Category: Iran

  • Iran and Turkey major exporters to Kurdistan

    Iran and Turkey major exporters to Kurdistan

    The Globe

    The Haji Omaran border crossing where goods come into Kurdistan Region from Iran.
    The Haji Omaran border crossing where goods come into Kurdistan Region from Iran.

    The Kurdistan Region depends on neighboring countries Iran and Turkey for many of its goods. According to experts, the Kurdistan Regional Government cannot end these trade relationships to pressure either country to end the bombardment of the Region.

    The Kurdistan Region depends on neighboring countries Iran and Turkey for many of its goods. According to experts, the Kurdistan Regional Government cannot end these trade relationships to pressure either country to end the bombardment of the Region.

    Iran and Turkey are the Region’s main suppliers of goods and trade is around $10 billion dollars a year, and rising. Around 80 percent of goods in Kurdistan Region come from either Turkey or Iran.

    Kurdistan Region has around 1,200 foreign companies investing in the Region, and more than half of these are Turkish. The Region also has dozens of Iranian companies.

    Economic expert and Deputy Head of the Kurdistan Region Economy Relationships, Faisal Ali, says if the Region broke off trade relations with these two countries, there would be dire consequences because “The only entry point for the Region to import materials would be the central and southern parts of Iraq whose goods are mostly Turkish and Iranian!”

    Other than clothes and consumer items, Iranian and Turkish companies build apartments and roads. After 20 years of KRG, the Region still relies almost exclusively on imported goods and raw materials, making it a net importer.

    Economic expert Dr. Dler Shawes believes the economy and businesses should be organized under specific theories and principles.

    “The absence of such theories and principles means the Region has a weak policy regarding its economy and business. This has also made the Kurdistan Region a net consumer, which depends mainly on Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia,” said Shawes.

    Most goods come over the border crossings with Iran and Turkey, but some goods come through Erbil and Suleimaniya airports.

    “Any consumer country cannot have a strong economic infrastructure. This economic situation caused KRG to have a weak political stance towards neighboring countries as well,” said Ali.

    Ali also said it is impossible to close the border crossings, as it would cause hardship on the people of Kurdistan Region. “Prices would go up and people would face huge problems.”

    While the Kurdistan Region practices these policies in its economy and and there is negligible local investment, the Region is rich in terms of oil and other natural resources, such as fertile land.

    Many of the villages were abandoned when the government started employing many in the public sector. According to Shawes, KRG should implement policies to encourage investment in rural areas and have people move back to the villages.

    “If the government had cared about the agricultural and industrial sectors in recent years, the Kurdistan Region would now be able to stop trade relations with one of these two countries and use it as political pressure to stop bombardments,” said Ali.

    Some experts believe Iran and Turkey would be hard pressed to find other countries to export their goods to, as Kurdistan provides an excellent and convenient market.

    Shawes thinks differently and points out Turkey has also a strong economic relationship with Europe, some eastern countries and Gulf countries. “Although Kurdistan Region is a location for those two countries in terms of business, economy, culture, politics and other aspects, Iran also has strong business ties with Russia, Azerbaijan and some other countries.”

    via KurdishGlobe- Iran and Turkey major exporters to Kurdistan.

  • Secret trial revelations prompt US-Israeli diplomatic storm

    Secret trial revelations prompt US-Israeli diplomatic storm

    Blogger tells how US government spied on Israeli officials in Washington

    By David Usborne, US Editor

    us israeli
    Shamai Leibowitz was worried by Israeli attempts to lobby American politicians

    A court case against a translator who leaked US government secrets was conducted in secret because it centred on the revelation that the FBI had eavesdropped on Israeli embassy phone calls, it was revealed yesterday.

    The extraordinary limitations in place for the prosecution of Shamai Leibowitz, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison for disseminating classified information, meant that even the judge sentencing him did not know what he was supposed to have leaked. “All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams said last year. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”

    But now Richard Silverstein, the blogger to whom Leibowitz passed his information, has come forward to defend his source and in so doing has made public another source of difficulty in the strained US-Israeli relationship. Leibowitz passed him about 200 pages of verbatim records of phone calls and conversations between embassy officials, saying that he believed the documents revealed Israeli officials trying unlawfully to influence US policy and edging towards military action against Iran.

    “I see him as an American patriot and a whistleblower, and I’d like his actions to be seen in that context,” Silverstein told The New York Times. “What really concerned Shamai at the time was the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, which he thought would be damaging to both Israel and the United States.”

    He could not provide hard copies of the documents as he said he had burnt them when the case against Leibowitz came under investigation. But, he said, among the exchanges detailed was one where Israeli officials expressed their nervousness that they were being monitored. They also discussed their intention of drafting opinion pieces to be published under the names of prominent supporters. There has been dismay among civil liberties and open government advocates who point to pledges made by Mr Obama before his election to seek new transparency in Washington. Instead, his administration has launched a record number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act – five including the Leibowitz case. Previously, there had been only four such prosecutions opened by all previous administrations.

    The government notably had egg on its face when a case against a former official of the National Security Agency, collapsed this summer. Thomas Drake had faced up to 35 years for leaking information exposing bungling at the agency to The Baltimore Sun. Most of the charges were dropped when the judge insisted that the leaked documents be shown to the jury.

    “The government’s penchant since September 11, 2001, for operating in secrecy and hiding behind an executive branch “state secrets” doctrine has damaged our long-term national security and national character,” Mr Drake wrote in The Washington Post last week.

    What seems odd in this latest case is that no one in Washington will be shocked to learn that the FBI keeps tabs on the Israeli embassy. Monitoring foreign missions, particularly to screen for spies, is common practice and legal if sanctioned by a special court in the Justice Department.

    Leibowitz, meanwhile, seems to have been afflicted more by naiveté than ill-will. The leaked documents, which reportedly include conversations involving at least one US congressman, did appear to reveal lobbying by Israeli officials of Capitol Hill. But that is what diplomats are paid to do.

    In addition to the prosecutions, the Obama administration classified more than 77 million government documents last year, a one-year increase of 40 per cent. This zeal to protect government business is in sharp contrast to Mr Obama’s praise in 2008 of whistleblowers, whom he described as, “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government”.

    www.independent.co.uk, 7 September 2011

  • ‘Muslim countries should not advance NATO’s interests’

    ‘Muslim countries should not advance NATO’s interests’

    TEHRAN – Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi has advised Muslim countries in the region not to take measures that would serve the interests of the NATO alliance.

    brojerdiBoroujerdi, who is the chairman of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, made the remarks in an interview with the Mehr News Agency published on Sunday in reference to the fact that Turkey has agreed to host an early warning radar as part of NATO’s missile defense system, which is ostensibly meant to counter an alleged ballistic missile threat from Iran.

    The Turkish Foreign Ministry announced on September 2 that negotiations over NATO’s anti-missile shield had reached “their final stages.”

    However, Turkey did not say when or where the U.S. early warning radar would be stationed, according to the Guardian.

    Boroujerdi said, “Muslim countries should maintain security in the region through reliance on their capabilities and cooperation and should not allow a situation to develop where insecurity prevails in the region and NATO’s interests in the region are served by Muslim countries.”

    He added, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has the necessary capability to safeguard its security,” and such measures will not deter it.

    “NATO not only does not contribute to regional security but is also a major source of insecurity in the region,” Boroujerdi stated.

    “NATO’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrated the fact that NATO is only pursuing its own interests in the region.

    “NATO’s intervention in Libya also proved that NATO has no respect for Muslim countries,” Boroujerdi added.

    via ‘Muslim countries should not advance NATO’s interests’ – Tehran Times.

  • Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

    Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

    Criminals acquired over 500 DigiNotar digital certificates; Mozilla and Google issue ‘death sentence’

    By Gregg Keizer

    SSL SecuredComputerworld – The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.

    The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.

    Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft’s Windows Update service.

    “Now that someone (presumably from Iran) has obtained a legit HTTPS cert for CIA.gov, I wonder if the US gov will pay attention to this mess,” Christopher Soghoian, a Washington D.C.-based researcher noted for his work on online privacy, said in a tweet Saturday.

    Soghoian was referring to assumptions by many experts that Iranian hackers, perhaps supported by that country’s government, were behind the attack. Google has pointed fingers at Iran, saying that attacks using an ill-gotten certificate for google.com had targeted Iranian users.

    All the certificates were issued by DigiNotar, a Dutch issuing firm that last week admitted its network had been hacked in July.

    The company claimed that it had revoked all the fraudulent certificates, but then realized it had overlooked one that could be used to impersonate any Google service, including Gmail. DigiNotar went public only after users reported their findings to Google.

    Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly intercepted.

    Google and Mozilla said this weekend that they would permanently block all the digital certificates issued by DigiNotar, including those used by the Dutch government.

    Their decisions come less than a week after Google, Mozilla and Microsoft all revoked more than 200 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates for use in their browsers, but left untouched hundreds more, many of which were used by the Dutch government to secure its websites.

    “Based on the findings and decision of the Dutch government, as well as conversations with other browser makers, we have decided to reject all of the Certificate Authorities operated by DigiNotar,” Heather Adkins, an information security manager for Google, said in a Saturday blog post.

    Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox engineering, echoed that late on Friday.

    “All DigiNotar certificates will be untrusted by Mozilla products,” said Nightingale, who also said that the Dutch government had reversed its position of last week — when it had asked browser makers to exempt its DigiNotar certificates.

    “The Dutch government has since audited DigiNotar’s performance and rescinded this assessment,” Nightingale said. “This is not a temporary suspension, it is a complete removal from our trusted root program.”

    On Saturday, Piet Hein Donner, the Netherlands’s Minister of the Interior, said the government could not guarantee the security of its websites because of the DigiNotar hack, and told citizens not to log into its sites until new certificates had been obtained from other sources.

    The DigiNotar breach is being audited by Fox-IT, which told the Dutch government that it was likely certificates for its sites had been fraudulently acquired by hackers.

    Several security researchers said the move by browser makers puts an end to DigiNotar’s certificate business.

    “Effectively a death sentence for DigiNotar,” said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, in a Friday tweet.

    Mozilla was scathing in its criticism of DigiNotar.

    Nightingale ticked off the missteps that led Mozilla to permanently block all sites signed with the company’s certificates, including DigiNotar’s failure to notify browser vendors in July and its inability to tell how many certificates had been illegally obtained. “[And] the attack is not theoretical,” Nightingale added. “We have received multiple reports of these certificates being used in the wild.”

    Markham went into greater detail on the hack and its ramifications. “It has now emerged that DigiNotar had not noticed the full extent of the compromise,” said Markham in a Saturday post to his personal blog. “The attackers had managed to hide the traces of the misissuance — perhaps by corrupting log files.”

    Because the Google certificate that prompted DigiNotar to acknowledge the intrusion was obtained before most of the others, Markham speculated that there had actually been two separate attacks, perhaps by different groups.

    “It is at least possible (but entirely speculative) that an initial competent attacker has had access to [DigiNotar’s] systems for an unknown amount of time, and a second attacker gained access more recently and their less-subtle, bull-in-a-china shop approach in issuing the [hundreds of] certificates triggered the alarms,” he said.

    Last week, Helsinki-based antivirus company F-Secure said it had found signs that DigiNotar’s network had been compromised as early as May 2009.

    Mozilla will update Firefox 6 and Firefox 3.6 on Tuesday to permanently block all DigiNotar-issued certificates, including those used by the Dutch government.

    On Saturday Google updated Chrome to do the same.

    Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at  @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is [email protected].

    www.computerworld.com, 4 September 2011

  • Libya and Syria: The Neocon Plan to Attack Seven Countries in Five Years

    Libya and Syria: The Neocon Plan to Attack Seven Countries in Five Years

    Kurt Nimmo

    In the video below, former four star general and NATO commander Wesley Clark talks about the neocon plan to invade seven countries in five years. Included in the plan was an attack on Libya. Clark mentions the plan at two minutes, 26 seconds into the video.

    The video was recorded on October 3, 2007, at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

    Clark’s revelation is nothing new, although it reminds us that the attack on Libya fits into a larger context and there are horrific conflicts to come if the globalists have their way.

    Following the election of Obama and a reshuffling of the same old deck in Congress in 2008, it was believed the bad old days of neocon wars were finally behind us. Obama said he would close down the wars and bring home the troops. Instead, he intensified the effort to spread chaos, mayhem and mass murder in the Middle East and South Asia, thus underscoring the fact there is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to creative destruction (it is telling that the neocon Michael Leeden has used the term – creative destruction is a Marxist concept).

    Clark has talked about the neocon plan on several occasions. He said the following during a speech at the University of Alabama in October of 2006, recounting a conversation with a general at the Pentagon:

    I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a… five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, “Is that classified, that paper?” He said, “Yes Sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it.”

    The neocons, of course, are merely one of a number of establishment factions, all of them reading from the same script. Obama’s attack on Libya and the impending attack on Syria under the ruse popularly known as the “Arab Spring” (pushed by elite NGOs and the CIA) is interchangeable with the Bush regime’s call to action against the Axis of Evil. The only difference between Democrat Obama and the (supposedly) Republican neocons (who have roots in Trotskyism) is that the neocons are decidedly Israeli-centric in their geopolitical stance.

    The global elite do not care about Israel or any other nation-state, but are not above using the neocons – who are highly organized and motivated (despite propaganda depicting them as inept) – in their quest to destroy Arab and Muslim nationalism that directly threatens their drive for hegemonic rule (in particular, Sharia law with its restrictions on banking poses a threat to the banksters).

    Syria is the next target followed by the big Kahuna, Iran. For the globalists, who are determined to wreck all nation-states and eradicate national sovereignty and borders, the fact this effort will precipitate the destruction of the “world’s policeman,” the United States, is an extra added bonus.

    Multiple wars in multiple and far-stretched “theaters” will ultimately bankrupt the United States, as Ron Paul and a handful of others have warned. Obama has made if perfectly clear that the U.S. will not leave Iraq and Afghanistan and plans to continue attacking Pakistan and failed states in Africa where the CIA cut-out al-Qaeda has appeared on cue.

    Wesley Clark’s warning is prescient, but nearly a decade too late. Clark is, at best,disingenuous because he himself a war criminal for the role he played in the slaughter of civilians in Yugoslavia.

    www.infowars.com, September 2, 2011

  • UN raises fears over Iran’s nuclear weapons plan

    UN raises fears over Iran’s nuclear weapons plan

    By George Jahn in Vienna, AP

    The UN nuclear agency has said it is “increasingly concerned” about intelligence suggesting that Iran continues to secretly work on developing a nuclear payload for a missile and other components of a nuclear weapons programme.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report said “many member states” are providing evidence for the assessment, describing information as “credible, extensive and comprehensive”.

    The report was made available after being shared with the 35 IAEA member nations and the UN Security Council. It also said Tehran has fulfiled a promise made earlier this year and started installing equipment to enrich uranium at a new location – an underground bunker better protected from air attack.

    Enrichment can produce both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material, and Tehran – which says it wants only to produce fuel with the technology – is under four sets of UN Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze it.

    Tehran also denies secretly experimenting with a nuclear weapons programme.

    www.independent.co.uk, 3 September 2011