Israel mulls Iran nuclear deal, sanctions

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened top advisers Tuesday to assess an Iranian nuclear deal with Turkey and Brazil that may stall the new U.N. sanctions Israel seeks against Tehran, officials said.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem

The unscheduled inner cabinet meeting, accompanied by an announcement from Netanyahu’s office that ministers were under orders to withhold public comment, reflected Israel’s worries about the efficacy of foreign efforts to negotiate with Iran.

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity following the meeting, said Israel regards the Iranian nuclear deal with Turkey and Brazil as a ruse to fend off international pressure ahead of a new U.N. Security Council resolution on sanctions.

Israel, widely assumed to have its own atomic arsenal, has hinted at military strikes, as a last resort, to deny its most powerful foe the means to make a nuclear bomb. But it faces big tactical challenges as well as Western reluctance to see another regional war.

World powers voiced doubt over whether Iran’s agreement on Monday to ship some low-enriched uranium to Turkey would be enough to address wider concerns about further fuel production.

Iran, which insists its nuclear program is peaceful, said the deal aimed to fend off a fourth round of U.N. Security Council sanctions.

Netanyahu has so far endorsed Security Council diplomacy, while urging U.S. and European efforts to toughen up sanctions.

First word of the compromise bid by Brazil and Turkey, both of which are non-permanent members of the Security Council, drew a mixed response from Israeli officials who spoke to the media before being muzzled by Netanyahu.

“Iran is equipping itself, intent on getting (nuclear) weapons. It is taking steps that are far from being for the sake of Iran’s self-defense, as the president of Brazil would tell it,” Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said.

“We are watching this, and making decisions accordingly,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.

Trade and Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense chief, said Israel could only know with time if, with the new deal, Iran was “continuing to toy with the whole world” or was open to placing curbs on its domestic uranium enrichment.

Ben-Eliezer was cautiously upbeat about the intervention by Turkey. Ties with Ankara have been strained following its strong condemnation of Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2008 and its policies toward the Palestinians.

“Turkey is certainly a regional superpower,” Ben-Eliezer said on Israel Radio. “Listen, 72 million people live there. And to say that they would be happy with their neighbor going nuclear? Certainly not.”

Baroness Warsi calls on Nawaz Sharif

LONDON, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative Party’s chairwoman, called on PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif at his Park Lane residence on Monday and reiterated her party’s stress on promoting bilateral relations between Pakistan and the UK. The Baroness became the first Muslim woman to join the British cabinet when she was named minister without portfolio by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in his new coalition government following the May 6 parliamentary elections.

The Baroness became the first Muslim woman to join the British cabinet when she was named minister without portfolio by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in his new coalition government following the May 6 parliamentary elections.

Sharif felicitated Baroness Warsi both on her appointment as the chairwoman of the Tory party and her elevation to a Cabinet post and said the UK Pakistani Diaspora was proud of her achievement.

The Baroness who was accompanied by her husband Iftikhar Azam has been a high-profile champion of Muslim women’s rights and was recently voted the country’s most powerful female Muslim.

Sharif, currently on a private visit to London, also appreciated the charity work of Baroness Warsi in villages near Gujjar Khan from where parents emigrated to England in the 1960′s.

She runs five vocational training centres for orphaned in the villages through a women’s charity and in 2008 David Cameron visited Gujjar Khan with her.

Sharif said women like Baroness Warsi were a fine example in the UK Muslim community who by sheer dint of hard work had been able to achieve high position in the British party politics.

Where is Faisal Shahzad?

WASHINGTON: Suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad has disappeared from sight, going a week without appearing in court on weapons of mass destruction and terror charges.

NY terror suspect Faisal Shahzad (R) with his wife and several unidentified individuals stand in Times Square, 2008. (Reuters/CBS News)

Federal authorities say 30-year-old Shahzad voluntarily waived his right to an initial court appearance and agreed to answer questions, possibly without a lawyer and while in custody at an undisclosed location.

His decision to talk and the open-ended undetermined duration of the hidden dialogue – one week and counting – are allowed by law.

But they’re also uncommon for a suspect without a formal plea deal with prosecutors, reported CBS News.

Shahzad was supposed to appear in court the day following his arrest:

Defendants normally are brought to court within a day or two of their arrest to formally face charges, and that was the expectation with Shahzad. A middle-of-the-night statement by prosecutors which announced the arrest said he would appear later the following day.

But later word came that the appearance had been indefinitely postponed because of his continued cooperation.

Since then, the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan and the FBI, have steadfastly refused to discuss Shahzad’s whereabouts or conditions of confinement. His name is absent from a US Bureau of Prisons online database.

Too early to cooperate:

“You usually don’t see a defendant cooperate this quickly, because his cooperation is really his only bargaining chip,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

Authorities “will continue to question him for as long as it takes to get important and time-sensitive information,” Mintz added. “But they won’t interrogate him indefinitely, even with his cooperation. At some point, it’s in the government’s interest to get him counsel and have him appear before a judge to ensure his waiver was done knowingly.”

Manhattan version of Guantanamo:

“He’s the magic jihadist,” said civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, who has represented several terrorism case defendants over the last two decades.

“First you see him and then he disappears into some Manhattan version of Guantanamo, but with worse weather and better coffee.”

Kuby said the questioning of Shahzad was solely to gain intelligence because the evidence was so strong against him before he was caught.

He said Shahzad was probably not thinking about trying to win leniency at sentencing.

Written Waiver?

Shahzad would have had to sign a written waiver and keep reiterating that he was sticking to it in order for his cooperation to continue, said William H. Devaney, another former federal prosecutor.

That’s something he could do on his own. But enough time has passed that prosecutors “would probably want to play it safe and make sure he has counsel,” Devaney said.

Leniency not the goal:

Ken Wainstein, a former U.S. attorney in Washington who headed the Justice Department’s anti-terrorism efforts and served as homeland security adviser under President George W Bush, said cooperation does not always mean a defendant is trying to win leniency.

Sometimes, he said, a defendant’s cooperation is motivated by “just sheer pride in what he’s done, a desire to lay out or even boast about the crimes he committed.”

“Some terror suspects since 9/11 have been happy to talk about the terrorist acts they’ve committed,” he said.

Involvement of Pakistani Taliban:

A criminal complaint made public last week gave some clues about Shahzad’s cooperation: it said he had admitted receiving bomb-making training in Waziristan.

Attorney General Eric Holder claimed Sunday that investigators had evidence that the Pakistani Taliban helped facilitate and finance Shahzad, saying, “They were intimately involved in this plot.”

However, Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon, while calling Shahzad a “misguided soul”, said that he disagreed with the Obama administration officials’ claim that the accused was trained by the Pakistani Taliban.

“All I am saying is that the evidence I have points in one direction: it does not have the Taliban’s signature,” he said.

“This is not, and I repeat not, a Pakistan terror threat,” the Pakistani envoy said, while underscoring the fact that Shahzad is not a Pakistani citizen.

“If this is the standard of the TTP, then I think there is nothing to worry about,” he said. The attempt was botched to such a degree that it was “not even funny,” Haroon said.

He said that the reason he believes that the Taliban have no hand was because this militant group has carried out so many successful bombings inside Pakistan, killing and maiming thousands of innocent people.

The Stranded Pakistanis of Bangladesh

I recently returned from a medical student elective in Dhaka, Bangladesh. There I learned about the so-called “Stranded Pakistanis.” These are people who had either sided with Pakistan during the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971 or were otherwise considered sympathetic to Pakistan due to having migrated from India. Most of them speak Urdu, whereas the native language of the country is Bangla. The Stranded Pakistanis have been relegated to camps since 1971, some of which are located in Dhaka but the majority of which are in remote locations throughout the country. The Bangladesh government has denied these people full citizenship and prevented many of their children from attending school. Although some were issued national identification cards in 2008, they are unable to obtain many jobs and cannot leave the country. Instead, they have been for the last 39 years entrapped as the poorest of the poor – with malnutrition and diarrheal diseases causing an astounding number of deaths each year. The conditions are subhuman, with 7-10 people living in each small room or tent, and in some areas 3-4 bathroom stalls per 3000 people. Children roam the streets and beg for money and drug use is rampant, which begins at a young age. Recently a U.S. based non-governmental organization named OBAT Helpers, Inc started schools at various camp sites and now provides interest-free microfinancing. An estimated 300,000 people live in 66 camps throughout Bangladesh. Many of them still wait to be accepted by Pakistan as refugees from the 1971 war.

Taliban suicide bomb hits NATO convoy, kills 18

KABUL, Afghanistan – A suicide bomber detonated his vehicle near a U.S. convoy Tuesday, killing 18 people, including six troops – five Americans and a Canadian – in the deadliest attack on NATO in the Afghan capital in eight months. Two other American service members were killed in separate attacks in the south, making Tuesday the deadliest day of the year for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

5 U.S. Troops Killed in Afghanistan

The Canadian, Col. Geoff Parker, 42, was the highest-ranking member of the Canadian Forces to die in Afghanistan since the Canadian mission began in 2002, the country’s military said.

Twelve Afghan civilians also died – many of them on a public bus in rush-hour traffic along a major thoroughfare that runs by the ruins of a one-time royal palace and government ministries. At least 47 people were wounded, the Interior Ministry said.

The blast was the first major attack in the Afghan capital since February and followed a Taliban announcement of a spring offensive even as the U.S. gears up for a major push to restore order in the turbulent south.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the blast, telling The Associated Press in a telephone call that the bomber was a man from Kabul and that the vehicle was packed with 1,650 pounds (750 kilograms) of explosives.

The mangled remains of a vehicle lies at the place of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, …

Afghan President Hamid Karzai joined the U.S. and NATO in condemning the attack, which he said killed women and children.

The explosion, which thundered across the capital, happened about 8 a.m. as streets were packed with cars, buses and trucks. The bomb ripped apart vehicles and hurled body parts along the street. U.S. and Afghan forces blocked off the area as emergency workers loaded the wounded into ambulances.

“I saw one person lying on the ground with no head,” said Mirza Mohammad, who was on his way to work when the blast took place. Police officer Wahidullah, who goes by one name, said he saw the body of a woman in a pale blue burqa smashed up against the window of the bus.

“Dead bodies were everywhere,” Wahidullah said.

U.S. forces spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks said five American service members were killed in the Kabul blast. That plus the two deaths in the south brought the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since the war began in 2001 to at least 994, according to an Associated Press count.

The Kabul attack was the heaviest loss of life for NATO in a single attack in the capital since Sept. 17, when a suicide car bomber killed six Italian soldiers. For U.S. forces, it was the bloodiest day since Oct. 27, when nine Americans died in separate attacks in central and southern Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, the Taliban announced a new offensive – “Operation Al-Fatah” or “Victory” – which would target NATO forces, foreign diplomats, contractors and Afghan government officials.

The announcement was made on the eve of Karzai’s visit to Washington and comes as U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are gearing up for a major operation to secure Kandahar, the biggest city in the south and the former Taliban headquarters before they were ousted from power in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. U.S. officials believe control of Kandahar is the key to stabilizing the Taliban’ southern heartland.

Kabul has been abuzz for weeks with rumors of imminent Taliban attacks against Afghan government and international targets. The last major assault in the city occurred on Feb. 26 when suicide attackers struck at two residential hotels, killing six Indians and 10 Afghans.

Afghan authorities blamed the February attack on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group that India blames for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 166 people.

On April 8, Afghan police announced they had arrested five would-be suicide bombers on their way to carry out a major attack in the city. Eleven days later, the Afghan intelligence service said nine members of a terrorist cell had been arrested – presumably from the support network that was to have helped the five others carry out their attacks.

The bombing Tuesday suggests the Taliban have reconstituted their underground cells, presumably from within the city’s large Pashtun community which forms the bulk of the insurgent force.

Also Tuesday, Afghan and NATO aircraft continued the search for an Afghan commercial airliner which disappeared Monday on a flight from Kunduz to Kabul with 44 people on board, including three British citizens and an American. Air traffic controllers lost track of the Antonov-24, operated by Pamir Airways, when it was about 55 miles (85 kilometers) north of Kabul.

“Right now, we are looking to identify the location of the crash,” Karzai said at a news conference. “In some areas, the bad weather – snow, rain and fog – will not let us do the search. We’re very hopeful that we will able to find the victims of the crash soon and hand the bodies over to their families.”

Abdul Shakour, a district official in Parwan province, said seven tribal elders in the area where the plane was last reported each promised to send two or three experienced climbers to search the remote mountains for any sign of the missing aircraft.

For families of those aboard the aircraft, however, despair turned to anger over delays in finding the wreckage.

“People are very upset with the government because it has no forces here to help us. And these 48 countries in ISAF, where are they today? They are not here to help us,” said Mohammad Isahq, a Kabul shopkeeper whose nephew, Omar Sahel, was a flight attendant on the plane.

Isahq said that the families were ready to do the search themselves if authorities would provide them with proper equipment and point them in the right direction.