Saturday 02 March 2019
One Bribery Charge out of Three Cases against Netanyahu……..
March 01 2019
In a dramatic televised speech on Thursday night, February 28, Binyamin Netanyahu pledged to serve Israel as prime minister for years to come after the charges against him collapse “like a house of cards.”
Attorney general Avihai Mendelblit [pictured above] had just released his rulings on the three police probes against Netanyahu.
All three accused him of fraud and breach of trust and one of bribery – favourable press coverage for the prime minister on a website owned by Shaul Alovitch, the largest shareholder in Bezeq telecom, in exchange for regulatory benefits for the company.
Before he gets his day in court to defend himself, or presents his side of the case to the attorney general, the prime minister faces an election on April 9.
This entire legal process could take months.
Until then he is a “suspect.”
However, the AG chose to publish the charges 40 days before the election, which Netanyahu’s Likud denounced as “flagrant interference” in the democratic process.
Netanyahu accused his enemies of a long persecution and a witch hunt to bring him and his right-wing government down after failing to overthrow him at the polling booth.
Following the prime minister’s address to the nation, two of his leading opponents went on camera to demand that he step down forthwith.
Former prime minister and Labour leader Ehud Barak [pictured above] accused the attorney general of dealing too leniently with the Netanyahu’s offences, while opposition Blue-White leader Benny Gantz, who is challenging the Likud leader for election, lavished Brutus-like praise - but advised him to step down before he is beaten.
The AG’s 55-page document appears to criminalise the prime minister for choosing officials willing and able to carry forth his policies or any other kinds of machinations which are par for the course for politicians.
In the case of Netanyahu, favours were dispensed but no money changed hands, in return for favourable press coverage.
Will this conduct stand up in court as criminal bribery?
It would be hard to find any politician who has not solicited a publisher, an op-ed writer or reporter for favourable coverage withoffers of benefits.
Trump called him a great prime minister and said he does a great job.
Netanyahu returned from Moscow early Thursday after an amicable meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Khamenei to Assad: You Owe Us, Now Pay up………
02 March 2019
Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, on his first visit to Tehran since the civil war erupted in March 2011, faced a tough supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
When the smiles and hugs were over, the Iranian leader reminded his visitor how much he owed Tehran for the survival of his regime.
1. Khamenei needed those photo-ops of warm embraces with a foreign leader and grateful thanks for all Iran had done for him and Syria through eight years of war.
The regime is bitterly blamed by the Iranian street for bringing the country to penury by squandering precious national resources for propping up the Syrian dictator, importing foreign militias and paying Hizballah to fight for him.
Iran’s state TV ran non-stop images of Assad and the supreme leader warmly embracing in the style of a world-class summit.
2. Khamenei made no bones about his expectation that the contracts for all the vast reconstruction work on the war-damaged country, its cities, agriculture, transport, industry and rebuilding the national army, be awarded to Iranian firms.
He proposed setting up an Iranian-Syrian clearing house for this purpose. Assad was understood to have agreed to appointing Iran head of Syria’s reconstruction program.
3. The Iranian leader demanded that the imported Shiite militias beintegrated in Syria’s national armed forces. He referred to the Pakistani Zainab Brigade and the Liwa Fatemiyoun Brigade or Hezbollah-Afghanistan, although not the Iraqi Shiite militias.
Khamenei wants the families of the Pakistani and Afghan militiamen, which are held in refugee camps in northern and eastern Iran, to be transferred to Syria and granted citizenship.
4. Tehran demands Assad’s backing for the Al Qods chief General Qassem [pictured above] Soleimani’s next plan, which is to string Iraqi Popular Mobilization (PMU) forces the full length of the 675km of Iraqi-Syrian border.
To clear the way for the militia to take over, Soleimani is conducting a purge of local Sunni tribal chiefs who object to the PMU’s invasion of their lands.
Assad’s consent to this project would cause the cut-off of US cross-border supply routes for the American forces staying in north-eastern Syria.
5. Khamenei insists on the 5,000 Hizballah troops remaining in Syria receiving the same preferential status as Russian forces.
6. The Iranian and Syrian leaders also discussed joint operations between their forces and Hizballah against Israel. General Soleimani took part in this discussion.
Iran Seeks Trump-Kim Style Negotiations to Refill Its Empty Coffers……
02 March 2019
Iran’s hard-line leaders, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Revolutionary Guards chief General Ali Jaafari, [pictured below] are sure they can bring US President Donald Trump to the table and end sanctions, without giving up their nuclear and missile weapons capabilities.
They were encouraged by the US president’s relaxed comments on Monday, February 25, before setting off for Hanoi for his second summit with Kim Jong-un:
“We both expect a continuation of the progress made at first summit in Singapore,” but “I don’t want to rush anybody [on denuclearization]. I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy.”
In the event, the Hanoi summit was cut short on Thursday, February 28, without an agreement.
However, the Khamenei-Jaafari camp in the regime leadership insists against the moderate faction’s view that Iran should scale its nuclear program up to generating a crisis with Washington and then Trump will turn to bargaining.
And to defuse the crisis, he may even be more generous with concessions than Barack Obama was for obtaining the 2015 nuclear deal.
Iran and North Korea have little in common in terms of geography, faith, life style or mindset. But both are ruled by totalitarian regimes buttressed by a fanatically devoted military armed with missiles and nuclear capabilities.
At the same time, both are flat broke because of Trump’s tough sanctions. The Iranian leaders are sure that that they are slick enough to bargain their way to ending US sanctions, although Kim has not so far pulled this trick off.
Most Western commentators attribute Iran’s economic straits to US sanctions.
Our sources set the record straight.
Even before they landed on Tehran, the Iranian economy was staggering under the weight of corruption in high places and bad administration.
Abysmal Russian and Iranian mismanagement in its construction only partially accounts for this colossal loss.
Some of the capital allocated was diverted to parts of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs; some siphoned off by officials close to the project and tucked away in illegal foreign accounts.
As a digression from the mess in which the Islamic regime finds itself, Tehran has been playing up the “feats” of its new weapons.
On February 2, Iran announced the launch of the new Hoveizeh cruise missile, [pictured above] a member of the Soumar family, whose 1,350km range makes all parts of Israel accessible.
However, our military sources report that there is no such cruise missile.
On February 4, Tehran claimed to have armed its long-range ballistic Khorramshahr missiles (2,000km range) with precision-guidance warheads.
That tale was also more fiction than fact.
Then, on February 22, the Revolutionary Guards Air Force chief Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, claimed his forces had hacked into the command and control systems of 6-8 US drones flying over Syria and Iraq.
This claim was never corroborated.
The next day, Ali Shamkhani, [pictured above] head of Iran’s national security council, declared: “We will soon witness a major upheaval in upgrading the deterrent power of the resistance axis in Syria.”
Nothing of the kind has surfaced so far, say reliable military and intelligence sources and Tehran seems to be trying scare tactics to cover up its predicaments.
Zarif Resigned (retracted) because Khamenei Wants a New Team for Dealing with Trump……
02 March 2019
Foreign Minister Muhammed Javad Zarif quit on Tuesday February 26 because Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told him to, in pursuance of the supreme leader revamped strategy for extricating the country from its dire economic straits.
The efforts of the regime’s who’s who to persuade him to retract his resignation and remain in place does not mean that Khamenei has changed his mind, only that he prefers to avoid major upsets in high places.
In any case, the foreign minister was never a senior policy-maker in the revolutionary Islamic republic.
Ali Akbar Velyati, the supreme leader’s foreign affairs adviser, is the real architect of foreign policy.
Still, everyone lined up to assure Zarif how badly he is needed: President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s Middle East commander, General Qassem Soleimani, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, [pictured below] and a majority of Majlis lawmakers who wrote a flattering open letter
The foreign minister was assured that he was left out of President Bashar Assad’s visit to Tehran on February 25 - the first in more than a decade - not deliberately but due to an “oversight.”
By Wednesday, Zarif was back at his desk as top Iranian diplomat.
But he knows that his wings have been clipped. This polished, articulate figure is not the man Khamenei wants to see leading the tough bargaining with President Donald Trump.
A knowledgeable Western diplomat in Tehran referred to Zarif as “diplomatic dead man walking.”
With Iran’s back to the wall, Khamenei has been setting the stage for diplomacy with Washington, while taking care to buttress his position as the unchallenged, omnipotent head of the Islamic regime.
For the new man in Washington, Khamenei needed a new strategy and a new team.
He cast about for a lead negotiator with the qualities of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who seems to know how to handle Trump.
Khamenei’s decision-making process has finally matured.
This was signalled by his invitation to Syrian President Bashar Assad to pay an unannounced trip to Tehran on Monday, February 25. (More about their conversation in the article above.)
Trump’s Grand Design for an Arab NATO……………..
02 March 2019
US President Donald Trump has talked about creating a Sunni Arab alliance, a kind of Arab NATO, for countering Iran’s expansionist drive in the Middle East.
It even has a name and an acronym: Middle East Strategic Allianceor MESA.
Gulf sources report that its first candidates for membership are Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Trump’s adviser Jared Kushner is on a tour of their capitals to promote MESA, while ostensibly pitching the US Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
Trump intends the forces of this alliance to assume control of northern and eastern Syria backed by US air cover from its bases in Iraq.
Kushner is treading in the footsteps of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who, in mid-January, went on a mission to enlist eight countries to MESA.
This organisation, he said, would both counter threats to the region and promote economic and energy cooperation. Kushner was given the job of giving the plan concrete form.
When he presented the US peace plan in a Sky Arabic interview on Monday, Kushner accentuated the importance of creating a new Palestinian economic dynamic before getting down to political solutions and reconciling the rival Hamas and Fatah factions.
Reliable sources disclose that Kushner, by this ploy, hoped to open Arab doors to accepting military and intelligence support from Israel, as well as America, for their initial contributions of personnel to MESA.
The Russians quickly caught on to its implications. On February25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov [pictured above] commented: “The United States is trying to impose the creation of the so-called Arab NATO, the Middle East Strategic Alliance, despite serious doubts of its possible members,” he said.
“The steps to reshape a geopolitical landscape are made in a way to obstruct the natural development of events and try to contain the formation of new growth centres.”
Lavrov was speaking in Ho Chi Minh City at the International Cooperation in a Troubled World conference organised by the Valdai International Discussion Club in partnership with the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.
Is ISIS Finished?……………
02 March 2019
On January 23, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) reported that the small town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani in Deir ez-Zour, the last retreat of the Islamic State in Syria, had been captured andISIS was surrounded and under fire in nearby Al-Marashidah. (see map above.)
Still, the next day, the Islamists broke the siege with a string of suicide attacks, and recaptured parts of the towns under international coalition air raids.
Then, on February 7, The SDF captured Al-Marashidah. Now, ISIS was besieged in Baghuz.
On February 9, the SDF with coalition support launched what was supposed to be the final assault to take Baghuz and stamp out the Islamic State’s last territorial stronghold.
Although they struck a mosque used as the terrorists’ command and control centre, 1,000 to 1,500 terrorists and their “emirs” are still holding out in Baghuz and apparently ready to fight to the death unless a deal can be struck for their relocation, such as the transactions negotiated in Jarablus, Raqqa and Dabiq.
It is strongly suspected that their fervour and refusal to surrender are down to the presence of top leaders, including possibly the “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,[pictured above] who has not been seen or heard from since his last audio appearance in August.
This suspicion is fuelled by Iraqi intelligence from informants inside the town. If he is indeed holed up there, he will be rallying his men to fight to the end for the last ISIS stronghold on Syrian soil.
The only deal so far is for ISIS to allow civilians, fighters’ wives and children, the wounded and those willing to throw in the towel, to leave the beleaguered town.
The refugees report that food and medicine are running low in Baghuz. By letting the civilians go, the fighters have more food to ration out.
These fighters have plenty of experience in digging tunnels for underground shelters, from which the leaders and commanders can wait out an SDF offensive to capture the town.
Iraqi security forces are now fully prepared to shut down any ISIS resurgence in their country.
The days of laxity and lack of organisation, which enabled the Islamists to conquer large tracts of their county, are over.
A strong Iraqi counterterrorism unit, Intelligence service, army and Federal Police, are all on guard for any signs of ISIS rebounding.
This could happen, they believe, even if Baghdadi is killed. [supposed photo of his body above]
A new leader could take his place after the organisation regains its footing.
Therefore, can ISIS be considered finished after it is finally defeated and eclipsed in Syria and Iraq? The wives and children coming out of Baghuz [pictured above] don’t think so.
The women are defiant, proud of their lost husbands and continue to spew Islamist slogans. One of these, “Baqiya,” meaning “remaining,” is frequently heard to express faith in the eventual victory of their menfolk.
Baghdadi’s ideology lives on. More than 2,000 offspring of ISIS families are detained in camps and prevented from reuniting with their parents or reaching the countries from which they left to join ISIS.
They were brought up as Young Islamists and thoroughly brainwashed in the caliphate’s violent tenets.
Any dreams of them disappearing are probably unfounded – but it is difficult to see how such a spent force could have any credence on the battlefields developing in the days just ahead..
Editor; Mike Claydon
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