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Israel's Dithering Over Golan Strikes Gives Assad Go-Ahead For War Of Attrition

The Syrian army in more than two years of fighting a civil war has proved to be highly professional, steadfast under pressure and above all disciplined. Not once in this brutal conflict were there instances of lone initiatives by a local unit or commander. Every move was directed by the presidential palace via the general staff in Damascus. Even when Syrian troops faced setbacks, they retreated in orderly fashion. For some months, nothing more has been heard of mass desertions, whose scale turned out to be highly inflated by the opposition.

Therefore, the proposition, which unnamed Israeli defense quarters fed military correspondents Wednesday, May 22, that more time was needed to tell whether Monday’s Syrian shooting attack on the Golan was ordered by Assad or a local initiative was not just way off track but harmful: It conveyed the impression of dithering among Israel’s decision-makers in the face of the Syrian ruler’s firm resolve, backed by Iran and Hizballah, to turn the divided Golan into the next “resistance front” against Israel.

Ignored was the Syrian government’s first direct claim of responsibility for the latest Golan attack. In fact, Assad has made his intentions plain more than once in the two weeks since Israel’s air strike over Damascus - and so has Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Tehran’s proxy.

Their plan is to begin with a trickle of small-scale military strikes against Israeli military and civilian targets starting from the Golan - and expanding to other fronts, the Lebanese-Israeli border, in particular. Hizballah, whose troops are deeply committed to the Syrian conflict, will at the same time extend its military effort to the war of “resistance” against Israel.

In case their message was missed, on Monday, May 20, Assad and Nasrallah told their henchman Ibrahim al-Amin, senior editor of the Hizballah publication Al Akhbar, to write the following: “The rope is taut to the limit… If anyone at either end flexes a finger, the big confrontation will start… This is the situation on the enemy’s northern front. Now means today; it means this hour.”

And indeed, the next day, Syria flexed its military finger three times by firing three shots at an IDF military patrol jeep on the Golan - and then got in first to the UN Security Council Wednesday morning with an accusation that an Israeli military jeep had trespassed Syrian territory and was destroyed.
Israel’s defense minister and chief of staff firmly denied that any IDF vehicle had been destroyed. But when the attack occurred, they ordered the Israel position to fire back with a Tamuz rocket and destroy the Syrian position, only after the third round of Syrian fire.

Caution and a measured response are undoubtedly prudent in the face of the war of attrition Assad has declared. But hiding their heads in the sand is not - and this is exactly what members of the Israeli defense establishment have been doing in the last few hours.

By trying to toss off the Golan attack as a local initiative, for which it was unnecessary to rethink the approach to border security at the end of 29 years of unbroken ceasefire, those officials were also contradicting the grave warnings issued to Damascus Tuesday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz. Someone here was trying to backtrack on their firm statements.

Because of this mixed message, the Israeli government sounded as though it was stammering in the face of am unequivocal menace issuing from Damascus.

This uncertain, divided posture let the Palestinians fire rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip for a decade. Today, it emboldens Israel’s enemies, Syria and Hizballah, to launch an escalating campaign of aggression across its borders.

Some of Israel’s leading strategists have erred in the first place by refusing to accept Syrian President Assad’s durability in defiance of their predictions of his imminent fall. Most of all, they are still turning their eyes away from the unfolding reality that Assad, Nasrallah and Iran’s Khamenei are coming out of the Syrian civil war as victors, contrary to Israeli hopes that defeat would snap the bonds of their implacably hostile alliance.

The Syrian ruler, conscious that he is riding high in the ferocious campaign against is own people, feels he can safely move on to a war of attrition against Israel.
By holding back and wavering in their responses, the Israeli defense establishment, possibly under the guidance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is making Assad and Nasrallah the gift of the initiative, a major advantage in any conflict.
 

Benghazi Exclusive: State Department Denies Libya Weapons Buyback Program

We are a hair trigger away from World War III. Reportedly Assad is preparing missile strikes against Tel Aviv if Syria is attacked again.

Why is getting the status and inventory of Libya’s weapons recovery program so critical? Because arms from Libya have shown up in Syria. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation,” and the State Department presence in Benghazi “provided diplomatic cover” to conceal weapon transfers from Libya to Syria.
Is that why all my Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests regarding Ambassador Christopher Stevens meeting with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin before he was murdered have been denied?

Gunrunning from Libya into Syria is a violation of international law. Furthermore, one has to ask how arming rebels in Syria would serve America’s interests because it doesn’t. Just like it didn’t serve America’s interest in Egypt or Libya where the Muslim Brotherhood has steadily gotten or is gaining power. Arms running would also explain why the Obama-Clinton regime gave “stand-down” orders and denied providing any help to Americans in peril. Do not be deceived by the administration’s cover story, parroted by the mainstream press, that there was no time to send help to Benghazi, instead, as reported here, by not providing help or options—the Obama-Clinton regime guaranteed a bad outcome that could have spread throughout the region.

Stay tuned, the hunt for the truth in Benghazi continues.

CIA Source: 4th Shoe Is About To Drop

But in spite of the fact that the mainstream media totally ignores Fast and Furious, which would make four scandals if the truth were important to elected officials and the mainstream media, a CIA official has told a Drudge Report editor that a fourth shoe is about to drop, make that the 5th shoe in the correct count, that has Obama political operatives at the White House literally shaking in their boots.

Weasel Zippers reported that Drudge Editor Joseph Curl stated that the source at CIA says that this is the one scandal that truly has the White House in a state of fear and panic. But as of yet no one has been told what the scandal entails.

The comment section at Weasel Zippers went wild with speculation. One reader wondered if the new scandal involves proof of massive voter fraud. Another speculated that the scandal revolves around the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in the Benghazi debacle, that Stevens was perhaps sent to an outpost at Benghazi rather than to remain at his post at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. Had Stevens and his security detail remained in Tripoli, they would be alive today.

The Administration's War On Fox News Reporters

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald explains the implications of targeting Rosen. “Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information,” he explains. “That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ—that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for ‘soliciting’ the disclosure of classified information—is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.”

Fox News’ Brit Hume echoed that assessment. “The Obama-Holder Justice Department is now prepared to treat the ordinary newsgathering actives of reporters to seek information from government officials as a possible crime,” he warned.

Adding insult to injury, the IG’s Fast and Furious report reveals even more abuse by the DOJ: it confirms that U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke intentionally leaked a document aimed at smearing Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson. Furthermore, additional emails uncovered by the IG reveal other DOJ officials also discussed smearing Dodson, one of whom was Tracy Schmaler, the former Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs. She was forced to resign after it was discovered she was colluding with the radical leftist advocacy group Media Matters to smear those attempting to cover DOJ scandals.

Fox News’ executive vice president of news, Michael Clemente, made it clear the network would not be intimidated by the DOJ. “We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said statement. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

Last week, in an interview with Democracy Now, James Goodale, former general council for the New York Times, revealed the likely motive for the administration’s determination to criminalize reporting of classified information. “Obama has classified, I think, seven million‚Äìin one year, classified seven million documents,” he explained. “Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it’s classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they’re complicit, and they’re going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.”

That reality raises an extremely important question: who’s going to stop the Obama administration.

Top Official To Plead Fifth Amendment Protections After Targeting Constitutional Groups That Taught Bill Of Rights

IRS official Lois Lerner who heads the tax exempt division of the IRS will be invoking Fifth Amendment protections under the Bill of Rights to avoid incriminating herself in federal testimony, reports the LA Times. What makes this such a hilarious example of hypocrisy, of course, is the fact that her office specifically targeted non-profits that were teaching the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

As has now emerged across mainstream news, the IRS targeted these groups for "extra scrutiny" by demanding answers to questions like: What are the contents of your prayers? What books do you read? What are the names of the students you've instructed? Applications for tax exempt status were also denied tax exempt status for three years even while pro-Obama non-profits were quickly approved, no questions asked.

By invoking the Fifth Amendment, Lois Lerner is flat out admitting that her campaign of targeting pro-Constitution groups was a traitorous, criminal betrayal of America. She also apparently believes that Bill of Rights protections only apply to her, not the People of America. This elitist attitude runs like a festering case of cancer throughout the Obama administration, where a culture of intimidationpersists.

Across the board, Obama officials are either taking the Fifth Amendment or declaring they "know nothing" about anything that happened. Check out this amazingly annoying video of Eric Holder, the top law enforcement "official" in the U.S. government, claiming just how little he knows!

Lois Lerner of the IRS knows nothing, too. In fact, she knows so much nothing that she's going to plead the Fifth Amendment in order to make sure she doesn't actually say exactly how much she doesn't know.

In reality, this pleading of the Fifth Amendment by a key lawbreaking operative in the Obama administration is a tactic to make sure she doesn't either spill the truth or perjure herself by lying under oath.

Because, you see, a whole los of people like Lois Lerner are ultimately going to prison once the true criminality of the entire Obama network of government operatives implodes.

America's Bubble Economy Is Going To Become An Economic Black Hole

What is going to happen when the greatest economic bubble in the history of the world pops?  Themainstream media never talks about that.  They are much too busy covering the latest dogfights in Washington and what Justin Bieber has been up to.  And most Americans seem to think that if the Dow keeps setting new all-time highs that everything must be okay.  Sadly, that is not the case at all.  Right now, the U.S. economy is exhibiting all of the classic symptoms of a 

Rather, the reckless euphoria that we are seeing in the financial markets right now reminds me very much of 1929.  Margin debt is absolutely soaring, and every time that happens a crash rapidly follows.  But this time when a crash happens it could very well be unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  The top 25 U.S. banks have more than 212 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives combined, and when that house of cards comes crashing down there is no way that anyone will be able to prop it back up.  After all, U.S. GDP for an entire year is only a bit more than 15 trillion dollars.

What we are witnessing right now is the calm before the storm.  Let us hope that it lasts for as long as possible so that we can have more time to prepare.

Unfortunately, this bubble of false hope will not last forever.  At some point it will end, and then the pain will begin.

Also see:

Obama's Communist/Soviet Ties

Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out