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DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis
June 30, 2009
An Israeli West Bank community
The Obama administration signalled a new mood of compromise on settlement construction just ahead of the key talks in New York between Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak and prime minister's adviser Yitzhak Molcho and US envoy George Mitchell Tuesday, June 30. While the Israeli delegation was still airborne, the US state department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We've been working with all the parties to try and come up with... an environment conducive to the resumption of negotiations. I'm not going to prejudge what happens tomorrow." Asked by reporters if that meant the US administration was ready to compromise and accept a suspension of settlement activity instead of a total halt, Kelly said that some level of flexibility was part of the negotiation process. "Working our way to our resolution, I'm not going to say we're not going to compromise. Let's just see what happens." At the White House, spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "I don't want to get ahead of some very important...
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis
June 13, 2009
Backers of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi
Friday night, June 12, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was already on his way to victory in Iran's turbulent presidential election although only the first votes had been counted. By Saturday morning, it was clear he had won a landslide for a second term, widening the gap with his closest rival opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. According to final results, the incumbent won 62.6 percent of the vote, Mousavi 33.75 percent. This contradicted Western predictions that the record-breaking turnout of 85 percent of Iran's 46 million eligible voters favored the challenger. Yet strangely enough, even then, Washington and the US media were still doggedly insisting that that the reformist Mousavi could still make it in a run-off, although that door had been finally slammed shut by the president's broad majority. Indeed a high-ranking White House official, quoted by a British TV correspondent, even stated that a second round was inevitable and Mir Hossein Mousavi was bound to win. Even before that,...
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis
June 13, 2009
Almost a week after Israeli prime minister held his first talks with US president Barack Obama at the White House, last Tuesday, May 18, some of the fog obscuring their content is finally beginning to clear. The White House was forced to rebut a major misapprehension, that the US president would use his June 4 speech in Cairo to launch a new Middle East peace plan. There never was such a plan, DEBKAfile's Washington sources confirm. Once that misapprehension was removed, some of the subjects really discussed by the two leaders hoved into sight - or proved false. For instance, Obama did not demand the repartition of Jerusalem; neither was he keen to pursue the Palestinian issue at all at this time. Most of all, he was after space to engage in negotiation with Tehran without the threat of a surprise Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear sites hanging over the talks. Who then had an interest in running the false hare of an Obama Middle East plan? 1. At some point, the...
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DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
June 28, 2009
Millions of sympathizers around the world looked forward to seeing Iran's protest movement using the Internet for the first online coup in history. Instead, the Iranian Islamic regime turned the tables: Its Internet police, arguably the largest in the world, pushed "control," "halt," "delete" and "send" buttons to activate a deadly weapon for suppressing the movement, as soon as it took to the streets to protest the June 12 election which was believed to have given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a false victory. By Sunday, June 28, when the Guardian Council was to hand down its final verdict on their complaints, the street rallies had petered out. Part of the reason, DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report, was their organizers' heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their...
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DEBKAfile Special Report
June 9, 2009
Divers pull Air France tail fin out of Atlantic Ocean
A week after Air France A330's unexplained fatal dive into the Atlantic June 1, DEBKAfile reports from Paris that US, French and Brazilian investigators have begun going through the list of more than 200 passengers on the flight from Rio to Paris with a tooth comb. They are looking at the victims' countries of origin, family, social and denominational associations for possible clues to the mysterious disaster. After the recovery of 24 bodies, some personal possessions and large sections of the doomed aircraft, there is still no understanding of what happened aboard the craft in the few short minutes before the crash when its automated monitoring systems transmitted a series of 24 error messages indicating the shutdown of critical systems. As long as the fog surrounding the tragedy remains impenetrable, a man-made disaster cannot be ruled out. Both the French defense minister and Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved in the crash. This was short of an...
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DEBKAfile Special Analysis
June 9, 2009
Although Pakistan's Taliban took responsibility, the latest bombing attack in Pakistan's third city, Lahore, Wednesday, May 27, in which 27 people lost their lives and 294 people were badly hurt, was executed on its behalf by al Qaeda's new strike units. These units, made up mainly of fighters from Lashkar-e-Taiba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, have been reinforced lately by an influx of Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians and Libyans, who fought the Americans in Iraq. Their methods have changed four times in the last six months, adapted to their individual missions. DEBKAfile's counter-terror experts note that they are evidently being run by a proactive command, capable of great tactical flexibility. Al Qaeda is no longer satisfied with simple massacres. The last six months show that each operation is designed to make a separate point. In its last outrage in Lahore, the focus was on a northern Pakistani nerve center consisting of police emergency response headquarters and the local Inter-Services...
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