Intelligence: Iran smuggling 1,350 tons of purified uranium pre

Such a deal would be significant because Tehran appears to be running out of that material, which it needs to feed its uranium enrichment program.

 

A summary of the report obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday said the deal could be completed within weeks. It said Tehran was willing to pay $450 million, or close to 315 million euros, for the shipment.

 

An official from the country that drew up the report said Kazakh government employees acting on their own were behind the deal. The official demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing intelligence matters.

 

After-hours calls put in to offices of Kazatomprom, the Kazak state uranium company, in Kazakhstan and Moscow, were not answered. There was no immediate reaction from Tehran.

 

Iran is under three sets of Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze its enrichment program and related activities that could be used to make nuclear weapons. Tehran denies such aspirations.

UN expert repeats call for threat of sanctions against Israel over Gaza blockade

The United Nations independent expert on Palestinian rights has again called for a threat of economic sanctions against Israel to force it to lift its blockade of Gaza, which is preventing the return to a normal life for 1.5 million residents after the devastating Israeli offensive a year ago.

Al-Qa’idah members - criminals or combatants?

The recent case of the 23-year old Nigerian who attempted to blow up an American airliner on a flight from Europe to the United States on Christmas highlights a continuing problem that goes back at least as far as the presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton believed that persons who conduct acts of terrorism are basically criminals and should be handled by the judicial system.

President Obama initially referred to ‘Umar al-Faruq ‘Abd al-Mutalib as a lone extremist and an “alleged bomber.” In fact - as later acknowledged by the President and his confused Secretary of Homeland Security - ‘Abd al-Mutalib was trained in Yemen by al-Qa’idah. The poster above is part of a press kit released by al-Malahim, the media branch of the al-Qa’idah in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Note that al-malahim is Arabic for “fierce battles, slaughters.”

My translation of the Arabic on the poster:

—-The Al-Qa’idah Jihad Organization in the Arabian Peninsula
—-The operation of Brother Holy Warrior
—-‘Umar al-Faruq al-Nijiri

The use of the honorific name ‘Umar al-Faruq al-Nijiri, translated as ‘Umar al-Faruq the Nigerian, is a common style among al-Qa’idah militants. Often they will use a kunya - Abu ____ is the most common - followed by a geographic designator. That is why you read about many militants with final names al-Masri (the Egyptian), al-Libi (the Libyan), al-Maghrabi (the Moroccan), etc. A good example is Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi (Father of Mus’ab, of Zarqa’ - a city in Jordan).

It appears that President Obama is reverting to the same Clinton policies that failed to prevent al-Qa’idah from mounting attacks on the two American embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the World Trade Center in 2001. Following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, President Bush attempted to have captured al-Qa’idah militants labeled as “unlawful combatants” with no legal rights under the Constitution, nor eligible for protection under the Geneva Conventions. This has been successfully and unfortunately challenged in U.S. courts.

The court did however agree that al-Qa’idah detainees can be tried by U.S. military tribunals, which seemed like a workable compromise. However, in its attempts to put the previous administration (and some of our intelligence officers) on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to try at least four of the senior al-Qa’idah leadership in federal courts in New York City. With that decision comes the attachment of all legal rights of American citizen - right to remain silent, right to counsel, rules of evidence, etc.

The Obama Administration is treating committed enemy combatants as common criminals. The poster above belies that mistaken theory. These people are not common criminals - they are warriors. Misguided by a perverted interpretation of Islam, yes, but warriors nonetheless. They have an organization, a hierarchy, resources, plans and a fervent commitment that far exceeds criminal enterprise. Criminals have a profit motive - these mujahidin (holy warriors) have a political and religious ideology.

These photos show ‘Abd al-Mutalib’s underwear and the explosives hidden inside. This is not the work of a criminal - this is the work of a committed mujahid, a holy warrior, a terrorist.

This amount of the explosive PETN (a major ingredient of the terrorists’ preferred explosive Semtex) is more than enough to destroy an airliner in flight - it is more than used by the “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid. Fortunately, PETN requires the use of a strong detonator - the acid used by this terrorist was not sufficient to cause a detonation and only started the PETN on fire. I have lit Semtex with a match (don’t ask) - it burns hotly but does not explode.

What is critical in the Clinton/Obama approach is how we can treat people like ‘Abd al-Mutalib. Both Clinton and Obama are lawyers and view the world from that particular optic. Evidence, arguments, rules, procedures - and civility. None of those apply to this war in which we find ourselves.

Once we attach citizen’s rights to these terrorists, we lose the ability to effectively interrogate them for useful intelligence. Does the President not believe that ‘Abd al-Mutalib may be able to provide information on al-Qa’idah personalities, plans, training, capabilities, contacts, procedures, etc.? We need to extract and exploit all we information can from these captured combatants, not allow them to “lawyer up” and deny us the intelligence we need to better defend ourselves.

These militants are not criminals, they are combatants - start treating them like it. ‘Abd al-Mutalib should be in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo, not a jail in Michigan.

Joint UN-African Union force and Sudan agree to boost blue helmets’ security

The joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in the war-torn Darfur region and the Sudanese Government have taken the first steps to bolstering the safety of peacekeepers due to a surge in attacks against blue helmets in recent months.

UN brings Sudanese tribes together for historic peace talks

The United Nations has paved the way for historic talks between clashing tribes to bolster the fragile peace in the disputed oil-rich area of Abyei, close to the border between Sudan’s north and south and where a referendum on its future is scheduled to be held in 2011.

UN-backed container-profiling project leads to seizure of drugs, counterfeit goods

Latin American port authorities are seizing more drug consignments and counterfeit goods along container routes thanks to a United Nations-backed initiative that is showing growing success after its inception six years ago.

Economics and the environment: Down to earth index

Editorial
The Guardian, Monday 28 December 2009
How much is the planet worth? Not a jot, according to most economists’ calculations. Last week, politicians and City analysts got Tiggerishly excited over an official report showing that Britain’s economy shrank 0.2% in the three months to the end of September rather than the 0.4% initially reported. Yet that all-important measure of GDP is a 20th-century invention which simply tots up all the goods and services produced in an economy, as valued at market prices. Among all the many things it leaves out is the cost to the environment of this activity. Indeed, it often puts a perverse value on damage to the planet. While another Exxon Valdez would be a huge environmental disaster, the cleanup costs would give a big boost to GDP – fantastic evidence for that old jibe about economics being the dismal science.
Or perhaps it is modern practitioners who are particularly dismal, or myopic. Writing to comrades in Germany in 1875, Karl Marx criticised their assertion that “Labour is the source of wealth and all culture”. No, he replied, “Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!)”. Yet it is only in the last 15 years or so that economists have done much more than treat environmental issues – whether smog or global warming – as mere footnotes (or “externalities”) to their various measures of human progress. Climate change has forced the issue up the academic agenda, so that an LSE economist, Nicholas Stern, is now a world authority on how to reduce carbon emissions. Other economists have been working on ways to measure natural capital, or environmental damage and depletion (and those rare opposite examples).
Foremost among these is Partha Dasgupta, who has just published a lucid survey of the field for the Royal Society. The most striking bit comes when the economist takes a handful of developing countries and measures their performance along a few yardsticks, such as GDP. To these old favourites he adds the index of wealth, which tries to measure “natural capital assets“: forests, oil and minerals, and atmospheric quality. Nearly all of Professor Dasgupta’s countries have enjoyed income growth over the past 30 years, but in natural wealth they have all gone backwards. Pakistan’s GDP per head rose 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000 – but its per capita natural wealth shrank 1.4%.
This is interesting and vital work. Interesting because the methods of environmental measurement, and the parts of the environment measured, are still crude (the wealth index does not include water or soil); vital for, well, obvious reasons. In nearly all their earlier calculations and prescriptions, economists have taken the earth for granted. Time to get real.

Blame Denmark, not China, for Copenhagen failure

The decision to override the multilateral process and hold a secret meeting of select nations ruined any chance of success

Martin Khor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 December 2009 12.11 GMT
It’s been several days since the chaotic end to the Copenhagen climate conference but the aftershocks from its failure are still reverberating. As John Prescott points out in his letter to the Guardian, the pointing of fingers in the blame game does not help the regaining of trust needed for the positive resumption of talks early next year and to complete them by December 2010, the new deadline agreed to in Copenhagen.
First, the misinformation put out in the past few days has to be corrected. The UK climate secretary, Ed Miliband, backed by individuals such as Mark Lynas (both writing in the Guardian) have turned on China as the villain that “hijacked” the conference. The main “evidence” they gave was that China vetoed an “agreement” on a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 and an 80% reduction by developed countries, in the small meeting of 26 leaders on Copenhagen’s final day.
There was indeed a “hijack” in Copenhagen, but it was not by China. The hijack was organised by the host government, Denmark, whose prime minister convened a meeting of 26 leaders in the last two days of the conference, in an attempt to override the painstaking negotiations taking place among 193 countries throughout the two weeks and in fact in the past two to four years.
That exclusive meeting was not mandated by the UN climate convention. Indeed, the developing countries had warned the Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, not to come up with his own “Danish text” to be negotiated by a small group that he himself would select, as this would violate the multilateral treaty-based process, and would replace the documents carefully negotiated by all countries with one unilaterally issued by the host country.
Despite this, the Danish government produced just such a document, and it convened exactly the kind of exclusive group that would undermine the UN climate convention’s multilateral and democratic process. Under that process, the 193 countries had been collectively working on coming to a conclusion on the many aspects of the climate deal.
Weeks before, it had become clear that Copenhagen could not adopt a full agreement because many basic differences remained. Copenhagen should have been designed as a stepping stone to a future successful outcome accepted by all. Unfortunately, the host country Denmark selected a small number of the 110 top leaders who came, to meet in secret, without the mandate or even knowledge of the convention’s membership.
The selected leaders were given a draft Danish document that mainly represented the developed countries’ positions, thereby marginalising the developing countries’ views tabled at the two-year negotiations.
Meanwhile, most of the thousands of delegates were working for two weeks on producing two reports representing the latest state of play, indicating areas of agreement and those where final decisions still had to be taken.
These reports were finally adopted by the conference. They should have been announced as the real outcome of Copenhagen, together with a decision to resume and complete work next year. It would not have been a resounding success, but it would have been an honest ending that would not have been termed a failure.
Instead, the Copenhagen accord was criticised by the final plenary of members and not adopted. The unwise attempt by the Danish presidency to impose a non-legitimate meeting to override the legitimate multilateral process was the reason why Copenhagen will be considered a disaster.
The accord itself is weak mainly because it does not contain any commitments by the developed countries to cut their emissions in the medium term. Perhaps the reason for this most glaring omission is that the national pledges so far announced amount to only a 11-19% overall reduction by the developed countries by 2020 (compared to 1990), a far cry from the over 40% target demanded by the developing countries and recent science.
To deflect from this great failure on their part, the developed countries tried to inject long-term emission-reduction goals of 50% for the world and 80% for themselves, by 2050 compared to 1990. When this failed to get through the 26-country meeting, some countries, especially the UK, began to blame China for the failure of Copenhagen.
In fact, these targets, especially taken together, have been highly contentious during the two years of discussions, and for good reasons. They would result in a highly inequitable outcome where developed countries get off from their responsibilities and push the burden of adjustment onto the developing countries.
Together, they imply that developing countries would have to cut their emissions overall by about 20% in absolute terms and at least 60% in per capita terms. By 2050, developed countries with high per capita emissions – such as the US – would be allowed to have two to five times higher per capita emission levels than developing countries. The latter would have to severely curb not only their emissions but also their economic growth, especially since there is, up to now, no credible plans let alone commitments for financial and technology transfers to help them shift to a low-emissions development path.
The developed countries have already completed their industrialisation on the basis of cheap carbon-based energy and can afford to take on an 80% goal for 2050, especially since they now have the technological and organisational capacity and infrastructure. For a minimally equitable deal, they should commit to cuts of at least 200-400%, or move into negative emission territory, with net re-absorption of greenhouse gases, to enable developing countries the atmospheric space to develop.
The acceptance of the two targets would also have locked in a most unfair sharing of the remaining global carbon budget as it would have allowed the developed countries to get off free from their historical responsibility and their carbon debt. They would have been allocated the rights to a large amount of “carbon space”, historically and in the future, without being given the obligation and responsibility to undertake adequate emission cuts nor to make adequate financial and technology transfers to developing countries.
Fortunately these targets are absent from the accord. The imperative for the negotiations next year is to agree on what science says is necessary for the world to do (in terms of limits to temperature rise or in global emissions cut) but also on what is a just and equitable formula for sharing the costs and burdens of adjustment, and to decide on both simultaneously. By asking for agreement on only a global goal and a very low commitment figure for their own obligatory cut, the developed countries were attempting to fix a global carbon budget distribution that enables them to get away with the hijacking of atmospheric space, a resource worth many trillions of dollars.
Learning from Copenhagen’s mistakes, the countries should return to the multilateral track and resume negotiations in the climate convention’s two working groups as early as possible.
They can start with the two reports passed at Copenhagen as reference points. There should not be more attempts to hijack this multilateral process, which represents our best hope to achieve final results.
The bottom-up democratic process is slower but also steadier, compared to the top-down attempt to impose a solution by a few powers that will always lack legitimacy in decision-making and success or sustainability in implementation.

Burundi: UN helps distribute free identity cards for next May’s polls

One million Burundians old enough to vote next May will receive a free national identity card, thanks to a campaign supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other agencies.

Sir Richard Branson: the airline owner on his new war

“Carbon is the enemy,” says Sir Richard Branson. “Let’s attack it in any possible way we can, or many people will die just like in any war.”

By Rowena MasonPublished: 3:10PM GMT 28 Dec 2009

With a certain sense of irony, the billionaire part-owner of five airlines has just jetted into Copenhagen, battleground of the international climate change talks, to warn fellow business leaders, politicians and campaigners about this apocalyptic scenario.
Sir Richard, who is due to give a speech at an event on saving the rainforests, has no sooner sat down than launched into a diatribe against carbon dioxide, of which his Virgin Atlantic airline emits 4.8m tonnes per year.

Every weapon in the arsenal must be deployed to reduce carbon dioxide, he argues, from biofuels to greener materials for aeroplane bodies, both through financial penalties for polluters and more funding for technology.
Flying around the world for seven days and taking tourists into space have been among Sir Richard’s well-documented – and carbon-intensive – thrill-seeking missions.
He claims that his current goal for the decade is not only to ensure that all his planes run on eco-friendly biofuel mixes by 2015, but to persuade others in the airline industry that they should do the same by 2020.
Relaxing in jeans and a shirt at a hotel conference centre in the greenest city in the world, Branson is showing no signs of nerves about being an airline owner about to share a stage with an array of environmentalists, from the governor of the Amazon to the president of the World Wildlife Fund.
But as the self-confessed owner of a “dirty business”, doesn’t he feel some responsibility for his key role in the transport industry that produces 20pc of the world’s emissions each year?
A quick look at the website of Virgin Atlantic shows that this single airline emits more carbon dioxide than many entire countries – including Uganda, Paraguay and Albania.
Even within the industry it is not the greenest airline of them all. Per passenger-kilometre, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic emit substantially higher amounts of carbon dioxide than easyJet – and even Ryanair, the airline run by the famous environmental sceptic Michael O’Leary.
Budget airlines, with their newer fleets and passengers crammed into every seat, boast significantly lower emissions than the traditional flyers.
“We do owe it to the world to get our house in order, which is why I want airlines to get together and set an example on lowering emissions. Realising that flying was part of the problem is why we donate all the profits from Virgin Atlantic to environmental projects,” Sir Richard says, ducking the low-flying question about whether consumers should simply be hopping on fewer planes.
Green activists have criticised this approach, which, like offsetting, assumes that business can simply pay to pollute – the corporate equivalent of trashing a hotel room and leaving a pile of cash at reception. Some also point out that these donations are only the dividends paid to Sir Richard’s Virgin Group, with the bulk of profits injected back into the business. The sum total of his green philanthropy has so far failed to reach anywhere near the $3bn (£1.87bn) originally promised in 2006.
But as a businessman, it is hardly surprising that Sir Richard is desperate to find a means of spending his way out of the problem rather than stymie growth for the airline industry. His strong support for Heathrow’s third runway makes it clear that he thinks that reducing consumption is not the answer.
“We have to make a low-carbon world capable of growth otherwise we won’t have hospitals and schools, and society will start falling apart,” Sir Richard claims, swinging from one Doomsday narrative to the next. “We’re not going to get China and India to stop growing, so the challenge will be all about changing our ways.”
Recognising that financial penalties on heavy carbon emissions could make huge dents in the future profits of the transport sector, he says, it also makes financial sense to pump some profits into researching new fuels.
Scientists regularly cast doubt on the idea that biofuels will be ready for air travel within the next decade, despite the ideal solution that one day petroleum will be replaced by algae or sugar. Virgin Atlantic pioneered the first biofuel flight last year, but the brief journey from London to Amsterdam had only 20pc coconut oil in one of four jet engines – and the technology is still a long way off being commercially viable.
With $75m spent on researching biochar, a charcoal that may be able to pump CO2 out of air, and more funding for geo-engineering to change the make-up of the earth’s atmosphere, Sir Richard is at pains to show he is at least trying.
Top on his list of priorities is a global emissions trading system for aviation and shipping, which he would like to see go towards environmental causes.
“What we really want is a global agreement on aviation, where a percentage goes to the rainforests,” he says, pointing out that under the European emissions trading scheme for airlines due to start in 2012, governments will be able to spend the proceeds on whatever they wish.
Another crusade is shipping and he has used his time in the Danish capital to meet the mayors and port authorities of Calgary and Los Angeles to try to show them how to “impose specific standards on ships coming into those ports”.
“Business groups have done a good job in some areas like energy but some industries like shipping have done very little and that’s where I can help,” Sir Richard says. “I would love every industry in the world to be clear about what it has to do.”
The plane manufacturers, such as Airbus and Boeing, are also crucial to cleaning up the industry’s image, Sir Richard says, urging them to move from carbon-based plastics and titanium to new “composite” green materials.
However, at the mention of potential green taxes, rather than market-mechanisms, Sir Richard shifts from environmental fervour into a rage against the business-bashing policies of New Labour. “The airline industry has suffered a 100pc increase in taxes by this Labour Government, which are not going to environmental causes, and the danger is that this would tax the industry out of existence,” he says. “But if they do end up taxing industry they need to make it absolutely clear that running planes on clean fuels would see taxes removed.”
There is an argument that aviation’s acceptance of emissions trading and offer to peak its emissions by 2020 is purely a move to pre-empt stricter potential curbs in the future. Sir Richard disagrees, but thinks the aviation industry could push itself harder by offering to cut emissions even further given the failure of the Copenhagen talks.
“If governments don’t get their act together or make stupid, populistic decisions, businesses will have to take action on their own and we might as well do that now,” he says.