WarSclerotic

The Yeshiva World Report: Israel Navy Takes Out Syrian Air Defense Command « » Frum Jewish News.

( Feeling lots  of pride for my Navy at the moment… – JW )

According to the Walla report, which is not confirmed by official Israeli sources, loud explosions were heard in a Syria air defense command base in the Latakia area in northwestern Syria during the night between Wednesday and Thursday, 27 Cheshvan 5774. The base is located in a village called Snubar Jabala and it was totally destroyed.

Lebanese and Syrian sources point the finger of blame at Israel; citing missiles were fired from an Israeli naval vessel. In addition, Lebanese media is reporting six IAF fighter planes violated Lebanese air space on Wednesday, seen flying north of Beirut, near the Syrian border.

Chinese police detain five suspected Islamist militants after ‘terror attack’ on tourists – The Irish Times – Thu, Oct 31, 2013.

( The GLOBAL scourge of Radical Islam strikes again. – JW )

Assault near Tiananmen Square was ‘carefully planned and premeditated’

A Chinese policeman takes information from the passports of the family members of Filipino doctor Rizalina Bunyi, who was killed two days ago when a car rammed into a crowd around Tiananmen Square. Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

As Iran closes in on nuclear capability, regional states pursue their own programs | JPost | Israel News.

Shi’ite, Sunni tensions play critical part in fears over Iran’s increasing nuclear capabilities; The United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Turkey all have plans to build their own nuclear power plants.

Iran’s Nuclear Black Box – The Daily Beast.

( Thanks to artaxes… – JW )

by Eli Lake Oct 30, 2013 5:45 AM EDT

We caught them twice before. But as Iran gets craftier, sussing out its nuclear program is no sure thing.

Western intelligence agencies have had great success in the past sleuthing out Iran’s undeclared nuclear facilities. But the Iranians have gotten better at hiding their tracks, according to some current and retired United States intelligence officers who say it could prove very difficult for the world to catch Iran again if it tries to build a nuclear weapon in secret.

Since 2009, when the second uranium enrichment facility was revealed in Qom, Iran has taken several steps to better conceal a weapons program, these people say. It has beefed up security of its cyber networks, for example, after the Stuxnet computer worm infected computers in Iran’s largest uranium enrichment site. Its Revolutionary Guard has also established a cyber warfare command. The division’s commander died mysteriously earlier this month.

Iran has also improved security procedures for protecting personnel in its nuclear program, following a string of attacks on its scientists, allegedly by Israel. Finally, as Iran’s declared uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz and Qom have expanded, so has the country’s infrastructure for building centrifuges, the machines that enrich that uranium. The current and former U.S. intelligence officials say this means it’s easier for Iran to siphon off material for secret facilities with more nefarious purposes, if it chose to do so.

“There have been successes in finding secret Iranian sites but we know they are getting better at this,” said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit think tank. “They are better at keeping better secrets, better at compartmentalization of their program and they are better at cyber security.”

Iran’s leaders have publicly said they don’t intend to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S. intelligence community’s official estimate since 2007 is that Iran stopped work on developing a warhead, while continuing to work on the much more challenging process of enriching weapons grade fuel.

But the latest U.S. estimate, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, is that Iran has mastered the process for making the highly enriched uranium needed to build a nuclear weapon.

One recently retired senior U.S. intelligence official said he believed Iran was trying to build a weapon, but stressed that it’s a slow process. This official also said it would be easy to hide a secret enrichment facility in a warehouse in downtown Tehran. To start, it is difficult to detect uranium enrichment through measuring the changes in atmosphere around a physical plant. The lack of these kinds “signatures” means that the U.S. has to rely more on human assets as opposed to sophisticated satellites and other kinds of technical intelligence gathering to know if enrichment was taking place in a specific location.

The concern about hidden facilities is not hypothetical. Iran’s nuclear negotiators in the past have said there are plans to build new enrichment plants. In 2010 Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Akbar Salehi, said there were plans to build ten more such plants. Iranian officials in 2011 said those plans were delayed for two years.

Iran’s gains in security are not the only reason why detecting a secret facility could be difficult for western spies. Between 2003 and 2005, Iran shared information with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on its production of centrifuges, but it stopped sharing this data in 2005 after it withdrew from an interim agreement with the west on its nuclear programs and began expanding its program.

The data on centrifuge production was vital to intelligence agencies. Olli Heinonen, a former senior IAEA executive who worked on Iran’s program, said, “You can establish how many centrifuges they can manufacture out of this material. When you know the amount, you can fairly easily determine an upper limit of how many centrifuges have been made and determine whether they have declared everything to you.”

In 2009, when the U.S. discovered the secret underground enrichment facility known as Fordow in Qom, the centrifuge production information was only four years out of date. Today that information is eight years old.

“It’s much more likely that Iran would try to build nuclear weapons in a secret enrichment plant than one of the safeguarded plants,” said Gary Samore, who was the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction during President Obama’s first term. “If they tried to use one of their safeguarded plants it would be detected in a matter of weeks. It’s much safer for them to do it secretly. Once they have built a couple of nuclear weapons they would be in a position to test one to show the world and there is not much we can do about it.”

Samore said he still has faith in America’s ability to detect secret Iranian activities. But he also said it was no guarantee. “We detected both Natanz and Qom before they were completed. Whatever magic we are using, it’s still available to us. It’s not 100 percent guaranteed, of course not,” he said.

Iran denies 20% enrichment halt as nuclear diplomacy intensifies | JPost | Israel News.

Iran and 6 powers prepare for upcoming political talks in Geneva.

Polite statement after White House talks belies differences on Iran | The Times of Israel.

Unusual meeting of selected Jewish leaders with senior Obama officials comes amid signs of divergence in US and Israeli positions on nuclear crisis

The White House (photo credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON — A group of American Jewish leaders met Tuesday at the White House with senior Administration officials to discuss efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The meeting, arranged at the last minute, was described in a joint statement issued by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations as a “constructive and open exchange.” The sides agreed “to continue the consultation to enhance the prospect of achieving a transparent and effective diplomatic resolution,” the statement said.

There was nothing in the statement, however, to suggest that problems and disagreements between some of the groups and the administration had been resolved. AIPAC, for instance, has been lobbying hard for a new sanctions bill that is supposed to go to a vote in the Senate soon, and which the Obama administration has indicated it does not want to see advanced.

The Jewish leaders — from the Conference, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and AIPAC — said the Administration officials reaffirmed President Barack Obama’s “commitment to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear capability and that all options remain viable to assure that end.” Members of left-leaning organizations said that they had been excluded from the session by the White House.

One person present described the atmosphere as “congenial,” and said several aspects of US policy on Iran were discussed, including the new international negotiations and the pending Senate legislation.

The meeting was arranged amid an escalation of signals that the Obama and Netanyahu governments are parting ways on Iran strategy, and those leaders invited came from groups that deal closely with Israel and its security concerns. A number of groups normally high on the list for White House briefings were not invited, including representatives of the Reform and Orthodox movements.

A White House meeting with a broader group of Jewish-American organization leaders had been scheduled for Monday, but on Sunday, White House officials contacted some organizations to tell them that the meeting was delayed. When the meeting was rescheduled for Tuesday, one source told The Times of Israel, White House officials once again contacted the excluded organizations and explained to them that the meeting was only with the organizations that had challenged the administration’s policies on Iran.

A statement from Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, confirmed that the timing of the meeting was related to talks with Iran. “Following on the recent P5+1 talks with Iran, and in advance of the next round of talks November 7-8, Senior Administration Officials today briefed the leaders of several Jewish organizations on our progress,” Meehan said. “The administration officials made clear that the United States will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that our preference is to resolve the issue peacefully through diplomacy.”

The unusual session followed a tense, albeit coded, public exchange between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of State John Kerry in the last two days over Iran, as well as persistent backing by pro-Israel groups for a congressional bid to enhance Iran sanctions despite White House pleas to put new sanctions on hold.

On Sunday, addressing his Cabinet, Netanyahu derided in unusually sharp terms the attempts to talk Iran down from 20 percent to 3.5 percent uranium enrichment. “The Iranians are intentionally focusing the discussion on this issue. It is without importance,” said Netanyahu, who has insisted that Iran must dismantle all enrichment capabilities as part of a deal to end sanctions aimed at ending its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Netanyahu did not specify Kerry as advancing the proposal, but made it clear his remarks were made in the context of talks he had with Kerry last week in Rome. “This was the focus of the long and detailed talks I had with John Kerry,” he said.

Kerry appeared to return the jab in an address Monday evening to the Ploughshares Fund, a group that advocates nuclear disarmament. “The president has charged me to be and has welcomed an opportunity to try to put to the test whether or not Iran really desires to pursue only a peaceful program, and will submit to the standards of the international community in the effort to prove that to the world,” Kerry said.

“Some have suggested that somehow there’s something wrong with even putting that to the test,” Kerry said. “I suggest that the idea that the United States of America is a responsible nation to all of humankind would not explore that possibility would be the height of irresponsibility and dangerous in itself, and we will not succumb to those fear tactics and forces that suggest otherwise.”

In recent days a number of leading Jewish groups, including AIPAC, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Jewish Federations of North America, have reiterated support for advancing through Congress new and enhanced Iran sanctions, although the Obama administration has made clear publicly that it would prefer Congress put off dealing with the legislation until after the next round of talks in mid-November.

On Monday, Obama spoke with Netanyahu by phone about Iran’s nuclear program, Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and other Mideast issues. The phone call was part of their “regular consultations,” said a White House statement. “The two leaders agreed to continue their close coordination on a range of security issues.”

In Rome last week, Netanyahu held a marathon session of discussions with Kerry, much of which were focused on the Iranian threat.

In his speech to the UN General Assembly last month, Netanyahu said, “We all want to give diplomacy with Iran a chance to succeed, but when it comes to Iran, the greater the pressure, the greater the chance.” He added: “When it comes to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, here’s my advice: Distrust, dismantle and verify.”

Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Association, said Monday that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build an atomic weapon within two weeks and had, “in a certain way,” already reached the point of no return in its nuclear program.

Israel Hayom | ‘Congress loves Israel, but is even more averse to another conflict’.

Slowdown or showdown en route to new Iran sanctions bill | The Times of Israel.

Obama administration steps up top-level push to delay additional sanctions legislation set to go through Senate

Will Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) support a showdown or a slowdown on the Iran sanctions bill? (photo credit: CC BY-Glyn Lowe Photoworks, flickr)

WASHINGTON — Concerned about support in the Senate for the administration’s plan to delay a new Iran sanctions bill, the Obama administration was set to dispatch top-tier advocates to press the president’s cause on Capitol Hill starting Wednesday.

The push is expected to culminate in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday during which Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are slated to make the administration’s case to delay any additional sanctions legislation.

The Washington-based website Politico detailed a busy schedule of meetings on Iran over the next two days. Kerry was scheduled to hold a breakfast meeting Wednesday with Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN), while other administration officials were set to be dispatched to Capitol Hill to brief other committee leaders and ranking members.

The Senate Banking Committee is set to take up draft legislation that would further toughen up sanctions against Iran, despite Tehran’s return to the negotiating table. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) told AIPAC that the sanctions legislation he was considering would cut Iran’s oil exports further to a mere 500,000 barrels per day.

Such sanctions would reduce by half the current amount of oil exported from Iran, but would be more moderate than the parallel bill approved in July by the House of Representatives, which would almost completely eliminate such exports. Should such a bill pass through the Senate, it would then face a reconciliation process with the House legislation.

Menendez has taken a hard line in the past on Iran sanctions, and, according to a copy of his speech to AIPAC obtained by Reuters, he believed at the beginning of this week that “this is not the time to loosen sanctions.” Now, the powerful senator is reportedly waiting until this week’s briefings to deliver a verdict as to whether he will comply with the administration’s call to delay action on the Senate legislation.

The administration is looking for a delay on the legislation — most likely at least until it knows the outcome of the upcoming P5+1 talks with Iran scheduled for November 8 in Geneva.

“While we understand that Congress may consider new sanctions, we think this is a time for a pause, as we asked for in the past, to see if negotiations can gain traction,” State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said late last week.

The administration’s strong push to delay sanctions legislation began Thursday, when Senate Democratic leaders were asked, during a meeting at the White House, to delay the bill’s progress in the Senate. The Senate Banking Committee had been expected to introduce the sanctions bill on the following Tuesday.

The bill was one of the topics on the table Tuesday evening as well, when the White House called in a number of American Jewish organizations’ leaders who have advocated for a tougher approach on Iran.

Among the organizations that participated was AIPAC, which has taken the lead in pushing for the new sanctions legislation in the House and the Senate. AIPAC officials would not comment as to whether they were explicitly asked during the hastily-summoned meeting to ease up the pressure on senators to approve the legislation, but left-leaning Jewish groups who are less sanctions-enthusiastic said that they had not been asked to attend the meeting.

Leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and AIPAC met with National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisors Antony Blinken and Ben Rhodes and Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, but none of the organizations emerged from the meeting publicly voicing promises to stop pushing for the new legislation.

Afghanistan already here – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

( I’d say, “there goes the neighborhood” but it’s always been terrible.  Cyanide or strychnine… – JW )

Analysis: Global jihad spreading like cancer throughout Middle East; Israel preparing for the worst

Alex Fishman

More than 30,000 global jihadists have settled in and are fighting in countries that border with Israel. They belong to various groups, but they all have one dream: To liberate the Arab world from heretic regimes, with the climax being the liberation of Jerusalem. Afghanistan is already here; on our border.

Global jihad is the main concrete threat the army will be preparing for in 2014, and it is the focus of discussions the defense minister is holding with the General Staff ahead of the next working year. While not all of the IDF’s top officers accept the term “Afghanistan is already here,” there is broad agreement regarding the scope of the threat this development poses to Israel.

The argument is about the timetable: Is global jihad approaching the time when it will turn its attention to “take care” of the State of Israel, or does it need more time to establish itself on the ground and complete the mission of “taking care” of the heretic regimes of Assad, King Abdullah, General al-Sisi and others? IDF operational officers identify the jihadi threat as immediate. Army officials specializing in assessment are more cautious.

All the incidents that occurred along the borders between Israel and its neighbors since August 2011 involved global jihadists. The expected threat consists not only of the firing of rockets and missiles. Global jihad will try to breach the border and paint in the heart of Israel a picture of terror attacks similar to the one that is seen in Iraq and Afghanistan on a daily basis.

Never better?

The global jihad threat is a direct result of the Arab Spring. Just as the turmoil the region experienced between 1979 and 1982 (from Khomeini’s rise to power to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the first Lebanon war) led to the rise of extremist forces such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban, global jihad was drawn into the vacuum left by the collapsing regimes around us.

The army is also discussing the supposed discrepancy between the sense that the Middle East has shifted from a reality of crises to a reality of agreements and the intelligence assessments indicating that the potential for an explosion remains high. There are talks with Iran, dialogue with Syria and negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The security establishment sees another positive development in the dramatic weakening of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Seemingly, our situation has never been better.

But all of these processes are expected to exhaust themselves towards May-June. The Iranians are talking about a solution within six months; the Syrians are supposed to get rid of their chemical weapons and head for elections in the summer of 2014; and Israel and the Palestinians need to reach an agreement by April. What if these processes fail to yield results? Where will that put the State of Israel?

The only element in the Middle East that these processes have no effect on is global jihad. The dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons and the plan to reach a political agreement with the opposition in Syria does not interest global jihad. Lately there have been more and more clashes not only between global jihad and the Syrian army, but also between jihadists and moderate rebels. Global jihad settles in every area that is vacated in Syria, including the Deraa region, which is not far from the Israeli-Syrian-Jordanian border triangle. If they get a foothold in the Golan Heights, Israel will not be able to remain indifferent.

Meanwhile, this cancer is spreading, and no one can stop it. Who’ll be able to expel from Syria those tens of thousands of global jihadists? The Egyptians estimate there are some 3,000 jihadists in Sinai. Some of them are connected to the Syrian Jabhat al-Nusra group, while others are affiliated with al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. In Lebanon several hundred Sunni-Lebanese are operating under the auspices of Syrian global jihad groups. Hezbollah is having a hard time dealing with groups such as the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which launched rockets at Israel and detonated car bombs in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district. In Gaza there are also a few hundred global jihadists, who pose a threat to the Hamas regime.

Has the Middle East missed the train?

US senators seek to cut Iran’s oil sales in half – again – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez tells AIPAC he’s pushing package of sanctions aimed at cutting Iran’s current oil exports; White House officials meet with Jewish leaders ahead of Geneva talks

Reuters

Fresh US sanctions over Iran’s disputed nuclear program being debated behind closed doors in the Senate aim to slash the country’s oil sales in half within a year of the plan being signed into law, an influential senator said this week.

Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in New York on Monday that a package of sanctions ready to move in his chamber has a goal of cutting Iran’s current oil exports to no more than 500,000 barrels per day.

The reduction being sought is about 500,000 bpd less than a more severe bill passed by the House of Representatives in July, which aimed to slash exports to nearly zero.

The Senate bill, which has yet to be introduced by the banking committee, has been widely expected to be weaker than the House bill, which some analysts had said was not realistic.

Since the beginning of 2012, US and European sanctions have already cut Iran’s oil exports to about 1 million bpd from about 2.5 million bpd, costing the Islamic Republic crude sales worth billions of dollars a month, and helping to spike inflation and unemployment.

But international talks over Iran’s nuclear program have revived after self-described moderate President Hassan Rohani took office in August in Tehran.

Menendez said Iran must freeze and dismantle its nuclear program and demonstrate it is complying before sanctions are lifted.

“This is not the time to loosen sanctions,” Menendez told AIPAC, according to a copy of the speech that was seen by Reuters. Menendez said he had told members of the Obama administration he was ready to work with fellow senators to move a new package of sanctions if necessary.

Menendez said the sanctions package would require China, India, South Korea, Turkey andJapan, Iran’s remaining oil customers, to further slash their purchases of Iranian crude and other petroleum products.

Aversion to conflict

Bob McNally, a White House adviser on energy to former President George W. Bush, Obama’s Republican predecessor, said the House bill was seen by many lawmakers as too aggressive.

“The only thing stronger than love for Israel in the Congress is aversion to another military conflict,” said McNally. “There is a concern in the Congress about tightening the sanctions so much that it would lead to a conflict.”

The plan mentioned by Menendez could still undergo big changes in the banking committee and before being passed by the full Senate, reconciled with the House, and signed into law by Obama.

The Obama administration has pressed the Senate to hold off on introducing new sanctions in order to give the talks a chance.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew are set to hold a secret meeting with senators on Thursday about progress of the talks. The United States, China, Russia, Great Britain, France and Germany, the so-called P5+1, are due to hold a second round of talks with Iran in Geneva on Nov 7-8.

Meanwhile, Top US administration officials hosted Jewish leaders ahead of the second round of nuclear talks with Iran. One official told the Jewish leaders that that the US will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon but that the preferred course of action would be to resolve the matter in peaceful, diplomatic ways.

The meeting was attended by leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC. White House officials said the meeting was constructive.

Yitzhak Benhorin contributed to this report