The Cutting Edge

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife expressed their condolences early Wednesday morning at the passing of Israel’s ninth president and internationally cherished diplomat emeritus Shimon Peres. Few are the people in Israel's history who have done as much for the state and the Jewish people as Shimon Peres, Netanyahu said in a statement released just before a special cabinet meeting he is convening to honor the former president. “Like all the citizens of Israel, the whole Jewish people, and many in the world, I bow my head in memory of our beloved Shimon Peres,” he said in a statement.

Peres, who dedicated his life to Israel's independence, was a visionary who looked to the future, Netanyahu said. But he was also a man for whom security was utmost in his mind, and who buttressed the country's security capacities in many ways, some of which are still not publicly known to this day.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked a storm of diplomatic disapproval last week, when he pointed out that “the Palestinian Authority actually demands a Palestinian state with one precondition: no Jews.” The Obama Administration responded that it is “inappropriate” to speak of demands for a removal of settlers in such terms. Removing the settlers, Netanyahu’s critics say, is natural and appropriate: their presence in a Palestinian state would cause tension and problems, and in any case, they should not have been there in the first place.

While it is not surprising that the head of the U.N. was unhappy with Netanyahu’s remarks, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, also joined in. But neither actually addressed the central issue that Netanyahu raised: why it is legitimate for the Palestinians to ask for a Jew-free state? Read more ..

It was no surprise that in the first hours after the New York and New Jersey bombing attacks, the culprit was widely suggested to be a “lone wolf.” The term, used to describe an individual inspired by others but acting on his or her own, has become the counterterrorism metaphor-of-choice in the age of the Islamic State.

It’s time, however, to put the lone-wolf metaphor, and its associated counterterrorism analysis, out to pasture. According to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, we now live in a world where terrorism is “carried out by those who live among us in the homeland and self-radicalize, inspired by terrorist propaganda on the internet.”But if that diagnosis isn’t wrong, it is incomplete. The New York bomber may have been “self-radicalized,” but it’s very unlikely he was merely “inspired” by terrorist groups. Read more ..

Can the United States provide sufficient help to offset the growing North Korean and Chinese threat to the independence and security of South Korea and Japan? It can. It should put Pershing missiles in both countries.

How should the U.S. respond to North Korea?  Thus far the U.S. response has had little or no effect on the North Korean drive to test nuclear weapons, work on miniaturization of warheads, launch ballistic missiles in the Sea of Japan and move forward on a submarine-launched ballistic missile threat.

The U.S. has shown some determination by flying B-1B nuclear bombers over South Korea.  But they departed almost as soon as they arrived, and while a point was made it had no impact on North Korea’s programs.  Read more ..

The Islamic State (IS) has recently announced the death of its official spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, first via its auxiliary outlet Amaq News and then through an official posting under Wilayat Halab (‘Aleppo Province’). It seems most likely that he was killed in a U.S. strike on the al-Bab area in north Aleppo, the last remaining stronghold in the area amid rebel advances along the border with Turkey. Thus, it is unsurprising that the announcements of his death mention he was ‘inspecting’ IS military operations in Aleppo. It is also of note that the Wilayat Halab posting describes Adnani as a Husseini (a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad’s household) and Qurashi (of the Quraysh tribe to which the Prophet belonged). Read more ..

It was just over 20 years ago—a blink of a cosmic eye—that astronomers found the first planets orbiting stars other than our sun. All these new worlds were gas-shrouded giants like Jupiter or Saturn and utterly inhospitable to life as we know it. But for years each discovery was dutifully reported as front-page news, while scientists and the public alike dreamed of a day when we would find a habitable world. An Earth-like place with plentiful surface water, neither frozen nor vaporized but in the liquid state so essential to life. Back then the safe bet was to guess that the discovery of such a planet would only come after many decades, and that when a promising new world’s misty shores materialized on the other side of our telescopes, it would prove too faraway and faint to study in any detail.

Evidently the safe bet was wrong. On Wednesday astronomers made the kind of announcement that can only occur once in human history: the discovery of the nearest potentially habitable world beyond our solar system. This world may be rocky like ours and whirls in a temperate orbit around the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri just over four light-years away. Their findings are reported in a study in Nature. Read more ..

Richard Allen is not a careful, polished Jewish communal leader with a seasoned staff operating from a mid-town Manhattan office, ensconced behind a stylized logo, fortified by tax-exempt donations and burnished advisors. Allen is a private businessman. He wields his entire “organization” from a computer in his office and, not infrequently, from a phone in his pocket. One moment he can be alone with his message, staring at his device screen with no one peering over his shoulder or blue-lining his message. Then, an instant later—from his office, from his home, from a sidewalk in New York City— he hits the SEND button.

Instantly, he is no longer alone. Like an excitated neutron firing on a neural network, he is connected to 10,000 recipients who believe that he is a one-man crusade for Jewish issues, especially where establishment Jewish organizations have, from their perspective, failed to do the right thing. Those 10,000 recipients repeat, re-fire, and forward Allen’s calls-to-arms throughout their overlapping networks. Social media lights start blinking. Within minutes, a community of like-minded believers is mobilized against what they perceive as threats to Jewish and Israeli interests. Read more ..

In last year’s hack, which led to Chrysler’s recall for 1.4 million vehicles, Miller and Valasek focused on pulling off “wireless attack” on the Jeep.

The two at that time exploited a Harman “head unit,” which offers a Wi-Fi hot spot — in a 2014 Jeep Cherokee — to get into the vehicle’s network. Later the hackers invaded the car through its cellular connection, via Sprint’s wireless network.

This year, the security experts turned their attention to injecting rogue messages into a vehicle’s CAN bus, which resulted in a full-speed attack on the Jeep’s steering and acceleration.

Instead of getting into the guts of a car wirelessly, Miller and Valasek this year used a laptop directly plugged into the Jeep’s CAN network through a port under its dashboard. They confirmed that they used the patched Jeep for this hacking. Read more ..

Everything looked surreal in Turkey; soldiers inviting the head of the police anti-terror squad for a "meeting" only to shoot him in the head; top brass, including the chief of the military general staff, air force commander, land forces commander and gendarmerie commander, being taken hostage by their own aide-de-camps; then people taking to the streets in their thousands to resist the coup d'état, taking over tanks, getting killed, soldiers opening fire at the civilians, and finally the victorious pro-Erdogan people lynching coup-staging soldiers wherever they could grab them.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused his formerly staunchest political ally, a Muslim cleric in exile in the United States, Fethullah Gulen, and his loyalists within the military. Appearing before a crowd of party fans, Erdogan pleaded to Washington for "the terrorist" Gulen's extradition. Read more ..

Before the so-called Islamic State emerged in the Middle East, not too many had heard of the Kurds. Commonly referred to as “the world’s largest nation without a state” following World War I, international actors skipped over the Kurds when awarding statehood to various actors in the region. As a result, the group was left at the mercy of strong and antagonistic central governments in Ankara, Baghdad, Damascus, and Tehran. As a minority, they remained isolated from international actors, who feared provoking irredentism.

Since the emergence of IS, however, many in the West have become convinced that openly supporting, and even arming, the Kurds in Iraq and Syria is one of the best ways to combat the Salafi-jihadist group. IS has presented the Kurds with their opportunity to solidify their relations with international actors and increase their autonomy en route to their treasured status of independence. Read more ..

After Hitler's defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world.

Egypt was a prime destination for German Nazi relocation in the Arab world. Dr. Aribert Heim was notoriously known as "Dr. Death" for his grotesque pseudo-medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was fond of surgical procedures including organ removals without anesthesia, injecting gasoline into prisoners to observe the manner of death, and decapitating Jews with healthy teeth so he could cook the skulls clean to make desk decorations. Dr. Heim converted to Islam and became "Uncle Tarek" Hussein Farid in Cairo, Egypt, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police.

Two of Goebbels's Nazi propagandists, Alfred Zingler and Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin respectively, working in the Egyptian Information Department. In 1955, Zingler and von Leers helped establish the virulently anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. Hans Appler, another Goebbels propagandist, became Saleh Shafar who, in 1955, became an expert for an Egyptian unit specializing in anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hate propaganda. Erich Altern, a Gestapo agent, Himmler coordinator in Poland, and expert in Jewish affairs became Ali Bella, working as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists. A German newspaper estimated there were fully 2,000 Nazis working openly and under state protection in Egypt. Read more ..

The Mufti of Jerusalem celebrates The Farhud in Nazi Germany

June 1-2 is the 75^th Anniversary of the 1941 Farhud pogrom, the pro-Nazi Arab attempt to exterminate the Jews of Baghdad. Hundreds were murdered, raped, and many Jewish homes and business looted and burned during a two-day orgy of hate and violence orchestrated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. This heinous rampage was the Farhud. In Arabic, it means “violent dispossession.” This forgotten Holocaust-era pogrom was the first step toward the extinguishing the 26 centuries of Jewish life in Iraq. It led to the eventual mass expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from Arab lands into Israel, penniless and stateless.

To mark the 75^th anniversary of the Farhud, I will race across the time zones to lead ceremonies of commemoration with Jewish groups and senior Israeli diplomats in four cities spanning the continents. It was the next logical step after the inauguration of International Farhud Day, which was proclaimed in an official live global event at United Nations Headquarters on June 1, 2015. Read more ..

The military wing of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah has been instructed by Iran to suspend operations against Israel and to target Saudi Arabia instead, Middle East Eye can reveal.

The instruction comes in the wake of widespread anger at the apparent assassination of Mustafa Badreddine, its military commander in Syria and head of the movement's military wing, which Hezbollah blamed on “takfiri” forces supported by Riyadh.

According to well informed sources in Lebanon, the order was conveyed in person by Qasim Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) who came to Beirut to give his condolescences.

Soleimani also named Badreddine’s successor and his two deputies, which is believed to be an unprecedented move in the relationship between Iran and the Lebanese movement. Previous appointments have been an internal matter for Hezbollah in consultation with Iran, MEE understands. Read more ..

In recent years, some in the African-American community have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else's nightmare. After all, African-Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement. Read more ..

For a hard-core segment of travelers to Jerusalem, when the sun sets at the Sabbath, the magic in the air is not just the serene image of a peaceful dusk in an enchanted land. It is the empowering knowledge that the sun still shines on a Jewish State surrounded by fiery military and diplomatic turmoil. Israel remains a nation determined to survive and preserve its sense of magnetic amazement. In the minds of many, a visit to Israel is more than just a vacation. It is a geopolitical destination. Traveling to and enjoying Israel makes a statement to the world and to history. It reflects the steeled determination to be happy and fulfilled in one of the most treasured places on earth, despite a virtual siege around every corner. Read more ..

Prince Bandar

The American media, which continues to concentrate on a bill making its way through Congress that would allow American citizens to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for losses suffered as a result of the 9/11 attacks, paid no attention to the Golden Chain.

The victims claim that the release of the 28 pages missing from the 9/11 Commission Report is of crucial importance to their case. Those pages, they say, would show the interrelationship that ties the hijackers to the Saudi regime itself and therefore would offer a damning indictment of the Kingdom. But President Obama, like President Bush before him, refuses to make it public. And the Saudi Royal Family that vehemently denies funding al Qaeda, threatened that if the 28 pages are released, they would sell more than $750 billion of Saudi investments in the U.S.

Of equal if not of greater importance than the missing 28 pages, is the forgotten investigation of the Bosnia-BIF office. Crucially, among the boxes and files was found a note ostensibly written by Osama Bin Laden that lists a "Golden Chain" of twenty Arab plutocrats who were and remain suspected of financing international terrorism, including the funding of al Qaeda. Read more ..

The Eastern Mediterranean is changing fast with its estimated 122 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas reserves (the equivalent of 21 billion barrels of oil) already having an impact on regional patterns of amity and enmity.[1] With Israel and Cyprus well underway to becoming gas exporters, the problematic Israeli-Lebanese and Cypriot-Turkish relationships have been further strained. At the same time, energy cooperation has been the driving force behind the nascent Greek-Cypriot-Israeli partnership, manifested in rapidly growing defense and economic cooperation. Clearly, the development of energy resources and their transportation will have far-reaching geopolitical implications for the Eastern Mediterranean and its nations. Read more ..

Largely ignored by the mainstream media, Friday's Taiwan elections have enormous implications not only for the Island's 25 million people but also China - and the U.S.
Ironically, the election of the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] leader, Tsai Ing-wen, a woman at that - reinstalled a movement dedicated to maintaining Taiwan's separate identity, the Island's culture remains Chinese. It marks only a second time in its 2,000-year a Chinese entity has peacefully transferred power. The DPP earlier won power in 100-1008 as a minority government.

The meeting last fall between Beijing's Pres. Xi Jinping and Taiwan's outgoing Pres. Ma Ying-jeou was not only unprecedented but finally marked the tacit recognition by the Communists of the Island's stature. Beijing now has to bite its lip, having apparently Communist leadership thought that protocol concession after six decades would help Ma's Party. Read more ..

Four years ago, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her advisers to clandestinely foment unrest among Arabs in Judea and Samaria, in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table.

The revelation arises from emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.

The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that in a December 18, 2011, email, former US ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider restarting peace negotiations by stirring up Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.

Pickering described the idea as a potential “game changer in the region.” Clinton reportedly asked that his email be printed.

“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote. Read more ..

When it comes to looking at the Islamic State, a significant problem for research is that much of the content coming out of Islamic State-controlled territory is propaganda, primarily in the form of high quality videos and photo releases from the Islamic State’s official media outlets. Though there is some important analysis to be done on this propaganda- see the work of Charlie Winter, for instance, analysing the themes in-depth, and a more recent piece by Aaron Zelin suggesting a decline in quality of output- I myself find that after a while the monitoring of the content becomes rather predictable. For example, photo streams continue to centre around familiar motifs like battles, scenes of daily life in Islamic State-controlled towns and villages, implementation of Islamic justice, photos of natural beauty, and the like. Read more ..

Following the 2008 war in Georgia, Russia projected an air of victory. Georgian forces were crushed, and the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were bolstered. But the win was clouded by the poor performance of Russian ground and air forces in what had turned out to be a far messier and bloodier campaign than the Kremlin envisioned. And in the aftermath, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, launched a massive program to trim the country’s bloated military, beef up training, and replace its outdated hardware.

Two-and-a-half months into Russia’s air war in Syria, the fruits of those reforms are on display as Moscow ups the ante in the Middle East. Read more ..

What is mistakenly perceived as an agreement under the title of "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" (JCPOA), that was concluded on July 14 in Vienna, and celebrated by the White House as an "historic agreement," is neither a contract nor even a real agreement between Iran and the P5+1. It is a set of understandings and disputes compiled into a single document.

For example, the JCPOA states that in the event of Iranian violations, sanctions will be re-imposed (snapback). However, the Iranian position, which rejects all sanctions, is incorporated in the same document. In outlining the snapback of the sanctions, Article 37 also stipulates: "Iran has stated that if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part."[1] Read more ..

On February 17, 2015, a number of America’s most vituperative anti-Israel activists woke up to discover that they had been named and spotlighted by a mysterious new website called Canary Mission, visible at www.canarymission.org. The site boldly aggregates the public statements, videos, and photographs of leading members of the organized movement against Israel in their most telling and often most demonstrative moments. The profiled individuals span a gamut of track records ranging from those with leadership roles with such intensely anti-Israel groups as Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association to unaffiliated campus agitators who regularly advocate for the destruction of Israel and even the murder of Jews. All its profiles are compiled from public Internet sources such as social media, You Tube, Twitter, press releases, news clips, and interviews.

In essence, Canary Mission took a card from the New Israel Fund, which some years ago helped finance the Coalition of Women for Peace that created the Who-Profits database that acted as a global compass of Israeli commercial activity for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions strategies. Canary Mission flipped the card and blacklisted the blacklisters.

Because Canary Mission works beneath a complete shroud of secrecy, it has been called “shadowy.” It is commonly labelled as McCarthy-like in its actions within the pages of leading Jewish and mainstream media, as well as political websites, even though its modus operendi is obviously the opposite of McCarthyism. Even sources as tenuous as Wikipedia define McCarthyism as “the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence,” as was done during the anti-Communist scare of the 1950s. Canary Mission relies on vetted, publically visible pictures, protest placards, open statements, and video clips that speak for themselves and are primarily drawn from previously well-publicized activities. In other words, Canary Mission aggregates publically verifiable information into a single place. It is not clear why media outlets have not made the historical distinction or provided context. Read more ..

Last week was an eventful one for China. First, the People's Bank of China shocked the financial world when it cut the yuan's reference rate against the U.S. dollar by nearly 2 percent, leading to a greater than 2 percent drop in the value of the yuan in offshore trading. The decline triggered a frenzy of speculation, including some expectations that the Chinese move would trigger a race to the bottom for Asian currencies. Beijing said the adjustment was designed to fix distortions between the trading rate of the yuan and the rate it should have been at according to speculation, and that subsequent large shifts were unlikely. The International Monetary Fund, however, noted that the move could lead to a freer floating yuan — something the IMF has asked of Beijing before the organization considers including the yuan in its Special Drawing Rights basket of currencies. In comments made on the sidelines of its annual report on the Chinese economy, released later in the week, the IMF also noted that the yuan was not undervalued, despite the decline. Read more ..

The Arab upheavals have enabled a Greater Kurdistan to emerge as a major regional player by blurring geographical barriers and strengthening cross-border nationalism among the disparate Kurdish communities in Turkey (15 million), Iran (8 million), Iraq (6-7 million), and Syria (2.5 million). At the same time, with most of these groups mired in fights with their own governments and/or the nascent Islamic State and expanding into areas rich in oil reserves and water resources, conflicting interests and competition for control of these strategic assets have exacerbated rivalries and tensions among them.

Iraq's Kurds have made the greatest strides toward statehood. Since their 2003 delivery from Saddam Hussein's despotic regime they have enjoyed effective autonomy, and their geostrategic significance has greatly increased as they became the main bulwark to the Islamic State following the Iraqi army's repeated defeats at the hands of the Islamist group. Read more ..

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Times Square July 22 evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.

Protest organizers proclaim ed: “Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror.”

Former New York Governor, and Presidential contender, George Pataki joined the chorus of voices urging lawmakers to block the deal.

“Reject this deal. Protect America. Protect Israel and protect the world from freedom,” Pataki said.

The Stop Iran Rally Coalition — a bi-partisan group — is also calling out Sen. Charles Schumer, saying he “has the votes as presumptive leader to override this deal….If this deal is not stopped, New York voters will know whom to blame,” protestors shouted. Sen. Schumer said in a statement Wednesday that he wasn’t ready to make a decision on the deal yet. Read more ..

When the last plaintive shofar blast echoed through the Washington D.C. Convention Center of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Policy Conference extravaganza of support for Israel, July 13–14, 2015, it was not the record attendance of 5,000 fired-up pro-Israel Christians that marked a turning point for the 10-year old group. Nor was it the several on-stage and pre-recorded presidential candidate interviews -- from Jeb Bush to Mike Huckabee, conducted by Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal that will be most remembered. Nor was it the video salute from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, nor the blazing oratory of Presidents Conference Vice-Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein that prompted standing ovations.

Instead, it was the quiet 24-minute briefing by CUFI executive director David Brog and CUFI national leader Gary Bauer for a half-dozen national reporters conducted around a circular table in a small non-descript room in a roped-off corner off the lobby that revealed the muscular new role for the CUFI community.

CUFI has spun off a ready-to-rumble NRA-style political lobbying arm called Christians United for Israel Action Fund. Its first mission will be to demonstratively oppose the controversial Iran nuclear deal now before Congress. Working independently of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the CUFI Action Fund promises to deliver a partisan political punch from its national reservoir of 2.2 million fiercely supportive Christian Zionists, asserted Bauer, a former presidential hopeful, key Republican strategist, and Washington director of the new CUFI Action Fund.

Bauer stated that even though the Fund’s office space has not been rented or even selected yet, and a proposed staff of about a dozen is still being hired, multimillion funding is in place and the Fund is ready to tackle the Iran nuclear deal at once. Job one, said Bauer, is the immediate commencement of daily reports to every Congressional office. In addition, the Fund will mobilize core supporters across the country to create “centers of influence of local pastors and businessmen … leaders in their communities” that can act in home districts the way a national office cannot. Home district activists “who are donors to an elected official or have a business relationship” are in a position “that the Congressman or top aide will actually take their phone call,” Bauer elaborated. Hence, the Fund will flex both national and localized muscle. Read more ..

The July 11 escape of the notorious Sinaloa crime boss, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, from a maximum-security prison in Mexico has drawn considerable Mexican and international media attention. While the brazen and elaborate nature of the escape will add to the lore already surrounding Guzman, the escape itself carries little significance for organized crime in Mexico — though it will place a momentary strain on coordination between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement. The forces that drive the evolution of organized crime and their impact on society in Mexico are simply greater than any single crime boss.

Mexico's geography enabled drug traffickers like Guzman to operate on a global scale. As international law enforcement effectively dismantled the powerful Colombian cartels and stymied their maritime trafficking routes through the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico became the lynchpin of new smuggling routes into the United States. This evolution took place just as the Mexican criminal networks that trafficked drugs broke down into smaller groups. Though crime bosses like Guzman rose in stature relative to others, all organized crime groups in Mexico are the result of a systematic decentralization in cartel structure that continues today. Read more ..

In a result that should surprise no one, the Greeks voted to reject European demands for additional austerity measures as the price for providing funds to allow Greek banks to operate. There are three reasons this should have been no surprise. First, the ruling Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza party, is ruling because it has an understanding of the Greek mood. Second, the constant scorn and contempt that the European leadership heaped on the prime minister and finance minister convinced the Greeks not only that the scorn was meant for them as well but also that anyone so despised by the European leadership wasn't all bad. Finally, and most important, the European leadership put the Greek voters in a position in which they had nothing to lose. The Greeks were left to choose between two forms of devastation — one that was immediate but possible to recover from, and one that was a longer-term strangulation with no exit. Read more ..

Eighteen distinguished Iran specialists have signed an opne letter of alarm to Obama administration over the pending nuclear deal with Iran. The eminent list includes some of those who worked with the Administraion closely on the question. The list includes: Robert Einhorn, special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control at State until just before the interim deal, Gary Samore who served as the Administration's lead expert on arms control and WMDs from 2009-2013, and Dennis Ross who held the Persian Gulf portfolio at State, David Petraeus former head of the CIA, and Gen. James Cartwright former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The statement follows:

Over the last three years, members of this bipartisan group have convened regularly under the auspices of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy to discuss the status of the Iran nuclear issue, frequently benefitting from the input of current Administration officials. Last week, at its most recent meeting, the group determined that it could usefully contribute to the public debate on the ongoing negotiations by presenting its consensus view of critical issues.This statement reflects that broad consensus. Read more ..

The State Department Inspector General inspected the agency’s Diplomatic Security Service, or DSS.  The inspection covered the final year of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. More than 1,000 cases of criminal conduct by State Department personnel were investigated by DSS in 2012. A final IG report was issued shortly after Clinton left office.

Reports of pedophilia, sexual abuse, and confrontations among co-workers should've been included in the report.  But they were not.

A pair of whistleblowers [Aurelia Fedenisn and Richard Higbie] separately came forward and reported criminal acts allegedly perpetrated by senior State Department personnel had been stripped from the final report. 

Some investigations were stopped in-progress. Like the case of a senior official who was alleged to have sexually abused foreign nationals while assigned to several embassies. 

The investigation of an ambassador -- accused of pedophilia -- was halted on orders from “someone on the 7th floor,” according to official documents.  Read more ..