Interesting article by Bill Gerz -- here are some excerpts.
Weeks before the presidential election, President Barack Obama's administration faces mounting opposition from within the ranks of U.S. intelligence agencies over what career officers say is a "cover up" of intelligence information about terrorism in North Africa.
Intelligence held back from senior officials and the public includes numerous classified reports revealing clear Iranian support for jihadists throughout the tumultuous North Africa and Middle East region, as well as notably widespread al Qaeda penetration into Egypt and Libya in the months before the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
"The Iranian strategy is two-fold: upping the ante for the Obama administration's economic sanctions against Iran and perceived cyber operations against Iran's nuclear weapons program by conducting terror attacks on soft U.S. targets and cyber attacks against U.S. financial interests," said one official, speaking confidentially.
Officials with access to intelligence reports, based on both technical spying and human agents, said specific reporting revealed an alarming surge in clandestine al Qaeda activity months before the attack in Benghazi.
Yet the Obama administration sought to keep the information from becoming public to avoid exposing what the officials say is a Middle East policy failure by Obama.
Officials said that the administration appeared to engage in a disinformation campaign aimed at distancing the president personally during the peak of the presidential election campaign from the disaster in Benghazi, where numerous warning of an attack were ignored, resulting in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other officials.
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Recent intelligence reports show that Egypt's Al-Azhar University in Cairo is emerging as a covert base for al Qaeda organizational and training activities for a jihadi network consisting of many nationalities.
The Morsi government has turned a blind eye to both the increased jihadist activity and Iran's support for it in the region, particularly in Libya and Syria.
However, the administration is keeping the intelligence under wraps to avoid highlighting Obama's culpability for the democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring being hijacked by Islamists sympathetic to al Qaeda's terrorist ideology.
Intelligence officials said in Egypt--currently ruled by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood--one of the key al Qaeda organizers has been identified as Muhammad al-Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Muhammad al-Zawahiri was released by Morsi in March after having been sentenced to death for terrorist acts in Egypt.
In recent months Egypt-based al Qaeda terrorists were dispatched to Libya and Syria, where they have been covertly infiltrating Libyan militia groups and Syrian opposition forces opposing the Bashar al Assad regime.
In addition to Egyptian government backing, intelligence from the region has revealed that operatives from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the main spy service, and from Iran's Quds Force paramilitary group and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are also facilitating al Qaeda terrorists based in Egypt that are preparing to conduct operations to increase instability throughout the region.
The intelligence revealing that al Qaeda is growing in Egypt is said by officials to be one of the reasons behind Obama's decision to cancel a meeting in New York with Morsi during the U.N. General Assembly meeting last month.
Other news outlets in recent days have revealed new internal U.S. government information that contrasts sharply or contradicts official Obama administration statements that appear designed to minimize the rise of Egyptian-origin terrorism.
#1
Recent intelligence reports show that Egypt's Al-Azhar University in Cairo is emerging as a covert base for al Qaeda organizational and training activities for a jihadi network consisting of many nationalities.
Covert? This $hit has been going on there for a decade, even when Mubarak was around. Then they kept it a little quiet but good grief is this now some big surprise?
#2
If you think the Iranians are brazen now, wait until they get The Bomb. If you are worried about how they might retaliate now, wait until they get The Bomb. Or you could just let them spread their tentacles throughout the region and terrorize their neighbors unchallenged. That seems to be the course that Hildebeast and Bummer prefer.
#4
I don't think you even need to wait for Tehran to get the Bomb (although that's a huge problem). They are in serious trouble now with their economy and the effects of the economic sanctions. Ahmadinejad can't afford a popular uprising. He has got to respond in a big way - and the usual approach is to create an external aggression. It's gotta' be coming.
However - it is gratifying to see this news report. Because we have been speculating on Rantburg.com for a while that Iranian secret operations were behind some/all of the embassy riots.
#6
Iranian Strategy folks are not dumb. They are modeling their fight after the way we fought during the cold war. The Qud forces are funding and training AQ and other groups that are enemies to the US. It is game on.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/05/2012 15:33 Comments ||
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#7
Africa 1990's Kosovo before entire region close to 70th year Nazi Germany invaded Libya looks like some one in the 4th Reich is telling some Fibs. Does anyone have the location on a group of crackers one who got a scare and wounded in Africa working with Al Qaeda as part of the whole messy 911 thing?
#9
As per TOPIX + WORLD NEWS, inquiring minds wanna know is the US planning to transfer its MilFors/Assets from AFPAK to AFRICA, vee US Africom???
This infers no US milstrike or major ground war agz Iran is to be initiated in the Persian Gulf either by the Bammer or a POTUS-elect Mittens save for Dilomatic, Econ "holding the line".
HOWEVER, Iran is threatening to enrich uranium to 60% iff nuke talks fail, besides also not giving up on its NucProg.
THE mother superior of a 1500-year-old monastery in Syria warned yesterday during a visit to Australia that the uprising against Bashar al-Assad has been hijacked by foreign Islamist mercenaries, with strong support from Western countries.
Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix was forced to flee to neighbouring Lebanon in June when she was warned of a plot to abduct her, after she revealed that about 80,000 Christians had been "cleared" by rebel forces from their homes in Homs province.
She described on the website of the Greek-Melkite Catholic monastery of St James, the church she rebuilt 18 years ago after discovering it in ruins, how Islamist rebels had gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya in Homs. Then they blew it up with dynamite and attributed the act to the regular army.
Mother Agnes-Mariam plans to return to Syria soon, to support the Mussalaha (Reconciliation) community-based movement, which rejects sectarian violence and includes, she said, members of all ethnic and religious communities who are tired of war.
Rallies with the theme "Hands Off Syria" are scheduled for lunchtime tomorrow in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart, and will involve a wide variety of groups from the country.
Mother Agnes-Mariam, 60, speaks five languages fluently and spent 22 years as a contemplative Carmelite nun in Lebanon, where she was born. Her late father was a Palestinian refugee who fled Nazareth in 1948 when the state of Israel was established.
She told The Weekend Australian, while visiting Melbourne yesterday - between meetings with Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart and state parliamentarians - that after the uprising began, she had noticed growing numbers of "aggressive, armed gangs which wished to paralyse community life, abducting people, beheading, bringing terror even to schools".
Slowly these groups became identified: some are recruited by and affiliated with al-Qa'ida, some have a Muslim Brotherhood background, some are attached to other Islamist factions. Only about one in 20 of these fighters is Syrian, she said. The rest come from places ranging from Britain to Pakistan, from Chechnya to North Africa. "Many have fought in Iraq, some also in Afghanistan," Mother Agnes-Mariam said. "Now their cause is being recycled to kill Syrians."
The two million Christians in Syria - which contains the world's first church - "are sharing Syria's fate", she said.
"But as a minority, they are more vulnerable. They have no army. They are caught, like the filling in a sandwich."
Her own community of nuns at St James has been mostly trapped in the monastery for 18 months.
In the beginning, she said, the uprising embraced values including freedom and democracy. "But it steadily became a violent Islamist expression against a liberal secular society."
She described "a hidden will to empty the Middle East of its Christian presence. We don't know why. We have always been the peaceful catalyst bringing diverse communities together."
The foreign Islamist threat, she said, "is a terrible one for all the minorities. Do we stay and become second-class citizens? Where do we go? We shouldn't have to accept this in the 21st century."
Mother Agnes-Mariam said some Westerners, "even Christians", were insisting that all Syrians enter dialogue with the Islamist insurgents to form common cause, tolerating the imposition of "a kind of Islamic will" - and criticising her as a controversialist. "But what is happening now is against the uprising," she said. "There is a way to implement the choices of the Syrian people - by giving them back self-determination and freeing them of this massive foreign interference and this media instigation for violence.
"There are powerful seeds inside the Syrian people for reform through dialogue and negotiation."
Political rehab, that is. Apparently our gal is reading the tea leaves and sees who's going to be throwing the better DC parties next year. She's going to climb on the bandwagon if she has to use a lasso and golf spikes.
Warning: WSJ may be re-using this URL so the article may not stick.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/05/2012 11:38 ||
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#1
Seems a number of beltway pundits where inside the medias protective bubble around Obama and now that it is popped can bravely write about what the blogs have been saying since 2007. Without apologies or admissions or wrong.
Pathetic. Then she lost me when she went wobbley in Iraq with a bunch of weak platitudes to support her change.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
