Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu convened his inner cabinet Saturday night, March 12, to discuss the spiraling crisis with Washington and his first response.
debkafile's military and Washington sources report: The Obama administration is considering withholding from Israel military items urgently needed in case of a flare-up of hostilities with Iran and its allies. This would further ratchet up the row over the added 1,600 homes in ...

 US president Barack Obama, in a speech after meeting top security chiefs, Tuesday, Jan. 5, said: We had enough information to foresee and prevent the attempted bombing [of the Northwest airliner] on Christmas day." But it was not fully analyzed or leveraged for putting the suspect on the no-fly list. "I will not accept this. We have to do better and must do it quickly."

US president Barack Obama, in his second speech in 24 hours, said: "Data was not shared and a systemic failure occurred. I consider that totally unacceptable."
Weeks ago, information came from the suspect's father to intelligence which was not efficiently distributed. "Bits of information with the intelligence community should have been pieced together and was not." 
Twelve hours before this speech on the failed airline bombing, debkafile ran a ...

The failure of Lagos and Amsterdam airport security to detect the explosives the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab carried aboard two flights on Christmas Day was a side-effect of US intelligence policy-makers' flawed approach to al Qaeda. Until the agencies which fell down on the tasks of thwarting and combating terror are overhauled and change their approach, Americans will continue to be caught napping.
More about this in debkafile ...

US president Barack Obama's tough talk of sanctions has melted into soft soap for luring Iran into further dialogue. Adopting the reverse tactic, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds almost reasonable for a change, even as Tehran pushes its revolutionary goals as pugnaciously as ever.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave the US president another six months for diplomacy up to mid-2010 without the threat of military action when they met at the White House November 9.