Posts tagged usa

First high gas prices, now water. A shocking new report about the nation’s crumbling drinking water system says that Americans should expect their bills to double or triple to cover repairs just to keep their faucets pouring. That means adding up to $900 a year more for water, nearly equal the amount of the newly extended payroll tax cut.

Fixing and expanding underground drinking water systems will cost over $1 trillion in the next 25 years and users will get socked with the bill, according to the American Water Works Association.

As with most infrastructure investments, spending heavily now means less costs down the road. But with little appetite in the country for even trickling taxes now, a delayed and more expensive fix is almost guaranteed. The association figures that spending to fix leaky water systems will double from roughly $13 billion a year today to $30 billion annually by 2040.

“Because pipe assets last a long time, water systems that were built in the later part of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th century have, for the most part, never experienced the need for pipe replacement on a large scale,” said the report provided to Washington Secrets. “The dawn of an era in which the assets will need to be replaced puts growing stress on communities that will continue to increase for decades to come.”

What kind of stress? Families can expect to pay at least $300-$550 more for water in taxes and fees just to keep their current systems operating. Add growth and improved systems, and that bill jumps to $900 for a family of three, said the report.

Currently, Americans pay about $400 a month in water taxes and fees.

(Source: washingtonexaminer.com)

Deputy Chief of Iran’s Armed Forces Gen. Mohammad Hejazi issued a new threat Tuesday, Feb. 21: “Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests… we will act without waiting for their actions.”
debkafile’s military sources report that an Iranian preemptive attack on Israel has been in the air for some weeks. It became realistic because the dragging out of the argument between Washington and Jerusalem over a military strike and the two government’s indecisiveness gave Tehran a golden opportunity to further its interests.

It bestowed on Iran the gift of entering into talks on its nuclear program with the six world powers (P5 plus 1) free of a military threat and therefore in a superior bargaining position. For openers, Tehran has already pocketed the Obama administration’s promise of permission to continue to enrich uranium up to 5 percent in any quantity and will be more than ready to lay down more demands.
Gen. Hejazi’s threat of a preemptive strike against Israel also serves the Islamic regime in its run-up to a general election on March 3. It aims to show the Iranian voter and Middle East public that Iran has successfully turned US and Israeli aggression against Iran against them and demonstrated they are no more than paper tigers incapable of carrying through on their rhetoric. The military initiative therefore stays in Iran’s hands.

In Tehran, the standard Israeli cliché of “We don’t’ advise anyone to test our resolve” has worn thin.
By letting two Iranian warships bearing arms for Assad pass Israel’s coast on its way to Tartus without interference, Israel encouraged Tehran to assume that, in the last reckoning, it will abstain from a unilateral strike to eradicate Iran’s nuclear facilities without Washington’s blessing.

The Netanyahu government’s resolve is expected to melt away under the bulldozer assault of one American emissary after another touching down at Ben-Gurion airport to corner them into backing down.
Once Israel lets its hands be tied, Tehran calculates, it will become progressively harder to break them loose, so that if Tehran does carry out a limited “preemptive” missile attack on the Jewish state, Jerusalem will again bow to Washington and let itself be coerced into not responding.

Thursday, Feb. 23, US National Director of Intelligence James Clapper arrives in Israel to tackle its military and intelligence chiefs on the question, after US National Defense Director Tom Donilon spent three days in fruitless discussions with government leaders Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff tried his hand at persuasion earlier this month. This cycle of pressure will peak with Netanyahu’s White House talks with President Obama on March 5.
The Iranians felt confident enough to safely deny requests from the team of IAEA inspectors who arrived in Tehran Monday for access suspect nuclear locations and meetings with scientists employed in their nuclear program.
Gen. Hejazi’s words were backed up by a four-day air defense exercise, dubbed Sarallah (God’s Revenge), in the south of the country. The Islamic Republic also took another initiative by cutting off oil exports to Britain and France and so turning the tables on the European Union’s oil embargo on Tehran.

(Source: debka.com)

The horrors of the nuclear age, in terms of exploding reactors and nuclear bombs, are well known. Behind the well-publicized threat of mass death lies a secret history of nuclear projects being used to destroy individuals. In the late 1940s, United States citizens were injected with plutonium without their knowledge.

In early 1945, Ebb Cade, a worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility, got into a car wreck. He survived, but was bed bound with a broken arm and a broken leg. When doctors interviewed him, they ascertained that the fifty-three-year-old African American man was otherwise perfectly healthy, eating well, drinking well, and had no history of serious illness. And so, having obtained a healthy subject, on April 10th his doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. Who exactly ordered the injection, and who exactly administered it, has never been determined, with the most likely candidates all contradicting each other.

What is certain is that no one administered the dose for the man’s health. Although radium was still being touted by unscrupulous companies to the masses as a health tonic, enough people had gotten cancer and radiation sickness that any scientists knew that radiation was bad news. Since the beginning of the Manhattan Project, tests had been done to see how plutonium isotopes affected living beings. Animals had been fed and injected with the element, and their subsequent health problems were noted. When a scientist working on separating isotopes of plutonium had gotten a face full of gas, his stomach was pumped, to get out any plutonium he had swallowed, and his face was thoroughly scrubbed.

Over the next five days after the injection, doctors collected any excretions from Cade to see how much plutonium he retained in his body. Other tests were more invasive. His bones weren’t set until April 15th, and before they were set samples were cut out of them to see how much plutonium had moved into the bone tissue. Fifteen of his teeth were pulled and sampled for plutonium as well. Ebb Cade was never informed about the reasons for any of this, but he might have had an idea of what was happening to him. According to one account, one morning a nurse opened his door to find he’d fled during the night. He died in 1953, of heart failure. He was the first person to be injected with plutonium in the United States, but not the last.

The next three injectees were patients suffering from cancer who had come into Billings Hospital in Chicago for treatment. From April through December, a man in his sixties suffering from lung cancer, a woman in her fifties suffering from breast cancer, and a ‘young man’ suffering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma were all injected. Not much is known about the third patient. He was not mentioned in many official reports, nor is the date of his death known. What is known is he was injected with 95 micrograms of plutonium, roughly fifteen times what anyone before had been injected with.

The University of Rochester also became the next facility to start injections of plutonium, as well as other radioactive isotopes, including polonium and uranium. The director of the program there wrote that nearly all the patients had diagnoses that meant they were unlikely to live for more than five years. Although it’s true that many patients did have serious illnesses, many had illnesses that allowed for more than ten years of life, three were still living when investigations into the plutonium injections began in 1974, and one was misdiagnosed entirely.

Researchers at the University of California also took part in these experiments. In May of 1945 Albert Stevens came in for treatment of his stomach cancer. He was injected with plutonium. After the injection, it was found that the cancer was actually an ulcer. When Stevens thought about moving away, he was offered a stipend to stay in the area, so the lab could continue to test him for radiation, but he was never told about the injection. In April of 1946, Simeon Shaw, a four-year-old boy suffering from bone cancer was the next test subject. His parents, who had brought him from Australia for treatment in the United States, were told that the injection, and a subsequent removal of some bone tissue, was part of his cancer treatment. When he got sicker, his parents brought him back to Australia, where he died. It wasn’t until thirty years later that they found out what their son was actually injected with.

In December of 1946, the Manhattan Project ordered a halt to the injection of humans with radioactive materials, at which point the Atomic Energy Commission took over. In April of 1947, possibly in response to the Nuremburg trials concerning human experimentation, it was recommended that patients be told that they would be injected with a ‘new substance’ and that ‘no one knew what it did,’ but that it could inhibit cancer growth. The trials continued. A thirty-six-year-old man named Elmer Allen was injected and his left leg amputated shortly after.

Although the injections themselves were halted at the end of 1947, follow up studies, including the removal of bone tissue and excretion monitoring, were conducted into the early 1950s. Some of the eighteen known patients injected with plutonium died and were actually exhumed for more tests to be conducted. Their families were still told that they had received an unknown mixture of isotopes purely for medical treatment. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a full investigation was conducted. Surviving patients were informed, families of the deceased were questioned and eventually informed. Only one surviving patient never knew what happened to her. Her current doctors judged her emotional state too fragile to be told about the injections.

The last survivor of the plutonium experiments was Elmer Allen, the man whose leg was amputated after his injection. When doctors looked back through his notes, they found that his prognosis, at the beginning, was very good, and that it was deemed likely that the then-thirty-six-year-old would live more than ten years. He died in 1991.

(Source: io9.com)

“Israel is the central guarantor of its own security; this is our role as army, the State of Israel should defend itself,” Lieutenant General Benny Gantz told state-owned Channel One TV.

“We must follow the developments in Iran and its nuclear project, but in a very broad manner, taking into account what the world is doing, what Iran decided, what we will do or not do,” he said.

In recent weeks, there has been feverish speculation that Israel was getting closer to mounting a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program, though Israel has denied reaching such a decision.

Tensions between Iran and Israel have been simmering with Iranian warships entering the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal in a show of “might”, a move Israel said it would closely monitor.

On Wednesday, Iran said it had installed another 3000 centrifuges to increase its uranium enrichment abilities and was stepping up exploration and processing of uranium yellowcake.

And Israel blamed a recent wave of attacks targeting Israeli diplomats on agents of Tehran, allegations that Iran denies.

US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon will begin talks with Israeli officials on a range of issues including Iran, two weeks ahead of a Washington visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for White House talks with US President Barak Obama on the same topic.

A recent article in the Washington Post said that US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta thinks Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear installations in the coming months.

According to Gantz, whose interview was conducted prior to the developments, Iran was not only an “Israeli problem”, but also “a world and regional problem”.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called on the world to tighten sanctions on Iran before the country enters a “zone of immunity” against a physical attack to stop its nuclear program.

Iran has been slapped with four sets of UN sanctions and a raft of unilateral US and European Union measures over its nuclear drive, which Tehran maintains is peaceful.

(Source: news.com.au)

The West is losing the heroin war in Afghanistan – ten years after Tony Blair pledged that wiping out the drug was one of the main reasons for invading the country.

Despite spending £18billion and a conflict which has so far cost the lives of almost 400 British troops, production of the class-A drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons.

It increased by 61 per cent last year alone.

The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control.

Declaring that the West had lost its war against the drug, a glum UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon added: ‘Time is not on our side.’

The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion.

Cutting the supply of heroin was one of the prime reasons given by then-prime minister Tony Blair in 2001 for sending in British troops.

Three weeks after the attack on America’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Mr Blair said: ‘The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. This is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy.’

But ten years later, the UN figures reveal how the outcome has been so dramatically different.

Some 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s Gross National Product now comes from drug-related exports – a business worth up to £1.6billion each year, it was claimed.

Officials say there is clear evidence that the opium trade is being orchestrated by the Taliban, with vast profits used to buy weapons and fuel the insurgency.

The warning came at a meeting in Austria of more than 50 countries.

Britain alone has spent an estimated £18billion – a further £4billion is said to have been earmarked for this year – in Afghanistan, where 398 of its troops have died and thousands have been injured.

The most recent was Senior Aircraftman Ryan Tomlin, from 2 Squadron RAF Regiment, who was fatally wounded by small arms fire during an insurgent attack on Monday in Helmand Province – the heart of the opium industry.

Ironically, the Taliban had overseen a significant fall in heroin production in the months before the invasion. Their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – collaborating with the UN – had decreed that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns.

As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91 per cent from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares.

The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this production, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.

However, with the overthrow of the Taliban opium fields returned, despite the destruction of crops by coalition forces and initiatives to persuade farmers to switch to other produce.

There was some success but, commanders said, the ‘reality’ was that forces were too thinly stretched to focus on crop destruction – a move that, anyway, turned farmers against the troops.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the 2006 harvest was around 6,100 tons, 33 times its level in 2001, a 3,200 per cent increase in five years.

Cultivation in 2006 reached a record 165,000 hectares compared with 104,000 in 2005 and 7,606 in 2001 under the Taliban. This fell in figures for 2010 because of crop disease, but the UN figures show that it increased sharply again last year when 131,000 hectares were under cultivation, producing some 5,800 tons of opium.

The rise came even though the Afghan government and Nato have boosted crop eradication measures by 65 per cent and made significant seizures in recent months. The UN says there are now 17 provinces in Afghanistan affected by poppy cultivation, up from 14 a year ago.

Experts say the Taliban’s involvement in the drugs trade ranges from direct assistance – such as providing farmers with seed, fertiliser and cash advances – to distribution and protection.

In his opening address to the Vienna conference, the UN Secretary General warned that the problem extends beyond those who abuse drugs and is threatening Afghanistan itself.

‘Drug trafficking and transnational organized crime undermine the health of fragile states, (and) weaken the rule of law,’ he said, ‘Above all, the Afghan government must prioritise the issue of narcotics.’

A report by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime said revenue from opium production in Afghanistan soared by 133 per cent last year to about £900million after the crop recovered from a 2010 blight and approached previous levels.

Ban Ki-moon, in his opening comments, cited a 2011 UN survey saying that poppy cultivation has increased by 7 per cent and opium production by 61 per cent in the past year.

Zarar Ahmed Moqbel Osmani, the Afghan minister, said his country understood international concerns but noted that ‘95 per cent of poppy cultivation takes place in nine insecure provinces’.

He urged the international community to work hard in preventing the components needed to turn opium into heroin from entering Afghanistan from neighbouring countries.

Confirmation that the U.S. and its allies are studying their military options for helping the anti-Assad rebels in Syria is a worrying development on a number of levels, not least of which is the prospect of the West becoming embroiled in a direct confrontation with the Russians.

As I have argued before, I think the West – and that includes Britain – needs to proceed with great caution before it gets too closely involved in the Syrian crisis. As with the Libya situation last year, we still have no clear idea who the rebels are in Syria, or what their ultimate objective might be.

Homs, the centre of the anti-Assad rebellion, is a known centre for Islamist extremists, and if all Western intervention achieves is the replacement of the Assad regime with an Iranian-style Islamist dictatorship, then we will have scored a monumental own goal.

Of deeper concern, though, is the possibility that the U.S. could find itself involved in a direct military confrontation with Russia over the future of Syria’s destiny. We have been here before, of course, during the 1980s when, at the height of the Cold War, Moscow and Washington fought a proxy war over the fate of neighbouring Lebanon.

Even though U.S. President Ronald Reagan deployed thousands of U.S. Marines to Beirut, the Americans were eventually sent packing. During that conflict Russia backed the Syrians, who in turn used the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militia to carry out a series of devastating terrorist attacks against the Americans, ultimately forcing them to withdraw their forces from Lebanon.

The Cold War might be consigned to the history books, but a similar confrontation could easily arise if Washington decides to become engaged militarily in Syria to protect anti-government rebels.

This week’s visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Damascus has highlighted Syria’s importance to Moscow. The Syrian port of Tartus is Russia’s only military base outside the old Soviet Union and, at a time when the West is strengthening its ties throughout the Arab world, the Russians regard Syria as a vital strategic asset. Consequently any attempt by the Western powers to meddle in Syria’s internal affairs is likely to prompt a robust response from Moscow.

One of the reasons the Lebanese civil war dragged on for fifteen years was that the conflict ended up being caught in a turf war between Washington and Moscow. I fear a similar fate could soon befall Syria

(Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk)

The top US Navy official in the Gulf said Sunday he takes Iran’s military capabilities seriously but insists his forces are prepared to confront any Iranian aggression in the region.

Vice Adm Mark Fox, commander of the 5th Fleet, told reporters at the naval force’s Bahrain headquarters that the Navy has ‘built a wide range of potential options to give the president’ and is ‘ready today’ to confront any hostile action by Tehran.

He did not outline specifically how the Navy might answer an Iranian strike or an effort to shut the entrance to the Persian Gulf, though any response would likely involve the two US aircraft carriers and other warships cruising the waters off Iran.

‘We’ve developed very precise and lethal weapons that are very effective, and we’re prepared,’ Fox said. ‘We’re just ready for any contingency.’

Faced with tightening Western sanctions, Iranian officials have stepped up threats to close the Strait of Hormuz if the country’s oil exports are blocked. A fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through the narrow waterway, which is only about 30 miles (50 kilometers) across at its narrowest point.

Iran and Oman share control of the waterway, but it is considered an international strait, meaning free transit passage is guaranteed under international law.

Iran’s army chief, General Ataollah Salehi, early last month warned an American warship not to return to the Gulf shortly after the aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis and another vessel left. Another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, entered the Gulf without incident on January 22.

Fox acknowledged that Iran’s military is ‘capable of striking a blow’ against American forces in the Gulf, particularly using unconventional means such as small attack boats or mines laid along shipping lanes.

‘We’re not bulletproof. There are people that can take a swipe at us,’ Fox said.

But he added that he has reminded officers under his command that they ‘have a right and an obligation of self defence’ if attacked.

The admiral’s comments echo those of other Western officials, who say they will respond swiftly to any Iranian attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz.

Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ last month that Iranian forces could block shipping through the strait ‘for a period of time,’ but added, ‘We can defeat that.’

In his briefing in the Bahraini capital Manama, Fox voiced support for the tiny island nation that has hosted U.S. Navy vessels for decades.

‘They are a long-term partner and a very important piece of our ability to do our mission,’ he said of the country.

Bahrain has been rocked by protests led by the country’s majority Shiites against the country’s Sunni monarchy that erupted in force a year ago. Street battles between security forces and protesters still flare up almost daily in the predominantly Shiite villages around the capital.

Fox’s command encompasses the bulk of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and a large swath of the Indian Ocean along the east African coast. There are about 25,000 sailors under his command.

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.

The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.

Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.

“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.

The provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones” in American airspace, she added.

According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars once the FAA clears their use.

The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020.

The highest-profile use of drones by the United States has been in the CIA’s armed Predator-drone program, which targets al Qaeda terrorist leaders. But the vast majority of U.S. drone missions, even in war zones, are flown for surveillance. Some drones are as small as model aircraft, while others have the wingspan of a full-size jet.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. use of drone surveillance has grown so rapidly that it has created a glut of video material to be analyzed.

The legislation would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies. The FAA currently issues certificates, which can cover multiple flights by more than one aircraft in a particular area, on a case-by-case basis.

The Department of Homeland Security is the only federal agency to discuss openly its use of drones in domestic airspace.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the department, operates nine drones, variants of the CIA’s feared Predator. The aircraft, which are flown remotely by a team of 80 fully qualified pilots, are used principally for border and counternarcotics surveillance under four long-term FAA certificates.

Officials say they can be used on a short-term basis for a variety of other public-safety and emergency-management missions if a separate certificate is issued for that mission.

“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.

Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.

The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.

The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.

“We need a list so we can ask [each agency], ‘What are your policies on drone use? How do you protect privacy? How do you ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment?’ ” Ms. Lynch said.

“Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.

The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.

“We are looking at our options” to oppose that, she added.

Section 332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic control system by 2015.

The agency must establish six flight ranges across the country where drones can be test-flown to determine whether they are safe for travel in congested skies.

Representatives of the fast-growing unmanned aircraft systems industry say they worked hard to get the provisions into law.

“It sets deadlines for the integration of [the drones] into the national airspace,” said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group.

She said drone technology is new to the FAA.

The legislation, which provides several deadlines for the FAA to report progress to Congress, “will move the [drones] issue up their list of priorities,” Ms. West said

(Source: m.washingtontimes.com)

United States authorities prevented a British couple from entering the U.S. on account of their jokes about the country on the microblogging website Twitter, Daily Mail reported.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting were on their way to Hollywood when they were arrested after deplaning in Los Angeles.

Bryan had previously tweeted about his trip to LA, saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?”

Bryan was held on suspicion and questioned about his tweets, including one other in which he had quoted a popular American TV show, saying that he was planning to “dig Marilyn Monroe up.”

“I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe,” Daily Mail quoted Bunting as saying.

Authorities searched the couple’s belongings, and they were held separately for about 12 hours.

“It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels. They did a full body search on me, too,” Bryan said.

The couple was not allowed to enter the country and was sent home, Daily Mail reported.

(Source: hurriyetdailynews.com)

Iran, at odds with Western governments over its nuclear program, has accuses U.S. and Israeli agents of being behind the killing.

By Reuters

Funeral of of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran, who was killed in a brazen daylight assassination.

Iran charged on Thursday that assassins who killed an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran last week may have used information obtained from the United Nations.

Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, 32, was killed by a motorbike hitman who put a magnetic bomb on his car on a street during the morning rush hour on Jan. 11. Iran, at odds with Western governments over its nuclear program, has accused U.S. and Israeli agents of being behind the killing.

Iran’s deputy UN ambassador Eshagh Al Habib said there was a “high suspicion that … terrorist circles used the intelligence obtained from United Nations bodies, including the sanctions list of the Security Council and interviews carried out by IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) with our nuclear scientists, to identify and carry out their malicious acts.”

Ahmadi-Roshan recently met with IAEA inspectors, Al Habib told the Security Council, “a fact that indicates that these UN agencies may have played a role in leaking information on Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientist.”

He also accused the world body of failing to observe secrecy over its inspections of nuclear facilities.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said he was looking into the allegations. The Vienna-based IAEA is the UN nuclear watchdog and has played a key role in trying to determine whether Tehran’s atomic program has military dimensions.

The murder of Ahmadi-Roshan was the fifth daylight attack in two years on technical experts involved in Iran’s nuclear program, which Western countries believe is aimed at producing an atomic weapon but Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.

The United States has denied involvement in the killing and has condemned it, as has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. An Israeli minister also said this week that Iran’s charges of Israeli involvement were “completely baseless.”

The Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities. Its list of sanctioned individuals does not include Ahmadi-Roshan, but does name another scientist, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, wounded in a Tehran car bomb blast in November, 2010.

Al Habib, addressing a Security Council debate on justice and the rule of law, said it was “odd” that the council had said nothing about attacks on Iranian scientists. “Is it the way to advance the rule of law at the international level?” he asked.

(Source: haaretz.com)