US, allies to complain to ElBaradei on Iran
22 May 2007 19:09:47 GMT
Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) - The United States and some European allies plan to complain to the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog about his proposal for Iran to retain some nuclear enrichment activities, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that envoys from the United States and from France, Germany and Britain -- the so-called EU3 -- were expected to visit International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei this week and tell him their concern as major powers seek to persuade Tehran to end uranium enrichment.
The countries' ambassadors to the IAEA plan to give a "demarche", or formal private complaint, that the agency chief's comments "were not helpful," the official said.
ElBaradei has occasionally irked U.S. leaders but his recent comments, including in the New York Times, rankled both American and European officials because they were interpreted as siding with Tehran at a critical time.
He said IAEA inspectors had concluded that Iran is starting to enrich uranium on a much larger scale after solving technical problems.
"We believe they pretty much have the knowledge about how to enrich," the newspaper quoted ElBaradei as saying. "From now, it's simply a question of perfecting that knowledge. People will not like to hear it, but that's a fact."
ElBaradei used that conclusion to argue for a negotiated solution that would allow Iran to retain a limited enrichment program, diplomats said.
"I believe that demand (for enrichment suspension) has been superseded by events," ElBaradei was quoted by the Spanish daily ABC as saying in an interview carried online.
The U.N. Security Council -- with the United States and its European partners in the vanguard -- has pushed through two resolutions demanding that Iran suspend enrichment before entering negotiations and imposing sanctions until it complies.
IAEA inspectors are expected to report on Wednesday that Iran has not only ignored an imminent U.N. deadline to stop enriching uranium but markedly expanded the program, exposing itself to broader sanctions.
ElBaradei says Western powers' strategy of making a halt to enrichment a precondition of talks is out of date. He says they should focus on limiting the program to a level that would pose little risk of yielding atom bombs.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N22452187.htm
Blix: Iran entitled to enrich uranium
Press TV
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has underscored Iran's right to acquire peaceful nuclear technology as a signatory of the NPT.
In an interview with the Russian daily Vremya Novostei on Tuesday, Blix suggested that the West should propose enough incentives to Iran in order to convince the country to suspend uranium enrichment as an inalienable right.
Besides economic incentives, the international community should also assure Iran there would be no possibility of attack on the country, he added.
As the Chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC), Blix termed concerns over Iran's intentions as baseless.
Innocent victims caught up in a war of endless revenge
Robert Fisk: Innocent victims caught up in a war of endless revenge
Robert Fisk reports from the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, northern Lebanon
Published: 24 May 2007
Independent UK
It is a place of Palestinian fury - and almost as much Palestinian blood. The bandage-swaddled children whimpering in pain, frowning at the strange, unfatherly doctors, the middle-aged woman staring at us with one eye, a set of tubes running into her gashed-open stomach, a series of bleak-faced, angry, young men, their bodies and legs torn apart.
There was eight-year Youssef al-Radi who was cut open by shrapnel in the arm and back yesterday morning and brought to the Palestinian Safad hospital at Badawi, another refugee camp in Tripoli, his feet bleeding, a tiny figure on a huge stretcher. He hasn't been told that his mother died beside him. Nor that his father is still in the Nahr el-Bared camp.
And let us not forget six-year-old Aiman Hussein, who was hit by up to a hundred pieces of metal from a Lebanese army shell - in the neck and the spine, the tibia, the foot, the back, you name it. The doctors had to rush him to Tripoli because they could not operate. Visit the Safad hospital if you dare. Or climb gingerly out of your car on the Lebanese army's front line at Nahr el-Bared and walk past the sweating, tired soldiers who have been told they are defending Lebanon's sovereignty by doing battle with the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam - who are still hiding in the smashed, smoking ruins on the edge of the Palestinian camp.
Some of the buildings look like Irish lace and a mosque's green minaret has a shell hole just below the platform where the muezzin's call would be heard five times a day, as if a giant had punched at it in anger. There is even a field of ripped-up tents, which must have been what this camp looked like when the grandfathers of those wounded children arrived here from Palestine in 1948.
The Lebanese armoured personnel carriers were dug into the rich earth, and the soldiers were sheltering behind a collection of smashed houses, petrol stations and lock-up garages. We found two colonels in one garage, who politely offered us coffee, and a lieutenant who had lived in Montreal and who called a mutual friend of ours - a Lebanese army colonel in the south of Lebanon - who roared with laughter down his mobile phone: "Robert, what are you doing in Nahr el-Bared?" As if he didn't know.
I looked across the camp. Was it worth all this pain, the grotty, empty streets, the broken apartment block with dirty grey smoke still drifting from its windows? The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
Most of the troops around me were from the north of Lebanon - so were the murdered soldiers. Had there been feelings of revenge rather than military discipline when they first opened fire? There were certainly growls of retaliation in the Safad hospital - named, with terrible coincidence, after the very town in pre-Israel Palestine from which many of Nahr el-Bared's refugee families originally came - and Fatah, the old Arafat PLO Fatah, now had armed men on the streets to protect the medical personnel and the new, wounded refugees from the next burst of fury.
All day, the ambulances ran a ferry service of wounded from the camp, sirens shrieking through the wards, spilling out the wounded and the sick and the ancient men and women who could bear no more. They were given small sacks of bread - like animals newly arrived at market, I couldn't help thinking - and led away.
They had heard all the political statements. Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French President, had been on the phone to the Lebanese Prime Minister, insisting that he should not give in to "intimidation" - perhaps he thought the Palestinians were the same kind of "scum" that he called the rioting Arabs of the Paris suburbs last year - and President Bush gave his his support to the Lebanese government and army.
And Walid Jumblatt said of the Syrian President that "the Lebanese Army ought to crush Fatah al-Islam once and for all to prevent Assad from turning Lebanon into a second Iraq". That's all the talk now, that another sovereign Arab nation might become a new Iraq. The Algerians were saying the same two days ago, that Islamist suicide bombers were trying to turn Algeria into "a new Iraq".
What, I kept asking myself yesterday, have we unleashed now? Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa who stood yesterday at the bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia, so terribly wounded by army shellfire in the face that she could neither talk nor focus upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just woken up when we heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said. "My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She haemorraged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this. The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling.
"And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then we'll see!"
Of course, one wants to remind Suheila - perhaps not her dreadfully wounded sister - that the Palestinians are guests in Lebanon, that by allowing Fatah al-Islam to nest on the edge of their north Lebanon camp, they were inviting their own doom. But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.
I found an old lady in Safad hospital, whimpering and sobbing. She was 75, she said, and her daughter had just brought out her own two-month-old child and this was the fifth time she had been "displaced". She used that word, "displaced". She had lost her home in Palestine in 1948 and four more times in Lebanon her home had been destroyed. And on what date did she leave Palestine, I asked? "I can read and write," she said. "But I no longer have the memory of being so exact."
No wonder that in all the Palestinian camps of Lebanon yesterday, they were protesting the "massacre" at Nahr el-Bared with gunfire and burning tyres.
And so we continued through the wards. There was Ghassan Ahmed el-Saadi, who had arrived at the camp's medical centre to distribute bread with his friends Abdul Latif al-Abdullah and Raad Ali Shams. "A shell came down and my friends both fell dead at my feet," said Mr Saadi, who is a mass of tubes and wounds and a bloody foot.
There was Ahmed Sharshara, just eight years old, with a huge plaster over his chest. A hunk of shell had entered his back and broken into his spine and partly emerged from his chest. The X-ray showed a piece of metal like a leaf in his stomach. His lungs were still being drained.
And there was Nibal Bushra who went to his balcony on Sunday morning to find out why the camp was being shelled when a single bullet hit his brother. Then a sniper's bullet hit him. For two days he lay bleeding in the camp before being brought out.
"I wish they would take us to a European country because we are not safe here, and the Arab nations are beasts, monsters to us," he said. "I won't even talk to Arab journalists. They are not prepared to tell the truth." And what has become of his desire to return to the old Safad of Palestine, I asked. "We will never go home," he said. "But I trust the Europeans because they seem good and kind people."
And then - a little annex to this story - there was a small room where I found Ahmed Maisour Sayed, 24, part-paralysed and unable to speak, who was not a victim of the Lebanese army. He was brought here on 3 May after being shot by two gunmen from Fatah al-Islam because he was a PLO supporter. "His family and one of their families had quarreled about ideology," his father told me. "So they shot him and killed two other men. They are a terrorist organisation and we don't know what they want. There's only about 700 of them. But now my son can never work, We need help from an international organisation." I dared not tell him that I come from the land of Lord Balfour.
But I did notice, back at Nahr el-Bared, a heap of empty Lebanese army machinegun cartridges, and I picked one up as a souvenir. And when I got home to Beirut, I put it with a much older cartridge case which I picked up back in the late Eighties when the same army was besieging the Palestinians in Sidon. Of course, the two cases were identical in calibre. The tragedy goes on. And its identical nature has made it normal, routine, typical, easy to accept. And woe betide if we believe that.
Re: Innocent victims caught up in a war of endless revenge
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:Robert Fisk: Innocent victims caught up in a war of endless revenge
Robert Fisk reports from the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, northern Lebanon
Published: 24 May 2007
Independent UK
It is a place of Palestinian fury - and almost as much Palestinian blood. The bandage-swaddled children whimpering in pain, frowning at the strange, unfatherly doctors, the middle-aged woman staring at us with one eye, a set of tubes running into her gashed-open stomach, a series of bleak-faced, angry, young men, their bodies and legs torn apart.
There was eight-year Youssef al-Radi who was cut open by shrapnel in the arm and back yesterday morning and brought to the Palestinian Safad hospital at Badawi, another refugee camp in Tripoli, his feet bleeding, a tiny figure on a huge stretcher. He hasn't been told that his mother died beside him. Nor that his father is still in the Nahr el-Bared camp.
And let us not forget six-year-old Aiman Hussein, who was hit by up to a hundred pieces of metal from a Lebanese army shell - in the neck and the spine, the tibia, the foot, the back, you name it. The doctors had to rush him to Tripoli because they could not operate. Visit the Safad hospital if you dare. Or climb gingerly out of your car on the Lebanese army's front line at Nahr el-Bared and walk past the sweating, tired soldiers who have been told they are defending Lebanon's sovereignty by doing battle with the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam - who are still hiding in the smashed, smoking ruins on the edge of the Palestinian camp.
Some of the buildings look like Irish lace and a mosque's green minaret has a shell hole just below the platform where the muezzin's call would be heard five times a day, as if a giant had punched at it in anger. There is even a field of ripped-up tents, which must have been what this camp looked like when the grandfathers of those wounded children arrived here from Palestine in 1948.
The Lebanese armoured personnel carriers were dug into the rich earth, and the soldiers were sheltering behind a collection of smashed houses, petrol stations and lock-up garages. We found two colonels in one garage, who politely offered us coffee, and a lieutenant who had lived in Montreal and who called a mutual friend of ours - a Lebanese army colonel in the south of Lebanon - who roared with laughter down his mobile phone: "Robert, what are you doing in Nahr el-Bared?" As if he didn't know.
I looked across the camp. Was it worth all this pain, the grotty, empty streets, the broken apartment block with dirty grey smoke still drifting from its windows? The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
Most of the troops around me were from the north of Lebanon - so were the murdered soldiers. Had there been feelings of revenge rather than military discipline when they first opened fire? There were certainly growls of retaliation in the Safad hospital - named, with terrible coincidence, after the very town in pre-Israel Palestine from which many of Nahr el-Bared's refugee families originally came - and Fatah, the old Arafat PLO Fatah, now had armed men on the streets to protect the medical personnel and the new, wounded refugees from the next burst of fury.
All day, the ambulances ran a ferry service of wounded from the camp, sirens shrieking through the wards, spilling out the wounded and the sick and the ancient men and women who could bear no more. They were given small sacks of bread - like animals newly arrived at market, I couldn't help thinking - and led away.
They had heard all the political statements. Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French President, had been on the phone to the Lebanese Prime Minister, insisting that he should not give in to "intimidation" - perhaps he thought the Palestinians were the same kind of "scum" that he called the rioting Arabs of the Paris suburbs last year - and President Bush gave his his support to the Lebanese government and army.
And Walid Jumblatt said of the Syrian President that "the Lebanese Army ought to crush Fatah al-Islam once and for all to prevent Assad from turning Lebanon into a second Iraq". That's all the talk now, that another sovereign Arab nation might become a new Iraq. The Algerians were saying the same two days ago, that Islamist suicide bombers were trying to turn Algeria into "a new Iraq".
What, I kept asking myself yesterday, have we unleashed now? Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa who stood yesterday at the bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia, so terribly wounded by army shellfire in the face that she could neither talk nor focus upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just woken up when we heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said. "My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She haemorraged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this. The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling.
"And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then we'll see!"
Of course, one wants to remind Suheila - perhaps not her dreadfully wounded sister - that the Palestinians are guests in Lebanon, that by allowing Fatah al-Islam to nest on the edge of their north Lebanon camp, they were inviting their own doom. But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.
I found an old lady in Safad hospital, whimpering and sobbing. She was 75, she said, and her daughter had just brought out her own two-month-old child and this was the fifth time she had been "displaced". She used that word, "displaced". She had lost her home in Palestine in 1948 and four more times in Lebanon her home had been destroyed. And on what date did she leave Palestine, I asked? "I can read and write," she said. "But I no longer have the memory of being so exact."
No wonder that in all the Palestinian camps of Lebanon yesterday, they were protesting the "massacre" at Nahr el-Bared with gunfire and burning tyres.
And so we continued through the wards. There was Ghassan Ahmed el-Saadi, who had arrived at the camp's medical centre to distribute bread with his friends Abdul Latif al-Abdullah and Raad Ali Shams. "A shell came down and my friends both fell dead at my feet," said Mr Saadi, who is a mass of tubes and wounds and a bloody foot.
There was Ahmed Sharshara, just eight years old, with a huge plaster over his chest. A hunk of shell had entered his back and broken into his spine and partly emerged from his chest. The X-ray showed a piece of metal like a leaf in his stomach. His lungs were still being drained.
And there was Nibal Bushra who went to his balcony on Sunday morning to find out why the camp was being shelled when a single bullet hit his brother. Then a sniper's bullet hit him. For two days he lay bleeding in the camp before being brought out.
"I wish they would take us to a European country because we are not safe here, and the Arab nations are beasts, monsters to us," he said. "I won't even talk to Arab journalists. They are not prepared to tell the truth." And what has become of his desire to return to the old Safad of Palestine, I asked. "We will never go home," he said. "But I trust the Europeans because they seem good and kind people."
And then - a little annex to this story - there was a small room where I found Ahmed Maisour Sayed, 24, part-paralysed and unable to speak, who was not a victim of the Lebanese army. He was brought here on 3 May after being shot by two gunmen from Fatah al-Islam because he was a PLO supporter. "His family and one of their families had quarreled about ideology," his father told me. "So they shot him and killed two other men. They are a terrorist organisation and we don't know what they want. There's only about 700 of them. But now my son can never work, We need help from an international organisation." I dared not tell him that I come from the land of Lord Balfour.
But I did notice, back at Nahr el-Bared, a heap of empty Lebanese army machinegun cartridges, and I picked one up as a souvenir. And when I got home to Beirut, I put it with a much older cartridge case which I picked up back in the late Eighties when the same army was besieging the Palestinians in Sidon. Of course, the two cases were identical in calibre. The tragedy goes on. And its identical nature has made it normal, routine, typical, easy to accept. And woe betide if we believe that.
Fisky should be required reading for all. Hey anyone noticed title of this thread
www.III? Whichis an insurance site.
According to IBC, Iraq is suffering on the average 78 killed per say for the past 12 months - and that's a low-ball number. Makes you wonder who's winning and losing this war.
The media love the non-Israeli Palestinians because they are victimizers or are supporters of victimizers, and the media thinks victimizers are caused to be victimizers by their victims?
Advocate wrote:Why do the media love the Palestinians?
That sounds quite racist to me. If you had said something like "Why does the media love Palestinian terrorists" or "Why does the media love radical Palestinians" or something along those lines... that would still be a loaded question, but rather neutral concerning any inherent racism.
Just imagine your reaction if somebody would ask "Why do people love Jews?" Would you be offended?
Really, your argument does not profit when your racism becomes that evident.
I suspect Advocate proceeds from the assumption that the present situation of greater Israel is appropriate for them and the region. In those terms the persistent Palestinial attacks and their continued resistence may well appear as unreasonable and incomprehensible.
Another perspective looks at the major events since the partition of Palestine, and in particular at the selfish hubris that can be said to characterize the Israeli exploitation of their victory in the 1967 war. From this perspective the narrow-minded greed and intolerance of the Israeli state is more evident. I believe it is this perspective that most influences the journalists to whom Advocate refers. (There is, by the way, an excellent article in the current Economist on this very point -- I like it because it conforms to my own long held views on this aspect of the problem.)
In short, the journalists in question - who, a few decades ago, were largely ardent supporters of Israel - may well be animated by the new conviction that the core policies and ambitions of the Israeli state are unjust, promising only continued suffering and hardship for the Palestinian people with whom they cohabit the region. Some may also feel that the continued portrayals of Palestinians as fanatics who won't even concede the "right of Israel to exist" (whatever that means) are a self-serving example of truly stupendous psychological projection on the part of the Israelis. In the short term is is the existence of the Palestinians that is threatened.
The presistent resistence of the Irish to English oppression in the 18th and 19th centuries was likewise incomprehensible to their English overlords,; as was the subsequent resistence of the Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland to the policies of their (Mostly Scottish) Protestant oppressors, and to the English who were in effect their pawns. Both conflicts persisted for centuries, and both exhibit remarkable similarities to the situation in Palestine. To the degree that they offer precedent, the promise for Israel on its present course is not good.
Well, part of the problem is that no effort, at all, is made to distinguish between the violent radicals and the terrorists among the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims and the rest of the civilian population.
Advocate is pretty consistent in lumping them all together, calling them "Pals". And every now and then his racism, his view of
the others as second-class human beings at best and as subhuman at worst becomes evident.
Like when he recently argued that Israel, as a society, is so much better than any of its neighbours (which, in itself, is not really a good argument at all) and then went on to declare that <paraphrasing> "Arab Israeli citizens have all the right that proper Israeli citizens have. Except that they can't serve in the Army, because these feckin' Arabs can't be trusted."
Having said that, I found the reports about the fights between the Lebanese military and the Fatah al Islam militants in Nahr al-Bared quite troubling. However, to put the blame on all Palestinians or even on all Palestinian refugees in the Lebanese camps is obviously as simplistic as it is wrong.
The statement issued by the Lebanese army said that the offensive was to target Fatah al Islam fighters hiding in the Palestinian refugee camps who were allegedly led, armed and financed by Syria......
I believe that 'terrorism' as it is now called is merely the preferred tactic of the weak against the strong. It is (in my view) no better or worse than conventional war as practiced over the last few centuries. The Irish independence movement pursued what would be called today as terrorism right from the start. Moreover, it was very effective both in wearing down the resources and the will of its oppressor, and of making evident the nature of the oppression itself to a world otherwise indifferent to it.
I agree with you that the situation of Lebanon is truly tragic. At one time that country provided a remarkable example of accomodation and cohabitation by Sunni, Shia, Druze and Eastern & Western Rite Christians. Sadly nearly all of that is gone and Israel bears much of the blame for it.
old europe wrote:Advocate wrote:Why do the media love the Palestinians?
That sounds quite racist to me. If you had said something like "Why does the media love Palestinian terrorists" or "Why does the media love radical Palestinians" or something along those lines... that would still be a loaded question, but rather neutral concerning any inherent racism.
Just imagine your reaction if somebody would ask "Why do people love Jews?" Would you be offended?
Really, your argument does not profit when your racism becomes that evident.
Racism
When was it determined that Palestinians were a race of humans?
Answer? Never!
ican711nm wrote:old europe wrote:Advocate wrote:Why do the media love the Palestinians?
That sounds quite racist to me. If you had said something like "Why does the media love Palestinian terrorists" or "Why does the media love radical Palestinians" or something along those lines... that would still be a loaded question, but rather neutral concerning any inherent racism.
Just imagine your reaction if somebody would ask "Why do people love Jews?" Would you be offended?
Really, your argument does not profit when your racism becomes that evident.
Racism
When was it determined that Palestinians were a race of humans?
Answer? Never!
It never was determined that Jews were a race of humans. It never was determined that Arians were a race of humans.
Would you therefore say that the Nazi regime was not racist?
McGentrix wrote:georgeob1 wrote:Sadly nearly all of that is gone and Israel bears much of the blame for it.
How do you figure?
Consult the history of the long Israeli intervention in Lebanon.
georgeob1 wrote:McGentrix wrote:georgeob1 wrote:Sadly nearly all of that is gone and Israel bears much of the blame for it.
How do you figure?
Consult the history of the long Israeli intervention in Lebanon.
What about the history of terrorist groups working out of Lebanon attempting to kill Israelis?
I just did another Godwin.
<sheesh>
