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2019-05-14 Arabia
Initial US analysis shows Iran likely behind attack on Saudi oil tankers
[American Thinker] A preliminary U.S. assessment indicates Iran was likely behind the attack that caused "significant damage" to two Saudi oil tankers on Sunday, according to a new report.

A U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that the early findings in the ongoing analysis show Iran was likely behind the attack that occurred near the Persian Gulf as the two vessels were attempting to head into the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih announced the vessels were attacked on Sunday along with at least two other oil-industry vessels. He also said that one of the ships was traveling to a Saudi port in the Persian Gulf to load oil that would head to the U.S.

Few details were offered, but Saudi officials said the engine on the tanker called Al-Marzoqah caught fire, leading to an explosion.

The U.S. official declined to say what the initial assessment means for the U.S. and a potential response going forward. The State Department has so far refrained from saying whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believes Iran or its allies was behind the attack.
Posted by Besoeker 2019-05-14 01:23|| || Front Page|| [11134 views ]  Top
 File under: Govt of Iran 

#1 Yup. We can't go to war without a casus belli against Iran. Very conveniently, we now have one! Isn't it amazing how things neatly fall into place, time after time.

Just like we needed to invade Iraq to stop them from giving WMD to Al-Qaeda. FYI: Iraq giving WMDs to Al Qaeda would be as absurd as the Jews giving Zyklon-B to Hitler.
Posted by  Herb McCoy 2019-05-14 03:07||   2019-05-14 03:07|| Front Page Top

#2 Gulf of Tonkin, baby - bet Rumsfeld came up with this one!
Posted by Raj 2019-05-14 06:26||   2019-05-14 06:26|| Front Page Top

#3 Channeling The Herb
Posted by Frank G 2019-05-14 07:20||   2019-05-14 07:20|| Front Page Top

#4 And I was betting on the Missouri Synod of Baptists....
Posted by Phomorong Pelosi5448 2019-05-14 08:05||   2019-05-14 08:05|| Front Page Top

#5 I can't help but notice a complete lack of refutation. US is actively looking for a war with Iran, and wouldn't you know it, here is a convenient casus belli that just fell into their laps. Perfect timing.
Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-05-14 09:18||   2019-05-14 09:18|| Front Page Top

#6 Because the Iranians are pure as the driven snow and incapable of doing violence on other nations, Herb? Yeah, what do I know, a simple jingoistic NEO-CON!
Posted by Frank G 2019-05-14 09:36||   2019-05-14 09:36|| Front Page Top

#7 FYI: Iraq giving WMDs to Al Qaeda would be as absurd as the Jews giving Zyklon-B to Hitler.

FYI: An analogy is not an argument.

Often times, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. For example, the Sunnis and the Shia hate each other, but would put that distaste aside to kill Crusaders and Juice. See Calvinball.

As a favor, can we stop rehashing the Iraq/WMD thing?
Posted by SteveS 2019-05-14 09:45||   2019-05-14 09:45|| Front Page Top

#8 About Iraq and Al Qaeda, Herb — that question was answerd over a decade ago:

Saddam's Terror Training Camps

January 16, 2006
[WeeklyStandard] THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

"We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 11:07||   2019-05-14 11:07|| Front Page Top

#9 can we stop rehashing the Iraq/WMD thing?


Sure, the moment it becomes irrelevant.

Right now it seems very relevant. They lied us into a war. Now, we've got a casus belli to go to war with Iran. Probability of false flag: High. The timing is incredibly convenient. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was also incredibly convenient?

a simple jingoistic NEO-CON!

Neo-cons were the ones who lied us into Iraq. Leaving aside the fact that overthrowing empires, toppling nobilities and religious proselytism aren’t evil per se, to be evil you need to be at least willing to murder innocents for personal gain. That immediately disqualifies you from being a ‘decent guy’. A decent father, wife or cook, maybe. But not a decent person.

Hundreds of thousands of innocents died in Iraq, a war started by neo-cons under false pretenses.
Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-05-14 11:25||   2019-05-14 11:25|| Front Page Top

#10 Dan Darling, who was a moderator here while in college, submitted the above article to Rantburg. After he graduated he joined a national security consultant firm based on the work he had done here and elsewhere since high school, and disappeared from public view — a precocious young man. Mr. Darling also submitted this one in 2003, among others. The nexus between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda, among other jihadis groups, was a regular topic of interest in the early post-9/11 years here at Rantburg. You’ll need to go to the link to see where Mr. Darling and Fred commented on the original text:

About that smoking gun ...

This is a complete transcript of the Weekly Standard article that details US intelligence on the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection.
OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
And there goes the "hyped intelligence" charge in regards to the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection. A lot of this stuff also comes from the early to late 1990s, long before Bush even thought of running for president.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America’s most determined and dangerous enemies.
Which would seem to annihilate the belief that secular and religious terrorist groups are incapable of collaboration. Why, it’s as outrageous as a right-wing American Republican president being in league with a left-wing British Labour prime minister! Their ideologies are completely incompatible.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 11:32||   2019-05-14 11:32|| Front Page Top

#11 TW - wasted effort on a closed mind
Posted by Frank G 2019-05-14 11:40||   2019-05-14 11:40|| Front Page Top

#12 Wow, tw! That's a blast from the past. I was amused by this bit:
Oh and I'll be waiting for Murat to claim this doesn't mean Al-qaeda was involved in Iraq.

A nice reminder not to let your analysis get hung up on a single fact, assumption or event.
Posted by SteveS 2019-05-14 12:27||   2019-05-14 12:27|| Front Page Top

#13 Believe me when I tell you Saddam had WND, and a lot of it.
Posted by Besoeker 2019-05-14 12:29||   2019-05-14 12:29|| Front Page Top

#14 Don't tickle the Troll.
Posted by Skidmark 2019-05-14 12:48||   2019-05-14 12:48|| Front Page Top

#15  Possibly Herb will argue that the Weekly Standard articles were written by neocons, and to some extent that’s true. But we also had a lot of personal witnesses over the years of the points in question – one simply needs to read through the first 10 years of comments to find it. I will admit that reading through nearly two decades of archives is a valuable exercise exactly to remember things since forgotten, but it does take a bit of time.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 13:35||   2019-05-14 13:35|| Front Page Top

#16 So, nationalists like Saddam and Islamists like Al-Qaeda were actually best buddies? Who knew?

So we were right to invade Iraq all along? Is that the point here?

Jesus Christ, I had no idea Rantburg was so neo-con. I thought Rantburgers were good people. But here you all are, making excuses for warmongers who lied us into a war we had no business getting into.

So, you're in favor of attacking Iran, too? How about Venezuela? What about any other country that our neo-cons want to attack? War, war, more war is that it?

I'd think that when you came to the realization that you were killing innocent people, you might have a "My God, what have I done?" moment. But I guess not. More war!
Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-05-14 14:46||   2019-05-14 14:46|| Front Page Top

#17 Herb, a playing card placed in the crotch of your panties will keep them from bunching up so much - Helpful tip
Posted by Frank G 2019-05-14 15:09||   2019-05-14 15:09|| Front Page Top

#18 So, nationalists like Saddam and Islamists like Al-Qaeda were actually best buddies? Who knew?

We knew, Herb. You would know, too, if you scrolled through the archives. Or google “Salman Pak AND Al Qaeda” or” Iran AND Al Qaeda”. Saddam Hussein trained a great many jihadi terror group personnel — and non-jihadi as well — at Salman Pak. Al Qaeda was only one of many organizations that sent cadres to learn the basics of hijacking airplanes, making bombs, document forgery, and all the other skills necessary to wage a covert war, as well as sending them back for advanced courses in biological and chemical weapons and such. Saddam Hussein saw them all as tools to be used against various external targets, just as the whiskey-swilling generals of Pakistan keep all sorts of domestic and international jihadi groups on the payroll to use against India, Afghanistan and, incidentally, America and Europe — not to mention the occasional domestic target.

So we were right to invade Iraq all along? Is that the point here?

Low hanging fruit, as the war had been ongoing since President George H.W. Bush. In order to end the current expansionist jihad, we needed to eradicate support from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran (where half of Osama bin Laden’s family, Al Qaeda’s Shura council, and military commanders were sheltered after they fled from Tora Bora), and Saudi Arabia — Kuwait and Qatar being highly secondary. Unfortunately, my dear, this is the third anti-totalitarian world war — the first ended up being against the racial fascism of Germany’s Nazis and Japan (because Stalin chose to side with the Allies for the duration), the second against the economic socialism of the Soviet Union and Communist China and their allies, and the third is against the expansionist neo-jihad of the Islamists.

It should not be a surprise that we believe this, my dear. Page 1 of Rantburg, after all, is devoted to War on Terror Operations, and Page 2 is for War on Terror Background.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 15:26||   2019-05-14 15:26|| Front Page Top

#19 I'd think that when you came to the realization that you were killing innocent people, you might have a "My God, what have I done?" moment.

As it happens, I come from a long line of innocent people who were intentionally targetted by, among others, Nazis, Soviets, and Muslims on jihad. So when such people surround themselves with human shields, whether willing or unwilling, as specifically forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, I agree with the next section of said Conventions which squarely places the blame for casualties among human shields on the shoulders of those hiding behind them — not on the attackers.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 15:35||   2019-05-14 15:35|| Front Page Top

#20 Many people are debased. They kill and want to be killed. They will kill you in a heart beat. They don't need a reason. That goes for many people. You don't get a choice in not killing or killing if you can defend yourself and those around you if you are prepared. You give them DEATH. If you are not prepared, be prepared to die as you walk to your car in a parking lot, and death walks up to you and demands your wallet, and then death puts a gun against the side of your head and pulls the foching trigger...

No.
Choice.

A. truth. "Herb McCoy". just. can't. deal. with.
Posted by Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-05-14 20:20||   2019-05-14 20:20|| Front Page Top

#21 AMEN
Posted by Frank G 2019-05-14 21:36||   2019-05-14 21:36|| Front Page Top

#22 I had no idea there was such a reservoir of neocons here who support invading countries who never attacked us.
Posted by Herb McCoy  2019-05-14 23:02||   2019-05-14 23:02|| Front Page Top

#23 I bet such a thought never crossed your dull mind.
Posted by Phaick Uneretle6310 2019-05-14 23:13||   2019-05-14 23:13|| Front Page Top

#24 FYI: Iraq giving WMDs to Al Qaeda would be as absurd as the Jews giving Zyklon-B to Hitler.

It would be as absurd as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia signing a treaty to divide up a third country. Or Christian Britain and France allying with Ottoman Turkey to fight Christian Russia. Or Christian Russia and Buddhist Mongols allying to fight Christian Germans.
Posted by Zhang Fei 2019-05-14 23:27||   2019-05-14 23:27|| Front Page Top

#25 So, nationalists like Saddam and Islamists like Al-Qaeda were actually best buddies? Who knew?

I don't understand where you get the idea that people who form alliances are best buddies. Alliances form out of common interests. Once that common interest ceases to exist, the allies turn against each other if they have other goals that put them in opposition. Crack open a history book some time. It's nothing like Star Wars or Disney movies. You do realize that Greek states allied with Persia against other Greek states, don't you? And that European alliances shifted constantly. Italy sided with Britain in WWI and Germany in WWII. It's a matter of who offers the best deal.
Posted by Zhang Fei 2019-05-14 23:40||   2019-05-14 23:40|| Front Page Top

#26 Never attacked us? Have you been reading the articles posted in Home Front: WoT, Herb? Asymmetric warfare doesn’t look like two armies going toe to toe, Civil War style. It’s all those stupid, semi-crazy lone wolves who self-radicalize after reading the posts and watching the videos posted by ISIS, Al Qaeda, and all the other jihadi groups and individuals; all the connected known wolves who pull together plots involving guns, bombs, and trucks; and the formal sleeper cells reporting to the handlers in Iran and Lebanon. It’s a steady trickle of attacks intended to terrorize us and prepare us for the final surrender. And it’s certainly not about a single jihadi organization, because even local leaders, eg Boko Haram change affiliation based on whichever label is cooler at the moment.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-14 23:44||   2019-05-14 23:44|| Front Page Top

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