Washington Times article.

[...] a U.S. air-war planner in the Persian Gulf War tells The Washington Times he does not think Israel's relatively small air force -- compared with the United States huge bomber and cruise-missile fleet -- has the firepower to properly hit all the necessary Iranian targets.

The only real way to stop Iran's atomic bomb, said retired Air Force Col. John Warden, is for the U.S. to shut down Iran's electric generation for the foreseeable future -- a strategy not currently on the Pentagon's table.

Andy Worthington writes.

President Obama's hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison's closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress.

Independent report.

Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear whistleblower who spent 18 years in prison, went back to jail yesterday for violating the terms of his parole.

Gary Younge in the Guardian.

That Israel would try to do so on the backs of black South Africans is a laughable indication of its desperation. For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid's crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa's principle and most dependable arms dealer. As we learn elsewhere in the Guardian today, it even offered to sell the South African regime nuclear weapons.

Juan Cole writes.

Obama mysteriously has ceased leading on the Iran issue and is instead showing himself willing to be led. Thus have the pragmatic hawks (with the war hawks waiting in the wings) defeated the Realists and the liberal internationalists. Obama stabbed Turkey and Brazil in the back after asking them to risk their face for him. Obama is giving Iran the impression that he is indecisive. All of this backtracking for the sake of a sanctions regime that is highly unlikely actually to change Iran's behavior, contrary to the express hopes of Secretary Gates. Obama's current Iran policy cannot be explained in the terms of US-Iranian relations. It must be driven by something else. The Israel lobbies and dealings with the Netanyahu government are the likeliest candidates in explaining the abandonment of a Realist approach.

Guardian report.

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

Telegraph report.

There is evidence that bets against the euro are being placed by important investors around the world, which last week took the euro to four-year lows on fears Greece, Spain and Portugal may be forced to leave the single currency.

From Israel national News.

Iran on Tuesday night said it had fired several Fajr 5 missiles during its war games in the Strait of Hormuz, capable of sinking American warships.

Scott Horton in Harper's.

It's clear that the Labour government was engaged in the same sort of dissembling about torture that marked the Bush Administration, using wiggle words with secret meanings. If the truth is now to emerge, it serves the public interest in Britain, just as it would serve the U.S. public interest, for it to emerge from a detached and depoliticized process--so the formal judicial inquiry is the appropriate tool, just as a commission of inquiry would be for the United States.

[...]

At this point, no issue is more fundamental to the civil liberties agenda. The Obama Administration should watch and learn a bit about how a modern democracy approaches the question of accountability for torture.

Wall Street Journal report.

China's biggest oil company is pressing ahead with oil-and-gas projects in Iran valued at billions of dollars, its top executive said, highlighting Beijing's strong economic ties to Tehran even as China has signed onto a U.S.-led sanctions effort against Iran.

Roger Cohen writeing in the New York Times.

Obama could instead have said: "Pressure works! Iran blinked on the eve of new U.N. sanctions. It's come back to our offer. We need to be prudent, given past Iranian duplicity, but this is progress. Isolation serves Iranian hard-liners."

No wonder Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, is angry. I believe him when he says Obama and U.S. officials encouraged Turkey earlier this year to revive the deal: "What they wanted us to do was give the confidence to Iran to do the swap. We have done our duty."

IMEMC report.

The United States Senate approved the American President's plan to grant Israel more than $200 Million meant for the development of Israel's Iron Dome that intercepts short-range missiles.

Independent report.

The acclaimed Iranian filmmaker and opposition supporter Jafar Panahi has gone on a hunger strike in protest against his imprisonment.

Seattle Times report.

Boeing said Monday that its first unmanned jet fighter-sized aircraft, called Phantom Ray for its likeness to an undersea manta ray, is on track to have its first flight this year.

[...]

The pilotless unmanned aircraft is designed to execute a full range of potential military missions, including surveillance and reconnaissance; long-range, pre-emptive strikes against enemy air defenses; bombing of ground targets; and autonomous aerial refueling.

The Leveretts comment.

Now that Tehran has accepted the main elements of the Baradei proposal--the transfer of 1,200 kilos of low-enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for new fuel for the TRR--the United States has unilaterally changed the game.

Gary Sick comments.

According to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he had been in "constant contact" with Clinton herself and with national security adviser James Jones, while his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had face-to-face encouragement from President Obama in December and April.

[...]

The Turks and Brazilians, who felt they had "delivered" Iran on the terms demanded by the United States, were surprised and disappointed at the negative reactions from Washington. Little did they know that their success in Tehran, which had been given a 0-30 percent chance just days earlier, came just as the Americans were putting the final touches on a package of sanctions to be presented to the UN Security Council. The Tehran agreement was as welcome as a pothole in the fast lane, and the Americans were not reluctant to let their displeasure be known.