Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

Turkey Aids U.S. Plan to Oust Pro - Iranian Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Maliki
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has put his “good neighbor” foreign policy up for reassessment. None of the neighbors are inclined to buy his political wares and multiple dangers are fast creeping up on Turkey’s borders and his credibility at home.
Erdogan was already in hot water with Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf emirates over his script for a Middle East Sunni Pan-Islamic bloc led by Turkey, and his only real ally, the Muslim Brotherhood, had just been thrown out by Egypt and Qatar.
This week, trouble piled up on four fronts: Syria, the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds allied with the separatist Turkish Kurdish PKK, and the home front, from the Gezi Park protest movement and police violence.
The Syrian front is bringing the Al Qaeda peril closer than ever to the Turkish border in the form of Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria) and Al Qaeda in Iraq (which calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
No matter which way he turns, the Turkish prime minister faces insurmountable problems.
DEBKA Weekly’s military and intelligence sources in Ankara report that his order to military leaders and intelligence agencies for a policy reassessment covers existing policies and military deployments on the Syrian and Iraq borders.

Peace package with the Kurdish PKK is falling apart

This reassessment may be no more than a bureaucratic gimmick to buy the Turkish leader time during which some of his difficulties will sort themselves out. But it may be a major revamp of foreign policy and military strategy for the purpose of sealing Turkey off from Syria and Iraq.
The latter may be imperative in view of at least three pressing military and political woes besetting Ankara at this time:
1. The peace package the Turkish prime minister fashioned with the separatist PKK insurgent movement, as a vehicle for lifting him to the presidency in the 2014 election, is coming apart.
Thursday Aug. 16 he accused the PKK of breaking its promise to pull its fighters off Turkish soil. “Only 20 percent have left Turkey, and they are mostly women and children,” he said.
This put Erdogan in a cleft stick: He must decide now whether or not to interrupt Turkey’s parliamentary recess and push through the ratification of his “democratization package” for granting Turkish Kurds (one-fifth of the total population of 77 million) partial national rights and recognize their language. This was supposed to be the quid pro quo for the PKK’s withdrawal.
PKK leaders vehemently deny Erdogan’s allegation. In a statement Monday Aug. 19, they insisted “Our forces have followed the withdrawal decision to the letter and the implementation process is continuing.”

Iran seeks to plant a Kurdish proxy against Turkey

Whichever claim is correct matters less than the new and menacing Kurdish entanglement disclosed here by DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources.
Iranian agents have penetrated PKK strongholds in the Kandil Mountains of northern Iraq, as well as the ranks of the Kurdish fighters retreating from Turkey. Those fighters are being offered Iranian cash and weapons for stealing back into Turkey through Iraq and Syria.
The Turkish prime minister must conceal this dangerous development from the public eye at all costs because it means that Tehran has turned the Kurdish tables on Ankara and is developing a secret proxy force capable of mounting a clandestine Iranian war inside Turkey without being exposed as the aggressor.
2. The Kurds on the Syrian side of the border have been engaged in fierce battles for the past three weeks over control of Syrian-Turkish border areas.
The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party – the PYD – which is tied to the Turkish PKK, is fighting to fend off the assaults of two jihadist militias – Al Qaeda-Syria and Al Qaeda-Iraq, and demanding artillery and air cover from Ankara to keep the jihadists at bay. Both want a foothold on the Turkish border.
Our sources in Ankara say Erdogan hasn’t yet decided which is worse – a concentration of Kurdish PKK militiamen on his border, or a large pack of Al Qaeda fighters.

A grand scheme for getting rid of Iraq’s Nuri al Maliki

3. In DEBKA Weekly 598 of Aug. 2, we revealed a recent pact concluded by Turkey and the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) to establish a Kurdish republic in Syria. This was part of a comprehensive military, political and financial cooperation understanding, in pursuance of which the KRG president Massoud Barzani made a special trip to Ankara.
Beset by ongoing obstacles, this grand design has been put on a back burner to make way for another new scheme which may eventually offer solutions.
It comes in the form of an ad hoc coalition, which DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources reveal is secretly in the making, between the US, Turkey, Iraqi Kurds, and the Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia, for the common goal of getting rid of Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.
As a first step, the seriously ailing, 80-year old Kurdish leader Jalal Talaban would be replaced as President of Iraq by Massoud Barzani. The presidency of the Kurdish Republic would pass to Massoud’s son, Nechiervan Barzani, who has the trust of the Americans and the Turks.
Western and Arab intelligence pundits all agree that Maliki’s days are numbered with no chance of his winning the March 2014 general election.
Eight months hence, therefore, a new coalition government can be installed in Baghdad composed of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions opposed to Iran’s growing influence in the Iraqi capital.

The devil is in the timeline

The backers of this scheme have picked a future prime minister: he is the incumbent oil minister, Abdul Karim Luaibi Bahedh, a 59-year-old Shiite, who is no friend to Tehran and close to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
This radical turnaround in Baghdad would suit the books of the US, Turkey and the Gulf Emirates in that it would make it possible to seal Iraq’s borders with Syria and Turkey against the traffic nourishing Bashar Assad - fighters, wads of cash and weapons – and deny al Qaeda access from Iraq to both countries.
Its biggest snag, say our experts, is the length of its timeline.
Any planning reaching eight months into the future cannot expect to survive full term in the volatile Middle East – not least when no one in Washington, Ankara or Irbil has any notion of how Tehran will react.

Three U.S. Options for Destroying Syria’s Chemical Arsenal
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

DEBKAfile’s exclusive military sources reported Saturday that President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel were weighing three options: One: Striking the Syrian unit which perpetrated the poison gas last Wednesday east of Damascus. Two: Destroying the Syrian army’s three chemical weapons depots. Or Three: Coordinated attacks on the first two targets.
For Options Two and Three, the attack would have to destroy all the poison shells without them exploding and leaking their contents across wide regions of Syria and neighboring Turkey, Israel and Jordan. The Syrian ruler is capable of having the shells’ contents mixed and armed ready for use, thus maximizing the deadly impact of deadly gases across a broad Middle East region.

The Sarin Shells Fired on Damascus - By Syrian 4th Division’s 155th Brigade - Were Followed By Rocke
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

In the space of 48 hours, the Assad regime, Iran and Hizballah launched a three-point offensive against foreign intervention, debkafile reports. Here are some facts: The sarin nerve gas atrocity of Wednesday, Aug. 21, alleged to have claimed more than 1,000 lives, was the work of the 155th Brigade of the Syrian army’s 4th Division, headed by President Bashar Asad’s younger brother Gen. Maher Assad.

The poison gas shells were fired from the big Mount Kalmun army base south of Damascus, one of the three repositories of Syria’s chemical weapons. In response to a demand from Moscow last December, Assad collected his chemical assets in three depots. The other two are Dummar, a suburb 5 kilometers outside Damascus, and the Al-Safira air base, west of Aleppo.
Not a single shell or gram of poison gas is loaded for use at any of the three sites without an explicit directive from the president or his brother.
Therefore, the clamor raised by the US and French presidents, Western prime ministers and Russian leaders for an independent investigation to turn up evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria and identity of its perpetrator – the Assad regime, says the West, and a rebel provocation, according to Moscow – is nothing but playacting.  The facts are known and the evidence is present. And the price for refusing to come down to earth and putting an immediate stop to this horrifying precedent may be unimaginably grim – not just for Israel and Jordan – but for the rest of the Middle East and beyond.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented Thursday, Aug. 22 that Iran is using Syria as its testing ground while closely monitoring international responses to its actions.

His remark followed the four Grad rockets fired on northern Israel the day after the chemical attack in East Damascus. His words were scarcely noticed, mainly because Israel’s own spokesmen were busy spreading a blanket of disinformation over the attack, attributing it vaguely to “Global Jihad” (whatever that is).
debkafile’s military sources affirm that, just as the Assad brothers orchestrated the chemical shell attack on Syrian civilians, so too did Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah set in motion the rocket attack on Israel.

By good fortune, the two which exploded in built-up areas caused damage but no casualties and a third was intercepted by Iron Dome.

Nasrallah had his disposal two Palestinian terrorist groups functioning in Lebanon and Syria under direct Iranian command. They are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian – General Command (PFLP-GC) and Jihad Islami – both of them eager to attack Israel.
Then, on Friday night, two car bombs blew up outside Sunni mosques in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli, killing 42 people and injuring 500.
The triple coordinated outrages added up to a dire warning from Tehran and Damascus about what they have in store for the region, and especially Syria’s neighbors, as payback for foreign intervention in the Syrian civil war.
On the subject of intervention, the French daily Le Figaro took the liberty last Thursday, Aug. 23, of lifting wholesale and publishing without credit the exclusive report carried Wednesday, Aug. 21, by debkafile. We were the first publication in the world to reveal on Saturday, Aug. 17 the entry from Jordan into southern Syria of a unit of US-trained Syrian rebel commandoes, under the caption: Reported Syrian gas attack after first US-trained rebel incursion from Jordan.
In that report, debkafile was also the first to expose Assad’s poison gas attack as a warning of the heavy price he would exact for intervention in the Syrian war by foreign forces or by rebels trained by foreign forces – in this case US instructors and officers based in Jordan.

CBS News reported Friday that US and Israel intelligence monitoring known chemical weapons sites detected activity there 20 minutes before the chemical shells were fired Wednesday. Those agencies were therefore on top of valuable advance information, but did nothing to stop - or even warn against – the coming poison gas attack.

Washington and other Western capitals as well as Israel continued to circle around reality Friday and Saturday, when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel let it be known that US warships had been sent to the region for possible cruise missile attacks, in case the president decided on action against Syria.
The Secretary “forgot” to mention that, had the president really wanted to do something, all he had to do was keep the USS Truman aircraft carrier, which was present in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, the day of the chemical attack, from sailing out through the Suez Canal Thursday.

Furthermore, America doesn’t need to send more warships to the region for possible attacks on Syria. It holds plenty of assets at US air and missile bases crisscrossing the Middle East, southern and central Europe and the Persian Gulf. All are fully capable of conducting a variety of operations against Syria without bringing in extra warships.
Except that none of these assets has so far been ordered into action.

What could the Obama administration do if it was so minded?

debkafile’s exclusive military sources described three options available: One: Striking the Syrian unit which perpetrated the poison gas last Wednesday east of Damascus. Two: Destroying the Syrian army’s three chemical weapons depots. Or Three: Coordinated attacks on the first two targets.
For Options Two and Three, the attack would have to destroy all the poison shells at once before they exploded and leaked contamination across wide regions of Syria and neighboring Turkey, Israel and Jordan. The Syrian ruler is capable of having the shells’ contents mixed and armed ready for use ahead of a US attack, thus maximizing the deadly impact of lethal gases across a broad Middle East region.

Notwithstanding the grave risks of action, the consequences of inaction by the US and Israel would be worse: It would give Damascus and Tehran a green light for escalating their viciousness – and not just against the Syrian people. If the barbarity is not stopped, they will get away with making nerve gas and other poison substances acceptable weapons for fighting their foes. Lebanon and Israel are in extreme jeopardy.

Tehran Doubles Its Military Strength in Syria, Adds Revolutionary Guards
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Until now, Iran has maintained about 5,000 fighting men in Syria. While their commanders are officers of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), the rank and file were a motley assortment of Shiite recruits from Muslim countries, most of them from Iraq and the Gulf Emirates.
DEBKA Weekly’s Iranian and military resources disclose that Tehran has now substantially beefed up its strength in Syria with an infusion of another 4,000 troops, all drawn from the IRGC, for fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Syrian army. These figures do not include the 1,300 Iranian instructors already present for training Syrian army troops and the Popular Army Tehran established and trained for guerilla warfare against rebel forces.
Add to these numbers, 10,000 Hizballah militiamen, who are also under Iranian command.
Tehran was driven to consolidate its hold on Syria by the upheaval in Egypt. Despairing of any sort of détente with Cairo under military rule in the foreseeable future, Tehran is concerned that the loss of Syria would leave it without a leg to stand on in the Arab world, excepting only highly unstable Iraq.
There are two more considerations. Iran is alive to the wholehearted support Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates extended to the Egyptian army versus the Muslim Brotherhood. It is also watching America’s wavering reaction to the Assad regime’s use of poison chemicals in an unprecedented massacre of Syrian citizens.

Tehran is enlarging the Shiite imprint on Syria

If Bashar Assad were to fall, the Iranians fear, they would be exposed to more concentrated international pressure that ever before to give ground on their nuclear aspirations.
As an extra shield, Tehran has doubled its fighting strength in Syria with the transfer of the Vali-e-Asr Brigade, named eponymously for the Mahdi, which is a detachment of the IRGC’s elite Khatam-Al-Anbya Brigade.
Iran is also accentuating the Shiite imprint on the Syrian war.
HIzballah’s Hassan Nasrallah recently reacted to the destruction of the tomb of the Shiite saint Hojar Ben Adi Alkendi in Damascus, by offering to lay down his life to protect it.
A special Shiite unit is assigned by Iran to defending the shrines sacred to their faith and objects of pilgrimage. That unit also plays an active combat role in Syria’s civil war.
Syrian Sunni rebels have made Shiite shrines targets of attack, providing Tehran with yet another pretext for boosting its military presence in the Syrian war.
Not long ago, the tomb of Mohsein, son of Imam Hossein, was blown up in the Al-Mashad Quarter of Aleppo.

Protecting shrines as rallying-point for Shiite volunteers

It was followed by a heavy mortar attack on the revered Sayida Zeinab shrine outside Damascus. This ornate gold-domed mosque is used by Tehran and Hizballah as a rallying point to draw Shiite fighters to Bashar Assad’s flag. Shiite fighters were ready to die in the shrine’s defense against Sunni rebel attack.
The last two months have seen two thousand Shiite fighters joining up from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bahrain. They are mustered in the Abold-Fazl El-Abbas Division, commanded by an IRGC officer known as “Abu Seif.”
Among the recruits to this unit are also members of the Assaeb Ahl-e-Haq, known as the Iraqi Hizballah. Abu Seif took command after the former brigade commander, an Iraqi called Abd-el Amir Al-Rabi’i fell in battle.
So critical is the Syrian front to Tehran, that Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the half billion dollar monthly allocation for Iranian operations in Syria to be doubled.
The topped-up budget made it possible to start registering volunteers to fight in that country in the service of the Revolutionary Guards. So far, 2,500 volunteers have signed up.

NM Supreme Court: Christian Photographers Can’t Refuse Gay Weddings
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsthechristianpost
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

In New Mexico, professional photographers may not refuse to work at gay weddings, that state’s Supreme Court decided Thursday.

When Elane Photography refused to work for Vanessa Willock at her same-sex wedding, the Court said, it violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in public accommodations based upon sexual orientation.

“First, we conclude that a commercial photography business that offers its services to the public, thereby increasing its visibility to potential clients, is subject to the antidiscrimination provisions of the NMHRA and must serve same-sex couples on the same basis that it serves opposite-sex couples,” Justice Edward Chavez wrote for the majority.

Chavez also wrote that refusing to work at a same-sex wedding is equivalent to refusing to work at a mixed-race wedding: “Therefore, when Elane Photography refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony, it violated the NMHRA in the same way as if it had refused to photograph a wedding between people of different races.”

Elane Photography is not protected by their rights to freely exercise their religion, which are protected by the U.S. Constitution, because the NMHRA is a “neutral law of general applicability,” the Court said. This means that the law does not target a specific religious group when it restricts Elane Photography’s religious freedom.

In the proceedings, Elane Photography argued that it did not discriminate based upon sexual orientation because it would have photographed same-sex couples in other contexts. It was only the conveyance of a same-sex marriage in the company’s photos that conflicted with the owner’s religious beliefs.

Let the Headlines Speak
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily NewsFrom the Internet
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Gaza: Hamas urges Egypt to reopen Rafah crossing
Officials from the Islamist group Hamas are urging Egypt to reopen the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian authorities closed the crossing point this week after more than 20 Egyptian policemen were killed near the border by suspected militants. Thousands of Palestinians, including students and medical patients, wanting to leave or enter Gaza have been stuck.  

The Thug Culture That Killed Chris Lane
In a testament to the depravity of thug culture, an Australian collegiate baseball player attending school in America was killed by three teenagers looking for fun, police reported. Christopher Lane, who was out for a jog in the town of Duncan, Oklahoma where his girlfriend and her family live, was targeted at random after he passed a home where the boys were staying. ”They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,’” said Police Chief Danny Ford. ”The boy who has talked to us said, ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.’”  

Obama: Republicans privately ‘agree’ with me
President Barack Obama argued some Republicans secretly side with him on wanting to avoid a government shutdown, but they’re afraid they may face backlash from the conservative right. "Sometimes they say to me privately, 'I agree with you, but I'm worried about a primary from, you know, somebody in the Tea Party back in my district,' or, 'I'm worried about what Rush Limbaugh is going to say about me on the radio,'” Obama said in an exclusive interview with CNN "New Day" anchor Chris Cuomo.  

Al Qaeda blames Hezbollah for Lebanon bombings
Al Qaeda's North African branch blamed Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim militant group Hezbollah for twin bombs that hit the northern city of Tripoli on Friday and threatened retribution, a U.S.-based intelligence monitoring website reported on Saturday.  

US forces move closer to Syria as options weighed
U.S. naval forces are moving closer to Syria as President Barack Obama considers military options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government. The president emphasized that a quick intervention in the Syrian civil war was problematic, given the international considerations that should precede a military strike.  

Sales of New U.S. Homes Fell More Than Forecast in July
Purchases of new U.S. homes plunged 13.4 percent in July, the most in more than three years, raising concern higher mortgage rates will slow the real-estate rebound. Sales fell to a 394,000 annualized pace, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. The reading was the weakest since October and was lower than any of the forecasts by 74 economists Bloomberg surveyed.  

Syrian soldiers see chemical agents in rebel tunnels: state TV
Syrian state television said troops found chemical agents in rebel tunnels in a Damascus suburb on Saturday and some soldiers were "suffocating", intensifying a dispute over blame for a reported nerve gas attack that killed hundreds this week. The top U.N. disarmament official arrived in Damascus on Saturday to seek access for inspectors to the site of the attack and the United States was realigning naval forces in the region to give President Barack Obama the option for an armed strike on Syria.  

Bombings Strike Lebanon, as Mosques Are Targeted in Growing Violence
Car bombs exploded outside two Sunni mosques in this northern Lebanese city on Friday as many worshipers were just finishing prayers, killing dozens of people, wounding hundreds and sending new sectarian shudders through the country, already deeply unsettled by the conflict in neighboring Syria.  

California Gov. declares state of emergency as wildfire spreads into Yosemite
California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco late Friday after electrical infrastructure serving the city was damaged by a giant wildfire raging out of control on the western edge of Yosemite National Park. The fire has damaged San Francisco city and county electrical equipment and poses an "imminent threat to critical infrastructure assets" of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, according to a news release.  

Pat Buchanan: U.S. has been ‘de-Christianized’
The United States has lost one of its core guiding lights — its Judeo-Christian focus — said one conservative pundit, reflecting on the tragic and senseless shooting death of an Australian man in Oklahoma on a baseball scholarship, whose life was allegedly snipped by three self-proclaimed bored teens.  

Putin bans protests during Olympics
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday banned rallies and demonstrations during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a move that could be aimed at curbing dissent over the country’s anti-gay laws.  

King Abdullah Builds His Own Sunni Grouping to Counter Obama’s
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Commentary

The political instincts of Saudi King Abdullah, 90, who is dismissed by some American pundits as “past it” and “ailing,” are still sharp enough for him to weigh in strongly in the Arab world’s current upheavals.
In June 2009, President Barack Obama impressed him by making Riyadh his first stop in the Arab world as new US president, before going on to Cairo and delivering his landmark outreach gesture to the Muslim world.
But that was four years ago. Today, the Saudi monarch is no fan of Obama. He has never forgiven him for hustling his good friend President Hosni Mubarak out of office in February 2011 with an order to step down NOW! And he has no time for any facet of the US president’s performance in the region ever since.
Abdullah’s disapproval was stoked by the “Arab Spring” as it unfolded in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.
US and European backing for the ostensibly “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents of autocratic rulers and incumbent regimes was seen as the enemy of stability in the region.
The Saudis saw the successive breakup of states and the weakening of their political fabric and economy as creating a broad base for Western domination. They complained that the process targeted the very pro-Western regimes willing to gradually introduce economic and social reforms under the steady hand of strong ruling elites.
Those elites and the nation-state born in the last century are being swept away in the upheaval by extremist groups and ruling castes like the Muslim Brotherhood which espouse Islamic extremist ideologies and aspire to replace the incumbent regimes with a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate and Sharia law.

Riyadh galvanized into reforms and foreign interventions

After witnessing these events, Saudi and Gulf rulers feared they were doomed by Obama’s political philosophy to go the way of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. They saw the shock waves radiating from Iraq and Syria threatening to inundate the Kingdoms of Jordan and Bahrain, before drowning the Saudi monarchy as well.
This nightmare perception galvanized Saudi rulers into preventive action.
The king and princes set about bolstering the throne - first on the domestic front, with measures ranging from a $130 billion benefits package released to the populace in March 2011, to tighter supervision of Facebook and Twitter, and a major campaign to provide jobs for university graduates.
Second, Riyadh adopted a more proactive foreign policy: It slashed assistance to post-Mubarak Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi and took steps to thwart the Shiite-led push across the region.
The Saudis decided to respond to the rising strength of the Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah bloc, which they saw as being boosted in the past year by US and Western European passivity and their non-response to the Syrian rebels’ appeals for means to fight against Bashar Assad’s butchery and the country’s devastation.
This response was manifested in the past two years by four steps for directly counteracting US objectives in the Middle East and Persian Gulf:

Squashing Muslim Brotherhood elements – in defiance of Obama

1. Helping Bahrain quell the Shiite disturbances, aided by Iran and Hizballah for toppling the throne.
Saudi armored forces went into the tiny kingdom - in defiance of Obama administration endorsement of Shiite demands for more rights.
2. Encouraging the Gulf emirates to crack down hard on Muslim Brotherhood elements. Like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other sheikhdoms had Brotherhood adherents and propagandists fired from their jobs or detained.
3. Actively promoting the change of rulers in Qatar last year. The pro-Muslim Brotherhood emir, Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani, abdicated in favor of his son, Crown Prince Tamim bin Khalifa al-Thani, who then and there, sacked Prime Minister Jassem bin Jaber al-Thani, the proponent of Qatar’s pro-Brotherhood, anti-Saudi policies. Riyadh has since enjoyed an attentive ear in Doha.
4. And in the past couple of months, Saudi Arabia threw its wholehearted support behind Egypt’s top soldier, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and his coup against the Muslim Brotherhood.
After passing the hat round, the Saudis collected $40 billion to sustain the Egyptian military from Kuwait, the UAE and its own treasury.

Saudis seek to form their own Sunni bloc

This wasn’t the first Saudi sally into active foreign intervention, but it is the most comprehensive and ambitious ever undertaken by the deeply conservative kingdom. Riyadh hopes to establish a new Sunni Middle East alliance composed of moderate Arab regimes that will counteract Obama administration initiatives in the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt will form the grouping’s nucleus, encircled by the Gulf emirates and Jordan and, at a later stage, perhaps some North African states. The durability of this grouping will gain strength paradoxically from the rising potency of the rival it is bent on defeating, namely the Syrian-Iranian and Hizballah bloc. It would also depend heavily on Egypt achieving stable rule.
To succeed, the Saud-led group must keep going with domestic social and political reforms, even though they were prompted by the despised Arab Spring.

Gen. El - Sisi’s Total Control of Egyptian Intelligence Files Used to Smash Muslim Brotherhood
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Commentary

Late Tuesday night, August 13, when the lights went out in the office of Egyptian Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the officers heading home from a general staff meeting were certain the minister was still undecided on how to disperse the long Muslim Brotherhood protest sit-ins in Cairo.
He even asked them for detailed plans for the operation without conveying any sense of urgency.
Only two of the 25 generals present, Gen. Mohamed Ibrahim and Gen. Ahmad al-Tohamy, head of the General Intelligence Services, knew that El-Sisi had planted a false trail. The operation for breaking up the Muslim Brotherhood protest was to go forward in just a few hours, early Wednesday morning, the fourteenth.
DEBKA Weekly’s military and Cairo sources name Gen. Mohamed Ibrahim as El-Sisi’s closest confidant. He was also the only individual privy to the identity of the high member of the judiciary with whom the defense minister had been conferring intensely from late May.
This judge cooperated with Gen. El-Sisi - and through him with the military - on a secret scheme for removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power – a scheme which had gained the backing of some of the country’s most prominent judicial authorities and prosecutors.
The third branch of the triumvirate designing the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi – under their very noses – was the intelligence service and all its agencies.

The Brotherhood turned a deaf ear to a warning

The July 3 takeover, led by three branches of government – the military, the judiciary and the intelligence community –with broad popular support, wasn’t strictly speaking the usual military putsch. It ushered in a new chapter in Egypt’s three-year history of turmoil, which no political or religious power in the land was strong enough to resist, although the Muslim Brotherhood had received due warning.
In early 2012, Gen. Omar Suleiman, Egyptian Intelligence Minister under Mubarak and briefly vice president in the weeks before the president’s removal, met secretly with Brotherhood leaders and cautioned them not to aim for the presidency, but be satisfied with their majority in parliament.
Asked to explain, Suleiman, who had devoted his entire career to subduing the Muslim Brotherhood, replied: None of you has the faintest inkling of the number of secrets stored in our intelligence files against your leaders. Without this knowledge – and control of it – you won’t last a year in power.
Straight from this secret interview, Gen. Suleiman took himself out of Egypt into European exile. Not long afterwards, in July 2012, he died.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which despised Suleiman, ignored his advice, mostly because they didn’t believe it. That mistake was to cost them dear.

El-Sisi used secret Intelligence as tool for Brotherhood detentions

Exactly a year ago, on August 12, 2012, President Morsi fired Egyptian Defense Minister Field Marshal Hossein Tantawi and replaced him with Gen. El-Sisi, who was to be his eventual nemesis.
Maj. Gen. Mohamed Rafaat Shahata was appointed as head of intelligence in Omar Suleiman’s stead.
Morsi was not to know that his two handpicked appointees had come to an agreement to deny the new president and all Brotherhood high-ups access to the secret records on their doings kept under close guard at military intelligence and GID (Mukhabarat) headquarters.
Ignorant of the contents of those files, Brotherhood leaders were hopelessly vulnerable when the police came to arrest them this week on criminal charges.
According to DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources, their lack of access to intelligence files did come up in several meetings between President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood strongman Mohammed Khairat Saad el-Shater. They decided that, with another five years in office, they could afford to concentrate on more urgent issues and hold this one over.
That was the Muslim Brotherhood’s second mistake, and it finally sealed their fate.
In his campaign for the undoing of the Brotherhood, Gen. El-Sisi had at his disposal a unique mine of secret information on the movement’s hierarchy, clandestine apparatuses, funding sources, foreign ties and double agent networks – the totality of which not even Brotherhood leaders themselves commanded.
While international attention was fixed on the military crackdown in Cairo last week, security forces spread out quietly across the country rounding up the Brotherhood’s undercover operatives. The 15-member leadership suddenly was suddenly left high and dry, isolated and bereft of field support.

Brotherhood decapitated

For the next stage in smashing the Brotherhood, security forces were armed with lists from the intelligence files of the secret hideouts set up by the leaders against an emergency. They were picked up one by one in a coordinated swoop. One of the last to be netted was Spiritual Guide Mohammed Badi’a, who was run to earth and arrested Tuesday Aug. 20 in a hidden apartment in Nasser City, eastern Cairo.
With most of its high-ups in Cairo and nationwide under lock and key, the defense minister has ended his operation for decapitating the Brotherhood. No mass arrests of thousands of rank and file are in store – only certain key figures. There will be no long-term persecution of the group.
Out intelligence sources reveal that for the future, Gen. El-Sisi laid down two options in his behind-doors interviews with the Brotherhood leaders in detention and those left at large:
1. He asked for a commitment to put up Brotherhood candidates in the next presidential and parliamentary elections, the dates for which will be announced shortly. The military ruler is confident that its poor showing at the polls will finally wipe the Brotherhood off Egypt’s political map by a democratic process that will buy him legitimacy in the West.
2. If the Muslim Brotherhood refuses to run for election, the interim government will stage show trials against its leaders on charges grave enough to carry death sentences.
In this article, we have outlined the domestic preparations El-Sisi made for his takeover of Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood. Another item in this issue reveals his campaign for foreign support, especially from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

Four Mid East Intel Agencies Who Lent a Helping Hand to Gen. El - Sisi
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Commentary

In some respects, the putsch which overthrew Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood would be more aptly termed an intelligence coup, rather than a military takeover.
Inside the country, strongman Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi used his total control of the secrets gathered by intelligence on Brotherhood leaders to end their rule of Egypt and put them behind bars.
Tuesday, Aug. 20, the day that Spiritual Guide Mohammed Badi’a was discovered hiding in an apartment in Nasser City, Cairo and arrested, a small civilian plane touched down at Cairo airport’s military section. The unnamed Israeli visitor and two aides who stepped off the plane were greeted by Gen. Ahmad Al-Tohamy, head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Services, and some of his senior officers.
DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources report exclusively that they immediately sat down for an urgent discussion, the main subject of which was the wanted Brotherhood fugitive, Mahmoud Izzat Ibrahim, who was named Spiritual Guide immediately after Badi’a’s arrest.
A month ago, Izzat was revealed in an exclusive debkafile story as having led a group of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives in flight from Egypt. They went to ground in the Gaza Strip’s Beach Hotel. There, they set up a clandestine command center for a mutiny against Egypt’s armed forces, in partnership with armed Salafist Bedouin. The violence was planned to spread across Sinai before infecting Egypt’s main cities and toppling the interim government set up by the military.

Israel asked for help to find wanted Brother Izzat Ibrahim

The Egyptian intelligence officers asked their Israeli guests for help in finding the answers to three questions:

1. Were Izzat Ibrahim and his five confederates still holed up in the Gaza hotel? If so, could a joint military operation be mounted to catch them?
   This kind of joint operation could be tricky – even more than the Israeli drone strike guided by Egyptian intelligence which on Aug. 9 wiped out a rocket team poised to attack Israel from Ajraa, near Rafah, in northern Sinai.
   An operation for nailing Izzat Ibrahim could be foiled by the Palestinian Hamas which rules the Gaza Strip and has placed itself under his command.
2. Since their exposure by debkafile, the band of six Brothers has gone to ground. They are no longer sighted going in or exiting the Beach Hotel. Are they still in Gaza? Or have they managed to smuggle themselves back into Egypt, or escaped to another part of the Middle East? Turkey comes to mind, for instance, in view of prime minister Tayyip Erdogan’s hostile attitude toward the new rulers of Egypt. Only this week, the interim government in Cairo warned that it was “losing patience with the Turkish prime minister.”
3. If Izzat Ibrahim is still hiding in the Gaza Strip, can Israel help bottle him in and prevent him from escaping?

El-Sisi’s four foreign intel helpers

Four high-powered Middle East intelligence services contributed to Gen. El-Sisi’s success by assisting in his preparations for ousting the Muslim Brotherhood and taking power on July 3.
They were Saudi General Intelligence headed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan; the United Arab Emirates Intelligence and Security agency headed by Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, who is also Dubai Police chief; Israel’s Mossad under Tamir Pardo and Military Intelligence (AMAN) headed by Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi.
Each of their bosses, Saudi King Abdullah, Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, owned a special and profound interest in breaking the Muslim Brotherhood’s grip on Egypt.
For the Saudi monarch, the transformation of Islam into a political force posed a threat to the Saudi throne and the regimes of fellow Gulf Arab rulers. Abdullah was also deeply concerned that the Brotherhood would abuse its power to manipulate the Suez Canal as a tool for impeding the free passage of Saudi oil exports out to market through the Mediterranean Sea.
UAE rulers found the Egyptian Brothers no less menacing than the Iranian Shiites.

Israel was preparing a Sinai showdown

The Israeli prime minister viewed Islamist rule in Cairo as a major political and military threat menacing the country from its southern border.
Indeed, the Egyptian coup found Israel deep in secret preparations for a military showdown with the Brothers over control of the lawless Sinai Peninsula. Netanyahu had resolved to curtail Sinai’s decline, with approval from Cairo, into a stamping ground for the most radical jihadi movements between Libya to the Gaza Strip, and a smuggling highway for arms, goods and human traffic.
As Sinai became a seething hotbed for armed Salafist bands, Hamas gave the Gaza Strip over to the Muslim Brotherhood as its rear command for clandestine operations.

'Gay' Lawmaker to Christians: 'we'll Take Your Children'
Aug 24th, 2013
Daily NewsWND
Categories: Today's Headlines;Moral Decline

Few people doubt that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hopes to become president in 2016. Unfortunately for him, he may have just signed away any chance of that.

On Monday, Christie signed A3371, a draconian piece of legislation that bars licensed therapists from helping children overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, behavior or identity. This law bans help for minors even when – as is so often the case – those same-sex attractions arise from childhood sexual abuse by the likes of a Jerry Sandusky.

This law will prohibit minors and their parents from receiving counseling they desire and will force counselors to violate ethical codes because they will not be able to help clients reach their own counseling goals. This law would enslave children – whether abused or not – to a subjectively determined sexual identity that they reject.

The connection between homosexual abuse and “gay identity” is undeniable. Consider this: Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have found that homosexual men are “at least three times more likely to report CSA (childhood sexual abuse)” than heterosexual men.

Moreover, the Archives of Sexual Behavior – no bastion of conservatism – determined in a 2001 study that nearly half of all gay-identified men were molested by a homosexual pedophile: “46 percent of homosexual men and 22 percent of homosexual women reported having been molested by a person of the same gender. This contrasts to only 7 percent of heterosexual men and 1 percent of heterosexual women reporting having been molested by a person of the same gender” noted the study.

For obvious reasons, this politically motivated law has been dubbed the “Jerry Sandusky Victimization Act.” Liberty Counsel, one of the fastest growing civil rights law firms in the country, has stepped in to protect New Jersey children, parents and licensed therapists. We’ve filed suit to block the law, as we’ve already blocked a similar law in California.

In his signing statement, Gov. Christie wrote: “Government should tread carefully into this area and I do so here reluctantly. I have scrutinized this piece of legislation with that concern in mind. However, I also believe that on issues of medical treatment for children we must look to experts in the field to determine the relative risks and rewards.”

Beyond the fact that Christie and the New Jersey Legislature have just violated the First Amendment rights of New Jersey parents, children and counselors, there remains another problem with his assertion. It’s not true. As with any form of therapy, the “experts” are all over the board on the issue of change therapy.

For instance, both New Jersey Democrats and Christie cited the American Psychological Association, or APA, as justification for this gross infringement on the right of self-determination. Although, no doubt, the highly liberal APA supports this and similar Sandusky Laws for political reasons, the group’s own task force on change therapy – led entirely by members who themselves are “gay”-identified or known political activists – has had to admit, nonetheless, that homosexuality itself “refers to feelings and self-concept.”

The taskforce confessed that such therapy has shown “varying degrees of satisfaction and varying perceptions of success.” It acknowledged within its own skewed, very limited “study” that some people had “altered their sexual orientation. … [P]articipants had multiple endpoints, including LGB identity, ex-gay identity, no sexual orientation identity, and a unique self-identity. … Individuals report a range of effects from their efforts to change their sexual orientation, including both benefits and harm.”

Reports of “both benefits and harm”? Exactly what might be expected from any form of therapy.

But that’s for adults. Here’s the kicker: The APA also acknowledged that there is no evidence whatsoever that change therapy harms minors. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, addressed this, the most outrageous aspect of the law: “The very report that the governor cited for signing this law also admitted that there is absolutely zero research – none – regarding the effect of change therapy with minors.”

Get that? Gov. Christie just signed into law a bill purporting to prevent harm to minors from change therapy, citing, as the reason, an APA report that admits there is neither research nor empirical evidence to suggest that change therapy harms minors.

Is your head swimming? It should be.

The governor is one of three things. He is either: 1) ill-informed, 2) politically motivated or 3) stupid.

I don’t know, I guess he could be 4) all of the above.

Meanwhile, there are many experts outraged over this gross overreach by Christie and other New Jersey liberals. Dr. Nicholas Cummings, former president of the APA, wrote in USA Today: “Contending that all same-sex attraction is immutable is a distortion of reality. Attempting to characterize all sexual reorientation therapy as ‘unethical’ violates patient choice and gives an outside party a veto over patients’ goals for their own treatment. A political agenda shouldn’t prevent gays and lesbians who desire to change from making their own decisions.”

Dr. Cummings has testified to personally helping hundreds of formerly homosexual clients achieve the change they desired.

Things get more sinister yet. On Wednesday, New Jersey Assemblyman Tim Eustace, who sponsored the bill and is openly homosexual, bombastically compared change therapy to “beating a child” and suggested that the government take children seeking change away from their parents. He told Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, “What this does is prevent things that are harmful to people. If a parent were beating their child on a regular basis we would step in and remove that child from the house. If you pay somebody to beat your child or abuse your child, what’s the difference?”

Mat Staver responded on the same program: “It is shocking to hear the law’s sponsor threaten parents that the state will remove their children from them if they provide the counsel they need and which helps them. This is the ultimate nanny state,” he said.

I’ll take it a step further, and I think I speak for many Christian fathers. None of my three children suffer from unwanted same-sex attraction, but if any of them did and they decided to seek change therapy to reconcile their feelings with their faith, Mr. Eustace and the rest of his Gaystapo would be extremely ill-advised to crest my front porch with designs on taking my children.

Is this George Washington’s America, or Joseph Stalin’s Russia?