WarSclerotic

Iranian-Hizballah convoy blown up on Syrian Golan. Border tensions shoot up.

DEBKAfile Special Report January 26, 2013, 11:04 AM (GMT+02:00)

Syrian Golan site of twin bombing

At least eight officers were killed in a mysterious twin-car bomb explosion Friday, Jan. 25 at Syrian regional intelligence headquarters in Quneitra on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. Some of the fatalities were Syrian, but Western intelligence sources disclosed to debkafile that most were high-ranking Iranian Al Qods Brigades and Hizballah officers. The blasts sent tensions shooting up on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria.  Israeli, Jordanian and US Special Forces posted in the kingdom went on high alert. Heavy Syrian reinforcements were seen streaming toward the two borders.
Syrian regime sources said the explosive devices were attached to the intelligence command building’s outer walls. But the Western sources report that two large bomb cars were lying in wait on both sides of the road leading to the Syrian HQ and were detonated as the two-car convoy of Iranian and Hizballah officers drove by. There were no survivors.
Those sources also refute reports that the al-Qaeda linked Jabhat al-Nusrah fighting with the Syrian rebels claimed responsibility for the attack. This was a rare occasion when no Syrian opposition group issued any statement at all, they said. The speed with which Syrian army helicopters flew in to remove the casualties indicated their high rank.

In the view of a Jordanian military source, this attack by an unknown hand has delayed Bashar Assad’s advanced preparations for an all-out armored offensive to finally crush the revolt against his regime. His first targets were to have been the rebel-held villages along the Israeli and Jordanian borders.
The Syrian ruler was working to a plan of operations his generals had drawn up with Iranian Al Qods Brigades strategists.

Saturday, Ali Akbar Velayati, an aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned that Iran would consider any attack on Syria an attack on itself: “Syria has a very basic and key role in the region for promoting firm policies of resistance [against Israel]… For this reason an attack on Syria would be considered an attack on Iran and Iran’s allies.”
Meanwhile in Iran itself, the Fordo underground uranium enrichment plant was again reported targeted for sabotage, according to an unconfirmed report published by Reza Kahlil, who is described as a former Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer who worked under cover as a double agent for the CIA until he escaped to the United States.

Kahlil reported that at 11:30 a.m., Monday, Jan. 21, the day before Israel’s general elections, a large explosion occurred 100 meters deep inside the underground plant, trapping 240 nuclear staff in the third centrifuge chamber.  Among them, he said, were Iranian and Ukrainian technicians.
There was no information about casualties or the extent of damage to the 2,700 centrifuges which have been turning out 20-percent enriched uranium.

Khalil cited his source as Hamidreza Zakeri, a former Iranian Intelligence Ministry agent, who said the regime believes the blast was sabotage and the explosives could have reached the area disguised by the CIA as equipment imported for the site or defective machinery.

None of the information about an explosion at Fordo has been verified either by US officials or regime sources in Tehran.
Thursday, Jan. 24, Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and Military Intelligence Director Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi ceremonially promoted Col. G., commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal, to the rank of major general in recognition of his unit’s “outstanding covert operations.”

Sabotage! Key Iranian nuclear facility hit?.

( I’ve been sitting on this story since it came out yesterday.  Luis now says that it has been picked up by Israel radio, so I have to give it some credence.  Debka mentions it, but cannot verify. – JW )

Source: Explosion destroys much of underground installation

Published: 1 day ago

by Reza Kahlili Email | Archive

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An explosion deep within Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility has destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground, according to a former intelligence officer of the Islamic regime.

The previously secret nuclear site has become a center for Iran’s nuclear activity because of the 2,700 centrifuges enriching uranium to the 20-percent level. A further enrichment to weapons grade would take only weeks, experts say.

The level of enrichment has been a major concern to Israeli officials, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly has warned about the 20-percent enriched stockpile.

The explosion occurred Monday, the day before Israeli elections weakened Netanyahu’s political control.

Iran, to avoid alarm, had converted part of the stockpile to fuel plates for use in the Tehran Research Reactor. However, days after the recent failed talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iranian officials announced the enrichment process will not stop even “for a moment.”

The regime’s uranium enrichment process takes place at two known sites: the Natanz facility with more than 10,000 centrifuges and Fordow with more than 2,700. The regime currently has enough low-grade (3.5 percent) uranium stockpiled for six nuclear bombs if further enriched.

Get the inside story in Reza Kahlili’s “A Time To Betray” and learn how the Islamic regime “bought the bomb” in “Atomic Iran.

However, more time is needed for conversion of the low-grade uranium than what would be needed for a stockpile at 20 percent. It takes 225 kilograms of enriched uranium at the 20-percent level to further enrich to the 90-percent level for one nuclear bomb.

According to a source in the security forces protecting Fordow, an explosion on Monday at 11:30 a.m. Tehran time rocked the site, which is buried deep under a mountain and immune not only to airstrikes but to most bunker-buster bombs. The report of the blast came via Hamidreza Zakeri, formerly with the Islamic regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security,

The blast shook facilities within a radius of three miles. Security forces have enforced a no-traffic radius of 15 miles, and the Tehran-Qom highway was shut down for several hours after the blast, the source said. As of Wednesday afternoon, rescue workers had failed to reach the trapped personnel.

The site, about 300 feet under a mountain, had two elevators which now are out of commission. One elevator descended about 240 feet and was used to reach centrifuge chambers. The other went to the bottom to carry heavy equipment and transfer uranium hexafluoride. One emergency staircase reaches the bottom of the site and another one was not complete. The source said the emergency exit southwest of the site is unreachable.

The regime believes the blast was sabotage and the explosives could have reached the area disguised as equipment or in the uranium hexafluoride stock transferred to the site, the source said. The explosion occurred at the third centrifuge chambers, with the high-grade enriched uranium reserves below them.

The information was passed on to U.S. officials but has not been verified or denied by the regime or other sources within the regime.

Though the news of the explosion has not been independently verified, other sources previously have provided WND with information on plans for covert operations against Iran’s nuclear facilities as an option before going to war. The hope is to avoid a larger-scale conflict. Israel, the U.S. and other allies already have concluded the Islamic regime has crossed its red line in its quest for nuclear weapons, other sources have said.

However, this information was not revealed for security reasons until several days ago when sources said the regime’s intelligence agency, through an alleged spy in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, had learned of the decision to conduct sabotage on Iran’s nuclear sites on a much larger scale than before.

As reported, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called an urgent meeting Tuesday with the intelligence minister, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization and other officials to discuss the threat, and now it’s clear the meeting included the sabotage at Fordow.

Several Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in recent years. Last year, saboteurs struck the power supply to the Fordow facility, temporarily disrupting production. And a computer worm called Stuxnet, believed to have originated in the U.S., set Iran’s plans for nuclear weapons back substantially.

The 5+1 (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) hope to resume talks with Iran over its illicit nuclear program. The talks ended last year after regime officials refused to negotiate.

Sources in the Islamic regime previously have revealed exclusively to WND the existence of:

• A secret nuclear site in Najaf Abad.
• A list of Iranian scientists working on a nuclear bomb.
• A secret uranium enrichment site in Khondab, where the Russians and North Korean scientists are helping with Iran’s nuclear bomb program.
• The secret bio-weapons site in Marzanabad, where, with the help of Russia, Iran has mastered production of eight microbial agents, arming its missiles with biological warheads.
• Another nuclear site at Bonab, where, with the help of Russians, uranium enrichment is taking place using laser technology.

Reza Kahlili, author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray”, served in CIA Directorate of Operations, as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, counterterrorism expert; currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board authorized by Congress and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI). He regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East

Report: Explosion Destroys Key Iran Nuclear Site – Tablet Magazine.

A source is reporting much of the underground Fordo site has been hit

Fordo Nuclear Enrichment Facility in Iran(AFP/Getty Images)

Update: 3:52 PM A few major sites that linked to WND story have removed it. I take that as a pretty good indication that this story cannot be confirmed.

According to World News Daily, a massive explosion is said to have destroyed most of Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordo.

An explosion deep within Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility has destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground, according to a former intelligence officer of the Islamic regime.

The previously secret nuclear site has become a center for Iran’s nuclear activity because of the 2,700 centrifuges enriching uranium to the 20-percent level. A further enrichment to weapons grade would take only weeks, experts say.

The explosion is said to have taken place on Monday. The nuclear site is a high profile target given that it’s completely underground and recently reached nuclear capacity. Just earlier today, it was reported that the Iran could quadruple enrichment at the Fordo site.

While I am extremely skeptical of this report’s veracity until I hear more, this is potentially a massive development. More to come.

Barak: US has plans for ‘surgica… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

The United States has prepared plans for a “surgical” military operation to delay Iran’s nuclear program in the event that diplomatic efforts to thwart Tehran’s drive for nuclear weapons capability fail, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview with The Daily Beast on Friday.

Speaking from Switzerland, where he is attending the Davos World Economic Forum, Barak challenged the notion that a military operation against Iran would develop into a “full fledged war the size of the Iraqi war or even the war in Afghanistan.”

“What we basically say is that if worse comes to worst, there should be a readiness and an ability to launch a surgical operation that will delay them by a significant time frame and probably convince them that it won’t work because the world is determined to block them,” Barak told The Daily Beast.

The defense minister stated that, while the US was once heavy-handed in its attempts to carry out pinpointed military actions, under the leadership of President Barack Obama, the United States has “prepared quite sophisticated, fine, extremely fine, scalpels. So it is not an issue of a major war or a failure to block Iran. You could under a certain situation, if worse comes to worst, end up with a surgical operation.”

Barak said that even a small-scale series of surgical strikes was a last resort, and that Israel’s preference would be to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat diplomatically.

Barak called for harsher sanctions against the Islamic Republic, but noted that he did not believe the diplomatic path was likely to succeed in halting Iran’s nuclear drive given Russia and China’s tendency to thwart harsher measures in the United Nations.

Iran accused of dragging feet on meeting again with 6 global powers for nuclear talks | Fox News.

European officials are accusing Iranians of dragging their feet on plans for nuclear talks with six top global powers. A diplomat told Reuters on Friday that although a meeting was once a possibility in January, talks likely will be delayed until February.

The European Union’s foreign policy head, Catherine Ashton, is coordinating between Iran and representatives from six nations — the U.S., Britain, China, Russia, France, and Germany — to try to sway the Iranians to scale back their nuclear activity.

Diplomacy between the countries has been stalled since last June, when talks ended with no clear directives.

The West has long suspected Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapon capability, and that possibility has raised concerns that Israel could attack Iran’s nuclear installations, which could spark a major Middle East conflict.

Envoys from the six countries were hoping to meet with Iranian officials again after the U.S. presidential election, in December or January, but the talks never materialized.

EU diplomats and Iranian officials have met to try to organize a new sit-down. But the European representatives say Tehran has not committed to a location or date. A European diplomat — speaking on condition of anonymity — told Reuters there was still no firm agreement on a meeting.

“We showed flexibility when it came to date and venue. We want to present our refreshed offer (to Iran) but didn’t get the opportunity to do so,” the diplomat said.

Last May, discussions in Baghdad focused on a proposal to stop Iran’s production of higher-grade enriched uranium in exchange for supplying Iran with fuel for a reactor. No details were available on any new offer.

Tehran maintains its enrichment work is for energy and medical purposes and denies allegations it’s attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

For years, the six nations have encouraged diplomacy with Iran and imposed economic sanctions to force the country to comply with United Nations demands to suspend all activities related to producing enriched uranium.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has also been meeting with Iranian officials to allow the U.N. agency to complete its investigation into suspected nuclear bomb research in Iran.

Think again: One nomination worse t… JPost – Magazine – Opinion.

Photo by: REUTERS/Mian Kursheed

Barry Rubin of the Gloria Center, one of the Middle East’s shrewdest analysts, was in an unkind mood recently, as he himself admitted.

The common element joining President Barack Obama’s three appointments last week – Senator John Kerry for secretary of state, Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense and John Brennan as director of the CIA – is, in Rubin’s view, that “they are all stupid people” of the worst sort – “stupid, arrogant people, with terrible ideas.”

Unfortunately, there is little to contradict Rubin’s harsh judgment. Each holds views that make it impossible for them to understand Middle East reality, much less do anything about it. Hagel, for instance, is a “realist,” which is, as we shall see, a doctrine having little to do with reality. Among the central planks of realist doctrine is that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is at the center of all the Middle East’s problems, and that the United States’ interests are significantly damaged by the lack of resolution of that conflict.

Speaking at J Street’s first annual conference in 2009, Hagel said, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central, not peripheral, to US vital security interests in combating terrorism, preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, stability in the Middle East and US and global energy security.”

Each one of these examples is patently absurd.

Though Iran might use a nuclear weapon to strike at Israel, that is not the primary purpose for which it seeks nuclear weapons. Ayotallah Khomeini defined the 1979 Iranian revolution from the start as an Islamic revolution. He and his successors identified nuclear weapons as a potentially important tool in spreading that revolution and immunizing Iran to countermeasures from the West.

And Israel has precious little to do with the instability of the Middle East, as the events of the past year have made abundantly clear. Israel has not kept Egypt from being able to grow enough grain so that it does not have to import from the rest of the world (though Israel would certainly be able to help Egypt in this regard).

Israel does not keep Saudi men from working, or looking down on those who do. Israel has nothing to do with the second-class status of women in almost every Muslim society, and the lost potential that follows.

Israel is not responsible for the high rates of illiteracy and paucity of academic production of the Arab world (though again it could help to alleviate them). The Sunni-Shi’ite divide that continues to roil Muslim countries pre-existed the State of Israel by more than a millennium.

Israel was not an issue in during Arab Spring, or in the Libyan civil war, or in the Syrian civil war. Israel did not cause Iraq to invade Kuwait or have anything to do with the Iraq-Iran war that claimed more than a million lives. Israel had nothing to do with the Algerian civil war, or with the slaughter of 400,000 black Muslims in Darfur by their co-religionists. The blood shed in all the Israel-Arab wars since 1948 is chicken feed in terms of Middle East bloodletting.

It is the perpetual backwardness of Arab and Muslim societies that causes such resentment and hatred of the West, of which the US is the principal representative – the Big Satan. Al-Qaida’s propaganda justifications for the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon centered on the US, and its defiling presence on holy Saudi soil. Israel was only added later as an afterthought because attacks on Israel have a special status for much of the Western Left. But again, Israel bears no responsibility for the near universal backwardness of Muslim societies.

In short, to refute one of “realism’s” central premises all one needs is half a brain cell and eyes in one’s head.

ONE OF the central corollaries of the realist emphasis on the centrality of the Arab-Israel conflict is that America should impose a settlement on the conflict.

In 2002, when Palestinian terrorism against Israelis was still in full swing – terrorism which Hagel justified as “desperate men do[ing] desperate things” – he opined that the time for negotiations had passed. “An endgame must be brought to the front, now,” he said.

In short, the US must impose a solution on the parties, even when the Palestinians have yet to show any willingness to accept Israel’s existence.

But if the Palestinians refuse to accept a two-state solution, such an imposed solution, however it was drawn, would be life-threatening for Israel, since it would certainly put Israel in a less defensible situation than today.

It is not just Israelis, but also impartial observers of the Middle East who have finally come to see that there is no Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s existence. As Walter Russell Mead wrote last week, “The real problem is what it has been for 60 years, deeply rooted Palestinian opposition to a two-state solution.”

Mead even argues that the Palestinian opposition is not wholly irrational, for the truth is that “the West Bank and Gaza together are not enough to support the existent Palestinian population. But rational or not, as long as no Palestinian leader could sell a twostate solution to his people, the Israelis cannot help but doubt that a peace agreement would be honored even if it were signed. They will not trust to the tender mercies of Hagel and President Obama.”

IN MANY respects, the nomination of Obama’s counter- terrorism chief John Brennan to head the CIA is an even worse disaster. How can someone whose vision has been blinded by the dictates of political correctness possibly give the president the quality of analysis he needs? Unfortunately, Brennan, like Hagel, has been deliberately picked by the president precisely because of his ardent political correctness.

Brennan oversaw the purging from all US government counter-terrorism and law enforcement manuals any reference to radical Islam, Islamism or jihad.

Jihad, he writes, is a “holy struggle to purify oneself or one’s community,” a line that could have been taken directly out of the propaganda of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated American Muslim organizations.

He deliberately ignores the fact that jihad in contemporary Islamic discourse almost always refers to military action to spread Islam.

He consistently defines the terrorist threat as al- Qaida and affiliated organizations, without ever mentioning or appearing to notice that al-Qaida is only one of a large constellation of Islamic terrorist organizations.

And in a discussion of the sources of terrorism, he writes of violent extremists as victims of “political, economic, and social” forces, but never of religious forces.

Religion, or the one particular religion whose adherents are behind almost every terrorist attack in the world, is never allowed to intrude into Brennan’s analyses. Thus he told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate secular group, and has urged the greater inclusion of Hezbollah into the Lebanese political system. His confidence in the moderating impact of political participation is apparently unlimited, when it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, and we are today witnessing the fruits of what can only be described as a pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy in Egypt.

Brennan claimed as proof of Hezbollah’s path toward moderation the fact that it includes in its ranks doctors and lawyers. Well, Hezbollah’s arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, Osama bin Laden’s replacement Al-Zahrawi, the pioneer of air hijacking George Habash, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Josef Mengele were all doctors, and Yasser Arafat an engineer.

That is hardly proof of moderation.

Brennan’s analysis is on par with the 80-page government report on the Fort Hood massacre, which made no mention of the perpetrator’s religious beliefs, even though he shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he shot 13 people.

The report even managed to conclude that “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor,” though it did not suggest what other risk factors might have led to Dr. Nidal Hassan’s murderous rampage.

After a while, such relentless political correctness and whitewashing of Islamic extremism cannot but cloud analysis. What cannot be mentioned is eventually not thought about. Thus the Christmas airplane bomber, who narrowly missed blowing up a commercial airliner carrying over 200 passengers above Detroit, was never placed on an American watchlist, despite warnings from British intelligence based on the terrorist’s father’s expressed concerns about his growing religious fanaticism.

BRENNAN’S ENTIRE career seems to consist of one faulty judgment and failure after another. On the eve of the Obama presidency, he recommended rapprochement with Iran based on a policy of advancing rather than trying to thwart Iranian interests. Since the expressed goal of the current Iranian regime is the spread of its own form of theocracy, it is hard to know what “Iranian interests” he had in mind. In any event, we know how well that turned out.

Brennan enthusiastically endorsed the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted work on its nuclear weapons program based on a ridiculously narrow definition of nuclear weapons program, which did not even include the 3,000 centrifuges openly enriching uranium at Iran’s Natanz site as the report was issued. The opening statement, which was belied by almost everything else in the report, was carefully crafted by the US intelligence community to forestall president Bush from seeking new sanctions against Iran and even more so from military action.

Even The New York Times now admits that US counter- terrorism policy overseen by Brennan in North Africa, starting with the decision to intervene in Libya, has been a “comprehensive failure.”

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Brennan is no friend of Israel. Besides his endorsements of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, he also recommended that the US engage Hamas. Again, the failure is the total inability to take seriously Hamas’s theological call for the extinction of Israel. He often refers to Jerusalem as Al-Quds, and when addressing a Muslim group at NYU complained, “It’s tough, but we are not going to separate ourselves from Israel.”

Could someone in the White House be sending Israel a message?

The writer is director of Jewish Media Resources, has written a regular column in The Jerusalem Post Magazine since 1997, and is the author of eight biographies of modern Jewish leaders.

‘Iran would definitely use nucle… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.