Posts Tagged ‘iran’

‘Castro back in the spotlight, predicts nuclear war’

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

From the Sydney Morning Herald article:

HAVANA: Fidel Castro has taken questions from Cuban ambassadors, warning them of the threat of global nuclear war in his most overtly political public act since he emerged from four years of near-total seclusion.

It was the revolutionary leader’s fifth appearance in less than a week, and the first in which he met senior government officials. The media blitz has many observers wondering if the 83-year-old former president plans to reinsert himself into Cuba’s political scene at a particularly sensitive time. The government – now run by his brother Raul – is in the midst of freeing dozens of political prisoners, faces a severe economic malaise and has been cracking down on high-level corruption.

[. . .]

Dr Castro’s fear that America would unleash a nuclear war is something he has warned about in opinion pieces for weeks.

He went so far as to predict in one essay that the recent World Cup in South Africa would be interrupted by a looming conflict. He later apologised for jumping the gun, but said he still thinks a nuclear conflagration is on the horizon.

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‘Israel convinces US with Credible military plan on Iran’

Monday, July 19th, 2010

From the jpost.com article:

Recent media reports suggests Jerusalem has increased diplomatic efforts to persuade White House that credible military option needed.

Have Israel’s efforts to convince the US to threaten Iran with a credible military option paid off? According to recent media reports, the answer might be yes.

Since the US pushed a fourth round of sanctions against Iran through the UN Security Council last month, Jerusalem has increased diplomatic efforts to convince the White House that for the sanctions to work, a credible military option needs to be on the table to scare Iran to reconsider its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

An indication that this might have happened came in the latest issue of Time magazine, in an article titled “An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table.”

Written by Joe Klein, the article claims that in recent months, the US military’s Central Command has made significant progress in planning targeted air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, some of which were deemed impossible to penetrate just two years ago.

According to the report, the progress was made possible by the “vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region.”

Israel has reportedly been “brought into the planning process.”

Read the full article for more information.

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‘Two explosions in Iran leave casualties-agency’

Friday, July 16th, 2010

From the AlertNet article:

TEHRAN, July 15 (Reuters) – Two strong explosions in Iran’s southeastern city of Zahedan on Thursday night killed and injured a number of people, the official IRNA news agency quoted a provincial official as saying.

“The number of casualties is not yet clear,” Jalal Sayyah told IRNA.

Irna said the explosions took place in front of a mosque.

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‘Cashing in on Internet censorship’

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

From the CNN article:

(CNN) — A growing number of software companies are capitalizing on an unexpected business opportunity: Internet censorship.

In countries where governments continue to ramp up Web filtering systems, more people are searching for tools that will allow them to access inaccessible information — and they are willing to pay for them.

Such tools include virtual private networks (VPN), proxy servers and other workarounds that enable users to breach barriers to blocked information online.

VPNs “tunnel” through to servers in a country with no Web controls, encrypting information under an anonymous computer address to conceal private traffic. Proxies also allow unfiltered Internet access but are considered less secure than VPNs.

“The market is growing very rapidly at the moment,” said Patrick Lin, who offers a circumvention technology he calls “Puff” to those looking for ways to leap over firewalls. One version is available for free, while another costs $16 to use for a year.

According to Lin, since he launched the application from his California office last June, it has been downloaded more than 500,000 times. Sixty percent of its 60,000 daily users are from China while 40 percent are in Iran, he said.

“The reason is the Chinese and the Iranian governments are becoming more aggressive with blocking Web sites,” he told CNN. “If China blocks Gmail, then the user base will increase a lot more rapidly.”

Earlier this month Iranian authorities imposed restrictions on Internet access in the country and a permanent ban on Gmail, Google’s e-mail service.

While there has been no such move in China, there has been speculation Google’s international site could be blocked after the company announced on January 12 it was considering ending its operations in the country and would stop censoring results on its Chinese search engine, Google.cn.

Read the full article for more information.

It’s quite interesting to see such articles in recent news despite how readily the super-elite have been discussing how to handle the thorn-in-their-sides that is freedom on the internet. Hopefully some good-hearted individuals, not only cash-hungry fiends, are looking into the technology behind breaking through internet censorship. Folks may be needing it in the United States pretty soon.

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‘An Impossible Happiness’

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Fidel Castro has written a new letter, this time warning of imminent nuclear war. Please read it in its entirety.

From periodico26.cu:

I promised that I would be the happiest man in the world to be wrong and, unfortunately, my happiness didn’t last.

The Football World Cup is still being contested and there are still six more days to go before the final match.

What a great opportunity will the Yankee imperialism and the fascist State of Israel possibly miss to keep the minds of the overwhelming majority of the people on Earth off their fundamental problems!

Who knows about the imperialists’ sinister plans towards Iran and their gross pretexts to attack it?

At the same time, I wonder, what are the Israeli warships doing, for the first time, in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s maritime areas?

Is it possible to think that the Yankee nuclear aircraft-carriers and the Israeli’s warships will leave the area, with the tail between the legs, when the demands contained in Resolution 1929 of June 9, 2010, approved by the UN Security Council are met, that is, the one authorizing the inspection of Iranian ships and aircraft in the territory of any State that, this time, allows the inspection of ships in the open sea?

The Resolution also establishes that the Iranian ships will not be inspected if Iran does not consent. In this case, the refusal would be analyzed.

An additional element is the possibility of confiscating what has been inspected; if confirmation is obtained that it infringes the provisions of the Resolution.

A disarmed Iran was the victim of that cruel war with Iraq where large groups of Guardians of the Revolution cleaned up the mine fields walking on them.

That is not the case today. As I said in previous Reflections, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was chief of the Revolutionary Guardians in the west of Iran that shouldered the main weight of that war.

Several years later, an emboldened Iraqi government sent most of the Republican Guard to the Arab Emirate of Kuwait and annexed that oil-rich territory, which became an easy prey.

The Iraqi government had sustained a good friendship with Cuba, which from the days when it was not at war with anyone had rendered it important health services. Our country tried to persuade it to leave Kuwait and put an end to the war it had provoked based on misperceptions.

Today, it is known that a mediocre Yankee ambassador, who had excellent relations with the Iraqi government, induced it to make that mistake.

Bush senior attacked his old friend leading a powerful coalition with a strong composition of Arab-Moslem-Sunni countries which supply oil to most of the rich industrial nations. That coalition advanced from the south of Iraq to prevent the withdrawal of the Republican Guard, which escaped to the Iraqi capital thanks to the restraint of the US Marine Corps and Armed Forces –commanded by Colin Powell, a prestigious general and later Secretary of State under George W. Bush.

Purely out of revenge, the retiring force became the target of rockets contaminated with downgraded uranium tested for the first time to determine the damage they could cause in the opposing troops.

The Moslem Shiite Iran that they are threatening now with their ground, sea and air forces is nothing like the Republican Guard they attacked with impunity in Iraq.

The empire is about to make an irreparable mistake and nothing can stop it. It walks inexorably towards a sinister fate.

The only thing sure now is that the Football World Cup had its quarterfinals. Thus, the fans of that sport could enjoy the exciting matches where we saw incredible things happen. It is said that the Netherlands team had not lost a World Cup match on a Friday, in 36 years. Only computers could make it possible to register such an event.

The fact is that Brazil did not make it to the semifinals of this Cup.

An arbiter left Brazil out of the competition. At least, that was the impression of an excellent commentator of the Cuban television who repeated it tirelessly. Later, the FIFA would say that the arbiter’s decision was correct.

Afterwards, at a decisive moment, with more than half the second time still to play, the same arbiter left Brazil with only 10 players in the field.

Yesterday, Argentina was eliminated. In the first minutes of the match, the German team, through its midfield player Muller, took by surprise the unsuspecting Argentinean defenders and the goalkeeper, and scored one goal.

After a while, the Argentinean forward players tried to score and failed no less than ten shots –compared to one from the German team.

The German team, on the other hand, scored three more goals, that even German Chancellor Angela Merkel applauded passionately.

Again, one of the favorite teams lost, leaving over 90% of football fans in Cuba perplexed.

The overwhelming majority of fans of that sport do not even know in what continent Uruguay is located. Final matches between European countries will the most colorless and anti historic since that sport was born.

On the other hand, the international developments that have taken place had nothing to do with a game of chance but rather with the basic logic guiding the destiny of the empire.

A number of news came to light on July 1, 2 and 3. They are all connected to one event: on July 2, the big powers with a right of veto in the UN Security Council, plus Germany, urged the Iranian government to “promptly respond” the invitation to return to the negotiations on its nuclear program.

The previous day, President Barack Obama had signed a law expanding the current measures against Iran’s energy and banking sectors and penalizing the companies that do business with government of Teheran. The result: a rigorous blockade and the suffocation of Iran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that his country will resume the talks by the end of August and emphasized that countries like Brazil and Turkey should be involved. These are the only Security Council members that opposed the sanctions of June 9.

A senior European Union official disdainfully remarked that neither Brazil nor Turkey would be invited to take part in the talks.

Nothing else is needed to draw the relevant conclusions.

None of the two sides will yield; one, prevented by the pride of the powerful, and the other because it has the capacity and the will to fight oppression, as we have seen so many times before in the history of mankind.

The people of Iran, a nation with ancient cultural traditions, will undoubtedly defend itself from the aggressors. It’s had to understand that Obama may seriously believe that it would yield to his demands.

The president of Iran and its religious leaders will resist, drawing inspiration from the Islamic Revolution headed by Ruhollah Khomeini, the creator of the Guardians of Revolution, the modern Armed Forces and the new State of Iran.

The poor peoples of the world, which cannot be blamed for the terrible mess created by imperialism, located as they are in this hemisphere south of the United States, and others in the west, center and south of Africa, as well as others on the planet who might be left untouched by the nuclear war, are left with the only option of coping with the consequences of the catastrophic nuclear war that will break out very soon.

Unfortunately, there is nothing for me to rectify. I take full responsibility with what I wrote in my latest Reflections.

Fidel Castro Ruz
July 4, 2010
5:36 p.m.

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