to restrict trade with Iran.

Several Democratic leaders, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., say Iran should be given a short time to show it is acting in good faith.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the talks should have the chance to succeed. But, he added, "We don't have to wait, certainly for Russia or China or for anybody else, to take the action we deem to be appropriate."

Hoyer made the comments while speaking to the No. 2 Republican, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, on the House floor Thursday.

Cantor prodded Democrats to restrict gas and refined petroleum exports to Iran. He said Republicans did not support the concept of waiting "until there is some collective agreement on the world stage in order for Congress to act."

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was more direct. "The U.S. must put away the begging bowl, act like a world leader and lead the effort to impose immediate, crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime," she said.

Ros-Lehtinen introduced a bill this year to toughen penalties against people who aid Iran's proliferation efforts. She has an ally in the committee chairman, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif. He's pushing a bill that would prohibit foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran from doing business in the United States.

While Iran is a major oil producer, it imports gasoline and refined petroleum products. Stopping fuel shipments to Iran could have serious effects on the Iranian people.

Mideast expert Kenneth M. Pollack, director of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, said it was questionable whether such penalties would work. There's bound to be ways around them, Iran is quickly expanding its refinery capacity and Tehran could manipulate world opinion by displaying the suffering of common Iranians, Pollack said.

The hardline positions of some in Congress, he added, could prove useful to the White House as it tries to get U.S. allies on board for the administration's more targeted penalties.

I wonder what kind of authorizations they're going to hand out to the president....

Just dying to hear, aren't you? Probably a good idea to bookmark this page....