WarSclerotic

Steinitz to press US on Iran san… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

Israel: State of Syrian chemical weapons could change in a moment.

DEBKAfile Special Report January 8, 2013, 6:36 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syrian chemical weapons site

“Syria’s chemical weapons are under control for now, but no one in America or Israel can tell what the situation will be five minutes from now,” a senior Israeli defense official told debkafile Tuesday, Jan.8. The situation is dangerously fluid because there is no certainty about who is in control, or when some Syrian chemical unit commander may take it into his head to use it.”

There were two touch-and-go moments in the last two months – first, when Assad was on the verge of directing chemical arms to be used against the rebels; second, when Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusrah front fighting in rebel ranks came close to getting hold of them. The first occurred in the last week of November and the second in the last ten days of December.
The New York Times Tuesday reported that, in the first instance, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence showing up on satellite imagery that “Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pound bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.”

American sources then mobilized international forces, Russia, China, Turkey, Jordan and other Arab nations for sharply worded messages to the Syrian ruler Bashar Assad and his senior commanders to stop the mixing of chemicals and preparation of bombs. The sources did not say what persuaded Assad to halt the process. According to debkafile’s military sources, there was no direct threat of US or NATO military action in Syria.
Our sources add that, among the messages’ recipients, were commanders of the top secret Chemical Weapons Unit 450 of the Syrian Air Force. This brought to light for the first time that the US has developed direct channels of communications to Syrian unit commanders, including a top-secret air force outfit which has not so far taken part in the fighting.
According to debkafile’s American sources, the bombs filled with sarin were not dismantled and they are still sitting in stores at – or in close proximity to – Syrian air forces bases, ready for operational use at short notice.

This means that the Syrian ruler in effect flouted the American demand, although it was backed by Moscow, to dismantle the bombs.  In his defiant speech Sunday, Jan. 6, Assad made it clear that he “no longer takes dictation from anyone” – especially the West.

It is important to note that sarin nerve gas once mixed has a life of 60 days, after which it must be destroyed. More than half of this period has elapsed and so the Syrian ruler has until the end of January to decide how he wants to dispose of those deadly bombs.
The German newspaper Die Welt recently quoted the head of the BIND external intelligence service as estimating that he Syrian Air Force was able to have chemical weapons ready for operation within four to six hours from receiving an order. The New York Times believes that two hours would be enough.
Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a rare comment on the Syrian chemical weapons question, told a cabinet meeting that the Syrian regime is very unstable and “the question of chemical weapons here worries us.” He said that Israel was coordinating with the United States and others “so that we might be prepared for any scenario and possibility that could arise.”

Then, in an interview Monday, Netanyahu warned that world peace is under grave peril from the nuclear weapons under development in Iran and Syria’s chemical arms arsenal, which could reach the wrong hands. A senior security official told debkafile that the prime minister was referring to the repeated rebel assault on Syria’s largest chemical weapons depot at a=Al Safira near Aleppo, which has been repulsed by the Syrian army – for now.

Hezbollah sent 5,000 fighters to help Assad, daily reports | The Times of Israel.

According to Al-Watan, members of the Shiite Lebanese militia have already killed 300 Syrian rebels

Lebanese Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, center, speaks to the crowd in a rare public appearance July 16, 2008 (photo credit: Ferran Queved)

Some 5,000 Hezbollah combatants entered Syria in December to aid the faltering regime of Bashar Assad, a Saudi daily reported on Monday.

According to Al-Watan, a government daily, four “support battalions” comprising at least 1,300 soldiers each had succeeded in killing some 300 rebel soldiers in recent weeks as battles raged between government and opposition forces around the capital Damascus. The fighters reportedly entered Syria through the border town of Madaya, located northwest of Damascus.

Hezbollah has remained staunchly allied with the Assad regime throughout the popular uprising in Syria that began in March 2011. Syria has served as a conduit of logistical support and weapons sent to Lebanon from Iran.

A number of Lebanese bloggers have reported funerals conducted by Hezbollah recently for fighters killed in action in Syria, Jordanian daily Al-Ghad reported on Monday.

In early October, a Hezbollah commander, Ali Hussein Nassif, was reportedly killed by an opposition ambush near the Syrian city of Homs along with a number of other fighters when a roadside bomb destroyed the vehicle he was driving.

Iran’s nuclear bomb program complete.

Source reveals secret site; last obstacle is to arm missiles

Published: 11 hours ago

by Reza Kahlili Email | Archive

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Reza Kahlili 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. He is the author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray” and regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East.More ↓

Early nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll

Iran successfully has built a nuclear bomb with the help of Russia and North Korea and has enough weapons-grade uranium and plutonium for more, according to a source in the Revolutionary Guards intelligence unit.

The source, who has access to Iran’s nuclear program, said the Islamic regime is working out of seven nuclear sites, most unknown to the IAEA, and that its nuclear bomb program is complete.

North Korea has provided the regime with plutonium for nuclear warheads, the source verified, and the last obstacle to overcome is arming missiles with those warheads.

The source, who revealed the existence of the regime’s microbial plant and its effort on biological weapons as published on Jan. 1 by WND exclusively, now has provided information on two of the seven secret sites.

The first is in the town of Khondab near the city of Arak in central Iran where Iran’s heavy-water plant reactor is located, which, once operational, will provide enough plutonium for several bombs just in its first year. WND will soon publish information on the second secret nuclear site, which has direct Russian participation involving laser technology for uranium enrichment.

The Khondab site, according to the source, expands on the activity at Iran’s previously secret site in Fordo, about 80 miles away. When the existence of Fordo was revealed in September 2009, much of the nuclear bomb research and equipment was later transferred to Khondab.

Google Earth – FEB 2009 – Initial start of the work at Khondab

DigitalGlobe SEPT 2012 – Khondab secret nuclear facility

The new site, in the belly of a mountain, is immune to airstrikes. It has three levels accessible by three elevators. The first level is security, where personnel check in, cell phones, arms and other items are confiscated, IDs are checked and passage allowed. The second level houses the centrifuges and the third level the lab, where work is ongoing on both uranium and plutonium bombs.

The uranium enrichment on the second level is in two phases: The first phase has eight cascades of centrifuges into which uranium hexafluoride gas has been fed for enrichment; the second phase has 12 cascades with six already operational and six more being readied.

The planning of the site was approved under former president Mohammad Khatami, but the project was approved by the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and completed over two years ago.

Several high-power towers, visible in images, have been installed near the site to provide much-needed electricity for the centrifuges. The electricity flows only to the bottom of the mountain, where entrances have been dug out.

DigitalGlobe SEPT 2012 – All high power towers installed since work on Khondab – Several marked

DigitalGlobe SEPT 2012 – Power polls extend only to the bottom of the mountain where entrances are

“The imagery clearly shows some kind of highly sensitive and fortified installation supporting a deep underground facility inside the mountain,” stated Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA analyst and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board to Congress.

“The exterior facility has a huge security gate and guard post, the entire installation is surrounded by miles of deep trench and berm, like a medieval fortress, with modern security fences and guard posts.

DigitalGlobe SEPT 2012 – Security parameter of the site as marked

“And there are clearly two enormous underground entrances surmounted by a building that may power elevator shafts, escalators or a subway to the underground complex inside the mountain,” he said.

DigitalGlobe SEPT 2012 – Underground entrances & Air vents on top of the mountain

Of particular interest, Pry said, are the high-tension power lines at the facility.

“Whatever is going on inside needs a lot of electricity. Chemical and biological weapons programs have very modest power needs, compared to nuclear weapons programs, which consume enormous amounts of electricity.”

Pry said that Russia, China and North Korea are helping Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and that it is probably no accident that Iran’s underground facilities closely resemble those countries’ setups, which were intended to deceive the West during and after the Cold War.

“The discovery of previously unknown underground facilities of such size and potential significance in Iran is further proof that the U.S. is probably underestimating the advancement and sophistication of Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” Pry said. “The present policy of negotiation until Iran is caught red-handed moving toward nuclear weaponization is a policy doomed to fail – probably already has failed inside one of Iran’s underground nuclear installations.”

The site is supervised by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, the father of Iran’s nuclear bomb program. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative, former defense minister Ali Shamkhani, routinely visits the site.

There are 60 personnel working at this site, with four Russian and three North Korean scientists helping the Iranian scientists.

Iranian scientists Massoud Ali Mohammadi and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who worked on this Khondab project, were assassinated, Mohammadi in 2010 and Roshan last year.

Because of those assassinations, Khamenei has ordered the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security to keep a close eye on all employees at various sites and monitor their movement and communications.

Two missile sites in the vicinity of this nuclear site are hidden underground to protect the site from an airstrike.

Currently more than 2,000 centrifuges are enriching uranium at this facility, with more to be operative shortly.

With the failure in three rounds of talks since last April between the world powers 5+1 and Iran over its illicit nuclear program and the regime’s defiance in stopping its enrichment and preventing the International Atomic Energy Agency from inspecting suspect sites, the West is running out of options, the source added.

He said the regime believes that ultimately America will have no choice but to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

WND last October revealed that regime scientists at another secret site were working on a neutron detonator for a nuclear weapon and warhead design for ballistic missiles.

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray” (Simon & Schuster, 2010). He serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI).

Reporters wanting to interview Reza Kahlili on this issue should email media@wnd.com.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/irans-nuclear-bomb-program-complete/#6UqQJS5fyqhd6t2R.99

Israeli Intel to Obama Stopped Syrian Chemical War – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Chemical attack drill (file)

Israel news photo: Flash 90

Israeli surveillance that spotted Syria preparing chemical bombs to load them on airplanes spurred President Barack Obama into action to win rare support from Russia to stop the plan, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The report follows bits of information published over the past several weeks, according to which Syrian soldiers were spotted mixing chemicals, but details of Israeli surveillance and American involvement were not previously disclosed.

IDF commanders informed Washington in November, according to the newspaper, after satellite imagery showed Syrian soldiers filling 500-pound bombs with a substance that may have been the deadly “sarin” nerve gas.

Further reports by Israeli revealed that the bombs has been loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases, where Assad’s planes could use them within two hours, too late for the United States to intervene militarily.

The New York Times reported that “a remarkable show of international cooperation” over the civil war in Syria found Russia and China agreeing with the United States and working to stop Assad through diplomatic channels.

The report may explain analysts’ statements that Russia has taken control of Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles.

The immediate threat of a chemical attack on Syrians has been averted, but the threat remains as Assad continues to follow the path of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and murdered Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom denied the reality of revolutions against their power.

One senior defense official told the New York newspaper that while Russia may have finally understood that Washington is prepared to intervene in the civil war if Assad uses chemical weapons, it is “ anyone’s guess” if Assad got the message.

Israeli civilians would be under a direct threat of a deadly chemical attack if Assad unleashes the weapons. Shifting winds could blow the chemicals over the Israel border.

Syrian opposition forces have shown vivid photos and videos of Syrians already having been exposed to chemical gas attacks.

Israel media have reported that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently traveled to Jordan to discuss how to deal with the chemical war threat from Syria, which could easily transfer the chemical bombs to Hizbullah, if it already has not done so.

Jeremy Binnie, a terrorism and insurgency specialist at IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, was quoted by the Times as saying that Hizbullah terrorists “who got their hands on such munitions would find it difficult to deploy them effectively without the associated aircraft, artillery or rocket launcher systems. That said, Hizbullah would probably be able to deploy them effectively against Israel with a bit of help.”

Iran says it’s hopeful on Hagel nomination – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Tehran says Hagel’s appointment as US defense secretary could improve relations between Iran and US; expects ‘practical changes’ to US policy

Associated Press

Iran‘s Foreign Ministry says it is hopeful the appointment of former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon would improve relations between Tehran and the US.

Asked about Hagel’s nomination, ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Tuesday that Tehran was hopeful that there would be “practical changes” to US foreign policy, and that nations would change their attitude towards the US if it respected their rights.

Hagel was nominated Monday and faces tough confirmation hearings. Critics have said he is hostile toward Israel and soft on Iran.

Washington and Tehran have no diplomatic relations since 1979 when Iranian militants stormed the US embassy and took American diplomats hostages.

Tensions have spiked over America’s belief that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapon, a charge Iran denies.

Shortly after being nominated as the next US secretary of defense, Hagel said his record shows “unequivocal, total support for Israel,” insisting that critics have misrepresented his views on the Jewish state.

In an interview with the Lincoln Journal Star, Hagel also dismissed claims that he was soft on Iran.

Chemical Weapons Showdown With Syria Led to Rare Accord – NYTimes.com.

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

The violence in Syria continued on Monday. Above, Syrians went to the aid of a man who was wounded when a missile hit the al-Mashhad district of Aleppo.

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER

¶ WASHINGTON — In the last days of November, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.

¶ Within hours President Obama was notified, and the alarm grew over the weekend, as the munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases. In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria’s increasingly desperate president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.

¶ What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

¶ The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

¶ But concern remains that Mr. Assad could now use the weapons produced that week at any moment. American and European officials say that while a crisis was averted in that week from late November to early December, they are by no means resting easy.

¶ “I think the Russians understood this is the one thing that could get us to intervene in the war,” one senior defense official said last week. “What Assad understood, and whether that understanding changes if he gets cornered in the next few months, that’s anyone’s guess.”

¶ While chemical weapons are technically considered a “weapon of mass destruction” — along with biological and nuclear weapons — in fact they are hard to use and hard to deliver. Whether an attack is effective can depend on the winds and the terrain. Sometimes attacks are hard to detect, even after the fact. Syrian forces could employ them in a village or a neighborhood, some officials say, and it would take time for the outside world to know.

¶ But the scare a month ago has renewed debate about whether the West should help the Syrian opposition destroy Mr. Assad’s air force, which he would need to deliver those 500-pound bombs.

¶ The chemical munitions are still in storage areas that are near or on Syrian air bases, ready for deployment on short notice, officials said.

¶ The Obama administration and other governments have said little in public about the chemical weapons movements, in part because of concern about compromising sources of intelligence about the activities of Mr. Assad’s forces. This account is based on interviews with more than half a dozen military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the intelligence matters involved.

¶ The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, warned in a confidential assessment last month that the weapons could now be deployed four to six hours after orders were issued, and that Mr. Assad had a special adviser at his side who oversaw control of the weapons, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported. Some American and other allied officials, however, said in interviews that the sarin-laden bombs could be loaded on planes and airborne in less than two hours.

¶ “Let’s just say right now, it would be a relatively easy thing to load this quickly onto aircraft,” said one Western diplomat.

¶ How the United States and Israel, along with Arab states, would respond remains a mystery. American and allied officials have talked vaguely of having developed “contingency plans” in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require upward of 75,000 troops. But there have been no evident signs of preparations for any such effort.

¶ The United States military has quietly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there, among other things, prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons.

¶ Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to have traveled to Jordan in recent weeks, and the Israeli news media have said the topic of discussion was how to deal with Syrian weapons if it appeared that they could be transferred to Lebanon, where Hezbollah could lob them over the border to Israel. But the plans, to the extent they exist, remain secret.

¶ American, Israeli and other allied officials remained fixed on this potential crisis, especially as the opposition appears to have gained more momentum, seizing several Syrian military bases and the weapons stored there, and have been closing in on Damascus, the Syrian capital.

¶ In response, Syria has reached deeper into its conventional arsenal, including firing Scud ballistic missiles at rebel positions near Aleppo. Over the past week a new concern emerged: Syrian forces began shooting new, accurate short-range missiles, believed to have been manufactured in Iran. None had chemical warheads. But their use showed that the Syrian military was now deploying a more accurate weapon than the notoriously inaccurate Scud missiles they have used in previous attacks.

¶ As the fighting has escalated, American and other allied officials have said that government troops have moved some of the chemical stockpiles to safer locations, a consolidation that, if it continues, could actually help Western forces should they have to enter Syria to seize control of the munitions or destroy them.

¶ Syria’s chemical weapons are under the control of a secretive Syrian air force organization called Unit 450, a highly vetted outfit that is deemed one of the most loyal to the Assad government given the importance of the weapons in its custody.

¶ American officials said that some of the back-channel messages in recent weeks were directed at the commanders of this unit, warning them — as Mr. Obama warned Mr. Assad on Dec. 3 — that they would be held personally responsible if the government used its chemical weapons.

¶ Asked about these communications and whether they have been successful, an American intelligence official said only, “The topic is extremely sensitive, and public discussion, even on background, will be problematic.”

¶ Allied officials say whatever safeguards the Syrian government have taken, there remains great concern that the weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists fighting the government or the militant group Hezbollah, which has established small training camps near some of the storage sites.

¶ “Militants who got their hands on such munitions would find it difficult to deploy them effectively without the associated aircraft, artillery or rocket launcher systems,” said Jeremy Binnie, a terrorism and insurgency specialist at IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly.

The Hagel litmus test.

By Jennifer Rubin , Updated: January 6, 2013

Israel Hayom | The approaching Hagel storm.

Ahead of Chuck Hagel, John Brennan nominations, US intel official in Cairo.

DEBKAfile Special Report January 7, 2013, 5:27 PM (GMT+02:00)

Chuck Hagel nominated US Defense Secretary

As Washington prepared for new appointments to the Obama cabinet, the US president dispatched US Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence Michael Vickers to Cairo Sunday, Jan. 12 on a two-day mission to try and revitalize the counter-terror war on two key fronts: post-Qaddafi Libya and Egyptian Sinai. debkafile’s Washington sources report that President Barack Obama hastened to address these fronts, because he expected the five-month old murder of US Ambassador Christ Stevens in Benghazi by al Qaeda to come up at congressional hearings and hamper the endorsement of ex-Senator Chuck Hagel as defense secretary and John Brennan as Central Intelligence Director. Their appointments were to be announced Monday, Jan. 7.
Hagel faced a preliminary storm over his attitudes on Israel and Iran, whereas Brennan, as counterterrorism adviser to the president, has been responsible for shaping administration policy in this sphere in Libya, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula.
The United States has still not taken steps against the Libyan Ansar al-Sharia group, which assassinated the ambassador and three US staffers on Sept. 11. 2012, and numbered Egyptian al Qaeda jihadis who came in from Cairo.

This cross-alliance still functions with impunity as the Libyan group enforces its control over large areas of Benghazi and eastern Libya, funded by the smuggling of arms from Libya and pumping them into the big smuggling pipelines running through Sinai via Egypt.

Jihadist terror is also rampant in Sinai.  On Nov. 21, President Obama, in a phone call to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, pledged the immediate deployment of US troops for leading a comprehensive Egyptian campaign against the al Qaeda and Salafist Bedouin extremists who have settled in northern and central Sinai after driving the Egyptian administration out. This pledge was part of the ceasefire deal which ended Israel’s Gaza Strip operation. But so far, according to our military and counterterrorism sources, very little has been done except for a visit to Sinai by a small study group of American officers and servicemen.
The delay is accounted for mainly by the weighty challenges confronting Egyptian President Mohamed Mors in the last couple of months. Morso is practically the only office-holder in Cairo ready to endorse an covert military US operation in Sinai for eradicating the terrorist bane. Egyptian Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi was his only ally, but in recent weeks the Egyptian army has come out against an anti-al Qaeda expedition in Sinai.

The security situation there is constantly deteriorating as Egypt struggles to retain some grip on the territory. In mid-December, the defense minister in Cairo quietly issued an order, with made hardly a ripple outside Egypt, “restricting the right to buy property in Sinai to second-generation Egyptian citizens.”

This prohibition was made necessary, our sources disclose, by the land grab in force by partnerships of Persian Gulf tycoons, mainly Qatar, and Gazan Palestinian, mostly Hamas adherents. They were quietly snapping up choice coastal strips of Sinai to gain control of the peninsula’s Mediterranean and Gulf of Aqaba shores, as well as the western and eastern regions.

The Egyptian military passed the new law to save the territory from slipping out of its hands to Palestinian Hamas and Gulf oil interests.  Hamas is also believed to be in cahoots with allies in the armed terrorist groups of Libya and Sinai.

Delayed American action in Sinai has produced three results:

1.  The Sinai arms smuggling route (which also serves Iran) is thriving as never before. The expanded earnings of Ansar al-Sharia are bolstering its grip on power in Libya;
2.  Sinai has been allowed to evolve into al Qaeda’s primary operational-logistical hub for Africa and the Middle East, its jumping-off base for action in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen;
3.  In the absence of any resistance, al Qaeda is bringing its positions close to the Israeli border. All Egyptian military efforts to curtail the terrorist creep into the northern Sinai towns of El Arish and Rafah have had no effect.
Sunday, Jan. 6, a band of Salafist Bedouin came up to a parked car on the El Arish main street and shot the driver dead. debkafile reports that the victim, one of the top men in Egypt’s counter-terror campaign in northern Sinai, was on a surveillance mission in civilian dress. The terrorists knew who he was – indicating they have established a clandestine presence inside Egypt’s security services.