WarSclerotic

Jerusalem Post – Breaking News.

IDF Changes Rules of Engagement Near Syria – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Near the Syria border

Israel news photo: Flash 90

The continued spillover of the fighting in Syria into Israel has caused the IDF to change the rules of engagement along the Syrian border.

According to a Channel 2 News report on Friday, the new orders instruct soldiers to respond if fire from Syria is dangerous and persistent.

The report noted that while Israel wants to avoid such confrontation with Syria as much as possible, the main concern is that Islamist elements are contained along the Syrian border.

At the beginning of the week, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz warned that Syria’s civil war might soon become “an Israeli matter” if military spillover continues. Gantz made the comments during a visit to the northern border, and Channel 2 News noted that during his visit he could hear cries of “Allahu Akbar” coming from the Syrian side of the border.

There have been several instances over the past few days of the Syrian civil war spilling over into Israel.

On Thursday morning, three mortar shells were fired into Israel, with one of them hitting a neighborhood in the religious Zionist town of Alonei Habashan, which is less than a kilometer from the border. None of the shells exploded.

IDF sappers rushed to the scene to neutralize the shells. No one was injured, and there was no damage.

Also on Thursday, IDF soldiers from the “Oketz” canine unit arrested a 17-year-old Syrian teen after he crossed the Israeli-Syrian border in the southern Golan Heights.

As the unit chased after the teen, one of the unit’s dogs caught him and bit him. A search of the teen revealed that he was not armed. He was taken for questioning by security forces and was then given medical treatment at the Ziv Hospital in Tzfat (Safed).

A military source said that the incident does not appear to be a terrorist act, but rather an attempt to escape the fighting in Syria.

On Wednesday, an IDF position near the border with Syria was hit by stray bullets. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

The IDF said that the bullets appear to be strays from light weapons used in internal fighting in Syria.

On Monday, an Israeli military jeep was hit by Syrian gunfire on the Golan Heights. IDF soldiers were patrolling near the northern border when they came under gunfire from the Syrian side of the border. No one was hurt.

Barrage of rockets slams South in violent esca… JPost – Defense.

Jerusalem Post – Breaking News.

Was an affair just a pretext for Petraeus’ resignation as CIA chief?.

DEBKAfile Special Report November 10, 2012, 11:52 AM (GMT+02:00)

Paula Broadwell, author of Petraeus bio All In

The resignation of the acclaimed national American hero, four-star general David Petraeus, as CI Director is being presented by his friends as an honorable act in the light of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, 39 – and nothing else.
The affair is said to have come out after the FBI placed his extramarital partner, author of his biography “All In,” under investigation for “improperly trying to access his email and possibly gaining access to classified information.”

Petraeus stepped down as Central Intelligence Director Thursday, Nov. 8, after serving less than a year. In his letter of resignation he wrote, “Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.” The President accepted his resignation Friday.

The point is that during his 2010-2011 stint as commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus and his biographer Broadwell were often seen together and tongues already wagged then. Before that, he served as head of the US Central Command and commander of US forces in Iraq, where his “surge” doctrine brought the US war to a successful end.

For a public figure of his stature and heroic repute, an extramarital affair would not normally these days be considered reason enough to quit his job. Bill Clinton’s presidency survived his affair with Monica Lewinsky, although the US president, who officiates as Commander in Chief of US forces and responsible for the CIA, lied to Congress.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the president should not have accepted his resignation. “A personal mistake should not have led to his departure.”

Informed sources in Washington told debkafile that they believed there was something more than an extramarital affair behind the Petraeus resignation and the FBI’s probe of Paula Broadwell.
The FBI denied the director himself was under investigation.
The chronology is also problematical. President Obama is said by some Washington sources to have had the letter on his desk no earlier than Nov. 8 and only discovered it was coming on Nov. 7 while he was celebrating his election victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Yet the FBI probe must have started much earlier and its chief, Robert Mueller, would not have launched an inquiry touching on the CIA director without consulting with the president and so Obama must have known it was coming well before the election.

Nursing the wounds of their election defeat, Republican party leaders, are trying to connect the Petraeus affair with the still murky circumstances surrounding the murder of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate in Libya on Sept. 10 at the hands of terrorists.

This affair has still not  been cleared up three months later and the labored explanations coming from the State Department and CIA have only deepened the mystery.
Republicans and many US media have called loudly for an inquiry into allegations of a cover-up hatched by the administration to keep a major security debacle dark before it damaged Obama’s campaign for reelection and marred the kudos he won as a valiant crusader by finishing off Osama bin Laden.
Next Thursday, Nov. 15, the Senate Intelligence Committee begins its hearings on the Benghazi affair. Heads of US security organizations and senior White House advisers on terror will be summoned to testify. Petraeus was bound to be on the list in his capacity as CIA director.
However, some hours after his resignation was made public, it was announced that he would not be called to testify. This was confirmed by the committee chair, Sen. Feinstein. The announcement followed speculation that he may have quit for the sake of protecting the president from embarrassing disclosures he was bound to make on the Libyan incident.
This theory ties in with Sen. Feinstein’s first response to Gen. Petraeus’ decision to step down, which was to criticize her fellow Democrat in the White House. “I wish President Obama had not accepted this resignation,” she said.  “I wanted him to continue. He was good, he loved the work, and he had a command of intelligence issues second to none.”
If the speculation is true, Petraeus may not be the only high Obama administration official to pay the price for Benghazi. Our Washington sources predict that the US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Elizabeth Rice, may lose the State Department she was promised after Hillary Clinton’s departure, in case she faced questions about the Libyan attack at the congressional hearings for her endorsement as secretary of state.
The Senate Intelligence Committee still has the authority to summon both Petraeus and Rice to answer questions on this troublesome incident. That would be up to Chairperson Feinstein.
Does all this mean that Al Qaeda scored a double coup in Benghazi? Knocking over the American chief of intelligence and stalling the career of a brilliant US diplomat? Or is there quite a different story behind the abrupt Petraeus exit? Watch out for more revelations.

Four soldiers injured, two seriously, by anti-tank missile fired at their jeep from Gaza; rocket fire on South | The Times of Israel.

IDF hit back at terror targets in Gaza Strip, four Palestinians said killed; army said bracing for ‘serious escalation’

An IDF Merkava tank fires during drills in the Golan Heights in 2008. (photo credit: Neil Cohen/IDF Spokesperson’s Unit via Wikimedia Commons)

An anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip struck and penetrated an Israeli army jeep patrolling some 200 meters inside the Israeli border with Gaza and injured four soldiers on Saturday evening.

Two of the four were in serious condition and were undergoing surgery on Saturday night.

Retaliatory strikes by the IDF against terrorists in the Gaza Strip left at least four Palestinians killed and two dozen wounded.

Later Saturday, there were two reports of rocket fire from Gaza into the South, and residents were ordered to say within 15 seconds of sealed rooms or other protected areas.

A statement issued by Hamas, which rules Gaza, said all Israeli military targets were “legitimate” objects of attack.

The IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz called an emergency meeting for late Saturday to discuss the escalation. Israel’s Channel 2 said he had ordered a “speeding up of preparations” for further conflict. The TV report noted that recent cross-border fire from Gaza had included highly accurate Katyusha rockets, capable of doing far more damage than previous rocket fire.

Of the soldiers injured, the IDF said one was seriously hurt with shrapnel wounds to the head, another was also in serious condition and two were  moderately injured when their Givati Brigade vehicle was hit by the missile near the Karni border crossing. The two seriously injured soldiers were airlifted to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba and the two moderately wounded soldiers were rushed to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.

Channel 10 reported that an initial investigation conducted by GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Tal Russo found that the vehicle was approximately 200 meters from the border fence when it was hit.

The Ali Abu Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), claimed responsibility for the anti-tank missile attack shortly afterwards, saying it fired two Kornet missiles at the Israeli vehicle.

The IDF and Israeli media reports were skeptical about the PFLP’s claim, and instead posited that the likely perpetrator of the attack was Islamic Jihad.

Palestinian eyewitnesses reported clashes between Palestinians and IDF troops, and local media reports claimed that the IDF immediately retaliated with tank fire and helicopter strikes that killed four Palestinians and injured at least 25 others.

Ashraf al-Kadera, a Gaza Hamas Health Ministry spokesman, claimed all four killed were civilians between the ages of 16 and 18 and that among the wounded were children.

Four more Palestinians were injured in an IDF airstrike east of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, Ma’an news agency reported.

A Southern Command officer told Channel 10 after the attack that “we cannot continue to restrain ourselves with these in incidents in the South. In the past few weeks there has been a rise in the number of wounded as a result of terror activities. If we continue to use restraint and not deal out harder hits, the injuries are likely to continue, and their strength is likely to increase.”

A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said Saturday that his movement would retaliate against the “Zionist escalation.”

“Our resistance to the occupation and the Zionist soldiers killing our people is legitimate as defense of our families,” Barhoum said, asserting that the Israeli attack came as part of the election campaign.

“We will not allow Palestinian blood to be the price for electoral and political achievements in Israel,” Barhoum told local media.

The clashes came two days after Israeli forces found a large tunnel filled with explosives burrowed beneath the Gaza border fence, and briefly sent ground troops into Gaza. After the IDF disarmed charges found on the Gaza side of the border, explosives in the tunnel exploded, damaging a jeep and lightly injuring a soldier.

In June 2006, Palestinian terrorists crossed into Israel from Gaza via an underground tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing, attacked an Israeli army position, killed two soldiers and captured a third, Gilad Shalit. Shalit was dragged back into Gaza and held captive by Hamas for more than five years. He was released in a lopsided prisoner exchange in October 2011 under which Israel also freed more than 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners.

Hamas and other Gaza terror groups have repeatedly vowed to kidnap more Israeli soldiers in order to pressure Israel into releasing further security prisoners, including the orchestrators of major suicide attacks in Israel whom Israel balked at releasing in the Shalit exchange.

Jerusalem Post – Breaking News.

Gazan anti-tank missile hits IDF jeep, injurin… JPost – Defense.

US timeline shows lagged military response to Libya consulate attack | The Times of Israel.

First commando unit arrived in Benghazi some 15 hours after the raid, Defense Department docs show

A Libyan man investigates the inside of the US Consulate, after an attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens on the night of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya (photo credit: AP/Mohammad Hannon)

WASHINGTON (AP) — New Pentagon details show that the first US military unit arrived in Libya more than 15 hours after the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was over, and four Americans, including the ambassador, were dead.

A Defense Department timeline obtained by The Associated Press underscores how far the military response lagged behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, due largely to the long distances the commando teams had to travel to get to Libya.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his top military adviser were notified of the attack about 50 minutes after it began and were about to head into a previously scheduled meeting with President Barack Obama. The meeting quickly turned into a discussion of potential responses to the unfolding situation in Benghazi, where militants had surrounded the consulate and set it on fire. The first wave of the attack at the consulate lasted less than two hours.

Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the attack. Intelligence, State Department and military officials have released details on the response in an effort to answer Republican criticism that the administration was holding back what and when it knew about the assault.

Panetta and other defense officials have repeatedly said that they did not have armed aircraft or military teams near Benghazi that could have gotten there quickly.

But there have been persistent questions about whether the Pentagon should have moved more rapidly to get troops into Libya or had units closer to the area as the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America approached. In particular, there was at least a 19-hour gap between the time when Panetta first ordered military units to prepare to deploy — between midnight and 2 a.m. local time in Tripoli — and the time a Marine anti-terrorism team landed in Tripoli, which as just before 9 p.m.

A senior defense official on Friday said forces were at the ready around the globe, but it took time to assess the murky situation, evaluate the threats, put plans in place and get the teams there. With the situation on the ground rapidly evolving, military officials have said there were a number of potential scenarios that had to be evaluated, including concerns that the violence could continue for some time or there could be a hostage situation to which commandos might have to respond.

In a letter to Republican Sen. John McCain on Friday, Panetta specifically addressed the claim that the military could have dispatched armed unmanned aerial vehicles, AC-130 gunships or fighter jets to thwart the attack. Such aircraft were not in the region and not an effective option, he said.

Panetta said that based on a continuous evaluation of threats, military forces were spread around Europe and the Middle East to deal with a variety of missions. In the months before the attack, he noted, “several hundred reports were received indicating possible threats to US facilities around the world” and noted that there was no advance notice of imminent threats to US personnel or facilities in Benghazi.

His explanation, however, did not satisfy McCain. In a statement Friday, McCain said Panetta’s letter, “only confirms what we already knew — that there were no forces at a sufficient alert posture in Europe, Africa or the Middle East to provide timely assistance to our fellow citizens in need in Libya. The letter fails to address the most important question — why not?”

The attack began at about 9:40 p.m. local time in Benghazi. Less than 20 minutes later, the US military began moving an unarmed drone to a position over Benghazi, so it could provide real time intelligence to the CIA team on the ground. The CIA team went to aid the Americans at the consulate. The drone arrived shortly after 11 p.m. By 11:30 p.m., a CIA team was able to get all the Americans out of the compound.

As that was happening, Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left the Oval Office and went into a series of meetings in the Pentagon with senior leaders to discuss how to respond to the Benghazi attack and assess the potential for other outbreaks of violence in the region.

Between midnight and 2 a.m., Panetta began to issue verbal orders, telling two Marine anti-terrorism teams based in Rota, Spain, to prepare to deploy to Libya, and he ordered a team of special operations forces in Central Europe and another team of special operations forces in the US to prepare to deploy to a staging base in Europe.

As the military units begin moving, just before dawn, the Americans in Benghazi, who were now at the CIA base less than a mile away from the consulate, again came under attack around 5:15 a.m. when five mortars were fired at the building. Two missed, but three hit, killing two CIA security officers who were on the roof.

The Americans fired back and soon afterward fled the CIA base for the airport. By 10 a.m., they had flown out, heading to Tripoli. Shortly after 7 p.m., the Americans, including the bodies of the four dead, were flown out of Tripoli on a military aircraft.

Not until just before 8 p.m., however, did the first US military unit arrive in the region, as the special operations team landed at Cigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily. An hour later, the Marine team landed in Tripoli. The defense official noted that even if the military had been able to get units there a bit faster, there was no way they could have gotten there in time to make any difference in the deaths of the four Americans.

“The US Armed Forces did everything they were in position to do to respond to the attack in Benghazi,” Panetta said in the letter, obtained by The Associated Press. “The department’s senior leaders and I spared no effort to save the lives of our American colleagues, as we worked to bolster security in response to a series of other threats in the region occurring at the same time.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Main Syrian opposition bloc elects left-wing Christian as president | The Times of Israel.

Choice of George Sabra, Communist-turned-social democrat, may counter Western fears about Islamist influences in the Syrian National Council

Syrian regime opponent George Sabra attends the Syrian National Council’s Executive Office elections in Doha, Qatar, on Friday. He won the post of president. (photo credit: AP Photo/Osama Faisal)

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Syria’s main opposition group in exile elected a left-wing veteran dissident born into a Christian family as its new president on Friday, a choice that could help counter Western concerns about possible Islamist influence over the group.

George Sabra, a Communist-turned-social-democrat and former high school teacher who once wrote for the Arabic version of Sesame Street, said his election as head of the Syrian National Council is proof that Syrians are not beholden to sectarianism.

“This day is a victory of the Syrian people to prove all over the world the reality of the Syrians … as young people shouted in the streets, ‘Syrian people are one, one, one,’” he said moments after his victory was announced at a conference in Doha, Qatar.

Sabra’s election came on the eve of a crucial decision for the SNC.

The Istanbul-based group, widely seen as out of touch with activists fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad, must decide Saturday whether to join a broader opposition leadership, an idea promoted by Western and Arab backers of those trying to oust President Bashar Assad.

Under the plan, the new group would form a transitional government in rebel-held areas of Syria and presumably serve as a conduit for foreign aid to the opposition.

However, SNC members have expressed reservations, such as fears the SNC’s influence would be diluted. The SNC, still the largest political opposition group, would get only about one third of some 60 seats in the new group to make room for activists inside Syria.

The SNC was to give its answer on Friday, but asked for more time after its own leadership elections dragged on and divisions arose among the members over whether to join the internationally backed initiative.

The SNC had promised its Qatari hosts and the author of the new plan, Syrian dissident Riad Seif, to decide quickly whether to accept the idea in principle. However, Sabra suggested Friday that negotiations over an acceptable formula could continue beyond the weekend.

“The problem is, there is no answer by yes or no,” said Sabra, a 65-year-old father of three. “This is politics,” he added with a laugh.

The gray-haired, jovial Sabra said earlier this week that he and Seif are longtime friends, and even shared a jail cell at one point. Sabra, a veteran dissident and leftist activist, said he was jailed for eight years starting in 1987 and for two brief stretches in the summer and fall of 2011, under Assad and his father and predecessor Hafez.

He said he was a leading member of Syria’s Communist party, but in 2005 his group became social democrat.

Sabra left Syria several months after the uprising against Bashar Assad erupted in March 2011 and moved to Paris. Sabra said he is a former geography teacher and writer for children’s television, including for the Arabic version of Sesame Street produced in Kuwait.

The SNC’s new vice president chosen Friday was Mohammed Farouk Taifur, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a region-wide Islamist movement that has risen to power in several countries in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.