2scottmontgomery

digitalspy:Barack Obama 'names Homeland as favorite show'

2012-01-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama 'names Homeland as favorite show'

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/s188/homeland/news/a362535/barack-obama-names-homeland-as-favorite-show.html

Barack Obama is reportedly a fan of Showtime's hit drama Homeland.

The psychological thriller follows an unstable CIA operative (Claire Danes) who is determined to prove that an ex-prisoner of war (Damian Lewis) has been turned by terrorists.

The US President requested and received at least four sets of the show's first season on DVD, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Obama was also said to have named Homeland - which also stars Mandy Patinkin and David Harewood - as one of his favorite shows.

In addition, a staffer for former President Bill Clinton is also said to have contacted Showtime's PR department to request a set of the DVDs.

Homeland recently dominated the 2012 Golden Globes, with star Danes taking home the prize for 'Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama' and the show itself being named 'Best Television Series - Drama'.

Mandy Patinkin, who plays troubled agent Saul Berenson, has claimed that the forthcoming second season has "endless possibilities".

"We could still end up in the CIA this year [or] we might all end up morphing ourselves into Congress or the White House or something else," he suggested.

Homeland's second season will air on Showtime in late 2012. The first season will air on Channel 4 in the UK.

AFP:Pakistan knew of bin Laden hideout: US Defense Secretary

2012-01-27T23:22:00.001-08:00

Pakistan knew of bin Laden hideout: US Defense Secretary

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iM7XKil-vLt8i_hph3gjyeNUqS4w?docId=CNG.782ee6697adf10e19e14035be0f1302b.551

(AFP) – 4 hours ago

WASHINGTON — US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has expressed concern about Pakistan's treatment of a doctor who helped the United States find Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

The doctor, Shikal Afridi, has been arrested and charged with treason by the Pakistani government.

In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" program due to be aired on Sunday, Panetta acknowledged that Afridi, a Pakistani doctor in Abbottabad, the town where bin Laden was found, had in fact been working for US intelligence, collecting DNA to verify the 9/11 mastermind's presence.

US Navy SEALs killed bin Laden on May 2 in a raid on a compound in Abbottabad, north of the capital Islamabad, and later buried him at sea.

"I'm very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual ... who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation," Panetta said, according to excerpts of the interview.

"He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan," the defense secretary said. "Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism ... and for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think is a real mistake on their part."

Panetta said he still believed someone in authority in Pakistan knew where bin Laden was hiding before US forces went in to find him.

Intelligence reports found that Pakistani military helicopters had passed over the compound in Abbottabad, according to the interview.

"I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what was happening at this compound," Panetta said. "Don't forget, this compound had 18-foot walls ... It was the largest compound in the area.

"So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, 'What the hell's going on there?'" Panetta told CBS.

The Pentagon chief said this concern contributed to Washington's decision not to give Pakistan advance warning of the impending raid.

"It concerned us that if we in fact brought (Pakistan) into it, that -- they might ... give bin Laden a heads up," he said.

Panetta acknowledged he did not have "hard evidence" that Pakistan knew of the Al-Qaeda leader's whereabouts.

foxnews:Biden claims Panetta was only Obama adviser urging a 'go' on bin Laden raid

2012-01-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

Biden claims Panetta was only Obama adviser urging a 'go' on bin Laden raid

Vice President Biden claimed Friday that Leon Panetta was the only member of the inner circle who definitively urged President Obama to green-light the raid on Usama bin Laden's compound, as Biden discussed new details about the behind-the-scenes deliberations.

Biden, speaking to the House Democratic Issues Conference in Maryland, candidly admitted that he told the president not to go forward with the mission. Biden said at the time he thought the administration should do more to find out whether bin Laden was actually inside the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Describing the scene when Obama sought the advice of his top officials on whether to go ahead, Biden said most advisers -- aside from himself and Panetta, the defense secretary who was CIA chief at the time -- didn't offer a clear opinion.

"He went around the table with all the senior people. ... Every single person in that room hedged their bet except Leon Panetta. Leon said, 'go.' Everyone else said 49, 51 (percent in favor)," Biden said.

"It got to me. (Obama) said 'Joe -- what do you think?' I said, 'You know, I didn't know we had so many economists around the table.' I said we owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is don't go."

Click here to see the video.

Biden recalled the scene to illustrate his point that Obama showed leadership and, in his words, has a "backbone like a ramrod."

Despite the uncertain and conflicting advice, Obama told his national security adviser the next day, "Go," Biden said.

"He knew what was at stake. Not just the lives of those brave warriors, but literally the presidency, and he pulled the trigger," Biden said. "This guy doesn't lead from behind -- he just leads."

Robert Gates, the defense secretary at the time of the raid, has already said publicly that he had reservations about the intelligence pertaining to the bin Laden compound.

It's not clear exactly what every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and key Cabinet members advised.

A defense official said Adm. Mike Mullen who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, "certainly recognized the risk, but he did not hesitate in offering his advice that we should go."

One U.S. official told Fox News that Gen. James Cartwright, who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, was leaning against a raid and more toward an airstrike in that final meeting.

The official also said that Michael Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, was pessimistic on the intelligence.

The official said many in the room were worried about losing their jobs should the mission go wrong. The official added that one of the reasons Panetta came down on the side of approving the raid was he had met with his intelligence team -- and even one of the most pessimistic analysts put a high percentage on the likelihood that bin Laden was indeed in that compound.

nytimes:Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation

2012-01-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/middleeast/israelis-see-irans-threats-of-retaliation-as-bluff.html?_r=1&ref=world

JERUSALEM — Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.

But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.

No issue in Israel is more fraught than the debate over the wisdom and feasibility of a strike on Iran. Some argue that even a successful military strike would do no more than delay any Iranian nuclear weapons program, and perhaps increase Iran’s determination to acquire the capability. Security officials are increasingly kept from journalists or barred from discussing Iran. Much of the public talk is as much message delivery as actual policy.

With the region in turmoil and the Europeans having agreed to harsh sanctions against Iran, strategic assessments can quickly lose their currency. “They’re like cartons of milk — check the sell-by date,” one senior official said.

But conversations with eight current and recent top Israeli security officials suggested several things: since Israel has been demanding the new sanctions, including an oil embargo and seizure of Iran’s Central Bank assets, it will give the sanctions some months to work; the sanctions are viewed here as probably insufficient; a military attack remains a very real option; and postattack situations are considered less perilous than one in which Iran has nuclear weapons.

“Take every scenario of confrontation and attack by Iran and its proxies and then ask yourself, ‘How would it look if they had a nuclear weapon?’ ” a senior official said. “In nearly every scenario, the situation looks worse.”

The core analysis is based on an examination of Iran’s interests and abilities, along with recent threats and conflicts. Before the United States-led war against Iraq in 1991, Saddam Hussein vowed that if attacked he would “burn half of Israel.” He fired about 40 Scud missiles at Israel, which did limited damage. Similar fears of retaliation were voiced before the Iraq war in 2003 and in 2006, during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the latter, about 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel by Hezbollah, most of them causing limited harm.

“If you put all those retaliations together and add in the terrorism of recent years, we are probably facing some multiple of that,” a retired official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing an internal study. “I’m not saying Iran will not react. But it will be nothing like London during World War II.”

A paper soon to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, written by Amos Yadlin, former chief of military intelligence, and Yoel Guzansky, who headed the Iran desk at Israel’s National Security Council until 2009, argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is largely a bluff.

The paper contends that, despite the risks of Iranian provocation, Iran would not be able to close the waterway for any length of time and that it would not be in Iran’s own interest to do so.

“If others are closing the taps on you, why close your own?” Mr. Guzansky said. Sealing the strait could also lead to all-out confrontation with the United States, something the authors say they believe Iran wants to avoid.

A separate paper just published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies says that the fear of missile warfare against Israel is exaggerated since the missiles would be able to inflict only limited physical damage.

Most Israeli analysts, like most officials and analysts abroad, reject these arguments. They say that Iran has been preparing for an attack for some years and will react robustly, as will its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Moreover, they say, an attack will at best delay the Iranian program by a couple of years and lead Tehran to redouble its efforts to build such a weapon.

But Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu believe that those concerns will pale if Iran does get a nuclear weapon. This was a point made in a public forum in Jerusalem this week by Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, chief of the army’s planning division. Speaking of the former leaders of Libya and Iraq, he said, “Who would have dared deal with Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein if they had a nuclear capability? No way.”

General Eshel added that when a senior Indian officer was visiting recently, he was asked why the Indians had done so little in response to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. “When the other side has a nuclear capability and is prepared to use it, you think twice,” the officer replied, referring to Pakistan.

Mr. Netanyahu has made no secret of his belief that the current Iranian leadership, which has called for Israel’s destruction and which finances and arms militant groups on Israel’s borders, is the contemporary equivalent of the Nazis who tried to eliminate the Jews.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak argue that sanctions on Iran’s banking and energy sectors, like the ones getting under way, are vital tools for pressuring the Iranian government internally and keeping it under world opprobrium. But they also suspect that such sanctions will not slow the country’s nuclear program and therefore consider a military option to be vital.

“With all the sanctions, which are unprecedented,” Mr. Barak said on the radio this week, “I don’t think we are very close to a situation in which the Iranian leaders will look each other in the eye and say: ‘There is no choice. We have to stop the nuclear program.’ ”

Mr. Netanyahu has told visitors that he believes the Tehran government to be deeply unpopular, indeed despised, and that a careful attack on its nuclear facilities might even be welcomed by Iranian citizens. They might see it, he has said, as the equivalent of removing the crown jewels from a hated monarch.

Most analysts here and abroad take a different view. They argue that while the Iranian government remains unpopular, the nuclear program has wide support in Iran, and one way to unite the people behind their rulers would be through an Israeli strike.

A former senior official who had top security clearance said he was worried that Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu wanted to attack Iran — a step requiring agreement from other top ministers — and that such a step would be catastrophic both militarily and diplomatically.

“The Iranians have 400 missiles they can shoot at Israel,” he said. “And imagine Israel’s isolation after it attacked. For what? A delay of a year and a half? We are successfully delaying them with other methods.” That was a reference to the sabotage of the Iranian program through the sale of faulty parts and the introduction of computer worms and malfunctions as well as the killing of nuclear scientists.

The official said that the defense establishment was not enthusiastic about an attack. It hoped that sanctions and diplomacy would work and that if military action were needed it would come from the United States.

But this approach poses a difficulty. America’s weapons and equipment are far more powerful than Israel’s. So as Iran enriches uranium underground, Washington can wait longer to decide to attack and still be effective. Israel worries that in the coming year Iran will enter what officials call a zone of immunity, meaning its facilities will move beyond reach.

On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu spoke on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and reminded his listeners why he might feel the need for Israel to launch an attack. He said: “I want to mention the main lesson of the Holocaust when it comes to our fate. We can only rely on ourselves.”

theatlantic:Administration Uses Drone Secrecy to Justify Concealment of bin Laden Photos

2012-01-27T03:37:00.002-08:00

Administration Uses Drone Secrecy to Justify Concealment of bin Laden Photos

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/01/administration-uses-drone-secrecy-justify-concealment-bin-laden-photos/47946/

The Justice Department has a new legal argument for why the government should be allowed to conceal the postmortem photographs of Osama bin Laden: It's doing the same thing with the CIA's classified drone program.

On Wednesday, the department filed court papers [PDF] asking a federal judge to rule against the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, which is suing for the release of "all photographs and/or video recordings" taken of bin Laden during the May 1, 2011 raid in Abbottabad. The filing rehashes many of the government's stated reasons for concealing the photographs (inciting violence in the Muslim world, revealing classified "operational methods," etc) but also leans on the CIA's refusal to acknowledge its widely-publicized drone program.

The argument confronts a claim by Judicial Watch that releasing the bin Laden photos would not pose a national security risk because everyone already knows the U.S. killed bin Laden. In response, the Justice Department says the CIA's drone program, like the U.S. raid in Abbottabad, is also public knowledge but that doesn't mean releasing information about it wouldn't jeopardize national security.

"The fact that the public may already speak freely of the existence of drones, or speculate openly that such a program may be directed in part or in whole by the CIA, does not emasculate the CIA’s warnings of harm were it forced to acknowledge officially the existence or nonexistence of requested records," reads the filing.

It's the sort of argument that makes government transparency advocates squeamish. As The New York Times noted about the CIA's failure to acknowledge the drone program in October, "The secrecy compulsion often merely makes the government look silly ... But it can also hinder public debate of some of government’s most hotly contested actions." Now, turns out, the Justice Department is using the government's much-pilloried refusal to acknowledge the widely-known drone program to justify its withholding of the bin Laden photos, creating a kind of slippery slope of secrecy.

Time will tell if U.S. District Judge James Boasberg will find the argument reasonable. As The Blog of Legal Times notes, Judicial Watch has until February to respond to the Justice Department's arguments.

hereandnow:Memos Reveal Israeli Spies Posing As CIA Agents

2012-01-27T03:37:00.001-08:00

Memos Reveal Israeli Spies Posing As CIA Agents

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/01/26/israel-iran-cia

President Obama touted the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security in his State of the Union speech, saying, “Our iron clad commitment, and I mean ironclad to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history.”

But an article in Foreign Policy raises some questions about that relationship when it comes to intelligence gathering and Iran.

The article says officers from Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, posed as American CIA agents to recruit members of the terrorist group Jundallah to fight in Israel’s covert war against Iran.

In the intelligence business, it’s called a false flag operation.

The mission happened during the last years of George W. Bush’s administration and it apparently affected cooperation between the U.S. and Israel when President Barack Obama assumed office.

According to intelligence officers who have seen CIA memos about the operation, President Bush went ballistic when he found out.

But author and historian Mark Perry says that the rift caused between the U.S. and Israel has largely been healed now that Barack Obama is president.

abcnews:Exclusive – Obama to ABC News: ‘I Second-Guess Constantly’

2012-01-27T03:35:00.000-08:00

Exclusive – Obama to ABC News: ‘I Second-Guess Constantly’

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/exclusive-obama-to-abc-news-i-second-guess-constantly/

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, President Obama today acknowledged that he has made mistakes during his presidency but defended the steps his administration has taken to create jobs and improve the economy.

“I second-guess constantly… I make a mistake, you know, every hour, every day,” he told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, laughing. “There’re always things that you’re learning in the job. And I have no doubt that I’m a better president now than the day I took office just because you get more experience. But when you look at the broad outlines of what we did, had it not been for the steps we took our economy would be profoundly weaker than we are right now.”

The president was responding to a question by a Yahoo user asking him if there’s something he learned about himself and wished he had done in the first three years.

Obama, who is in Las Vegas today promoting his energy agenda, didn’t give specific examples. Instead, he cited the auto bailout and the Recovery Act as examples of his administration’s successes. Addressing criticism that the economy hasn’t grown very quickly in the last three years, Obama said he laid out the foundations that will position the country to continue growing.

“The auto industry, which has now created 160,000 jobs, and sees GM as the number one automaker in the world again, that didn’t just happen by accident,” he said. “We had a little something to do with it, to help that industry restructure and save about a million jobs, that would’ve had ripple effects all across the country. The Recovery Act – what, you know, Republicans referred to as the stimulus package, well, most economists — almost every economist — will tell you that had we not put that in place we could’ve tipped into a great depression.

“So I think when the body politic goes through a trauma as great as the one that we went through in 2008, 2009, then everybody I think is gonna be frustrated that we don’t recover.”

NYTIMES:Sanctions Against Iran Grow Tighter, but What’s the Next Step?

2012-01-25T05:15:00.000-08:00

Sanctions Against Iran Grow Tighter, but What’s the Next Step?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-sanctions-grow-tighter-but-whats-next.html

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration and its European allies toughened economic sanctions against Iran on Monday — blocking its access to the world financial system and undermining its critical oil and gas industry — officials on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledge that their last-ditch effort has only a limited chance of persuading Tehran to abandon what the West fears is its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

That leaves open this critical question: And then what?

While the United States and Israel have not taken military options off the table, pursuing them is unpalatable, at least for now. Several American and European officials say privately that the most attainable outcome for the West could be for Iran to maintain the knowledge and technology necessary to build a nuclear weapon while stopping short of doing so. That would allow it to assert its sovereignty and save face after years of diplomatic tensions.

While that might seem to be a big concession on the part of the United States, Iran would first have to make even bigger ones: demonstrate that it could be trusted and drop its veil of secrecy so that inspectors could verify that its nuclear work was peaceful, steps Iran has resisted.

In other words, Iran would have to become a country like Japan, which has the capability to become an atomic power virtually overnight, if need be, but has rejected taking the final steps to possessing nuclear weapons. “If you’re asking whether we would be satisfied with Iran becoming Japan, then the answer is a qualified yes,” a senior European diplomat said. “But it would have to be verifiable, and we are a long ways away from trusting the regime.”

Today’s Iran is nothing like Japan, which has a deep aversion to nuclear weapons dating to the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And settling for an Iranian state that could quickly produce a nuclear weapon would be hard for the United States to embrace because of Israel’s deep antipathy toward Iran and Western and other nations’ fears of setting off a regional arms race.

On Monday, the 27 countries of the European Union agreed to ban Iranian oil imports in an embargo that will cover crude oil, petroleum and petrochemical products. Separately, the United States Treasury announced sanctions against Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat, saying in a statement that the United States was striking at “one of Iran’s few remaining access points to the international financial system.”

The discussion of what to do about Iran is coming in a political arena in which Iran’s nuclear program has become the top foreign policy concern on the Republican presidential campaign trail, with the candidates criticizing President Obama as not being tough enough on Iran.

So far, Iran has deliberately not taken certain technical steps toward building a nuclear weapon, even while it continues to enrich uranium, a senior American official said. He said that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was using a cost-benefit analysis, adding that the American view was that the ayatollah had not made a final decision about whether to build a weapon.

That means the United States and Europe must be careful to calibrate the impact of sanctions, officials on both sides of the Atlantic said. If sanctions bite too hard, they could cause the Iranian public to rally around the government. A senior intelligence official briefed Mr. Obama on Jan. 9 about new polls in Iran that reflect strong public support for the country’s nuclear program.

In debates at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, administration officials say they have gamed out several possibilities, including an alarming one: that tougher sanctions and increased global isolation might compel Iran to decide that the only way to get the West off its back is to speed up its program and become a nuclear power. That could leave the West with no choice but to back off, lest it provoke a nuclear confrontation.

Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration official and an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed to North Korea and Pakistan as guideposts for Iran’s possible strategy in pressing ahead with a uranium enrichment program. Both are nuclear states whose stability the West is committed to keeping because of concerns that their nuclear arsenals might fall into the hands of rogue elements.

While Western diplomats point to the Japan model, there is another one — the Libya model — that could serve as a cautionary example for the Iranian government. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader who abandoned his nuclear ambitions to gain favor with the West, was left without a nuclear card to play when regime change was pushed upon him.

“Look at it this way,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and former State Department official in the Obama administration. “These latest sanctions are weakening the regime, but they’re also putting pressure on the regime, which is arriving to the point where the Iranians have no motivation other than to get their nuclear capabilities faster.”

Still, for all the tough talk, American and European officials said the ever-changing events in Iran and in the region, including the move toward democracy in the Middle East, could give negotiations and diplomacy a chance.

American and European officials say that if Iran is still more than a year away from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, as many experts believe, the sanctions are their only real option, not because they necessarily believe that they will work, but because the other alternatives — a military strike, or doing nothing as Iran acquires a weapon — are unacceptable.

“If there were an alternative to the sanctions, that would be one thing,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the former under secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration who was an architect of the sanctions policy that began in 2006. “But is there? No. If you don’t have a military answer right now, you’re far better off continuing this strategy and trying to see if while doing all this, you can open up the path to negotiations.”

What could also shove Iran to the negotiating table are the kind of covert programs that have slowed its development of a nuclear program. This month an Iranian nuclear scientist, one of at least five who have been killed since 2007, died in a drive-by bombing, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attributed to “the evil hands of arrogance and Zionist agents.”

But Mr. Takeyh warned that at some point soon — maybe in a year, maybe two — tightening the noose in the hope that Iran decides to negotiate could give way to a military strike or a nuclear Iran, or both. “At some point,” he said, “the song stops playing and you’re in a different, and more dangerous, place.”

NYTIMES:WILL ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN?

2012-01-25T05:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/will-israel-attack-iran.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

...Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

...Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond “the removal of important brains” from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection — in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There is no doubt,” a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on Jan. 11, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination came from Tehran, “that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist — one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children — watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.”

...Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

...Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond “the removal of important brains” from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection — in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There is no doubt,” a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on Jan. 11, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination came from Tehran, “that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist — one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children — watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.”

...Cooperation between American, British and Israeli intelligence services led to the discovery in 2002 of a uranium-enrichment facility built with Khan’s assistance at Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. When this information was verified, a great outcry erupted throughout Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, with some demanding that the site be bombed at once. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not authorize an attack. Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was building a centrifuge installation at Natanz. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle — the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.

...“In the mind of the Iranian citizen, a link has been created between his economic difficulties and the nuclear project. Today in Iran, there is a profound internal debate about this matter, which has divided the Iranian leadership.” He beamed when he added, “It pleases me that the timeline of the project has been pushed forward several times since 2003 because of these mysterious disruptions.”

...On the night of April 6, 1979, a team of Mossad operatives entered the French port town La Seyne-sur-Mer and blew up a shipment necessary for the cooling system of the Iraqi reactor’s core that was being manufactured in France. The French police found no trace of the perpetrators. An unknown organization for the defense of the environment claimed responsibility.

...

“From our point of view,” Barak said, “a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”

At that point Barak leaned forward and said with the utmost solemnity: “And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.”

He warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its “immunity zone” — a term coined by Barak that refers to the point when Iran’s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) — will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project. Israel estimates that Iran’s nuclear program is about nine months away from being able to withstand an Israeli attack; America, with its superior firepower, has a time frame of 15 months. In either case, they are presented with a very narrow window of opportunity. One very senior Israeli security source told me: “The Americans tell us there is time, and we tell them that they only have about six to nine months more than we do and that therefore the sanctions have to be brought to a culmination now, in order to exhaust that track.”

...For their part, the Israelis suspect that the Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them. The Israelis find evidence of this in the shift in language used by the administration, from “threshold prevention” — meaning American resolve to stop Iran from having a nuclear-energy program that could allow for the ability to create weapons — to “weapons prevention,” which means the conditions can exist, but there is an American commitment to stop Iran from assembling an actual bomb.

...

Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.

In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:

Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”

Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”

Amit: “You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”

Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”

Amit: “That is not the point.”

Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”

Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”

Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”

Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”

Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”

Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”

That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”

From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us.” The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.

Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute “Tehran” for “Cairo” and “Strait of Hormuz” for “Straits of Tiran,” and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.

... In order to avoid it, the sanctions must be stepped up.” It is, of course, important for Ya’alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America’s well-being. “The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,” he went on. “One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.”

...On the operational level, any attack would be extremely complex. Iran learned the lessons of Iraq, and has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory. There is no way of knowing for certain if the Iranians have managed to conceal any key facilities from Israeli intelligence. Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carriers. If it attacked Iran, because of the 1,000 or so miles between its bases and its potential targets, Israeli planes would have to refuel in the air at least once (and more than once if faced with aerial engagements). The bombardment would require pinpoint precision in order to spend the shortest amount of time over the targets, which are heavily defended by antiaircraft-missile batteries.

...According to Israeli intelligence, Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate.

...

In recent weeks, Israelis have obsessively questioned whether Netanyahu and Barak are really planning a strike or if they are just putting up a front to pressure Europe and the U.S. to impose tougher sanctions. I believe that both of these things are true, but as a senior intelligence officer who often participates in meetings with Israel’s top leadership told me, the only individuals who really know their intentions are, of course, Netanyahu and Barak, and recent statements that no decision is imminent must surely be taken into account.

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

msnbc:Envoy: Rumors of plan to divide Afghanistan 'dishonor' sacrifice of 1,800 US troops

2012-01-24T19:33:00.000-08:00

Envoy: Rumors of plan to divide Afghanistan 'dishonor' sacrifice of 1,800 US troops

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/24/10224088-envoy-rumors-of-plan-to-divide-afghanistan-dishonor-sacrifice-of-1800-us-troops

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan on Tuesday condemned rumors that the United States is planning to divide the war-torn country, saying the suggestions were "lies that dishonor the sacrifice of more than 1,800 American service members who have died in the cause of a unified Afghanistan."

Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in a statement that a "free and independent media plays a vital role in any democracy" and that Afghanistan's media and the Afghan government spokespersons were "important elements in our close bilateral relationship."

But he then went on to say that, "rumors that the United States has a plan to divide Afghanistan or change its form of government are, frankly speaking, lies that dishonor the sacrifice of more than 1,800 American service members who have died in the cause of a unified Afghanistan, governed by its Constitution."

And he added that the idea "that the United States is seeking a secret deal with the Taliban at the expense of the Afghan government and people" was "another false and absurd rumor."

'Democratic and unified'
Crocker stressed that the United States was "committed to supporting the efforts of the central government, to build a strong, secure, democratic, and unified Afghanistan."

"We have no other aim or goal," he added, pointing out that American taxpayers had provided billions of dollars over the past decade to support "the government and people of Afghanistan."

Afghan soldiers killing more of their US allies

Crocker appeared to be addressing reports in the Afghan media, although The New York Times also reported Thursday last week that Afghan officials were worried about the possibility the Taliban might make a "secret deal" with the United States.

"Afghanistan and the United States both support a peace process for Afghanistan. But only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan," he added, according to the statement. "For a peace process to succeed, Afghans must talk to Afghans."

Afghan Taliban: We recruited soldier who killed French troops

He noted that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had spoken in support of the idea of the Taliban opening an office in Qatar, seen as key for peace talks to go ahead.

But Crocker said "nothing has been concluded on the opening of an office" and that the Afghan Taliban had to give a "clear statement ... against international terrorism and in support of a peace process to end the armed conflict in Afghanistan" before it could open.

"And for reconciliation to take place, we are in full agreement with the Government of Afghanistan that three conditions must be met by the Taliban and other armed insurgents: a complete break with al-Qaida; an end to violence; and respect for the Afghan constitution, including its protections for women and minorities," he added, according to the statement.

myfoxorlando:President Obama, please use Option C to defeat Iran

2012-01-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

President Obama, please use Option C to defeat Iran

http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/news/national/foxnews/President-Obama-please-use-Option-C-to-defeat-Iran_79125446

When I was on Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council Staff in the 1970’s he insisted that every presidential memoranda have three options. We thought it would be very funny to write a spoof proposing three options for a new U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union: Option A – all out war; Option B – capitulation and surrender; and Option C – something else. Somehow the memo made it all the way to President Ford’s desk before the mistake was spotted and everyone had a good laugh.

But Kissinger was right – you always want an Option C, especially when Options A and B are lousy.

That’s the nub of our problem with Iran, we’ve failed to develop an Option C.

For years we’ve had two extremely bad choices: Option A: bomb Iran, or Option B: let Iran get the bomb. Our efforts to find a third option have either failed or carried too high a price.

But now, for the first time, a credible Option C is possible– using Western resolve, Arab cooperation and Western technological advances to stress the Iranian economy to the point that it collapses and the Iranian people bring about regime change on their own.

To exercise Option A is to court disaster. An attack against Iran’s nuclear sites would be fraught with logistical difficulties. Iran would retaliate against Israel and the US interests worldwide, and likely make good on threats to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The price of oil, and gasoline at the pumps, would skyrocket.

At best we would have set Iran’s nuclear program back just a few years.

At worst we would have given the Iranian regime the opportunity to rally their people ‘round their tattered flag.

Yet Option B – letting Iran get the bomb -- would be even worse. A nuclear Iran will spark a nuclear arms race throughout the region as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others rush to acquire their own arsenals. That means the next war in the Middle East – and there is always another war in the Middle East – could well go nuclear.

An Option C has always been out of reach, but it’s not for want of trying. The Bush administration launched the second Iraq war in part to create a bulwark against Iran. They thought post-Saddam Iraq would be a strong, pro-American democracy in the heart of the Arab Muslim world and partner with us in containing Iran. They were wrong.

At best, post-American Iraq will be fragile and weak; at worst it will be in Iran’s orbit.

President Obama came into office thinking the problem rested with Bush’s failure to engage Iran diplomatically, so he immediately extended the ‘hand of friendship.’ It was promptly rebuffed, time and again.

Obama’s efforts to create an anti-Iran coalition at the United Nations, and among Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East, also failed.

And, while the new U.S. and UN sanctions have made life difficult for Iranians, they haven’t been enough to halt their nuclear weapons program or force regime change.

So far, we’ve stopped short of imposing the ultimate sanction: shutting down Iran’s oil exports. Why?

Because it would also hurt us, too. If Iran’s oil were taken off the world market oil prices would rise. If Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation, oil prices would rise even more. Even if the 5th Fleet were to clear the Strait almost immediately, oil prices would remain high because of increased insurance rates.

We’ve never had the ability to deny Iran its oil revenues without inflicting major damage to ourselves.

But now, for the first time, there might be a way to stop Iran’s oil exports without causing undue hardship to the U.S. and world economy.

First, the West is now united in imposing sanctions that could cripple Iran’s economy by putting a blockade around Iranian oil, but using banks instead of gunboats.

In November the U.K. agreed to sanction Iran’s central bank. In December the US Congress overwhelmingly voted for similar sanctions and President Obama signed them into law. The Europeans followed suit this week, and Japan is considering doing the same.

Even if the Chinese continue buying Iranian oil, they will press for steep price discounts, as much as 40% according to Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz.

Second, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab oil states appear willing to use their spare capacity and ramp up oil production to compensate for any loss of Iranian oil. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said recently his country is ready and able to meet any increase in demand.

Finally, western oil companies have developed new technologies that allow Canada, Brazil and the United States to become major energy exporters. Advances in engineering technology now make it possible to extract oil from tar sands in Canada at competitive prices, and Canada is on track to become a larger oil producer than Iran.

The U.S. will produce oil from significant resources in the Bakken in North Dakota. Breakthroughs in mapping technologies have made it possible for western companies to “see” past through thick layers of rock and salt and discover huge oil reserves off the coast of Brazil.

We’ve developed hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques to get natural gas from shale and “tight oil” from dense rocks in the U.S.

These technologies aren’t years away, they’re here now. In 2011 the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products for the first time in 62 years. We’ve now surpassed Russia as the world’s leading gas producer.

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War because he realized the Soviet Union's Achilles' heel was its failed economic model and dependency on oil exports. Working closely with selected oil producers, Reagan tightened the noose slowly, but when oil prices fell by two-thirds in the mid-1980’s, the oil-dependent Soviet regime came close to collapse. They had no money to pay for their defense buildup, social programs and most especially for imported wheat. Without that revenue, they had no choice but to come to terms.

Iran has the same problem. Oil exports account for nearly 80% of foreign exchange earnings, and more than 60% of government revenues.

If Iran can’t sell its oil, or is forced to sell at steeply discounted prices, it’s broke.

No money for the massive subsidies that keep the Iranian people fed and housed.

No money for their nuclear weapons program.

No money for their terrorist clients Hezbollah and Hamas or Syria’s thugocracy. Iran’s leaders would be lucky to keep their heads, much less their hold over government.

Even with the more limited sanctions we have imposed to date, the Iranian regime has had to cut subsidies and prices for gasoline, electricity and bread have skyrocketed. Hyperinflation has hit Iran and their currency has fallen by half since December 2010.

The new banking blockade will drain their treasury to the point of collapse and could reignite the democratic counterrevolution that the regime squashed in 2009.

As we have seen with The Arab Awakening in North Africa over the last year, regime change in the Muslim world isn’t just a pipedream. And an Iran under very different leadership is a very different story.

As former CIA Director Michael Hayden says, it’s not so much that we object to Iran getting nuclear weapons – it’s that we object to this Iran getting nuclear weapons.

Iran’s Green Movement in 2008 was the precursor to the Arab Awakening of 2011. It may also be the culmination of it and finally give us an Option C with Iran. If so, it will come just in the nick of time, because one way or another 2012 is the year of reckoning with Iran.

Kathleen Troia "K.T." McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's DefCon 3. She is a Distinguished Adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. She wrote Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s November 1984 "Principles of War Speech" which laid out the Weinberger Doctrine. Be sure to watch "K.T." every Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET on FoxNews.com's " DefCon3"-- already one of the Web's most watched national security programs.

fbi.gov:Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Charged with Disclosing Covert Officer’s Identity and Other Classified Information to Journalists and Lying t

2012-01-24T04:40:00.001-08:00

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Charged with Disclosing Covert Officer’s Identity and Other Classified Information to Journalists and Lying to CIA’s Publications Review Board
Investigation Involving Photos Seized from Guantanamo Detainees Concludes no Criminal Violations by Defense Team; Rather, Classified Info Kiriakou Allegedly Illegally Disclosed to a Journalist was Provided by the Journalist to a Defense Investigator

http://www.fbi.gov/washingtondc/press-releases/2012/former-cia-officer-john-kiriakou-charged-with-disclosing-covert-officers-identity-and-other-classified-information-to-journalists-and-lying-to-cias-publications-review-board

U.S. Attorney’s Office January 23, 2012

Northern District of Illinois (312) 353-5300

— filed under: Breaking News, Counterintelligence, Press Release

ALEXANDRIA, VA—A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, was charged today with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities, Justice Department officials announced. The charges result from an investigation that was triggered by a classified defense filing in January 2009, which contained classified information the defense had not been given through official government channels, and, in part, by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of certain government employees and contractors in the materials of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The investigation revealed that on multiple occasions, one of the journalists to whom Kiriakou is alleged to have illegally disclosed classified information, in turn, disclosed that information to a defense team investigator, and that this information was reflected in the classified defense filing and enabled the defense team to take or obtain surveillance photographs of government personnel. There are no allegations of criminal activity by any members of the defense team for the detainees.

Kiriakou, 47, of Arlington, Va., was a CIA intelligence officer between 1990 and 2004, serving at headquarters and in various classified overseas assignments. He is scheduled to appear at 2 p.m. today before U.S. Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson in federal court in Alexandria.

Kiriakou was charged with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly illegally disclosing national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it. Kiriakou was also charged with one count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA in an unsuccessful attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to include classified information in a book he was seeking to publish.

The four-count criminal complaint, which was filed today in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that Kiriakou made illegal disclosures about two CIA employees and their involvement in classified operations to two journalists on multiple occasions between 2007 and 2009. In one case, revealing the employee’s name as a CIA officer disclosed classified information as the employee was and remains covert (identified in the complaint as “Covert Officer A”). In the second case, Kiriakou allegedly disclosed the name and contact information of an employee, identified in the complaint as “Officer B,” whose participation in an operation to capture and question terrorism subject Abu Zubaydah in 2002 was then classified. Kiriakou’s alleged disclosures occurred prior to a June 2008 front-page story in The New York Times disclosing Officer B’s alleged role in the Abu Zubaydah operation.

“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of CIA officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Today’s charges reinforce the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information.”

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who was appointed Special Attorney in 2010 to supervise the investigation, said: “I want to thank the Washington Field Office of the FBI and the team of attorneys assigned to this matter for their hard work and dedication to tracing the sources of the leaks of classified information.” Mr. Fitzgerald announced the charges with James W. McJunkin, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they thanked the Central Intelligence Agency for its very substantial assistance in the investigation, as well as the Air Force Office of Special Investigations for its significant assistance.

“Protecting the identities of America’s covert operatives is one of the most important responsibilities of those who are entrusted with roles in our nation’s intelligence community. The FBI and our intelligence community partners work diligently to hold accountable those who violate that special trust,” said Mr. McJunkin.

The CIA filed a crimes report with the Justice Department on March 19, 2009, prior to the discovery of the photographs and after reviewing the Jan. 19, 2009, classified filing by defense counsel for certain detainees with the military commission then responsible for adjudicating charges. The defense filing contained information relating to the identities and activities of covert government personnel, but prior to Jan. 19, 2009, there had been no authorized disclosure to defense counsel of the classified information. The Justice Department’s National Security Division, working with the FBI, began the investigation. To avoid the risk of encountering a conflict of interest because of the pending prosecutions of some of the high-value detainees, Mr. Fitzgerald was assigned to supervise the investigation conducted by a team of attorneys from the Southern District of New York, the Northern District of Illinois, and the Counterespionage Section of the National Security Division who were not involved in pending prosecutions of the detainees.

According to the complaint affidavit, the investigation determined that no laws were broken by the defense team as no law prohibited defense counsel from filing a classified document under seal outlining for a court classified information they had learned during the course of their investigation. Regarding the 32 pages of photographs that were taken or obtained by the defense team and provided to the detainees, the investigation found no evidence the defense attorneys transmitting the photographs were aware of, much less disclosed, the identities of the persons depicted in particular photographs and no evidence that the defense team disclosed other classified matters associated with certain of those individuals to the detainees. The defense team did not take photographs of persons known or believed to be current covert officers. Rather, defense counsel, using a technique known as a double-blind photo lineup, provided photograph spreads of unidentified individuals to their clients to determine whether they recognized anyone who may have participated in questioning them. No law or military commission order expressly prohibited defense counsel from providing their clients with these photo spreads.

Further investigation, based in part on e-mails recovered from judicially-authorized search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou, allegedly revealed that:

Kiriakou disclosed to Journalist A the name of Covert Officer A and the fact that Covert Officer A was involved in a particular classified operation. The journalist then provided the defense investigator with the full name of the covert CIA employee;
Kiriakou disclosed or confirmed to Journalists A, B, and C the then-classified information that Officer B participated in the Abu Zubaydah operation and provided two of those journalists with contact information for Officer B, including a personal e-mail address. One of the journalists subsequently provided the defense investigator with Officer B’s home telephone number, which the investigator used to identify and photograph Officer B; and
Kiriakou lied to the CIA regarding the existence and use of a classified technique, referred to as a “magic box,” in an unsuccessful effort to trick the CIA into allowing him to publish information about the classified technique in a book.

Upon joining the CIA in 1990 and on multiple occasions in following years, Kiriakou signed secrecy and non-disclosure agreements not to disclose classified information to unauthorized individuals.

Regarding Covert Officer A, the affidavit details a series of e-mail communications between Kiriakou and Journalist A in July and August 2008. In an exchange of e-mails on July 11, 2008, Kiriakou allegedly illegally confirmed for Journalist A that Covert Officer A, whose first name only was exchanged at that point, was “the team leader on [specific operation].” On August 18, 2008, Journalist A sent Kiriakou an e-mail asking if Kiriakou could pick out Covert Officer A’s last name from a list of names Journalist A provided in the e-mail. On Aug. 19, 2008, Kiriakou allegedly passed the last name of Covert Officer A to Journalist A by e-mail, stating “It came to me last night.” Covert Officer A’s last name had not been on the list provided by Journalist A. Later that same day, approximately two hours later, Journalist A sent an e-mail to the defense investigator that contained Covert Officer A’s full name. Neither Journalist A, nor any other journalist to the government’s knowledge, has published the name of Covert Officer A.

At the time of Kiriakou’s allegedly unauthorized disclosures to Journalist A, the identification of Covert Officer A as “the team leader on [specific operation]” was classified at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) level because it revealed both Covert Officer A’s identity and his association with the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) Program relating to the capture, detention, and questioning of terrorism subjects. The defense investigator was able to identify Covert Officer A only after receiving the e-mail from Journalist A, and both Covert Officer A’s name and association with the RDI Program were included in the January 2009 classified defense filing. The defense investigator told the government that he understood from the circumstances that Covert Officer A was a covert employee and, accordingly, did not take his photograph. No photograph of Covert Officer A was recovered from the detainees at Guantanamo.

In a recorded interview last Thursday, FBI agents told Kiriakou that Covert Officer A’s name was included in the classified defense filing. The affidavit states Kiriakou said, among other things, “How the heck did they get him? . . . [First name of Covert Officer A] was always undercover. His entire career was undercover.” Kiriakou further stated that he never provided Covert Officer A’s name or any other information about Covert Officer A to any journalist and stated “Once they get the names, I mean this is scary.”

Regarding Officer B, the affidavit states that he worked overseas with Kiriakou on an operation to locate and capture Abu Zubaydah, and Officer B’s association with the RDI Program and the Abu Zubaydah operation in particular were classified until that information was recently declassified to allow the prosecution of Kiriakou to proceed.

In June 2008, The New York Times published an article by Journalist B entitled “Inside the Interrogation of a 9/11 Mastermind,” which publicly identified Officer B and reported his alleged role in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah—facts which were then classified. The article attributed other information to Kiriakou as a source, but did not identify the source(s) who disclosed or confirmed Officer B’s identity. The charges allege that at various times prior to publication of the article, Kiriakou provided Journalist B with personal information regarding Officer B, knowing that Journalist B was seeking to identify and locate Officer B. In doing so, Kiriakou allegedly confirmed classified information that Officer B was involved in the Abu Zubaydah operation. For example, Kiriakou allegedly e-mailed Officer B’s phone number and personal e-mail address to Journalist B, who attempted to contact Officer B via his personal e-mail in April and May 2008. Officer B had provided his personal e-mail address to Kiriakou, but not to Journalist B or any other journalist. Subsequently, Kiriakou allegedly revealed classified information by confirming for Journalist B additional information that an individual with Officer B’s name, who was associated with particular contact information that Journalist B had found on a website, was located in Pakistan in March 2002, which was where and when the Abu Zubaydah operation took place.

After The New York Times article was published, Kiriakou sent several e-mails denying that he was the source for information regarding Officer B, while, at the same time, allegedly lying about the number and nature of his contacts with Journalist B. For example, in an e-mail dated June 30, 2008, Kiriakou told Officer B that Kiriakou had spoken to the newspaper’s ombudsman after the article was published and said that the use of Officer B’s name was “despicable and unnecessary” and could put Officer B in danger. Kiriakou also denied that he had cooperated with the article and claimed that he had declined to talk to Journalist B, except to say that he believed the article absolutely should not mention Officer B’s name. “[W]hile it might not be illegal to name you, it would certainly be immoral,” Kiriakou wrote to Officer B, according to the affidavit.

From at least November 2007 through November 2008, Kiriakou allegedly provided Journalist A with Officer B’s personal contact information and disclosed to Journalist A classified information revealing Officer B’s association with the RDI Program. Just as Journalist A had disclosed to the defense investigator classified information that Kiriakou allegedly imparted about Covert Officer A, Journalist A, in turn, provided the defense investigator information that Kiriakou had disclosed about Officer B. For example, in an e-mail dated April 10, 2008, Journalist A provided the defense investigator with Officer B’s home phone number, which, in light of Officer B’s common surname, allowed the investigator to quickly and accurately identify Officer B and photograph him. Both Officer B’s name and his association with the RDI Program were included in the January 2009 classified defense filing, and four photographs of Officer B were among the photos recovered at Guantanamo.

In the same recorded interview with FBI agents last week, Kiriakou said he “absolutely” considered Officer B’s association with the Abu Zubaydah operation classified, the affidavit states. Kiriakou also denied providing any contact information for Officer B or Officer B’s association with the Abu Zubaydah operation to Journalists A and B prior to publication of the June 2008 New York Times article. When specifically asked whether he had anything to do with providing Officer B’s name or other information about Officer B to Journalist B prior to the article, Kiriakou stated “Heavens no.”

As background, the affidavit states that sometime prior to May 22, 2007, Kiriakou disclosed to Journalist C classified information regarding Officer B’s association with Abu Zubaydah operation, apparently while collaborating on a preliminary book proposal. A footnote states that Journalist C is not the coauthor of the book Kiriakou eventually published.

Prior to publication of his book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, Kiriakou submitted a draft manuscript in July 2008 to the CIA’s Publication Review Board (PRB). In an attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to publish information regarding a classified investigative technique, Kiriakou allegedly lied to the PRB by falsely claiming that the technique was fictional and that he had never heard of it before. In fact, according to a transcript of a recorded interview conducted in August 2007 to assist Kiriakou’s coauthor in drafting the book, Kiriakou described the technique, which he referred to as the “magic box,” and told his coauthor that the CIA had used the technique in the Abu Zubaydah operation. The technique was also disclosed in the June 2008 New York Times article and referred to as a “magic box.”

In his submission letter to the PRB, Kiriakou flagged the reference to a device called a “magic box,” stating he had read about it in the newspaper article but added that the information was “clearly fabricated,” as he was unaware of and had used no such device. The affidavit contains the contents of an August 2008 e-mail that Kiriakou sent his coauthor admitting that he lied to the PRB in an attempt to include classified information in the book. The PRB subsequently informed Kiriakou that the draft manuscript contained classified information that he could not use, and information regarding the technique that Kiriakou included in the manuscript remained classified until it was recently declassified to allow Kiriakou’s prosecution to proceed.

Upon conviction, the count charging illegal disclosure of Covert Officer A’s identity to a person not authorized to receive classified information carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, which must be imposed consecutively to any other term of imprisonment; the two counts charging violations of the Espionage Act each carry a maximum term of 10 years in prison; and making false statements carries a maximum prison term of five years. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250,000.

A complaint contains only allegations and is not evidence of guilt. The defendant is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial at which the government has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The government is being represented in court by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Iris Lan (Southern District of New York) and Mark E. Schneider (Northern District of Illinois), and DOJ trial attorney Ryan Fayhee, of the Counterespionage Section of the National Security Division. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Owings (Eastern District of Virginia) will assist in the matter under local court rules.

nytimes blog:How About Not Bombing Iran?

2012-01-23T18:13:00.000-08:00

How About Not Bombing Iran?

http://keller.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/how-about-not-bombing-iran/

If you need more convincing of the grave risks of a preemptive bombing attack on Iran, I recommend these freshly published arguments from Colin H. Kahl, who was until recently Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East in the Obama administration; R. Nicholas Burns, who was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the George W. Bush administration; and my Times colleague Roger Cohen, who sums it up this way:

Here’s the bottom line: an Israeli attack unites Iran in fury, locks in the Islamic Republic for a generation, cements the Syrian regime, radicalizes the Arab world at a moment of delicate transition, ignites Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, boosts Hamas, endangers U.S. troops in the region, sparks terrorism, propels oil skyward, triggers a possible regional war, offers a lifeline to Iran just as Europe is about to stop buying its oil, adds a Persian to the Arab vendetta against Israel, and may at best set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions a couple of years.

But if not bombing, then what?

Given the inflammatory rhetoric of its leaders, the brutal suppression of dissent, the chronic meddling in the affairs of its neighbors, and the long record of deceit surrounding its nuclear program, the Iranian regime is deeply – and justifiably – mistrusted by the U.S. Given our current saber-rattling and our historic meddling – we overthrew a democratically elected government in 1953 and installed a dictator congenial to our interests, especially our oil supply – it is no surprise that the mistrust is mutual. How do the U.S. and Iran even begin to talk to each other? Indeed, many of the people who follow this subject can point to instances where the U.S. or the Iranians failed to pick up a promising signal from the other side.

My column on the subject offers little optimism, at least for 2012. In a year of testosterone-infused campaign talk, any opening to Iran will be damned as appeasement. And, by the way, Iran has elections of its own – for parliament this spring, for president next year – in which candidates will be competing to demonstrate their muscular attitude toward American demands. If our long, fierce stalemate does end in the next year or two, I fear it is more likely to end in violent confrontation than in negotiation.

But hope springs eternal. I asked a few of the smart people who obsess about Iran to weigh in on the question of how – if the two sides really wanted to defuse this explosive relationship – we could conceivably get from here (bellicose rhetoric) to there (meaningful negotiations).

One fundamental sticking point has been the consistent American demand that Iran forgo its ability to enrich uranium. The Iranians point out that under the international treaties they have signed, they are entitled to enrich uranium for industrial use, mainly medical isotopes to treat cancer. The U.S. response is that Iran has periodically flouted other terms of these treaties and therefore must give up its enrichment rights; Iran just can’t be trusted. Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian nuclear official who ran afoul of Ahmadinejad and is now in exile as a research scholar at Princeton, says forfeiting the enrichment rights granted to other states (and to Iran when it was ruled by the shah) is a humiliation no Iranian leader can accept and hope to stay in power.

This is probably not the sort of issue Obama would dare broach in an election year, but the case for dropping the zero enrichment demand is pretty strong.

One of the most intriguing arguments I’ve heard for letting the Iranians enrich – at a low level – comes from R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton research scholar who spent a year at the State Department as a science adviser on Iran. He points out that under international treaties aimed at preventing nuclear proliferation, enrichment comes with international inspections. Iran presently has inspectors monitoring the Natanz and Fordo enrichment facilities. Ending enrichment also ends the obligation to be inspected, and without prying eyes it would be quite easy to reconstitute a nuclear enrichment program in secret. A plant dedicated to making weapons-grade fuel would be nearly impossible to detect.

Here’s Kemp on the subject:

While both the United States and Israel dream about shutting Iran’s nuclear program, that outcome might actually be one of the worst in the long run. In a twist of irony, it turns out that the best way to assure oneself that Iran’s nuclear activities remain peaceful is to keep the current program intact—subject to heavy monitoring and constraints that would lengthen time Iran needs to build a nuclear weapon. Any other outcome, including the destruction of Iran’s visible program through military strikes or regime change, would likely increase the chances that Iran could, and would, make a nuclear weapon in secret.
The catch arises because Iran has now mastered the most clandestine-capable nuclear-weapon pathway in history: the gas centrifuge. This property of the centrifuge has plagued policymakers ever since the centrifuge machine came into existence. In 1960, just months after the United States learned how to make centrifuges of its own, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission issued a public warning, “If successfully developed, a production plant using the gas centrifuge method could be simply housed. Its power requirements would be relatively small, and there would be no effects of the operation which would easily disclose the plant. There is no doubt in my mind [the centrifuge] will introduce an additional complicating factor in the problems of nuclear arms among nations.”
The Chairman was right. A gas centrifuge plant capable of making one nuclear weapon per year could be housed in a high-school gymnasium, powered by a diesel generator, and would not need more than a single canister of uranium feed material to make a bomb. It would emit less heat per square foot than a typical warehouse or grocery store and so would be invisible to infrared-sensing satellites; it would give off no chemical signatures; and it would not produce electromagnetic signals that could be detected beyond the fence-line of the facility. To this day, there remains no technical way to discover a clandestine centrifuge plant.
Not only are centrifuges difficult to find using technical means, they have a habit of escaping detection by human and signals intelligence as well. The Soviet Union opened its first centrifuge plant in 1957, and added new plants every few years thereafter. Despite the fact that the Soviet nuclear program was one of the most intensely targeted in history, the CIA was never able to find evidence of centrifuge use. By the 1970s, CIA analysts were growing deeply suspicious about the lack of centrifuge plants and began to protest the official assessment, but the absence of evidence remained. The estimate did finally change in 1991 when Russia announced in a diplomatic exchange that it had a uranium-enrichment capability built almost entirely on centrifuge technology—and incidentally it was largest in the world by almost a factor of ten.
China’s program remained similarly hidden for almost two decades. China achieved a centrifuge capability by 1961 and was on its second-generation centrifuge design by the time of its first-nuclear test in 1964. In China’s case, the United States not only suspected an absence of centrifuge facilities, it estimated that China had not yet mastered the technology even at the laboratory scale. In 1970 a human source divulged to the CIA that China had learned how to make centrifuges, but the official estimate on centrifuge use concluded, “Analysis of all available data has produced no evidence of a centrifuge plant because there are no specific identifying characteristics of a centrifuge plant.”
Time has not cured this shortcoming. Iraq’s nuclear-weapon ambitions were known at the time of the first Gulf War, but its centrifuge program was not. The world did not learn of Iraq’s centrifuges until after the war when an engineer revealed to an inspector that Iraq had had a centrifuge program as part of a multi-pronged uranium-enrichment effort. Libya’s program was yet another case. According the 2005 report of the presidentially mandated Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, the United States did not see Libya’s centrifuge program for sixteen years. According to that report, when it finally did, a “disproportionately large volume” of intelligence was related to Libya’s shopping habits, while little to no information had been obtained about what was happening inside of Libya. The report concluded on this point: “It is apparent to us that the [Intelligence] Community is not well-postured to replicate such success.”
The most recent case of surprise came from North Korea. In November 2010, North Korea invited three U.S. visitors to tour of its hither-to unknown centrifuge plant. Previous intelligence estimates had variously assumed that North Korea had an interest in centrifuges, based again on the country’s shopping habits and one-time confession, but no centrifuge plant had been identified.
In fact, essentially every centrifuge program that has ever been found was suspected and located because the country was buying equipment for the plant from abroad. In Iran’s case, it was buying centrifuge technology from A.Q. Khan, a known trafficker who was being watched by intelligence agencies around the world. Almost twenty years later, however, Iran is in a very different situation. It can now make centrifuges on an entirely indigenous basis. It does not need to shop abroad, and its knowledge is well formalized in internal documents and spread among hundreds of engineers. While it may be possible to shut Iran’s centrifuge plants, nobody can shut off Iran’s centrifuge capability.
Fortunately, history has granted the United States and Israel time to penetrate Iran’s program significantly. The West has incredible access, as highly sophisticated attacks like STUXNET have demonstrated. However, if Iran’s infrastructure were dismantled, intelligence sources lost, people repurposed, telephones disconnected, and computers networks shut down, then there would be significantly less insight into Iran’s activities, and accordingly less confidence going forward that Iran had not reconstituted a new program. It was exactly this kind of uncertainly that led to spurious claims of WMD in Iraq eventually to the second Gulf War. The lesson to learn is that letting Iran keep its current program, slightly reconfigured so it is not poised to make a weapons quickly, and subject to a rigorous transparency regime, is a better way forward.

For more on the enrichment debate, see Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor widely regarded as the go-to-guy on the mysteries of Iran’s nuclear capacity. He outlined a package that would let Iran enrich without developing a weapons capability in this 2009 piece.

One critical development since Bunn wrote that paper is that Iran has begun a more dangerous level of enrichment, up to 20 percent. That is the enrichment level required for the Tehran Research Reactor that produces medical isotopes. It is also much closer to bomb fuel. Fuel enrichment is not a linear process. Indeed, as the Israelis rightly point out with alarm, 20 percent enrichment is 90 percent of the way to bomb-grade fuel.

Olli Heinonen, who led the investigation of Iran’s program for the International Atomic Energy Agency and is now ensconced at Harvard, details the perils of 20 percent enrichment in a new Foreign Policy article.

The Iranians last September broached the idea of abandoning this higher level of enrichment in exchange for fuel rods to fit the Tehran Research Reactor, which produces medical isotopes.

The State Department was dismissive – and again, it’s hard to fault them for taking what the Iranians say as bluff and diversion – but given the added menace of 20 percent enrichment, the White House ought to be looking for a way to test that offer.

Another chronic impediment in dealing with Iran is choreography: who does what, in what order? Iranians want the sanctions dropped first, but we rightly respond that, once the sanctions end, it would be very hard to crank them up again if the Iranians don’t keep their side of the bargain.

Likewise, Iranians want to talk about the whole panoply of bilateral and regional issues, which we tend to see as muddying the waters and stalling.

Matthew Bunn of Harvard suggests that any deal with Iran will have to start small and proceed in phases. He offers a few ideas that could lead somewhere:

On the negotiating track, I think (a) you need some small but significant successes to convince each side it’s worth working with the other side (and to delay strikes, allowing enough time for diplomacy until both sides are ready to talk more seriously); (b) I think there’s no hope of the United States being able to engage seriously on the big issues in an election year, and in particular no hope of the United States being able to compromise on zero enrichment this year; (c) I think on the Iranian side as well, there is a competition for “who can be the most nationalist” as the 2013 Presidential election approaches — but there may also be a competition for “who can get us out of this unpleasant situation we’ve gotten into,” if we play our cards right.
Some things you MIGHT be able to get a deal on this year that could start building some confidence and delay itchy trigger fingers:
“Freeze for Freeze” — Iran agrees not to build up stocks of either 3.5% or 20% enriched material any further, and not to increase the number of operating centrifuges (either of the P-1 or of the more advanced varieties) if no further sanctions or murders take place. (ideally Iran also agrees to concrete steps to address the “military dimensions” aspect, but that may not be doable this year.) This would make it possible to say to the Israelis: “it’s not getting any worse right now, so give us some time to keep working it”.
Fuel for end of 20% enrichment — Iran agrees, as Ahmadinejad suggested, not to enrich to 20% any more in return for receiving fuel for the TRR. (Ideally Iran also agrees to export the existing 20% material or to blend it down to 5% once the fuel arrives, especially if they’d already agreed not to build up their 20% stock any more under the previous initiative.)
Incidents at sea — Iran and the United States work out an “incidents at sea” agreement, reducing the risk that some idiot in a patrol boat will provoke a shooting match.
Cooperation on Afghan drugs — Iran and the United States (and Afghanistan) could work together on controlling the flow of narcotics from Afghanistan into Iran (something Iran is worried about, something we’re worried about).
Iraq-Iran terrorism agreement — U.S. troops are gone, but there’s still a lot of U.S. personnel vulnerable to attack with Iranian-provided explosives (which increased a lot this past summer). Iraq and Iran could negotiate an agreement on addressing terrorist groups, and Iran could use that as a reason for ending the supply of these weapons (whether it says it’s doing this explicitly or not). (Might think about some similar Afghanistan-Iran agreement, as I gather Iranian-produced explosives are showing up with increasing frequency there as well.)
Iranian (and Israeli) participation in WMD free zone conference called for by 2010 NPT review.
One factor that policymakers will inevitably consider, though, is that any deals that loosened the sanctions at all (or reduced the chance for a substantial tightening of them) would (a) be seen as reducing the pressure on Iran and giving them more time; (b) presumably strengthen Ahmadinejad’s faction politically at home.

Bruce Riedel:Iran is not an existential threat

2012-01-22T18:02:00.000-08:00

January 19, 2012 Edition 3

Iran is not an existential threat

Bruce Riedel

http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/inside.php?id=1486

The danger of war is growing again over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran is rattling its sabers, the Republican presidential candidates and others are rattling theirs. But even if Iran gets the bomb, Israel will have overwhelming military superiority over Iran, a fact that should not be lost in all the heated rhetoric.

Former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, says Iran won't get the bomb until at least 2015. In contrast, Israel has had nuclear weapons since the late 1960s and has jealously guarded its monopoly on them in the region. Israel has used force in the past against developing nuclear threats. Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 were the targets of highly effective Israeli air strikes against developing nuclear weapons programs. Israel has seriously considered conducting such a strike against Iran and may well do so especially now that it has special bunker-busting bombs from the US.

Estimates of the size of the Israeli arsenal by international think tanks generally concur that Israel has about 100 nuclear weapons, possibly 200. Even under a crash program, Iran won't achieve an arsenal that size for many years--perhaps decades.

Israel also has multiple delivery systems. It has intermediate range ballistic missiles, the Jericho, that are capable of reaching any target in Iran. Its fleet of F15 long-range strike aircraft can also deliver nuclear payloads. Some analysts have suggested that it can also deliver nuclear weapons from its German-made Dolphin submarines using cruise missiles.

Israel will also continue to have conventional military superiority over Iran and the rest of the region. The Israel Defense Forces has a demonstrated qualitative edge over all of its potential adversaries in the region, including Iran. The Israeli air force has the capability to penetrate air defense systems with virtual impunity as it demonstrated in 2007 when it destroyed Syria's nascent nuclear capability. The IDF's intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities are vastly superior to its potential rivals. The 2006 Lebanon war and the 2009 Gaza war demonstrated that there are limits to Israel's conventional capabilities but those limits should not obscure the underlying reality of Israel's conventional military superiority over its enemies.

Iran, on the other hand, has never fully rebuilt its conventional military from the damage suffered in the Iran-Iraq war. It still relies heavily for air and sea power on equipment purchased by the Shah 40 years ago, much of which is antique today. Moreover, the June 2010 United Nations sanctions, UN Security Council resolution 1929, impose a very stringent arms ban on Iran. Virtually all significant weapons systems--tanks, aircraft, naval vessels, missiles, etc--are banned from sale or transfer to Iran. Training and technical assistance for such systems is also banned.

In other words, even if Iran wants to try to improve its conventional military capability in the next few years and has the money to do so, the UN arms ban will make that close to impossible. Iran does not have the capability to produce state-of-the-art weapons on its own, despite its occasional claims of self-sufficiency. It certainly cannot build a modern air force to compete with the IDF on its own.

Finally, Israel will continue to enjoy the support of the world's only superpower for the foreseeable future. Assistance from the United States includes roughly three billion dollars in aid every year. That is the longest running financial assistance program in American history, dating back to the 1973 war. It is never challenged or cut by Congress and permits Israeli planners to do multi-year planning for defense acquisitions with great certitude about what they can afford to acquire. When Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested cutting aid to Israel to zero in one Republican debate, his poll numbers plummeted. He backtracked fast.

US assistance is also far more than just financial aid. The Pentagon and Israel engage in constant exchanges of technical cooperation in virtually all elements of the modern battle field. Missile defense has been at the center of this exchange for over 20 years now. The United States and Israel also have a robust and dynamic intelligence relationship, which helps ensure Israel's qualitative edge. Every American president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama has been a supporter of maintaining Israel's qualitative edge over its potential foes, including US allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Iran, in contrast, has no major power providing it with financial help. Its arms relationships with Russia and China have been severed by Security Council Resolution 1929. Its only military ally is Syria, not exactly a powerhouse. And Syria is now in the midst of a civil war; its army is dissolving. If President Bashar Assad falls, Iran is the biggest loser in the "Arab spring". Hizballah will be the second largest loser. The deputy secretary general of Hizballah and one of its founders, Sheikh Naim Qassem, wrote in 2007 that Syria is "the cornerstone" of Hizballah's survival in the region. While Syria and Hizballah have their differences, the relationship is a "necessity" for Hizballah.

So don't let the hot air from Tehran or the Republican debates confuse the reality on the ground. Iran is a dangerous country but it is not an existential threat to either Israel or America.-Published 19/1/2012 © bitterlemons-international.org

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC and has advised four US presidents on the Middle East and South Asia.

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2012-01-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

BUCHANAN: Iran war not in U.S. interests

Murders of 4 scientists intended to provoke a confrontation

http://www.app.com/article/20120122/NJOPINION03/301220022/BUCHANAN-Iran-war-not-in-U-S-interests

On Sept. 21, 1976, as his car rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was assassinated by car bomb. Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American woman who worked with Letelier at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, died with him.

Michael Townley, an ex-CIA asset in the hire of Chile’s intelligence agency, confessed to using anti-Castro Cubans to murder Letelier, in what was regarded as an act of terrorism on U.S. soil.

Which raises a question: Are not the murders of four Iranian scientists associated with that nation’s nuclear program, by the attachment of bombs to their cars in Tehran, also terrorist acts?

Had the Stalin- or Khrushchev-era Soviets done this to four U.S. scientists in Washington, would we not have regarded it as acts of terrorism and war?

Iran has accused the United States and Israel of murder. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphatically denied any U.S. complicity: “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” added National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. “We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this.”

One of the assassinated scientists was a supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility that hosts regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. If Iran is building a bomb, it is not at Natanz.

U.S. denial of involvement leaves Mossad as the prime suspect. Israel has not denied it, and this comes at a sensitive time in U.S.-Israeli relations.

In Foreign Policy magazine, author and historian Mark Perry, claiming CIA documentation, alleges that Mossad agents in London posed as CIA agents and contacted Jundallah, a terrorist group, to bribe and recruit them to engage in acts of terror inside Iran.

Jundallah has conducted attacks in Sistan-Baluchistan province, killing government officials, soldiers, and women and children.

nytimes:Talks With Taliban a Long Way Off, American Envoy Says

2012-01-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

Talks With Taliban a Long Way Off, American Envoy Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/world/asia/taliban-talks-a-long-way-off-us-envoy-says.html?_r=1&ref=world

KABUL, Afghanistan — No peace talks with the Taliban this week: That was the short message on Sunday from the American envoy charged with starting those negotiations.

Stopping here in Kabul this weekend on his way to Qatar, where the insurgents are in the process of opening an office, the envoy, Marc Grossman, implicitly rejected reports that he planned to begin negotiations there this week. He made it clear that there was a long way to go.

Qatar still needs to talk to the Afghans about the proposed Taliban office, he said, and the United States needs to talk to Pakistan, which rebuffed Mr. Grossman’s plans to visit last week. Perhaps most telling, the Taliban still needs to clarify whether they actually intend to engage in peace talks, he said.

“The peace process is a comprehensive and large and complicated set of issues,” Mr. Grossman, the United States’ special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in a news conference here on Sunday after meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

He repeatedly reassured the Afghans that any peace talks would be “Afghans talking to Afghans.”

“Only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan,” he said.

What is obvious, however, is that the first steps are being taken by American officials, working through the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, and President Karzai’s aides had expressed concern that they might be sidelined.

The American envoy repeatedly emphasized that the Taliban have not explicitly said that they would participate in peace talks. While they have enthusiastically and publicly endorsed opening an office in Qatar, they have yet to clarify that it would be used for peace talks rather than, as some have feared, to enhance their international prestige while they wait out the American military withdrawal in 2014.

In addition, Mr. Grossman said, the Taliban would have to publicly renounce their links with international terrorists before talks could begin.

The Taliban also set a condition for opening an office in Qatar, saying that it would do so on the condition that the United States release Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Afghan officials have long advocated such a release as part of a peace process and on Sunday endorsed that idea. Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin went a step further, saying that Afghanistan would support the idea of transferring Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo to Qatar.

Illustrating how far apart the parties are, Mr. Grossman said the United States had not made any decision about releasing prisoners.

“This is an issue in the United States of law, something on which we would want to consult our Congress,” he said. “We have not made any decisions on this.”

Mr. Ludin also said the Afghan government had invited a Qatari delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan, to discuss the Taliban office, and Mr. Grossman seconded the idea of discussions between the Qataris and the Afghans.

Afghan officials had complained that Qatar had not only never consulted with them, but had yet to open an embassy in Afghanistan.

Mr. Ludin and Mr. Grossman said that Pakistan’s participation was crucial to any peace process. Mr. Grossman sought to play down Pakistan’s refusal to meet with him during this trip, which had been billed as an effort to prepare for peace talks by talking with regional leaders. However, he said, echoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, “There really can’t be a comprehensive peace process unless Pakistan is part of it.”

He added, “I would be happy to meet them at any time or any place.”

newsmax:US: Taliban Must Renounce Terrorism for Talks

2012-01-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

US: Taliban Must Renounce Terrorism for Talks

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Taliban-Afghan-Talks/2012/01/22/id/425046

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban must renounce ties to terrorists and endorse peace efforts as a condition for opening a political office in the Gulf state of Qatar, a senior U.S. diplomat said Sunday.

Marc Grossman, the special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, called for quick work in setting up the office in Qatar, seen as a step to negotiating an end to the decade-long war in Afghanistan between the Taliban and the Western-backed government.

The issue underscores the complexity of efforts to wind down the war ahead of the scheduled departure of NATO combat forces by the end of 2014. Publicly, the Taliban have expressed no interest in reconciliation, and while the U.S. says repeatedly that the peace process must be led by Afghans, Kabul continues to fear it is being left out of the negotiating process.

Grossman spoke to reporters Sunday in Kabul alongside Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin.

Grossman said Qatar and Afghanistan need to be in direct contact about the office, but "for an office to open, we also need to have a clear statement by the Afghan Taliban against international terrorism and in support of a peace process to end the armed conflict in Afghanistan."

Grossman, speaking at the Afghan Foreign Ministry on a snowy evening in Kabul, noted that the Afghan government would welcome a delegation from Qatar to discuss setting up the office.

Reassuring Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who fears he is being sidelined by U.S. efforts to find a political resolution to the war, Grossman said, "Only Afghans can decide the future of Afghanistan."

Before making his first visit to Afghanistan, Grossman made stops in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and India. He wanted to stop in Pakistan as well, but he said Pakistani officials did not want to meet with him now because they were still revising their policy toward the U.S.

The relationship is badly strained over the U.S. unilateral raid in Pakistan that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and a U.S. airstrike late last year that killed 24 Pakistan soldiers. Pakistan, where many Afghan insurgent leaders are said to be based, has closed overland routes into Afghanistan for U.S. and NATO war supplies.

Both Grossman and Ludin said Pakistan has a crucial role to play in efforts to craft a peace deal with the Taliban.

"There really can't be a comprehensive settlement here — a peace process — unless Pakistan is part of it," Grossman said.

Last year Washington opened secret negotiations with the Taliban exploring their willingness to enter into peace talks ahead of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Talks with the Taliban briefly faltered last summer after Karzai learned of the clandestine negotiations and made them public, temporarily scuttling them. Privately, Karzai has expressed fears that the United States will broker a deal with the Taliban that will be imposed on his government.

U.S. conversations with Taliban representatives have focused on establishing the Taliban office in Qatar and prisoner exchanges. The Taliban are seeking the release of five prisoners from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including Khairullah Khairkhwa, the former governor of Herat province, and Mullah Mohammed Fasl, a top Taliban commander.

Ludin expressed the Afghan government's support in getting a Taliban political office opened in Qatar and said it also would back an American decision to transfer some Taliban detainees from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar.

"If the United States decides to transfer these detainees to Qatar, to the extent that that means that these people will be reunited with their families, the Afghan government will support it. ... but you also will have to ascertain the desire of the detainees themselves," Ludin said.

Grossman said no decision has been made about the transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay.

Read more on Newsmax.com: US: Taliban Must Renounce Terrorism for Talks
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nytimes:News Analysis Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections

2012-01-22T04:05:00.000-08:00

News Analysis

Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/confronting-iran-in-a-year-of-elections.html

A DEMOCRATIC president running in a bitterly disputed presidential race faces a fateful national security decision: whether to approve an airstrike to thwart an adversary bent on becoming a nuclear-weapons state.

Conservative hawks deride the president as weak. In the West Wing, advisers debate the risks: a strike could lead to open conflict, but doing nothing would change the balance of power in a volatile, war-prone region.

The president was Lyndon B. Johnson, and less than three weeks before Election Day in 1964, the Chinese rendered the White House discussion moot by setting off their first nuclear test. “China will commit neither the error of adventurism, nor the error of capitulation,” the government of Mao Zedong told the world that morning, heralding the first Asian nation to get the bomb.

Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the election anyway, after a campaign in which — oddly enough, given the attack being contemplated — he tarred the Arizona conservative as a warmonger in the infamous black-and-white “daisy” television spot, featuring a young girl counting the petals of a flower, unaware of impending nuclear doom.

Historical analogies are always dangerous when it comes to presidential elections and nuclear geopolitics, so comparisons to the Obama administration’s calculus in the escalating confrontation with Iran calls to mind the caution that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. The election-year nuclear brinkmanship game was tricky enough in the cold war; the Chinese test was partly a warning to the Soviet Union, and Washington had even considered inviting Moscow to join in any strike.

But think of the multipolar chess President Obama is now playing. Every country involved in the dispute over Iran’s possibly acquiring nuclear weapons is calculating how the American presidential election plays to its agenda. The politics of soaring oil prices loom over any threat of military conflict, even a brief skirmish in the Strait of Hormuz. And with global economic turmoil a reality and leadership changes possible or certain this year in the United States, Russia, China and France, the game gets even more complex.

Start with the Iranians themselves. They have studied China’s example, and the case of Pakistan, which faced severe economic sanctions — urged foremost by the United States — for its pursuit of the bomb. But in both cases, once those countries conducted a test, the world adjusted to the new reality. Less than a half century later, China is the world’s second largest economy, and no one messes with it. As soon as the Sept. 11 attacks happened, the sanctions against Pakistan disappeared; suddenly the United States cared about cooperation in hunting down Al Qaeda more than it cared about Pakistan’s dangerous export of bomb technology, including to Iran.

“From the perception of the Iranians, life may look better on the other side of the mushroom cloud,” said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He may be right: while the Obama administration has vowed that it will never tolerate Iran as a nuclear weapons state, a few officials admit that they may have to settle for a “nuclear capable” Iran that has the technology, the nuclear fuel and the expertise to become a nuclear power in a matter of weeks or months.

No one can get inside the head of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Mr. Takeyh notes that his pattern of behavior over the past decade has been to push the nuclear program ahead “systematically but cautiously,” slowly raising the temperature but until now avoiding major crises. Several years ago the Western allies said Iran could not resume enriching uranium; it resumed. Then the “red line” was drawn around enriching at a much higher level of purity, which gets Iran closer to bomb-grade fuel. But Iran has been doing that for nearly two years now. And the latest violation, just two weeks ago, was beginning production in a deep underground facility that is far less vulnerable to bombing.

That moves the calculus to Israel. It used to declare that it would never permit Iran to go past “the point of no return,” an ill-defined line beyond which Iran could rapidly produce a bomb. There’s continuing debate about where that line is, but former Israeli intelligence officials say Iran is long past it. Yet so far, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been constrained by the United States, which argues that cyberattacks, sabotage and sanctions have been more effective at slowing Iran’s program, without creating an international furor.

The outbreak of a public debate in Israel over whether to strike soon clearly shook the Obama administration. Under pressure from American officials, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said on Wednesday that a decision on a possible strike on Iran was “very far off.” Mr. Netanyahu’s government may calculate that if Israel is going to attempt a strike, doing so during the presidential campaign, when it would have the sympathy of many American voters, is the only way to avoid a major backlash from Mr. Obama, with whom Mr. Netanyahu has a tense relationship. Elliott Abrams, President George W. Bush’s hawkish Middle East adviser, wrote recently that if Israel attacked “Mr. Obama would be forced to back it and help Israel cope with the consequences. It might even help the president get re-elected if he ends up using force to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and Israel safe.”

IT might — or it might not. The Iranians know they have little to gain from a confrontation that spins out of control; they don’t want to take on the Fifth Fleet in the Strait of Hormuz. But threats, small attacks on refineries and harassment of shipping can send the price of oil soaring, with economic effects no leader wants in election season. Sure, Americans don’t want Iran to get the bomb. But are they willing to pay $6 a gallon to prevent it?

Instability scares the Chinese, too, but gives the Russians an opportunity. For years China resisted sanctions on Iran, since it buys so much Iranian oil. Now it sees that escalating sanctions are inevitable, so it is busy hedging its bets, looking for alternative sources (with help from the Obama administration) while delaying a crisis. “They are a little late to the game,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said. “We have been telling them this was coming for two years now. But they are only now believing it.”

Russia is also looking to buy time, but as a significant oil producer, it benefits from a sustained crisis — as long as it stays at a low boil. The Russians have proposed a lengthy negotiating plan with Iran, one that would take years to complete. Washington sees it as a ploy that would drag out talks and give Iran time and political cover to get the bomb.

And then there are the Europeans and the Arab states. During the Bush administration they feared any tough sanctions, convinced that if they failed, President Bush would order a strike on Iran. They misread the politics in Washington; after invading Iraq, Mr. Bush was in no position to get into a conflict with another Middle Eastern country suspected of seeking nuclear weapons.

Now, exactly three years into the Obama administration, the situation has reversed. Europe is finally as eager for sanctions as Washington has been; it is preparing for an oil embargo on Iran. The United States has not purchased oil from Iran for many years, but Mr. Obama has stopped short of advocating a global total embargo, which could lead to confrontations at sea. The hard line taken by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has been the surprise in the latest chapter in the long-running Iranian nuclear crisis. Their operating assumption is that if the economic cost is high enough, the supreme leader will fold. Few in Washington are persuaded, but most go along with the assumption because the more forceful alternatives are too unpleasant to contemplate.

By comparison, solving the Iranian hostage crisis during the presidential election of 1980 looks almost simple. Hours after Jimmy Carter left office and the more hawkish Ronald Reagan came in, Iran freed the hostages taken at the American Embassy. When Mr. Obama or his opponent is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2013, no one expects Iran’s nuclear complex to be packed up and shipped out.

npr:CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye

2012-01-22T03:37:00.000-08:00

CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/22/145587161/cia-tracks-public-information-for-the-private-eye

January 22, 2012

Secrets: the currency of spies around the world. The rise of social media, hash-tags, forums, blogs and online news sites has revealed a new kind of secret, those hiding in plain sight. The CIA calls all this information "open source" material, and it's changing the way America's top spy agency does business.

NPR got a rare behind-the-scenes look at the CIA's Open Source Center. It operates on the down low, even though they deal with public material. We aren't allowed to tell you where the Open Source Center is. All we can say is that it's housed in an unmarked and unremarkable office building just off a nondescript, busy street.

My producer and I were asked to leave our phones in our car. We were ushered inside to a small room with half a dozen analysts working at cubicles, their eyes fixed to computer screens. There was a bank of television monitors on the wall projecting news from around the world, which gave it kind of a newsroom feel.

The managing editor is Glen; he gave no last name. He pointed out a poster on the back wall made to look like a 1950s comic book, and in one corner it read, "there's no escaping the information highway."

Changing Responsibilities

Social media have forced the CIA into the fast lane, transformed the Open Source Center. Its predecessor organization was basically a U.S. government translation service. Analysts translated foreign radio broadcasts or newspapers that sometimes took weeks to come in by ship.

Today, CIA analysts are still translating, but they're also responsible for figuring out what it all means. They're also under more pressure now to identify potential crises, when all they have to go on is a tweet or a status update.

Doug Naquin, the director of the Open Source Center, says the volume of information the people are analyzing is "massive."

He won't define "massive," but other intelligence officials say since Sept. 11, it's been like trying to drink from a fire hose. The political revolutions erupting around the Middle East have turned that fire hose into a flood.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill blamed the CIA for missing the Arab Spring, specifically the democratic uprising in Egypt. Naquin says his analysts knew something was brewing in the country.

"I want to clarify — we didn't predict, but we said it was going to be a game changer and did pose a threat to the regime," he says.

Naquin says that was in April 2009. His team wrote up reports on some kind of unrest, fueled by social media, but those reports were overlooked. That was in part, he says, because the CIA and the intelligence community as a whole weren't taking social media seriously.

"I remember there was a lot of resistance or skepticism, is the best word to say. 'Well it's just chatter, it's no value,' et cetera," he says. "And we said, there was enough people here who said, 'No, there's something there.' "

'Narratives' Decoded

But figuring out what that something is, that's the hard part. Naquin says his office isn't trying to uncover secrets so much as they're trying to put together what he calls a country's "narrative."

"You know, what are the underlying beliefs? So in the United States, for example, one of our master narratives is the American Dream. It's the same in other countries," he says.

Building those narratives for foreign countries means tracking almost anything.

"What's trending? Is it the Justin Bieber concert?" Naquin says.

Yes, the CIA uses Justin Bieber as a kind of social barometer.

"Well it says to me that their attention is not terribly focused on other issues that we may consider more serious," he says. "I kind of raised it as a frivolous point, but if Justin is number one, and the water situation is four or five, it'll give you sense of the mindset of a certain part of the population."

More Than Just A Google Search

We were given access to a regular morning meeting where the CIA analysts talked about what they had been monitoring, although we were told in advance that the meeting would be sanitized. In other words: No sensitive stuff in front of the reporters.

These analysts take what they learn through open source material and put it into classified reports, used by the CIA and other government agencies. But it's hard to see how this is more specialized than what a graduate student could research and write as a senior thesis. Naquin has heard this critique before.

"It's very easy to say, 'Well, this is what I found in Google, and this is what they're saying, so this must be true,' and that's I think one of the biggest changes over the past five years," he says. "People realize this is much more than just doing a Google search."

Analysts are responsible for monitoring everything that comes out of a specific country, but they're also tracking political movements and terrorist groups. Beth — that's what the CIA wants us to call her — spends her day looking at terrorist-related websites and monitoring Twitter feeds and Facebook pages that raise red flags.

"In order for these really reclusive groups to communicate with their supporters, they have to do it in open forum, often times using the Internet," she says, "where, you know, they can reach supporters around the world, and the more open they have to be, the easier it is for people like us to find it."

Broader Impact

Social media can kind of "out" terrorist sympathizers. The challenge for the CIA is figuring out exactly who and where they are. That's complicated because the Internet makes it easy for users to hide themselves — to literally create digital identities using shadow I.P. addresses. Someone could be tweeting in Arabic under a Yemen email address, but it could be a U.S. citizen sitting in his house in Ohio. The problem with that is it's illegal for the CIA to monitor Americans on American soil.

"We can't tell where individual posts come from," Naquin says.

So if they're pursuing someone and, at some point in that analysis they realize that that person is sitting in the United States, how does that change what they're doing?

"Well, first of all, I can't get into those types of questions in too much detail," he says, "but if there's any — let me put it broadly — if there's any situation in which we came across anything that involved U.S. persons, we would either stop or we would turn it over to one of our partners on the domestic side."

But the line between what kind of "monitoring" is legal and what's not could get more complicated as the technology evolves. Naquin says he's anticipating a future when our household appliances are all wired up to our iPhones and email accounts.

"The Internet is going from connecting people to connecting to things," he says. "People's thoughts that would never make it out of their homes now are available to everybody on the Internet."

For open source analysts with the CIA, that just means more information and hopefully more valuable intelligence. For those living in a country ruled by a government with a penchant for domestic spying, it's potentially a Big Brother nightmare.

reuters:Exclusive: How Pakistan helps the U.S. drone campaign

2012-01-22T03:32:00.001-08:00

Exclusive: How Pakistan helps the U.S. drone campaign

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/22/us-pakistan-drones-idUSTRE80L08G20120122

(Reuters) - The death of a senior al Qaeda leader in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan's tribal badlands, the first strike in almost two months, signaled that the U.S.-Pakistan intelligence partnership is still in operation despite political tensions.

The Jan 10 strike -- and its follow-up two days later -- were joint operations, a Pakistani security source based in the tribal areas told Reuters.

They made use of Pakistani "spotters" on the ground and demonstrated a level of coordination that both sides have sought to downplay since tensions erupted in January 2011 with the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor in Lahore.

"Our working relationship is a bit different from our political relationship," the source told Reuters, requesting anonymity. "It's more productive."

U.S. and Pakistani sources told Reuters that the target of the Jan 10 attack was Aslam Awan, a Pakistani national from Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed last May by a U.S. commando team.

They said he was targeted in a strike by a U.S.-operated drone directed at what news reports said was a compound near the town of Miranshah in the border province of North Waziristan.

That strike broke an undeclared eight-week hiatus in attacks by the armed, unmanned drones that patrol the tribal areas and are a key weapon in U.S. President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism strategy.

The sources described Awan, also known by the nom-de-guerre Abdullah Khorasani, as a significant figure in the remaining core leadership of al Qaeda, which U.S. officials say has been sharply reduced by the drone campaign. Most of the drone attacks are conducted as part of a clandestine CIA operation.

The Pakistani source, who helped target Awan, could not confirm that he was killed, but the U.S. official said he was. European officials said Awan had spent time in London and had ties to British extremists before returning to Pakistan.

The source, who says he runs a network of spotters primarily in North and South Waziristan, described for the first time how U.S.-Pakistani cooperation on strikes works, with his Pakistani agents keeping close tabs on suspected militants and building a pattern of their movements and associations.

"We run a network of human intelligence sources," he said. "Separately, we monitor their cell and satellite phones.

"Thirdly, we run joint monitoring operations with our U.S. and UK friends," he added, noting that cooperation with British intelligence was also extensive.

Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officers, using their own sources, hash out a joint "priority of targets lists" in regular face-to-face meetings, he said.

"Al Qaeda is our top priority," he said.

He declined to say where the meetings take place.

Once a target is identified and "marked," his network coordinates with drone operators on the U.S. side. He said the United States bases drones outside Kabul, likely at Bagram airfield about 25 miles north of the capital.

From spotting to firing a missile "hardly takes about two to three hours," he said.

DRONE STRIKES A SORE POINT WITH PAKISTAN

It was impossible to verify the source's claims and American experts, who decline to discuss the drone program, say the Pakistanis' cooperation has been less helpful in the past.

U.S. officials have complained that when information on drone strikes was shared with the Pakistanis beforehand, the targets were often tipped off, allowing them to escape.

Drone strikes have been a sore point with the public and Pakistani politicians, who describe them as violations of sovereignty that produce unacceptable civilian casualties.

The last strike before January had been on Nov 16, 10 days before 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in what NATO says was an inadvertent cross-border attack on a Pakistani border post.

That incident sent U.S.-Pakistan relations into the deepest crisis since Islamabad joined the U.S.-led war on militancy following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. On Thursday, Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said ties were "on hold" while Pakistan completes a review of the alliance.

The United States sees Pakistan as critical to its efforts to wind down the war in Afghanistan, where U.S.-led NATO forces are battling a Taliban insurgency.

Some U.S. and Pakistani officials say that both sides are trying to improve ties. As part of this process, a U.S. official said, it is possible that some permanent changes could be made in the drone program which could slow the pace of attacks.

The security source said very few innocent people had been killed in the strikes. When a militant takes shelter in a house or compound which is then bombed, "the ones who are harboring him, they are equally responsible," he said.

"When they stay at a host house, they (the hosts) obviously have sympathies for these guys."

He denied that Pakistan helped target civilians.

"If ... others say innocents have been targeted, it's not true," he said. "We never target civilians or innocents."

The New America Foundation policy institute says that of 283 reported strikes from 2004 to Nov 16, 2011, between 1,717 and 2,680 people were killed. Between 293 and 471 were thought to be civilians -- approximately 17 percent of those killed.

The Brookings Institution, however, says civilian deaths are high, reporting in 2009 that "for every militant killed, 10 or more civilians also died." Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, also said in April 2011 that "the majority of victims are innocent civilians."

Still, despite its public stance, Pakistan has quietly supported the drone program since Obama ramped up air strikes when he took office in 2009 and even asked for more flights.

According to a U.S. State Department cable published by anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, Pakistan's chief of army staff General Ashfaq Kayani in February 2008 asked Admiral William J. Fallon, then-commander of U.S. Central Command, for increased surveillance and round-the-clock drone coverage over North and South Waziristan.

The security source said Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, also was supportive of the strikes, albeit privately.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Ron Popeski)

state.gov:Hillary on IRAN TALKS

2012-01-22T01:32:00.002-08:00

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/01/182322.htm

QUESTION: Hi, Madam Secretary, Mr. Minister. A question on Iran, if I may. Iran in recent days has expressed some willingness to return to talks on its nuclear program. Just today, Lady Ashton released a letter she sent to the Iranians in October in which she calls on them to take some concrete steps for confidence building. First question would be: What exactly are those steps that you’re looking for the Iranians to take? And second, do you take them at their word this time that they’re willing to fully engage?

And if I may Madam Secretary, in our way of asking two questions – (laughter) – you’ve made a decision not to testify on the Keystone XL pipeline next week. Can you explain why you don’t want to do that? Thank you.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well Kirit, first let me say that we’re going to miss you. I understand this may be the last time I get two, three, or four questions from you. (Laughter.) But we wish you well as I think you head off to Moscow, which will be an exciting assignment, from all indications.

With respect to Iran, first let me say that we have a very strong partnership with the EU, and we expect to see the EU taking some additional steps to keep the pressure on Iran in the coming days. And I believe that we’re making it clear to Iran, as the minister said, that its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its needless provocations such as the threats regarding the Straits of Hormuz, place it on a dangerous path. Iran does have a choice to make. It can come back to the table, as we have consistently made clear to them, and address the nuclear program concerns that the international community rightly has or face increasing pressure and isolation.

I want to underscore we do not seek conflict. We strongly believe the people of Iran deserve a better future. They can have that future. The country can be reintegrated into the global community, able to share in the benefits when their government definitively turns away from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Last October, on behalf of the E-3+3 member nations, of which both Germany and the United States are two, High Representative Ashton did send the Iranians a letter saying that we are open to negotiations if Iran is serious about addressing the nuclear program without preconditions. We stand by that letter. The EU did make it public earlier today, and we await Iran’s response. And I think it’s been very important that the EU has kept this open channel. And we all are seeking clarity about the meaning behind Iran’s public statements that they are willing to engage, but we have to see a seriousness and sincerity of purpose coming from them.

csmonitor:Regime change: How fear of Iran nukes, and campaign politics, revived the call A tough-talking debate over pursuing regime change is all th

2012-01-22T01:32:00.001-08:00

Regime change: How fear of Iran nukes, and campaign politics, revived the call

A tough-talking debate over pursuing regime change is all the rage again, this time focused on Iran. But proponents say they prefer economic sanctions to military force as the main lever.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2012/0120/Regime-change-How-fear-of-Iran-nukes-and-campaign-politics-revived-the-call

Less than a decade after “regime change” became the rallying cry that defined the principal objective of the war in Iraq, the concept is gaining steam once again.

This time it’s about Iran.

But this time around, proponents of regime change envision not a boots-on-the-ground war but ever-tightening economic sanctions as the preferred means of toppling what many in the US view as an outlaw leadership.

Sanctions, primarily a cut-off of Iran’s oil income, would cause such disarray and social unrest, the thinking goes, that the Iranian people would rise up and do away with the root cause of the Iranian crisis, the country’s leaders.

Q&A: What's with the war talk surrounding Iran?

Others scoff at the idea of an externally induced revolution as wishful thinking, but say the rise of regime change rhetoric reflects the climate of a post-Iraq US election year where everyone wants to sound tough on Iran without endorsing an Iraq-style solution.

The idea that regime change is the only viable and lasting solution to the challenges posed by Iran – its advancing nuclear program, its sharpened brinkmanship over the Strait of Hormuz, its support for Islamist extremist movements around the world – has received growing attention and support from Republican presidential candidates vying to out-tough one another on Iran policy.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most vocal proponent of the “It’s the regime, stupid,” position, advocating regime change in foreign-policy debates and elaborating on how he would accomplish the goal: by “cutting off the gasoline supply to Iran and then, frankly, sabotaging the only refinery they have.”

Front-runner Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum also wave the regime-change card.

For some experts, Iran must take some responsibility for fomenting the shift in the Iran discussion. “Iran has done its part to encourage the regime-change talk by brandishing the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz,” says Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.

The Obama administration is also playing a role by using expressions like “tightening the noose” to describe what stronger sanctions are designed to do to Iran, some Iran experts say.

Adding to the frenzy is recent US legislation that targets any country, friend or foe, that continues to purchase Iranian oil through Iran’s central bank, and a proposed European Union (EU) embargo on imports of Iranian oil that could be approved as early as Monday.

An EU embargo on Iranian oil would represent a significant step, since Europe buys about 20 percent of Iran’s oil. European officials say the move may be the last option for forcing Tehran to “change course” before military action, which the Europeans want to avoid.

“If we want to avoid this dilemma of either the Iranian bomb or bombing Iran, then we have to go very far to force them to change course,” says one senior European diplomat in Washington.

The Europeans are not talking about regime change, but their new toughness is boosting those in the US who believe seriously toughened sanctions could be the key to what they say should be the goal: toppling the Iranian regime.

Taking a cue from the Arab Spring and the toppling of Arab tyrants by popular movements, some regional experts say an Iranian population infuriated by increasingly dire economic conditions could do the same. A “tsunami of sanctions” could be implemented “in a way that gives rise to the sort of popular economic discontent that led to the uprisings in the Arab world a year ago,” write two specialists with Washington’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz, in a recent Bloomberg opinion piece.

“Through sanctions,” they add, “a democratic counterrevolution in Persia might be born.”

Others say sanctions alone won’t work, no matter how tough they are. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, is all for regime change in Iran but he says induced economic hardship won’t do it: Iran has too many high-powered friends – Russia and China to start with – and he points to North Korea, which he says has preferred to starve its own population rather than give up its nuclear stockpile.

Still other experts say regime change is not the magic formula for preempting a nuclear Iran, since the Iranian population shows every sign of supporting the country’s nuclear program.

The journalist and author Robert Wright, writing in the Atlantic, notes that polls have shown that strong majorities of Iran’s Greens, who took to the streets to protest the 2009 elections, and other pro-opposition segments of the population are adamant that Iran should not give up its nuclear program “regardless of the circumstances.”

Further noting that the Iraqi government that has resulted from a regime-change war can hardly be accused of “hew[ing] to our policy guidelines,” Mr. Wright adds that, “when you induce regime change by tightening sanctions to the choking point, you don’t get to micro-manage the transition.”

That may be true, but the premise of the regime-changers seems to be that, just as Iraq’s government today, even if not exactly what the US would choose, is better than Saddam Hussein, so would a post-mullahs Iranian government almost certainly be preferable to what now rules in Tehran.

“It’s not so much that we don’t want a nuclear Iran, it’s that we don’t want this Iran to become a nuclear power,” says Michael Hayden, former CIA director and National Security Agency director under George W. Bush.

General Hayden, who places Iran at the top of his “list of five things to worry about,” says Iran earns that ranking not simply because of its nuclear program but because of the threat nuclear proliferation poses and because of the Iranian regime’s track record (of sponsoring international terrorism, for example).

Speaking Thursday at a discussion sponsored by Washington’s Center for the National Interest, Hayden said Iran can be seen to be operating under two clocks: one the nuclear clock, which sanctions aim to slow down, and another clock determining the pace of political change in Iran.

Hayden said he’d like to be able to turn back the second clock to June 2009, the height of Iran’s aborted “green revolution,” to see “where that might have led.”

The objective is to “slow down one clock long enough to allow the other to catch up,” Hayden says. “If you can slow it down long enough, maybe the direction of Iran changes.”

bloomberg:Germany’s Westerwelle Urges Iran to Begin ‘Serious Dialogue’

2012-01-22T01:31:00.001-08:00

Germany’s Westerwelle Urges Iran to Begin ‘Serious Dialogue’

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-21/germany-s-westerwelle-urges-iran-to-begin-serious-dialogue-.html

The U.S. and the European Union are urging Iran to return to talks centered on its disputed nuclear program, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said, amid steps to expand economic sanctions on the Islamic republic.

If Iran’s leaders agree to a “serious dialogue,” they must be prepared to discuss steps to give up “options for nuclear weapons,” he said in an interview yesterday at Bloomberg’s Washington office.

“Just meetings for propaganda and show is not what we are seeking,” he said.

Westerwelle spoke as he and other EU foreign ministers plan to meet Jan. 23 to consider imposing an oil embargo and additional financial sanctions against the Persian nation, and as international nuclear inspectors plan to visit the Iranian capital Tehran.

“A serious dialogue means that we have the commitment of the Iranian government” to address what the U.S. and Europe say is Iran’s prohibited work toward possible nuclear weapons, Westerwelle said. “This is important.”

Westerwelle was in Washington to discuss Iran and other foreign policy priorities with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He said the EU remains committed to the euro common currency and will erect a firewall to stem the debt crisis.

“We have to erect a firewall,” Westerwelle said in a separate interview on Bloomberg Television. “We have to show solidarity. We have to support those countries that are now in serious trouble.” He said “a long-term solution” is being sought.

Euro Outlook

The “euro currency is strong, is successful and will survive,” Westerwelle said. “It is absolutely decisive that we stay together in the euro region, that we understand Europe and the euro zone is not only our destiny, it’s also our desire.”

At a press conference with Clinton, Westerwelle said that the “the door for serious dialogue remains open” with Iran. Clinton underscored his diplomatic outreach by stressing the benefits of engagement for the Iranian people.

“We do not seek conflict” with Iran, Clinton said. “We strongly believe the people of Iran deserve a better future. They can have that future, the country can be reintegrated into the global community, able to share in the benefits when their government definitively turns away from pursuing nuclear weapons.”

Iran says its nuclear program is intended to generate electricity and for medical uses.

Tougher Sanctions

Dennis Ross, a former Middle East adviser to President Barack Obama, said this stand-off over Iran’s nuclear program differs from earlier clashes in the strength and breadth of the sanctions the U.S. and its allies have assembled.

“There’s one big difference now, and that difference is that the pressure is now dramatically higher,” Ross said in a telephone interview. Iran’s “currency has been significantly devalued, they’re facing a boycott of their oil, this goes much more to the heart of managing their economy,” he said.

EU foreign ministers are set to meet Jan. 23 in Brussels to discuss freezing assets of Iran’s central bank and imposing a ban on Iranian oil imports, a decision that requires unanimous backing among the bloc’s 27 nations. The embargo would hurt countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, which are dependent on Iranian supplies and would need to find alternate sources.

Westerwelle acknowledged that Greece is “in an extremely difficult situation” but said that widening sanctions on Iran’s energy and financial sectors was the right move. The foreign minister said the prospect of higher oil costs pales compared to the strategic costs if Iran obtained nuclear weapons, which he said would be “10 to 100 times more.”

Oil Embargo

Clinton and Westerwelle expressed optimism that EU members would move forward on the oil embargo.

“There is a realistic chance that we will have a clear result of our meeting on Monday,” he said in the interview with reporters and editors.

The EU yesterday released an Oct. 21 letter that foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton wrote to Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi laying out the EU’s interest in talks. The letter suggests confidence-building measures and a step-by-step approach without offering details of what those measures would entail.

The main focus of the talks needs to be on “developing practical steps aimed at rebuilding confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature” of Iran’s nuclear activities, Ashton said in the letter.

“It is crucial to look for concrete results,” she wrote.

‘Seeking Clarity’

Iran still hasn’t responded to the letter. On Jan. 19, Salehi said that he has asked Turkey to deliver a letter to Ashton that proposes talks be revived.

“We all are seeking clarity about the meaning behind Iran’s public comments that they are willing to engage, but we have to see a seriousness and sincerity of purpose coming from them,” Clinton said.

The U.S. and EU standards for restarting discussions with Iran effectively set preconditions that may scuttle the prospect for engagement, Vali Nasr, a former adviser to the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, said in an interview yesterday.

“That’s not a good way to do diplomacy,” said Nasr, now a professor of international politics at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

As the EU pressed its interest in renewing talks with Iran, French President Nicholas Sarkozy warned that a military confrontation would unleash chaos in the Middle East. He urged that “much stronger sanctions” be adopted in an effort to prevent a clash, including a freeze of central bank assets and an oil import ban.

Iranian Threats

Tensions with Iran have risen in recent weeks with Vice President Reza Rahimi warning on Dec. 27 that Iran, the second- biggest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia, may close the Strait of Hormuz if western nations block its crude oil sales.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, said on the Charlie Rose show Jan. 18 that his country doesn’t plan to do so “unless Iran is threatened seriously and somebody wants to tighten the noose.”

“I believe that we’re making it clear” to Iran, Clinton said, that “its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its needless provocations, such as the threats regarding the Strait of Hormuz, place it on a dangerous path.”

Nuclear Inspectors

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are due to arrive in Tehran on Jan. 29 to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, the Iranian state-run Mehr news agency reported Jan. 18, citing Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations nuclear watchdog.

Commenting on the euro crisis, Westerwelle said that it is a crucial time “not only for Greece, but for the euro zone.”

“We have to support those countries that are now in serious trouble,” Westerwelle said in the television interview. “It is necessary that structural reforms come through in Greece.”

“Our German commitment is that all European countries stay on board, that all members of the euro zone stay on board and that we solve this crisis together,” Westerwelle said in the meeting with Bloomberg reporters and editors. He said he has seen some “positive signals” at the beginning of 2012.

voanews:US, Germany Say Iran Faces Tougher Sanctions Over Nuclear Program

2012-01-22T01:30:00.003-08:00

US, Germany Say Iran Faces Tougher Sanctions Over Nuclear Program

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/US-Germany-Say-Iran-Faces-Tougher-Sanctions-Over-Nuclear-Program-137805793.html

The United States and Germany say Iran will face tougher international sanctions on oil revenues if it does not abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

With the European Union moving closer to a vote on an embargo of Iranian oil Monday, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the international community must not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

“The government in Tehran keeps violating its international obligations on the transparency of its nuclear program. We have no choice but to pass tough new sanctions that address the financial sources of the nuclear program. One thing is clear: the door for serious dialogue remains open, but the option of nuclear weapons in Iran is not acceptable,” said Westerwelle.

The German foreign minister spoke following talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said the United States and Germany are closely coordinating sanctions meant to deprive Iran of oil revenue it could use to pursue nuclear weapons. Westerwelle said the ultimate goal is clear: preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.

“This is not only our raison d'etre to protect Israel. It is also a question of the balance in the region. And it is also unacceptable if we look to the situation at the nonproliferation necessity worldwide,” said Westerwelle.

Secretary Clinton said the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and what she calls Iran's “needless provocations” against shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, put it on a dangerous path.

“Iran does have a choice to make. It can come back to the table - as we have consistently made clear to them - and address the nuclear program concerns that the international community rightly has or face increasing pressure and isolation,” said Clinton.

The European Union is expected to implement its oil embargo gradually so that already fragile economies - including Greece and Italy - can find other sources of fuel. While Iran will likely find other buyers, industry analysts expect China and India will insist on a discount. That would cut into oil receipts and could further weaken the value of Iran's currency.

Secretary Clinton and Foreign Minister Westerwelle say they are not seeking a conflict with Iran. Instead they want the government in Tehran to return to talks over its nuclear program. But only talks that, in the German foreign minister's words are “serious and substantial” not talks that are meant for show.

reuters:Major powers open to serious talks with Iran

2012-01-22T01:30:00.001-08:00

Major powers open to serious talks with Iran

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/21/us-iran-idUSTRE80H15Z20120121

Major powers signaled on Friday their willingness to reopen talks about curbing Iran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons but said Tehran must show it is serious about any negotiations.

The focus on diplomacy follows weeks of rising tensions between the West, which is seeking to cut Iran's oil sales, and Tehran, which has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz through which almost one-fifth of oil traded worldwide flows.

Alarmed Arab neighbors made a plea to avoid escalating the dispute over Iran's nuclear program, while an ally of Iran's supreme leader called for Israel to be "punished" for allegedly killing an Iranian nuclear scientist.

The West suspects Iran is using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to develop atomic weapons and has pursued a two-track approach of sanctions and diplomacy to try to rein it in. Iran says its nuclear program is solely to produce electricity.

While major powers stressed their openness to renewed talks,

diplomats said they remained divided on their approach, notably on whether to let Iran keep enriching uranium at some level.

The group, known as the P5+1 and as the EU3+3, includes Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the group, issued a statement making clear that a diplomatic path remained open to Iran despite tougher sanctions and fresh speculation of a military strike on its nuclear facilities.

"The EU3+3 has always been clear about the validity of the dual track approach," Ashton's spokesperson said in a statement that included her October 21 letter to the Iranians laying out the possibility of talks. "We are waiting for the Iranian reaction."

The release of the statement and letter appeared to reflect frustration at Iran's statements hinting at a willingness to resume talks but Tehran's failure to formally respond to the letter and commit to discussing the nuclear program in earnest.

In Beijing, China leaned on a visiting Iranian delegation, led by Supreme National Security Council Deputy Secretary Ali Baqeri, to return to nuclear talks, saying it was a "top priority," the Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

"China believes the Iran nuclear issue should be resolved peacefully through dialogues and negotiations, and that sanctions and military means will not fundamentally address the problem," Xinhua said, citing Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Wu Hailong at the Friday meeting.

Xinhua said the Iranian side "expressed its willingness to resume talks" and to "strengthen cooperation" with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s energy watchdog.

CONCILIATORY TONE FROM CLINTON

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a decidedly conciliatory tone at a news conference with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in Washington.

"We do not seek conflict. We strongly believe the people of Iran deserve a better future," she said. "They can have that future, the country can be reintegrated into the global community ... when their government definitively turns away from pursuing nuclear weapons.

"We have to see a seriousness and sincerity of purpose coming from them."

Westerwelle said, "One thing is clear: the door for serious dialogue remains open but the option of nuclear weapons in Iran is not acceptable."

Diplomats said major powers were divided over what incentives to offer Iran if talks were to resume.

A central issue is whether the group might ask Iran to cease enriching uranium to the higher level of 20 percent but allow it, at least for a time, to continue enriching at lower levels -

a stance partly at odds with the group's past positions.

Uranium enrichment is a process that at low levels can yield fuel for nuclear power plants or, if carried out to much higher levels of purity, can generate fissile material for bombs.

To let Iran enrich at lower levels would be something of a concession by the P5+1, although it has previously offered a temporary "freeze-for-freeze" in which Iran would not expand its nuclear program and the powers would not pursue more sanctions.

IRANIAN CALLS FOR PUNISHING ISRAEL

After Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei paid his respects to the families of two scientists assassinated on what Tehran believes were Israel's orders, one of them just last week, a close ally demanded retribution.

"Terrorism has a long history in some countries like the Zionist regime," Ali Larijani, speaker of Iran's parliament and a former nuclear negotiator, said of Israel, which views an atomic bomb in Iran's hands as a threat to its survival.

"The Zionist regime should be punished in a way that it can not play such games with our country again."

Such threats have been made before in Tehran and it is unclear how or when they might be carried out. Israel, widely assumed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is on guard against attacks on its borders and within, notably by Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, which is supported by Iran.

Obama's top military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, briefly visited Israel and was quoted by its Defense Ministry as telling officials there that Washington was keen to coordinate on strategy.

"We have many interests in common in the region in this very dynamic time and the more we can continue to engage each other, the better off we'll all be," Dempsey was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the Israeli Defense Ministry.

The comments may reflect U.S. concerns about the possibility that Israel, which has previously bombed nuclear facilities in Iraq and in Syria, might launch an attack on Iran.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday that time was running out to avoid a military intervention and appealed to China and Russia, veto-wielding U.N. powers that have been reluctant to tighten sanctions, to support new sanctions.

"Time is running out. France will do everything to avoid a military intervention," Sarkozy told ambassadors gathered in Paris. "A military intervention will not solve the problem, but it will unleash war and chaos in the Middle East."

"We need stronger, more decisive sanctions that stop the purchase of Iranian oil and freezes the assets of the central bank, and those who don't want that will be responsible for the risks of a military conflict," Sarkozy warned.

"We really need you," he said in an appeal to Moscow and Beijing.

msnbc:Officials: US drone strike killed Somali insurgent

2012-01-21T23:25:00.000-08:00

Officials: US drone strike killed Somali insurgent

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46088987/ns/world_news-africa/#.Txu52PmAE4k

NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali insurgents say that a U.S. drone strike killed an al-Qaida official fighting alongside them in Somalia.

A statement from the insurgent al-Kataib media foundation late Saturday says that three missiles fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle hit Bilal al-Berjawi's car on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Berjawi was a Lebanese and British citizen who grew up in West London.

The strike was confirmed by a U.S. official in Washington. He asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Berjawi was a close associate of late al-Qaida operative Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who directed the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

abcnews:US to Keep 11 Aircraft Carriers to Show Sea Power

2012-01-21T18:33:00.000-08:00

US to Keep 11 Aircraft Carriers to Show Sea Power

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-11-aircraft-carriers-show-sea-power-15412439#.Txt06vmAE4k

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the country's oldest aircraft carrier that the U.S. is committed to maintaining a fleet of 11 of the formidable warships despite budget pressures, in part to project sea power against Iran.

Panetta also told the crowd of 1,700 gathered in the hangar bay of the USS Enterprise that the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf region and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran.

Iran has warned it will block the Strait, a major transit point for global oil supplies, and bluntly told the U.S. not to send carriers into the Gulf. The U.S. has said it would continue to deploy ships there.

"That's what this carrier is all about," said Panetta. "That's the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East ... We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it's better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy."

There was speculation that budget pressures would force the Pentagon to scale back the number of carriers, perhaps to 10, and Panetta's predecessor, Robert Gates, questioned maintaining 11 ships.

But Congress has expressed strong support for the current U.S. carrier fleet and has passed a law requiring the Defense Department to maintain 11 of the ships.

After his speech, Panetta told reporters traveling with him that the department will be looking for cuts in other areas. He added, "Our view is that the carriers, because of their presence, because of the power they represent, are a very important part of our ability to maintain power projection both in the Pacific and in the Middle East."

Keeping 11 of the warships, he said, "is a long-term commitment that the president wants to put in place."

Panetta's remarks came amid the roar of fighter jets taking off and landing on the flight deck above, as the Enterprise conducted training operations about 100 nautical miles off the coast of Georgia.

Known as the Big E, the warship and the other six ships in the carrier strike group will deploy to the Middle East in March. Its presence there will allow the U.S. to maintain two carrier strike groups in the Gulf region, where they can support battle operations in Afghanistan, anti-piracy efforts and other missions in the area.

"The Big E is going to be an important symbol of that power in that part of the world," said Panetta, whose tour of the ship included stops on the bridge and the flight deck, as fighter jets catapulted off the ship.

This is Panetta's first visit to a carrier during operations at sea. He was to spend the night on the ship.

The decision to maintain 11 carrier groups, Panetta said, is part of the Defense Department's five-year budget plan that will include $260 billion in savings. Overall, the Pentagon must come up with $487 billion over the next 10 years.

The USS Enterprise, which is based in Norfolk, Va., was built 50 years ago as the first nuclear-powered carrier, and is now the oldest active duty ship in America's Naval fleet. The ship's upcoming deployment will be its 22nd and final tour, after which it is scheduled to be deactivated.

It is being replaced by the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is the first in a new class of technologically advanced carriers. There will be about a 33-month gap before the Ford is commissioned, but Congress has granted a waiver allowing the Navy to drop to 10 carriers for that period of time.

The Enterprise Carrier Strike Group includes the carrier itself, Carrier Air Wing 1, Destroyer Squadron 2, guided-missile cruiser USS Vicksburg, guided-missile destroyers USS Porter, USS James E. Williams and USS Nitze. Together they carry more than 5,000 personnel, with about 4,500 of them on the USS Enterprise. The ship's personnel include fewer than 400 women.

The air wing includes more than 50 aircraft, ranging from fighter jets and helicopters to electronic warfare aircraft.

The USS Enterprise has had a long and storied career. In October 1962, it helped set up a blockade around Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. The Big E, as the ship is called, also was dispatched to the North Arabian

The air wing includes more than 50 aircraft, ranging from fighter jets and helicopters to electronic warfare aircraft.

cnn:U.S. envoy in Afghanistan to discuss peace, Taliban

2012-01-21T17:28:00.001-08:00

U.S. envoy in Afghanistan to discuss peace, Taliban

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/21/world/asia/afghanistan-grossman-talks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- America's special envoy to the region talked peace and reconciliation with Hamid Karzai in Kabul Saturday, while the Afghan president made it clear that Afghans should be in the driver's seat.

To that end, Karzai, in an address to the Afghan parliament, said the government and its peace council were making every effort to bring an end to the bloodshed.

"The Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and any peace talks," Karzai said. "No other country or organization has the right to deprive the Afghan nation to this right. Afghanistan is not a place for foreigners to do their political experiments or a laboratory that every few years they test a new political system."

Karzai recently met with the party of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the militant Hizb-i-Islami.

"It was a positive meeting and happened in a good atmosphere," said a senior Afghan official with direct knowledge of the talks.

The official, who did not want to be identified because the talks were confidential, said Hizb-i-Islami supports the process of negotiating with the armed opposition and more talks are planned.

The meeting with Hekmatyar served as a signal from Karzai to the United States that peace talks encompass other radical groups besides the Taliban.

Hizb-i-Islami has attacked U.S. forces and Hekmatyar is on America's most-wanted list of terrorists. Another group, the Haqqani network, is another controversial branch of the insurgency accused of receiving sanctuary and support from Pakistan. It's not clear what role it will play in the peace process.

U.S. diplomat Marc Grossman is set to meet Karzai again Sunday in discussions aimed at a achieving a peaceful resolution to Afghanistan's conflict. Karzai is expected to reiterate the the importance of Afghan control over a complex process.

"I am pleased to be in Kabul to consult with the government of Afghanistan," Grossman said in a statement.

"The United States stands ready to assist in any way we can an Afghan-led reconciliation process to find a peaceful end to this conflict. I look forward to calling on President Karzai and discussing next steps."

Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi declined to give details of the talks with Grossman.

But another senior Afghan official, who also wished to remain anonymous, said Saturday's conversation went well and included "all aspects" of the peace process.

Grossman has been meeting secretly with Taliban negotiators for more than a year. Last week, U.S. senior administration officials said the United States could inch closer toward peace talks with the Taliban if Karzai blesses the negotiations.

"We don't have any idea standing here today what the outcome of such discussions could be," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. "I think all of us are entering into it with a very realistic sense of what is possible. And that includes, of course, President Karzai and his government, which after all bear the ultimate responsibility and the consequences of any such discussions."

Clinton acknowledged last week that discussions about opening up a Taliban office in Qatar and transferring some Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were part of the U.S. support for Afghan reconciliation efforts.

She stressed that nothing had been concluded, but said she was sending Grossman to Kabul and Qatar for further consultations. Diplomatic sources said that depending on the outcome of the talks with Karzai, Grossman could have another meeting with the Taliban.

Secret talks between the United States and the militant Taliban began in November 2010, sources said. Senior U.S. officials and diplomatic sources said German officials brokered initial meetings with Tayeb al-Agha, an aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The sources said after a series of meetings, Agha was able to prove his good faith as an interlocutor with key Taliban leaders.

The idea is for the talks to be Afghan-led, senior officials said, with as much U.S. participation as the Afghans need and want.

The talks would be the product of what officials call "confidence-building measures," such as the opening of the office in Qatar's capital Doha and a Taliban renunciation of terrorism in exchange for the release of five Taliban members being detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Clinton said last week no transfers were imminent, but Grossman's talks in Kabul are expected to address the possible release of the detainees.

Once described as preconditions for peace talks to occur, Clinton now says insurgents must lay down their arms, accept the Afghan constitution and end ties with al Qaeda as "necessary outcomes" of the discussions.

Grossman's visit to Afghanistan also comes days after Pakistan's government, embroiled in a squabble between civilian and military leaders, declined a visit from Grossman, according to a senior Pakistani government official.

"His visit could fuel anti-American sentiments and create trouble for the government, which is already surrounded by storms," the official said Wednesday.

The official asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media on this subject.

A U.S. State Department official said Grossman wanted to go to Pakistan, but the Pakistani government declined for the time being.

nytimes:Islamists Win 70% of Seats In the Egyptian Parliament

2012-01-21T16:01:00.001-08:00

Islamists Win 70% of Seats In the Egyptian Parliament

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhood-wins-47-of-egypt-assembly-seats.html

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent.

The military council leading Egypt since Mr. Mubarak lost power last February has said it will keep Parliament in a subordinate role with little real power until the ratification of a constitution and the election of a president, both scheduled for completion by the end of June.

But the council has assigned Parliament the authority to choose the 100 members of a constitutional assembly, so it may shape Egypt for decades to come, although the military council has sometimes tried to influence that process.

The election results were expected because of preliminary tallies after each of the three phases of the vote, but the confirmation comes in time for the seating of Parliament on Monday.

The tally, with the two groups of Islamists together winning about 70 percent of the seats, indicates the deep cultural conservatism of the Egyptian public, which is expressing its will through free and fair elections for the first time in more than six decades.

But the two groups have described very different visions and appear to be rivals rather than collaborators. The Brotherhood has said it intends to respect personal liberties and will focus on economic and social issues, gradually nudging the culture toward its conservative values. By contrast, the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, put a higher priority on legislation on Islamic moral issues, like the consumption of alcohol, women’s dress and the contents of popular culture.

Among the remaining roughly 30 percent of parliamentary seats, the next largest share was won by the Wafd Party, a liberal party recognized under Mr. Mubarak and with roots dating to Egypt’s colonial period.

It was trailed by a coalition known as the Egyptian Bloc. It included the Free Egyptians, a business-friendly liberal party founded by a Coptic Christian businessman, Naguib Sawiris, and favored by many members of the country’s Coptic Christian minority, about 10 percent of the public. The Egyptian Bloc also included the liberal Social Democratic Party, which leans further to the left on economic issues.

A coalition of parties founded by the young leaders of the revolt that unseated Mr. Mubarak won only a few percent of the seats, as did a handful of offshoots of the former governing party.

WASHTIMES:Palestinians to renew efforts for bid to U.N. Talks with Israel delayed attempt

2012-01-20T19:43:00.000-08:00

Palestinians to renew efforts for bid to U.N.

Talks with Israel delayed attempt

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/19/palestinians-to-renew-efforts-for-bid-to-un/

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian officials say that they will resume their effort to gain U.N. membership, and that they could launch a nonviolent third intifada because they see no chance of reaching a peace deal with the current Israeli government.

The Palestinians had put their U.N. bid on hold to participate in informal Jordanian-sponsored talks with Israel that began at the beginning of the year in Amman.

The Middle East “Quartet” — the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — had urged the parties to submit proposals on borders and security by Jan. 26, with the goal of reaching an agreement by the end of 2012.

But with that proposals deadline approaching, officials here said Thursday that they do not expect any breakthroughs.

“We hear from our Jordanian friends that things are not going well,” said Sabri Saidam, deputy speaker of the Fatah Council and an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr. Saidam and other Palestinian officials told The Washington Times that, barring a last-minute development Thursday, the U.N. campaign would begin anew.

A return to the U.N. would rile the U.S., which has vowed to veto the Palestinian application for membership in the Security Council. The U.S. was spared the headache of a veto in September because the Palestinians failed to gain a nine-vote majority.

“We got 8 3/4,” Mr. Saidam said.

The entire U.N. campaign has attained great symbolism here. A giant blue chair bearing the words “Palestine’s Right: Full Membership in the United Nations” still sits in Ramallah’s central square.

A wall of Mr. Abbas‘ presidential compound features a giant photo of him holding up the Palestinian application during his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

The Palestinians began the campaign after bolting short-lived U.S.-sponsored peace talks in September 2010, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did not extend a 10-month freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians say they will not restart formal direct talks unless Israel freezes settlement activity and agrees to President Obama’s formulation that any two-state solution be based on Israel’s pre-1967 frontiers — conditions Mr. Netanyahu has refused.

But the U.N. campaign is just one aspect of what many Palestinian officials describe as the “South Africanization” of their struggle — an approach that seeks to isolate Israel diplomatically while engaging in mass nonviolent protests.

“We can learn from the South African struggle against apartheid that international activism works,” said Nabeel Shaath, Fatah’s commissioner for international relations. “You don’t really have to shoot in order to get your rights.”

Mr. Shaath said it was “absolutely” a mistake for Palestinians to militarize the second intifada — the 2000-2005 uprising that claimed about 4,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives amid suicide bombings and Israeli military strikes.

“I have no qualms about telling you, yes, it was [a mistake],” Mr. Shaath said. “It was not supposed to have gone military, and it did get out of hand. We are much more careful this time around.”

Mr. Saidam, the Abbas adviser, posited that a third uprising could be “an electronic intifada,” citing this week’s hacking attack on Israel’s stock exchange and national airline, as well as Facebook campaigns calling for the boycott of Israeli goods.

“When I talk about a third intifada, I’m not advocating, nor am I anticipating, a repetition of the scenes of the past,” he said. “It will be a clever, more technology-based approach.”

Mr. Saidam and others said their pessimism about the peace process springs from their belief that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government is not as serious about peace as its center-left predecessor.

Many Palestinian officials pine for the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who helped create a framework for peace with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Rabin was killed by an Israeli extremist three years later.

“We always say, if Rabin was alive, we would have been in a different situation completely,” said Issa Kassissieh, deputy head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiation affairs department. “He was the only one that was able to strike a deal with the Palestinians. He had a vision.”

Officials said they also think that Mr. Obama will not pressure Mr. Netanyahu as much in an election year as he did at the beginning of his term.

“My great letdown is how rapidly this administration backed down when it came to Israel, whether on the settlements or on anything else,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a longtime Palestinian spokeswoman and lawmaker. “We saw how principle and values were abandoned so quickly in favor of narrow self-interest.”

Ms. Ashrawi said she was “alarmed because we’re seeing the end of the two-state solution.”

“There are already enough Palestinians who are saying it’s too late already — that these settlements have done enough damage to prevent a viable, contiguous Palestinian state,” she said. “I’m getting to the borderline of saying it’s no longer possible. … I think 2012 is the end.”

foxnews:Secret Service investigating Jewish newspaper column that discussed Obama assassination

2012-01-20T19:34:00.000-08:00

Secret Service investigating Jewish newspaper column that discussed Obama assassination

The Secret Service said it is looking into a recent op-ed from an Atlanta publisher that floated the idea of green-lighting Israeli Mossad agents to assassinate President Obama in order to improve Israel's security against enemies like Iran.

The publisher and author, Andrew Adler, reportedly has apologized.

But Jewish advocacy groups condemned his comments as "outrageous," and Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie said the agency is "aware" of the incident.

"We're conducting the appropriate investigative steps," he told FoxNews.com.

Ogilvie would not comment on whether Adler has been contacted or whether his column was deemed a potential threat to the president.

In the Jan. 13 column in the Atlanta Jewish Times, Adler floated three scenarios for how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would deal with a nuclear Iran and other threats in the region.

Adler wrote that Israel could order a strike on Hezbollah and Hamas, or a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

A third option, he wrote, would be to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies."

Leaving no question about what he was suggesting, Adler went on:

"Yes, you read 'three' correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles? Another way of putting 'three' in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of 7 million lives...Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?"

Adler later told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he will publish an apology. "I very much regret it," he said.

But Jewish advocacy groups were outraged.

Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said there is "no excuse" for that kind of rhetoric.

"It doesn't even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage," he said in a statement. "Mr. Adler's lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he's fit to run a newspaper."

The National Jewish Democratic Council described the comments as "despicable."

"It is the height of irresponsibility to make the horrific suggestion that the State of Israel should assassinate the President of the United States of America," NJDC President David Harris said in a statement. "To dare to give such despicable ideas space in a newspaper -- no less in the words of the paper's owner and publisher, and a Jewish newspaper at that -- is beyond the pale."

Adler has not responded to a request from FoxNews.com for comment.

The website Gawker first reported, and posted, the column.

foxnews:US sees new interest from Taliban in peace talks

2012-01-20T16:37:00.000-08:00

US sees new interest from Taliban in peace talks

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/01/19/us-sees-new-interest-from-taliban-in-peace-talks/?test=latestnews#ixzz1k34vi5YT

The Obama administration is moving ahead with plans for negotiating with the Taliban, confident that talks offer the best chance to end the 10-year-old war in Afghanistan. But the military worries things are moving too fast, and intelligence agencies offered a gloomy prognosis in their latest Afghanistan report.

Several current and former U.S. officials said the most substantive give-and-take to date between U.S. and Taliban negotiators could happen in the next week, with the goal of establishing what the U.S. calls confidence-building measures -- specific steps that the U.S. and the insurgents agree to take ahead of formal talks. Those talks, if they ever take place, would include the United States, the Taliban and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, a senior US official said.

Like others interviewed, the official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomacy. Elements of the U.S. outreach to the Taliban are also classified.

The diplomatic, military and intelligence branches of the U.S. government differ over the value of talks with the Taliban or whether now is the right time to so publicly shift focus away from the ongoing military campaign that primarily targets Taliban insurgents. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and some uniformed military leaders have recently sounded some of the strongest notes of caution, especially on when to grant Taliban requests for the transfer of several of its prisoners from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military and other U.S. officials said.

The latest Afghan National Intelligence Estimate warns that the Taliban will grow stronger, using the talks to gain credibility and run out the clock until U.S. troops depart Afghanistan, while continuing to fight for more territory, say U.S. officials who have read the classified document. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the roughly 100-page review, an amalgam of intelligence community's predictions of possible scenarios for the Afghan war through the planned end to U.S. combat in 2014.

It says the Afghan government has largely failed to prove itself to its people and will likely continue to weaken and find influence only in the cities. It predicts that the Taliban and warlords will largely control the countryside.

Meanwhile, Karzai is still uneasy with the pace and direction of talks. He resents the selection of Qatar as the site of a Taliban political office, although he has reluctantly agreed to that U.S.-backed plan. And he worries that the United States will strike a deal with the Taliban and force that deal on his government, two Afghan officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. Karzai wanted the office located in Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Afghanistan.

U.S. officials close to the negotiations say that despite these warnings the Taliban high command is more ready for talks than in the past, at least with the United States if not the elected Afghan government it opposes.

One sign was the surprising public endorsement by the Taliban of the plan to open a negotiating office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. But U.S. officials also cite more subtle indications of a shift toward peace negotiations, including the recent participation in preliminary talks of more senior and influential Taliban representatives.

The senior U.S. official said negotiators are now confident they are talking to credible intermediaries for the main Taliban command based in Pakistan.

The administration's top negotiator, Marc Grossman, was building support for talks among regional allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia this week, to be followed by discussions with Taliban representatives, U.S. and other government officials said. Ahead of those sessions, officials described them as the most substantive and highest-level to date, with plans to cover specifics of the new office and the sequence of further good faith efforts on both sides that would set the stage for real talks.

A waiting period would follow that transfer before any other Taliban transfers would be considered. U.S. officials said Congress would be consulted throughout.

The Taliban had sought both the office and the prisoner release as preconditions for real talks.

The senior U.S. official said the U.S. has set clear conditions for opening the office, including that the Taliban must agree not to use it for fundraising or propaganda, or to run insurgent operations. Larger conditions include assurances that the insurgents are truly interested in a political settlement and not using negotiations as a way to run out the clock until U.S. forces leave.

The central political office confers instant, though controversial, legitimacy on the diffuse insurgency as a political movement and provides a site for formal talks. The idea is to give the Taliban room to negotiate in a location with less direct pressure from Pakistan, which has ties to some militant groups and houses parts of the Taliban leadership.

The U.S. intelligence assessment looks past the near horizon for talks.

It predicts the likely outcome of two strategies: moderate engagement, in which the U.S. continues special operations raids against key Taliban leaders, and village outreach to strengthen local government, while conventional forces train Afghanistan's army and police force, and limited engagement, in which the U.S. would continue economic and political support, and some Afghan security training, but most troops would withdraw.

Both strategies can weaken the Taliban, the analysts say, but ultimately, neither course of action is likely to stop the continued weakening of the Afghan state, the officials said. The NIE did suggest eliminating top Taliban leaders in the next two years and continuing to build Afghan government could help offset that.

In that way, the NIE's bleak predictions also give the White House reason to hasten the reconciliation process, in order to pull U.S. troops out what some analysts termed a hopeless stalemate.

Arsala Rahmani a former Taliban official turned Afghan peace negotiator, said that in the past year the Taliban leadership had expressed to the United States a new willingness to negotiate.

"Something happened," said Rahmani, a member of the Afghanistan peace council. "The leadership of the Taliban saw a green light from the Obama administration and after that, the Taliban leadership appointed people to get involved in the negotiation process."

Although U.S. and Taliban representatives have met secretly several times over the past year in Europe and the Persian Gulf, the Taliban endorsement of the office plan on Jan. 3 was the first time it has publicly expressed willingness for substantive negotiations.

U.S. and other officials also said they are encouraged by the insurgents' apparent plans to staff the new headquarters office with senior figures with ties to top Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The U.S. considers full peace negotiations on the model of Northern Ireland or the former Yugoslavia to be a long shot now, several officials said. But the administration is trying to build a framework for political discussions between the Taliban and the Karzai government that could span the next two years when U.S. combat forces will withdraw.

The Taliban sought direct talks with the U.S., whom it considers the true power broker in Afghanistan, as an alternative to talks with the Karzai government. The United States had shunned such contacts for years, saying talks must be led by Afghans and that military gains must be consolidated before talks would be productive.

The Obama administration shifted course last year and opened the direct channel in secret. The US acknowledged the previously clandestine contacts only after they were revealed publicly, apparently by allies of Karzai who felt undermined by the separate channel.

There were multiple avenues of communication between the U.S. and the Taliban over the last year, some public and others through back channels. The senior U.S. official said none was judged to be an authentic direct message from Omar.

The United States considers Omar a terrorist who could be killed by U.S. forces in the same manner as Usama bin Laden. But the U.S. also recognizes that Omar is the linchpin to a deal that could finally end the war that began with the 2001 U.S. invasion and ouster of the ruling Taliban government. The Taliban has sought a return to political and territorial influence ever since, primarily through guerrilla tactics. U.S. and Afghan officials think Omar is interested.

A personal emissary of Omar, Tayyab Agha, conducted the initial, tentative contacts with the U.S. last year and remains a lead negotiator.

Rahmani said other Taliban negotiators include Shahabuddin Dilawar, former Taliban ambassador to Saudi Arabia; and Mohammed Sher Abbas Stanikzai., former deputy health minister during the Taliban regime. Without approval from Omar, these people would not have been appointed, he said.

foxnews:EXCLUSIVE: Pakistan official says US military will be allowed to return, but not CIA drones

2012-01-20T16:23:00.000-08:00

EXCLUSIVE: Pakistan official says US military will be allowed to return, but not CIA drones

U.S. military trainers will be invited back into Pakistan "as early as April or May," but the nation has ruled out allowing CIA drones back into the country, Fox News has learned.

Relations between the two nations have been at an all-time low since 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an inadvertent aerial attack by NATO in November.

The Pakistani parliament is reviewing the nature of its relationship with the U.S., and politicians are expected on Jan. 30 to deliver a list of conditions for cooperation to resume.

The stipulations will include no covert CIA or military operations on the ground in Pakistan, and no unauthorized incursions into its airspace. Drones, which are the CIA's biggest weapon against militants hiding in the tribal belt dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan, "can never return," a senior Pakistani official told Fox News.

"They will never be allowed back, at Shamsi or anywhere else," the official added, referring to the base in the country's southwest from which many of the unmanned aerial vehicles were deployed before the NATO attack in November.

In return, Pakistan would allow back U.S. military trainers, including special forces teams, and a resumption of close cooperation with the CIA in targeting militants who use the Pakistani side of the border as a safe haven and breeding ground for extremism. It would also reopen the Torkham and Chaman border crossings into Afghanistan, which have been closed to NATO supply convoys since the attack.

"After this is presented to the Americans, a lot could happen very quickly," the senior official told Fox News, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Islamabad also would reopen its doors to high-level U.S. diplomats after an embarrassing snub this week to President Obama's special envoy to the region, Marc Grossman, who was denied his request to visit Pakistan in the middle of his tour of South Asia.

Pakistan says it wants working conditions with Washington that provide "respect for the nation, its sovereignty -- both its soil and airspace -- and equal terms of cooperation." Government members have said publicly that there has never been equality in the relationship.

"We understand the government of Pakistan is still working on its review of U.S.-Pakistan relations, and we have not yet received a formal report from the government,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby said in an emailed statement. “Decisions about the level of Pakistani commitment to our military relationship are obviously theirs to make, and we respect that.

"We continue to desire a close military relationship with Pakistan. ... We both have a fundamental interest in cooperation, in eliminating Al Qaeda's ability to operate from Pakistan, and in ensuring a stable Afghanistan and stable region."

Pakistan, especially its military, has been reeling since U.S. forces killed Usama Bin Laden in a raid in May. The raid, which sparked nationwide protests and stoked further anti-Americanism, and civilian casualties caused by drone attacks are considered by Pakistan to be flagrant violations of its sovereignty by an "arrogant" American government.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said this week that ties "are on hold until we start re-engaging," but Pakistan is now motivated by the U.S. elections to move forward swiftly in rebuilding trust between the countries. Islamabad fears that if foundation stones are not laid before presidential campaigning begins in earnest in the summer, it will not be able to renegotiate with Washington until the middle of next year.

But the senior official suggested there might be a benefit to waiting.

"We would prefer it if there was a Republican government again,” he said. “Pakistan has always done well with the Republicans. Historically, over the decades, we have always had difficulty doing business with the Democrats."

The George W. Bush administration threw billions of dollars at Pakistan to fight Islamist extremists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Pakistan was under the rule of the military dictator Pervez Musharraf. President Bush is said to have convinced Musharraf to leave office, allowing the country to become a democratic state, albeit a highly unstable one ever since.

Under the Obama administration, "we have been getting mixed signals from State, the Pentagon and the CIA,” the official said. “None are on the same page. They do not know how to deal with us, which makes it difficult for us to deal with America." He said that dealings over the past year with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been "warmest [out of three] and friendly and she genuinely sympathized with the Pakistanis and reached out to the people."

But a gradual erosion of trust between Islamabad and Washington, brought about violence that Pakistan blames on the U.S. and by intransigence by the Pakistani security apparatus to wipe out key militants, has brought the relationship to a bitter impasse.

Congress has stalled much of the $2 billion Pakistan receives annually from the U.S. in civil and military aid, and Pakistan will struggle without its full resumption.

Next month it is due to repay $1.2 billion interest on a $7.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, which was deferred from last year. The government is expected to delay yet again amid a failed economy and poor foreign revenues.

MSNBC:After drone attack on al-Qaida planner, is Zawahiri next? Before the election?

2012-01-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

After drone attack on al-Qaida planner, is Zawahiri next? Before the election?

http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10200145-after-drone-attack-on-al-qaida-planner-is-zawahiri-next-before-the-election

With the successful Predator attack on al-Qaida operative Aslam Awan inside Pakistan, al-Qaida has lost, in the words of a senior U.S. official last night, "a senior external operations planner who was working on attacks against the West. His death reduces al-Qaida's thinning bench of another operative devoted to plotting the death of innocent civilians."

Awan is believed to have been somewhat close to Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida since shortly after Osama Bbn Laden's death on May 1. Although U.S. officials would not place a number on Awan's rank within al-Qaida, he was believed to have been involved in planning attacks, putting him in the high command.

But what of Zawahiri? The U.S. pursuit of him remains a high priority. (And his killing or capture would be regarded as a political coup for the Obama administration in a campaign year.) The U.S. has targeted Zawahiri five times by his own count, going back to the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A U.S. counterterrorism official tells NBC News that there's limited information on the status of U.S. planning against Zawahiri. "It's certainly not impossible" for an attack on Zawahiri to be attempted. "But he has clearly hung very low since May, with fundamentally no communications," said the official.

Evan Kohlmann, MSNBC analyst and counterterrorism consultant, reports that since bin Laden's death, al-Qaida's media arm has released eight recordings of al-Zawahiri, not all of which can be easily dated. At least one and possibly two of them were probably recorded prior to bin Laden being killed, then released after his death. The most recent one came out on December 1. In that video, Zawahiri boasted that al-Qaida had seized aid worker Warren Weinstein, a 70-year-old American, in Lahore last August. There's been no proof of life regarding Weinstein since then.

Those recordings are often hand-carried through a network of couriers to ensure Zawahiri's security.

From the archives: Bin Laden dead: Who will lead al-Qaeda?

TIME:JOE KLEIN:Likudnik Paranoia

2012-01-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

Likudnik Paranoia

By Joe Klein

http://swampland.time.com/2012/01/19/likudnik-paranoia/

Uh-oh, there’s another wave of attacks–both here and in Israel–on those of us who support Israel, but not in the mindless, aggressive way that neoconservatives do and not at the expense of America’s national interests. Over there, Bibi Netanyahu has proclaimed the New York Times and Haaretz the “biggest” enemies of Israel. Over here, my old buddy Abe Foxman and assorted other declaimers of anti-semites and anti-semitism have added the Center for American Progress and Media Matters to their blacklist for using a term I’ve used in the past, “Israel Firster.” What we have here is a problem of conflation.

Over there, Bibi Netanyahu conflates the best interests of Israel with the best interests of Bibi Netanyahu. Over here, we have a small but noisy group of people who conflate the American national interest with what they (mistakenly) perceive to be Israel’s national interest.

Let me make two points:

1. The U.S. and Israel are allies, and I’m sure we always will be. But our national interests and priorities don’t always coincide. Iran is certainly a high priority for Israel–less so for its nuclear program than for the fact that Iran is arming far more immediate threats to Israel’s security, Hizballah and Hamas. Iran is less of a national security threat to the United States. It does sponsor terrorism, which makes the regime our enemy; it may well be trying to produce a nuclear weapon, which isn’t good news, either–although the Iranians are not crazy and would only want a bomb as a deterrent against neighbors like Israel and Pakistan who have nukes. Iran is certainly less of a threat to our national security than Pakistan, which already has 100 nuclear weapons, an unstable government and a military with a history of Islamist coups (and has been funding Taliban factions that are killing American troops in Afghanistan). And a pre-emptive war with Iran would be an unnecessary disaster, although I do not underestimate the possibility that such a war may take place if Iran crosses some bright line and initiates it.

It seems to me that more than a few of those Americans who are pushing for war with Iran place Israel’s national defense priorities above own own–not just neoconservatives, but evangelical Rapturians and politicians like Newt Gingrich (funded by Sheldon Adelson–a classic Israel Firster, in that, by all reports, the only issue that motivates his largesse is a Likudnik view of Israel), and Rick Santorum, who has actually said that he wants to bomb Iran. They’re dangerously wrong; they have an inalienable right to be foolish; they even have the right to place Israel’s national security concerns first. But such people go disgracefully overboard when they designate those of us who disagree with them as “anti-Semites.”

Which brings me to my second point: I remember when the Anti-Defamation League had better things to do–during the civil rights movement; and during the period when Jews were discriminated against in college admissions, housing and a whole host of other areas. The ADL was an iconic institution back then; I considered Abe Foxman a hero. He is not anymore. He wantonly accuses people like David Petraeus, and me–and institutions like the Center for American Program and Media Matters–of anti-Semitism. He has debased a very important currency.

I’m not carrying water for CAP or Media Matters. I’ve disagreed with both in the past and both have criticized things I’ve written (although neither accused me of being a bigot). Calling them anti-semitic is absurd, though. Calling David Petraeus anti-semitic because he implied that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories made life more dangerous for U.S. troops in the region–well beyond absurd, since he was implying an obvious truth.

And I must say that being called an anti-semite by these people is surreal. Elliott Abrams launched a gross attack on me in the Weekly Standard based on a misinterpretation of something I wrote. I clarified that misinterpretation here. But Abrams never acknowledged that he had gotten it wrong. This is the sort of neoconservative thuggery that has become too familiar to those of us who disagree with these self-appointed defenders of Israel (or their perverse fantasy of Israel).

Israel is in perilous place right now, more isolated than it has been in years. The Arab Spring has pretty much ended the cold peace with Egypt. It has ended the stable standoff with Syria. The alliance with Turkey is over, too. Hamas still lobs rockets from Gaza; Hizballah has grown even stronger–and better armed by the Iranians–since the 2oo6 war. I support Israel’s right to defend itself against such threats. But I don’t support everything Israel does, certainly not its expansion of illegal settlements on the West Bank, certainly not the increasing influence of religious zealots who want to impinge on the rights of secular Israelis.

Those are the real threats to Israel’s existence–not the New York Times, Haaretz, CAP, Media Matters, Tom Friedman or me. The attempts to turn us into “enemies of Israel” are paranoid, demagogic and obnoxious.

wfs.org:MICHAEL RUBIN INTERVIEW:IRAN

2012-01-20T03:32:00.002-08:00

http://www.wfs.org/content/futurist-interviews-michael-rubin

The regime is nervous, though. There is no question that the regime is unpopular across a broad cross-section of society. The evidence for this is not only anecdotal, but also quantitative. Using Persian speakers in Los Angeles, polling companies have surveyed Iranians by taking every telephone exchange in Tehran, and randomizing the last four numbers and conducting what, on the surface is an economic survey but which also provides insight into political altitudes. In September 2007, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reorganized and implemented what its new commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, called the mosaic doctrine. Rather than orient the IRGC to defend against foreign armies—as it had been from the days of the Iran-Iraq War—Jafari divided the IRGC into inwardly-oriented units, one for each province and two for Tehran. Jafari argued that internal unrest and the possibility of a velvet revolution posed more of a threat to the regime than foreign armies, a judgment validated by the June 2009 unrest.

The key issue in regime survival therefore lies with the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards. It matters not if 90% of the Iranian people turn against the regime so long as the IRGC remains loyal to the Supreme Leader. Western politicians can hope for muddle-through reform, but ultimately change will come when the IRGC defects, much like regime change came to Romania after Nikolai Ceausescu’s security forces switched sides. The Iranian regime is aware of this, and so IRGC members are seldom stationed in their home provinces minimizing the risk that units will refuse to fire on crowds which might contain family members, friends, or neighbors.

If the Islamic Republic does not fall, then the regime will have made a Faustian bargain. The IRGC will become a predominant force, dominating not only political life, but also economic and religious life. What we are now seeing is a slow, creeping coup d’état. The Islamic Republic is becoming a military dictatorship, albeit one with a religious patina.

About the Interviewee: Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University

dailybeast:Leslie H. Gelb: Think Before Acting on Iran

2012-01-20T03:32:00.001-08:00

Leslie H. Gelb: Think Before Acting on Iran

Jan 17, 2012 4:45 AM EST

America is once again stumbling toward war. If we’ve learned anything from the past, it’s that we’d better debate Iran policy before, not after, the fighting begins. By Leslie H. Gelb.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/16/leslie-h-gelb-think-before-acting-on-iran.html

We’re doing this terrible thing all over again. As before, we’re letting a bunch of ignorant, sloppy-thinking politicians and politicized foreign-policy experts draw “red line” ultimatums. As before, we’re letting them quick-march us off to war. This time their target is Iran. And heaven knows Iran’s leaders are bad guys capable of doing dangerous things. But if we’ve learned anything, anything at all, from plunging into war in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it is this: we must have a public scrubbing of fighting rhetoric before, not after, the war begins.

Sure, there are risks in acting so sensibly. It does signal hesitation, even weakness, to the adversary. But to me, the far greater risk lies in not hesitating. The real risk is not fully, thoroughly, and publicly laying bare the case for war. In every major war of the last decades, the public assumed the government and the experts knew what they were talking about and proposing to do. But after a year or so, that faith collapsed. Except for those who would bless the sound of the cannon wherever it led, everyone soon realized the terrible truth: that government leaders had little or no idea what they were doing, what the invaded country was really like, and what could and could not be accomplished at what cost. By then, it was too late. Once our truly precious troops had been sacrificed and our prestige had been cast upon the waters, patriotism and politics overwhelmed reason.

For our own sake, don’t let this happen again. Let’s have carefully planned and extended public hearings on the pros and cons of war with Iran. Let those hearings be conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or a special public commission established by President Obama. Let’s do the job painstakingly and systematically, especially because Election Day beckons with its talons of stupidity and rashness. Yes, yes, I realize full well that a public pretrial is far from a perfect or even a good solution. But I cannot think of another way to slow down our familiar passive march toward war, and compel its drum majors to parade their plans on why the war must be fought and how it can be won. Hearings will surely confuse a lot of people, but at least give them their democratic chance to judge.

To step back, there are two issues likely to spark fighting with Iran: Tehran’s threat to block an internationally recognized waterway at the Strait of Hormuz, and its relentless moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

On the surface, the strait question is open and shut. If Tehran violates a fundamental principle of international law and closes an international waterway, that waterway must be reopened by whatever force necessary. My gut reaction is right there. But then the questions arise: Why does this burden fall almost entirely on the United States? What of the other states that buy and sell the Gulf oil that moves through the strait? How long will it take, and at what cost, to reopen the strait and keep it open? Is it necessary to attack shore targets to accomplish the job? How far ashore? And what of economic destruction and, above all, civilian casualties? Is such a military action likely to convince the Iranians that they must acquire nuclear weapons, or would it dissuade them? Would a U.S.-led naval action in the strait make it more likely that Israel would use this as cover to launch a full-scale attack against Iranian nuclear facilities? And would this broader action trigger Iranian retaliation against both Israel and the United States? There are no hard and fast answers to most of these queries. And yes, some military plans would be aired partially to Tehran’s advantage. Nevertheless, their being raised and addressed gives Americans a much clearer sense of what they’re getting into—and, more, compels Congress and the executive branch to think much harder about their intended actions. Often, administrations don’t answer the toughest questions themselves until they have to, until it’s too late.

The red lines being drawn against Iran’s growing capability to construct nuclear weapons are even more tortured and dangerous. These lines are all to the effect that if Tehran continues to move toward a nuclear-weapons capability, President Obama will attack and take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. I won’t bore you with the exact formulations, which are not intended to be exact. The administration doesn’t want to be exact and thus to tie its own hands. Nor could administration officials formulate exact words, because they can’t yet agree upon them.

The bottom line is that the administration is firming up its threats without absolutely committing itself to any particular action beyond ratcheting up rhetorical pressures and economic sanctions. Obama has been mostly careful to avoid pronouncements recently and has put that burden at a little distance from himself—onto the worthy shoulders of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Panetta’s now famous “red lines” have been a bit pinkish, for good reason, leaving some things to Tehran’s imagination. Or perhaps his intention is just to say enough to keep Israel from pulling its own unilateral trigger.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what lies ahead in our nation’s election year. Most Republican presidential candidates are saying that Iran will never get close to nukes if they’re in the White House. The candidates are outdoing one another in outrageous commitments to sound tough. Recently, Mitt Romney put it like this: “If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon … If you’d like me as the next president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” And though we all know how careful Obama is, the dynamics of campaigns are bound to push him toward incaution to fend off charges of “weakness.” This is what happens to presidents in most elections.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee or some public commission has to pose the tough questions here: Do we really know enough to hit and destroy the key underground targets? If not, why go ahead? How long will it take for Tehran to rebuild the facilities and make them less vulnerable? What’s the potential for collateral damage on oil prices and lives? If Washington doesn’t use force, will Israel go it alone, and will Tehran regard this as a quasi-American attack anyway? If Iran actually acquired nukes, why wouldn’t prospects of an overwhelming Israeli or American attack in a crisis deter it? Iranian leaders haven’t acted like crazy Hitlers. They’ve been pretty cautious, forever issuing threats and making trouble behind the scenes, which suggests they’re deterrable. Would war on Iran trigger worldwide terrorist attacks? Is it in the overall interests of the United States, given our worldwide security needs and economic weaknesses, to enter another war? And don’t fool yourselves, this would be war.

As is our tragic pattern, almost all these tough questions are unasked and unhonored. All one hears is the familiar boasts and threats. They are rarely probed by our media stars.

Senator J. William Fulbright’s brilliant hearings on Vietnam and the James Baker/Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group both came far too late to save us. But there’s still time now for a full-scale, nonpartisan, and systematic examination of policy. Don’t let the usual hawks stop us with the argument that we’d be giving away too much information and signaling weakness to the enemy. What we’d truly be giving away if we heeded these hawks is not our military plans, but our constitutional and democratic rights to freely and openly debate whether our sons and daughters once again must fight and die.

reuters:Exclusive: Senior al Qaeda figure killed in drone strike

2012-01-19T17:20:00.000-08:00

Exclusive: Senior al Qaeda figure killed in drone strike

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/19/us-usa-pakistan-drones-idUSTRE80I2G120120119

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WASHPOST:US sees opening for peace talks among Taliban, US and Karzai; military, CIA are cautious

2012-01-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

US sees opening for peace talks among Taliban, US and Karzai; military, CIA are cautious

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/us-sees-opening-for-peace-talks-among-taliban-us-and-karzai-military-cia-are-cautious/2012/01/19/gIQAdnQjBQ_story.html

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is moving ahead with plans for negotiating with the Taliban, confident that talks offer the best chance to end the 10-year-old war in Afghanistan. But the military worries things are moving too fast, and intelligence agencies offered a gloomy prognosis in their latest Afghanistan report.

Several current and former U.S. officials said the most substantive give-and-take to date between U.S. and Taliban negotiators could happen in the next week, with the goal of establishing what the U.S. calls confidence-building measures — specific steps that the U.S. and the insurgents agree to take ahead of formal talks. Those talks, if they ever take place, would include the United States, the Taliban and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, a senior U.S. official said.

Like others interviewed, the official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomacy. Elements of the U.S. outreach to the Taliban are also classified.

The latest Afghan National Intelligence Estimate warns that the Taliban will grow stronger, using the talks to gain credibility and run out the clock until U.S. troops depart Afghanistan, while continuing to fight for more territory, say U.S. officials who have read the classified document. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the roughly 100-page review, an amalgam of intelligence community’s predictions of possible scenarios for the Afghan war through the planned end to U.S. combat in 2014.

The senior U.S. official said negotiators are now confident they are talking to credible intermediaries for the main Taliban command based in Pakistan.

The administration’s top negotiator, Marc Grossman, was building support for talks among regional allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia this week, to be followed by discussions with Taliban representatives, U.S. and other government officials said. Ahead of those sessions, officials described them as the most substantive and highest-level to date, with plans to cover specifics of the new office and the sequence of further good faith efforts on both sides that would set the stage for real talks.

One topic was expected to be a U.S. offer to release two or three Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to custody in Qatar, although two officials said that effort is moving more slowly than plans for the office. A waiting period would follow that transfer before any other Taliban transfers would be considered. U.S. officials said Congress would be consulted throughout.

The Taliban had sought both the office and the prisoner release as preconditions for real talks.

The U.S. intelligence assessment looks past the near horizon for talks.

It predicts the likely outcome of two strategies: moderate engagement, in which the U.S. continues special operations raids against key Taliban leaders, and village outreach to strengthen local government, while conventional forces train Afghanistan’s army and police force, and limited engagement, in which the U.S. would continue economic and political support, and some Afghan security training, but most troops would withdraw.

In that way, the NIE’s bleak predictions also give the White House reason to hasten the reconciliation process, in order to pull U.S. troops out what some analysts termed a hopeless stalemate.

Arsala Rahmani a former Taliban official turned Afghan peace negotiator, said that in the past year the Taliban leadership had expressed to the United States a new willingness to negotiate.

“Something happened,” said Rahmani, a member of the Afghanistan peace council. “The leadership of the Taliban saw a green light from the Obama administration and after that, the Taliban leadership appointed people to get involved in the negotiation process.”

U.S. and other officials also said they are encouraged by the insurgents’ apparent plans to staff the new headquarters office with senior figures with ties to top Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The Obama administration shifted course last year and opened the direct channel in secret. The U.S. acknowledged the previously clandestine contacts only after they were revealed publicly, apparently by allies of Karzai who felt undermined by the separate channel.

The United States considers Omar a terrorist who could be killed by U.S. forces in the same manner as Osama bin Laden. But the U.S. also recognizes that Omar is the linchpin to a deal that could finally end the war that began with the 2001 U.S. invasion and ouster of the ruling Taliban government. The Taliban has sought a return to political and territorial influence ever since, primarily through guerrilla tactics.

U.S. and Afghan officials think Omar is interested.

A personal emissary of Omar, Tayyab Agha, conducted the initial, tentative contacts with the U.S. last year and remains a lead negotiator.

foreignpolicy(hayden):Bush’s CIA director: We determined attacking Iran was a bad idea

2012-01-19T17:04:00.000-08:00

Bush’s CIA director: We determined attacking Iran was a bad idea

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/19/bush_s_cia_director_we_determined_attacking_iran_was_a_bad_idea

President George W. Bush's administration concluded that a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be a bad idea -- and would only make it harder to prevent Iran from going nuclear in the future, former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Michael Hayden said Thursday.

"When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent -- an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret," Hayden told a small group of experts and reporters at an event hosted by the Center for the National Interest.

Hayden served as director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and then served as CIA director from 2006 until February 2009. He also had a 39-year career at the Air Force, which he ended as a four-star general.

Without an actual occupation of Iran, which nobody wants to contemplate, the Bush administration concluded that the result of a limited military campaign in Iran would be counter-productive, according to Hayden.

"What's move two, three, four or five down the board?" Hayden said, arguing that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities was only a short-term fix. "I don't think anyone is talking about occupying anything."

Hayden then said he didn't believe the Israelis could or even would strike Iran -- that only the United States has the capability to do it -- but either way, it's still a bad idea.

"The Israelis aren't going to [attack Iran] ... they can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They only have the ability to make this [problem of Iran's nuclear program] worse. We can do a lot better," he said. "Just look at the physics, the fact that this cannot be done in a raid, this has to be done in a campaign, the fact that neither we nor they know where this stuff is. [The Israelis] can't do it, but we can."

Hayden then went into some detail about how a U.S.-led strike on Iran's nuclear facilities could be accomplished, and why it would not solve the Iranian nuclear threat. There would first be a movement of aircraft carriers into the area, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile strikes, a diplomatic effort to get Gulf states to give access to their airspace, and "then you would pound it [with airstrikes] over a couple of weeks," Hayden explained.

But he also said that efforts to slow down the nuclear program, through mostly clandestine measures and encouraging internal dissent, is the better course of action.

"Could we go back to July 2009 and see where that could have led?" he said, referring to the Green Movement protests that raged through Iran then but ultimately failed to alter the regime's course. "It's not so much that we don't want Iran to have a nuclear capacity, it's that we don't want this Iran to have it ... Slow it down long enough and maybe the character [of the Iranian government] changes."

Hayden's comments track closely with the argument made by Colin Kahl, the recently departed head of Middle East policy at the Pentagon, who opposed a military strike on Iran in an article this week in Foreign Affairs.

"Even if a U.S. strike went as well ... there is little guarantee that it would produce lasting results," Kahl wrote. "[I]f Iran did attempt to restart its nuclear program after an attack, it would be much more difficult for the United States to stop it."

andrewsullivan:Obama's Long Game, Ctd

2012-01-19T04:51:00.001-08:00

Obama's Long Game, Ctd

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/did-i-get-obamas-foreign-policy-right.html

Andrew Exum does a point-by-point assessment of my Newsweek take on Obama's foreign policy. One bit:

The president deserves real and enduring credit for his bold decision to launch the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but let's not overstate the case here. Sullivan makes it sound as if the president was the de facto J3 for JSOC. (That was actually Rich Clark, if anyone at home is looking to assign credit.) The raid that killed Osama bin Laden was a great victory for the United States, but if victory truly has a thousand fathers, plenty of others deserve credit -- including George W. Bush, who was the president as JSOC and its allies in the intelligence community built up many of the capabiltiies that allowed them to track and kill bin Laden. Bush most certainly did not "ignore" bin Laden. Ultimately, the raid was enabled because the United States caught a break on intelligence. And does anyone think that George W. Bush, if given a similar break, would not have made similar decisions?

Really? Andrew ignores the fact that Obama actually had a major fight with McCain in the debates in 2008 over whether he would unilaterally launch a mission into Pakistan to get the guy, without Pakistan's approval. McCain and the rest of the right cited this as evidence of Obama's naivete and incompetence in foreign policy. Obama set a new course in early 2009 - and did exactly what he said he'd do. Here's what we know of Bush and Bin Laden. He let him escape in Tora Bora; in 2002, he said this on Bin Laden:

In 2006, Bush stenographer, Fred Barnes, talked about the issue with Bush:

“Bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.” Barnes said Bush told him that capturing bin Laden is “not a top priority use of American resources.”

Obama changed that. And, as I said, if he were a Republican, and had this record on this issue, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now. More to come - on Andrew's fair-minded critique and others'. This is a debate worth having.

theatlantic:Why Regime Change Won't Work in Iran

2012-01-19T04:16:00.000-08:00

According to public opinion polls done that year, the greens don't differ much on the nuclear issue from Iranians at large. With sanctions already underway and starting to bite, 78 percent of Mousavi supporters said Iran should not "give up its nuclear activities regardless of the circumstances."

(1) Those 2009 opinion polls showed greens to be in the minority, outnumbered by Ahmadinejad supporters; so even if you ensured fair elections, and restructured Iranian democracy so that the elected president was truly the country's supreme leader, that wouldn't mean greens ran the show

Why Regime Change Won't Work in Iran

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/why-regime-change-wont-work-in-iran/251603/

One of the most popular things on the Republican campaign trail--possibly more popular than any of the candidates themselves--is regime change in Iran. Mitt Romney favors it, Rick Santorum favors it, and Newt Gingrich even has a plan for doing it: "cutting off the gasoline supply to Iran and then, frankly, sabotaging the only refinery they have."

Give these guys some credit: At least they don't suffer from the common illusion that a few days of bombing will lastingly set back Iran's nuclear program. Unfortunately, the idea that regime change would do the job isn't much more reality-based.

You'd think that our eight-year adventure in Iraq would have raised doubts about the extent to which changed regimes will hew to our policy guidelines. There we deposed an authoritarian leader and painstakingly constructed a government, only to see the new regime (a) tell America to get the hell out of the country; and (b) cozy up to an American adversary (Iran!).

Maybe boosters of Iranian regime change are thinking: This time will be different; in Iran there are lots of well-educated, somewhat westernized regime opponents--the famous "green movement" that, having been brutally suppressed, lies waiting to take the reins, after which compliance with the international community's wishes will ensue.

An appealing scenario, but here's a flashback that complicates it:

In late 2009, negotiators reached a deal that would have defused tensions over the nuclear issue: Iran would send uranium abroad, where it would be further enriched and returned in a form suitable for medical use but not for use in weapons. President Ahmadinejad favored the deal, hailing it as a "victory". But then the deal was denounced not just by some Iranian conservatives but by Mir Hossein Mousavi, leader of the "progressive" greens. Ahmadinejad quickly changed his tune.

Mousavi's resistance isn't surprising. According to public opinion polls done that year, the greens don't differ much on the nuclear issue from Iranians at large. With sanctions already underway and starting to bite, 78 percent of Mousavi supporters said Iran should not "give up its nuclear activities regardless of the circumstances."

To be sure, they weren't talking about a nuclear bomb. They were talking about a nuclear energy program. But a UN Security Council pre-condition for suspending sanctions is Iran's suspension of "all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities." That's the kind of thing that Iranians broadly--green and non-green--seem to oppose; there is a strong, nationalistic insistence in Iran on the right of the country to enrich its own uranium as part of a nuclear energy program. And there is roughly as strong a resistance among the more hawkish Iran hawks to letting Iran do that.

So one key premise of regime change--that the will of a new democratic government would align with the will of regime-change boosters--is dubious even if you assume that greens would be the dominant force in this government. And that assumption, in turn, has two problems of its own: (1) Those 2009 opinion polls showed greens to be in the minority, outnumbered by Ahmadinejad supporters; so even if you ensured fair elections, and restructured Iranian democracy so that the elected president was truly the country's supreme leader, that wouldn't mean greens ran the show; (2) How would you ensure fair elections and restructure Iranian democracy in the first place?

After all, when you induce regime change by tightening sanctions to the choking point, you don't get to micro-manage the transition. Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz, champions of regime change, recently wrote that "through sanctions, a democratic counterrevolution in Persia might be reborn." Yes, it might. And through rolling a pair of dice, doubles might be born. But at least as likely as a smooth transition to a truer democracy is a civil war in which lots of people die. (When will neocons--and for that matter liberal hawks--learn that authoritarian leaders, though we may call them "autocrats," usually have a large constituency that sees itself as benefiting from their rule and will fight on their behalf?) Among the things that could follow a civil war are more authoritarian rule and regional conflagration. And, as long as we're on the subject of human suffering: How much misery winds up getting inflicted on innocent people before an economic chokehold leads to regime change in the first place?

Even in Iraq--where, with hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, we in theory could micro-manage things--we wound up with a regime that defies our will and is increasingly thuggish. And now we think we can do regime change by remote control and get a happy ending? I'd rather let nature take its course; if you leave Iran to its own devices the regime won't continue to escape the forces, technological and otherwise, that have fueled the Arab Spring.

Support for a policy of regime change rests on two major features of America's national psychology: optimism, reflected in the assumption that democracy would magically ensue; and moral self-confidence, reflected in the assumption that whatever America wants is best for the world and that reasonable people everywhere will see this if given the chance.

The Iranians--whether green or not--don't seem to see this. But who knows? Maybe if we shut off their gasoline imports and blow up their one refinery, they'll warm up to us.

cnn:US open to talking with Iran

2012-01-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

US open to talking with Iran

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/18/us-open-to-talking-with-iran/?hpt=hp_t3

A diplomatic solution with Iran is still possible, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

"We have always expressed a willingness to try do that," Panetta said at a Pentagon briefing. Panetta was responding to a report from Iran that said President Barack Obama had proposed direct talks in a letter passed to Iranian leadership.

Panetta refused to comment about specific communications but said diplomacy is always an option to pursue.

The U.S. recently sent a letter to Iran warning about blocking the Strait of Hormuz, among other communications, CNN reported earlier this week. The United States has suggested to Iran that the two sides establish a channel of direct communication to ensure miscalculations don't escalate.

The choice to talk is Iran's, said State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

"If you, Iran, are prepared to engage seriously and come clean about your nuclear program and demonstrate to the world that you have no military intent," the US is open to engagement, Nuland said.

While diplomacy is an option, Panetta noted that, given threats made by Iran, the US is also willing to respond militarily.

Two U.S. officials told CNN's Elise Labott the letter the Obama administration sent to Iran did not ask for negotiations, it suggested establishing a direct channel of communications to ensure no miscalculations escalate the situation.

The letter, the officials said, reiterated the administration's stance that blocking the Strait of Hormuz would be a "red line" for America. The sources would not say who wrote the letter or to whom it was directly addressed.

Iran's semi-official news agency Fars cited an Iranian lawmaker, Ali Motahari, as quoting from the U.S. letter and saying, "The first part of the letter contains threats and the second part contains an offer for dialogue."

Motahari told Fars that the U.S. letter said closing the Strait of Hormuz would be a "red line" for the United States. Motahari added, "In the letter, Obama has announced readiness for negotiation and the resolution of mutual disagreements," according to Fars.

Officials at the White House, State Department and Pentagon would not comment on the content of the letter at various press conferences on Wednesday. But various officials, including Panetta, noted the administration is open to talking with Iran provided the Iranians disclose the extent of their nuclear program.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said at Wednesday's White House briefing that "there is a path here towards renewed talks and a path here for Iran to pursue if it so chooses, that would allow it to get right with the international community."

But Carney added, "Iran has shown no inclination thus far to make that choice, to make that decision."

The top Republican in the House, Chairman John Boehner, R-OH, criticized any administration effort to talk with Iran, saying on Wednesday it makes America "look weak."

The U.S. is not changing its military posture in the region in response to recent threats from Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key transition point for oil, Panetta said. He noted that the current US presence of Navy and other military in the region is sufficient, though alternatives are always under consideration for different contingencies.

"We obviously always continue to make preparations to be prepared for any contingency, but we are not making any special steps at this point in order to deal with the situation. Why? Because, frankly, we are fully prepared to deal with that situation now," Panetta said.

Panetta's comments come as Israel's defense minister appeared to push back on the notion that Israel was ready to strike against Iran.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday that an Israeli decision on whether to strike Iran’s nuclear program was “very far off”.

Speaking to Israeli Army Radio, Barak would not offer a concrete estimate as to when he believes Iran may develop a nuclear weapon.

The U.S. and Israel recently put off a joint exercise that appeared to be aimed at sending a message to Iran. Asked at the Pentagon, Panetta said it was to better prepare for the exercise.

npr.org:Taliban's New Political Office Is A 'Game-Changer'

2012-01-18T16:32:00.000-08:00

Taliban's New Political Office Is A 'Game-Changer'

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/18/145384414/exploring-peace-talks-with-the-taliban

The Taliban has announced it is setting up an office in the Gulf state of Qatar as part of a process that might lead to peace talks in Afghanistan. Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, talks to Renee Montagne about an article he's written for Foreign Affairs magazine called "How to Talk to the Taliban."

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne.

The news that the Taliban are prepared to open an office in the neutral Gulf state of Qatar offers a new hope for a negotiated end to the Afghan war. So far, all the major players - the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S. - are onboard, having a place to actually talk face-to-face with the Taliban. Michael Semple has long written about Afghan politics and most recently sized up the Taliban offer in Foreign Affairs magazine. We reached him at Harvard, where he's been a fellow.

Good morning.

MICHAEL SEMPLE: Good morning.

MONTAGNE: Now, you follow the region closely. And in this article you call the announcement of this new office a game changer. That's pretty strong language. Why?

SEMPLE: I believe that the announcement of the office takes us into a whole new situation that we haven't seen before, where the Taliban movement, its leadership, have officially committed themselves to engaging in a political process. For the past ten years, we just have not been there.

MONTAGNE: That is very true. I mean, up until now the official pronouncements from the Taliban, their public pronouncements, have all been in the direction of they are not going to be talking. What changed?

SEMPLE: Ultimately, I think the leadership has finally twigged, that they're doing themselves and their country no favor by, you know, agreeing to host a battlefield for the world's jihadis and also the United States. And now they have to use all tools at their disposal to try and end the war.

MONTAGNE: Well, what happened to this concern that by putting an end date to this war the Taliban were smart enough, in a way, to just wait it out?

SEMPLE: I think that what they expect will happen is that NATO forces will draw down, but there will be some kind of residual U.S. or NATO presence, enough to prop up the government. And there is an acute risk of a shift to civil war. There are plenty of, you know, anti-Taliban Afghans who will be prepared to fight to keep the Taliban out.

And the responsible elements in the Taliban leadership have decided that the prospect of another round of civil war that could easily, you know, drag on another decade, it's so horrendous that they're prepared to take some risks to avoid it.

We sort of like worked on the assumption that the Taliban are necessarily warmongers. What if they're not warmongers? What if they're responsible Afghans who are rather concerned for the future of their country?

MONTAGNE: And what if they're people who want to effectively come home?

SEMPLE: What if they are middle-aged men who have spent the whole of their adult lives engaged in conflict and who are now at the time that they ought to be settling down with their grandchildren rather than facing the prospect of another ten years of civil war? They're middle-aged men who want to go home.

MONTAGNE: Looking ahead, if you had to set out the chief obstacles to get from here to there, even for someone who might be optimistic about the possibility of progress, what would those obstacles be?

SEMPLE: The first thing that worries me at the moment is will the United States be able to keep pace with a rapidly evolving situation in Afghanistan? And I say this - it's almost tantalizing. I think that few people appreciate how rapidly the debate inside the Taliban has changed over even the past few weeks and the extent to which there is now a part inside the Taliban leadership and the broader movement that wants to move towards peace.

Then, I think that there are real obstacles, problems around the current government in Kabul. They, you know, they're involved in domestic political power plays. They basically want to retain power. And they're prepared to sabotage just about anything that they ultimately see as a threat towards their power.

So will the various friends of Afghanistan be able to keep the Kabul authorities in line and make sure that they play some kind of positive role in moving this towards closure?

Then, of course, there's the issue of Pakistan. They have tremendous positive potential. Will they deliver on some of this or will they choose to sacrifice it for some other objectives?

And then, of course, you know, who wins out in the Taliban? Although, I'm convinced that there are now senior figures in the leadership who are working to try and wind down this conflict. Nothing's yet settled.

MONTAGNE: Michael Semple has worked in Afghanistan for more than two decades and most recently wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine the article, "How to Talk to the Taliban."

guardian:Taliban peace talks 'at risk' as Obama stalls on Guantánamo The White House blames Hamid Karzai for holding up progress towards peace talks

2012-01-18T15:16:00.000-08:00

Taliban peace talks 'at risk' as Obama stalls on Guantánamo

The White House blames Hamid Karzai for holding up progress towards peace talks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/18/taliban-peace-talks-risk-obama

The Obama administration is in danger of missing a historic opportunity for a peace settlement in Afghanistan if it does not act quickly to release prisoners in response to a Taliban offer to open talks, say European officials.

However, US officials said the hold-up in peace talks is at the insistence of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who was concerned that the process was being taken out of his hands and needed to shore up support for negotiations among his own supporters.

The US envoy, Marc Grossman, is due in Afghanistan this week for talks with President Karzai aimed at restarting the peace process.

Grossman is also expected to visit Qatar, where the Taliban have said they will open a political office for the purpose of holding peace talks with the international community. The insurgents have also said they expect the release of their officials being held at Guantánamo Bay. The US had provisionally agreed late last year to transfer five Taliban officials to custody in Qatar as part of a string of confidence-building measures, but Karzai objected, saying all releases should come through Afghanistan, and Congress passed a law in December extending a ban on transfers from Guantánamo.

European officials involved in the talks are urging Washington to act quickly to keep the momentum going before hardline spoilers on all sides can stall proceedings.

"We think Washington can rely on the Qatar authorities as far as this is concerned," a senior European official said. "We know there is a political risk involved in the middle of [US presidential] elections, but we also believe the earlier they do this the less the political risk, because by November it will be in the distant past."

Several diplomats stressed that the Taliban offer to enter talks was a historic step, representing a dramatic change in policy, and that for the first time since the war began all the parties were lined up behind official support for negotiations, but that such alignment might not last very long.

Some speculated that the Obama administration had been rattled by Republican attacks on the president's national security credentials. What was needed now, one diplomat said, was "political courage".

However, American officials insist that US politics were not the obstacle but rather the fraught dynamics of the tenuous Afghan coalition of forces that keeps Karzai in power.

"Around the Bonn conference, President Karzai asked us to pause talks. It was important for him that this remain an Afghan-led process and to go home to Kabul and do some domestic work with his people. Reconciliation is, after all, still controversial in Afghanistan," a US official said.

"We have not talked with the Taliban since Bonn, but ambassador Grossman is travelling to Kabul to talk to President Karzai about the next steps forward. We are not talking about the future of Afghanistan with the Taliban; that is for Afghans to discuss with Afghans."

Referring indirectly to prisoner transfers, the official said: "What we are discussing is a series of confidence-building measures that can help parties get back to the table. When we paused our discussions, we were talking about how to best sequence confidence-building measures to ensure both parties could come to the table understanding the other had seriousness of purpose."

Michael Semple, a former EU envoy to Afghanistan, who is in close contact with senior Taliban members, urged faster progress. He said: "It's an open question whether the Americans appreciate how momentous a step this was for the Taliban. It is serious and it is profound. It's completely game-changing."

"It is US policy to engage. But the people you've asked to engage are risking their lives, and they need help and they need credibility with their own people. If you invite everybody to the party and don't show up yourselves, my God you look stupid."

Semple added that if both sides promptly implemented confidence-building measures such as prisoner transfers, "it is realistic to think there could be a ceasefire in 2012".

"Do they [the Obama administration] realise that they could actually stop the fighting in Afghanistan this year?" he asked.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Administration officials have previously pointed to the constraints of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), when it came to prisoner releases. Under the act, passed by Congress in December, transfers from Guantánamo are banned unless the defence secretary certifies that those let out of the detention camp will not commit acts of terrorism or rejoin the fight.

Other European officials are not as confident as Semple that the talks could lead to a cessation of hostilities, pointing to wide differences between the parties. The Taliban insist on the complete removal of foreign troops, while the US and the Kabul government are negotiating a "strategic partnership" agreement that would establish long-term US bases in Afghanistan. Kabul and its western backers also insist that Afghanistan's present constitution, including women's rights, should be accepted as part of the agreement, while the Taliban argue some of the constitution conflicts with Islam.

Some European officials also believe that the Taliban might view the Qatar office as a form of diplomatic recognition as a government in exile, which is not the intention of the initiative from the point of view of western capitals. The Taliban are also insisting they will not negotiate with the government of Hamid Karzai, while the US and its allies maintain that the peace process must be "Afghan-led".

European capitals argued that such gaps can be finessed or fudged in the early stages of talks at least, and are urging Washington to call the Taliban's bluff and respond to its overture, if only to demonstrate that the west is exploring every avenue to a peaceful settlement.

A former member of the US administration who was involved in the preliminary talks said that since the death last year of the former American envoy, Richard Holbrooke, the logjam created by the competing views of the state department, Pentagon and CIA had got worse, making it harder for Washington to react quickly to events.

"Since Holbrooke died, we don't have anyone managing the relationship with Pakistan for example," the former official said. "We no longer have an overall strategist."

foxnews:Police chiefs to discuss terrorism at White House

2012-01-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

Police chiefs to discuss terrorism at White House

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/18/police-chiefs-to-discuss-terrorism-at-white-house/#ixzz1jqyVnbPB

The Obama administration is providing senior state and local police officials with its analysis of homegrown terrorism incidents, including common signs law enforcement can use to identify violent extremists.

The warning signs identified for police include someone joining a group advocating violence, receiving support from a network that plans attacks or seeking out charismatic leaders who encourage violence. The analysis was conducted by the Homeland Security Department, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center. An overview of the findings was shared with The Associated Press.

The conference Wednesday at the White House marks the first time this unclassified analysis will be presented to 46 senior federal, state and local law enforcement officials, many of whom are police chiefs and sheriffs. The conference will also include sessions on other programs the federal government has for countering violent extremism and a briefing from a deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department about what the city has done on this front.

"Engaging local communities is critical to our nation's effort to counter violent extremism and violent crime, and this meeting brings together many of our partners," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. Napolitano, Attorney General Eric Holder and the president's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, planned to attend the White House conference.

There has been an uptick in attempted attacks by Americans and other legal U.S. residents in the past few years, prompting the Obama administration to place a priority on finding ways to stop this type of violence. The administration rolled out a thin strategy last year that put local communities — not Washington — in charge of countering violent extremism in the U.S. That strategy was short on details and did not focus on threats from Islamic extremists.

The White House has encouraged law enforcement to reach out to Muslim communities to build relationships, insisting that these communities are partners in the fight against terrorism. At the same time, the government is trying to develop ways to help local law enforcement detect behavior that could indicate someone is plotting a violent attack. The challenge has been to provide behavioral indicators that indicate the potential for violence rather than religious beliefs or other constitutionally-protected rights.

Analysts from the FBI, Homeland Security Department and National Counterterrorism Center reviewed 62 cases of homegrown violent extremists and found basic similarities. The cases included violent extremists who adhered to a mix of ideologies, including people who ascribed to white supremacist beliefs and people inspired by a violent interpretation of Islam. The analysis is not a psychological profile of a homegrown terrorist, but instead offers similarities among cases that could help local law enforcement better understand and detect threats.

In the 62 cases reviewed, the subjects increasingly spoke out against the government, blamed the government for perceived problems and did so in a way that caught the attention of other people in their communities, according to the senior counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private White House event. Subjects became active on the Internet to espouse extremist views. In some cases, the subjects purchased weapons, ammunition or explosive materials.

Analysts found that a person's origin, ethnic background and socioeconomic status are not good indicators for potential violent extremist activity, the senior counterterrorism official said.

Later this month, a training program for local law enforcement on countering violent extremism will be tested in Southern California, and the government intends to roll out the training to the rest of the country through 2012. Part of the training will focus on understanding constitutionally protected activities so law enforcement can distinguish between illegal acts and free speech. The official said the FBI academy plans to incorporate this training into its programs as well.

The FBI came under fire last year for some controversial training sessions that portrayed Islam as a violent religion.

nytimes:As Powers Maneuver, Israel Says No Decision Yet to Attack Iran

2012-01-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

As Powers Maneuver, Israel Says No Decision Yet to Attack Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-program-sanctions-russia-israel-attack.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

JERUSALEM — Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel said on Wednesday that any decision on attacking Iran because of its nuclear program was “very far off,” apparently seeking to lower the tone of increasingly nervous discourse as powers maneuver in advance of European moves to intensify sanctions against Tehran.

At the same time, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia renewed his country’s aversion to sanctions and military threats against Tehran, while Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi of Iran said his country was ready to resume negotiations with the outside powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — trying to broker a settlement.

Mr. Salehi said during a visit to Turkey on Wednesday that negotiations were under way about the venue and date, Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency reported, and that the talks “will most probably be held in Istanbul.”

The previous negotiations — also in Istanbul — broke off a year ago when Iran presented its own set of preconditions, including a lifting of sanctions, that the West considered unacceptable.

Mr. Salehi made similar remarks about a resumption of the talks during a visit to Tehran two weeks ago by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, and some European officials have interpreted his remarks as an effort to buy time just days before European foreign ministers are to meet next week to discuss possible measures to curb Iran’s critical oil exports.

Speaking at an annual news conference in Moscow, Mr. Lavrov took issue with Western policy on Iran, saying a military strike would be a “disaster.”

He said sanctions now being proposed against Tehran had been couched in terms of nuclear nonproliferation but were “seriously intended to have a smothering effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian population, probably in the hopes of provoking discontent.”

Mr. Barak was speaking in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio at time of high tension following the assassination on Jan. 11 of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy director of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site — an act blamed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday as the work of “the evil hands of arrogance and Zionist agents.” On Tuesday, Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered stricter security to protect Iranian scientists from what some experts have portrayed as a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program.

After the assassination, Israel’s leaders maintained a customary, cryptic silence while the White House condemned it and vigorously denied any responsibility. At least five Iranian scientists with nuclear connections have been killed since 2007.

Tehran says its uranium enrichment efforts are for peaceful civilian purposes, but that assertion jars increasingly with Western insistence, supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iranian scientists have been working toward building nuclear weapons.

Twisting the spiral of regional tension, Israel has been pressing for more aggressive and immediate American-led sanctions against Iran while the Iranians have threatened to shut off the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil.

Mr. Barak’s remarks also came ahead of an imminent visit to Israel by the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. Israeli media commentators have suggested that General Dempsey was coming in part to warn Israel against going it alone in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr. Barak denied that suggestion, saying that military chiefs “are concerned with formulating different military options and bringing their views to the political leadership, and don’t deal with delivering diplomatic messages.”

Still, efforts seem to be under way on both sides to reduce regional anxieties.

Israel and the United States agreed this week to postpone major joint missile-defense exercises that had been scheduled for the spring. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, cited “diplomatic and regional reasons, the tensions and instability,” as factors in the delay.

In the interview with Army Radio on Wednesday Mr. Barak reiterated the Israeli assessment that Iran has not started building nuclear weapons.

“The Iranians have not ended the oversight exercised by the International Atomic Energy Agency,” he said, adding, “They have not done that because they know that that would constitute proof of the military nature of their nuclear program and that would provoke stronger international sanctions or other types of action against their country.”

The official Islamic Republic News Agency confirmed on Tuesday that a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency would visit Iran for three days starting Jan. 29.

Israel has kept open the possibility of military action against Iran, saying that a credible threat is necessary to back up the sanctions effort.

In a veiled reference to what some experts view as a kind of approaching deadline, Mr. Barak said that Iran was “focused on creating a reality in which its nuclear program would be immune from physical attack.”

He was apparently referring to Iran’s plans to start production at a second major uranium enrichment site, the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum. The new facility is buried deep underground and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz.

For Israel, the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, which opposes Israel’s right to exist, is by far its greatest strategic challenge.

Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, chief of the Israeli military’s planning directorate, said Tuesday that apart from the obvious risk to Israel, a nuclear Iran would create a nuclear arms race in the region and set off a process that could lead to “a global nuclear jungle.”

In addition, he said that extremist groups in Lebanon and Gaza would become more aggressive and daring once operating under an Iranian nuclear umbrella and that Israel would be more limited in its strategic options.

On Tuesday, the European Union and United States took new steps to raise the pressure. Denmark, the rotating president of the European Union, proposed that starting July 1, all countries in that body impose a full embargo of Iranian oil, setting a timetable for that threatened step for the first time. In South Korea, a major importer of Iranian oil, a senior American diplomat, Robert J. Einhorn, urged buyers there to reduce their dependence and “unwind their financial dealings with the Central Bank of Iran.”

A new law signed by President Obama, if fully enforced, would penalize any foreign entity that does business with the Central Bank, the primary conduit for purchases of Iran’s oil, its most important export. While the law allows some leeway, it is widely seen as the most punitive step yet taken by the United States against Iran.

foxnews:Israeli official says they are nowhere near deciding to attack Iran's nuke program

2012-01-18T04:11:00.001-08:00

Israeli official says they are nowhere near deciding to attack Iran's nuke program

JERUSALEM – Israel's defense minister says his country is "very far off" from deciding on whether to launch a military strike on Iran's nuclear program.

Ehud Barak did not specify when such a decision might be made, in his interview Wednesday with Army Radio.

He also denied Israeli media speculation that Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, would use his visit here on Thursday to pressure Israel not to attack.

Barak said the U.S. respects Israel's freedom of action and that the Israeli government doesn't "have the luxury" to "roll over responsibility" for Israel's fate to the U.S.

Israel considers Iran its most fearsome enemy and does not believe Tehran's claims that its nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not bombs.

haaretz:Israel: Iran still mulling whether to build nuclear bomb Israel also believes the Iranian regime now faces an unprecedented threat to its stab

2012-01-18T04:10:00.002-08:00

Israel: Iran still mulling whether to build nuclear bomb

Israel also believes the Iranian regime now faces an unprecedented threat to its stability, with pressures both home and abroad.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-iran-still-mulling-whether-to-build-nuclear-bomb-1.407866

Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb, according to the intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dempsey will be arriving on his first visit here since being appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September. He will meet with various senior defense officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon - or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

Israel also believes the Iranian regime now faces an unprecedented threat to its stability, which for the first time combines both external and internal pressure: from abroad, increasingly harsh sanctions and threats of military action, and at home, economic distress and worries about the results of the parliamentary election scheduled for March.

Israeli intelligence sees signs that the regime in Tehran is genuinely worried about the possibility of an opposition victory in March. Should that happen, the regime will have to choose between conceding the loss or falsifying results - as it apparently did in the 2009 presidential election - which could incite anti-regime protests thanks to the tailwind provided by the Arab Spring, which toppled the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

Moreover, the country's economic woes are already hitting ordinary Iranians in their pockets. Tighter sanctions have caused the Iranian currency to depreciate by dozens of percent; the regime is having trouble amassing as much foreign currency as it needs; and now, it faces the prospect of new sanctions by the United States and the European Union against its central bank and its oil industry.

The regime is also being confronted by two distinct ideological challenges. On one hand, a growing camp that includes supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is challenging the authority of the ruling clerics, and especially that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On the other, the Iranian model of a strict Islamic regime run by clerics is being called into question by Islamist ruling parties in Turkey, Tunisia and perhaps also Egypt, which either are or will soon be offering more democratic, modern and moderate models of Islamic governance.

Lastly, Tehran's chief ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, is in real danger of being toppled as well.

Altogether, therefore, "2011 was a very bad year for the regime in Tehran," a senior defense official told Haaretz. Israeli analysts believe 2012 will promise more of the same: more pressure, including the tougher public line now being taken by U.S. President Barack Obama, and also more uncertainty and instability, in both the region as a whole and Iran in particular.

All this makes it increasingly hard to predict what Iran will do. Recently, for instance, it threatened to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and thereby choke off a major portion of the world's oil supply. And under certain circumstances, it could also decide to make a sprint for a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian issue will presumably be the major focus of Dempsey's talks here. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration recently warned Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, and Dempsey is apparently here in part to make sure that Israel has no such plans.

In addition, the U.S. State Department publicly criticized the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Tehran last week and denied any connection to it. Iran has blamed Israel for the attack, though it later accused the United States and Britain of being involved as well.

Israeli officials have made contradictory statements in recent days about the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed on Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the sanctions in an interview with an Australian paper, but later told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that they were insufficient.

washpost:Iran is finding fewer buyers for its oil

2012-01-18T04:10:00.001-08:00

Iran is finding fewer buyers for its oil

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/iran-finds-its-oil-is-no-longer-so-popular-among-china-others/2012/01/17/gIQAWsHf6P_story.html

The squeeze is already beginning on Iran’s oil exports — and guess which nation quietly reduced its purchases from Tehran this month. Why, that would be China, Iran’s supposed protector.

The Chinese cut their imports from Iran roughly in half for January, trimming 285,000 barrels per day from their average last year of about 550,000 barrels per day, according to Nat Kern, the publisher of Foreign Reports, a respected industry newsletter.

Iran’s reduced sales to its biggest oil customer resulted from a dispute over payment terms, Kern explains. But it’s an early sign of what may be significant reductions in Iranian exports to Europe and Asia, as buyers there hedge against the likelihood of tighter sanctions.

Here’s how Kern and other oil industry analysts add up the potential dents in Iran’s exports, which were 2.2 million barrels a day last year. First, U.S. allies are considering sanctions: Europe has agreed on an embargo that by year’s end could cut about 450,000 daily barrels; Japan is talking about cutting 100,000 barrels; South Korean officials have discussed a reduction of 40,000 barrels. Even nonaligned countries are getting nervous about Iran’s reliability: Indian refineries, for example, bought extra oil from Saudi Arabia in January “just in case.”

The oil-market action shows how pressure by the United States and its allies is affecting the Iranian economy. Analysts reckon that, even if sanctions are only partly successful, Iran is likely to lose about 20 percent of its oil export volume and 25 percent of its revenues. For an economy that is already weak, that loss of revenue will be painful.

What’s driving this new squeeze is legislation signed Dec. 31 by President Obama, which authorizes him to ban dealings with the Iranian central bank. These new sanctions would prevent Iran from selling or shipping oil through normal channels. The Iranians and their buyers might find alternate financial arrangements — “special purpose vehicles” to handle the transactions — yet buyers would probably demand discounts, reducing Iran’s revenues. Iran could also smuggle oil through Iraq, but again, only at a discount.

The payments haggle between Iran and China illustrates Tehran’s new vulnerability. According to Kern, the Chinese cut the 285,000 barrels when Iran refused a request for better credit terms. The difference amounted to just 50 cents a barrel, but the Iranians apparently feared that if they gave China a discount, other purchasers would want one, too.

As China puts the screws to Iran, it’s warming relations with Saudi Arabia — which can cushion the market by tapping its 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity. A symbol of closer Sino-Saudi contact was the visit to Riyadh last weekend by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who inked a $10 billion joint refinery project.

“We are supplying our crude, but receiving the money with some difficulty — for sure,” said Mohsen Qamsari, director of international affairs for the Iranian national oil company, in an interview this month with Reuters cited by Kern.

Kern says Iran probably won’t be able to restore the lost exports to China until March or April. “At that time, the Obama administration could point to a substantial reduction in China’s imports of Iranian crude as a basis for excepting Chinese banks from the punitive measures,” explains Kern’s current newsletter. Administration officials say they hope to avoid sanctioning China, which, among other things, is America’s biggest creditor.

Can the U.S.-led effort cripple Iran’s oil exports without triggering a panicky price rise in the market? The problem is eased in part by Saudi Arabia’s extra margin of capacity. Saudi officials have said they are seeking not to replace Iranian oil but simply to supply what the market needs. Still, the effect is the same. Meanwhile, increased production from Libya and Iraq will likely add another 500,000 barrels a day. All told, experts reckon there’s a buffer of about 3 million barrels a day — making for a thin cushion of spare capacity, if all 2.2 million barrels of Iran’s exports were somehow curtailed.

And what will Tehran do, if Europeans and Asians reduce purchases of Iranian oil? Probably load it in tankers — carrying 40 million barrels or more — and park them outside the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians might imagine they’d be sitting pretty if they tried to close the strait — but experts note their floating reserve would also be hard to protect, and vulnerable to seizure.

And all that extra oil afloat might have a downward effect on prices, notes Kern. Almost any way you look at it, Iran is likely to have an oil problem in 2012.

davidignatius@washpost.com

nytimes:friedman:Trust, but Verify

2012-01-18T04:09:00.001-08:00

Trust, but Verify

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/opinion/trust-but-verify.html?ref=opinion

A few items came across the desk last week that underscore the challenge America faces in making policy toward the Islamist parties that are emerging as the early beneficiaries of the uprisings across the Arab world. The first was a news article about the Jan. 11 meeting in Cairo between Bill Burns, a deputy secretary of state, and Muhammad Morsi, the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, during which Morsi said his party “believes in the importance of U.S.-Egyptian relations,” but said they “must be balanced.”

Two days later came a report from the Middle East Media Research Institute, which tracks the Arab media, about recent writings on the Muslim Brotherhood Web site, Ikhwanonline.com. It said the site “contains articles with anti-Semitic motifs, including Holocaust denials and descriptions of the ‘Jewish character’ as covetous, exploitative, and a source of evil in human society. ...Among these are articles calling to kill Zionists and praising the Sept. 9, 2011, attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo — which one article called a landmark of the Egyptian revolution.”

Finally, came the news that Naguib Sawiris — an Egyptian telecommunications mogul and Coptic Christian who is the founder of one of Egypt’s new secular, liberal parties — was being charged with “contempt of religion” for re-tweeting images from last June that show Mickey Mouse with a full beard and wearing a traditional Islamic robe and Minnie Mouse wearing a full-face veil with just slits for her eyes.

There are two ways to read these news reports. One is that the Brotherhood and other Islamists are cleverly hoodwinking the naïve foreigners, feeding them the lines they want to hear. The other is that the Islamists never expected to be dominating Egypt’s new Parliament — with more responsibility than other parties for completing the country’s democratic transition, constitution-writing and election of a new president — and they are trying to figure out how to reconcile some of their ideology, with all of their new responsibilities.

My view is that both can be — and are — true at the same time.

In my mind, we all have to guard against lazy happy talk about the rise of the Islamist parties in Egypt (“I’ve met with them; they all seem reasonable”) and lazy determinism (“Just read what they say in Arabic; they clearly have a secret plan to take over Egypt”).

In the happy talk department, please don’t tell me that the rule of Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., proves that no one has anything to fear about Islamists taking power democratically. There is much I admire in the A.K.P.’s performance. (The recent suggestion by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that the A.K.P. is a party of “Islamic terrorists” is shockingly stupid.) But I will only cite the A.K.P. as a reassuring example of Islam and democracy in harmony after I see it lose an election and vacate power. That is the real test. As The Economist noted about the rule of the A.K.P. in Turkey in its Nov. 26 issue, “Around 76 journalists are now behind bars” in Turkey, “more than in China, many of them for supposed terrorist crimes. ... The West does not seem to notice the steady deterioration in human rights in Turkey, instead extolling it as a model for the Arab spring.”

American policy needs to be based on the assumption that, like all parties, Islamist parties contain moderates, centrists and hard-liners — and, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, lots of small businessmen. Which wing will dominate as they assume the responsibilities of governing is still an open question.

America needs to offer the Islamists firm, quiet (you can easily trigger a nationalist backlash) and patient engagement that says: “We believe in free and fair elections, human rights, women’s rights, minority rights, free markets, civilian control of the military, religious tolerance and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and we will offer assistance to anyone who respects those principles.”

Egypt is not destined to be Iran, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not destined to be the Muslim version of Christian Democrats either. There is an evolution under way — this is a very plastic moment — and our best chance of having an effect is to make sure we deal in a principled way with the Islamists (and also, by the way, with Israel, as the Islamists will be watching for any double standard) and with the Egyptian Army. The Egyptian Army is also trying to figure out its role in this new Egypt. It is balancing its desire to protect its economic interests, avoid prosecution for any killings of demonstrators and maintain its status as guardian of Egypt’s secular nationalist tradition. We need the Egyptian Army to play the constructive role that the Turkish Army once played — as midwife and protector of a gradual democratic transition — and not become the Pakistani Army, which evolved into a predatory institution dedicated to an aggressive foreign policy to justify its huge budget.

In short, the days of dealing with Egypt with one phone call to one man just one time are over. This is going to require really, really, really sophisticated diplomacy with multiple players — seven days a week.

haaretz:Report: Iran planning attacks on U.S. targets in Turkey According to Turkish Zaman daily, a cell of the Quds Unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guar

2012-01-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

Report: Iran planning attacks on U.S. targets in Turkey

According to Turkish Zaman daily, a cell of the Quds Unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is planning to attack U.S. embassy in Ankara.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/report-iran-planning-attacks-on-u-s-targets-in-turkey-1.407860

The Turkish newspaper Zaman reported Tuesday that Turkish intelligence has warned that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is planning attacks on the American embassy and American consulates throughout the country.

According to the report, Turkey’s security forces have warned police in all 81 districts throughout the country, telling them to remain alert and vigilant.

The report states that according to Turkish intelligence, it is likely that a cell of the Quds Unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is planning to break into the U.S. Embassy or one of its consulates. The intelligence further stated that the cell is planning on staying at a five-star hotel in the city in which the attack is being planned, cautioning forces to focus on foreigners residing in those hotels.

Moreover, the report states that Hezbollah may take part in such attacks against Americans.

According to Turkish intelligence, Iran is attempting to support the operations of small, illegal Turkish organizations in the wake of Turkey’s decision to establish a NATO radar within its territory, and due to Ankara’s condemnation of the Assad regime in Syria.

telegraph:The end of the affair between Hamas and Iran

2012-01-17T14:31:00.001-08:00

The end of the affair between Hamas and Iran

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaelweiss/100130480/the-end-of-the-affair-between-hamas-and-iran/

According to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, a group of armed Hamas fighters "brutally attacked" Shi'ite worshippers in the Gaza Strip last Friday, in part of a crackdown on Shi'ite groups that was sparked "by Hamas' fear of growing Iranian influence in Gaza." This is what happens with the Ayatollah stops paying the bills: up until a few months ago, "Iranian influence" was the sole reason for Hamas’ existence.

The two men most responsible in the last decade for ensuring that the Palestinian party of jihad was kept thoroughly flush with arms and cash were Qassam Suleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mouhsen Hussein Azahi, Iran’s intelligence minister. Since its 2007 seizure of Gaza, Hamas has been on the receiving end of Persian largesse that includes 120mm Grad rockets, Raa’d anti-tank missiles (Iranian knock-offs of the Russian-made Sagger variety), explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) which can cut through eight inches of steels, and the tech savvy to construct and place a host of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Hamas operatives used to spend anywhere between a month and six months training in Iranian camps learning how to fire guns, as well as drinking deep of the Khomeinist-flavoured ideology – without quite making the full leap to Shia Islam. So strong was the nexus between the Sunni terrorist organisation and the Shi’ite theocracy that, a senior agent of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – the military wing of Hamas – told The Sunday Times in March 2008 that “Anything [the Iranians] think will be useful, our guys there email it to us right away.”

Also, there was money. When Hamas’ administrative head in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Tehran in 2006 and met with Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he was rewarded with $250 million, a bundle that was allegedly confiscated by Egyptian authorities as Haniyeh attempted to make his way back to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. According to the London-based Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awasat, Hamas was granted an additional $150 million in 2008 contingent on its refusal to negotiate with Israel in any way.

So what dark turn has destroyed so fruitful a marriage of true minds? Nothing other than the imminent demise of the Assad regime in Syria.

Iran wants Hamas to hang around Damascus, currently its global headquarters, and show solidarity with the dictator who advertises himself as the last titan of Arab “resistance”. But Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal has other ideas which is why, when not promising to retire, he’s been shopping for new real estate in the Middle East and shuttering all business in Damascus. As punishment for going wobbly on a regional ally, Iran has reportedly cut some or all of its funding to Hamas, forcing the group into a budgetary shortfall that’s been somewhat compensated by Turkish and Qatari funds.

But how long can this emergency subsidy last? Islamist though the current government in Ankara is, it cannot support an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation forever without jeopardising its ties to the US and Europe, not to say its Nato membership. So either Turkish money will stop flowing or Hamas will have to not just “suspend” its commitment to violence, as it claims to have done recently in order to certify a dead-letter unity deal with its secular rival Fatah – it will have to permanently renounce violence altogether.

Book-keeping aside, Hamas also faces a tough relocation because it is seen a toxic tenant even by ideological sympathisers. A Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt will still have to rely on billions of dollars of American aid, which might be withheld or curtailed if Hamas moved to Cairo. The last time Jordan hosted the group, it had to ask Benjamin Netanyahu for the antidote to a lethal poison Mossad sprayed in Meshaal’s ear canal. Qatar might consider letting space to Meshaal and company in Doha, but Emir Al Thani — also a US ally who has recently advocated Arab intervention in Syria – would likely force Hamas into becoming a furry, loud-barking JINO (jihadist in name only).

Meanwhile, the mullahs’ new favourite proxy in Palestine is now Islamic Jihad, which will try to curry support by saying that Hamas has gone soft. These chaps are converting to Shia Islam in a bid to reclaim Iranian hegemony in Gaza. And Hezbollah, which is more a puppet of Iran than a mere proxy, has cast its sectarian lot with Assad by helping him kill Syrian protestors and thereby earning it the enmity of the entire Sunni Arab world.

My, how a little revolution goes a long way.

onlineopinion:Is the CIA bad or merely misunderstood?

2012-01-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

Is the CIA bad or merely misunderstood?

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13135

In response to this month's OLO Feature seeking reviews of favourite books from Christmases past, or present I offer three intelligence novels by David Ignatius. They are Agents of Innocence, Body of Lies and The Increment. Washington based Ignatius is disliked for his balanced coverage of the CIA and likely wide range of contacts in it.

As someone interested in intelligence matters I'm constantly in search of fiction that (probably) paints a realistic picture of the espionage business. Comparative authenticity is informed by (probably monitored) online contact with current or former security officers who have cropped up from four countries since 2005.

David Ignatius has the best handle on routine espionage (case officer relations with agents to produce intelligence) work that I've seen so far – especially his Agents of Innocence published in 1987. Ignatius' broad knowledge of the CIA has however drawn criticism, from perhaps jealous journalists, that he is a mouthpiece of the CIA. US columnist (and super blogger) Glenn Greenwald dubbs Ignatius "the CIA's spokesman at The Washington Post".

Ignatius is highly educated (Harvard and Cambridge University) a successful journalist (an editor of The Washington Post) and a successful writer (nine published novels, one made into a movie).

Ignatius however fails to place himself within the large herd of CIA critics whose ritualised(?) aversion to the CIA is only matched by their ignorance of the CIA, government workings and diplomacy. Automatic aversion to McDonalds and most things American probably runs concurrently. Ignatius fails to dismiss the CIA based on the oft-regurgitated menagerie of the CIA's (probably small proportion of) sins usually situated in Latin America in the nineteen seventies and blowback from (jointly) training al Qaida in the eighties. Worse still Ignatius matches broad knowledge of the CIA with an ambivalently critical attitude towards it.

Ignatius' novels bring out intelligence as more about people, discussion, planning and process (in the direction of John le Carré) and less about the late Ian Fleming's gun toting, serial womanising, James Bond formula. However Ignatius has come to realise that a wider readership as well as movie viewers ultimately crave violence, hence Ignatius' intelligence novels have evolved from understated realism to a higher proportion of action.

According to contacts formerly or currently in US security the trick is to work quietly under the radar and not create international incidents. Ignatius first attracted the attention of espionage aficionados in 1987 with Agents of Innocence. Agents of Innocence is the tale of a CIA officer operating out of the US Embassy in (then war-torn) Beirut who skilfully uses agents well disposed to America to gain access to the terrorism plans of the PLO's peak leadership. This CIA officer also enjoys good relations with the PLO's usual enemies: Lebanese Christian militia groups and Lebanese Security Intelligence. There are interesting sub plots about the strains on his family life. The book builds a vivid picture of complexity, danger and amorality experienced by the CIA case officer and his agents.

While Agents of Innocence was a critical success and perhaps quietly praised by intelligence professionals there may have been insufficient shoot-em-up violence to turn this book into a movie.

Ignatius succeeded in bringing his second intelligence novel Body of Lies (2008) to the big screen but the novel itself does not approach the authenticity of Agents of Influence and the plot is a leap of belief in the end.

His third intelligence novel The Increment (2010) combines authenticity, character development and paramilitary action to attract a wider audience and movie prospects. This presents the scenario of an Iranian scientist at the very heart of Iran's nuclear weapon's program sending Top Secret emails to the CIA website (which incidentally is at https://www.cia.gov/cgi-bin/comment_form.cgi). An MI6-SAS paramilitary team must then enter Iran to talk face to face with the scientist to prove the reliability of his information. This is all in the context of a short countdown before the US launches airstrikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure in the cause of world peace, of course. What happens next is surprising and resolved by buying the book.

Throughout his first three intelligence novels Ignatius is clearly dissatisfied with painting Muslim characters as stereotypical Mad Mullahs or Jihadist bombers-to-be. Instead he portrays individuals whose motivations and lifestyles are much more nuanced and complex.

In The Increment Ignatius delights in pithy sentences such as (page 166):

At the modern-day CIA, doing nothing was usually the desirable course of action. If you did something, it was bound to make someone angry, and then they would start asking questions and demanding answers.

On sex between colleagues being discouraged at the CIA but accepted at MI6 (p.197)

We don't have the same rules about not sticking your pen in the company inkwell.

On life (p.307)

They say the biggest mistakes we make in life are the ones we make with our eyes wide open – the ones where we know what we are doing, and decide to do it anyway.

On US foreign policy relying on military solutions (p. 372)

"Harry my friend, some people like to bomb. It makes them feel like they have a strategy, when they send the military in."

Ignatius will no doubt write many more knowledgeable novels about life in the CIA. His increasingly colourful cynicism is probably present in Bloodmoney (2011) about the CIA and that unfortunate custodian of the Islamic bomb Pakistan. A world with an additional nuclear weapon wielder, Iran, may well be too volatile for the US to happily control. Whatever happens the CIA is sure to cop the blame.

washpost:Former CIA official: Al-Qaeda in Yemen still nimble

2012-01-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

Former CIA official: Al-Qaeda in Yemen still nimble

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/former-cia-official-al-qaeda-in-yemen-still-nimble/2012/01/17/gIQApD285P_blog.html

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki was believed to have been a major blow to the propaganda efforts of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. But when it comes to his death’s impact on the ability of the group to carry out attacks, the picture remains as cloudy as it was when Awlaki was killed nearly four months ago.

It has been more than a year since the disruption of the last known terrorist plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – an attempt to bring down two cargo jets over the United States with package bombs. It has more than two years since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, reportedly trained by AQAP, attempted to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner.

What’s more, AQAP has been most active recently advancing its regional ambitions, not threatening attacks on U.S. soil.

Still, there are at least three key reasons to remain concerned about the persistent threat posed by AQAP, according to John McLaughlin, who was deputy CIA director from 2000 to 2004 and, briefly, the agency’s acting director.

The reasons, in short: speed, simplicity and strategy.

“Their operation that sent Abdulmutallab here in December of 2009 was something -- it was a pick-up game. It took about a month to get that thing going,” McLaughlin said Tuesday during an event on homeland security at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “They’re cheap: The package-bomb operation, by their own estimate, cost them about $4,200. And they have a strategy, which is a thousand cuts. So, basically, attack us where they can.”

There are also growing worries that AQAP is providing fighters and weaponry to other al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly al-Shabab in Somalia. Awlaki’s death has done little to allay those concerns, terrorism experts say, even though al-Shabab is still mainly regarded as a regional threat.

U.S. officials may have branded Awlaki as AQAP’s “chief of external operations” after his death. But McLaughlin said his loss has not “had a big impact on them operationally.”

The impact on AQAP’s propaganda efforts might be easier to measure. No one from AQAP’s ranks has been able to replace Awlaki as a messenger for the group. The last issue of the group’s online magazine, Inspire – believed to be largely the product of Samir Khan, the American killed alongside Awlaki in the U.S. drone strike – came out in September.

“I’m not sure how much AQAP will continue to be interested in a glitzy English-language Web journal,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and terrorism expert, told The Post back in October. “But it’s still going to be interested in attacking the United States.”

cnn:Former CIA chief: Military is "bad option" against Iran

2012-01-17T13:10:00.001-08:00

Former CIA chief: Military is "bad option" against Iran

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/17/former-cia-chief-military-is-bad-option-against-iran/

By Mike M. Ahlers

Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin said the U.S. can engage Iran through diplomacy, sanctions or military action, but said military action "would be a very bad option."
Speaking during a panel discussion in Washington, McLaughlin, who served as acting director of the CIA in 2004, said direct military action with Iran could grow to involve Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon.

"One of the reasons (military action is a bad option) is that Iran does have this relationship with Hezbollah. Hezbollah has not attacked American interests in recent years, but has lots of plans on the library shelf for doing that in the event we got into a confrontation with Iran," McLaughlin said.
"And Hezbollah of course has been present in the United States, at least in fundraising. And so one of the big problems with Iran is if you get into an open confrontation, a military confrontation, you risk a cycle of retaliation and response with great difficulty seeing where the end point is," McLaughlin said.
Speaking at the same forum, President Obama's former National Security Advisor said he believes 2012 will be a pivotal year in dealing with Iran, which experts believe is creating materials for a nuclear weapon.
"I think 2012 has seen itself as the year that Iran has got to be dealt with one way or the other," said James L. Jones, who served as National Security Advisor from January 2009 until October 2010.
The Iranian nuclear threat jeopardizes Israel, could spark a nuclear arms race in the region, and could provide a way for a non-state actor to get a nuclear weapon, Jones said. "And if that happens, I think that the world that we live in changes dramatically," Jones said.
Jones said the U.S. has successfully rallied nations to take economic sanctions against Iran, and that other nations also are beginning to "really tighten the screws on Iran."
"I think Iran knows that. I think that's one of the reasons that we're seeing the bellicose behavior of Iranian forces in the Arabian Gulf, or threatening the Strait of Hormuz," he said.
McLaughlin and Jones spoke during a panel discussion sponsored by the Aspen Homeland Security Group.

reuters:Costs in doubt as NATO moves toward smaller Afghan force

2012-01-17T12:59:00.000-08:00

Costs in doubt as NATO moves toward smaller Afghan force

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/16/us-usa-afghanistan-troops-idUSTRE80F19Z20120116

(Reuters) - As NATO nations revise their plans for standing up local security forces in Afghanistan, doubts are growing over whether the West will be willing to pay for even a smaller Afghan force seen as key to keeping militants at bay as foreign troops go home.

U.S. and NATO officials have been moving toward a decision on a revised target for Afghanistan's fledgling army and police, possibly leaving them much smaller than the goal of 352,000 already approved by the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to be reached by October 2012.

While no final decisions have been made, a likely scenario would involve an annual U.S. contribution of around $3 billion to $4 billion, with around another $1 billion from other NATO nations and a token contribution from the Afghan government.

A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the deliberations about the size and cost of the future Afghan forces would balance national security needs with the fiscal realities of Afghanistan and the nations that make up the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Maintaining an Afghan force of 352,000 would cost more than the Afghan government could afford and exceed Western nations' likely contribution, the diplomat said.

"European countries are looking hard at what they can contribute," the diplomat said.

Building a sufficiently strong, capable local security force is crucial to the Obama administration's plan to reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan more than 10 years after the Taliban government was toppled - without allowing the country to disintegrate into civil war.

Some NATO nations have seen the goal of building the police and army to 352,000 as a temporary, or "surge," target, which would make the force large enough to confront a tenacious Taliban, but would then subside over time. That view is not shared by all officials in Washington.

The issue was discussed initially at a meeting on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, last month, where U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged fellow foreign ministers to "better define" NATO's future in Afghanistan and their likely financial support for Afghan forces.

Details of respective funding pledges, which to a large extent will determine how large an Afghan force is possible, may not be announced until a NATO summit to be held in Chicago in May. But European diplomats have said that a plateau force of 250,000 might be more realistic.

Such a scenario would be far less costly than the annual $130 billion Washington currently spends in Afghanistan, and it would represent around a third of the $11 billion the Obama administration put forward for Afghan forces in fiscal 2012.

Still, it would leave Washington responsible for the bulk of the cost, a prospect unlikely to be popular among U.S. lawmakers as pressure to cut costs in an election year grows. The fiscal situation is even more ominous in Europe, where the credit ratings of nine of 17 euro zone countries were downgraded last week.

The Afghan government, expected to require about $7 billion a year in outside help after most foreign troops go home by 2015, will not be able to pay for its own military for years.

Last month, Afghanistan's finance minister warned that outside backers must not force it to choose between security and development.

HELL OF A LOT CHEAPER

Last week, Ivo Daalder, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, was in Afghanistan in part to discuss the future of Afghan forces, which have grown in leaps and bounds but which remain reliant on foreign troops for many military tasks, from medical evacuation and airstrikes to intelligence gathering.

Pentagon spokesman George Little suggested it was premature to predict what changes might be made. "Absolutely no decisions have been reached by anyone on the final size of Afghanistan's security forces," he said.

Last year Obama administration quietly put forward the idea of a "transition dividend," which would reinvest some of the military savings created by Western troop reductions, to its NATO allies. But the concept has not gained much traction.

Last week, Poland's defense minister said that Afghanistan shouldn't expect NATO nations to subsidize its security forces indefinitely.

The final arrangements could be made between NATO partners at a ministerial meeting in April in Brussels, ahead of the Chicago summit.

Some officials worry that limiting funding for the Afghan police and army could undercut hard-fought security gains.

One U.S. official familiar with Defense Department thinking said that "a lot of people inside DOD think that it's important to keep to higher numbers of (Afghan security) personnel."

Advocates of a larger force point to the destabilizing effect when Moscow ended funding for Afghan forces in the early 1990s. Afghanistan's government survived for several years after the 1989 departure of Soviet troops, only tipping into full-fledged civil war in 1992 when cash support dried up.

Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said it would be difficult to ensure that a smaller force was capable of keeping Afghanistan secure right away.

"It is faster to get big than good. If one wants to have a more qualified force that can be effective with smaller numbers that takes more time," he said.

One issue that has emerged in discussions is a rift over the Afghan Local Police, the quasi-militia groups that U.S. officials believe could take a more important role as foreign forces withdraw. Many European officials oppose that idea and rights groups warn that some local police have been terrorizing and robbing the people they are supposed to protect.

One defense aide in Congress warned against precipitous decisions that could be more costly in the long run.

"The bottom line is you don't want this thing to come apart at the seams," the aide said. Supporting foreign forces, after all, "is a hell of a lot cheaper than keeping our forces there."

abc.net:Israel 'waging covert war on Iran'

2012-01-17T12:58:00.000-08:00

Israel 'waging covert war on Iran'

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-17/israel-waging-covert-war-on-iran/3777042

A report released this week claims agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad posed as CIA officers in 2008 in order to recruit people to carry out attacks and assassinations against Iranian officials.

Iran says it has arrested several suspects over the death of a leading nuclear scientist who was killed when assassins on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car as it drove through Tehran's rush hour traffic last week.

It was the fifth such attack targeting Iran's scientists in the past two years.

Now analyst Mark Perry, writing in Foreign Policy Magazine, says it is clear Israel is waging a covert war against Iran.

Mr Perry says while he does not have confirmation Israel is behind the attacks, he is sure it is responsible.

"There's no question that it's accurate. I wouldn't have published it otherwise," he told AM.

"I have two requirements for publishing an article of this kind, which took me 18 months to nail down. And the first requirement is that it be right, and the second that it not damage my country. And not necessarily in that order."

He says while Iran has many enemies in the region, the sophistication of the attacks excludes the majority of them.

"If you take a look at these assassinations of Iranian scientists, they're very sophisticated operations," he said.

"And it seems unlikely that those kinds of sophisticated operations, using magnetic bombs and not IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) for instance, whether that's within the capabilities of Iranian dissident groups.

"It's not. This smacks of a much larger expertise and sophistication that only a few intelligence agencies would have."

He also says it is unlikely the US was directly involved in any of the attacks.

"The information that I've gotten directly is that the United States does not assassinate foreign officials of a foreign government," he said.

"That there's no evidence that we [the US] are behind this... We're co-operating on information gathering operations, I don't think there's any question on that, and Israel's a strategic ally, but it's a violation of the law for us to do assassinations."

He says targeting civilians is beyond what the US is willing to do in its war on terrorism.

"Now people will say, 'Well of course you do, take a look at the drone program'," he said.

"And I've asked that question of my sources, and I said, 'What about the drone program?' And they said, 'Listen Mark, we're conducting a war on terrorism - but to target Iranian officials and nuclear scientists, it's beyond the pale. We don't do it'."