Obama Peace in Syria by Dropping Leaflets

Is this how the Obama administration handles a civil war in Syria?

BEIRUT — A U.S.-led coalition dropped new leaflets over the de facto capital of the Islamic State group in Syria, warning those below that “freedom will come” to the region, activists said Sunday.

60,000 leaflets dropped in Sarrin and Raqqa

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A Raqqa-based anti-Islamic State group and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the leaflets had drawings showing dead extremists and their flag turned upside down. Four fighters with the main Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, walked down a street in the picture, with two words in Arab below: “Freedom will come.”

The network called Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered posted a copy of the leaflets on its Twitter account. There was no immediate response from the Islamic State group.

The latest leaflet drop comes as YPG fighters have been advancing in northern Syria as close as 50 kilometres north of Raqqa.

Coalition warplanes have dropped such leaflets in the past. One previous had a cartoon showing masked Islamic State extremists at a “hiring office” feeding people into a meat grinder.

The Islamic State group holds about a third of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in its self-declared “caliphate.” On Friday, a truck bombing by the group in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province killed 115 people at a crowded market.

On Sunday, two senior Iraqi police officials told The Associated Press that the police chief in the town of Khan Beni Saad, where the attack happened, and three officers have been fired in the wake of the bombing. They said two other officers are being investigated.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to talk to journalists.

Details Emerging on Chattanooga Shooter and Family

According to CNN Arabia:

Amman, Jordan (CNN) – Jordanian official said that the shooter in the American civil Chattanooga Tennessee, which led to the deaths of four US Marines Thursday, not a Jordanian citizen, but a Palestinian passport temporarily and without a national number.

The source explained that “after investigations show that the name of the person who launched the attack in Tennessee in the United States, is Mohammed Yousef Saeed Ali Haj, who was born on September 5 / September” in 1990, according to the source. His father moved to live in the United States in 1982.

He added that Mohammed’s father had changed his name to Abdul Aziz in 1990, so that became his son’s name is Mohammad Yousuf, Abdul Aziz, according to the Jordanian government source, who added that the gunman holds a US passport, and that the son was in Jordan in 2014 on a visit to his uncle.

***

According to a tip that came into WDEF, Muhammad Abdulazeez was spotted at a gun range just weeks before killing four Marines and one Navy Petty Officer.

Abdulazeez was reportedly spotted with three other men who were wearing long beards like Abdulazeez. All four were reportedly practice shooting.

The claim has not been confirmed by law enforcement but several sources told WDEF the men were likely spotted at Prentice Cooper Gun Range.

When News 12 arrived at the gun range, several men who were practicing shooting said a man who claimed to be a former Marine arrived at the range Saturday morning and said he was doing his own investigation to see if Abdulazeez had been shooting at that location.

The men said he asked multiple groups of people who were at the range.

CBS News is also reporting that Abdulazeez told his co-workers that he and a group of guys recently went shooting at a gun range. CBS News got its information from law enforcement sources who interviewed Abdulazeez’s co-workers.

According to a published CBS News report, the men reportedly shot rifles, BB guns and pistols last month.

***

Abdulazeez had purchased three guns after returning from Jordan, including an AK-74, an AR-15, and a Saiga 12. In the home was also a 9mm and a .22 caliber weapons, it is unclear in whose name those weapons were registered.

***

From the Center for Security Policy:

As we reported Friday, the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga (ISGC) is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood through the Hamas-linked North American Islamic Trust (NAIT.) Now new evidence has been revealed showing that ISGC actually raised funds for the building of their new mosque in 2009, by referencing jihad and key Muslim Brotherhood figures.

According to a 2009 Iftar fundraising dinner slide show, first apparently noticed by Twitter user @alimhaider, contained an overt reference to key Muslim Brotherhood figure Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The title of the slide, “In the cause of Allah” is an English translation of Fi Sabil Allah, as in the phrase “Jihad Fisabilallah”, which means violent jihad against unbelievers. Classic Islamic law reference book, the Reliance of the Traveller, notes in its index, “Fisabilallah: See Jihad”. There is no other reasonable interpretation of the phrase in context.

The reference to jihad in the fundraiser related to the Mosque, was done as a means of explaining that a contribution to the building of the mosque qualified under “Zakat” (annual tithe which is obligatory in Islam), under the category of funding Jihad.

ISGCZakat

Reliance of the Traveller notes, “The seventh category is those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster (O: but who are volunteers for jihad without remuneration)…”

The slide “Cause of Allah” references Yusuf Al Qaradawi, and S.A.A. Maududi, founder of Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Both Qaradawi and Maududi are prolific on the subject of Jihad.

Qaradawi has been noted for his avid support for the terrorist group Hamas and their jihad against Israel, including issuing fatwas authorizing suicide bombing, and has supported jihadist movements in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and most recently in Egypt. Qaradawi is the leader of the Hamas financing network known as the “Union of the Good”, which utilizes Zakat funds received by its charities in order to support Hamas.

In his work, “Islamic Education and Hassan Al Banna,” Qaradawi discusses how it was the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) which revitalized the classical concept of Jihad for a modern age:

The aspect of Ikhwani training which makes it eminent and unique is Jehad or crusade i e. : Crusader·like training…The real implication of · Jehad (crusade) had been dismissed from Islamic training and way of life, before its conception among the lkhwans.

And in his “Priorities of the Movement in the Coming phase” Qaradawi says:

…it is a duty to defend every land invaded by infidels, stating that such jihad is imperative for Muslims in this land as an individual obligation and that all Muslims must support them with money, arms and men as required until all their land has been liberated from any aggressor who usurps it. Therefore, the Islamic Movement cannot stand idle and watch while any part of Muslim land is occupied by a foreign aggressor.

The other modern Islamic scholar referenced by the document, Maulana S.A.A. Maududi, was famous for successfully merging classical Islamic concepts of Jihad with a modernist language of revolution. He noted the following in his work “Jihad in Islam”:

It must be evident to you from this discussion that the objective of the Islamic ‘ Jihād’ is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule. Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution. Although in the initial stages it is incumbent upon members of the party of Islam to carry out a revolution in the State system of the countries to which they belong, but their ultimate objective is no other than to effect a world revolution.

So the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga announced in 2009 that it openly aligned its views of Jihad with the views of Qaradawi and Maududi, and told its Muslim congregants that donating to the construction of ISGC was permissible, because it represented funding jihad.

Chattanooga shooter Mohammed Yusuf Abdulazeez and his family were regular attendees as ISGC. Despite claims by the mosque leadership that Abdulazeez was a rare attendee or little known there, a photo from a family Facebook account shows that Abdulazeez held his graduation party at the mosque, and that it was well attended, indicating they were well known regulars.

This fundraising document was publicly available information, three years before U.S. District Attorney William Killian attended the grand opening in 2012 and expressed his friendship with a mosque leadership who built their mosque with a promise that funding them represented an investment in jihad.

Now that investment appears to have matured.

U.S. District Attorney William Killian should recuse himself from this case, because of his association with ISGC, and the investigators must begin to conduct a detailed and through investigation of ISGC itself, and what role its support for violent jihad may have played in the attack in Chattanooga which claimed the lives of five servicemen.

WH: Census to Home Surveys to HUD to Massive Database

In 2013, Congresswoman Maxine Waters appeared on television and spilled the secret.

Did you ever wonder exactly why the White House took control of the U.S. Census in 2010 from the Commerce Secretary? It was a multi-tracked mission that not only included future Gerrymandering efforts, but it was for data-mining housing, and to all patterns of personal life across the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese have hacked databases and has personal data.

It was just a few weeks ago that Housing and Urban Development announced a scheme to racially diversify neighborhoods across the country. Zipcodes appear to be racist and the White House with HUD is working to change that.

So understand these efforts, in 2013 the profiles of cities began where fact sheets have been created.

A sample of what they are tracking is found here.

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So, when the NY Post publishes this by Paul Sperry, one must take real notice. We have a pattern here.

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.

 

Iran Agreement Celebrated by WH, What Others are Doing

While no one has paid much attention beyond Obama spiking the football, it is important to keep a keen eye on those countries affected and the other secret maneuvers the White House is still doing.

1. The National Security Council, the White House and the State Department have delivered the JPOA already to the United Nations before Congress received it, much less can debate it.

2. Those pesky inspections that likely will not happen at all, they certainly wont happen by ANY U.S. personnel. Iran has banned U.S. Inspectors.

3. An Iranian police chief has now been put in charge of Yemen with the West’s approval.

4. There are several additional parts to the JPOA that are under negotiation now, so a full understanding of the whole agreement cannot even be accessed nor achieved.

5. The deal with Iran includes elements to destroy Israel’s ability to defend itself.

6. Saudi Arabia made a decision to NOT wait until Iran get their big cash payload, they are moving ahead in matters with Yemen, Syria and offensive measures with Iran.

7. The White House is now meeting with Saudi Arabia and Israel to re-gen the relationship. A Saudi envoy is in Washington DC for talks and Secretary of Defense has been dispatched to Israel.

8. There are talks to provide Israel with the B-52 bombers and the Bunker Busters have already been upgraded and delivered.

9. Investigations are underway to determine what Iran will buy and stockpile with respect to their missile inventory given that concession.

10. Due to unforeseen future actions by Iran, the Pentagon has war-planners determining all military responses against Iran.

11. Several concerned countries have offered alternative plans to the signed Iran P5+1 deal yet they are being dismissed and or rejected, spelling out larger allied separation from the United States.

12. Future Middle East unrest and attacks are forecasted.

13. Russia is fully empowered with the Iran deal but may have to take a short term financial hit on oil prices.

14. Bashir al Assad of Syria remains in power, gets a financial boost from Iran and the civil war in Syria continues.

15. Allies are at odds over the Iran deal as noted by the clash between the UK and Israel.

16. The arms race in the Middle East has begun such that it includes missiles and purchasing nuclear weapons.

17. The continued divided between the White House and Congress is now permanently broken where Joe Biden has been dispatched to sell it.

18. The Iran lobby money and operations will escalate in Washington DC.

19. By Iran receiving billions, the plotting of future terrorism around the globe is probable.

20. Iran is already threatening those who opposed the deal.

21. Iran is now open for global business and Europe is delighted where they will fund additional aggressions by a rogue country leaving the United States to track covert money, agreements and relationships.

22. Iran and Cuba human rights abuses will continue to be noticed and checked yet will go without consequence.

 

In Secret: Obama Returned Iranian Prisoners, but Ignored Ours

There are 4 Americans in prison in Iran for which there have been countless calls and efforts for their release. Major Garrett of CBS asked Barack Obama during a press conference if he was content with leaving those Americans behind to which Obama responded by shaming Garrett for even asking the question.

It should also be noted that the Palestinian Authority demanded that thousands of terrorists in prison in Israel be released for a scheduled round of peace talks between Israel and the PA. Barack Obama forced Israel to comply for face financial extortion. Israel complied where later many of those terrorists were re-arrested in Qatar. The betrayal continues. The secrets were effective.

So the secret deals began and continued.

‘US freed top Iranian scientist as part of secret talks ahead of Geneva deal’

Mojtaba Atarodi, arrested in California for attempting to acquire equipment for Iran’s military-nuclear programs, was released in April as part of back channel talks, Times of Israel told. The contacts, mediated in Oman for years by close colleague of the Sultan, have seen a series of US-Iran prisoner releases, and there may be more to come

Times of Israel:

The secret back channel of negotiations between Iran and the United States, which led to this month’s interim deal in Geneva on Iran’s rogue nuclear program, has also seen a series of prisoner releases by both sides, which have played a central role in bridging the distance between the two nations, the Times of Israel has been told.

In the most dramatic of those releases, the US in April released a top Iranian scientist, Mojtaba Atarodi, who had been arrested in 2011 for attempting to acquire equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs.

American and Iranian officials have been meeting secretly in Oman on and off for years, according to a respected Israeli intelligence analyst, Ronen Solomon. And in the past three years as a consequence of those talks, Iran released three American prisoners, all via Oman, and the US responded in kind. Then, most critically, in April, when the back channel was reactivated in advance of the Geneva P5+1 meetings, the US released a fourth Iranian prisoner, high-ranking Iranian scientist Atarodi, who was arrested in California on charges that remain sealed but relate to his attempt to acquire what are known as dual-use technologies, or equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs. Iran has not reciprocated for that latest release.

Solomon, an independent intelligence analyst (who in 2009 revealed the crucial role played by German Federal Intelligence Service officer Gerhard Conrad in the negotiations that led to the 2011 Gilad Shalit Israel-Hamas prisoner deal), has been following the US-Iran meetings in Oman for years. Detailing what he termed the “unwritten prisoner exchange deals” agreed over the years in Oman by the US and Iran, Solomon told The Times of Israel that “It’s clear what the Iranians got” with the release of top scientist Atarodi in April. “What’s unclear is what the US got.”

The history of these deals, though, he said, would suggest that in the coming months Iran will release at least one of three US citizens who are currently believed to be in Iranian custody. One of these three is former FBI agent Robert Levinson.

Undated photo of retired-FBI agent Robert Levinson (photo credit: AP/Levinson Family)

Solomon told The Times of Israel that the interlocutor in the Oman talks is a man named Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily, who is the executive president of the Omani Center for Investment Promotion and Export Development and a close confidant of the Omani leader Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

Educated in the US and the UK and fluent in English, Ismaily has authored two books. “Messengers of Monotheism: A Common Heritage of Christians, Jews and Muslims” and “A Cup of Coffee: A Westerner’s Guide to Business in the Gulf States.”

The latter tells the fictional tale of John Wilkinson, a successful American businessman who fails in all of his business endeavors in the Gulf until he meets Sultan, who explains to him, according to the book’s promotional literature, how to forgo his hard-charging Western style and “surrender to very different values rooted in ancient tribal customs and traditions.” Those mores have been central to the murky prisoner swaps surrounding the nuclear negotiations, Solomon said.

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, right, shakes hands with Omani Sultan Qaboos during an official arrival ceremony, in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 25, 2013. (photo credit: AP/Iranian Presidency Office, Hojjat Sepahvand)

Solomon said he identified Ismaily’s role back in September 2010, when Sarah Shourd, an American who apparently inadvertently crossed into Iran while hiking near the Iraqi border, was released, for what were called humanitarian reasons. She was delivered into Ismaily’s hands in Oman and from there was flown to the US — the first release in the series of deals brokered in Oman. One year later, in September 2011, her fiancé and fellow hiker, Shane Bauer, was set free along with their friend, Josh Fattal. The two men were also received at Muscat’s Seeb military airport by Ismaily before being flown back to the US.

Former Iranian hostages Shane Bauer, left, Sarah Shourd, center, and Josh Fattal (photo credit: AP/Press TV)

The US began reciprocating in August 2012, Solomon said. It freed Shahrzad Mir Gholikhan, an Iranian convicted on three counts of weapons trafficking. Next Nosratollah Tajik, a former Iranian ambassador to Jordan — who, like Gholikhan, had been initially apprehended abroad trying to buy night-vision goggles from US agents — was freed after the US opted not to follow up an extradition request it had submitted to the British. Then, in January 2013, Amir Hossein Seirafi was released, also via Oman, having been arrested in Frankfurt and convicted in the US of trying to buy specialized vacuum pumps that could be used in the Iranian nuclear program.

Finally, in April, came the release of Mojtaba Atarodi.

The facts of his case are still shrouded. On December 7, 2011, Atarodi, a faculty member at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran — a US-educated electrical engineer with a heart condition, a green card and a brother living in the US — arrived at LAX and was arrested by US federal officials.

He appeared twice in US federal court in San Francisco and was incarcerated at a federal facility in Dublin, California and then kept under house arrest. The US government cloaked the contents of his indictment and released no statement upon his release. His lawyer, Matthew David Kohn, told The Times of Israel he would like to discuss the case further but that first he had to “make some inquiries” to see what he was allowed to reveal.

In January, shortly after Atarodi’s arrest, his colleagues wrote a letter to the journal Nature, protesting his detention. “We believe holding a distinguished 55-year-old professor in custody is a historical mistake and not commensurate with the image that America strives to extend throughout the world as a bastion of free scientific exchange among schools and academic institutions,” they said.

Solomon, who compiled a profile of Atarodi, believes that the scientist, prior to his arrest, played an important role in Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. Atarodi, he said, has co-authored more than 30 technical articles, mostly related to micro-electric engineering and, in 2011, won the Khwarizmi award for the design of a microchip receiver for digital photos. “That same technology,” he said, “can be used for missile guidance and the analysis of nuclear tests.”

Solomon further noted that the then-Iranian defense minister and former commander of the revolutionary guards, Ahmad Vahidi, attended the prize ceremony and that Professor Massoud Ali-Mahmoudi, an Iranian physics professor who was assassinated in 2010, was an earlier recipient of the prize.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Atarodi came to the US at the behest of the logistics wing of the IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps],” Solomon said.

On April 26 Atarodi was flown from the US to Seeb military airbase in Oman, where he met with Ismaily, and onward to Iran. “The release of someone who holds that sort of information and has advanced strategic projects in Iran is a prize,” Solomon said. The US, said Solomon, must have already received something in return or will do so in the future.

Thus far, US-Iran prisoner swaps have been conducted in a manner utterly distinct from the old Cold War rituals, in which, as was the case with Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, spies or prisoners from either side of the Iron Curtain walked across Berlin’s old Glienicke Bridge toward their respective home countries. Instead, with Iran claiming it knows nothing about the whereabouts of former FBI agent Levinson, for instance, and the US eager to show that it will not barter with hostage-takers, the deals have taken the form of a delayed quid pro quo.

There are currently three US nationals — Levinson, Saeed Abedini, and Amir Hekmati — still believed to be held in Iran.

US President Barak Obama raised the issue of the imprisoned Americans in his historic September phone call to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken, told CNN that aside from the nuclear program it was the only other issue that was brought up in the call.

The interim deal in Geneva did not include any reference to prisoner dealings. Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN, “you’ve got to decide how much you’re going to try to accomplish, and just tackling all the dimensions of the nuclear agreement is ambition enough.” A spokeswoman for the National Security Council added that the “talks focused exclusively on nuclear issues.”

The omission prompted the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow, who is representing Pastor Saeed Abedini’s wife Naghmeh, to charge Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry with turning their backs on an American citizen. On the center’s website, he called the decision “outrageous and a betrayal” and said it sends the message that “Americans are expendable.”

Abedini, who was born in Iran and later converted to Christianity, was arrested earlier this year in Iran for what would seem was strictly Christian charity work and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was recently transferred from Evin Prison, a notorious jail for political prisoners in Tehran, Sukelow wrote in a letter to Kerry, “to the even more notorious and brutal Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj.”

Amir Hekmati, a 31-year-old former Marine from Flint, Michigan, who allegedly obtained permission to visit his grandmother in Iran in 2011, was charged with espionage and sentenced to death in 2012. In September, Hekmati managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. Published in the Guardian, it contended that his filmed admission of guilt had been coerced and that his arrest “is part of a propaganda and hostage-taking effort by Iranian intelligence to secure the release of Iranians abroad being held on security-related charges.”

Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine held in Iran over the past two years on accusations of spying for the CIA. (photo credit: Hekmati family/FreeAmir.org)

Levinson, a 65-year-old veteran of the FBI, was last seen on March 9, 2007, on Kish Island, Iran. According to Solomon, Levinson was stationed in Dubai at the time as part of a US task force comprised of former officers operating in the United Arab Emirates, training officials there to combat weapons trafficking, and was tempted to come to Kish for a meeting.

The last person he is known to have had contact with, and with whom he shared a room the night before his abduction, according to a Reuters article from 2007, is Dawud Salahuddin, an American convert to Islam, who is wanted in the US for murder. According to a New Yorker profile of the Long Island-born Salahuddin, he showed up at the home of Ali Akbar Tabatabai’s Bethseda, Maryland door in July 1980, dressed as a mailman, and shot Tabatabai, a Shah supporter, three times in the abdomen, killing him. From there he fled to Canada and on to Switzerland and Iran.

Salahuddin has indicated that Levinson had come to Kish to meet with him.

In September, Rouhani denied any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts. In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, he said that, “We don’t know where he is, who he is. He is an American who has disappeared. We have no news of him.”

This is highly doubtful. In 2010 and 2011 Levinson’s family received a video and photographs respectively of him in captivity. In January of this year the AP reported that “despite years of denials,” many US security officials now believe that “Iran’s intelligence service was almost certainly behind the 54-second video and five photographs of Levinson that were emailed anonymously to his family.” The photos and the videos traced back to different addresses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggesting, perhaps, that Levinson, the longest-held hostage in US history, was imprisoned in Balochistan, a desert region spanning the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Levinson’s son Dan wrote a column in the Washington Post calling Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “well-respected men committed to the goodwill of all human beings, regardless of their nationality.”

Several hours later, White House Spokesman Jay Carney published a statement saying that the US government welcomes the assistance “of our international partners” in attempting to bring Levinson home and, he added, “we respectfully ask the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to assist us in securing Mr. Levinson’s health, welfare, and safe return.”

As was the case with the Geneva negotiations, and as is likely happening with the upcoming round of talks regarding Syria, there is good reason to believe, and in this case to hope, that the movements played out under the spotlights of the international stage have been choreographed well in advance, perhaps in the sea-side city of Muscat, under the careful tutelage of Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily.