This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 15.58 BST on Sunday 22 August 2010. A version appeared on p21 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Monday 23 August 2010. It was last modified at 14.00 BST on Tuesday 24 August 2010.
Iran unveils bomber drone that aims to deliver peace and friendship
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says craft has 'main message of peace and friendship' but is intended to deter aggression
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a ceremony inaugurating Iran’s new longrange unmanned bomber aircraft. The drone has been dubbed the Karrar, meaning ‘striker’ in Persian. Photograph: Vahid Reza Alaei/AP
Iran has unveiled an unmanned, longdistance bomber drone described by the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as "an ambassador of death" to Tehran's enemies.
At a ceremony today, Ahmadinejad said the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) – named Karrar, meaning "striker" in Persian – had "a main message of peace and friendship" but was intended to deter aggression "and keep the enemy paralysed in his bases".
The presentation came as technicians began fuelling the Islamic republic's first nuclear power station, at Bushehr, in a development Israel has described as "totally unacceptable".
The US and Britain say the Bushehr plant, which is monitored by the UN's nuclear watchdog, poses no proliferation threat because Russia is supplying the nuclear fuel and will remove the spent fuel rods, minimizing any risk that they could be used to make nuclear weapons.
Iran is under UN sanctions to force a halt to uranium enrichment because of fears that it secretly plans to build nuclear weapons. It flatly denies having any such intention.
Ahmed Vahidi, the Iranian defence minister, said the Karrar had a range of up to 620 miles, which is not far enough to reach Israel.
Iranian state TV reported that the UAV could carry four cruise missiles, two 250lb bombs or one 500lb bomb.
The drone was the latest item of military hardware to be inaugurated by Iran against a background of continuing tension over the nuclear issue.
On Friday, Tehran testfired a new surfacetosurface missile called the Qiam (meaning "rising"). It has already developed longrange missiles capable of hitting Israel and eastern Europe and of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Earlier this month, the Debka file website, which appears to have links to Israeli intelligence, reported that the father of Iran's UAV programme, Reza Baruni, had been assassinated in a bomb attack in his home town of Ahwaz, in Khuzestan.
There has been no confirmation of this unattributed claim from any other source.
It is widely believed that western intelligence services, Israel and perhaps
Arab countries have been seeking to sabotage the Iranian nuclear programme. Experts say the programme appears to have suffered setbacks.
The Iranian media has previously reported the successful test of a radarevading "stealth" drone with bombing capabilities. In March 2009, US fighter jets in Iraq shot down an unmanned Iranian spy drone, generating concern in
Washington. Yesterday, Ahmadinejad warned that any attack against Iran would be "suicidal". Still, the threat of preemptive military action that could ignite war across the Middle East may be receding. Obama administration officials were reported last week to have told Israel they believe Iran is still a year away from being able to build a nuclear weapon.
The New York Times quoted Israeli officials as saying that their assessments were coming into line with Washington's view, but they remain suspicious that Iran has a secret uranium enrichment site yet to be discovered – after one was revealed in a mountainside near Qom last September as sanctions moves intensified.
Israel, an undeclared atomic power which, unlike Iran, has not signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), has often warned that it cannot live with a nucleararmed Iran and hinted that it may attack it, as it did Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981.
Iran has repeatedly declared a willingness to return to nuclear talks with the EU, but the exact nature of any negotiations has yet to be defined. Nothing has happened since October.
Ahmadinejad was quoted in a Japanese newspaper on Friday as saying Iran would be prepared to stop highergrade uranium enrichment if it was guaranteed nuclear fuel supplies for a research reactor. But the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – who makes all key national security decisions – said last week that Iran would not talk to the US unless sanctions and military threats were lifted.
The dangers of Sharia Law in America:
FALLOUT: ‘Plugs had to be pulled on our system’ to clear Hamas operative to tour TopSecret NCTC, ‘The NCTC has Kifah Mustapha on the highest watch list we have’
Posted by Patrick S. Poole Sep 30th 2010 at 7:31 am in Featured Story, Islamic extremism | Comments (49)
The fallout continues in response to my Big Peace article filed on Monday concerning a known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism finance trial in U.S. history who was given a VIP tour of the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the FBI training center at Quantico as part of a six-week FBI Citizen Academy arranged by the FBI Chicago Field Office.
Now a Homeland Security official (requesting anonymity for fear of retaliation by superiors) has contacted Big Peace saying that “the plugs had to be pulled on our system” in order to allow Kifah Mustapha to enter the NCTC and that “the NCTC has Kifah Mustapha on the highest watch list we have. There’s no way from a systems point-of-view that this could be an accidental oversight, unless they didn’t bother checking at all as they are required to do.”
The DHS official added, “It’s as if we haven’t learned anything from twenty years of reaching out to the wrong people in the Muslim community
Photo of Hamas operative Sheikh Kifah Mustapha (front row, second on left) touring the National Counterterrorism Center on September 14th provided to Big Peace by FBI Chicago Field Office spokesman yesterday (resized from hi-res photo), which FBI-HQ claims is doctored.
My report on Monday was prompted by a WLS ABC7-Chicago story over the weekend by news anchor Ben Bradley describing his participation in the FBI’s Citizen Academy with Kifah Mustapha. As I noted then, curiously absent from Bradley’s story was any mention of his Hamas travel partner’s terror-tied background. Even more curious, ABC7 had aired an investigative report back in March about Mustapha, along with several subsequent reports about his by the From: http://bigpeace.com/abostom/2010/09/30/theoicandtotalitarianislam/
But as the “Islamintern”/OIC holds forth in Chicago this week. We must share and preserve for posterity these timeless, intellectually honest insights on the totalitarian nature of Islam Professor Lewis published in his prime, during January, 1954:
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition…. Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West…. In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy…[I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God’s vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”
…Quite obviously, the Ulama of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which- the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as
“There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet!” was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith-a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy-might well strike a responsive note.