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Rice Urges Iran's Nuclear Compliance

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that Iran will have no choice but to comply with worldwide insistence that it back off its disputed nuclear activities. Rice indicated the next step against Iran will be a resolution at the United Nations Security Council seeking punitive or coercive sanctions to stop what the United States says is a covert drive to acquire nuclear weapons. "When the Security Council reconvenes, there will have to be some consequence for that action and that defiance," Rice said after a meeting with Canada's new foreign minister, Peter MacKay. "And we will look at the full range of options available to the Security Council." Rice referred to the Security Council's power to "compel ... member states of the U.N. to obey the will of the international system." "I'm certain that we'll look at measures that could be taken to ensure that Iran knows that they really have no choice but to comply," Rice said. Iran denies it intends to build weapons, and has refused to give up what it calls a legitimate program to develop nuclear power for electricity.
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Iran Is `Some Years Away' From Making a Nuclear Bomb, U.S. Says

Iran is ``some years away'' from developing a nuclear bomb, said Thomas Fingar, deputy U.S. director of national intelligence.
Fingar, who chairs the National Intelligence Council, said that's the shared assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies. Fingar, one of three deputies who reports to national intelligence director John Negroponte, is in charge of intelligence analysis.
The question of how soon Iran could build a nuclear weapon gained urgency April 11 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country had enriched uranium sufficiently to produce nuclear fuel. He said used 164 centrifuges were used. Yesterday, Deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi said Iran planned to install 3,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant this year, then expand to 54,000. Nuclear experts say that's enough to build a bomb.
Fingar and other senior intelligence officials, talking with reporters in Washington, sought to put Iran's assertions in context.
Kenneth Brill, head of the National Counterproliferation Center and the U.S. envoy to the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, said previous Iranian claims about their number of working centrifuges were exaggerated.

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General: No Air Force planes lost in Iran

Spy planes that Iran claims to have shot down over its territory were not operated by the U.S. Air Force, a top American general said Thursday. Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck also played down Pentagon planning for air strikes on Iran, calling it routine.
Iran's Farsi-language daily Jomhouri Islami reported Sunday that Iran had downed an unmanned spy plane flying in its airspace near the border with southern Iraq.
Peck, the deputy commander of U.S. Air Force operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters, said no unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, that fly in the region had gone missing.
"All of my UAVs are accounted for," Peck said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I know where they all are and none of them are on the ground in Iran."
It is possible Iran downed a spy drone operated by an intelligence agency, military officials said, or it could have downed a plane flown by a non-coalition military.
Or Iran may have fabricated the incident, the military officials said.

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Once again the UNSC is not calling for any sanctions. It's really getting annoying, to see the great security council being so passive. At the end of the month once again Iran will be given another 30 days, until it creates a Nuclear weapon and then the UNSC will once again drop it saying they don't posses any nuclear weapons. This round is going to go round and round and it wont stop untill some country comes in and actualy does something.

UNSC shame on you.