WarSclerotic

Rouhani: Nuclear row is West’s pretext to confront Iran | JPost | Israel News.

Unexplained, conflicting US global terror warnings now extend to American homeland.

AQIM fighters in Yemen

Saturday night Aug. 3, the global warnings issued last week by the US State Department and Interpol against terrorist attacks covering almost the entire Muslim world, suddenly reached the American homeland. Sunday morning, Aug. 4, as US missions closed in 22 countries, including Egypt and Israel, the New York Police Department went on high alert. Security was beefed up in high-profile areas outside houses of worship and transportation hubs, although Police Commissioner Ray Kelly complained that “a lack of specific information was cause for concern.”

Friday, Aug. 2 the State Department issued a worldwide travel alert warning to Americans overseas of potential al Qaeda attacks in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Saturday night, National Security Adviser Susan Rice convened security officials on the situation. The White House stated: “Given the nature of the potential threat through the week, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and counter-terrorism Lisa Monaco has held regular meetings with relevant members of the inter-agency to ensure the US government is taking those appropriate steps.”
Nothing in this statement specified the nature of the “potential threat.”

Sunday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the ABC that the threat was “more specific than previous ones” and “the intent is to attack Western, not just US interests.” He reported that the diplomatic facilities closed “range from Mauritania in northwest Africa to Afghanistan.”

Western and Middle East terrorism and intelligence experts say that in additional to the lack of information, at least six elements don’t add up in the various global warnings released since Thursday Aug. 1:

1. Thursday, US President Barack Obama ordered that “all appropriate steps” be taken to protect Americans in response to a threat of an al-Qaeda attack. What does this mean? The experts comment that even if all US agencies were pressed into service worldwide, there is no way they could protect all Americans in the vast area marked out in the warnings.
2.  If the threat is specific why does the warning extend to so many countries? Al Qaeda is not even active in all them. If the danger is so immediate, why haven’t any governments in North Africa and as far east as Bangladesh declared their own terror alerts?

3.  US officials reported that some of the intelligence came from terrorist communications intercepted by the National Security Agency over the past days. This too raises questions, considering that al Qaeda leaders are wont to avoid electronic media and satellite phones for their communications on operations, preferring couriers who are not susceptible to electronic interception or eavesdropping. The Internet serves them for propaganda and planting red herrings.
4.  In the past week, US drones conducted three attacks against al Qaeda targets in Yemen, where the organization is defined by US officials as al Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate and capable of attacking the US embassy in Sanaa.

The last drone attack Aug. 1 killed five low-profile al Qaeda operatives, who were driving in a vehicle in the Qatan Valley of Hadramouth province (Osama bin Laden’s place of birth).
All 12 US drone attacks in Yemen of the last eight months targeted Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Although its deputy chief Said al Shiri, a former inmate of the Guantanamo Bay facility, was eliminated, AQAP’s entire high command has remained intact and fully functional. In other words, US intelligence counter-terror agencies have not discovered their whereabouts.
5.  Neither have they run down the location of al Qaeda’s top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Tuesday, he released a communiqué accusing US agents of engineering the coup which deposed the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood president by penetrating the Egyptian army. He called for more attacks on America.
6.  Saturday, the international police agency, Interpol, published a global security alert following “the escape of hundreds of terrorists and other criminals” in the past month, including jailbreaks in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan. Interpol feared that the escapees would team up with al Qaeda to hit Western targets. Yet none of its 190 member states have declared terror alerts on this score either.
7. Finally, the sweeping warnnings from the Obama administration dramatically refute its own oft-heard claims that al Qaeda is no longer a force to be reckoned with, because it has lost its compact central command and control of its component branches, which have split up into regional franchises operating autonomously. Al Qaeda, they have been saying, is no longer capable of large-scale terrorist attacks on a global scale.

Israeli silence on Syria is strategic | NDTV.com.

Reuters | Updated: February 01, 2013 18:19 IST

Jerusalem: Military secrets are not readily divulged anywhere. But in Israel the blanket silence that envelops officials after an event like Wednesday’s mysterious air strike on Syria reflects a deeper strategy involving both deterrence and outreach.

Beyond customary concern to safeguard spies and tactics for a government currently engaged in a graver confrontation with Iran, Israelis see such reticence as allowing their foes to save face and thus reduce the risk of reprisal and escalation.

Keeping silent, and so avoiding accusations of provocatively bragging of its exploits, also smoothes Israel’s discreet cooperation with Muslim neighbours – such as Turkey or Jordan – who might otherwise feel bound to distance themselves.

Israeli leaders see benefit at home from not trumpeting successes that might give their public, or indeed Western allies, an exaggerated faith in their forces’ capabilities.

And given international complaints that an unprovoked strike on a sovereign power breached international law, admitting the fact could only provide diplomatic complications.

So it was in 2007, when then prime minister Ehud Olmert muzzled his staff after the bombing of a suspected Syrian atomic reactor – a no-comment policy still in effect, though the United States has freely discussed that Israeli sortie and its target.

Olmert “wanted to avoid anything that might back Syria into a corner and force Assad to retaliate,” the U.S. president at the time, George W. Bush, would recall in his memoir.

A former Olmert aide confirmed that account, telling Reuters the premier also feared for close military ties with Turkey, whose territory the Israeli warplanes crossed en route to Syria.

Israelis were then – as now – poised for a threatened war against arch-enemy Iran. Olmert, skeptical about whether Israel had the clout to take on the distant and much larger adversary, did not want to mislead his public by playing up the successful but far smaller-scale sortie against Syria next door.

“We knew the message of what had taken place would be received by the Syrian and Iranian leaderships, and that was enough for us,” the ex-aide said on condition of anonymity.

So if Israel did attack a Syrian arms convoy headed to Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, or a military complex near Damascus, around dawn on Wednesday, as described by various sources, a similar logic may now be keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet and defence chiefs quiet.

Tackling the Iranian nuclear programme is Israel’s top priority, making it hesistant to lurch into other conflicts – especially with Syria’s Assad government, an old enemy whose menace has faded, in Israeli eyes, with the two-year-old revolt.

Nor does Israel seek a flare-up with Hezbollah, which has mostly held fire since their 2006 war in southern Lebanon.

LINES AND ALLIES

Russia, Damascus’s long-time arms supplier, said any Israeli air strike would amount to unacceptable military interference.

A former Israeli national security adviser, Giora Eiland, agreed. If Israel indeed attacked Syria, he said, eluding legal scrutiny might be a secondary reason for its silence: “The U.N. will never jump to back a military operation – certainly not by Israel,” Eiland told Reuters.

Mindful, perhaps, of the self-imposed silence that would follow any raid, Israeli officials may have taken pains to offer justifications for any intervention in advance.

For months, they had been saying that if Iranian-backed Hezbollah, or Syria’s Islamist rebels, acquired Syrian chemical weapons or advanced Russian missiles as Assad’s grip faltered, that could pose a new order of threat to Israel – a “red line” the Netanyahu government said must not be crossed.

Such warnings came thick and fast early this week, then died out when news surfaced of Wednesday’s strike – albeit some hours after it took place, a lag itself attesting to Israeli stealth and, perhaps, Syrian and Lebanese reluctance to go public.

Israel’s military censors then quickly stepped in, barring media there from reporting anything on it from Israeli sources.

For Israeli media to have given even anonymous commentaries on an attack on Syria from Israeli officials, would only make it harder for the Israeli government to avoid provoking hostility from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others on whom it is counting for at least quiescence in its struggle with mutual foe Tehran.

The former Olmert aide said Israel’s secrecy policy amounted to “recognising Middle East manliness” – not adding insult to injury for enemies and friends alike. Control of its own media by the censors reflected the fact that, “in this part of the world, many people see the messaging from a country’s media as synonymous with the messaging from that country’s government”.

So whether Israel wants to avoid provoking Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, or alienating Turkey and the Sunni Arabs, the former aide said, “silence is the best way forward”.

Sunni-Shi’ite battles spread like wildfire | JPost | Israel News.