TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's military has shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone aircraft in eastern Iran and has threatened to respond to the violation of Iranian airspace, a military source told state television Sunday.
"Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran," Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted the unnamed source as saying.
"The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces."
Iran shot down the drone at a time when it is trying to contain foreign reaction to the storming of the British embassy in Tehran Tuesday, shortly after London announced that it would impose sanctions on Iran's central bank in connection with Iran's controversial nuclear enrichment program.
WASHINGTON ”” A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.
I'd like to see them try.
No doubt with the growing desire by younger Iranians for 'western' culture and there increasing intolerance for fanatical religious rule, it would give the US and UK etc, an opportunity to do a 'Gadaffi' style campaign on them.
European Union governments moved closer to halting oil purchases from Iran, stepping up the confrontation over the Islamic republic’s nuclear program.
EU foreign ministers are aiming to announce harsher sanctions on Iran’s energy and banking industries at their next meeting on Jan. 30 after Greece lifted its objections to an oil embargo.
“We want to tighten sanctions on Iran -- the things that have been mentioned are the oil sector and the financial sector,” EU spokesman Michael Mann said by telephone in Brussels today.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in Lisbon today that he hopes a decision about an embargo on Iranian oil exports may be adopted at the Jan. 30 meeting of foreign ministers.
Oil fluctuated near an eight-month high after the European Union said it’s working to sanction oil imports from Iran and its banks and on concern that Europe’s debt crisis will affect consumption market. Crude for February delivery rose 29 cents to settle at $103.25 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The U.S. today welcomed the push toward an embargo.
“This is consistent with tightening the noose around Iran economically,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at a briefing in Washington. “The place to get Iran’s attention is in the oil sector.”
With all this hoo-ha going on with Iran, l'm pretty bullish on oil at the moment.
EU Moves Closer to Iran Oil Ban - Bloomberg
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Iran Charges ‘Foreign Quarters’ Assassinated Nuclear Engineer
Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Iranian government charged in a letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that a civilian nuclear scientist who was killed by a bomb yesterday was the latest victim of a foreign terror campaign.
“Based on the existing evidence collected by the relevant Iranian security authorities, similar to previous incidents, perpetrators used the same terrorist method in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, i.e. attaching a sticky magnetic bomb to the car carrying the scientists and detonating it,” Mohammad Khazaee, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, said in the letter yesterday. “Furthermore, there is firm evidence that certain foreign quarters are behind such assassinations.”
Iranian officials have accused the U.S. and Israel of targeting Iranian nuclear scientists in an effort to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which Western nations say is aimed at producing atomic weapons. Tensions have risen over U.S. and European efforts to increase economic sanctions on Iran because of the nuclear program.
There's no doubt in my mind that Israel is behind these assassinations with tacit approval from the US and probably UK, France and Germany. Israel are best positioned to conduct these types of attacks inside Iran with their deep cover agents. All would be deniable operators without links back home. Really, who else would be trying to kill off their nuclear scientists? It's just plain obvious.Boths sides are throwing propaganda around the place.
Hows this article?
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There's no doubt in my mind that Israel is behind these assassinations with tacit approval from the US and probably UK, France and Germany. Israel are best positioned to conduct these types of attacks inside Iran with their deep cover agents. All would be deniable operators without links back home. Really, who else would be trying to kill off their nuclear scientists? It's just plain obvious.
Interesting article about enriching Uranium and how it's getting easier and easier for Iran to do with existing Uranium...
NY Time's Article
Attacks May Escalate Covert Israel-Iran War
U.S. officials and defense analysts are concerned that a covert war of assassinations between Israel and Iran could escalate out of control.
“Things are heating up and there is a surge” of assassination attempts, Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department official and now director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a telephone interview.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday blamed Iran for car bombings of Israeli diplomatic vehicles in New Delhi and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The attacks come after the deaths of several Iranian nuclear scientists, the most recent in a Jan. 11 car bombing in Tehran that Iran said Israel had orchestrated.
Israeli leaders have said time is running out for sanctions to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons and have not ruled out a military strike. The U.S. and its allies have tightened economic restrictions on Iran while seeking to avert a military conflagration in a region that holds more than half of global oil reserves.
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One possible Israeli target, the uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, was guarded in 2007 by antiaircraft artillery.
WASHINGTON — Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.
That is the assessment of American defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon, who say that an Israeli attack meant to set back Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge and highly complex operation. They describe it as far different from Israel’s “surgical” strikes on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.
“All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going to be that easy,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official and who planned the American air campaigns in 2001 in Afghanistan and in the 1991 Gulf War.
Speculation that Israel might attack Iran has intensified in recent months as tensions between the countries have escalated. In a sign of rising American concern, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, warned on CNN that an Israeli strike on Iran right now would be “destabilizing.” Similarly, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that attacking Iran would not be “the wise thing” for Israel to do “at this moment.”
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