A private door opens from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in central Jerusalem directly into a long, modestly furnished, half-paneled room decorated with modern paintings by Israeli artists and a copy of Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence. It contains little more than a long wooden table, brown leather chairs and a single old-fashioned white projector screen.

This inner sanctum at the end of a corridor between Netanyahu’s private room and the office of his top military adviser, is where one of the decade’s most momentous military decisions could soon be taken: to launch an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

Time for that decision is fast running out and the mood in Jerusalem is hardening.

Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of international pressure, saying it needs the fuel for its civilian nuclear program. The West is convinced that Tehran’s real objective is to build an atomic bomb – something which the Jewish state will never accept because its leaders consider a nuclear armed-Iran a threat to its very existence.

Adding to the international pressure, U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said this week American military plans to strike Iran were “ready” and the option was “fully available”.

The central role Iran plays in Netanyahu’s deliberations is reflected in the huge map of the Middle East hanging by the door of his office. Israel lies on one edge, with Iran taking pride of place in the centre.

Experts say that within a few months, much of Iran’s nuclear program will have been moved deep underground beneath the Fordow mountain, making a successful military strike much more difficult.

CONTINUED at Reuters.

Syria remains the top destination for Iranian arms shipments in violation of a U.N. Security Council ban on weapons exports by the Islamic Republic, according to a confidential report on Iran sanctions-busting seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Iran, like Russia, is one of Syria’s few allies as it presses ahead with a 14-month old assault on opposition forces determined to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

News of the panel’s report came as Tehran and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency try narrow their differences on how to tackle concerns over Iran’s atomic program, and as Iran prepares for talks with the five permanent council members and Germany in Iraq next week.

The new report, submitted by a panel of sanctions-monitoring experts to the Security Council’s Iran sanctions committee, said the panel investigated three large illegal shipments of Iranian weapons over the past year.

CONTINUED at The Star.

Two suicide blasts ripped through the Syrian capital today, killing 55 people and leaving scenes of carnage in the streets in the deadliest bombing attack since the country’s uprising began 14 months ago, the Interior Ministry said.

UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said his peace plan could be the last chance to avoid civil war in Syria, where a truce has failed to end 14 months of bloodshed that monitors say has killed nearly 12,000 people.

Annan told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that the priority in Syria was “to stop the killing” and expressed concern that torture, mass arrests and other human rights violations were intensifying.

Regime forces “continue to press against the population,” despite a putative truce that started on April 12, but attacks are more discreet because of the presence of UN military observers, diplomats quoted him as saying.

“The biggest priority, first of all we need to stop the killing,” Annan told reporters in Geneva, adding that his six-point peace plan is “the only remaining chance to stabilize the country.”

Annan briefed the council on his efforts to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to implement the plan, which he said was possibly “the last chance to avoid civil war.”

CONTINUED at Taipei Times.

Vice President Joe Biden spoke out forcefully against the Iranian government Tuesday at the Rabbinical Assembly Convention meeting, saying actions taken by the Obama White House were preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But the Romney campaign was quick to disagree.

Military assistance, coupled with financial and oil sanctions passed by the U.S. and the European Union, would cripple the Iranian economy, Biden promised.

“When we took office, let me remind you, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem,” Biden said. “We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”

Biden continued, “We were neither fully respected by our friends nor feared by our opponents. Today is it starkly, starkly different.”

The other side of the aisle struck back at Biden’s comments, with GOP presidential candidate and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney’s Policy Director Lanhee Chen calling foul on the placement of blame, and stating the vice president’s words were “wrong and completely inappropriate.”

CONTINUED at CNN. Video at link.

Some US commanders believe funds available for relief and reconstruction during the country’s war in Iraq may have ended up benefiting insurgents, a report released by a US watchdog said.

The US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) surveyed officers and officials associated with the Commander’s Emergency Response Programme (CERP), a fund used by US military officers for projects to boost rebuilding in their areas of responsibility.

The US Congress has allocated nearly $4 billion since 2004 for CERP.

“Some commanders indicated that the diversion of CERP project funds may have benefited insurgents,” SIGIR said in the report published on Monday detailing the results of the survey.

“Money… was found during raids on insurgents (along with) admission from contractors that they paid money ‘for protection,’” the report quoted one US commander as saying.

“There was substantial evidence that the local authorities … were stealing right off the top,” another said. “Additionally, governors were offering insurgents money that was to pay for CERP activities to NOT attack certain CERP-funded programmes.”

The number of US forces in Iraq peaked at nearly 170,000 several years after the 2003 US-led invasion, but the vast majority pulled out at the end of last year. Now, around 150 remain under the authority of the US embassy.

SIGIR found that graft also posed a problem for the dispersal of CERP funds.

“Corruption is an integral feature of Iraqi society and politics. Battling corruption in the Iraqi system is a Sisyphean task… It was generally understood and accepted as common practice,” one commander said.

“When you pay $40,000 to a contractor to have a well dug and 10 percent goes to the contractor, and 10 percent more goes to the local tribal leader, we call that corruption. But that was the cost of getting things done,” another said.

“I never saw US personnel commit fraud, but in Iraqi culture there were many hidden costs.”

Another officer said: “I believe that contractors that were used for certain projects were required to pay off Iraqi officials. Incidents occurred when these contractors did not pay off officials, such as threats and attacks.

“Additionally, some Iraqi officials, political and military, attempted to force us to use certain contractors. The assumption was that these contractors were providing kickbacks to the Iraqi officials.”

The report noted: “About 76 percent of those surveyed estimated that at least some of the money their battalions spent on CERP was lost to fraud and corruption.”

Source: Middle East Online.

Israel’s military chief toned down the rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear programme on Wednesday, describing the Iranian leadership as “very rational” and unlikely to take the decision to build a bomb.

Speaking to the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz said Iran was systematically approaching the point at which it would be able to decide on whether to build a bomb, but had not yet made that decision.

“It still hasn’t decided yet whether to go the extra mile,” he said.

CONTINUED at the Raw Story.

An Exclusive interview, Alex Jones speaks with Sen. Rand Paul on NDAA, TSA undercover on Houston busses, Obama’s overall neglect of the Constitution, his possible impeachment and much more. This is a must see video.

There is a video that could be loosely translated as “Terrorist Turkish border opening fire on the Syrian side” that pretty accurately sums up what’s going on at the ultra-volatile geopolitical hotspot of the moment.

The voice over says, “This is the Syria-Turkey border, and this is an operation of the Free Syrian Army [FSA] … The Gate [that would be the Syrian side of the border, housing the Gate checkpoint] is going to be seized.”

What this means is that Turkey is sheltering the FSA right on the border, only a few meters – and not kilometers – away from Syrian territory. Way beyond hosting a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command and control center in Iskenderun for months now – a fact already reported by Asia Times Online – Turkey has now advanced right to the border, enabling a back-and-forth by heavily weaponized guerrillas/mercenaries to attack a sovereign state.

Imagine a similar scenario happening, say, at a Mexican-US border in Arizona or Texas.

This can be seen as a very peculiar Ankara interpretation of “safe havens” and “humanitarian corridors” as outlined by what can be seen as the prime blueprint for regime change in Syria: a report [2] by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, authored by the usual cocktail of Israeli firsters and Qatar-affiliated Middle East “experts”.

So expect to see this movie generating countless sequels; the FSA attacking a Syrian border checkpoint, killing soldiers and then retreating under a hail of bullets, which will inevitably hit a nearby Syrian refugee camp.

The border escalation graphically illustrates the wider scenario: civil war.

CONTINUED at The Asia Times.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has warned the government it will not support an IMF loan unless the terms are changed or it moves aside and allows a new administration to oversee how the funds are spent, its candidate for president said on Sunday.

The government has been negotiating a $3.2 billion loan with theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) to help it avert a balance of payments crisis caused by the political and economic turmoil of the last year, and an IMF technical team is now in Cairo.

The IMF has said that before it agrees to a loan, the government must first sell the plan to the country’s political groupings, especially the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which won nearly half the seats in the new parliament.

“We told them (the government), you have two choices. Either postpone this issue of borrowing and come up with any other way of dealing with it without our approval, or speed up the formation of a government,” Khairat al-Shater said in an interview.

He said he realised the country’s finances were precarious and a severe crunch could come by early to mid-May as the end of the fiscal year approached, but that this was the government’s problem to resolve. Egypt’s fiscal year runs to June 30.

“It is not logical that I approve a loan that the transitional government would take for two or three months, then demand that I, as a permanent government, repay,” he told Reuters.

CONTINUEd at Yahoo News.