Iran expected to face new sanctions from Canada, U.S.

[CHIMO]

Canada is expected to join the Obama administration and Britain in announcing new sanctions Monday that will hit the Iranian economy, in an effort to pressure Tehran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons program.

"We're not there yet," MacKay said of military intervention. "I think there are a number ... of other things we can do first."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/11/21/pol-iran-sanctions-canada-us.html
Nov 21, 2011 12:04 PM ET


Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay fields questions at the closing news conference at the Halifax International Security Forum in Halifax Nov. 20. Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press

Iran and the I.A.E.A.

But how definitive, or transformative, were the findings? The I.A.E.A. said it had continued in recent years “to receive, collect and evaluate information relevant to possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program” and, as a result, it has been able “to refine its analysis.” The net effect has been to create “more concern.” But Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html

Seymour Hersh: Propaganda Used Ahead of Iraq War Is Now Being Reused over Iran’s Nuke Program

The big change was, in the last few weeks, the IAEA came out with a new report. And it’s not a scientific report, it’s a political document. It takes a lot of the old allegations that had been made over the years, that were looked at by the IAEA, under the regime or the directorship of Mohamed ElBaradei, who ran the IAEA for 12 years, the Egyptian—he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work—somebody who was very skeptical of Iran in the beginning and became less so as Iran went—was more and more open. But the new director of the IAEA, a Japanese official named Amano, an old sort of—from the center-right party in Japan—I’m sure he’s an honorable guy, he believes what he believes. But we happen to have a series of WikiLeak documents from the American embassy in Vienna, one of the embassies in Vienna, reporting on how great it was to get Amano there. This is last year. These documents were released by Julian Assange’s group and are quite important, because what the documents say is that Amano has pledged his fealty to America. I understand he was elected as a—he was a marginal candidate. We supported him very much. Six ballots. He was considered weak by everybody, but we pushed to get him in. We did get him in. He responded by thanking us and saying he shares our views. He shares our views on Iran. He’s going to be—he’s basically—it was just an expression of love. He’s going to do what we wanted.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/21/seymour_hersh_propaganda_used_ahead_of