No nuclear deal better than bad deal: Leader

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says Iran would rather not sign any nuclear agreement with the P5+1 than strike a deal that contradicts the interests of the Iranian nation.

During an address to Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force commanders on Sunday, Ayatollah Khamenei said Iran agrees with the US on that no deal between Tehran and the P5+1 is better than a bad deal.

Ayatollah Khamenei further said Iranian nuclear negotiators are making efforts to secure the removal of hostile sanctions against Tehran during their discussions with the six world powers, adding, however, that if they fail to do so, there are numerous ways inside the country to blunt the impact of the US-led bans.

In order to reach a nuclear accord with the P5+1, the Islamic Republic has currently suspended 20-percent uranium enrichment as well as the development of centrifuges and nuclear facilities in Arak and Fordo, said the Leader, adding that Tehran has acted logically in the course of the negotiations, while the other side seeks to blackmail the Iranians.

The Leader said he does not agree a negotiations procedure based on which the two sides would initially reach a general nuclear agreement within a certain timeframe and confirming the details later.

Ayatollah Khamenei stressed that the general points and technical details of any accord need to be agreed upon simultaneously. Sun Feb 8, 2015 8:34AM PTV.

New Allegations Renew Old Questions About Saudi Arabia And 9/11.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, some current and former American officials have been urging President Barack Obama to release secret files they say document links between the government of Saudi Arabia and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Other officials, including the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, have said the classified documents do not prove that the Saudi government knew about or financed the 2001 terrorist attacks, and that making the material public would serve no purpose.

Now, unsubstantiated court testimony by Zacharias Moussaoui, a former al-Qaida member serving life in federal prison, has renewed the push by those who want a closer look into whether there was official Saudi involvement with al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 hijackers. They say it should start with the release of 28 pages relating to Saudi Arabia from a joint congressional inquiry into the attacks.

"We owe the families a full accounting," said Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, a Democrat who has read the classified pages written in 2002. They were left out of the public version of the report on the orders of President George W. Bush, who said they could divulge intelligence sources and methods. Officials on both sides of the debate acknowledge that protecting the delicate U.S.-Saudi relationship also played a role.

Lynch and Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., have sponsored a resolution that calls for declassifying the records. The White House has asked intelligence agencies to review the pages with an eye toward potential declassification, spokesman Ned Price said, but there is no timetable.

The controversy comes at a consequential moment in the relationship between the U.S. and the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has a new king — pro-American like the late monarch — and the two wary allies are working closely to confront the Islamic State, the turmoil in Yemen and Iran's nuclear aspirations. At the same time, U.S. officials say they continue to privately admonish Saudi Arabia over human rights abuses in the kingdom, such as the recent flogging of a blogger, and its support of the spread of religious extremism abroad.

Moussaoui, who claimed during his terror conspiracy court case that he had planned to fly a plane into the White House on Sept. 11, was deposed by lawyers in a civil suit by some Sept. 11 families who are seeking damages from the Saudi government and other defendants, including charities and banks. Saudi Arabia vigorously disputes the allegations.

Moussaoui testified at his trial that key members of the Saudi royal family continued to fund al-Qaida in the late 1990s, even after the organization had declared war on the House of Saud. He also described plotting with an employee of the Saudi Embassy in Washington to shoot down Air Force One.

Lynch said the classified 28 pages, which are drawn from intelligence collection and FBI investigations, "are consistent" with Moussaoui's testimony.

"There are specifics, there are transactions, there are names," Lynch said. Others who have read the document say it's far from definitive.

Two senior congressional aides described the case as weak. One noted that just because Saudi citizens helped the mostly Saudi hijackers in the U.S. does not mean they knew about the operation. Another said that the pages contain inaccuracies that could compromise an important diplomatic relationship.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to describe material that remains classified. "If you think it's thin, well then, why not release it?" Lynch said.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he supports the release because he believes the pages would "demystify" the notion of a Saudi conspiracy.

"The issues raised in those pages were investigated by the 9/11 commission and found to be unsubstantiated," he said.

That commission, which built on the work of the joint congressional inquiry with access to FBI files and secret intelligence, did not exonerate Saudi Arabia. But it did conclude in its 2004 report that there was no evidence that the Saudi government funded al-Qaida during the planning of the attacks.

"It does not appear that any government other than the Taliban financially supported al-Qaida before 9/11, although some governments may have contained al-Qaida sympathizers who turned a blind eye to al-Qaida's fundraising activities," the report said. "Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al-Qaida funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization."

Two ardent dissenters from that conclusion have been former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a leader of the congressional inquiry and longtime chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John Lehman, a Sept. 11 commission member and former Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan.

Graham has said he sees "a direct line between some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia." He believes that a Saudi government agent living in the United States, Omar al-Bayoumi, provided assistance to two Sept. 11 hijackers in San Diego at the behest of elements of the Saudi government.

The New York lawsuit argues that Saudi rulers were playing a double game in the years before the attacks, expelling Osama bin Laden and declaring opposition to al-Qaida, while secretly funding it to assuage the kingdom's religious conservatives.

Moussaoui, in testimony from a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, told plaintiff lawyers it was "an absolute lie" that Saudi Arabia severed its ties with bin Laden and al-Qaida in 1994.

"This is a complete misleading ... assumption of people who are not familiar with the way the Saudi government is established" because the government has "two heads of the snake," he said, according to a transcript.

The House of Saud, he said, "cannot keep power in Saudi Arabia without having the agreement" of the extremist Wahhabi religious establishment, he said: "Look, see, we are not against Islam or the jihad, we finance bin Laden." Huffington Post: 07/02/2015 14:13 GMT Updated: 07/02/2015 14:59 GMT.

Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis.

World View: Everyone knows where al-Qa'ida gets its money, but while the violence is sectarian, the West does nothing.

Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight "the war on terror", they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.

Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa'ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that "al-Qa'ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia".

Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa'ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa'ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen. But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.

Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on "terrorist finance" from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide". Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups". Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since "al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point".

Why did the US and its European allies treat Saudi Arabia with such restraint when the kingdom was so central to al-Qa'ida and other even more sectarian Sunni jihadist organisations? An obvious explanation is that the US, Britain and others did not want to offend a close ally and that the Saudi royal family had judiciously used its money to buy its way into the international ruling class. Unconvincing attempts were made to link Iran and Iraq to al-Qa'ida when the real culprits were in plain sight.

But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa'ida members or al-Qa'ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa'ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.
Pakistani papers no longer pay much attention to hundreds of Shia butchered from Quetta to Lahore. In Iraq, most of the 7,000 or more people killed this year are Shia civilians killed by the bombs of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, part of an umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which also encompasses Syria. In overwhelmingly Sunni Libya, militants in the eastern town of Derna killed an Iraqi professor who admitted on video to being a Shia before being executed by his captors.

Suppose a hundredth part of this merciless onslaught had been directed against Western targets rather than against Shia Muslims, would the Americans and the British be so accommodating to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis? It is this that gives a sense of phoniness to boasts by the vastly expanded security bureaucracies in Washington and London about their success in combating terror justifying vast budgets for themselves and restricted civil liberties for everybody else. All the drones in the world fired into Pashtun villages in Pakistan or their counterparts in Yemen or Somalia are not going to make much difference if the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria ever decide – as Osama bin Laden did before them – that their main enemies are to be found not among the Shia but in the United States and Britain.

Instead of the fumbling amateur efforts of the shoe and underpants bombers, security services would have to face jihadist movements in Iraq, Syria and Libya fielding hundreds of bomb-makers and suicide bombers. Only gradually this year, videos from Syria of non-Sunnis being decapitated for sectarian motives alone have begun to shake the basic indifference of the Western powers to Sunni jihadism so long as it is not directed against themselves.

Saudi Arabia as a government for a long time took a back seat to Qatar in funding rebels in Syria, and it is only since this summer that they have taken over the file. They wish to marginalise the al-Qa'ida franchisees such as Isil and the al-Nusra Front while buying up and arming enough Sunni war-bands to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

The directors of Saudi policy in Syria – the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the Deputy Defence Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan – plan to spend billions raising a militant Sunni army some 40,000 to 50,000 strong. Already local warlords are uniting to share in Saudi largesse for which their enthusiasm is probably greater than their willingness to fight.
The Saudi initiative is partly fuelled by rage in Riyadh at President Obama's decision not to go to war with Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on 21 August. Nothing but an all-out air attack by the US similar to that of Nato in Libya in 2011 would overthrow Assad, so the US has essentially decided he will stay for the moment. Saudi anger has been further exacerbated by the successful US-led negotiations on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.

By stepping out of the shadows in Syria, the Saudis are probably making a mistake. Their money will only buy them so much. The artificial unity of rebel groups with their hands out for Saudi money is not going to last. They will be discredited in the eyes of more fanatical jihadis as well as Syrians in general as pawns of Saudi and other intelligence services.

A divided opposition will be even more fragmented. Jordan may accommodate the Saudis and a multitude of foreign intelligence services, but it will not want to be the rallying point for an anti-Assad army.
The Saudi plan looks doomed from the start, though it could get a lot more Syrians killed before it fails. Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre highlights succinctly the risks involved in the venture: "Saudi Arabia could find itself replicating its experience in Afghanistan, where it built up disparate mujahedin groups that lacked a unifying political framework. The forces were left unable to govern Kabul once they took it, paving the way for the Taliban to take over. Al-Qa'ida followed, and the blowback subsequently reached Saudi Arabia." The Independent, 08 December 2013.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/mass-murder-in-the-middle-east-is-funded-by-our-friends-the-saudis-8990736.html

US contractor wants Abu Ghraib lawsuit scapped.

A US military contractor that allegedly orchestrated torture at notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is trying to have a federal judge dismiss a lawsuit lodged against it.

The Virginia-based CACI Premier Technology, which has been sued by four former Iraqi inmates, said Friday its employees were working under military control in wartime and that their actions can't be questioned in a federal court.

The four Iraqi inmates said they were tortured by the contractor officers ahead of interrogations. They said they were beaten and sexually abused, given electrical shocks and suffered sleep and oxygen dehydration as well as forced nudity.

A court scrapped the lawsuit in 2013 on different grounds, but a federal appeals court has revived the case.

The federal judge at the hearing at the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, said Friday he would need more time to think about whether to dismiss the lawsuit against CACI.

The hearing concentrated on the so-called political question doctrine which says a court cannot rule on political, rather than legal, matters.

“The military exercised complete control. These interrogation techniques were permitted," said defense lawyer John O'Connor. "There has to be a plan for every interrogation."

However, lawyers for the detainees asserted that CACI interrogators had effectively gone rogue because of a "profound command vacuum" that existed at Abu Ghraib.

They called on the judge not to confuse the "legitimate authority to lawfully interrogate individuals" with a "license to torture".

"It is undisputed that there was a command vacuum when these vicious abuses occurred," said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer for the detainees.

"None of them were authorized by the military,"  Azmy noted. The abuses of Abu Ghraib detainees committed by the US Army and the CIA first came to light in reports published in late 2003. The following year, photos emerged depicting the human rights violations including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.

Between May 2004 and March 2006, some US soldiers were convicted in courts-martial for the violations committed from 2003 to 2004. Sat Feb 7, 2015 7:15AM PTV.

Turkish FM withdraws from Munich summit because of Israel.

The Turkish foreign minister has withdrawn from the Munich Security Conference over the presence of an Israeli delegation in a marginal session.

Mevlut Cavusoglu decided on Friday to pull out of the conference at the last minute after he found out that organizers of a meeting on Middle East had included representatives from Israel.

"I was going to attend the conference but we decided not to after they added Israeli officials to the Middle East session at the last minute," Cavusoglu said in a news conference after a meeting in Berlin with Turkey’s envoys to the European countries.

However, he said that the decision has nothing to do with Turkey’s relations with Germany.

The move highly infuriated the Israelis present at the talks with head of the delegation Yuval Steinitz, who serves as Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, saying that Cavusoglu’s decision to pull out of the conference heavily clouded “Turkey's future and character.”

Turkey downgraded its ties with Israel after the Tel Aviv regime killed nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists on board of a flotilla that was heading toward Gaza in 2010. Another Turkish activist later died of wounds from the attack. Ankara reacted harshly and made the Israelis apologize for the killing, but the ties of the former allies remain to be normalized. The 2010 tragedy has also made Turkish officials more outspoken against Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

Last summer, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel’s massive assault on Gaza a clear case of barbarism which even outsized atrocities committed by Hitler. 

The Munich Security Conference is the largest gathering on international security policy and has been taking place annually since 1963. Fri Feb 6, 2015 9:19PM PTV.

Detroid’s James Robertson gets $300,000 in donations.

An African American man in the US city of Detroit who has walked 21 miles (34 kilometers) every day to and from work for the past decade has received over $300,000 in donations, in a country often associated with selfish individualism.

James Robertson, 56, has commuted eight miles to work and 13 miles back again ever since his car broke down 10 year ago, the Detroit Free Pressreported on Sunday. According to the newspaper, Robertson earns $10.55 an hour which is not enough to save up to buy, insure and maintain a running vehicle in Detroit.

He rides buses part of the way to and from his work, but because they don’t cover the whole route, he ends up walking 21 miles almost every day.

After his story was published, a wave of support followed. An Internet-based fund-raiser to buy Robertson a car reached the $300,000 mark Thursday, which had an initial goal of $5,000.

He now has enough money to buy a fleet of cars after generous donations poured from across the US, where individuals have mostly moved towards self-absorption and vanity.

The story has placed Robertson in the middle of a media hysteria, with interview requests from ABC, NBC, CBS, and a variety of radio stations and magazines.

Evan Leedy, a 19-year-old Wayne State University student, started the GoFundMe drive for Robertson on Sunday that has received donations from more than 11,400 donors in four days.

"This is the kind of guy America needs. Hard working and dedicated. He has the type of character that every employer dreams about," wrote Edward Klekotka, who donated $20.

Robertson says he will most likely purchase a Ford Taurus vehicle. He said he will also use some of the money he has received for medical and dental care expenses.

Robertson told the Detroit Free Press, “Even if my situation changes, you never forget there are so many other people that are in my situation.”

Robertson's plight has highlighted the situation many in Detroit, the birthplace of the US auto industry, face daily in getting to work.

The city, which filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2013, has pockets of extreme poverty and no cohesive transportation system. Fri Feb 6, 2015 5:19PM PTV

Experts discover gene that may prolong lifespan by 60%.

If you had the choice, would you like to live until you are 120 years old? If the answer is yes, then there is good news for you.

Researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland believe they have found a gene that can extend the lifespan by 60 percent.

The extra gene, called ahuizotl, or 'azot,' is thought to kill unhealthy cells in the body. At the moment, the experiment is limited to fruit flies, which have just been given their third round of gene treatment.

When the researchers from the Bern University gave the flies the gene, they noticed that the insects' tissues became healthier and aged more slowly. Researchers believe that this could also work for human bodies. Thu Feb 5, 2015 7:54AM  PTV