Reporter warns that Iran has nuclear weapons now

11-11-2005

By: MARILYN H. KARFELD 

Senior Staff Reporter

Since the end of the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, Americans have put Iran on the back burner, said investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman.

“Iran is a clear and present danger,” he recently commented to a small audience at The City Club. “This regime owes its birth to terrorism. Terrorism is public policy. And Iran has nuclear power.”

Although U.S. intelligence agencies speak of Iran as a potential nuclear power, Timmerman said the evidence indicates that Iran already possesses nuclear weapons. Before Iran gives a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group intent on incinerating an American target, the U.S. should be helping democratic factions already in the Islamic nation, the journalist said.

Timmerman’s recent book, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, spells out the warning signs U.S. officials continue to ignore. The fundamentalist regime in Iran, according to Timmerman, facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, is financing the insurgents in Iraq, and currently shelters Osama bin Laden.

Four years ago, U.S. intelligence officials discounted a detailed warning from an Iranian defector about an impending terrorist attack, Timmerman said.

On July 26, 2001, the defector told the CIA officer at the American embassy in Azerbaijan that six to ten Arabs with airline-hijacking training were in Tehran plotting an attack against the U.S. The date the defector gave for the attack was from the Persian calendar. Although the CIA official thought this date referred to September 10, Timmerman said the Persian date the defector specified actually was September 11.

Timmerman also cited other highly classified intelligence documents that reveal that Iran aided those Saudi hijackers who traveled through Iran enroute to Afghanistan.

A senior operative in the Lebanese-based terrorist organization Hezbollah was behind the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and Marines barracks in Beirut in October 1983, said Timmerman, who also heads the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. This same Hezbollah agent brought the Al Qaeda terrorists to Iran and into Afghanistan.

The CIA ignored this information for the same reason U.S. intelligence officials rejected other strong warnings of the impending Sept. 11 attacks. They operate under the concept that Al Qaeda terrorists are Sunni fundamentalists and the Iranians are Shia fundamentalists, Timmerman said. Since the two factions do not get along, the assumption was they could not have cooperated on an attack.

“The truth is,” said Timmerman, “Al Qaeda and Iran have conspired to murder Americans and Jews since 1993, when they first got together in Sudan. Multiple sources have laid this out.”

Despite the fact that the CIA recently reported that Iran was only 10 years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, Timmerman said Iran has had the capability to produce the necessary fissile material since 1995. That’s when China gave Iran the blueprints to build a uranium conversion facility.

Timmerman postulated that in the last 10 years, Iran has been able to make enough fissile material for 20 to 25 nuclear bombs. Furthermore, the Iranian regime and its intelligence agents are ruthless in suppressing political opposition to its policies.

“We’ve got a terrorist regime in Iran, a virtual nuclear state, with an aggressive intelligence apparatus. And we sit and twiddle our thumbs,” lamented Timmerman.

Prof. Amos Guiora, Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor and director of its Institute for Global Security Law and Policy, is not familiar with Timmerman and was not at the lecture. However, he said Iran does present a very real security threat and needs to be “front and center.”

In the last few days, the Israeli media have reported that the Iranian government is offering $10,000 to any Palestinian who fires a missile into Israel, said Guiora, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces who was active in its counter-terrorism operations.

His Israeli sources tell him that Iran will have nuclear weapons in a year. But, Guiora questioned the validity of conspiracy theories that Iran facilitated the 9-11 attacks or is sheltering bin Laden.

Despite the grave threat from Iran, Timmerman does not suggest the U.S. take military action against the fundamentalist Muslim regime. In fact, military force is the worst possible action and only a last resort, Timmerman said. Instead, “our secret weapon is two-thirds of the people of Iran who are under the age of 30 and hate the regime.”

America needs to empower the pro-democracy forces in Iran to overthrow the government, which is what Timmerman said the U.S. did in Serbia and Ukraine. Non-violent conflict, he insisted, “is war using other tools as weapons. We can train people to do it.”

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, despite some predictions, the Iraqi people have not greeted American troops with hugs and flowers. But Timmerman insisted Iran is different because it already has some democratic institutions in place, which Iraq did not have.

Currently, the U.S. spends $3 million to assist Iran’s pro-democracy factions. Instead, Timmerman said the U.S. should spend $300 million to foment a democratic movement in Iran. This is a relatively small sum compared with the $200 billion we’ve already spent in the war in Iraq.

Iranians “are actively working with terrorist cells in this country,” he said. “They’ve tested nuclear warheads. It’s urgent we do something about Iran.”

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