The Obama administration does not propose to let Bashar Assad go scot free for publicly poking fun at America as he stood side by side with the Iranian president. Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha was left guessing about the shape of the punishment to come.

The Obama administration fell for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tactics and suspended its drive for tough, speedy sanctions, DEBKA-Net-Weekly discloses, with a blow-by-blow account of how the process played out.

This exclusive, insightful item appeared in our latest issue out Friday.

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Pakistan turned its back on its US ally and conspired with the Afghan Taliban's Mullah Omar to get rid of his military commander Mullah Baradar who was open to talks with the Americans.

Dubai figures in another intelligence affair: Tuesday, Feb. 23, an Iranian bomber forced down a Kyrgyzstan airliner to seize Tehran's most wanted fugitive, Abdol Malek Rigi, leader of the Baluchi Jund Allah underground movement.

debkafile's intelligence and counter-terror sources rate Rigi's capture one of Iranian intelligence's biggest coups and a stinging setback for Western undercover operations against the Islamic regime in Tehran.

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How they cooperate is still moot. But Israel is preparing to face the music from Hizballah in the North, Hamas in the South and Syria in the northeast. Egypt secures the passage of Israeli warships through Suez, is conspicuously eager to join any US-Israeli action against Iran.

The Obama administration's decision last week to boost its military presence in the Gulf and supply its Arab allies with tens of billions of new weapons is a bid to win the galloping arms race with Iran and mark out American spheres of influence and contain Iran's drive for regional hegemony - whether or not it attains a nuclear weapon. Washington is closely watching the numbers Iran's ...

In a sharp policy reversal, Barack Obama has picked up the old US role of Arabian Gulf defender. He has seized on Gulf fears of Iran's ambitions to restore the US military presence "inside the horizon" with Saudi Arabia's blessing.

The malfunction of America's Sea-Based X-Band radar against long-range missiles, following last year's failure of Israel's Arrow-2 leaves a hole in US-Israeli defenses against Iranian ballistic missiles. The US X-Band radar station formerly located at Israel's Air Force Nevatim base in the Negev, was recently given its ...

Secret trips by CIA director Leon Panetta to Cairo and Jerusalem Thursday night signaled Washington's decision to expand US military intervention in Yemen to smash al Qaeda's strongholds in that country. Yemen is unfortunately beset by two more wars.

In a new audio message aired by Al Jazeera TV Sunday, Jan. 24, Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Dec. 25 attempt to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit and vowed there would be more attacks. In a message addressed from "Osama to Obama," he said America would have no peace unless there was "security for Palestinians."  
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The Libyan ruler has long been angling for United States acceptance as an intelligence partner in the war on al Qaeda. A deal was struck with the Obama administration last September, providing a flow of intelligence input from Tripoli and for turning Libyan ex-jihadists into double agents.

Iran is more ready than before to go back to the negotiating table and buy enriched uranium abroad because of technological glitches in its enrichment processing. China is not averse to cooling the crisis climate surrounding Iran's nuclear program.

Two men were arrested Friday, Jan. 8, suspected of being accomplices of Naijubullah Zazi, who was charged with a plot to bomb New York's transit system a year ago in Colorado. On Friday too, Friday too, the Nigerian, Umar Abdulmutallab, flanked by two American lawyers, told a federal court he was not guilty of trying to blow up the Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day.  He ...

At the core of the new peace proposal would be a letter signed by the US presidential underwriting an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord based on pre-1967 borders with adjustments to accommodate demographic changes, limited territorial swaps and support for East Jerusalem as capital of a future Palestinian state.
 

 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 official spokesmen have stepped up their rhetoric against al Qaeda in Yemen but do not have the manpower resources to open another anti-terror warfront in addition to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and to a lesser degree Somalia, debkafile's Washington sources report.
Washington has a problem with the Yemen president: In the ten years since al Qaeda blew up the USS Cole in Aden harbor, Salah has conducted a dual policy, posing as America's faithful ally in the war on al Qaeda  while maintaining close back-door ties with al Qaeda in Yemen and giving them his protection.

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