Saturday’s Daily Briefing on Iran

DoctorZin reports:

New satellite intel shows that Iran is building an underground tunnel just north of the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) at Esfahan. It appears too big to be only for storage. It might be intended to house production facilities for some uranium conversion processes.. Iran already has about 500 tons of uranium concentrate.

Update and observation from jriemer: Follow the road that goes along side the explosive storage site to a black topped building (on right of road) and appears to go into the mountainside.

Here are a few of items you may have missed.

• President Bush and Putin will be meeting next week, and will be discussing Iran’s nuclear program.
• Bush is making it clear that the military option against Iran’s nuclear program is not our first choice.
• But Bush accused Iran of trying to blame any failure of the EU3/Iran talks on the US.
• France hopes that the US will offer Iran admission to the WTO if Iran agrees to halt all nuclear enrichment, permanently.
• Condi warns Russia about trusting the Iranians.
• Iranians threaten to retaliate within 15 minutes of any US attack, but the average Iranian on the street doesn’t appear to want to join in a fight with the US.
• The White House wants more funding for the Voice of America, most which is going towards broadcasts into Iran.
• The Europeans keep pushing for US concessions (carrots) if Iran agrees to a permanent halt to its uranium enrichment. But they seem to forget that Iran's nuclear negotiator has warned there was nothing the West could offer Tehran that would persuade it to scrap a nuclear program.
• And finally, Iranians appear to believe that the mysterious events of the past week: the fire at the Mosque in Tehran and the explosion near the Bushehr nuclear facilities are all part of a US effort towards regime change in Iran, which they appear to welcome.