Skip to main content

Stand up President Ahmadinejad

The media savages him. He is scorned by many. It is said that many of his countrymen don't like him let alone approve of his random pronouncements. Who? President Ahmadinejad. True, he has made totally outrageous statements. The UN wants to order sanctions against his country, Iran. But, who is this man actually?

One person has sought to find out, in this rare insight into the man, published on Mother Jones:

"Yossi Melman is one of the most interesting intelligence correspondents around. He covers intelligence and national security issues for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and is the coauthor, with Meir Javedanfar, of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran (Carroll & Graf, 2007).

In their book, Melman and Javedanfar provide an in-depth look at the personality of Ahmadinejad, his religious beliefs, and the continuous cat-and-mouse game being played by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran. Their book also describes how IAEA inspectors came to the realization that Iran utilized technology provided by the renegade Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Previously, Melman wrote (with CBS reporter Dan Raviv) a book about the history of the Israeli Intelligence community including Mossad, Every Spy a Prince. Melman answered Laura Rozen’s questions about Israeli thinking about Iran, Iranian president Ahmadinejad, and the mystique of Israeli intelligence."

Read the interview with Melman here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...