Ahmadinejad says new world order needed to get away from US dominance in interview

NEW YORK –  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that a new world order needs to emerge, away from years of what he called American bullying and domination.

Ahmadinejad spoke to The Associated Press in a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly -- his last as president of Iran. He was to address the Assembly Wednesday morning.

He also discussed solutions for the Syrian civil war, dismissed the question of Iran's nuclear ambition and claimed that despite Western sanctions his country is better off than it was when he took office in 2005.

"God willing, a new order will come together and we'll do away with everything that distances us," Ahmadinejad said, speaking through a translator. "I do believe the system of empires has reached the end of the road. The world can no longer see an emperor commanding it."

"Now even elementary school kids throughout the world have understood that the United States government is following an international policy of bullying," he said.

President Barack Obama warned Iran earlier Tuesday that time is running out to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program. In a speech to the General Assembly, Obama said the United States could not tolerate an Iran with atomic weapons.

Ahmadinejad would not respond directly to the president's remarks, saying he did not want to influence the U.S. presidential election in November.

But he argued that the international outcry over Iran's nuclear enrichment program was just an excuse by the West to dominate his country. He claimed that the United States has never accepted Iran's choice of government after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"Everyone is aware the nuclear issue is the imposition of the will of the United States," he said. "I see the nuclear issue as a non-issue. It has become a form of one-upmanship."

Ahmadinejad said he favored more dialogue, even though negotiations with world powers remain stalled after three rounds of high-level meetings since April.

He said some world leaders have suggested to him that Iran would be better off holding nuclear talks only with the United States.

"Of course I am not dismissing such talks," he said, asked if he were open to discussions with the winner of the American presidential election.

Israeli leaders, however, are still openly contemplating military action again Iranian nuclear facilities, dismissing diplomacy as a dead end. Israel and many in the West suspect that Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, and cite its failure to cooperate fully with nuclear inspectors. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

Ahmadinejad also proposed forming a new group of 10 or 11 countries to work to end the 18-month Syrian civil war. Representatives of the nations in the Middle East and elsewhere would meet in New York "very soon," he said.

Critics have accused Tehran of giving support to Syrian President Bashar Assad in carrying out massacres and other human rights violations in an attempt to crush the uprising against his rule. Activists say nearly 30,000 people have died.

He said the so-called contact group hopes to get the Syrian government and opposition to sit across from each other.

"I will do everything in my power to create stability, peace and understanding in Syria," Ahmadinejad said.

Earlier this month, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi announced the formation of a four-member contact group with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia so far has not participated.

He denied Iranian involvement in plotting attacks on Israelis abroad, despite arrests and accusations by police in various countries. He also vehemently disputed the U.S. claim that Iranian agents played a role in a foiled plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States last year.

Ahmadinejad will leave office next June after serving two four-year terms. He threw out numbers and statistics during the interview to show that Iran's economy and the lives of average Iranians have improved under his watch. Since his 2005 election, he claimed, Iran went from being the world's 22nd-largest economy to the 17th-largest; non-petroleum related exports increased sevenfold; and the basic production of goods has doubled. Median income increased by $4,000, he said.

"Today's conditions in Iran are completely different to where they were seven years ago in the economy, in technical achievement, in scientific know-how," Ahmadinejad said. "All of these achievements, though, have been reached under conditions in which we were brought under heavy sanctions."

Iran has called for the U.S. and its European allies to ease the sanctions that have hit its critical oil exports and left it blackballed from key international banking networks.

Ahmadinejad said he had no knowledge of the whereabouts of Robert Levinson, a private investigator and former FBI agent who vanished in Iran five years ago. He said he directed Iranian intelligence services two years ago to work with their counterparts in the U.S. to locate him.

"And if any help there is that I can bring to bear, I would be happy to do so," he said.

He also claimed never to have heard of Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine who is imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran. Hekmati was arrested while visiting his grandmother in Iran in August 2011, and his family has been using Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to plead for his release.

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Violent protests across Middle East target embassies, Pope visit to Lebanon

Anti-American protests erupted across the Middle East on Friday, following week-long demonstrations outside of several U.S. embassies and a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that left the U.S. ambassador and three others dead.

Protesters reportedly broke into the German Embassy in Sudan -- pulling down its emblem and raising the Islamic flag -- and demonstrators in Lebanon burned Kentucky Fried Chicken and Arby's restaurants while chanting against the pope's visit to Lebanon.

At least one protester was killed and 25 were injured in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli after clashes between police and protesters over an anti-Islam film, security officials said.

In Egypt, protesters in Ciaro's Tahrir Square could be seen carrying a 4-foot-tall poster of Usama bin Laden, and graffiti reportedly found on the U.S. Embassy there read: "Take care America. We have 1.5 billion bin Ladens."

In Sudan, police fired tear gas to prevent protesters from storming the U.S. Embassy outside Khartoum, according to eye witness accounts. About 5,000 demonstrators arrived in buses and cars to gather on the main street outside the embassy, Reuters reported. 

Several hundred protesters in Cairo, meanwhile, demonstrated blocks away from the U.S. Embassy as the president went on state TV and appealed to Muslims to protect embassies, trying to patch up strained relations with the United States.

The protesters, who gathered after weekly Muslim Friday prayers, tore up an American flag and waved a black, Islamist flag through the streets. When protesters tried to move toward the embassy, they were confronted by lines of police who fired tear gas.

"With our soul, our blood, we will avenge you, our Prophet," they chanted.

Ahead of the clashes, Islamist President Mohammed Morsi spoke for more than seven minutes on state TV, his most direct public move to contain protests since an angry crowd assaulted the embassy Tuesday night, scaling its walls and tearing down the American flag.

"It is required by our religion to protect our guests and their homes and places of work," Morsi said. "So I call on all to consider this, consider the law, and not attack embassies, consulates, diplomatic missions or Egyptian property that is private or public."

He denounced the killing of American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, who died in an attack Tuesday night on the U.S. Consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi along with three other Americans.

"This is something we reject and Islam rejects. To God, the attack on a person to Allah is bigger an attack on the Kaaba," he said, referring to Islam's holiest site in Mecca.

The region is bracing itself for more protests after traditional mid-day Friday prayers over the anti-Islam film produced in the United States called "Innocence of Muslims." The movie ridicules the Prophet Muhammad, portraying him as a fraud, a womanizer and a child molester.

Morsi's own Muslim Brotherhood group has called for peaceful protests to denounce the film.

A firebrand cleric with the beard of a Salafi Muslim, known for their ultraconservative views, blasted the film and in his sermon in Cairo's Tahrir Square said it was upon Muslims to defend Islam and its prophet.

Protesters have been clashing in Cairo with police since the unrest Tuesday night. More than 240 people have been injured in the clashes, including a number of policemen, and 31 people have been arrested.

In Sudan, a prominent sheikh urged people on state radio to protest outside the main mosque in Khartoum. Sheikh Mohammed Jizouly said protesters would then move to the German Embassy in the city center to protest alleged anti-Muslim scrawling on mosques in Berlin and then to the US embassy, just outside the capital, to protest the film.

"America has long been an enemy to Islam and to Sudan," Jizouly said.

In Israel, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police have boosted the number of officers patrolling east Jerusalem and Jerusalem's old city to thwart potentially violent protests following Muslim prayers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site.

Protesters are expected to march to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.

A small, peaceful demonstration was held Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

A prominent cleric in Indonesia has urged Muslims there to remain calm despite their anger about the film. But Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a branch of the international network that advocates a worldwide Islamic state, on its website blamed the U.S. government for allowing the film to be produced and released, calling it "an act of barbarism that cannot go unpunished."

Meanwhile, a Libyan airport official said all flights to and from the eastern city of Benghazi were canceled due to security concerns. The nearest airport is 200 kilometers away. The airport official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Benghazi is where the attack on the U.S. consulate took place Tuesday.

Click for the latest updates from the State Department on Twitter.

Fox News' Leland Vittert and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Violence spreads across Middle East over anti-Islam film

Anti-American protests have erupted in the Middle East, resulting in violent embassy protests around the Middle East and heightened security at U.S. facilities abroad.

U.S. officials are bracing for possible protests across the Muslim world over an anti-Islam film blamed on the attack in Libya that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

With angry protests already occurring in Egypt and Yemen, the U.S. has put all of its diplomatic missions on high alert. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has denounced the anti-Islam video in hopes of pre-empting further turmoil.

In Libya on Tuesday, the storming of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi killed the American ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other embassy staff members. Libyan officials say the attack in Benghazi was a planned operation by heavily armed militants that may have been timed to mark the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. and that the militants used civilian protesters as cover for their action.

In Egypt, angry youths climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday in Cairo and brought down the flag. Protesters clashed Thursday with police near the U.S. Embassy. Police used tear gas to disperse he protesters and the two sides pelted each other with rocks. But unlike Tuesday, when protesters climbed the embassy's walls and several of them breached its grounds, police kept the protesters away from the compound.

The Health Ministry said 224 people, including policemen, were wounded, but they mostly suffered light injuries. Twelve protesters have been arrested.

The clashes continued well into the night.

In Yemen's capital of Sanaa, hundreds of protesters chanting "death to America" and "death to Israel" stormed the U.S. Embassy compound and burned the American flag on Thursday.

Yemen's president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, quickly apologized to the U.S. and vowed to track down the culprits, just as Libya's president did. Egypt's Islamist President Mohammad Morsi, who had been slow to speak out on Tuesday's assault on the embassy in Cairo, promised Thursday that his government would not allow attacks on diplomatic missions.

In Iraq, several hundred Shiite hardliners protested Thursday in Baghdad's Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, and the leader of an Iranian-backed Shiite militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, threatened anti-U.S. attacks. And in Iran, about 50 protesters shouted, "Death to America" outside the Swiss Embassy, which looks after U.S. interests there. Riot police kept the crowd at bay.

The U.S. State Department said via Twitter that Kuwait, Jordan, and Oman would be on alert for possible protests:

Travel - State Dept @TravelGov
#Travel #Kuwait possible protests in front of the US embassy Kuwait over the next few days, incluidng this evening at approximately 8 pm.

Travel - State Dept @TravelGov
#Travel #Jordan possible demonstrations near the embassy this evening & tomorrow. #AmCits should exercise caution & enroll in STEP for info.

Travel - State Dept @TravelGov
#Travel #Oman demonstrations have begun in front of US Embassy Musct. #AmCits should exercise caution & enroll in STEP for more info.

Click for more from the State Department on Twitter.

President Barack Obama ordered increased security at American embassies and consulates around the world Thursday following the attack and urged its citizens abroad to be vigilant. His administration sent two warships to the Libyan coast, ready to respond to any mission ordered by the president, and 50 Marines were sent to the Libyan capital of Tripoli to help with security. Obama told voters campaigning Thursday in Colorado that the Benghazi Consulate killers will be brought to justice and that protecting Americans serving abroad is one of his highest priorities.

The spreading violence comes as outrage grows over a movie called "Innocence of Muslims" produced by anti-Islam campaigners in the U.S. that mocked Islam's Prophet Muhammad. The amateurish video was produced in the U.S. and excerpted on YouTube. It depicts Muhammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a madman in an overtly ridiculing way, showing him having sex and calling for massacres.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Memos suggest US hid evidence of Soviet massacre during WWII

WARSAW, Poland –  The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives is releasing Monday and putting online. Historians who saw the material days before the official release describe it as important and shared some highlights with the AP. The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs — something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.

The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn't conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 — a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier. Historians say the new material helps to flesh out the story of what the U.S. knew and when.

The Soviet secret police killed the 22,000 Poles with shots to the back of the head. Their aim was to eliminate a military and intellectual elite that would have put up stiff resistance to Soviet control. The men were among Poland's most accomplished — officers and reserve officers who in their civilian lives worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or as other professionals. Their loss has proven an enduring wound to the Polish nation.

In the early years after the war, outrage by some American officials over the concealment inspired the creation of a special U.S. Congressional committee to investigate Katyn.

In a final report released in 1952, the committee declared there was no doubt of Soviet guilt, and called the massacre "one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history." It found that Roosevelt's administration suppressed public knowledge of the crime, but said it was out of military necessity. It also recommended the government bring charges against the Soviets at an international tribunal — something never acted upon.

Despite the committee's strong conclusions, the White House maintained its silence on Katyn for decades, showing an unwillingness to focus on an issue that would have added to political tensions with the Soviets during the Cold War.

___

It was May 1943 in the Katyn forest, a part of Russia the Germans had seized from the Soviets in 1941. A group of American and British POWs were taken against their will by their German captors to witness a horrifying scene at a clearing surrounded by pine trees: mass graves tightly packed with thousands of partly mummified corpses in well-tailored Polish officers uniforms.

The Americans — Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. — hated the Nazis and didn't want to believe the Germans. They had seen German cruelty up close, and the Soviets, after all, were their ally. The Germans were hoping to use the POWs for propaganda, and to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western Allies.

But returning to their POW camps, the Americans carried a conviction that they had just witnessed overwhelming proof of Soviet guilt. The corpses' advanced state of decay told them the killings took place much earlier in the war, when the Soviets still controlled the area. They also saw Polish letters, diaries, identification tags, news clippings and other objects — none dated later than spring of 1940 — pulled from the graves. The evidence that did the most to convince them was the good state of the men's boots and clothing: That told them the men had not lived long after being captured.

Stewart testified before the 1951 Congressional committee about what he saw, and Van Vliet wrote reports on Katyn in 1945 and 1950, the first of which mysteriously disappeared. But the newly declassified documents show that both sent secret encoded messages while still in captivity to army intelligence with their opinion of Soviet culpability. It's an important revelation because it shows the Roosevelt administration was getting information early on from credible U.S. sources of Soviet guilt — yet still ignored it for the sake of the alliance with Stalin.

One shows head of Army intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell, confirming that some months after the 1943 visit to Katyn by the U.S. officers, a coded request by MIS-X, a unit of military intelligence, was sent to Van Vliet requesting him "to state his opinion of Katyn." Bissell's note said that "it is also understood Col. Van Vliet & Capt. Stewart replied."

MIS-X was devoted to helping POWs held behind German lines escape; it also used the prisoners to gather intelligence.

A statement from Stewart dated 1950 confirms he received and sent coded messages to Washington during the war, including one on Katyn: "Content of my report was aprx (approximately): German claims regarding Katyn substantially correct in opinion of Van Vliet and myself."

The newly uncovered documents also show Stewart was ordered in 1950 — soon before the Congressional committee began its work — never to speak about a secret message on Katyn.

Krystyna Piorkowska, author of the recently published book "English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn: Recent Research," discovered the documents related to the coded messages more than a week ago. She was one of several researchers who saw the material ahead of the public release.

She had already determined in her research that Van Vliet and Stewart were "code users" who had gotten messages out about other matters. But this is the first discovery of them communicating about Katyn, she said.

Another Katyn expert aware of the documents, Allen Paul, author of "Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth," told the AP the find is "potentially explosive." He said the material does not appear in the record of the Congressional hearings in 1951-52, and appears to have also been suppressed.

He argues that the U.S. cover-up delayed a full understanding in the United States of the true nature of Stalinism — an understanding that came only later, after the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in 1949 and after Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe were already behind the Iron Curtain.

"The Poles had known long before the war ended what Stalin's true intentions were," Paul said. "The West's refusal to hear them out on the Katyn issue was a crushing blow that made their fate worse."

The historical record carries other evidence Roosevelt knew in 1943 of Soviet guilt. One of the most important messages that landed on FDR's desk was an extensive and detailed report British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent him. Written by the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile in London, Owen O'Malley, it pointed to Soviet guilt at Katyn.

"There is now available a good deal of negative evidence," O'Malley wrote, "the cumulative effect of which is to throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility for the massacre."

___

It wasn't until the waning days of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe that reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted to Soviet guilt at Katyn, a key step in Polish-Russian reconciliation.

The silence by the U.S. government has been a source of deep frustration for many Polish-Americans. One is Franciszek Herzog, 81, a Connecticut man whose father and uncle died in the massacre. After Gorbachev's 1990 admission, he was hoping for more openness from the U.S. as well and made three attempts to obtain an apology from President George H.W. Bush.

"It will not resurrect the men," he wrote to Bush. "But will give moral satisfaction to the widows and orphans of the victims."

A reply he got in 1992, from the State Department, did not satisfy him. His correspondence with the government is also among the newly released documents and was obtained early by the AP from the George Bush Presidential Library.

The letter, dated Aug. 12, 1992, and signed by Thomas Gerth, then deputy director of the Office of Eastern European Affairs, shows the government stating that it lacked irrefutable evidence until Gorbachev's admission:

"The U.S. government never accepted the Soviet Government's claim that it was not responsible for the massacre. However, at the time of the Congressional hearings in 1951-1952, the U.S. did not possess the facts that could clearly refute the Soviets' allegations that these crimes were committed by the Third Reich. These facts, as you know, were not revealed until 1990, when the Russians officially apologized to Poland."

Herzog expressed frustration at that reply.

"There's a big difference between not knowing and not wanting to know," Herzog said. "I believe the U.S. government didn't want to know because it was inconvenient to them."

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