RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/the-mysterious-explosions-at-irans-nuclear-facilities/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Three incidents, including two explosions at nuclear facilities, have shaken Iran in recent days. Were they connected? Were they caused by accidents or were they carried out by a foreign power? If the latter, were they executed via cyberattack? And what will be their domestic and international implications?

Early in the morning on June 26, Tehran was rocked by a huge explosion at the Parchin military complex, 30 kilometers southeast of the Iranian capital. Some media outlets attributed the blast to Parchin’s role in the development of nuclear weapons, which were reaffirmed when Iran’s secret nuclear research archive was smuggled to Israel and exposed in 2018. The regime’s choice of Parchin as the site at which to conduct nuclear experiments was probably due to the fact that ammunition, explosives, and solid rocket fuel were produced there.
As early as 2012, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked the Iranian authorities to allow its inspectors to tour Parchin following information it had received about nuclear activity at the facility. Its request was rejected. The Iranians then demolished the buildings where the suspect activity had allegedly taken place and even razed the area around them.
In September 2015, after signing the JCPOA nuclear agreement, Tehran finally allowed IAEA inspectors to tour the area and take soil samples. Despite the regime’s thorough sanitizing of the site, anthropogenic (human-processed) uranium particles were found that could only have been produced during “cold test” explosions of nuclear devices.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2020/07/clive-hamiltons-brave-and-urgent-alarm/

Last year an agent for Chinese printing companies – which have the most advanced and cheapest production facilities in the world — handed Australian publishing houses a list of words and topics that could not appear in any books that were to be printed in China. The overwhelming majority of these books are for markets – including Australia — outside China itself, which has become the default printer globally.

Naturally, the names of Chinese dissidents, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died excruciatingly while still incarcerated in China in 2017, are high on this list. But it also includes those of the country’s paramount leader Xi Jinping and his muse and propagandist Wang Huning, predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and references to Tiananmen 1989, the Hong Kong protests, or the Xinjiang conflict, as well as to the island groups in the South China Sea.

This is one of the myriad intriguing and concerning anecdotes replete in the new book by Clive Hamilton, co-written with Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World.

The challenges that are aligned globally against freedom, democracy and the rule of law – public values which 30 years ago appeared, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, to have “won” — are today legion. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged in the last few years as by far the most significant, due to its immense economic and military capacity, its unparalleled and unconstrained surveillance and control technologies, its purposefulness… and its great institutional success. This was underlined on July 1 by the publication of the extraordinarily comprehensive and far-reaching “security” legislation effectively bringing Hong Kong fully within the PRC’s direct control – marking another great step forward by Xi, whose progress has persisted, unhindered in its thrust by the occasional burst of Western rhetoric or of temporarily inconvenient trade gestures.

The USSR posed nothing like the challenge China does today. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consumed a vast amount of time and energy in reviewing what went wrong for its former “big brother” Russian party, and concluded essentially that it failed because it conceded ground, it liberalised, it lost control of history, including by permitting criticism of its great dictator Joseph Stalin.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese party’s general secretary since November 2012, has instead doubled down on core communist values. On July 23 next year, he will lead the celebration of the centenary of the party – whose period in untrammelled power, 70 years, has already surpassed that of the Russian party.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16174/iran-spies-assassinations

The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

While the Iranian regime continues its assassinations and terrorist plots in the West, the EU and the UN — which it is time for the US to defund — remain silent.

Another spy from the Iranian regime, Mohammad Davoudzadeh Loloei, 40, has been sentenced to prison in a European court — this time, Denmark — for being an accessory to the attempted murder of one or more individuals who are opponents of the Iranian regime. What is unusual is that this is all taking place while Europe’s leaders continue to pursue a policy of appeasement with the ruling mullahs of Iran.

According to Roskilde District Court, in Denmark, Loloei had collected information on a dissident, so far unnamed, and given it to Iran’s intelligence service, who planned to murder the man. The information included photos of the target’s house, street and surroundings. “The court found that the information was collected and passed on to a person working for an Iranian intelligence service, for use by the intelligence service’s plans to kill the exile,” the court’s statement read.

The public prosecutor, Soeren Harbo, pointed out that the Iranian spy has received a permanent entry ban and would also be expelled from Denmark after serving his sentence. Harbo added that “It’s a historic case. And it’s a powerful message to (foreign) intelligence services: they have to handle their conflicts among themselves and stop involving us.”

Remarkably, this case involving the Iranian regime’s intelligence service carrying out espionage and attempting to assassinate its opponents abroad is not a rare one. The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

Last fall, in November 2019, another dissident, Massoud Molavi, who ran a social media channel on Telegram criticizing the Iranian regime and exposed corruption in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was gunned down while walking on the streets of Istanbul.