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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Kenneth R. Timmerman</title>
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		<title>Obama’s White Whale</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/obamas-white-whale/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-white-whale</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:46:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[normalize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[After Cuba, could embracing Iran be next?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248067" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini.jpg" alt="rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini" width="305" height="234" /></a>President Obama is not one to be rebuffed.</p>
<p>As he showed when the Castro brothers rejected repeated entreaties to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, Obama can display exceptional determination, even imagination, in finding a path to surrender.</p>
<p>When the Castros wouldn’t accept his entreaties, Obama turned to the Vatican to offer the candy.</p>
<p>The Castros have no intention of loosening their grip on Cuban society, or of opening the Internet to free speech, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-ogrady-who-benefits-if-the-embargo-is-lifted-1419205562"><span style="color: #0433ff;">as Obama has claimed</span></a>. But they will take U.S. taxpayer subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank to finance purchases from fellow-Communist China. How’s that for a good deal!</p>
<p>And so, Iran. Obama has now written to Supreme Terrorist – sorry, Supreme Leader &#8211; Ayatollah Khamenei four times since taking office in 2009. And each time, Khamenei has responded with insults and rejection.</p>
<p>The most recent offer was in October 2014, when Obama reportedly offered a whole plate-full of goodies – extensive relief from U.S. economic and financial sanctions, and perhaps much more – in exchange for the Ayatollah accepting Obama’s capitulation on the nuclear agreement.</p>
<p>But that wasn’t good enough for Khamenei, who immediately denounced the United States as a <a href="https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/532514135020695552"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“nuclear criminal”</span></a> &#8211; and on Twitter, no less!</p>
<p>Now we are told that Iran is “cooperating” with the United States in the fight against ISIS, most recently by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/.../iran-airstrikes-hit-islamic-state-in-iraq.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">bombing ISIS targets inside Iraq</span></a>.</p>
<p>But Iranian sources in Europe with access to current regime intelligence told me last week that Iran has provided 30 percent of the weapons ISIS has been using in its offensives in Syria and Iraq, mainly from Chinese sources.</p>
<p>Surprise? Not really. Despite what some “experts” in Islam will tell you about how Shiite Iran is irrevocably opposed to Koran-citing, Sunna-invoking, Sharia-inflicting ISIS, the two have a common cause: the triumph of Islam throughout the world.</p>
<p>Iran’s Islamic regime is also Koran-citing, Sunna-invoking, and Sharia-inflicting. They stone to death female rape-victims for “adultery” and make child-brides of young girls, imitating the example of the Prophet of Islam. They just disagree with ISIS – as they do with Turkish president Erdogan, and the al-Saud family – about who should be leading the Islamic caliphate.</p>
<p>Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin disagreed about whose army should march first into Berlin. Roosevelt caved. Stalin won. A fifty-year Cold War ensued.</p>
<p>Shiite Iran has a long and well-documented history of supporting Sunni terrorist groups. They <a href="http://www.iran911case.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">helped al-Qaeda recruit, train, and elude U.S. surveillance</span></a> before the 9/11 plot, and they have sheltered senior al-Qaeda operatives ever since.</p>
<p>They continue to publicly support Sunni jihadi groups including the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hamas in Gaza.</p>
<p style="color: #202020;"><span style="color: #000000;">In 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1261.aspx"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exposed Iran</span></a> for sheltering al Qaeda’s top financiers. Earlier this year, <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2613.aspx"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Treasury identified yet another top al Qaeda financial operative,</span></a> </span>Abdul Mohsen Abdullah Ibrahim al-Sharikh, whom Iran nurtured and protected until he moved to Syria and joined the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra front, “later becoming one of its top strategists.”</p>
<p>So don’t be surprised to see that the Islamic Republic of Iran has provided weapons to the Islamic State (of Iraq and Syria). After all, on most days ISIS uses those weapons to slaughter America’s “allies,” the weak-kneed, slightly less Islamified opposition to Iran’s ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.</p>
<p>It’s an old trick of totalitarians everywhere. Light a fire on your enemy’s doorstep, then offer to help him put it out. The Soviets used it repeatedly.</p>
<p>Now the Pentagon wants to provide yet more goodies to Iran. Under the misguided leadership of outgoing SecDef Chuck Hagel, DoD has asked the U.S. Treasury Department to <a href="http://www.nasdaq.com/article/pentagon-sought-sanctions-exemptions-for-iranian-investment-in-afghanistan-20141104-01797"><span style="color: #0433ff;">remove sanctions so U.S. companies can help Iran</span></a> with multi-billion dollar development projects in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Let me spell that out. The Pentagon has identified “worthy” projects in Afghanistan and turned them over to the Iranians, and is now “inviting” U.S. companies to provide financial and technical assistance so the Iranians can make it rich.</p>
<p>There is more than just stupidity at work here.</p>
<p>Listen to “progressive” Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=b6wwvf87260bd94514057851fd5200ffab291#bookmark=http://video.foxnews.com/v/3951118421001/van-hollen-alan-gross-exchange-a-good-deal-for-us/?"><span style="color: #0433ff;">speaking to Foxnews</span></a> after “bringing back” U.S. hostage Alan Gross from Cuba. (Remember, Alan Gross was jailed five years ago for helping Havana Jews get access to the Internet.)</p>
<p>Cuba’s human rights abuses and its lack of freedom “have resulted from 54 years of failed U.S. policies,” Van Hollen said without even blushing.</p>
<p>For Obama and his acolytes, America is the problem. We have “caused” the world’s problems with our sanctimonious nonsense about God-given freedoms. Any self-respecting Socialist would naturally react to men and women who fear God and love life by banning God and substituting a government that robs citizens of their freedom.</p>
<p>And so, Obama’s mission as president is to make America as small as possible so we can’t continue to spread freedom and the values underpinning it around the world. We are going to stop causing harm by vacating the premises and allowing <i>real</i> bad guys to take over.</p>
<p>Former Brookings Institution scholar Michael Doran calls Obama’s obsession with making bad deals with rogue states his “white whale.”</p>
<p>“The president is dreaming of an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison,” <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/08/13-doran-obama-middle-east-policy-danger-to-allies"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Doran wrote earlier this year.</span></a> “The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy.&#8221;</p>
<p>The ship of state is taking on water in Iraq? Let’s make a deal with Iran and hand it over to them. Afghanistan can’t stay afloat? Not to worry, Obama’s Iranian allies will come to the rescue.</p>
<p>There is only one thing Iran’s leaders can do to prevent Obama from rushing to conclude a deal with them that will allow them to develop a militarily-useful nuclear arsenal, impose their hegemony over the Persian Gulf, swallow up Lebanon and install their genocidal legions on the borders of Israel: they can just say no.</p>
<p>So far, that’s just what Khamenei has been doing. He has swallowed all the goodies Obama has offered without even saying thank-you. And Obama’s response has been to offer more.</p>
<p>Don’t think for an instant that cooler heads will prevail. They won’t. This president is determined to take America down, and he is pursuing that goal with all the single-minded intensity that Captain Ahab displayed in his chase for the white whale.</p>
<p>Will someone please wrench the harpoon out of his hands?</p>
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		<title>Turkey, Friend or Foe?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/turkey-friend-or-foe-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=turkey-friend-or-foe-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:40:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Erdogan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[turkey]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247165</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even Joe Biden is talking about Erdogan's treacherous support for the Islamic State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/turkish-prime-minister-turkey.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247168" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/turkish-prime-minister-turkey-436x350.jpg" alt="turkish-prime-minister-turkey" width="369" height="296" /></a>As the battle for the Syrian border city of Kobani raged and prospects of an ISIS-led massacre of thousands of innocent civilians loomed this fall, the BBC interviewed the vice-chairman of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP Party in Ankara.</p>
<p>Why hadn’t Turkey responded to NATO’s request to launch joint military operations to halt the ISIS assault on Kobani? How could Turkey just sit back and watch so many innocent civilians die, BBC correspondent Jonathan Marcus asked.</p>
<p>The replies from Yasin Aktay are telling.</p>
<p>&#8220;Why is Kobani the most important problem?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;There is no tragedy in Kobani as cried out by the terrorist PKK. There is a war between two terrorist groups. You mean we should… favor one terrorist organization over another?&#8221;</p>
<p>The AKP deputy leader <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29555999"><span style="color: #0433ff;">went on to explain</span></a> the calculus of death as seen from Turkey’s point of view. &#8220;Less than 1000 people have been killed in Kobani, but more than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria. Which is more important?”</p>
<p>Aktay’s remarks reveal much more than just a callous disregard for the Kurds, who comprise roughly one-third of Turkey’s overall population, or for the popular Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which broke off peace talks with the Turkish government in October to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/world/middleeast/kurdish-rebels-assail-turkish-inaction-on-isis-as-peril-to-peace-talks.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">protest Turkey’s stranglehold</span></a> over the Kurds in Kobani.</p>
<p>According to Vice-president Joe Biden, <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/biden-says-erdogan-admitted-isil-mistake.aspx?PageID=238&amp;NID=72530&amp;NewsCatID=359"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Erdogan himself admitted</span></a> that Turkey had ordered border guards to turn a blind eye as new ISIS recruits flooded across Turkey’s borders to join the battle against Assad in Syria. (Okay, when Erdogan was informed of Biden’s comments, he hit the roof <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/turkey-erdogan-biden-apologize-apology-isis-2014-10"><span style="color: #0433ff;">and demanded that “loose-lips” Uncle Joe retract them</span></a>).</p>
<p>In response to a Harvard University student’s question whether the U.S. could have intervened earlier in Syria, Biden went even further:</p>
<p>“[O]ur allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends – and I have the greatest relationship with Erdogan, which I just spent a lot of time with – the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.</p>
<p>“Now you think I’m exaggerating – take a look. Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them. So what happened? Now all of a sudden – I don’t want to be too facetious – but they had seen the Lord. Now we have – the President’s been able to put together a coalition of our Sunni neighbors, because America can’t once again go into a Muslim nation and be seen as the aggressor – it has to be led by Sunnis to go and attack a Sunni organization.” [h/t to Mark Langfan for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npd4OSPjrt0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">excerpting this Q&amp;A</span></a> from Biden’s speech]</p>
<p>But Erdogan’s treachery goes much deeper.</p>
<p>Kurdish sources tell me that the initial Turkey-al Nusra front agreement was made more than two years ago, and included Turkey’s agreement to help smuggle arms to the Syrian rebels from Benghazi and other parts of Libya.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, Turkish and Qatari intelligence officials met with senior ISIS leaders in Jordan to plot the take-over of Mosul and the predominantly Christian Nineveh Plain.</p>
<p>Also at the meeting was a representative of Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) president Massoud Barzani, who has worked closely with the Turkish government and has spearheaded massive Turkish investment in northern Iraq. Barzani apparently believed ISIS would stop their advance after seizing Mosul and the Nineveh Plain, and ordered his peshmerga fighters to withdraw rather than fight the ISIS advance.</p>
<p>The most dramatic events occurred in Sinjar, when 13,000 peshmerga fighters mysteriously “melted away” in August rather than confront an ISIS assault force of around 1000 men. While much of the national media focused on the plight of the Yazidis, a Shiite sect considered heretical by most Sunnis, ISIS continued to march eastward through the Nineveh plain, massacring the Christians who failed to flee.</p>
<p>Not until they began threatening Erbil, the capital of the KRG, did Barzani apparently realize he had been duped and called on the United States to supply heavy weapons so the peshmerga could halt the ISIS advance. As <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/31/kurds-accuse-turkish-government-supporting-isis-278776.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Kobani was falling</span></a>, Barzani authorized Kurdish fighters from the PKK and <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2007_1017-pkk-pjak.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">PJAK, who had bases in northern Iraq</span></a>, to transit through his territory to relieve the besieged city.</p>
<p>A former ISIS communications technician, using the pseudonum “Sherko Omer,” recently sat down with Newsweek reporter Barney Guiton and spilled the beans on Turkey’s deep relationship to the Islamic State.</p>
<p>ISIS fighters traveled regularly back and forth from their stronghold in Raqaa, Syria into Turkey to acquire supplies and new fighters. “ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks,” Omer said.</p>
<p>It was imperative for the Islamic State to establish a secure supply line through Turkey in order to bypass areas in northern Syria controlled by Kurdish fighters from the Democratic Union Party (YPG), which is allied to the PKK.</p>
<p>“ISIS saw the Turkish army as its ally especially when it came to attacking the Kurds in Syria,” Omer said. “The Kurds were the common enemy for both ISIS and Turkey.”</p>
<p>“I have connected ISIS field captains and commanders from Syria with people in Turkey on innumerable occasions,” Omer said.</p>
<p>In the same report, a YPG <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/isis-and-turkey-cooperate-destroy-kurds-former-isis-member-reveals-turkish-282920"><span style="color: #0433ff;">spokesman told Newsweek</span></a> that Turkey was providing ISIS with arms and ammunition, in addition to allowing Islamic State fighters to cross unimpeded back and forth between Turkey and Syria.</p>
<p>His accusations were repeated in Berlin Claudia Roth, a deputy speaker of the German parliament and a Green Party MP.</p>
<p>President Erdogan’s “dealings with the ISIS are unacceptable,” <a href="http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/12102014"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Roth said.</span></a> “I could not believe that Turkey harbors an ISIS militant camp in Istanbul. Turkey has also allowed weapons to be transported into Syria through its borders. Also that the ISIS has been able to sell its oil via Turkey is extraordinary.”</p>
<p>Turkish opposition politician Ali Ediboglu <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2014/06/turkey-syria-isis-selling-smuggled-oil.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">claimed in June</span></a> that ISIS had already exported oil worth $800 million through Turkey through special pipelines and convoys of trucks, without any opposition from the Turkish authorities.</p>
<p>(For more on Turkey’s support for ISIS read <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/14486/turkey-isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Daniel Pipes’ summary</span></a> of what Kurdish and Turkish intellectuals have been writing, and this <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/schanzer-jonathan-bordering-on-terrorism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">excellent if lengthy report</span></a> from the FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer.)</p>
<p>President Obama once named Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan among his top five <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/obama-names-turkish-pmerdogan-among-trusted-friends.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nid=11897"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“best friends”</span></a> on the world stage, “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend.”</p>
<p>No longer. According to Erdogan, the two no longer chat on the phone. The time of Obama <a href="http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/03/26/obama-hearts-turkish-leader-erdogan-as-he-oppresses-his-own-people-and-stabs-america-in-the-back/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“hearting”</span></a> Erdogan are over.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/no-longer-talk-obama-turkeys-erdogan-100909241.html">Erdogan says</a></span> their falling out began in September 2013, when Obama failed to order unilateral military operations against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad once he faced resistance in the U.S. Congress.</p>
<p>If that’s the case, why is Obama letting Erdogan off the hook for his support for ISIS?</p>
<p>It’s time to let Turkey choose: they can continue to be a NATO ally and join us in the fight against ISIS and other enemies of freedom. Or they can continue to support ISIS and suffer the consequences. Which is it?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss<strong> Ken Timmerman </strong>discuss his new book<strong>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forces-Truth-Happened-Benghazi/dp/product-description/0062321196/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books">Dark Forces:</a></strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pu5T70blH-I" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
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		<title>Gowdy Approaches Benghazi Minefield</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/gowdy-approaches-benghazi-minefield/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gowdy-approaches-benghazi-minefield</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2014 05:57:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Wood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trey Gowdy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246479</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With another hearing tentatively planned for next week, will Rep. Trey Gowdy play his cards?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gowdy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246492" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gowdy-450x232.jpg" alt="gowdy" width="295" height="152" /></a>Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood was the commander of the 16-man Special Forces security detail at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Libya, until the State Department ordered him and his men home on August 5, 2012 and never replaced them.</p>
<p>Despite repeated pleas from Ambassador Chris Stevens and his State Department security officers in Tripoli that they remain in Libya, Washington wouldn’t listen.</p>
<p>Colonel Wood remains perplexed at what happened on the night Ambassador Stevens was murdered, and in a recent conversation, recalled a similar event in June 2012 when the British ambassador came under RPG attack while visiting Benghazi.</p>
<p>“When I went to help the British ambassador, we got to the scene faster than the CIA team did on September 11. I went over to the CIA Annex, waited for the 18 Delta medic to grab his kit, then left immediately,” he told me.</p>
<p>“Why would they say ‘get over there as quick as you can’ when the British ambassador gets attacked, and say ‘wait’ when it’s our own ambassador?” he wondered.</p>
<p>And yet, that’s the behavior former deputy CIA Director Mike Morell told the House intelligence committee was <a href="http://intelligence.house.gov/investigative-report-terrorist-attacks-us-facilities-benghazi-libya-september-11-12-2012">“a very prudent decision.”</a></p>
<p>Their report was welcomed by the national media as the final nail in the coffin of Republican-led Congressional investigations.</p>
<p>Many conservatives have been pushing for Rep. Trey Gowdy (R, SC) to play his cards, even as his investigators continue to conduct their probe far from the media spotlight.</p>
<p>The Washington Post has already proclaimed Gowdy’s investigation “superfluous,” and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/benghazi-debunked/2014/11/29/876ff67e-751f-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html">last week blasted</a> “unfounded conspiracy theories” propounded by Republicans for distracting from the “big mistake in Libya policy… [which] was President Obama’s refusal to support the new government’s attempt to build security after he helped topple the nation’s longtime dictator.”</p>
<p>In Gruberesque fashion, the Post failed to mention that Ambassador Stephens was still talking to Prime Minister candidates for the “new government” on the day he was brutally murdered, <a href="http://sofrep.com/22460/ambassador-chris-stevens-benghazi-diary/">as his Diary shows</a>.</p>
<p>But hey, what difference do the facts make when there’s a presidential campaign afoot? The Post and other members of the Hillary Clinton support society (aka the national media) have demonstrated they will spare no ink, tar, or feathers to besmirch anyone who gets close to the truth, and will pass up no opportunity to claim this investigation over before it’s even begun.</p>
<p>That’s why Gowdy must (and is) treading carefully as he navigates the labyrinthine minefield constructed by partisan hacks and entrenched bureaucrats to hide the truth.</p>
<p>One of the first things Gowdy did was to hire a three-star U.S. Army general as his chief counsel. Lieutenant General Dana Chipman had just stepped down as the Judge Advocate General (JAG) for the United States Army, where <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dana-chipman/8b/189/220">in his own words</a> he had led “a legal enterprise consisting of 5,000 personnel in 600 offices in 20 countries.”</p>
<p>Prior to that, General Chipman was the chief lawyer for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, stepping into that hot seat in June 2003 just as U.S. forces switched from liberators to occupiers in Iraq.</p>
<p>The three stars on Chipman’s shoulderboards give him the authority to candidly question anyone in the military chain of command that night without concerns more junior officers might have about disputing the wisdom of an order from on high.</p>
<p>Many in the military have been asking why reinforcements weren’t flown in from Croatia, where a fifty-man U.S. Army counter-terrorism/hostage-rescue unit known as C-110 was on a military training mission.</p>
<p>C-110 was the Commanders In-Extremis Force (CIF) for European Command, a rapid reaction force capable of getting men and equipment into their C-130s to respond to a crisis in somewhere between two to six hours.</p>
<p>Because C-110 was slated to become the Africom CIF on October 1, Africom commanders were intimately aware of its capabilities, and its current position – roughly two hours flight time from Benghazi. But instead of flying directly to Benghazi, C-110 was told to stage en route at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Italy, where it stopped.</p>
<p>The diversion order was given from the Pentagon, not by Africom headquarters in Stuttgart. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, has claimed in Congressional testimony that the earliest C-110 could have left Croatia was 6 AM the morning of September 12<sup>th</sup> – a statement disputed by members of the unit who have spoken anonymously to the media.</p>
<p>Were the commanders of this powerful hostage-rescue unit champing at the bit but told to stand down? If so, by who? And why?</p>
<p>We know the official reasons why C-110 was not sent. Africom commander General Carter Ham and his subordinates have all testified that in the “fog of war” they believed they were facing a situation similar to the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis and needed more time to gather intelligence and plan a hostage rescue operation.</p>
<p>But General Ham also <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/10/top-africom-leader-general-carter-ham-was-never-ordered-to-save-us-men-in-benghazi-video/#!">told Rep. Jason Chaffetz</a>, who is slated to succeed Rep. Darrell Issa as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, that he never sent boots onto the ground in Benghazi because the State Department “never asked.”</p>
<p>That explanation was buttressed by <a href="http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Lovell-Statement-5-1-Benghazi-Libya.pdf">testimony from Brigadier General Robert Lovell,</a> the Africom deputy director for intelligence (J2), this past May, where he explained that in the spirit of “expeditionary” diplomacy – a favorite Hillary Clinton term – the military was “waiting for a request for assistance from the State Department” before moving reinforcements into Libya.</p>
<p>The answer to this question could help determine who bears the responsibility for leaving brave four men to die that night.</p>
<p>Did the desire to demonstrate that Obama was “not Bush” drive the administration to abandon any recourse to military action? We know that Hillary Clinton was so obsessed by not deploying boots on the ground in Libya that she ordered Colonel Wood and his 16-man Special Forces unit guarding Ambassador Stevens to never appear in public in uniform, not even their boots, until her underlings told them to leave Libya on August 5, 2012 altogether.</p>
<p>We also know that Mrs. Clinton issued two very specific stand-down orders on the night of September 11, 2012:</p>
<p>• She refused to convene the counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), the only structured, experienced interagency reaction team that could have decided which resources of the government were available for immediate deployment, despite pleas from a top counter-terrorism advisor, Mark Thompson.</p>
<p>• She refused to activate the State Department-led Foreign Emergency “Support Team (FEST), an extraordinary operational unit whose sole purpose was to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack.</p>
<p>Her entire effort that night and ever since has been to draw as little attention as possible to U.S. government activities in Benghazi. What was she trying to hide?</p>
<p>Deeper in the Benghazi labyrinth lies the true mission of the CIA Annex, whose security team ultimately came to the rescue of the besieged diplomats after the CIA Chief of Base in Benghazi told them to “stand down” for a fatal twenty-one minutes – longer than Lt.Col. Andy Wood had to wait for his 18 Delta medic before aiding the British ambassador three months earlier.</p>
<p>In the House intelligence committee report, the cause of recent gloating by Hillary Clinton’s media fans, the discussion of the CIA’s mission in Benghazi is largely redacted, with Members of Congress <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/24/house-intelligence-committee-report-obfuscates-benghazi-arms-smuggling/">warned that they are not cleared</a> to know what the CIA was doing there.</p>
<p>The Africom Chief of Operations, Rear Admiral Richard Landolt, told Congressional investigators that he and his fellow Africom commanders “were not aware” of the CIA Annex until the night it was under attack– an extraordinary admission. “I guess it was in their interest to keep it to as few people as necessary,” he told me.</p>
<p>Now, it is just possible that the folks at the CIA Annex were baking brownies for the local Islamic scouts. Or it is possible that they were engaged in activities the administration still finds too embarrassing – or politically too dangerous – to discuss, such as overseeing an arms transfer operation to the Syrian rebels being conducted by “liaison services.”</p>
<p>The American people deserve answers that only Gowdy and his committee are now in a position to provide.</p>
<p>-          Was Congress fully and properly briefed on the activities of the CIA in Benghazi? Was the CIA operating under Presidential findings for the Global War on Terror signed by President George W. Bush? Or more recent presidential findings signed by President Obama?</p>
<p>-          What was the status of the State Department’s program to collect surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS) “missing” from Qaddafi’s arsenal, and what role was the CIA Annex assigned to that program?</p>
<p>-          After Ambassador Stevens and his Country team were briefed on Iran’s support for Ansar al-Sharia in June 2012, how many intelligence reports did the CIA or other agencies file warning about <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/06/20/how-irans-spy-chief-paid-for-the-benghazi-attack/">the activities of the Iranian Special Forces</a> (Quds Force) officers who were on the ground in Benghazi?</p>
<p>-          Was the State Department concerned that exposing Iran’s role in the Benghazi attacks would sabotage ongoing nuclear negotiations?</p>
<p>-          Who specifically carried out the precision mortar attack that killed CIA security officers Glen Doherty and Ty Woods and severely wounded Mark Geiss and State Department security officer David Ubben? Where were those individuals trained and by whom?</p>
<p>-          Where is the paper trail documenting the initial State Department statement issued at 10:08 pm on the night of September 11, 2012, blaming the attacks on a Youtube video, which was contrary to all reporting from U.S. embassy and CIA sources on the ground?</p>
<p>Until now, the State Department and the CIA have swept all of these questions aside or given answers aimed at blaming the dead, and the sympathetic headline in the national media went something like this:<em> Benghazi “sheep” committed suicide, wolf declares.</em></p>
<p>It’s time for the truth. Trey Gowdy, press on!</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss<strong> Ken Timmerman </strong>discuss his new book<strong>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forces-Truth-Happened-Benghazi/dp/product-description/0062321196/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books">Dark Forces:</a></strong></em></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Parallel Universe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/obamas-parallel-universe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-parallel-universe</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/obamas-parallel-universe/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:40:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245984</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama tossed away a winning hand in the Iran negotiations.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama_iran_0117.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245989" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama_iran_0117-383x350.jpg" alt="obama_iran_0117" width="314" height="287" /></a>You’ve got to hand it to Obama. He is no slouch when it comes to redefining reality.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He can look at an elephant and proclaim it a donkey without a bat of the eye. Or in the case of Iran, look at spinning centrifuges and see no threat.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Over the weekend <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30169378">he told</a> George Stephanapolous that the nuclear deal with Iran, which his negotiators extended for another eight months on Monday without a single concession from Iran, has “definitely stopped Iran’s nuclear program from advancing.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Welcome to Obama’s Parallel Universe.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Iran continues to spin centrifuges and expand its stockpiles of enriched uranium. It continues to develop new generations of centrifuges that will allow Iran to race to the bomb five times faster than it can today. As we learned <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/12/us-iran-nuclear-centrifuges-idUSKCN0IW11O20141112">earlier this month</a>, the International Atomic Energy Agency even found that Iran was feeding uranium gas into some of these new generation centrifuges in violation of the interim nuclear deal. The U.S. declined to call out the Iranians for cheating.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Iran also continues work on the plutonium bomb plant at Arak, rather than dismantling it as the U.S. initially demanded. It continues to deny full scope inspections and to refuse inquiries from the IAEA to explain its past nuclear weapons-related activities, without which the United States and its allies cannot map the full scope of the Iranian program or verify it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In fact, there is not a single aspect of Iran’s nuclear program that has stopped advancing. On the contrary, they are making progress by leaps and bounds.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When Stephanapolous played the sceptic and asked Obama whether he could get the deal through Congress, Obama said he was “confidant that if we reach a deal that is verifiable and assures that Iran does not have breakout capacity, not only can I persuade Congress but I can persuade the American people that it’s the right thing to do.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The problem is, no one believes that is what this deal will accomplish, including the French and German foreign ministers who took part in the months-long farce in Vienna, Austria that gave birth to yet another extension of talks.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Former CIA Director General Michael Hayden <a href="http://blogs.rollcall.com/five-by-five/former-cia-chief-intel-community-cant-on-its-own-track-iranian-nuclear-development/?dcz=">told Congress last week</a> that without an “invasive inspections regime” attached to any deal, “I am unwilling to guarantee American intelligence can sufficiently verify the agreement on its own.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That’s a pretty damning admission. Given the track record so far – massive U.S. and Western concessions on sanctions relief and enrichment, and no meaningful concessions on Iran’s side – it’s unlikely such an inspection regime will ever exist.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman told a Washington, DC conference last week that the Western powers have been in “serial retreat” on their negotiating demands toward Iran since the EU-3 first started unsuccessful talks in 2003.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At the start of the current process, one year ago, Secretary of State John Kerry was still talking about “dismantling” Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But in the first stage of talks, the P5+1 (US., UK, France, Russia, China + Germany) swept that demand off the table, caving into Iran’s demand that the great powers recognize a supposed “right to enrich,” which <a href="http://isis-online.org/publications/iran/irannptviolations.pdf">I and others argue</a> Iran forfeited in the mid-2000s when the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions condemning Iran for violating its commitments under the Nonproliferation treaty.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Why would Iran agree to make meaningful concessions when the United States continues to back off its demands and to throw away its trump card: the complex tissue of U.S. and multilateral sanctions that had crippled Iran’s economy and brought it to the negotiating table in the first place?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Economist published a series of revealing economic charts on the impact of the Iran sanctions in its November 1st edition, drawing on sources from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Energy Information Administration, the Statistical Centre of Iran, and the Central Bank of Iran.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Once crippling oil and financial sanctions imposed in 2010-2011 began to kick in, Iran’s economy went into a freefall. Iran’s GDP has been gradually expanding for several years. In 2012, the economy went into full recession, retracting by 6%. Consumer prices skyrocketed by 40%, as did the youth unemployment rate. Vehicle production plunged, the currency collapsed, while both imports and exports declined dramatically.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">By all accounts, the halving of Iran’s oil exports – a much greater impact than most analysts had expected – resulted in bringing Iran to the table.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">But now, all of that is changing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Mark Dubowitz, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, estimates that real sanctions relief over the first year of negotiations was close to $20 billion – far more than the administration has claimed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The Geneva process has turned around Iran’s economy,” he told a Washington, DC conference last week. As a result, “their nuclear intransigence has increased, not decreased.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Former IAEA nuclear safeguards chief Olli Heinonen told the same conference that the negotiations were “rewarding Iran for its past bad behavior,” and set a “bad example for future proliferators.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Iranians “will just lie their faces off to get a bomb,” Senator Mark Kirk (R,IL) added.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On Monday, Secretary of State <a href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/11/234363.htm">John Kerry declared</a> in Vienna that a final agreement, to be negotiated in the coming months, would “close off all the pathways for Iran to get fissile material for a nuclear weapon.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The formula was designed to meet a key criterion set down by Democrats in the House and Senate, such as Florida Rep. Ted Deutch, who agree with their Republican colleagues that Congress must set a high threshhold for what an acceptable deal must look like.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">For these security-minded Democrats, an <a href="http://teddeutch.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398343">acceptable nuclear deal</a> “must dismantle Iran’s centrifuge program to prevent Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear state, create robust verification and monitoring mechanisms to prevent undetectable breakout, force Iran to come clean on its past nuclear activities including possible military dimensions and cover a long enough duration that the regime won’t simply ‘wait it out.’”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">If a deal along these lines cannot be reached, “Congress must make clear to Iran that sanctions will be ratcheted up dramatically at the end of the extension period,” he added.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The problem is, Obama has no intention of letting that happen, and has made it clear he will remove additional sanctions by the stroke of his Executive Order pen or by issuing waivers to legislative sanctions. (On pages 5-7 of his excellent testimony <a href="http://defenddemocracy.org/content/uploads/documents/Dubowitz_Testimony_Nov20_2014.pdf">before Congress last week</a>, FDD’s Dubowitz outlines “the administration’s plan to circumvent Congress” through executive branch sanctions relief).</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Die-hard Obama loyalists in Congress, such as Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, argue that a bad nuclear agreement is better than no agreement. “Beware making the perfect the enemy of the good,” he said last week. “Without an agreement, we are condemning the world to a conflict with Iran.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That in the end is Obama’s hammer. He will accuse anyone who opposes his massive concessions to Iran as a war-mongerer – a charge that Rep. Ted Deutch has tried to tackle head on. “Those who oppose a bad deal do not support a ‘march to war,’ but refuse an agreement that allows Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” he said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Want to bet what Obama will be saying about him when he and Kerry finally reveal the terms of the bad deal they want Congress to approve? “They’ve red-teamed this. They will paint their opponents as war-mongers,” Dubowitz says.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Get ready to enter Obama’s parallel universe.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Like Hassan ibn Saba, leader of the 11th century hashish cult fictionalized by novelist Vladimir Bartol, Obama believes himself to be a master of illusion. If you can make people believe the illusion, then the illusion becomes reality. Perception is everything.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">So here we go. Obama wants us to watch his hands and repeat after him: Iran is not a threat. We have stopped Iran’s nuclear weapons development. Iran is our ally against ISIS. Iran is a rational regime.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s up to us and to Congress to break the spell. Don’t look at his hands but at the fire burning just behind him.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> interview with <strong>Ken Timmerman</strong> about his new book, <strong>Dark Forces</strong>: </em></p>
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		<title>Turkey&#8217;s Siren Song on Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-r-timmerman/turkeys-siren-song-on-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=turkeys-siren-song-on-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:05:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IAEA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[turkey]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=122220</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the US should reject renewed calls for sham negotiations with the Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Iran-Turkey-Diplomacy-thumb-470x318-2214.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122235" title="Iran-Turkey-Diplomacy-thumb-470x318-2214" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Iran-Turkey-Diplomacy-thumb-470x318-2214.gif" alt="" width="375" height="254" /></a></p>
<p>Turkey’s foreign minister came to Washington on Friday, trying to push another fake “peace in our time” deal with Iran. Given the Obama administration’s track record with Iran to date, they may take it – with disastrous consequences.</p>
<p>Ahmed Davotoglu hectored members of Congress and activists who have been pushing for tough measures on the Iranian regime, arguing that a spoonful of sugar was all that was needed to get Iran to “cut a deal on limits to its nuclear program.”</p>
<p>“The deal is clear. It could be resolved in a few days,” Davotoglu said. The problem was “mutual distrust,” made worse by U.S. sanctions. “What happened [as a result of sanctions]? Iran produced more” enriched uranium, he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/turkish-diplomat-iran-is-ready-to-cut-a-deal/2012/02/10/gIQANA164Q_story.html">argued</a>.</p>
<p>We have heard this siren song many times before. In 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency woke up to the fact that Iran had been lying to IAEA inspectors for the previous 18 years about its secret nuclear weapons-related program, the same advocates of talks with Tehran argued that everything could be resolved “in a few days.”</p>
<p>Then IAEA secretary general, the Egyptian Mohamed Elbaradei, flew to Tehran in February 2003 to meet with Iran’s then “moderate” president, mullah Mohammad Khatami. Instead of a few days, talks dragged on for two years, during which time the Iranian regime completed construction on key facilities needed for its weapons program.</p>
<p>Are our memories so short that we have forgotten this charade? Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was criticized by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the 2005 presidential elections in Iran for having “gone soft” and “caving in to imperialist powers” by signing an agreement with the IAEA that theoretically opened Iran’s nuclear facilities to inspections.</p>
<p>But Ahmadinejad hadn’t read the memo – at least, not yet. The former negotiator, Hossein Musavian, revealed the truth in a television interview that should have put a halt to any future attempts to negotiate with Tehran.</p>
<p>”Thanks to our dealings with Europe, even when we got a 50-day ultimatum, we managed to continue the work for two years,” Musavian <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2005_11-04wt.htm">said</a> of the 2003 deal that was eventually struck. “Today, we are in a position of power.&#8221; The negotiations with Europe and the IAEA had been a ploy to “buy time” so Iran could complete work on its enrichment facilities, he added.</p>
<p>Every time the U.S. or the Europeans or the P5+1 (the permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) engage in “negotiations” with Tehran, the Iranian regime feigns to make concessions, then enriches away.</p>
<p>That is precisely what is going on today. Except that today, Iran is so close to the bomb that the slightest mistake will be deadly.</p>
<p>Thanks to the IAEA inspections, we now know that the Islamic Republic has enough enriched uranium to make four nuclear warheads. Much of this uranium has been enriched to twenty percent. Once uranium is enriched to 20%, Iran can complete the process to reach weapons-grade fuel in just a few weeks. That means Iran can “break out” of any agreement and make the fuel for nuclear weapons between two inspection visits by the IAEA, making it extremely difficult to detect – until too late.</p>
<p>We also know that Iran has developed a nuclear warhead with aid from Pakistani nuclear black market genius, A.Q. Khan, and has extensively tested all of its non-nuclear <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2011_06_02-iaea-iran-cold-test.htm">components</a> to validate the design.</p>
<p>In November, thanks to a mysterious explosion at a missile research center outside of Iran, we learned that Iran has been working hard to develop a new <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/30/the-shadow-war-against-iran/">ICBM</a> with a range of 10,000 miles. While the design parameters of that missile are not well known, it is clear that the Iranian regime is developing this missile in order to target the United States.</p>
<p>The man who designed that new missile, who was killed in the blast, left behind instructions that the epitaph on his tomb should <a href="http://iran-times.com/english/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=3088:my-epitaph&amp;catid=110:tam-left&amp;Itemid=396">read</a>: “Write on my tombstone: This is the grave of the one who wanted to annihilate Israel.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>The China Illusion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-r-timmerman/the-china-illusion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-china-illusion</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-r-timmerman/the-china-illusion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:13:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taiwan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119054</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama White House sees Taiwan's free enterprise as an affront.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cin.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-119056" title="cin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cin.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="309" /></a></p>
<p>The Obama administration has been toying with a proposition so dangerous it dare not utter it directly.</p>
<p>The NY Times oped pages headline writers helped generate the proper spin for this pernicious ploy: “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan.” The story by Paul V. Kane, a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war and former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, spelled out with wide-eyed enthusiasm a fantasy that would have disastrous consequences for America if it were ever enacted.</p>
<p>Mr. Kane urged President Obama to make a Faustian bargain with China’s leaders.</p>
<p>“He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/to-save-our-economy-ditch-taiwan.html">Kane wrote.</a></p>
<p>In support of his “grand bargain,” Kane argued that “Today, the America has little strategic interest in Taiwan,” an argument the “China-is-not-a-threat” lobby has been making unsuccessfully for years.</p>
<p>Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in China this week, ostensibly to win China’s support for the latest round of Iran sanctions, an embargo on Iranian oil sales and a ban on Iran’s Central Bank.</p>
<p>Given the lack of public outcry over Mr. Kane’s trial balloon, will Geithner make the debt-for-Taiwan pitch while he is there?</p>
<p>The Chinese appear to be playing along. In a story filed from Beijing on Tuesday about Geithner’s upcoming visit, the Associated Press touted China’s hostility toward more Iran sanctions.</p>
<p>“China has no reason to go along with this,” the AP quoted an Iran analyst at Peking University as saying. “China does not want to be seen as helping the U.S. when China’s own interest is concerned.”</p>
<p>So in other words, if the U.S. wants to get China’s cooperation on the oil cut-off and Central Bank sanctions, we are going to have to offer something really, <em>really</em> important. How about Taiwan? These days an island of free enterprise just across the Strait from China is seen more as an affront than an asset by the Obama White House.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget that in signing the new Iran sanctions into law on December 31, <a href="../2012/01/06/irans-bluff/">President Obama said</a> he disagreed with the sanctions and had no intention of applying them.</p>
<p>So the table is set for a betrayal of Taiwan.</p>
<p>This President needs no lessons in cynicism from anyone. He recently announced a permanent deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia to defend against a growing China threat, so he can argue that he is no softie when it comes to Chinese expansionism. But defend Taiwan? Why? After all, as Kane says in his NY Times gambit, “our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war,” and “fear of a Red China menacing Asia is anachronistic.”</p>
<p>The Republican National Committee is taking the debt-for-Taiwan gambit so seriously that they will vote on a resolution at their annual winter meeting in New Orleans on Friday that would enshrine U.S. military support for Taiwan as a guiding foreign policy doctrine for the party’s presidential candidate this year.</p>
<p>What happens to Taiwan is “potentially the biggest foreign policy challenge that a new president will face, so we want our candidates to know our position and help them formulate their own,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/10/geithner-on-uphill-quest-for-chinas-backing-on-ira/">told the Washington Times.</a></p>
<p>The draft RNC resolution includes support for continued arms sales to Taiwan, and an acknowledgement of Taiwan’s strategic relationship with the United States. Several of the resolution sponsors are seeking to get the presidential candidates to talk about Taiwan during the campaign. They have included a provision requiring the RNC to send the resolution to all the GOP presidential hopefuls, something the Washington Times says is “a first” for the GOP and has never been done by Democrats.</p>
<p>Some of us have been warning about Communist China’s intentions since the early 1990s and before. A series of investigative magazine articles I wrote for the America Spectator about the sell-off of U.S. military technology to China became part of the “China-gate” scandal of the Clinton years. (Those stories are <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/soa.htm">now available</a> in a low-price Kindle edition).</p>
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		<title>Iran&#8217;s Bluff?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-r-timmerman/irans-bluff/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-bluff</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:32:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persian gulf]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[strait of hormuz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. naval power]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118243</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What will the Mullahs really do if push comes to shove? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ahmadinejad1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-118248" title="ahmadinejad1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ahmadinejad1.jpg" alt="" width="403" height="270" /></a></p>
<p>Iranian leaders are threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz to international traffic, and on Wednesday the parliament passed a law “forbidding” foreign warships to enter the Persian Gulf.</p>
<p>These moves came as the United States and Europe consider moves that will dramatically increase the economic and diplomatic pressure on Tehran – moves that already have caused the Iranian currency to lose more than half of its value, plunging from <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/03/iran-currency-dollar-idUSL6E8C30JN20120103">10,500 rials to the U.S. dollar last month</a> to around 18,000 rials on Monday, before recovering to around 15,500 on Wednesday.</p>
<p>On Dec. 31, President Obama signed a Defense Authorization bill that includes comprehensive new sanctions against Bank Markazi, Iran’s Central Bank. Existing sanctions against Iranian commercial banks have forced Iran over the past two years to increasingly take payment for its oil exports – the overwhelming hard currency income for the regime – through Bank Markazi.</p>
<p>While <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2012/01/03/obama-signs-iran-central-bank-sanctions-into-law/">loopholes in the legislation exist</a> that Obama has pledged to exploit, the National Iranian American Council – a group that consistently reflects the concerns and policy goals of the Iranian regime – <a href="http://www.niacouncil.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Action_SanctionsCampaign">lobbied hard against it.</a></p>
<p>Most significant among NIAC (and Tehran’s) worries is the potential that “Tehran could find itself unable to execute oil sales,” <a href="http://www.niacouncil.org/site/DocServer/Unintended_Consequences_of_Central_Bank_Sanctions.pdf?docID=1141">a NIAC briefing paper</a> warned.</p>
<p>But that is precisely the reason Congress finally took the step of imposing a worldwide ban on Iran’s Central Bank after years of hand-wringing that such a move would drive up oil prices and impinge upon the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.</p>
<p>“Without immediate and serious action, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have a nuclear weapons capability in the near future,&#8221; <a href="http://kirk.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=363">Senator Mark Kirk said </a>when he filed the amendment in November. &#8220;As the world&#8217;s leading state sponsor of terrorism, it&#8217;s quite likely that the Iranian regime would transfer its nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. And we can be sure that an Iranian bomb will set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East &#8211; from Saudi Arabia to Egypt. We must act now or face the consequences of a nuclear Iran.&#8221;</p>
<p>So what will Iran really do if push comes to shove? And how will the increased tensions affect the price of oil?</p>
<p><strong>Scenario 1: Iran attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz.</strong></p>
<p>The Iranian navy could attempt to use its Russian-made <em>Kilo-class</em> diesel-electric subs and smaller home-made <em>Ghadir-class</em> boats to torpedo ships entering the narrow sea lanes of the Strait, or try a repeat of its 1988 effort to mine the Strait.</p>
<p>Iranian leaders have made many threats recently that this is what they will do, boasting like drunken sailors that closing the Strait is a simple matter they could undertake with no preparation that would devastate world oil markets and exacerbate the international economic downturn.</p>
<p>But most analysts believe such a move would provide an acceptable excuse for the U.S. Navy to unleash its overwhelming firepower against Iran, sinking the majority of Iran’s major surface ships, knocking out its coastal artillery and anti-shipping missile batteries, and perhaps sinking offshore oil platforms, as during Operation Praying Mantis in April 1988.</p>
<p>“If the Islamic Republic wants to commit suicide, then by all means, close the Strait of Hormuz right away,” <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/28/tehrans-moment-of-truth/">the Washington Times editorial page</a> remarked recently.</p>
<p><strong><em>Consequence: oil prices increase sharply for several days, then drop like a rock. Iran loses.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong>Scenario 2: Iran uses “swarming” attacks against U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf.</strong></p>
<p>When the USS John C. Stennis or another U.S. carrier attempts to re-enter the Persian Gulf (which the U.S. Navy <a href="http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.html">sometimes refers to</a> as the “Arabian” Gulf), Iran could carry out its threat to attack – not using large surface ships or missile boats, but with swarms of small “go-fast” boats armed with Revolutionary Guards troops and shoulder-launched weapons.</p>
<p>Such attacks could have dramatic success. U.S. planners have been worried about this since at least 2002, when they had to <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/4/iranian-threats-churn-up-fears-of-spiking-oil-pric/">halt a war -gaming exercise</a> after Iranian go-fast boats sank the majority of the U.S. fleet.</p>
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		<title>Germany, Wavering Ally</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/germany-wavering-ally/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=germany-wavering-ally</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:15:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Merkel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sarkozy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=114987</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A crucial European ally drifts away from America -- and towards Russia and Iran.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/sarkozy-merkel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-114990" title="sarkozy-merkel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/sarkozy-merkel.jpg" alt="" width="415" height="289" /></a></p>
<p>As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.</p>
<p>They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.</p>
<p>It’s well-known that German taxpayers are <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763294,00.html">fed up with footing the bill</a> for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.</p>
<p>“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”</p>
<p>Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.</p>
<p>But the duplicity of German Chancellor Merkel – smiling at Sarkozy in public, while throwing daggers at him in private – takes the cake.</p>
<p>The European media often talks of the Paris-Berlin axis, a code phrase meant to signify a marriage of reason between Europe’s two biggest economies.</p>
<p>But the extent of the falling out between Merkel and Sarkozy goes way beyond a marital spat. It is verging on divorce.</p>
<p>As the French rely increasingly on Britain and the United States, Germany is leering to the east. “What we are seeing is the emergency of a new Berlin-Moscow-Tehran axis,” the Sarkozy advisor warned.</p>
<p>There are many signs of trouble just beneath the surface.</p>
<p>First, there is Germany’s ongoing trade with Iran. Despite strong European Union sanctions on Iran, top German firms continue to do a booming business with Tehran.</p>
<p>Even worse: German trade associations are actively promoting exports to Iran, even as the EU calls for halting trade entirely.  Here are a few of these trade promotion events from just the past two months:</p>
<blockquote><p>-          On October 10, 2011, a delegation from southwest Iran visited Dresden seeking to expand Iran’s purchase of oil and gas field technology from German firms. (The organizers of this event have no sense of irony, <a href="http://www.eivent.de/khuzestan.html">as their website slogan shows:</a> “European-Iranian ventures, Your Economic Success”)</p>
<p>-          On October 26, the <a href="http://de.stopthebomb.net/fileadmin/editors_de/D-Iran/11-10-26_Einladung_Reza_Farzin.pdf">German Foreign Policy Association</a> hosted Iran’s Vice Minister of Economics and Finance, Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzin, to a public forum to promote cooperation with Iran and oppose sanctions.</p>
<p>-          On November 8, the German Business Association hosted a German-Iranian Business Congress in Berlin, spotlighting “<a href="http://de.stopthebomb.net/en/d-iran/eivent.html">Iranian Business Women Power.”</a></p>
<p>-          On November 22, the Bavarian Ministry for Economics held its annual Export Promotion Day, with a special emphasis on exploring <a href="http://de.stopthebomb.net/en/d-iran/economic-promotion.html#c1851">“better market chances in Iran, possibilities to invest, finding business partners in Iran.”</a></p></blockquote>
<p>(Hat tip to the enterprising group known as <a href="http://de.stopthebomb.net/en/d-iran/economic-promotion.html#c1851">Stop the Bomb</a> for keeping close tabs on German exports to Iran).</p>
<p>We’ve been through this song and dance before with Libya and Iraq in the 1980s, where the Germans were building poison gas factories and ballistic missile plants. It became known as trade <em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">über alles.</span></em></p>
<p>At the same time, Merkel’s government has been pressing hard behind the scenes to <a href="http://www.welt.de/print/wams/politik/article13737433/Die-deutsche-Iran-Connection.html">block EU sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank,</a> an initiative being promoted by French president Sarkozy.</p>
<p>So what’s going on? At a closed door meeting among European intelligence czars recently, top officials at Germany’s BND (their equivalent of the CIA) shocked their counterparts with the virulence of their ant-American remarks.</p>
<p>There’s a 1930’s style resurgence of nationalism in Germany that has caught the attention of many Europeans, the top Sarkozy advisor told me. “It’s Germany first, and to hell with Europe,” he said.</p>
<p>At the same time Germany is eager to protect its business ties to Tehran, Chancellor Merkel has been forging a closer political and economic relationship with Russia.</p>
<p>Some observers see the covert hand of Russia’s SVR intelligence service in the recent anti-nuclear campaign that led to <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=merkel%20says%20nuclear%20plants%20will%20close&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CCAQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2011%2F05%2F31%2Fworld%2Feurope%2F31germany.html&amp;ei=9KreTrnfLITq0gGH4eGoBw&amp;usg=AFQjCNFBmQWgwzJY2HrERD936Bqgd6DEZA">Merkel’s surprise announcement on May 30</a> that Germany will close all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022.</p>
<p>The French, of course, are particularly sensitive to such things since they rely on nuclear power to produce around 80% of their electricity and are the world’s foremost exporter of nuclear power technology.</p>
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		<title>Iran’s Thugocracy Attacks Again</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/iran%e2%80%99s-thugocracy-attacks-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iran%25e2%2580%2599s-thugocracy-attacks-again</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:15:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ahmad Rezai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ayatollah Khomeini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mohsen Rezai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=112445</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Murder in Dubai, a prelude to war?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/aaaRezaeiFatherAndSon.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-112477" title="aaaRezaeiFatherAndSon" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/aaaRezaeiFatherAndSon.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>The 35-year-old son of the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Gen. Mohsen Rezai, was found dead in a luxury suites hotel in Dubai on Sunday, a death his family deemed “suspicious.”</p>
<p>Ahmad Rezai had gone to Dubai on September 8 to visit his family, who maintain a residence in Dubai. He has been unable to travel to Iran since he was released from house arrest by the regime on May 1, 2008.</p>
<p>According to the <em><a href="http://www.tehrantimes.com/index.php/politics/92522-mohsen-rezaiis-son-found-dead-at-a-hotel-in-dubai-">Tehran Times</a></em>, the younger Rezai “died after receiving an electric shock.” An opposition Iranian source told me he was followed back from Tehran by two members of the Quds Force who may have carried out the hit.</p>
<p>The younger Rezai’s murder was discovered just hours after a series of explosions rocked the main depot for the Revolutionary Guards stockpile of Shahab-3 missiles in the southwestern suburbs of Tehran, killing one of Iran’s top missile experts, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2099376,00.html">Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghadam</a>.</p>
<p>It’s unclear if the two events are related, as many bloggers have been <a href="http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/39000#CurDomainURL%23/blog.cfm">suggesting</a>. However, Gen. Mohsen Rezai commands a substantial following within the IRGC even today, fourteen years after he was replaced as IRGC commander. The murder of his son by another faction of regime thugs will surely have repercussions inside Iran.</p>
<p>To me, this feels like the murder of Ahmad Shah Massood in Afghanistan on Sept 9, 2001. I can still remember hearing of Masood’s murder and thinking at the time: this is the beginning of something really bad.</p>
<p>By the very fact that he lived in the United States and had U.S. citizenship, Ahmad Rezai gave his father an “American connection” the regime jinned up into a massive conspiracy. The fact that they couldn’t prove any of their allegations against him, despite many years of efforts, only convinced them further that father and son constituted a threat to the regime.</p>
<p>Combine this murder with the missile base explosion, the latest IAEA report that reveals ongoing nuclear warhead work – despite the CIA’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate to the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/10/connecting-the-nuclear-dots-on-iran/">contrary</a> – and the intense factional warfare inside the regime that is pitting Ahmadinejad against Khamenei and splitting the IRGC into multiple, mutually-hostile factions – and you’ve laid the table for a dramatic series of events. Something bad is going to happen. And the target is likely to be Israel.</p>
<p><strong>Family background</strong></p>
<p>Gen. Rezai has twice run for president, both times against Ahmadinejad. After the stolen election of June 2009, he joined the other failed candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karrubi, in calling for a full investigation of election fraud.</p>
<p>But as street protests in Tehran and elsewhere intensified, Rezai caved into pressure from Ayatollah Khamenei – including threats to his family – and retreated to Mashad for several months where he lectured at the local university. (He holds a PhD in economics.)</p>
<p>Khamenei also threatened the family of Rezai’s boss at the Expediency Council, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.</p>
<p>Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, was arrested after the election on allegations of failing to pay import duties on large quantities of green “mantos” – the head to toe covering, usually in black, that Iranian women are forced to wear in public – she was planning to distribute thanks to grants from NGOs with ties to George Soros and his Open Society Institute.</p>
<p>Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Hashemi, was planning to return to Iran from London after the election, but was ultimately warned away from returning by Ahmad Rezai, who learned that the regime had issued an arrest warrant for Hashemi and fully intended to carry it out if he came to Tehran.</p>
<p>Ahmad Rezai has been in the gunsights of the regime ever since he defected to the United States in 1997 at the age of 22.</p>
<p>I first interviewed him in Los Angeles the following year, when he blasted the regime for carrying out terrorist attacks, including the Khobar Towers bombing.</p>
<p>&#8220;Three persons sign off on every order to commit a foreign terrorist action: Ayatollah Khamene&#8217;i, Rafsanjani, and Khamene&#8217;i&#8217;s chief of staff, Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammadi-Golpayegani,&#8221; he told me in that <a href="http://www.iran.org/tib/public/4901.htm">interview</a>.</p>
<p>In 1999, his father dispatched two people to lure Ahmad away from Los Angeles, where he had obtained political asylum, to the estate of a wealthy Iranian businessman in Costa Rica, on the pretext that Iranian agents in Los Angeles were trying to kill him.</p>
<p>Gen. Rezai was trying to get Ahmad to return to Iran, where he thought he could get the regime to “forgive” his outspoken radio and television interviews. At the time, President Khatami was leading a reformist movement that included a loosening up of the regime’s intelligence apparatus. Gen. Rezai was working with Khatami at the time.</p>
<p>In the end, the younger Rezai managed to return to the United States from Costa Rica, with help from the Foundation for Democracy in <a href="http://www.iran.org/tib/public/5610.htm">Iran</a>, which I founded in 1995. He learned English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies for three months while getting resettled into the United States.</p>
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		<title>Connecting the Nuclear Dots on Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/connecting-the-nuclear-dots-on-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=connecting-the-nuclear-dots-on-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:40:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense Minister Barak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jericho 3 test]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pre-emptive strike]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=111880</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the U.S. should fire top intelligence analysts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iran7.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111883" title="iran7" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iran7.jpg" alt="" width="412" height="277" /></a></p>
<p>With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu &#8211; exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?</p>
<p>A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.</p>
<p>According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/2/israeli-missile-test-air-drill-heat-up-talk-of-att/">third test-launch of a Jericho 3</a> nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.</p>
<p>According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.</p>
<p>Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.</p>
<p>“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”</p>
<p>Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week <a href="http://empactamerica.org/attendevents_11012011.php">at a briefing organized by EMPact Americ</a>a for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?</p>
<p>EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.</p>
<p>According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.</p>
<p>In one unsigned editorial from the IRGC’s Fars news agency, the Guards threatened to utterly destroy Israel with just four missiles if Israel dared to launch any kind of attack on Iran.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the question, what if Iran already had the bomb?</p>
<p>Former IRGC officer and undercover CIA spy, Reza Kahlili, believes Iran <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/31/iran-nuclear-warheads/">acquired nuclear warheads from a former Soviet republic</a> at the end of the Cold War, and has designed its own nuclear warhead with the help of Ukrainian scientists.</p>
<p>As I reported in my 2005 book, <a href="http://www.kentimmerman.com/countdown.htm">Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran,</a> IRGC commander Gen. Mohsen Rezai traveled to North Korea in January 1993, seeking assistance in arming those warheads. My informant, a top advisor to Gen. Rezai who later defected (and who spoke with me), said the North Koreans agreed to provide that help.</p>
<p>From that day forward, Iran believed it had a nuclear deterrent – not a strike force, but at least a deterrent – and its behavior changed. The IRGC believed they could carry out aggressive acts against the United States, including a terror alliance with Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and the U.S. would never strike back with any consequence, and certainly would not strike the Iranian homeland.</p>
<p>This week’s IAEA report is only the latest in a series of revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna that has documented Iran’s long march toward nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Despite these reports, <a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/10575/iaea-iran-nuclear-report-a-skeptics-primer">nuclear skeptics</a> continue to claim that Iran is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, incapable, and lacking the will to defy the international community and deploy nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Just three weeks ago, the same nuclear analyst <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iaea-says-foreign-expertise-has-brought-iran-to-threshold-of-nuclear-capability/2011/11/05/gIQAc6hjtM_story.html">quoted this week by the Washington Post</a> to sound the alarm about the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear weapons progress, David Albright, was telling folks how the Stuxnet virus had <a href="../2011/10/20/peace-in-our-time-with-iran/">crippled Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.</a></p>
<p>As they say, what a difference a week makes.</p>
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		<title>The Problem With Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/the-problem-with-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-problem-with-islam</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Nov 2011 04:00:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=111021</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book dares to call out the "Religion of Peace."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/islam66.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111025" title="islam66" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/islam66.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="441" /></a></p>
<p>It is difficult for Americans to comprehend the challenge to Western civilization from Islam and Islamist ideology. While our political leaders tell us constantly that we are not at war with Islam, the Obama administration will not acknowledge the fact that we <em>are</em> at war with Islamist ideology.</p>
<p>In a slim new volume of four essays, <a href="http://isaac-publishing.us/">“Islam in our Midst: the Challenge to our Christian Heritage,”</a> Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo examines the roots of Islamist ideology and finds little difference between them and Islam itself as it is currently preached in the Muslim mainstream.</p>
<p>And therein lies the problem with Islam. “Politically correct approaches often present a sanitized view of Islam, ignoring its terrorist forms,” Sookhdeo writes.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has conscientiously excised words such as “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamist terrorism” and “jihad” from the lexicon of its national security doctrine, “because they are deemed to anger Muslims and increase tensions with the wider Muslim world,” Sookhdeo notes.</p>
<p>This has only encouraged the Islamists, who are using left-wing think tanks such as the Center for American Progress to send out the political thought-police to condemn anyone who dares to discuss such issues openly as “Islamophobe.”</p>
<p>Dr. Sookhdeo is a noted scholar of Christianity and Islam, and is the international director for Barnabas Aid, a Christian agency that gives assistance to Christians facing persecution around the world.</p>
<p>Because of his scholarship and his deep understanding of Islamic texts and Islamic law, it is harder for the pro-Sharia lobby to dismiss him as an Islamophobe.</p>
<p>He believes we need to understand the fundamental contradiction and incompatibility between the “Islamic worldview” (note: not “Islamist”) and its American secular counterpart.</p>
<p>First, “a fundamental doctrine of Islam is the unity of religion (<em>din</em>) and state (<em>dawla),”</em> he writes. “Islam is thus inherently political. In a very real sense, for Muslims Islam is the state.” [p39]</p>
<p>Sharia law, which is derived from the Koran, the Hadith, and the various accounts of the life of Mohammad, “contains a complete social and political order, with regulations not only on personal devotion but also on all elements of legal jurisdiction, political institutions, relations with other states and even military endeavors.”</p>
<p>Muslims are taught in their mosques that they form a community that spreads across national borders, even across continents, as opposed to the individualism of American society.</p>
<p>“This can create tensions and conflicts for Muslims living in societies such as the U.S.,” Sookhdeo writes. “It raises the question of where one’s first loyalty lies.” [p41]</p>
<p>If all this sounds familiar, it should. Sookhdeo’s message bears a strong family ressemblance to what you may have heard from the likes of Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Stephen Coughlin or John Guandolo, who have decrypted Islamist ideology and the efforts of Muslim Brotherhood front groups to gradually impose Sharia law on the United States.</p>
<p>But Sookhdeo’s approach is more spiritual, and he has written this latest slim volume as a challenge to Christians to better understand the differences between their worldview and the Islamic one.</p>
<p>Born a Muslim in exile from his native Pakistan, Sookhdeo moved from British Guyana to Britain and became a Christian while studying at university. He went on to become an ordained Anglican priest, in addition to doing his PhD at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies.</p>
<p>For Muslims, therefore, Sookhdeo is an apostate, a man with a price on his head. In Britain recently, Islamist activists <a href="http://barnabasfund.org/UK/News/News-analysis/Dr-Patrick-Sookhdeo-responds-to-critical-Guardian-article.html">sought to get him condemned as an Islamaphobe</a> by the UK Charities Commission for <a href="http://www.barnabasfund.org/UK/Act/Campaign/Operation-Nehemiah/What-is-Operation-Nehemiah/">his efforts to educate Christians about Islamic doctrine</a> and to promote Christian prayer.</p>
<p>“Islam in Our Midst” tackles the problem of Sharia law and the efforts by Muslim organizations to gradually impose it on the West, and why Sharia is totally incompatible with Western societies.</p>
<p>“The existence of a divine law, ordained by the god of Islam, excludes the possibility of any other kind of law, such as natural law or human law,” Sookhdeo writes. [p42] At its core, Islam is a political ideology, operating in the public space. “The concept of a personal devotional life of faith within the private space has little emphasis in mainstream Islam.”</p>
<p>Mainstream Muslim clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular proselytizer who appears on al-Jazeera and other Arabic language networks, “explicitly rejects secularism as apostasy from Islam because it means abandoning the rule of Sharia,” Sookhdeo notes.</p>
<p>I hosted a panel in June on the future of the war on terror at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom conference. In addition to excellent contributions from Frank Gaffney and CBN correspondent Erik Stakelbek, a lawyer named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Jordan_Breger">Marshall Bregar</a> was added to our panel at the last minute at the assistance of Grover Norquist, a close friend of Ralph Reed’s.</p>
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		<title>Peace in Our Time with Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/peace-in-our-time-with-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=peace-in-our-time-with-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:49:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[centrifuges]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IAEA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=109399</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama wants us to believe he has tamed the Mullahs' nukes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Ahmadinejad1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-109403" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Ahmadinejad1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="566" /></a></p>
<p>Now we can all rest assured. Iran’s nuclear weapons program has “stumbled badly” and is “beset by poorly performing equipment, shortages of parts and other woes,” <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/irans-nuclear-program-suffering-new-setbacks-diplomats-and-experts-say/2011/10/17/gIQAByndsL_story.html">the Washington Post proclaimed</a> on Tuesday.</p>
<p>An alleged joint U.S.-Israeli cyber attack known as Stuxnet and other problems have taken “a mounting toll” on Iran’s nuclear centrifuge program that could “hurt Iran’s ability to break out quickly” into the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers,” the Post concluded.</p>
<p>In other words, it’s “peace in our time” when it comes to Iran. Obama’s policy of pressure and incentives (the old “carrots and sticks” approach) is working. We can all go home, pop open a good bottle, and relax.</p>
<p>In case you were wondering about his “administration” sources, the author of this good news story, Joby Warrick, jetted off to Libya with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as his story appeared on the front page of Post’s printed edition on Tuesday. Pravda has spoken.</p>
<p>To give his fairy tale the “audacity of hope,” Warrick cited two just-released reports by David Albright, who briefly worked as an on-site inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).</p>
<p>Citing fragmentary evidence gathered by IAEA inspectors in Iran, Albright <a href="http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/test1/">extrapolated graphs</a> for the production of low-enriched uranium (LEU) at Iran’s primary enrichment plant at Natanz, which many analysts believe was hit by the Stuxnet virus in the fall of 2009.</p>
<p>While overall production of LEU appeared to have remained stable, there appears to have been an abrupt drop over the summer. Albright attributes this to problems Iran is having with acquiring centrifuge production materials, and to the lingering impact of Stuxnet. “Without question, they have been set back,” he told the Post.</p>
<p>But at the same time, the IAEA data shows that Iran has actually <em>increased significantly</em> the number of centrifuges that are actively spinning. So if their setbacks are temporary, they quite feasibly could dramatically increase their production in the very near future. That is just the opposite of what the Washington Post wants you to believe.</p>
<p>Albright has a history of downplaying the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, and tried to get Rep. Sylvester Reyes (D, Tx) to call back a report by the Republican staff of the House intelligence committee in 2007 once he took over as committee chairman.</p>
<p>The report warned that the IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community were downplaying the seriousness of Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts, in particular, its successful procurement of centrifuge gear from Pakistani nuclear weapons guru A. Q. Khan, as I <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24778">described on this website</a> at the time.</p>
<p>The HPSCI report criticized then IAEA Secretary General Mohamad ElBaradei for firing chief inspector Christophe Charlier, a U.S. nuclear weapons expert, for raising concerns about Iranian deception. Albright defended ElBaradei for firing the Charlier and <a href="http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/reportintelcommittee.pdf">called on HPSCI to recall</a> the report.</p>
<p>In a parallel report, released on Monday, Albright claimed that Iran appears to have abandoned using imported maraging steel to make the bellows of its new, more efficient uranium enrichment centrifuge design. Instead, they are using carbon fiber, a material Iran claims to be manufacturing locally.</p>
<p>There are several possible explanations for the shift. Albright says the most likely is that U.S. and international “sanctions may have forced Iran into choosing a less desirable technical centrifuge design.”</p>
<p>In fact, according to design information Iran provided the IAEA, Iran always intended to use carbon fiber for the bellows and rotors of its newer, more efficient IR-2 centrifuges, and is not resorting to a cheap substitute because of sanctions.</p>
<p>A fellow left-leaning analyst writing the <a href="http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1388/bellows-bearings-and-rotors">“arms control wonk” website</a> pointed out four years ago that Iran’s IR-2 (also known as P-2) centrifuges would be using carbon fiber, not maraging steel.</p>
<p>Despite this evidence, Albright concluded, “Constraints on Iran’s advanced centrifuge program have resulted directly from the effectiveness of targeted sanctions against critical goods necessary for the manufacture of centrifuge components.” That certainly warranted a front-page story in Tuesday’s Washington Post, since it gave the key to the “Peace in Our Time” theme that ran throughout.</p>
<p>But Warrick went even further by tying the apparent (and I believe, unsubstantiated) setbacks in Iran’s nuclear programs to the <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/13/if-only-they-had-picked-the-right-mexican-why-i-think-the-iran-saudi-terror-case-is-for-real/">apparent stumble-bunnie plot</a> to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC.</p>
<p>‘“We’re used to seeing them do bad things, but this plot was so bizarre, it could be a sign of desperation, a reflection of the fact that they’re feeling under siege,” said [an Obama administration] official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could discuss the matter candidly,” Warrick reported.</p>
<p>In other words, this attempted act of terror was not an act of war; it was the act of a desperate man that can be safely ignored.</p>
<p>To further enhance the impression that we have nothing to worry about, Warrick then hauled out a real whopper:</p>
<p>“U.S. officials have said that the alleged assassination plot originated from elements within Iran’s elite Quds Force, a covert paramilitary group. But <em>it is not clear whether the nation’s top leaders knew about or approved the plan</em>,” he wrote (emphasis mine).</p>
<p>Now the indictment states clearly that Gen. Qassem Suleymani, the head of the Quds Force, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/13/if-only-they-had-picked-the-right-mexican-why-i-think-the-iran-saudi-terror-case-is-for-real/">approved the plot.</a> The Quds Force is the overseas expeditionary wing of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, the IRGC, and takes its orders directly from Supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Gen. Suleymani is a close confidant of Khamenei. What more “top” leader could possible have approved such a plot?</p>
<p>The Obama White House believes that Khamenei feels trapped, and they are trying to give him some wiggle room. They argue that he is fighting for his political life against Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani, both of whom would like to unseat him, and that he doesn’t have a direct line to Washington so he can arrange a Kumbaya moment with our president.</p>
<p>So what we are getting is excuses for the Iranian regime’s murderous impulses. Next perhaps will be, “the devil made him do it.”</p>
<p>The IAEA has already told us that Iran has <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2011_06_02-iaea-iran-cold-test.htm">cold-tested the components of a workable nuclear weapons design</a>. Forget this nonsense about some illusory “setback” to their program. All clandestine nuclear weapons programs, including our own in the 1940s, have had their setbacks. Our biggest worry should be the upcoming nuclear weapons test Iran is planning to conduct with North Korea, especially if they focus on a smaller yield but potent EMP warhead.</p>
<p>Peace in our time? Sure, we’ve seen that film before, and we ought to know how it ends.</p>
<p>Stay tuned.</p>
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		<title>Woefully Unprepared for EMP Attack</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/woefully-unprepared-for-emp-attack/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=woefully-unprepared-for-emp-attack</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:03:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EMP Attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EMP Commission]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rep. Trent Franks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SHEILD Act]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=108162</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“Keep some money in the sock drawer,” official advises.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/emp-attack.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-108165" title="emp attack" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/emp-attack.png" alt="" width="400" height="170" /></a></p>
<p>Whenever the left-wing media wants to conjure up an image of Republican failure and incompetence, they point to Hurricane Katrina and the days it took the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to respond in any effective manner.</p>
<p>Forget for the moment the fact that President Bush and his team were hampered in their efforts to provide emergency assistance by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Bianco (both Democrats), and the fact that New Orleans <a href="http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005372.php">actually had plans</a> to evacuate the city in the event of a major hurricane that Nagin failed to implement.</p>
<p>Katrina was an afternoon thunderstorm compared to what could hit the United States in the near future.</p>
<p>After three days of table-top exercises last week in and around Washington, DC to simulate the impact of a major solar event or a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, officials and experts concluded that our nation is woefully unprepared to handle the aftermath of such an event. And unlike a major hurricane, our nation’s leaders would have just minutes of warning before it occurred, making evacuation of vulnerable populations impossible.</p>
<p>As I explained in last week’s column, experts have been warning for some time that a major geomagnetic event or a nuclear EMP attack would mean <a href="../2011/10/04/an-emp-attack-on-america/">“TEOTWAWKI”</a> – The End Of The World As We Know It.</p>
<p>But the table-top exercises conducted last week under the auspices of National Defense University and the state of Maryland’s Emergency Management Agency, provided dramatic new evidence of our nation’s woeful lack of awareness and preparedness for handling the aftermath of such an event.</p>
<p>“This is the potential catastrophic incident,” said Michael Fisher, the head of Maryland’s Emergency Management Agency (MEMA). “It’s not a snow storm, it’s not a rain event, it’s not a building that had some bricks fall off when the earth shook. This is a potential catastrophic event that will change life as we know it.”</p>
<p>Fisher cited the panic that gripped the city of Baltimore over the summer during the mild earthquake that hit Virginia, several hundred miles to the south. To counter the hysteria, MEMA used Twitter, Facebook, radio, and television to calm the population, and things gradually returned to normal.</p>
<p>But in the event of a major geomagnetic event or an EMP attack that takes down the power grid, none of those means of communicating with the public will be available.</p>
<p>“After a few days, not only are folks going to begin to take matters into their own hands, but the depth and breadth of our first responders – that system is going to fail, also,” he said.</p>
<p>In other words, there will be no going back to the way things were before. The snow will not melt, the sun won’t come out, the flood waters won’t recede, and help will not be on the way. Americans will be on their own, just as during the days of the Wild West.</p>
<p>One of the most dramatic impacts of a major geomagnetic event or a nuclear EMP will be on law and order. “Police officers have told us they would just go home to take care of their own families,” said Dr. Richard Andres, an analyst with the National Defense University.</p>
<p>MEMA’s Mike Fisher said his agency needs to start planning today to identify emergency supplies, back-up generators, and to organize staging areas for police and fire fighters who will have no means of communicating with each other beyond the human voice.</p>
<p>Even if first responders manage to locate food supplies and make them available at select locations thanks to back-up generators after a week or two of no power, citizens won’t be able to use their credit cards because the banking system will still be down. “So keep some money in the sock drawer,” Fisher advised.</p>
<p>One of the table top exercises gathered experts who gamed what would happen if the 300 large generators that form the backbone of the national power grid went down, an event many analysts believe is possible. This is the “catastrophic” scenario that the power industry and those lobbying on behalf of expensive cyber security programs don’t want you to imagine.</p>
<p>David P. Hunt, an analyst with CRA, Inc., a Beltway security consulting firm, described the inability of the utilities and national command authorities to recover after such an event.</p>
<p>Industry representatives who participated in the simulations acknowledged the difficulties of “cold starting” power plants and the need for continuous power at nuclear power plants to maintain cooling of spent fuel ponds, Hunt said. Further complicating their efforts would be the lack of communications, since telephone and even radio networks would go down along with the grid, making it nearly impossible to localize back-up generators and the fuel needed to run them. This would lead to multiple “Fukushima” style events, with spent nuclear fuel irradiating large portions of the nation.</p>
<p>But if multiple nuclear meltdowns weren’t bad enough, the “cascading effects” of a prolonged shut down of the national power grid might prove irreparable to society as a whole.</p>
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		<title>An EMP Attack on America?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/an-emp-attack-on-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-emp-attack-on-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:35:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why Congress needs to pass the SHIELD Act now.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/emp.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107476" title="emp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/emp.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="218" /></a></p>
<p>For most of this week, the Department of Energy and the states of Maryland and Florida will be <a href="http://www.empactamerica.org/attendevents.php">holding emergency response exercises</a> to determine their readiness in the event of a major failure of the national electric power grid.</p>
<p>The scenarios to be tested vary from a low-level event that would take out a handful of the transformers that control the grid that conceivably could be repaired within a matter of days, to a “worst case” scenario to simulate a total take-down of the grid, an event many experts believe could take four to six years to recover from.</p>
<p>William Forschen, in his novel “The Minute After,” helps us to imagine what America would be like after a major EMP event. Survivalists have even invented a new acronym to describe it: TEOTWAWKI – The End of the World As We Know It.</p>
<p>No cell phones, no personal or business computers. No gas stations, no natural gas or water service. Cold storage, down; food processing plants, off-line. No trucking, no railroads, no airplanes, no ATMs, no inter-bank transfers. Americans would revert to eating whatever food they could hunt, fish or forage within walking distance of their homes. City-dwellers would flee en masse, or face starvation.</p>
<p>Some experts point to the partial meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan after a tsunami took down the power grid in March as an example of what could happen here.</p>
<p>Even though the Japanese had help from the US and others that enabled them to bring on line backup generators, spent fuel rods in the cooling ponds of several reactors melted down, narrowly averting a major nuclear disaster. Without that outside help, a collapse of cooling power at US nuclear power plants could cause stored nuclear fuel rods sitting in cooling ponds to melt down, irradiating vast swathes of the country, Dr. Cynthia Ayers, a former National Security Agency analyst, told me recently.</p>
<p>Such an event is <a href="http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Energy/053111/Franks.pdf">so catastrophic in nature</a> you would think the federal and state governments had planned for how to handle it long ago. Think again.</p>
<p>We are woefully unprepared, even though solutions are cheap and near at hand. This is why Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and several colleagues have proposed legislation known as the <a href="http://www.empactamerica.org/legislation.php">SHIELD Act (H.R. 668)</a> that would promulgate standards necessary to protect the grid and require the utilities to install hardware solutions to protect the main components of the grid.</p>
<p>There are two main sources of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that potentially could take down the national electric grid: a major geomagnetic event such as the “solar maximum” flare expected to occur next year, or an attack by a hostile power using a “super-EMP” weapon detonated at high altitude over the US mainland.</p>
<p>The US military discovered the EMP effect in 1962 during the Starfish Prime nuclear explosion in the atmosphere over the Pacific.</p>
<p>Within instants, the lights went out 900 miles away in Hawaii, without any visible signs of an attack. The military designated a young Air Force 2<sup>nd</sup> Lieutenant named William Graham to investigate. He determined that EMP was a bi-product of a nuclear blast, and that it had the effect of frying everything made of silicon hundreds &#8211; and possibly thousands &#8211; of miles away from the place of the blast.</p>
<p>Flash forward to 2001. Congress established an EMP commission to assess the vulnerability of the United States to an EMP attack or a massive solar flare. And they picked William Graham – now a distinguished scientist, who had served as President Reagan’s science adviser in the White House – to chair it.</p>
<p>The EMP commission issued a <a href="http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf">public report in 2004</a> that ought to be required reading for every American. They determined that a single EMP warhead exploded over the center of the US could bring down the power grid all across the country. A major geomagnetic event could have a similar impact.</p>
<p>Dr. Graham warned in public testimony that a major EMP event would take us back to a pre-industrial age, when the US population was just a fraction of what it is today.</p>
<p>EMPact America, an advocacy group run by Dr. Graham’s staff director on the EMP Commission, former CIA strategic weapons analyst Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, will be involved in most of this week’s exercises.</p>
<p>At a September 23 conference in New York sponsored by the group, national security consultant Peter Huessy said it would cost a mere $60-$100 million to protect the 300 largest transformers running the grid, and another $400 million to $600 million to protect an additional 3,000 transformers.</p>
<p>“These are one-time costs for equipment that bolts down, plugs in, and immediately works to protect against all forms of electromagnetic storms and nuclear EMP effects as well,” <a href="http://www.empactamerica.org/event_2011-09-23.php">Huessy said.</a></p>
<p>He called it an “insurance policy” that amounted to a one-time payment of just over $3 per person for every American. As yet, until now the utilities, Congress, and the Obama administration have balked at making these improvements.</p>
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		<title>Grover Norquist&#8217;s New Muslim Protégé</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/grover-norquists-new-muslim-protege/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=grover-norquists-new-muslim-protege</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:31:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Troubling questions about Imad Afif “David” Ramadan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/David_Ramadan.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-106492" title="David_Ramadan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/David_Ramadan.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="268" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: See David Horowitz calling out Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan <a href="../2011/02/14/the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-fellow-traveling-left-at-slate-2/">here</a>. See also Frank Gaffney exposing both<a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15084"> Norquist</a> and <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=63">Khan&#8217;s</a> troubling connections.]</strong></p>
<p>“To illustrate the danger of the first approach of evil habit, the Arabs have a proverb, ‘Beware of the camel’s nose,’” wrote 19<sup>th</sup> century British author, Lydia Sigourney.</p>
<p>Why? Because once the camel gets its nose inside the tent, his body will soon follow. And once the camel gets inside the tent, the former occupants face a choice: leave the tent, or lie down in the camel’s bed.</p>
<p>The Republican primary victory of Imad Afif “David” Ramadan in the 87<sup>th</sup> legislative district in Virginia on Aug. 23 reminds me of this Arab proverb – not because Ramadan is the camel’s nose. If anything, he is the camel’s tail.</p>
<p>Imad Ramadan is just the latest of a series of Muslim protégés discovered and promoted by Republican activist Grover Norquist,  the man whose vicious personal attacks on conservative Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma over ethanol subsidies earlier this year (Norquist favored the corporate hand-outs; Coburn opposed them) <a href="http://www.frumforum.com/coburn-norquist-spar-over-tax-hike-pledge">prompted Coburn’s chief of staff to respond</a> that Norquist has become the “chief cleric of sharia tax law.”</p>
<p>What’s wrong with Muslims running for public office or assuming prominent positions in the conservative movement? Nothing at all – as long as they are clear about the primacy of the U.S. Constitution over Koranic (or Sharia) law.</p>
<p>Where does Imad Afif “David” Ramadan stand on this crucial question? The answer is – well, unclear. And that’s when the camel begins to spit.</p>
<p>In his campaign literature, Ramadan touts his respect for the U.S. Constitution, his love of America, and his “story” as an immigrant from Lebanon living the American dream.</p>
<p>But nowhere does he mention why he really left Lebanon, or why he came to America. Nor does he tell us anything about what it was like to grow up as a Shiite Muslim in Beirut in the midst of a sectarian civil war, when the Islamic Republic of Iran dominated the Shiite community through a large variety of proxy organizations, from the Hezbollah and Islamic Amal militias to local health clinics and schools.</p>
<p>In fact, while he mentions “God” several times in a <a href="http://www.davidramadan.com/meet-david/living-the-american-dream/">just-released campaign video</a>, he doesn’t mention Islam – not once. He doesn’t mention why he legally changed his name in 2002 from “Imad Afif” to “David,” nor why he signed an online petition in 2008 demanding the right to vote as a Lebanese citizen in Lebanon’s elections, despite having become a naturalized American.</p>
<p>He says merely that his parents “gave everything they had” so he could leave a Lebanon at war and come to America to “get an education.”  Since coming here, he says, he has prospered, and brought his father and four brothers to the U.S. as well. And that’s it.</p>
<p>In more than thirty years of experience in the Muslim world, I have seen many different flavors of Islam. I invited a dissident Iranian Shiite Muslim ayatollah <a href="http://www.iran.org/about.htm">to join the board</a> of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, because of his outspoken opposition to Islamic rule (Sharia) in his home country.</p>
<p>In the United States and in Europe, I have met and befriended countless exiles who fled Islamic fascism in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. They all have one thing in common: their very vocal denunciation of Islamic rule. They were leaving something – something despotic – and they wanted everybody to know it. That’s what is missing from Imad Afif “David” Ramadan’s story.</p>
<p>AT CPAC this year, Grover Norquist told <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/02/11/143645/norquist-marginalize-islamophobia/">a George Soros publication</a> that Islam “is completely consistent with the U.S. Constitution and a free and open society,” a statement that reveals either a profound lack of understanding of Islamic law, or a conscious effort at deception.</p>
<p>Like the Soros-funded study, <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/08/islamophobia.html">“Fear, Inc.,”</a> from the Center for America Progress, Grover labels anyone who disagrees with his views as “Islamophobic.” Republicans need to “knock that stuff down and just make it clear that there’s no place for that in the party of Reagan,” he insisted in the same interview.</p>
<p>Imad Afif “David” Ramadan has not said even that much about Sharia law, at least not in English or in public. So how do you identify an Islamist – that is, someone who believes in the Koranic precept that Islam must dominate the world through voluntary submission or by force – especially if he goes out of his way to appear non-aggressive?</p>
<p>The answer is actually pretty simple. You listen to see if he denounces Islamic dictatorship – the rule of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rule of the Shiite clerics in Iran, the rule of Hamas in Gaza or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or the rule of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>In answering a similar question about another Grover Norquist protégé, Suhail Khan, at CPAC earlier this year, David Horowitz recalled his own experience as a former leftist who had grown up as a red diaper baby.</p>
<p>“When an honest person has been a member of a destructive movement and leaves it, he will feel <em>compelled</em> to repudiate it publicly and to warn others of the dangers it poses. This is a sure test as to whether someone has left the Muslim Brotherhood or not,” <a href="http://suhailkhanexposed.com/2011/02/12/021211-david-horowitz-calls-out-grover-norquist-and-suhail-khan-on-muslim-brotherhood-ties-at-cpac-2011/">Horowitz said.</a></p>
<p>Absent such a repudiation, one has to comb through Imad Ramadan’s past and behavior. And there, the camel starts kicking and snorting.</p>
<p>Just last year, Ramadan joined Suhail Khan and other Grover Norquist protégés in writing a letter to “Republican colleagues” in support of the Ground Zero mosque.</p>
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		<title>The Turkey-Iran Pact</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/turkey-friend-or-foe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=turkey-friend-or-foe</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:28:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[NATO-ally joins U.S. arch-enemy in war against the Kurds.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ErdoganAhmadinejad.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-105395" title="ErdoganAhmadinejad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ErdoganAhmadinejad.jpg" alt="" width="330" height="206" /></a></p>
<p>A hot war has been raging in northern Iraq since mid-July, and despite the casualties and the drama, it has gone virtually unreported by the international media.</p>
<p>The war was launched on July 16 by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) troops in an effort to crush Iranian rebel Kurds who have sought refuge in the 12,000 foot high Qandil mountains that form the border between Iran and Iraq.</p>
<p>It began with cross-border shelling by Iranian artillery, air strikes, and several attempted ground incursions into Iraq by Iranian forces. But within ten days, NATO-ally Turkey openly joined the fray.</p>
<p>On whose side did Turkey fight? On behalf of the secular, pro-Western Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), whose bases in northern Iraq were under assault from the Islamist regime in Tehran? Think again.</p>
<p>The Turkish military <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2011_07_28-turkey-iran.htm">sent 20 tanks into Iran</a> at the invitation of the Iranian regime to support the flailing Iranian attack against the rebel Kurds. They also dispatched 300 Turkish Special Forces troops to Iran to conduct intelligence missions into the Qandil mountains using Heron surveillance drones purchased from Israel.</p>
<p>PJAK leader Rahman Haj Ahmadi <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2011_08_04-pjak-leader.htm">told m</a>e that the Turkish drones were the most effective weapon the Iranian military used against them. “This limited our ability to move, but it didn’t matter much since most of our positions were underground,” he said.</p>
<p>The Turkish incursion marked just the latest instance of Turkey’s ongoing military and strategic alliance with Iran, an alliance that ought to give NATO allies pause, starting with the United States.</p>
<p>I first learned of the Turkey-Iran military alliance while on a reporting trip to PJAK bases in the wild mountains of northern Iraq four years ago. As we gazed up at an Iranian Revolutionary Guards base set atop the 12,000 foot peaks of the Qandil mountains, a PJAK guerilla told me that Iran and Turkey had established a joint military headquarters in Urmiyeh, Iran, to coordinate their military strikes against the Kurds.</p>
<p>“The goal of the Iranians is to drive us from the border area,” <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2007_1015_iran-turkey.html">rebel leader Biryar Gabar told me.</a> “They want to turn this area into a no-man’s land, so they can use it to smuggle weapons and Islamist guerillas into Iraq to fight the Americans.”</p>
<p>Despite all the help from Turkey, the IRGC has suffered a dramatic rout at the hands of the PJAK fighters, who repeatedly attacked IRGC bases inside Iranian Kurdistan in response to the Iranian attacks on their bases inside Iraq. Except for the initial onslaught, in which eight IRGC were killed, the IRGC troops were badly mauled.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.rojhelat.info/english/component/content/article/1435-after-3-hours-of-resistance-iranian-attack-was-smashed">accounts in the local media</a>, PJAK fighters killed more than three hundred IRGC troops during the clashes. They even managed to kill the commanding general of IRGC troops in the region. We know this because he was given a public burial in Qom along with several other officers. The Iranian state-run media acknowledged they had been killed in the fighting.</p>
<p>After two weeks of running battles, PJAK was claiming victory. “Now everyone can see how powerful PJAK has become,” <a href="http://kentimmerman.com/news/2011_08_04-pjak-leader.htm">Ahmadi told me</a>. “For Kurds, Qandil has become like Mecca, a sacred place. This is where we have shown our strength.”</p>
<p>Earlier this month, PJAK <a href="http://www.rojhelat.info/english/taybet/1562-pjak-iran-would-be-responsible-for-future-violence-and-hostility">announced a unilateral ceasefire</a> and called on the Iranian regime to negotiate their demands for Kurdish rights. PJAK is seeking to establish a democratic federation in Iran, not a separate state or separate province for the Kurds, as PJAK secretary general Rahman Haj Ahmadi <a href="http://iran.org/news/2011_08_4-pjak-interview.html">told me</a> when we met in Stockholm this summer.</p>
<p>The response from the IRGC was almost immediate. Instead of a ceasefire, they launched repeated shelling of PJAK bases and villages inside Iraq, killing three fighters, including the deputy commander of all PJAK forces. PJAK claimed its forces killed 107 IRGC fighters and destroyed two tanks, 5 vehicles and 1 bulldozer in counter-strikes against IRGC bases inside Iran. The shelling continues <a href="http://www.rojhelat.info/english/component/content/article/1582-iran-resumed-shelling-south-kurdistan">even as I write these words</a>.</p>
<p>During the latest round of fighting, PJAK showed off NATO-issue weapons they claimed they had taken from dead Iranian troops<strong>,</strong> including Western-made night vision goggles, GPS systems, anti-tank missiles, and BKC guns. PJAK has claimed for some time that Iran&#8217;s ally Turkey has provided NATO weaponry to Iran that has been turned against the Kurds, in direct violation of the North Atlantic Treaty.</p>
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		<title>Iran’s Dirty 9/11 Secrets</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-r-timmerman/iran%e2%80%99s-dirty-911-secrets/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iran%25e2%2580%2599s-dirty-911-secrets</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:20:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[After ten years, the real story of Iran’s direct, material involvement in 9/11 is finally coming to light.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Mullahs.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-104402" title="Mullahs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Mullahs.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="240" /></a></p>
<p>It has taken nearly ten years, but the real story of Iran’s direct, material involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy is finally coming to light. And it’s being revealed not by the U.S. government or by Congressional investigators but by private attorneys representing families of the 9/11 victims in U.S. District Court.</p>
<p>Just one week before the 9/11 Commission sent its final report to the printers in July 2004, diligent staffers discovered a six-page classified National Security Agency analysis summarizing what the U.S. intelligence community had learned about Iran’s assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.</p>
<p>They happened upon the document by chance. It had been tucked away at the bottom of the last box in the last stack of classified documents they were reviewing. But it was so explosive that several Commissioners pushed hard to make sure the information it contained was included in the final report, despite intense push back from the intelligence community.</p>
<p>The page and a half section that made the final cut (<a href="http://information.iran911case.com/Exhibit_1.pdf">see pages 240-241</a>) details repeated trips to Iran by 8-10 of the “muscle” hijackers between October 2000 and February 2001. Flying in from Saudi Arabia, Damascus, and Beirut, the future hijackers were accompanied by “senior Hezbollah operatives” who were in fact agents of the Iranian regime.</p>
<p>The information was so explosive that the CIA lobbied hard to get it expunged from the final report, in part because they had detected some of the movements as they were occurring but failed to appreciate their import. “They saw them as travel <em>through</em> Iran, not travel <em>to</em> Iran,” a senior 9/11 Commission staffer told me at the time.</p>
<p>By the time the staffers had read into the 75 source documents on a Sunday morning out at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, MD, the Commission was pushing up against the end of its mandate and could not do any additional work. The information was so serious and had such clear geopolitical import that it “requires further investigation by the U.S. government,” they concluded. Many of the Commissions and senior staff who were aware of the document find assumed someone else would pick up the ball.</p>
<p>But as attorney Thomas Mellon, Jr. and his colleagues representing Fiona Havlish and other 9/11 widows and family members discovered, no such investigation was ever carried out. Not even the Congressional intelligence committees would go near the subject, despite direct appeals from the <em>Havlish</em> plaintiffs and a review of many of the original still-classified documents cited in the report.</p>
<p>I was engaged by the <em>Havlish</em> attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Commission report called on the U.S. government to handle. We had no governmental authority, hardly any budget, and no access to classified intelligence or intelligence assets. But what we found and made public starting this May is enough to hang a fish. Put simply:</p>
<p>• The Islamic Republic of Iran helped design the 9/11 plot;</p>
<p>• provided intelligence support to identify and train the operatives who carried it out;</p>
<p>• allowed the future hijackers to evade U.S. and Pakistani surveillance on key trips to Afghanistan where they received the final order of mission from Osama bin Laden, by escorting them through Iranian borders without passport stamps;</p>
<p>• evacuated hundreds of top al Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan to Iran after the 9/11 just as U.S. forces launched their offensive;</p>
<p>• provided safe haven and continued financial support to al Qaeda cadres for years after 9/11;</p>
<p>• allowed al Qaeda to use Iran as an operational base for additional terror attacks, in particular the May 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>Key elements of our proofs are in bullet points <a href="http://www.kentimmerman.com/news/2011_05_19-Havlish-Iran-links-lawsuit.htm">at the end of this article.</a> For those wishing a more detailed account, <a href="http://information.iran911case.com/Exhibit_2.pdf">here is a partially-redacted affidavit</a> I provided to the Court that traces the Islamic Republic of Iran’s relationship al Qaeda back to the early 1990s.</p>
<p><strong>Panic at CIA</strong></p>
<p>As the <em>Havlish </em>case was getting closer to making its information public last year, certain old guard elements within the CIA went into a panic mode, apparently worried that their failure to act on indicators and warnings in 2000 and 2001 would come to light and ruin their post-Agency careers. I can now reveal that they made several attempts to suborn two of the <em>Havlish </em>witnesses who were located overseas.</p>
<p>In the first attempt, in August 2010, an individual presenting himself as a CIA official, told our witness that the Agency wanted to “break” the <em>Havlish</em> litigation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and considered the witness’s testimony to be crucial to the lawsuit’s success.</p>
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