Iran, a Terror State But Latin America Also?

Posted on March 17, 2015March 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

Iran has a long history of killing Americans and has several proxy armies including Hezbollah, Qods and the Madhi Army. No one seems to ask deeper questions but personally I have been quite concerned over the Iranian influence in Central and South America, our own hemisphere. For years I have been watching this closely. Why?

Bombshell report alleges Argentina, Iran, and Venezuela were once all bound together by sex, drugs, and nuclear secrets

Three former Venezuelan government officials who defected from Hugo Chavez’s regime spoke to the Brazilian magazine Veja about an alleged alliance between Argentina, Venezuela, and Iran, which included a deal in which Argentina would get Interpol to remove from its database the names of Iranians suspected of bombing a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor, had been investigating the deadly bombing before he was found dead in his apartment in January with a gunshot wound to the head. He was about to testify to Argentina’s legislature that the administration of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had helped cover up Iran’s hand in the bombing.

Nisman alleged that the Fernandez regime engaged in the cover-up to secure an oil-for-grain deal with Iran (Argentina is energy poor), but Veja’s sources take it a step further. They say the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez helped broker a deal between Argentina and Iran that secured cash for Argentina (including funds for Fernandez’s 2007 presidential run) and nuclear intelligence for Iran on top of derailing the AMIA probe.

“Not only is [the Veja report] credible, but it underscores the allegations prosecutor Nisman put forth about Iran’s longstanding desire to have Argentina restart nuclear cooperation with Iran,” Toby Dershowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Business Insider.

Nisman believed the bombing of the Jewish center, called AMIA, may have been about more than Iran’s attitude toward Israel and the Jewish people. He believed it was a punishment directed at Argentina. Back in the 1980s, Iranian nuclear scientists receieved training at Argentine nuclear plants.

Iranian nuclear scientist Ali Akbar Salehi was mentioned in Nisman’s report as being among the back-channel negotiators who reportedly wanted to clear the names of Iranians from an Interpol database. He spent six months learning about nuclear technology in the 1980s. In 1987, Argentine scientists went to Iran to help upgrade a Tehran research reactor.

“The DOJ and other USG agencies should be concerned about who killed a prosecutor with whom it had an important relationship and whether it was aimed at silencing him and his work implicating Iran,” Dershowitz said. “Nisman’s work was akin to a canary in a coal mine, and his suspicious death is a matter I hope the next attorney general and others will pursue impartially even if it comes at an inconvenient time as the P5+1 negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.”

kerry zarif REUTERS/Rick Wilking US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif before a meeting in Geneva in January.

To Dershowitz, Nisman’s report was about more than just AMIA. It was about how Iran operates in Latin America — how it recruits, how it uses resources, how it activates sleeper cells.

According to a member of the military who said he was in the room during negotiations between Venezuela and Iran, here’s how a conversation between Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then Iran’s president, on January 13, 2007, went down (via Veja):

Ahmadinejad — It’s a matter of life or death. I need you to help me broker a deal with Argentina to help my country’s nuclear program. We need Argentina to share its nuclear technology. Without their collaboration it would be impossible to advance our nuclear program.

Chávez — Very quickly, I will do that Comrade.

Ahmadinejad — Don’t worry about what it costs. Iran will have all the money necessary to convince Argentines … I need you to convince Argentina to continue to insisting that Interpol take Iranian officials off their list.

Chávez — I will personally take charge of this.

ReutersMahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, then Iran’s president, with his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez at Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2012.

The kind of nuclear technology Iran was looking for, specifically, was a heavy-water nuclear reactor. It’s expensive, complicated, and old-fashioned technology, but it allows plutonium to be obtained from natural uranium. That means the uranium doesn’t have to be enriched, which makes the whole operation more discreet.

To sweeten the deal for Argentina, Venezuela allegedly bought $1.8 billion worth of Argentine bonds 2007 and $6 billion worth in 2008. Remember that Argentina has been a pariah of international markets since it defaulted in 2002. The Kirchners (Cristina and her husband, late-president Nestor) each thanked Venezuela for these purchases publicly.

Also in January 2007, Ahmadinejad and Chavez allegedly hatched the plan for “aeroterror,” as Chavistas came to call it. It was a flight from Caracas to Damascus to Tehran that was made twice a month. It flew from Caracas carrying cocaine to be distributed to Hezbollah in Damascus and sold. The plane then went to Tehran carrying Venezuelan passports and other documents that helped Iranian terrorists travel around the world undetected.

tehran iran skyline Tehran, Iran.

Where this story makes a turn for the bizarre is that the woman who was allegedly handling the Argentine side of negotiations was former defense minister Nilda Garre, who is now Argentina’s ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Veja’s sources say she had a sexual relationship with Chavez.

“It was something along the lines of ’50 Shades of Grey,'” the former Venezuelan official said, adding that when the two were together, all of Miraflores (Venezuela’s presidential palace) could hear it.

“I cannot say that the Argentine government gave nuclear secrets, but I know it received much by legal means (debt securities) and illegal (bags of money) in exchange for some valuable asset to the Iranians.”

Another former Chavista said: “In Argentina, the holder of secrets is the former ambassador Garre.”

On Wednesday the House Foreign Affairs Committee is having a meeting — this should probably come up.

Cristina fernandez nilda garre ReutersKirchner with defense minister Nilda Garre, right, during a meeting with Chavez at the Casa Rosada Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires in 2009.

Don’t Count on John Kerry to Rescue Americans

Posted on March 17, 2015March 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are millions of Americans that work in various positions across the globe. Each day many of them are in peril and there are some Americans being held in Iran. The go-to agency to deal with the release of Americans is the State Department. In dealing for several months with Iran over their nuclear program, has John Kerry demanded one of the issues to be resolved is for Americans to be released? Sadly, no one is saying. This also begs the question, will the American government come to the aid of Americans in jeopardy in a foreign country? Recent history tell us no when it came to the U.S Marine in a Mexican prison.

Marine Veteran Requests Deportation From Iran

By RICK GLADSTONE

Increasingly desperate to return to the United States, a Marine veteran of Iranian descent who has been incarcerated in Iran for three and a half years has renounced his Iranian citizenship, requested deportation and accused Iran of using American prisoners as “bargaining chips,” his family said Monday.

“Once deported, he promises never to return,” the family of the Marine veteran, Amir Hekmati, a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, said in a statement.

The statement also detailed what it described as a litany of previously undisclosed torture and other abuses — including feet whippings, Taser hits to the kidneys, sleep deprivation and extended solitary confinement — suffered by Mr. Hekmati in the Iranian penal system since he was arrested in August 2011.

There was no immediate comment from the judicial authorities in Iran or from Mr. Hekmati’s Iranian lawyer, Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei, about Mr. Hekmati’s renunciation of citizenship or new assertions of mistreatment. Mr. Tabatabaei has said before that he would try different approaches to secure his client’s freedom.

The family released a copy of a letter it said Mr. Hekmati had written, addressed to the Iranian interests section of the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, where he acquired his Iranian passport so he could visit relatives in 2011.

Mr. Hekmati stated in the letter that it had “become very clear to me that those responsible view Iranian-Americans not as citizens or even human beings, but as bargaining chips and tools for propaganda.”

For that reason, the letter stated, “I formally renounce my Iranian citizenship and passport.”

Mr. Hekmati, 31, who was born in Flagstaff, Ariz., grew up in Flint, Mich., and served with the Marines in Iraq, is one of at least three American citizens of Iranian descent known to be imprisoned in Iran.

The Iranian authorities do not recognize dual citizenship. They regard all three as Iranian citizens, regardless of birthplace, and have treated them accordingly, denying them the consular access that is afforded to foreign inmates.

Their cases have acquired added significance as Iran and the United States have intensified efforts to reach an agreement on Iran’s disputed nuclear program. The deal, if completed, could potentially lead to a broader thaw in the longstanding estrangement between the two countries.

It was not clear from the family’s statement why Mr. Hekmati believed that renouncing his Iranian citizenship might be a means of leaving the country. Iranian human rights advocates said they had not seen this strategy used before.

“It’s creative,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a group based in New York. “I’m not sure that it will work.”

Mr. Hekmati was convicted of espionage after what the family has described as a forced confession. He was sentenced to death, but the verdict was reversed and he was convicted of the lesser charge of aiding a hostile country, meaning the United States, and sentenced to 10 years.

He and his family have repeatedly asserted that he is innocent and have implored the Iranian authorities to release him, if for no other reason than so he could return to Flint and see his father, Ali, who has terminal brain cancer.

Obama administration officials say they have raised his case — and those of the other prisoners — numerous times on the sidelines of the nuclear talks.

The new accusations that Mr. Hekmati has been tortured in prison were based on what the family’s statement described as accounts from “his family in Michigan, his extended family in Iran and from Amir himself.”

They said he had been held in solitary confinement for the first 17 months, often in stress positions for extended periods, and had not been allowed to speak with his family by phone for 20 months. “Cold, foul-smelling water was repeatedly poured into his cell to prevent him from sleeping,” the statement said.

He was also forcibly given drugs including lithium, Tasered in the kidneys during interrogations, whipped on the feet with cables and subjected to “mental torture through threats, insults and humiliations,” the statement said.

It repeated a complaint Mr. Hekmati made last December about the conditions of his imprisonment, asserting that he had been housed with hardened criminals and drug dealers and that “he experiences recurring lung infections, his cellmates have lice, and he is surviving on a diet of only rice and lentils.”

The release of the statement coincided with a new report by the United Nations human rights investigator for Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, asserting that political repression and use of the death penalty in Iran are rising.

The other Americans incarcerated in Iran are Jason Rezaian, 39, of Marin, Calif., The Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, who has been held on unspecified charges since July; and Saeed Abedini, 34, of Boise, Idaho, a pastor sentenced in 2013 to eight years in prison on charges of disturbing national security through a private network of churches.

A fourth American, Robert A. Levinson, disappeared while visiting Iran in 2007. Iranian officials say they have no information on his whereabouts. Last Tuesday, on the eighth anniversary of Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, the United States quintupled, to $5 million, its reward for information that could lead to his safe return.

Anyone Notice the Genocide of Christians?

Posted on March 16, 2015March 16, 2015 by Denise Simon

ISIS’ dark agenda: Terror group’s tweets show more destruction of sacred Christian sites

Chilling new images released Monday show ISIS thugs advancing the Islamist army’s dark agenda of eradicating Christianity from Iraq by smashing crosses, toppling statues and destroying sacred relics that have been in place for thousands of years.

The latest batch of photos, culled from the Internet by watchdog Middle East Media Research Institute, show ISIS members in the heart of Iraq’s once-thriving Assyrian Christian community of Nineveh, destroying symbols the Islamist terror group considers polytheistic and idolatrous. The images show the men removing crosses from atop churches and replacing them with the black ISIS banner, destroying crosses at other locations such as atop doorways and gravestones, and destroying icons and statues inside and outside churches. The sickening images are just the latest evidence of ISIS’ ongoing effort to cleanse its so-called caliphate of its Christian heritage.

“They don’t care what it’s called; they are just following their ideology and that means getting rid of churches and minorities,” said MEMRI Executive Director Steven Stalinsky. “It is the Islamic State, and there’s no room for anyone else.

“This has been going on for some time, a systematic campaign to rid the region” of any vestiges of Christianity.

Although the United Nations has condemned the acts, Islamic State, as ISIS is also known, has enthusiastically circulated photos of its fighters destroying the sacred symbols and relics.

“We cannot remain silent,” Irina Bokova, head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said Friday. “The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime. I call on all political and religious leaders in the region to stand up and remind everyone that there is absolutely no political or religious justification for the destruction of humanity’s cultural heritage.”

Bokova spoke after ISIS reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Statues, tablets and other relics have been taken from churches and destroyed or possibly sold on the black market. While the humanitarian crisis facing Iraq’s Christian community is of paramount concern, religious leaders also lament the loss of the religion’s most ancient artifacts.

In Iraq, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako last week called on the central government and the international community “to act as soon as possible for the protection of innocent civilians and to offer them the necessary assistance in lodging, food and medication.”

ISIS “is burning everything: human beings, stones and civilization,” he said in a March 9 statement.

Sako said thousands of families have been displaced by the fighting, and he called for an emergency meeting of Iraq’s Council of Ministers and the National Assembly deputies “to discuss this situation that threatens to deteriorate from bad to worse.”

“This is obviously a human catastrophe that cannot suffer any silence,” he said.

Nimrud, built more than 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 B.C. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, until approximately 600 B.C. For centuries, the region along the Tigris River retained monuments, frescos, temples and a ziggurat, the stepped pyramid characteristic of Mesopotamian civilizations.

But earlier this month, ISIS released video showing men smashing statues with sledgehammers in the Nineveh Museum, in Nineveh, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 705 B.C.

In recent weeks, ISIS has also set off bombs around Mosul Central Library, destroying as many as 10,000 priceless and irreplaceable books and manuscripts.

Many relics have been taken to museums in Baghdad or around the world for safekeeping, but artifacts in churches, including murals and statues, have been left where they stood for millennia, until the rise one year ago of the black-clad terrorist army. Last summer, ISIS fighters used explosives to blow up the tomb of a key figure in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The holy site in Mosul was believed to be the burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions.

The mob beat them and broke their legs so they would not be able to flee. “They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire. And then they threw them inside the furnace.” — Javed Maseeh, family spokesman, to NBC News.

The attack was not an isolated one. Rather it seems to be part of systematic killings, community by community.

Imagine you are a person of Christian faith living as a citizen in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: every moment your life is at risk. Imagine a Pakistani Muslim shouting that you have burned a page of holy Quran when you have not; or accusing you of having desecrated the Prophet Mohammed: you have hardly any chance of saving yourself. There would be no question of providing evidence or proof against you. You would be killed either by the mob or by the country’s legal system.

If you were one of the 3% minority Christians of Pakistan, you would fear for your life every moment among the majority Muslims; any one of them could shout and point at you as the Nazi collaborators did during the Second World War against the Jews. You inevitably would be beaten to death by your fellow countrymen.

This month in Pakistan, a Christian couple and their unborn child were burned to death, because of a false accusation of burning pages of a Quran.

Christians riot in Pakistan after attacks targeting churches kill 14
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Members of the Christian community rampaged through the streets of Lahore on Sunday after suicide bombers attacked two churches during morning services, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than 70.

The Pakistani Taliban took credit for the attacks, reviving concerns that the Islamist militant group will increasingly target religious minorities in a bid to further divide Pakistanis and distract them from ongoing military operations against extremists.

bin Ladin al Suri in Afghan Hideout

Posted on March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

The full photo catalog is here.

New York (CNN) The house is primitive, constructed of baked mud and stone. The landscape is sparse and mountainous, with snow cover in the winter. The terrain is rugged and challenging for the long walks the owner liked to take with his sons.

32 OBL photos GX-2067-OBL-film[3]-57

Photographs quietly introduced as evidence in the latest major terrorism trial in Manhattan federal court offer a rare look inside Osama bin Laden’s lair — years before al Qaeda flew hijacked planes into buildings or bombed U.S. embassies in Africa and even before the FBI placed bin Laden on its Most Wanted List.

Still, bin Laden was preparing, hiding out in a remote, mountainous area of Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.

A remarkable set of photos — the first showing bin Laden in the hideout where he would seek refuge after 9/11 — came to light only last month in the terrorism conspiracy trial of bin Laden lieutenant Khaled al-Fawwaz, a communications conduit for al Qaeda in London in the mid-1990s. Al-Fawwaz would arrange bin Laden’s first television interview for CNN’s Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen in 1997 and a sit-down for ABC News’ John Miller a year later. But before then, al-Fawwaz called on a Palestinian print journalist, whose 1996 journey to Afghanistan yielded these photos.

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Visiting bin Laden
Bin Laden had declared war on the United States and wanted more people to know it, especially in the Arab world. He reached out to Abdel Barri Atwan, the founder and then-editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, an independent Arabic weekly published in London that had been critical of certain Arab regimes and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Atwan had broken the story about bin Laden’s first fatwa, or religious decree, stating his grievances against the United States, such as the presence of U.S troops in Saudi Arabia. He published the entire screed in August 1996. The next month, al-Fawwaz went to Atwan’s office to offer him the first print interview with the emerging jihadist leader in Afghanistan.

“I was told that Osama bin Laden was fond of my writing, he liked my style, and he wanted to meet me personally,” Atwan recalled in an interview for Bergen’s 2006 book, “The Osama bin Laden I Know.” “I was hesitant, because it was very dangerous.”

25 OBL photos GX-2067-OBL-film[3]-50-b

Danger aside, in November 1996, Atwan was airborne to Afghanistan. The date-stamped photographs from his trip — which Scotland Yard detectives discovered two years later in a search of al-Fawwaz’s London home — show a healthy, relaxed, sometimes smiling bin Laden, not yet 40, conversing, hiking, videotaping pronouncements, surrounded by children.

06 OBL photos GX-2067-OBL-film[3]-17

The photos also show rare images of another man who has become an influential ideologue in the global jihadist movement — Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian now in his mid-50s who has not been seen in public or heard from in a decade. Still, al-Suri is arguably the most influential strategic thinker in Islamist militant circles today.

“A generation of jihadis were influenced by his teachings,” said Paul Cruickshank, a CNN terrorism analyst who has written about al-Suri. “He wanted a global jihadist intifada, where people rose up and fought as individuals.

“His teachings have deeply influenced jihadis in Syria — how to build up an organization, how to win support for it,” he said.

39 OBL photos 43

The mountain hideout
Bin Laden, from Saudi Arabia, first went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to participate in the armed resistance to Soviet invaders, one of thousands of Arab fighters defending a Muslim nation. As the anti-Soviet jihad wound down, bin Laden began organizing al Qaeda, meaning “the base,” around the border city of Peshawar, Pakistan. By 1992, Pakistan forced him and his fighters to leave.

Bin Laden relocated to Khartoum, Sudan, welcomed by a new Islamist regime. But after four years headquartered there, in 1996, under pressure from the United States, Sudan made bin Laden go. By then, the ideologically in sync Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan, and bin Laden decided to move there.

In May 1996, bin Laden settled in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. His mountain fortress in Tora Bora was a long drive up a dirt road he had built. Atwan was driven there in a red Toyota pickup in a twisting seven-hour drive through the mountains. As a photo of him shows, Atwan donned Afghan-style baggy trousers and a turban to get past security checkpoints and fit in.

Atwan met bin Laden in his cave. It was small, 13 by 20 feet in Atwan’s estimation, and as the new photos show, it was lined with shelves of books about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. Bin Laden liked to use the bookshelves as a backdrop for his videotaped edicts and interviews. The cave not only offered bin Laden a hiding place but also street credibility in the Muslim world, as the prophet is believed to have received the revelations of the Koran while camped in his own mountain cave.

After hours of conversation and an inedible dinner featuring salty cheese and sandy bread, Atwan ended up bunking in the cave on a mattress that rested on boxes of grenades.

“He wanted media exposure,” Atwan recalled in the interview for Bergen’s 2006 book. “He wants to say, ‘Now I am an international figure; I’m not just a Saudi. I am aggrieved at Americans who are occupying Saudi Arabia who are desecrating the Holy Land.’ ”

As seen in the photographs, bin Laden always carried a Russian-made Kalashnikov rifle. His comrades addressed him as “Abu Abdullah,” for father of Abdullah, his eldest son. Two younger sons, Saad and Ali, then in their early teens, sometimes were at the compound. As one photo shows, Atwan and bin Laden took a two-hour walk around Tora Bora.

“He loved that nature there. He loved the mountain. They were trying to have their own community, grow their foods,” Atwan recalled. “It’s like an oasis in Afghanistan.”

Bin Laden’s three wives and more than a dozen children did not share bin Laden’s joy in living the life of medieval peasants in the Tora Bora mountains, where the only light at night was from the moon and gas lanterns, and the only heat in a place where tremendous blizzards were common was a wood-burning metal stove. Hunger was a frequent companion to the bin Laden children who lived on a subsistence diet of rice, bread, eggs and that salty cheese.

In December 2001, with U.S. troops retaliating for 9/11 closing in, bin Laden fled Tora Bora, eventually making his way to Pakistan, where U.S. Navy SEALs ended a decade-long manhunt by killing him in his Abbottabad hideout, an hour north of Islamabad.

Atwan stepped down from the helm of Al-Quds in 2013 and recapped his journey in a deposition for the al-Fawwaz trial. Al-Fawwaz was convicted in Manhattan federal court on February 26 and faces a possible life sentence.

Even in Tora Bora, Atwan felt bin Laden was vulnerable to intelligence agencies. “I thought this man would not last,” Atwan said Tuesday. “He wasn’t really well-protected. He was visible and moving freely.”

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In 1996, bin Laden knew but certainly did not disclose the lethal plots he had set in motion — the embassy bombings, the planes plot that would become 9/11. Atwan said, “He was very optimistic, and it never occurred to me that this would be the most be dangerous man in the world.”

The jihadist intellectual
With his pale skin, short red hair and beard, and green wool hat, Abu Musab al-Suri could pass for Irish. But he is Syrian, originally from the ancient city of Aleppo, fought in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, and lived in London in the 1990s.

19 OBL photos GX-2067-OBL-film[3]-39

Al-Suri was close to bin Laden, which explains his comfortable presence in the 1996 photos of Tora Bora, seated next to al Qaeda’s leader in his cave or hiking with him, carrying his own cameras. (Al-Suri also accompanied Bergen and Arnett on their visit to bin Laden in 1997.)

The United States has since accused al-Suri of training recruits at al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 al-Ghuraba and Derunta camps in Afghanistan, where operatives such as Ahmed Ressam, who planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999, learned how to kill with poisons and chemicals.

Eventually, al-Suri publicly criticized bin Laden for making al Qaeda so hierarchical, for courting publicity and being so controlling, even calling him a “Pharoah” for his imperial leadership style.

But al-Suri was no less militant. He set up his own training camp in Afghanistan and advocated a “leaderless jihad” featuring, as he put it, “spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells all over the whole world without connection between them.”

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Al-Suri summarized his philosophy in his 1,600-page treatise, “The Call for Global Islamic Resistance,” which he published on the Internet in 2004. He coined the Arabic slogan nizam, la tanzim, meaning “a system, not an organization,” to describe his belief that there should be no organizational bonds between “resistance fighters.”

Al-Suri advocated terrorist cells of no more than 10 men and envisioned more “lone-wolf” attacks, such as the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre carried out in 2009 by rogue U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was inspired by the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, himself an al-Suri disciple.

Strategically, al-Suri argued, a less centralized jihadist network would make operatives who were arrested less likely to expose fellow militants to intelligence or law enforcement agencies, because the fighters would not know who else was part of the movement. Al-Suri was forward thinking about al Qaeda evolving into an international ideology more than a centrally controlled organization.

After 9/11, al-Suri appeared on the U.S. Most Wanted Terrorists list with a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.

In 2005, al-Suri was tracked down in Quetta, Pakistan, and sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned. There were unconfirmed reports that he was released in 2012, followed by al Qaeda statements by leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and spokesman Adam Gadahn in 2014 saying, “May Allah release him.”

A decade after his arrest, al-Suri’s whereabouts are a mystery.

Balance of Power and Peace Determined Tuesday

Posted on March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

Israel’s next 22 months

By Caroline Glick

The next 22 months until President Barack Obama leaves office promise to be the most challenging period in the history of US-Israel relations.

Now unfettered by electoral concerns, over the past week Obama exposed his ill-intentions toward Israel in two different ways.
First, the Justice Department leaked its intention to indict Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez on corruption charges. Menendez is the ranking Democratic member, and the former chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also the most outspoken Democratic critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing the Iranian regime.
As former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this week at PJMedia, “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put it another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”
The Menendez prosecution tells us that Obama wishes to leave office after having vastly diminished support for Israel among Democrats. And he will not hesitate to use strong-arm tactics against his fellow Democrats to achieve his goal.

We already experienced Obama’s efforts in this sphere in the lead-up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3 with his campaign to pressure Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s address.
Now, with his move against Menendez, Obama made clear that support for Israel – even in the form of opposition to the nuclear armament of Iran – will be personally and politically costly for Democrats.
The long-term implications of Obama’s moves to transform US support for Israel into a partisan issue cannot by wished away. It is possible that his successor as the head of the Democratic Party will hold a more sympathetic view of Israel. But it is also possible that the architecture of Democratic fund-raising and grassroots support that Obama has been building for the past six years will survive his presidency and that as a consequence, Democrats will have incentives to oppose Israel.
The reason Obama is so keen to transform Israel into a partisan issue was made clear by the second move he made last week.
Last Thursday, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice announced that the NSC’s Middle East Coordinator Phil Gordon was stepping down and being replaced by serial Israel-basher Robert Malley.
Malley, who served as an NSC junior staffer during the Clinton administration, rose to prominence in late 2000 when, following the failed Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war, Malley co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times blaming Israel and then-prime minister Ehud Barak for the failure of the negotiations.
What was most remarkable at the time about Malley’s positions was that they completely contradicted Bill Clinton’s expressed views. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the talks squarely on then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s shoulders.
Not only did Arafat reject Barak’s unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty over all of Gaza, most of Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount, he refused to make a counter-offer. And then two months later, he opened the Palestinian terror war.
As Jonathan Tobin explained in Commentary this week, through his writings and public statements, Malley has legitimized Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Malley thinks it is perfectly reasonable that the Palestinians refuse to concede their demand for free immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to the Jewish state in the framework of their concocted “right of return,” even though the clear goal of that demand is to destroy Israel. As Tobin noted, Malley believes that Palestinian terrorism against Israel is “understandable if not necessarily commendable.”
During Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama listed Malley as a member of his foreign policy team. When pro-Israel groups criticized his appointment, Obama fired Malley.
But after his 2012 reelection, no longer fearing the ramifications of embracing an openly anti-Israel adviser, one who had documented contacts with Hamas terrorists and has expressed support for recognizing the terror group, Obama appointed Malley to serve as his senior adviser for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Still facing the 2014 congressional elections, Obama pledged that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians. But then last week, he appointed him to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.
The deeper significance of Malley’s appointment is that it demonstrates that Obama’s goal in his remaining time in office is to realign US Middle East policy away from Israel. With his Middle East policy led by a man who thinks the Palestinian goal of destroying Israel is legitimate, Obama can be expected to expand his practice of placing all the blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians solely on Israel’s shoulders.
Malley’s appointment indicates that there is nothing Israel can do to stem the tsunami of American pressure it is about to suffer. Electing a left-wing government to replace Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will make no difference.
Just as Malley was willing to blame Barak – a leader who went to Camp David as the head of a minority coalition, whose positions on territorial withdrawals were rejected by a wide majority of Israelis – for the absence of peace, so we can assume that he, and his boss, will blame Israel for the absence of peace over the next 22 months, regardless of who stands at the head of the next government.
In this vein we can expect the administration to expand the anti-Israel positions it has already taken.
The US position paper regarding Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that was leaked this past week to Yediot Aharonot made clear the direction Obama wishes to go. That document called for Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, with minor revisions.
In the coming 22 months we can expect the US to use more and more coercive measures to force Israel to capitulate to its position.
The day the administration-sponsored talks began in July 2013, the EU announced it was barring its member nations from having ties with Israeli entities that operate beyond the 1949 armistice lines unless those operations involve assisting the Palestinians in their anti-Israel activities. The notion that the EU initiated an economic war against Israel the day the talks began without coordinating the move with the Obama administration is, of course, absurd.
We can expect the US to make expanded use of European economic warfare against Israel in the coming years, and to continue to give a backwind to the anti-Semitic BDS movement by escalating its libelous rhetoric conflating Israel with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
US-Israel intelligence and defense ties will also be on the chopping block.
While Obama and his advisers consistently boast that defense and intelligence ties between Israel and the US have grown during his presidency, over the past several years, those ties have suffered blow after blow. During the war with Hamas last summer, acting on direct orders from the White House, the Pentagon instituted a partial – unofficial – embargo on weapons to Israel.
As for intelligence ties, over the past month, the administration announced repeatedly that it is ending its intelligence sharing with Israel on Iran.
The Hillary Clinton email scandal has revealed that during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton transferred top secret information regarding Israel’s operations against Iran to the New York Times. We also learned that the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is being fingered as the source of the leak regarding the Stuxnet computer virus that Israel and the US reportedly developed jointly to cripple Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
In other words, since taking office, Obama has used the US’s intelligence ties with Israel to harm Israel’s national security on at least two occasions.
He has also used diplomacy to harm Israel. Last summer, Obama sought a diplomatic settlement of Hamas’s war with Israel that would have granted Hamas all of its war goals, including its demand for open borders and access to the international financial system.
Now of course, he is running roughshod over his bipartisan opposition, and the opposition of Israel and the Sunni Arab states, in the hopes of concluding a nuclear deal with Iran that will pave the way for the ayatollahs to develop nuclear weapons and expand their hegemonic control over the Middle East.
AMID ALL of this, and facing 22 months of ever more hostility as Obama pursues his goal of ending the US-Israel alliance, Israelis are called on to elect a new government.
This week the consortium of former security brass that has banded together to elect a leftist government led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s relations with the US. The implication was that a government led by Herzog and Livni will restore Israel’s ties to America.
Yet as Obama has made clear both throughout his tenure in office, and, over the past week through Malley’s appointment and Menendez’s indictment, Obama holds sole responsibility for the deterioration of our ties with our primary ally. And as his actions have also made clear, Herzog and Livni at the helm will receive no respite in US pressure. Their willingness to make concessions to the Palestinians that Netanyahu refuses to make will merely cause Obama to move the goalposts further down the field. Given his goal of abandoning the US alliance with Israel, no concession that Israel will deliver will suffice.
And so we need to ask ourselves, which leader will do a better job of limiting the danger and waiting Obama out while maintaining sufficient overall US support for Israel to rebuild the alliance after Obama has left the White House.
The answer, it seems, is self-evident.
The Left’s campaign to blame Netanyahu for Obama’s hostility will make it all but impossible for a Herzog-Livni government to withstand US pressure that they say will disappear the moment Netanyahu leaves office.
In contrast, as the US position paper leaked to Yediot indicated, Netanyahu has demonstrated great skill in parrying US pressure. He agreed to hold negotiations based on a US position that he rejected and went along with the talks for nine months until the Palestinians ended them. In so doing, he achieved a nine-month respite in open US pressure while exposing Palestinian radicalism and opposition to peaceful coexistence.
On the Iranian front, Netanyahu’s courageous speech before Congress last week energized Obama’s opponents to take action and forced Obama onto the defensive for the first time while expanding popular support for Israel.
It is clear that things will only get more difficult in the months ahead. But given the stakes, the choice of Israeli voters next Tuesday is an easy one.

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