Bad News via Yossi Baidatz!
Iran Rapidly Developing Bomb!
Yaalon – Iran War is Unavoidable!
IAEA Head: Iran may be hiding nukes
War likely to start between 2010 & 2015!
Khamenei: Iran, Israel on “Collision Course”
September 23, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from DEBKAfile Special Report
Israeli intelligence revises estimate: Iran is progressing fast towards a nuclear bomb
DEBKAfile Special Report
September 21, 2008, 7:37PM (GMT+02:00)
The director of research at Israeli military intelligence (AMAN), Brig. Yossi Baidatz, surprised the Israeli cabinet Sunday Sept. 21, with a new appreciation of Iran’s nuclear timetable.
Tehran, he disclosed, has already stocked one-third or even half the quantity of enriched uranium needed for a nuclear bomb.
He warned the ministers that Iran is dashing at top speed towards a nuclear weapons capability and nothing stands in the way of its headlong advance, including international sanctions.
Separately, former Israeli army chief Lt. Gen (Res.) Moshe Yaalon said in a radio interview that an Israel-Iranian war is unavoidable.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources say Israeli intelligence has drastically revised its former evaluation of the Iran’s nuclear progress and intentions. Although Iran has only 4,000 centrifuges producing 4-5-grade uranium, it is fasting building up a stock of enough low-grade uranium – 1.5 tons – to convert quickly and simply into weapons grades material – within a year or eighteen months.
The conventional intelligence view until now was that Tehran, in the final reckoning, would take its program up to the brink of a weapons capability and stop there before its consummation. It was based on Iran’s decision not to follow through on the detailed plans for building a device for an underground nuclear test it obtained from Pakistan in 2002.
Baidatz’s update Sunday has reversed this evaluation.
Begin Excerpt from Jerusalem Post
‘Iran halfway to first nuclear bomb’
September 22, 2008
Herb Keinon , THE JERUSALEM POST
Iran is halfway to a nuclear bomb, and Hizbullah, Hamas and Syria are using this period of relative calm to significantly rearm, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Baidatz, the Military Intelligence’s head of research, told the cabinet Sunday during a particularly gloomy briefing on the threats facing the country.
Baidatz said there was a growing gap between Iran’s progress on the nuclear front
and the West’ s determination to
stop it. “Iran is concentrating on uranium enrichment, and is making progress,” he said, noting that they have improved the function of their 4,000 centrifuges.
According to Baidatz, the Iranian centrifuges have so far produced between one-third to one-half of the enriched material needed to build a bomb.
“The time when they will have crossed the nuclear point-of-no-return is fast approaching,” he said, though he stopped short of giving a firm deadline. Last week in the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, however, he put the date at 2011.
Baidatz said that neither the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency nor the US and European attempts to get a fourth round of sanctions through the UN Security council were slowing down the Iranian nuclear march.
“The Iranians are pleased that the gap is widening,” Baidatz said. “Their confidence is growing with the thought that the international community is not strong enough to stop them,” he added.
Baidatz said the Iranians were playing for time, and that time was working in
their favor since the longer the process dragged on, the wider the rifts appearing among the countries in the West become. “Iran is in control of the technology and is moving with determination toward a nuclear bomb,” he said.
In addition to their nuclear efforts, the Iranians were also deepen ing their
influence in the region through cooperation with Syria and the Palestinian terrorist organizations, as well as being the main arms supplier to Hizbullah and a source of constant attacks on American troops in Iraq. All of this, he said, was part of Iran’s efforts to stand at the head of the region’s extremist front.
The region’s moderates, he said, were limiting their opposition to “just rhetoric.”
Baidatz also briefed the ministers on the situation in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority since the beginning of the “calm” in Gaza on June 19, some three months ago.
Baidatz said that while the cease-fire has – for the most part – held, the intelligence agencies were seeing some weakening of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s commitment to it. He said that the cease-fire had led to a significant drop in rocket fire on the western Negev, and that since the cease-fire went into effect, some 15 rockets
and 13 mortars had been fired from Gaza into the Western Negev.
Nevertheless, he said that the terrorist organizations were still planning attacks from Gaza, and were recruiting terrorists to go from Gaza into the Sinai, and then back into Israel to carry out attacks or kidnap soldiers.
Regarding kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit, Baidatz said that Hizbullah had stiffened its demands, believing that Schalit was an “asset,” and that the price for his release would only increase. “They are not rushing for a solution, and are preventing a renewal of talks on the matter with Egypt.” he said.
Hamas and the other terrorist organizations have taken advantage of the cease-fire to rearm and prepare for the next round of fighting, increasing training and continuing to smuggle in raw materials that allow it to increase its rocket arsenal. As a result of of the cease-fire, he said, the threat to the home front and the IDF had increased.
Baidatz said the smuggl ing from Egypt was cont
inuing, although the Egyptians – with the help of US technology – were also showing better results in detecting the smuggling tunnels. At the same time, the Egyptians were still not dealing with the root of the problem, which was the need to go after Beduin smugglers in Sinai, he said.
Baidatz added that as time went on, Hamas was consolidating its political hold on Gaza, and that he didn’t think the Egyptians had much chance of success in mediating an agreement between Hamas and Fatah.
Regarding Israel’s negotiations with the PA, Baidatz said the Palestinian Authority was not willing to compromise on core issues, and was opposed to a partial agreement. He said the PA was holding firm to the position that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed, and were continuing to demand an end to all construction in the West Bank.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently tried to get the PA to agree to moving negotiations over Jerusalem to another framework, so it did not hold up attempts to come up with some kind of shelf agreement by the end of the year.
Begin Excerpt from Jerusalem Post
IAEA chief: Iran could be hiding nukes
September 22, 2008
AP, THE JERUSALEM POST
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Monday that he cannot guarantee that Iran is not running a secret nuclear program, comments that appeared to reflect a high level of frustration with stonewalling of his investigators.
A senior Iranian envoy accused the United States of trying to use the IAEA as a tool in Washington’s confrontation with Teheran. Iran, he said, has demonstrated full cooperation with the agency. Allegations of nuclear weapons work by Teheran is based on forged documents and the issue is closed, the envoy said.
The two men spoke at the start of a 35-nation board IAEA meeting.
With time running out before Teheran develops potential nuclear weapons capacity, some worry that Israel or the US might resort to military strikes if they believe all diplomatic options have been exhausted.
And with Teheran showing no signs of giving up uranium enrichment or heeding other international demands, the diplomatic window appears to be closing.
ElBaradei said Iran’s stonewalling of his agency was a “serious concern.”
“Iran needs to give the agency substantive information” to clear up suspicions, he told the closed board meeting, in comments made available to reporters. He rejected the Iranian suggestion that the IAEA probe could expose non-nuclear military secrets, saying the IAEA “does not in any way seek to ‘pry’ into Iran’s conventional or missile-related military activities.”
“We need, however, to make use of all relevant information to be able to confirm that no nuclear material is being used for nuclear weapons purposes,” he said, urging Iran to “implement all measures required to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear program at the earliest possible date.”
If Teheran fails to do so, the IAEA “will not be able to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran,” he said.
Diplomats at the gathering described ElBaradei’s comments as unusually blunt
Outside the meeting, an indignant Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian delegate to the IAEA, rejected suggestions his country was hiding something, and accused Washington of hijacking the agency for an anti-Iran campaign.
“The international community and all member states of the IAEA are frustrated with this kind of United States actions in the IAEA,” he told reporters. “The Americans are every day isolating themselves.
“Iran is of course very advanced in missile activities and technology,” he said. “But there is no activity at all related to nuclear weapons.”
Ahead of the meeting, hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that Iran’s military will “break the hand” of anyone targeting the country’s nuclear facilities.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are geared only toward generating power. But Isr ael s
ays the Islamic Republic could have enough nuclear material to make its first bomb within a year. The US estimates Teheran is at least two years away from that stage.
Physicist and former UN nuclear inspector David Albright says says Teheran could reach weapons capacity in as little as 6 months through uranium enrichment.
An IAEA report drawn up for the IAEA board meeting says that Teheran has increased the number of centrifuges used to process uranium to nearly 4,000 from 3,000 just a few months ago.
But Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security closely tracks suspect secret proliferators, says he has also been able to extrapolate other information from the report that is less obvious but of at least equal concern.
Iran, he says, has managed to iron out most of the bugs in the intensely complicated process of enrichment that often saw the centrifuges breaking down. The machines, he says “now appear to be running at approximately 85 percent of their stated target capacity, a significant increase over previous rates.”
That, he says means, they can produce more enriched uranium faster.
And while the IAEA says that the machines have spewed out only low-enriched material suitable solely for nuclear fuel, producing enough of that can make it easy to “break out” quickly by reprocessing it to weapons- grade uranium suitable for the fissile core of warhead.
To date, Iran has produced nearly 500 kilograms of low enriched uranium, said the report – close to what Albright says is the 700 kilogram – minimum needed to produce the 20-25 kilograms needed for a simple nuclear bomb under optimal conditions.
And with Iran’s centrifuges running ever more smoothly, it “is progressing toward this capability and can be expected to reach it in six months to two years,” says Albright.
Additional work – making a crude bomb to contain the uranium – would take no more than a “several months,” he said.
But that work could be done secretly and consecutively with the last stages of weapons-grade enrichment. With Iran limiting access of IAEA inspectors to facilities it has declared to the agency, the UN nuclear monitor is blind-sided in efforts to establish whether such covert atomic work is going on.
Begin Excerpt from Los Angeles Time
Ayatollah Khamenei Says Iran, Israel on “Collision Course”
Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi
September 22, 2008
Iran’s highest authority lashed out against Israel on Friday with some of his harshest comments in recent memory about the Jewish state. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is Iran’s top political and military figure, said his country’s hostility to Israel extended beyond the government to the Israeli people as well, brushing aside recent overtures by top Iranian officials to the Israeli public. Khamenei said Iran and Israel were on a “collision course,” and that “It is incorrect, irrational, pointless and nonsense to say that we are friends of the Israeli people.” (Los Angeles Times)
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