Former Fatah strongman Dahlan accused of taking part in Sinai attack
MEMO | August 10, 2012
Advocate Mostafa Olwan has submitted a notice to the Egyptian Attorney General in which he accuses former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan of passing maps of Egyptian security posts to Israel. According to Olwan, maps of the army post targeted in northern Sinai were handed over to Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency by Dahlan.
In a second notice, also submitted to the authorities in Cairo, Mr Olwan said that there is an organisation led by Dahlan in Sinai which is supported by Mossad. The notice was accompanied by documents allegedly proving the involvement of the former Fatah strongman in giving sensitive information to the Israelis, including details of the police stations in Rafah.
Previous attempts by Olwan to have such matters investigated were dropped, “intentionally,” he claims. “The reasons were unclear.”
Meanwhile, Quds Press has reported that investigations by the Egyptian military and public intelligence have revealed that two other members of Fatah, who fled the Gaza Strip in 2007, were also involved in planning the recent Sinai attack. Their names have not been released by officials, but they are believed to have been in contact with various renegade groups in Sinai in order to train them in sabotage techniques.
It is alleged that the two men had direct contact with Israeli intelligence which was well briefed about the plan for the attack last Sunday. The involvement of Sinai Bedouins is explained by the fact that their community has been marginalised by Cairo.
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Israel evacuated military outpost near Rafah hours before Sinai attack
MEMO | August 8, 2012
Israel evacuated military outpost near Rafah hours before Sinai attackThe Israel Defence Forces knew about the attack which targeted an Egyptian army post on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, and evacuated an outpost close to the area where the attack took place in advance of the incident. The IDF’s southern area commander was involved in taking the decision to evacuate army personnel.
According to reports on Hebrew Radio, intelligence warning about Sunday’s attack was received last Friday; this pushed the IDF to take a number of preventive measures a few hours before the bombings. The moves included ordering all Israeli tourists and nationals to leave Sinai and the evacuation of an Israeli military outpost near the attack site.
The radio reports claim that the IDF noticed a small Egyptian armoured vehicle about two kilometres from the border which started to weave its way around concrete barriers before it was fired upon by the Israeli soldiers. Nevertheless, the vehicle managed to make its way towards the Karam Abu Salem crossing point where heavy machine guns were used against it. It is alleged that the focus was on a small cart which apparently contained high explosives and exploded as soon as it was targeted by the Israelis.
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Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel Is Connected To Sinai attack”
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC News | August 07, 2012
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt stated that Sunday’s attack against an Egyptian military base in the Sinai, “could be attributed to the Israeli Mossad”, adding that this attack aimed to foil efforts of newly-elected Islamist President Mohammad Morsi.
In an online statement, the Brotherhood said that Israel is trying to foil the achievements of the Egyptian revolution that removed former President Hosni Mubarak from power. The Brotherhood added, “this attack pushes all related sides into reconsidering the articles of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement”.
The Brotherhood stated that after the Egyptian revolution several groups tried to sabotage popular achievements and began plotting against the country and its people.
“Yesterday, a group of criminals attacked our policemen, killed nearly twenty soldiers, brothers, in an ugly crime, before the criminals managed to hijack two armored vehicles and drove them towards the border”, the Brotherhood said. “Immediately after the attack, Zionist media agencies accused fighters in Gaza of being behind the criminal attack; the timing of the attack comes to create a rift between Gaza and Egypt”.
The Brotherhood also said that the attack aims to prove the failure of the new Egyptian government, formed just three days ago, “to foil the reform agenda of the newly elected Islamic president”.
“This crime carries the signature of the Israeli Mossad as Israel has been trying to sabotage the achievements of the revolution, especially when taking into consideration that just a few days before this attack was carried out, Israel called on its tourists to leave Sinai”, the Brotherhood added.
The Muslim Brotherhood further called on the Egyptian people to counter the criminal activities collaborators, and to stand with the newly elected president in his efforts to restore law and order, and to maintain a strong security situation.
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Analysts say Sinai attack attempt to strain Egypt-Gaza relations
Ma’an – August 6, 2012
GAZA CITY – The attack on a Sinai police station that killed 16 Egyptian officers on Sunday was an attempt to strain relations between Egypt and Gaza, political analysts said Monday.
“What happened in Egypt was a crime and organized terror meant to drive a wedge in Palestinian-Egyptian relations. It is possible that external hands are interfering with Egypt after Muhammad Mursi became president,” Gaza-based analyst Mustafa al-Sawwaf told Ma’an.
Palestinians have no interest in attacking Egyptian forces, but Israel has been unsettled by the improvement in relations between Gaza rulers Hamas and Egypt’s recently elected Muslim Brotherhood president, al-Sawwaf said.
Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak, who was overthrown by a citizen revolt in Jan. 2011, had played a key role in maintaining Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip, but Mursi has pledged measures to ease the blockade and held several high-level meetings with Hamas.
Al-Sawwaf said some parties within Egypt and at an international level were uncomfortable with Hamas’ friendly relations with Mursi. Hamas has condemned the Sinai attack and vowed not to let anyone threaten Egypt’s security.
Faysal Abu Shalha, a Fatah MP in Gaza, said he hoped Mursi would still implement his pledges to aid Palestinians in the besieged enclave.
But Akram Atallah, a political analyst based in Bethlehem, said he feared residents of Gaza could pay a heavy price for the deaths of the Egyptian officers, particularly if militants in Gaza were involved in the attack.
Mursi had promised to extend the opening hours of the Rafah crossing but Egyptian security officials said the Egypt-Gaza border was indefinitely closed in the wake of the attack.
Attallah told Ma’an he suspected Israel was involved in the attack. He said Israel knew about the raid and noted that it had advised its citizens to leave Sinai days earlier.
He added that Israeli forces assassinated a man in Gaza earlier on Sunday claiming that he was involved in a plot “to execute a terror attack against Israeli civilians via the Israel-Egypt border.”
Hamza Abu Shanab, a Gaza-based analyst, said the Sinai attack was an opportunity for Mursi to cancel Egypt’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel.
The Camp David agreement limits the number of soldiers Egypt can deploy to Sinai, Abu Shanab noted, and so Mursi must ask Israel’s permission to enlarge its force in the peninsula.
An Israeli refusal would be embarrassing as Tel Aviv has called on Cairo to tighten its grip on Sinai, Abu Shanab added.
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Israel, US Bent on Brewing Iran Crisis
By Ismail Salami | Palestine Chronicle | July 29, 2012
Tehran – A report published on Sunday in Ha’aretz reveals that US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon has presented Washington’s contingency plans for a possible attack on Iran to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once the nuclear negotiations reach an impasse.
However, the report was immediately denied by a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said, “Nothing in the article is correct. Donilon did not meet the prime minister for dinner, he did not meet him one-on-one, nor did he present operational plans to attack Iran.”
A quick justification for this denial could be that such a contingency plan was not supposed to be publicized and should have remained confidential for as long as necessary.
Still, there is no denial that Washington and Israel are the two sides of a coin and it is manifest that they have in their political wheeling and dealing formed a united front against Iran.
US GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has recently paid a visit to Israel to marshal up support of the Israelis on the one hand and express his unswervingly servile commitment to Israel (including his anti-Iran stance) on the other. Dan Senor, a top foreign policy adviser for the GOP presidential candidate, says that Romney would support “Israel’s decision to launch a military strike against Iran to keep that country from achieving nuclear capabilities, but hopes diplomatic and military measures will dissuade Tehran from pursuing its path toward nuclear acquisition.”
Furthermore, he told reporters ahead of the speech, planned for late Sunday near Jerusalem’s Old City, “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision.”
With a more somber tone, however, Romney himself has repeatedly said that he has a “zero tolerance” policy toward Iran obtaining the capability to build a nuclear weapon.
In the recent past, Washington has frequently threatened Iran with a military strike. The threats, which evidently run counter to all international laws, are generally uttered by a massive number of officials influenced by the powerful Zionist lobby in Washington. A brazen instance of these threats is that Washington may use the 14-ton bunker buster (20ft long, 1ft wide weapon) known as Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the world’s largest conventional bomb against Iran nuclear sites. Michael Donley, the US Air Force Secretary, said the bomb would be available if necessary.
“We continue to do testing on the bomb to refine its capabilities, and that is ongoing,” he said “We also have the capability to go with existing configuration today.”
In order to justify their illegal threats and sanctions, the US has apparently embarked on a systematic program of fomenting Iranophobia in the US and the rest of the world. In this pernicious Iranophobic campaign, a number of groups and parties including the Tea Party, neocons and AIPAC are actively involved.
By this program, the US is hell bent on distorting the realities of the Islamic Republic as well as brainwashing public opinion in the world into believing that Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons, and that Iran poses a grave danger to the security of the world. In this smear campaign, Washington also makes use of its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel in the region.
A politically bankrupt politician who does have but little respect in his own country, Romney follows the selfsame Iranophobic campaign, takes an aggressive stand on Iran in Israel where he is falsely emboldened and says Tehran’s leaders are giving the world “no reason to trust them with nuclear material.” He even voiced support for an Israeli decision for military action “to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability”.
“Make no mistake: The ayatollahs in Tehran are testing our moral defenses. They want to know who will object, and who will look the other way. My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away; and neither will my country.”
These facts aside, the duo have recently started a string of false flag terrorist attacks taking place in different parts of the world. With Washington pointing the finger of blame at Iran, Israel feels more fallaciously entitled to tone up its war rhetoric against the Islamic Republic and make the best of the fabricated ops. In the same line, former UN Ambassador John Bolton has called on the Zionist entity to attack Iran in retaliation for the alleged killing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, saying “the time has come for the Jewish state to quit threatening and take action”.
“This is obviously a very dangerous period for Israel with the civil war in Syria, refugees reported going across the border into Lebanon, and Hezbollah well armed with rockets on Israel’s northern border,” Bolton told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday night. “So I think if there were ever a time to retaliate, and directly against Iran this time, this is it.”
In the final analysis, one can see that the real threat in the world is being posed and imposed by those warmongers in Washington who will turn the situation to the best of their own interests in the region as well as by Israel who will in the wake of a war against Iran reap the benefits of such aggression if of course they ever outlive such an act of belligerence.
– Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues.
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Smiles and Denials: Official Israeli and Iranian Statements Demonstrate a Double Standard
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | July 24, 2012
Reacting to the immediate Israeli accusations that Iran was behind the blast that killed Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, insisted, “The Islamic Republic of Iran, which itself is the biggest victim of terrorism, considers any act that endangers the lives of innocent people in order to fulfill illegitimate political objectives as inhumane and strongly condemns it.”
The official IRNA news agency quoted Mehmanparast as saying, “The Zionist regime, which had a direct role in the assassination of our country’s nuclear scientists, is leveling baseless accusations to divert global attention to its own terrorist nature.”
Despite incessant allegations – devoid of evidence, of course – of Iranian culpability, the BBC reports that Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov has consistently “declined to back Israeli claims that Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah played a role.”
A bogus story in the Times of Israel which claimed that Iranian President Mahmoud had gloated over the Burgas bus bombing has been successfully debunked by both myself and BBC Persian correspondent Bahman Kalbasi. Still, it may be illuminating to consider the differences between the actual Iranian response to the terrorist attack in Bulgaria that took the lives of Israeli vacationers and the Israeli response to the multiple murders of Iranian scientists on the streets of Tehran, often when they have been accompanied by members of their family, going to work, or dropping their children off at nursery school.
The targeted killings of Iranian professors and scientists have widely been considered to be the work of Mossad, either on its own or in conjunction with Iranian terrorist organizations. Yet, in response to the murders, the Israeli government has never issued an official denial of responsibility.
On January 11, 2012, the day 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was murdered in his car, Israel’s top military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, posted on his Facebook page: “I don’t know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear.”
What possible “score” could be settled by killing a man who works at a nuclear facility that is fully safeguarded and monitored by the IAEA remains a mystery, especially considering that – as a Reuters Special Report affirmed earlier this year – “[t]he United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.”
Responding to the murder of Ahmadi-Roshan, married and the father of a young son, Time Magazine quoted a “senior Israel official” who smiled and said, “Yeah, one more. I don’t feel sad for him.”
Confronted with the claim that Israel was responsible for the targeted killing, an anonymous Israeli official told The Washington Post, “It is not our policy to comment on this sort of speculation when it periodically arises.”
During an interview with CNN shortly after Ahmadi-Roshan’s killing, Israeli President Shimon Peres was also asked about Israel’s involvement. He replied dismissively: “Not to the best of my knowledge.”
Meanwhile, Mickey Segal, a former director of the Israeli military’s Iranian intelligence department, said, “Many bad things have been happening to Iran in the recent period. Iran is in a situation where pressure on it is mounting, and the latest assassination joins the pressure that the Iranian regime is facing.”
Ahmadi-Roshan’s murder came the day after IDF Chief Benny Gantz reportedly told a Knesset panel that 2012 would be a “critical year” for Iran, not least of all because of “things that happen to it unnaturally.”
Now imagine if any of these statements had come from Iranian officials about Israel this past week. And think what we’d be hearing if Iran’s Foreign Ministry had yet to issue a statement about the Burgas bombing, with the claim that it is not Iran’s “policy to comment on this sort of speculation.” Still, Iran’s denials are dismissed as yet another instance of devious Persian duplicity, while Israel’s smug silence is simply ignored, or even admired.
Of course, while denial doesn’t mean absolution and silence isn’t necessarily complicity, the double standards of international expectation, obligation, and suspicion when it comes to Israel and Iran remain as stark as ever.
*****
July 25, 2012 – Addressing a United Nations Security Council meeting today, Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee stated, “It’s amazing that just a few minutes after the terrorist attack, Israeli officials announced that Iran was behind it,” adding, “We have never and will not engage in such a despicable attempt on [the lives of] innocent people.”
Khazaee even suggested that Israel itself was behind the bombing. “Such terrorist operation could only be planned and carried out by the same regime whose short history is full of state terrorism operations and assassinations aimed implicating others for narrow political gains,” he said. “I could provide… many examples showing that this regime killed its own citizens and innocent Jewish people during the last couple of decades.”
While such an allegation is surely reactionary and hyperbolic (the result, one can assume, of a frustrating week of unfounded and unsubstantiated accusations), it is nevertheless grounded in the fact that Israel has engaged in false flag operations many times before.
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French journalist killed by Syrian opposition: Report

Slain French journalist Gilles Jacquier (file photo)
Press TV – July 19, 2012
French journalist Gilles Jacquier, who lost his life in central Syria earlier this year, was killed by the Syrian opposition’s mortar fire, a report says.
“This investigation was carried out by French intelligence and based on a ballistic study carried out in the area. According to my contact, the mortar fire came from the Sunni rebel zone,” wrote Georges Malbrunot, a member of the editorial board of Le Figero, in the French newspaper.
This is while Western reports have put the blame on Damascus, saying Jacquier was killed by a Syrian army shell.
On January 11, Jacquier, 43, was killed in the central Syrian city of Homs.
The Western journalists were on a government-authorized trip to the city at the time of the attack.
Gilles Jacquier, working for France 2 TV, was the first Western reporter to die since the beginning of the unrest in Syria in mid-March 2011. He had covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
The Syrian government had previously blamed armed groups for the attack.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the turmoil.
While the West and the Syrian opposition accuse the government of killing protesters, Damascus blames ”outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups” for the unrest, insisting that it is being orchestrated from abroad.
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MI6 chief hints that US torture of Islamists was to get the ‘right answers’ to suit their propaganda
By Damian Lataan | July 13, 2012
In a UK Telegraph article today, Sir John Sawers, Britain’s head of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, was reported as telling an audience of public servants that the Americans were so keen to get intelligence after 9/11 that would fit their propaganda that they resorted to torture in order to ‘get the right answer’.
Sawers told the gathering
There’s always a danger that, as a bunch of secret squirrels, you can get involved in something that takes you down a pathway where you end up in the wrong place.
The Americans have done that over their interrogation techniques after 9/11. They got so obsessed with getting a right answer that they drifted into an area that kind of amounted to torture.
One has to wonder what the ‘right answer’ was that they were seeking. Could it be that it was one that fitted in with their version of the events of 9/11? Is this why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to over 180 incidents of waterboarding torture in March 2003 in the course of which he confessed to having been the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks on behalf of al Qaeda?
And, just to tie in al Qaeda with a few other ‘terrorist’ loose ends, was it this obsession with ‘getting the right answer’ that also led to Mohammed confessing also to many other terrorist plots over the last twenty years, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, Operation Bojinka, which was an attempted 2002 attack on the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, the Bali nightclub bombings, the attempted blowing up of American Airlines Flight 63, the so-called Millennium Plot, and the murder of Daniel Pearl?
“Obsessed with getting a right answer”?
Aren’t we all!

