“It may be that the sanctions screw needs to be or can be turned here and there,” Guttenberg told reporters at the annual Munich Security Conference on Sunday, January 7. “We need to consider very carefully what impact our options could have.”

“At the same time, however, it must be made clear to Iran that patience is at an end.”

He was speaking after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country would soon start enriching uranium to 20 percent on its own.

“We are still interested in cooperation [with the West] but if they wanted to continue playing games with the Iranian nation, then we would be prepared to do the 20 percent by ourselves,” Ahmadinejad said at a laser technology conference in Tehran on Sunday, January 7.

The president of the Islamic nation said the Iranian Atomic Organization (IAO) was ready to start the uranium enrichment and would eventually do so.

“I had given [world powers] a time range of two to three months to accept the deal but if they don’t, we would start ourselves,” he said.

“Now Dr [Ali Akbar] Salehi, start to make the 20 percent with the centrifuges,” the president said, addressing Iran’s nuclear chief who was sitting in the audience at a laser technology plant in Tehran.

Uranium exchange

Last year the United Nations watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposed that Iran ship low-intensity uranium abroad for enrichment, then re-import the enriched variant for use in a medical reactor, used to treat cancer patients, in Tehran.

The idea was to give Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology without it enriching uranium at home and so allay fears held by world powers that Iran might try to produce a nuclear bomb.

After months of stalling, Ahmadinejad said last week said that his country was willing to accept the deal.

Western officials at the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday criticized Iran, however, for not submitting a concrete plan for uranium exchange, and accused Tehran of pursuing a secret program to manufacture an atomic bomb.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Saturday that Iran still had to prove to the rest of the world that it was willing to make meaningful concessions regarding its nuclear program.

“Our hand is still reaching out towards [Iran],” Westerwelle said. “But so far it’s reaching out into a void. And I’ve seen nothing since yesterday that makes me want to change that view.”

Nothing new

Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met with IAEA head Yukiya Amano on Saturday in Munich. Amano said the Iranians brought nothing new to the table.

“We had a very interesting discussion,” Amano said. “There was not a new proposal.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman for the Islamic Republic, Ramin Mehmanparast, said on Sunday that remarks by Western officials in Munich had complicated the issue of uranium exchange.

He said comments suggesting that Iran should not have nuclear weapons were irrelevant to the main issue, which was to implement a deal based on an initiative by the IAEA, which, he said, should not be a “political propaganda” forum.

“Raising the irrelevant issue of nuclear weapons which have never been in our military doctrine, [the world powers] have just further complicated the issue,” Mehmanparast said.

“Iran is still ready to make the deal and whenever the other side is ready as well, the technical negotiations by the experts could start,” the spokesman added.

ipj/dpa/AFPE/Reuters

Editor: Toma Tasovac

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Maybe the experts never got the message about no meaning no. And maybe Mr. Obama forgot that the late Ayatollah Khomeini tried to ban Nowruz, a pre-Islamic tradition, and that both Mr. Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have sought to curtail and Islamicize the holiday against widespread resistance. But never mind: The most telling indicator of what we can expect from Mr. Obama’s overture is Mirsayafi’s death, a fitting emblem of everything the Islamic Revolution stands for on its 30th anniversary.

What was a blogger doing in prison in the first place? Ask 26-year-old Kianoosh Sanjari, another Iranian blogger and Evin prison alumnus who fled the country in 2007 and is now in the U.S. seeking asylum.

Mr. Sanjari was first arrested at 17 for joining a procession commemorating the first anniversary of the violently suppressed 1999 student protests at Tehran University. Over the next seven years he was arrested nine times, imprisoned six, flipped between “official” and secret prisons, surveilled and harassed by the secret police, subjected to endless interrogations, held both in overcrowded cells and incommunicado in solitary confinement (for a total of nine months), beaten while blindfolded and subjected to extreme sensory deprivation.

“When you express your dissatisfaction in a civil way and you’re faced with physical violence and cruelty, you realize the baseness of the equation,” Mr. Sanjari tells me, explaining the impulses that animated his dissent. “The moment you go to prison is when you realize you are in the right. And when you see what nefarious people the regime has to break you is when you feel the need to fight back.”

Between prison terms Mr. Sanjari headed the Association of Political Prisoners, which follows more than 500 known cases in Iran. About Mirsayafi, he says that when his fellow blogger “found out that he had been summoned to court and that he may end up with a prison sentence, he wrote an email to friends. He said he felt powerless to withstand what torture he would have to face in prison. He also told a mutual friend that he did not think he would survive the imprisonment. He was well aware of the fact that they wanted to do away with him.”

Mirsayafi’s forebodings proved well-justified. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that he was taken to the prison hospital shortly before his death with an irregular pulse. “The doctor told [the prison authorities] how to treat him, asked him to send him to a city hospital,” Mirsayafi’s lawyer told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda. “But they ignored the doctor and said [Mirsayafi] was faking his illness. The doctor said, ‘his heartbeat is 40 per minute, you can’t fake that.’ But they sent the doctor out of the room.” Prison authorities ruled the death a suicide; Mirsayafi was only 25.

Whether Mirsayafi’s death cows or emboldens Iran’s dissident bloggers remains to be seen. Not the least of their considerations will be the attitude of Mr. Obama, who in his videotaped address went out of his way to speak of “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” thereby giving the mullahs claim to a nation, and a civilization, they have done so much to oppress and degrade. Yes, an American president must look first, second and third to American interests. But a presidency predicated on the view that our values are our strength should not forsake those values for diplomatic expediency, much less betray our friends abroad who live, and have died, by those values.

Shortly after Mr. Obama’s inauguration, Mr. Sanjari put his name to an open letter to the new president, signed by several prominent young Iranian dissidents, calling on him “to pay special attention to the repressive, unaccountable nature of the regime” that now threatens and provokes the U.S. and our allies. Its conclusion is as fitting a tribute as any to Mirsayafi’s notable and too-brief life:

“Mr. President, you marked your first day in the White House by ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison. But in our country, many Guantanamos exist, only our Guantanamos are home to students, women’s rights activists, labor organizers, political activists, and journalists. We, as former student activists who spent time in Iranian prisons under inhumane conditions, call on you and all those who defend human rights, freedom and equality to express solidarity to the people of Iran as they wage their struggle for freedom.”
Source: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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Guzman Loera, whose nickname means Shorty, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001. He heads the powerful Sinaloa cartel, investigators say. Authorities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border blame the Sinaloa and other cartels for a surge in violence in the region.

He ranked 701th on Forbes’ yearly report, with an estimated fortune of $1 billion.

Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora expressed outrage at the publication and described Forbes’ calculations on Guzman Loera’s fortune as mere “speculation.”

“I will never accept that a criminal could be recognized as someone distinguished, even if it is by a magazine like Forbes,” Medina Mora said to local media during a drug traffic summit Thursday in Vienna, Austria.

Forbes is “comparing the deplorable activity of a criminal wanted in Mexico and abroad with that of honest businessmen,” he said.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon — speaking at a business summit Thursday in Mexico City — alluded to the report, saying, “It is very sad the intensification of a campaign, which seems to me, has been launched against Mexico.”

Calderon added, “Public opinion and now even magazines not only attack and lie about the situation in Mexico but now also praise criminals. In Mexico, it is considered a crime to praise criminals.”

Guzman Loera has a three-decade history of drug trade spanning North, Central and South America. The Forbes profile of Guzman Loera reported that “the U.S. government is offering a $5 million reward” for the billionaire’s capture.

Forbes magazine was not available for comment, but its article offers a clue as to why Guzman Loera made the list.

“So is there anywhere one can still make a fortune these days? The 38 newcomers offer a few clues. Among the more notable new billionaires are Mexican Joaquin Guzman Loera, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine to the U.S.”

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“Representatives of Iran’s film industry should only have an official meeting with representatives of the Academy and Hollywood if they apologize for the insults and accusations against the Iranian nation during the past 30 years,” said Javad Shamghadri, Ahmadinejad’s advisor on the arts, ISNA reported.

He singled out the 1991 Sally Field thriller “Not Without My Daughter,” about an American woman who marries an Iranian and then tries to flee Iran with their child, and the comic-book-inspired action flick “300″ as “two clear examples of total lies.”
TheHollywood delegation, which ISNA said also includes AMPAS president Sid Ganis, is supposed to meet with Iranian filmmakers and hold a news conference on March 7. The Academy did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

But Shamghadri demanded to know how the meetings could produce results.

“How can we sit and have a sincere meeting with American film makers while they humiliate and insult the Iranian people and the great revolution of this nation?” he asked, ISNA reported.

“The Iranian nation and its revolution has repeatedly and undeservedly been attacked by Hollywood movies,” he said.

“The film “The Wrestler” is the latest among them,” he said of the film for which Mickey Rourke received an Oscar nomination this year. “We know that even right now there are other films being made with the aim of insulting and accusing the great nation of Iran and its rich culture.”

“The Wrestler” features a character known as The Ayatollah, played by Ernest Miller, who takes on Rourke’s Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson.

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