Car bomb attacks on workers at two Israeli embassies in India and Georgia could help provide a pretext for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel immediately blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the attacks, which occurred overnight. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But if the Israeli accusations are verified they would represent [...]

Israel is getting really nervous that they just might not have enough time to bomb Iran, which would just be terrible. They claim that the new international sanctions have closed the window for them to act. I wonder if this has anything to do with it: the fact that the latest intelligence estimates, both in [...]

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the President of Yemen, left the country for Oman over the weekend, en route to the United States for medical treatment on wounds suffered during an assassination attempt last year. This has been rumored for many weeks, but Saleh did not leave until the Yemeni Parliament approved an immunity law on Saturday, [...]

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said today that Israel was “very far off” from any attack on Iran. More important, Israeli intelligence indicates that they have not yet determined that Iran has decided even to build a nuclear weapon. These are things you don’t hear much in the US press, so let’s run the [...]

Prior to all the rising tensions around Iran, the US and Israel had scheduled a large set of joint military exercises in the spring. Maybe this wasn’t necessarily a provocative act, but with everything happening around Iran, it gained a new resonance. So today, when the two sides postponed the exercises, some saw it as [...]

A provocative article in Foreign Policy magazine suggests that Israeli Mossad officers recruited members of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jundallah to aid in the covert operations against Iranian targets, including bombings in the Baluchistan region and potentially the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. The Mossad officers, according to Mark Perry, posed as American intelligence agents [...]

Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up on his story about the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, and he calls the incidents what they actually are: Terrorism. Part of the problem here is the pretense that Terrorism has some sort of fixed, definitive meaning. It does not. As Professor Remi Brulin has so exhaustively documented, the meaning [...]

Thrill to the exploits of New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane, aka Truth Vigilante! Watch him wonder if it’s worth it to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Witness him ask around to see if he should run faster than a locomotive! I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York [...]

One important part of the suspected covert war with Iran, in addition to the drone surveillance and cyberwarfare, concerns the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Several scientists have been murdered under questionable circumstances over the past several months. And now, another death has been reported: An Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility [...]

It must be an election year, because the noise about war with Iran has quite suddenly elevated. You have Republican Presidential candidates talking about blockades and putting missiles on high alert, threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, and the like. And Iran is doing its best to avoid an apocalyptic rhetoric gap, by announcing [...]

The President signed the defense authorization bill today, appending a signing statement expressing concerns with the detainee measures in the bill. The White House had earlier stated they would not veto the bill, so this was no surprise. “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, [...]