Brazil, a Sad Tale of Government Failure

"Every shift it was like that [a lack of ventilators forcing doctors to choose who might survive and whose condition was so dire they might not, to decide who would get the ventilator and the opportunity to survive COVID-19]."

"Sometimes, I would give them [seriously ill patients] sedatives just so that they didn't suffer. Eventually, they would pass away." 

"It's very difficult to accept things you know are wrong."

Dr.Pedro Archer, surgeon, municipal hospital, Rio de Janeiro

"It ended up creating a perfect storm for corruption."

"The pandemic allowed governments to spend significant resources very quickly while internal controls were relaxed due to the emergency."

Guilherme France, research director, Transparency International, Brazil

The Maracana campaign hospital is seen next to the Maracana stadium amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil September 16, 2020. REUTERS/Pilar Olivares

 

 

In Brazil the public health system was quickly flooded with COVID-19 patients, where people struggling to breathe were mentally divided into two groups; the health-impaired elderly who might not survive even if heroic efforts were made on their behalf, and the others who were though ill with the virus, in superior physical shape who were more likely to survive with the use of a ventilator. Ventilators in such short supply that doctors had little option but to quickly gauge such situations and come to a reluctant determination that some would live and others would not.

This is a scenario that played out elsewhere, not just in hard-hit Brazil. Italy and Spain too were overwhelmed by COVID cases, their hospitals stretched to their limits and beyond. Ventilators were in short supply everywhere. Even in Canada where the first wave of COVID cases failed to inundate hospitals as expected with more patients than they could care for, those very same scenarios of choosing who would survive played out beforehand as a potential scene that thankfully failed to materialize.

The deaths in Brazil are now viewed as entirely avoidable in theory though practise and reality made it otherwise. Federal and state prosecutors allege top officials in the country were more fixated on enriching themselves personally than planning for legitimate, trustworthy contracts to provide the badly needed health supplies and personal protection equipment, which resulted in the critical shortage of medical devices to face the emergency of respiratory distress due to COVID.

Top officials in the country saw $72.2 million ending up in their bank accounts thanks to corrupt schemes to steer inflated state contracts to allies in self-serving plots to defraud the country and deny it the equipment to leverage control over the virus and save Brazilian lives, according to prosecutors. Three contracts for a thousand ventilators, claim the prosecutors, were signed with the intention of favouring corrupt officials' bank accounts, and in the event most of the ventilators were never received.

In July, Rio state Health Secretary Edmar Santos was arrested, charged with corruption related to those contracts. Rio state Governor Wilson Witzel was suspended from office in August, reflecting concern he could interfere with the investigations, even while he is facing impeachment proceedings over alleged graft. Even as Latin America as a whole has been stunned by the ferocity of the pandemic, with 8.9 million cases by September 24, over 139,000 COVID deaths have been registered in Brazil alone.

Bolsonaro greets supporters upon arrival at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, on May 24, 2020, amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

 

Over ten thousand people have perished from COVID-19 in the city of Rio itself; 18,000 in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Poverty and crowded urban conditions are partially to blame for the situation. And it has been anything but helpful that Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has minimized the severity of the epidemic; infamously he has compared the disease to a common cold. Perhaps he feels differently now that he has the experience of recovering from the virus.

Brazilian prosecutors have zeroed in on what they describe as a series of interrelated criminal enterprises where contracts for masks, coronavirus tests and hand gel sanitizers have all been rigged, expressing the opportunistic corruption so irresistible to those in authority who feel they will be able to mask their corrupt plans for enriching themselves, robbing the population of the necessary safety equipment to see them safely through the pandemic.

 

As Latin American countries cope with the pandemic, investigators are probing whether funds to pay for protective equipment, medicine and other essentials are being misused © AFP via Getty Images

 

The state called for seven field hospitals to be built for the treatment of COVID-19 patients, where the state health ministry -- SES -- awarded contracts to the value of $151 million to a non-profit health group, IABAS was directed to construct the structures to open by the end of April. Of the seven, two were opened to date, one in May, the other June, long after the first surge of COVID-19. These contracts are seen to comprise a portion of a kickback racket managed by a local entrepreneur.

That man, Mario Peixoto, had been arrested in May on charges of defrauding the Rio state health system, federal court documents describing a complex scheme where Peixoto's associates arranged for bribes routed to government officials in the interests of securing public health contracts, among them for the field hospitals. IABAS had drafted its winning proposal prior to the SES having solicited offers. Four of the seven field hospitals were incomplete in early June when Rio state cancelled the contract with IABAS and took control of all project sites.

A little-known company, Arc Fontoura, was awarded a contract worth $12.3 million  for 400 ventilators to be delivered immediately, toward the end of March. The health ministry, according to state auditors, paid close to a 200 percent markup from the market price for the ventilators, only a small batch of which had been received from the company, leaving hospital workers complaining the machines that were delivered were lacking key components.

Two additional firms were awarded contracts to the value of $20.9 million to supply 300 ventilators each. According to court documents, these shady enterprises submitted their proposals less than an hour after SES opened the tender, though it hadn't been advertised beforehand; clearly indicating the companies had inside knowledge, according to prosecutors. Of the one thousand ventilators Rio's state health department had ordered, a mere 52 had been delivered, all from the original firm.

Leading the SES to cancel its contract with one of the companies reflecting "the company's inability to deliver" the ventilators. Dr.Archer, the surgeon in Rio de Janeiro, is beyond bitter over his experience leaving him helpless to give needed medical assistance to patients during the peak of the pandemic in April and May when as many as 30 of his patients were left waiting for the arrival of the machines. Many of those patients too unstable to move to hospitals elsewhere and who ended up dying.

"It gives you a feeling of impotence and anger to know that you could have saved more lives and helped more people if resources were not diverted, if supplies were not overpriced,."

"The pandemic comes to expose all these dirty politics and its schemes -- and we are the ones who are the frontline suffering from their actions."

Micaella Melo de Paula, respiratory physiotherapist in a Rio de Janeiro public hospital

Military police walk outside the official residence of Rio de Janeiro Gov. Wilson Witzel on May 26 after a raid by Federal Police as part of an investigation into the alleged embezzlement of public resources.

In God They Trust

"Throughout this pandemic, infection rates in Haredi [Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities] and some Arab towns have been more than double the rate of the wider population. Encouraged by their religious leaders, who they revere and follow unquestioningly, they have resisted adhering to many public health measures intended to manage the contagion rate and have insisted that continued prayer will do more to contain the virus than masks or social distancing."

Vivian Bercovici, Journalist, Tel Aviv

In the United States Evangelical churches have resisted public health and government instructions to close to normal activities during the pandemic. Drive-in services were put in place in many churches to allow congregations to meet in smaller, socially distanced numbers in church parking lots. In some churches built to accommodate huge memberships, there was resistance to mandated closures. Large church gatherings of fundamentalists in Korea and elsewhere were found to be responsible for massive COVID outbreaks.

SAUL LOEB via Getty Images

Supporters listen as President Donald Trump speaks at a Students for Trump event at the Dream City Church in Phoenix.

 

In Montreal in the early stages of the novel coronavirus, Hasidic communities with their large families and penchant for socializing, alongside congregations packed into limited interiors, cases of COVID rose quickly, particularly when congregation members travelled to synagogues in New York to meet with their American counterparts and brought infections back with them that spread in the community. Government and health authorities had little option but to impose 14-day lockdowns on a number of Hasidic communities in the Montreal area to control the outbreaks.

The Tash community, in Boisbriand, north of Montreal, has a population of roughly 4,000. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

 

 

In many areas of the world religious fundamentals declared themselves protected from harm by their faith. That it was far more important to continue attendance at their places of worship to fervently pray and that those of faith could depend upon the protection that faith conferred on them. Nothing untoward could occur to these believers because a force more powerful than any mere virus would keep them safe from harm. It is as though religious fervour robs people of common sense. Their faith so intense no room is left for critical thinking.

 

And norsis the the Islamic world free of fundamentalist Islmists who refuse the majority consensus of closing down mosques during the pandemic. From Cairo to Mogadishu, the risks of contagion were ignored in many mosques: "I am not telling you to reject the preventive measures, but there is too much exaggeration of coronavirus", Sheikh Abdi Hayi in Mogadishu said in his sermon, as people prayed on the street, the packed interior of the mosque now allowing them to enter.

Faisal mosque in Islamabad during Jummah prayer  Photo Shazziya Mehmood: "Kindly arrest all of them, they put everyone at risk"

In Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, mosques were intensely crowded as the faithful flocked to hear a religious scholar inform his congregation via loudspeaker: "We are not too weak to let this one virus empty our mosques." And in the town of Depok, south of Jakarta, Inonesia, Aswin Jusar 76, stated "Allah is protecting those who abide by their obligations", as he prepared to attend a Friday prayer despite a call from the mayor for religious activities to be suspended.

Muslim faithfuls attend Friday prayers at the National Mosque in Abuja, Nigeria [Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters]

 

The religious communities in New York hosted an uncommonly high number of COVID cases throughout the pandemic, earning criticism from health and government authorities for their insistence on the vital importance in their lives of attendance at synagogue. In Brooklyn Orthodox Jews were preparing to mark Yom Kippur, the most sober, important day in the Jewish holidays calendar, raising the concern that praying in numbers would expose more people to infection in an area where community transmission is already much above the average.

Illustrative. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

In Israel, with its nine million population, another lockdown, more strict than the original has been imposed on the entire country. It is not, however, the entire country where COVID cases have risen and continue to rise steeply, and for this reason alone, many Israelis are enraged at once again having their lives disrupted without sound purpose but to satisfy the demands of he ultra-Orthodox whose political wing holds the balance of power in the Knesset. Though small in numbers, by supporting the Likud and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they are able to exert outsized influence in government decisions.

The Israel Democracy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank, released a poll report that 25 percent of the Israeli public have no trust now in the prime minister's management of the nation's COVID situation. In early April that number was 60 percent approval, reflecting trust in the ability of Prime Minister Netanyahu to act expeditiously and carefully to gain control of the virus's impact and its spread. Their trust was rewarded when case numbers plunged close to zero. The public was awarded an exhortation to relax and enjoy themselves; restrictions lifted.

Like publics everywhere in the world, released from the bondage of unnatural social life, evading all human contact, focusing on hygiene to an uncommon degree, and remaining socially isolated, the opportunity to break  free led people to behave recklessly and the predictable resulted with a steadily increasing case rise. This time the government was not as quick to take remedial, protective action. Its focus was on exterior politics and diplomacy, along with controversial plans of note drawing international concern.

As another crisis with an expanding case load loomed, the public became distrustful of their government and protests began mounting in numbers and frequency. Israel now posts one of the highest daily per capita infection rates globally. That has resulted in large numbers of Israelis testing positive and being seriously ill with hospitalizations so great in number hospital capacity and ability to care for the sick are near to collapse. The military has been tasked with setting up field hospitals for the overflow.

Closer inspection to numbers and locations demonstrate that it is the Haredi and some Arab towns responsible for the greater rise in infections. When the former director of the ministry of health, epidemiologist Ronnie Gamzu was appointed to manage the response to the pandemic, his expertise and initiatives have been knocked back by the prime minister when they focus on the number of cases in the Haredi community. A very small proportion of Israeli Jews belong to the ultra-Orthodox community, about 12 percent in total.

Yet that 12 percent wields hugely disproportionate influence, thanks to its role as Likud support in a minority government. Not just this time around, but following most elections when, small in number as they are, they end up holding the balance of power through their conditional support of the government. Conditioned on government listening carefully to their exhortations, and demands under threat of removal of support and the fall of the government.

In this instance, it is the coronavirus that the tail wags the dog over. Their insistence that should prayer and study halls close, outdoor political demonstrations must also be shut down. They demanded that the entire country, irrespective of many parts of the country having little reason to shut down, with low case loads -- be shut down, not only the Haredi communities where most of the cases arise. This is a situation that has enraged most Israelis, most of whom are not particularly religious, and many of whom are secular Jews.

Many Haredi during the first lockdown refused adamantly to follow government recommendations. Self isolation and mask-wearing was not for them, much less social distancing. this is an attitude that still prevails in many of the areas Haredis congregate within. The broader Israeli public is irate over this, bringing ever greater numbers of Israelis out to the protests. An effect of the latest, strict lockdown will be the death of many small and mid-size business interests.

Ultimately, fundamentalists anywhere and everywhere seek guidance from a mystical, mythical figure above, scorning and belittling the authority of elected governments dedicated to serve the best interests of everyone they represent. The loyalty of these people of hyper-faith beliefs is to their vision of an almighty spirit, never to the nations in which they are citizens. Their care and concern goes no further than their fellow congregants; none others need apply.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in a Jerusalem synagogue September 9, 2020, Photo: Ohad Zwogemberg

Honouring the Exploits of a Celebrated Terrorist

PFLP hijacker Leila Khaled. Photo: Sebastian Baryli

"Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations, subject to certain limitations contained in our Terms of Service, including those related to user compliance with applicable US export control, sanctions, and anti-terrorism laws."

"In light of the speaker’s reported affiliation or membership in a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, and SFSU’s inability to confirm otherwise, we determined the meeting is in violation of Zoom’s Terms of Service and told SFSU they may not use Zoom for this particular event."

Zoom’s deputy general counsel, Lynn Haaland

"SFSU cannot provide support to a member of a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Full stop. To do so will expose them to liability under federal criminal law, and the very severe associated penalties, and should certainly run afoul of university leaders’ consciences."

"We urge SFSU, in the strongest possible terms, to take its cues from Zoom and prevent this event from happening. There should be no scenario where an American university has any engagement with a notorious leader of a designated terror group (the PFLP) — who also happens to be a virulent antisemite and two-time plane hijacker."

Benjamin Ryberg, chief operating officer, director of research, Lawfare Project

 

"We hope Zoom’s de-platforming sends an important message to SFSU that Professor Rabab Abdulhadi’s repeated attempts to indoctrinate students with her hatred of Israel and condoning of terrorism is a dangerous abuse of her faculty position, and it has dangerous consequences, including the inevitable targeting of Jewish students at SFSU."

"Unfortunately, though, SFSU continues to provide a daily platform for Abdulhadi to exploit in order to achieve her hateful political ends. And Zoom’s canceling of this event only addresses a symptom of a much larger problem — faculty being permitted to use their academic positions and classrooms to indoctrinate students under the guise of education — which is why we asked SFSU’s president to vigorously address this abuse, but President Mahoney hid, once again, behind a mistaken understanding of academic freedom."

"Academic freedom does not protect faculty when their clear intent is to use the classroom or other academic spaces for promoting their own political causes, and the responsibility for preventing this ongoing abuse lies with universities."

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director, AMCHA Initiative

A San Francisco State University seminar titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled” organized by Professor Rabab Abdulhadi of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program, had invited the 76-year-old Palestinian Leila Khaled to be the featured speaker of the seminar. An event that did not go unnoticed by Jewish groups who protested the appearance at an American university of a member of the U.S.-outlawed terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. 

 

Khaled graffiti on the Israeli West Bank Barrier near Bethlehem 

Leila Khaled had been involved in two separate incidents of plane hijacking on behalf of the PFLP, an organization she remains connected to. She is a known terrorist, one glorified by the Palestinian Authority for her engagement in violent exploits against Jewish Israel. Dr.Abdulhadi of SFSU had assigned her students to produce signs and tee-shirts glorifying those exploits synonymous with murder, terrorism and violence. The Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Facebook page was posted by her with messages demonizing Israel and supporters of the Jewish state. 

As seminar organizer she had arranged with Zoom, Facebook and YouTube to broadcast the event to a wider audience. The activists and supporters of the Jewish state that the  seminar and its organizer slandered went into action, pointing out to the social media platforms that the PFLP is a terrorist organization outlawed in the U.S. by law, that Leila Khaled is a convicted terrorist. Her message and that of the seminar itself is one of victimhood, hatred and vengeance, the declaration that Israel's very existence represents a crime against Palestinian aspirations for statehood, the solution to which is the destruction of the Jewish state.

 

She was tasked by the PFLP as part of a team to hijack TWA Flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv, in August of 1969, diverting the Boeing 707 to Damascus in the belief that the-then Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, would be on the flight. A photograph of Khaled (now a resident of Amman, Jordan} holding an AK-47 rifle while wearing a kaffiyeh became a popular reproduction, following the hijacking, during which no one was hurt, but the plane was blown up once everyone disembarked.

A year later, Khaled with another PFLP member, a Nicaraguan-American, went aboard El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York. Their hijacking effort failed when Israeli sky marshals went into action, overpowering Khaled and killing her partner, Patrick Arguello. She had two hand grenades in her possession at the time, and Arguello had shot a member of the flight crew during their attempt at hijacking the plane. She was arrested and imprisoned in Britain, later released in a hostage exchange.

PFPL plane hijacker Leila Khaled in South Africa

(photo credit: AFP PHOTO/GIANLUIGI GUERCIA)

The seminar was refused hosting by both Zoom and Facebook. The event was broadcast live on You Tube on Wednesday, 23 September, but twenty minutes into the seminar, the feed was cut by YouTube and the video removed on the basis that it was violating the YouTube Terms of Service. Khaled had not had the chance to speak when the event was dropped. Last week, SFSU President Mahoney published an opinion piece, to appear in The Jewish News of Northern California, citing academic freedom and diversity as justification for proceeding with the seminar and Khaled as featured speaker.  

De-Fanging The Islamic Republic of Iran

"Today, more than ever, there is fertile ground - with the grace of God - for the annihilation, the wiping out, and the collapse of the Zionist regime. In Lebanon alone, over 100,000 missiles are ready to be launched."

"If there is a will, if it serves [our] interests, and if the Zionist regime repeats its past mistakes due to its miscalculations, these missiles will pierce through space, and will strike at the heart of the Zionist regime."

"They will prepare the ground for its great collapse in the new era."

Hossein Salami, Commander-in-Chief, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Islamic Republic

Not a word of condemnation has been issued by either the UN or the EU on the Iranian regime's acceleration of its threatening ballistic missile program. Pictured: Iranian soldiers launch a Ghader missile on September 11, 2020, during a military exercise near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran. (Photo by Iranian Army Office/AFP via Getty Images)

"The Iranian regime is in clear violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231. The resolution calls on the Islamic Republic of Iran "not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology."

"In addition, as Iran and the P4+1 (Germany, the UK, Russia, China and France) still contend that the nuclear deal [which Iran never signed] remains effective, Tehran is even violating the nuclear deal due to the fact that it indicates that Iran should not undertake any ballistic missile activity'"until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day [Oct. 18, 2015] or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the broader conclusion, whichever is earlier."

"The Iranian regime is also reportedly setting up weapons factories abroad and manufacturing advanced ballistic missiles and weapons in foreign nations, including Syria. Some of the arms that Tehran is producing there include precision-guided missiles, using advanced technology to strike specific targets. Iran's foreign-based weapons factories give it an advantageous military capability for waging wars or striking other nations through third countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen or Iraq."

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, political scientist, board member, Harvard International Review, president of the International American Council on the Middle East

The IRGC has its own navy and air force, and oversees Iran's strategic weapons  Getty Images

 U.S.President Donald Trump has stated time and again his lack of confidence in the usefulness of the United Nations. He has taken the United States out of the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the UN cultural agency UNESCO, and a global accord meant to bring nations in line to tackle climate change. He has opposed a UN migration pact. His administration cut funding for the UN Population Fund, and the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees [UNRWA]. On the other hand, the United States has always paid the lion's share of financial support of the United Nations, and its headquarters is based in New York.

That the United Nations is corrupt, that it is heavily infested with group influence brought to bear by human-rights abusing states, that its general membership has assented to one country and one country only being held in contempt as a perpetual scapegoat, is undeniable. The UN Human Rights Council is farcical, and the fact that UNESCO has denied Judaic heritage status of undeniably Judaic historical sites is yet another symptom of the body's bias against Israel and its lack of capacity to function as it should. The worst human-rights-abusing nations are continually being elected to head various 'rights' groups as yet another unabashed demonstration of contemptible corruption and cronyism.

But the United States still turned to engage the UN in a move to place further sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran in an effort to stop the Islamist theocracy from continuing on with its surreptitious program to attain nuclear weapons to complement the technologically advanced ballistic missile systems the country has devoted time, energy, research and production upon. An industry whose results have been shared with the Lebanon-based terrorist militia Hezbollah. Iranian rocketry has also been shared with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

As a destabilizing influence in the Middle East, Iran has no peer. It has laboriously built a Shiite-dominated alliance against the region's majority Sunni population, co-opting Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Yemen in a deadly triangle of opposition and threat against Arab Sunni dominance. The ruling Ayatollahs' poisonous hostility against Israel and the United States; the West in general and democracy in particular, drives Iran's antipathy and aspiration to restore its historical position as the leading influence in the Middle East.

 

Iran is investing in the development of its nuclear technology, including at its power plant in the city of Arak.Photograph: Tina Manley/Alamy

Its deliberately transparent ambitions and its sinister threats alongside its covert weapons development pose an unambiguous threat to the majority Arab nations who have gradually moved to implicitly accept the presence of the State of Israel, viewing it as a bulwark of defence against the Islamic Republic. The agreement reached by the EU and Germany with UN approval to hold Iran to a mutually-agreed schedule of nuclear development for breathing space has been a dismal failure. Conditions that Iran agreed to, have never been met and nor has the Republic diminished its nuclear research activities, merely placed them deeper below ground to keep their presence hidden from prying Western intelligence.

In overtures to the United Nations to support additional snap-back sanctions on Iran as a penalty for its non-observance of conditions associated with the nuclear agreement, the Security Council chose to give its thumbs-down even while supporting sanctions collectively on North Korea. Handily overlooking that North Korea is a nuclear-weapons nation, and there is close collaboration between Iran and North Korea cooperating in the development of Iran's nuclear ambitions to obtain its own cache of miniaturized nuclear heads to complement its missiles.

 

Iran's missile capabilities are a key part of its military prowess. Iran has launched more than a dozen missiles at two bases in Iraq housing US forces  Getty Images

 

Although Europe, China and Russia deigned not to support further debilitating Iran sanctions the U.S. has made it clear that any of their corporations wanting to do business with Iran, offering it technical weaponry components aid will themselves be penalized for failing to return all UN sanctions on Iran. Failure to implement those measures to discourage Iran from further uranium enrichment has its clear consequences. Enforce UN sanctions or pay the penalties of the Iranian threat to the Middle East and the larger world order. 

Crippling sanctions once again imposed to persuade Iran to negotiate a new, more heavily binding and inclusive agreement on nuclear arms and other weapons development, along with Iran's interference in the affairs of other Middle East states, its support for Islamofascist terrorism and alliances with like-minded regimes will deliver an indelible message, that Iran's current trajectory will not be permitted by a world order alarmed at the extent of its sinister and destructive ambitions.

A senior Security Council diplomat has stated that "Iran is closer to the bomb right now than it was two years ago", (ostensibly as lash-back to the U.S. pull-out on the nuclear agreement), that the threat posed by North Korea "now is bigger than three years ago", speaking anonymously. Some level of credit must go to Donald Trump, as flawed a human being as he is, for making the effort to set aside earlier failed efforts and committing to a personal appeal, face-to-face with North Korea's Kim to relinquish its own nuclear ambitions, only to fail in the end. 

So little having been accomplished at great effort and hopes for a resolution of the impasse, the US. has proceeded with sanctioning over two dozen people and entities linked to Iran's nuclear, missile and conventional arms programs. Another anonymous official speaking on the situation stated that Iran could have sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon by year's end, along with the resumption of long-range missile co-operation with nuclear-armed North Korea.