Fatah and Hamas met once again to iron out a cease-fire between the two factions, apparently coming to grips that their last cease-fire of just one week ago was already destroyed when the two groups continued to fight anyways.  It’s what they do, after all.  Sorry if I’m being pessimistic about the chances here, but I prefer to call it realism.

Mr. Abbas is also trying to restore a cease-fire with Israel that reduced the number of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel. Israel responded to Hamas’s recent statements that it was ending the cease-fire, and to the subsequent increase in the rocket attacks, with air attacks on Hamas targets and on those believed to have ordered the attacks or to be conducting them.

Mr. Abbas says he views the rocket attacks as counterproductive, but Hamas defends them as either “resistance” to Israeli occupation or as responses to Israeli military actions in the West Bank and Gaza.

That’s just it.  Even though the Times doesn’t actually mention it, the rocket attacks never actually stopped.  The Hamas version of a cease-fire is just a piece of paper or spoken word attempting to persuade other nations and media outlets they want peace.  It’s a ruse.

It was, after all, Hamas who recently increased the already increasing number of rocket attacks in an attempt to draw Israel into the Hamas-Fatah conflict.  They want to divert attention away from Palestinians killing each other and act like they can act like civilized human beings.

Iran is drawing up plans to attack European sites including nuclear power plants according to an address in the British parliament yesterday the Associated Press reports.

Claude Moniquet, president of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, a private think-tank in Brussels, said his organization also had evidence Tehran has increased numbers of intelligence agents across Europe.

“We have serious signals that something is under preparation in Europe,” Moniquet said. “Iranian intelligence is working extremely hard to prepare its people and to prepare actions.”

The center, which he said deals directly with European intelligence agencies, believes Iranian operatives have carried out “reconnaissance of targets in European cities, including nuclear power stations,” Moniquet said. He mentioned no other specific targets.

Iran appeared to be preparing to target “British citizens on the streets of London,” Moniquet said. “Just as they kill British soldiers in the south of Iraq.”

I really wish the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center would quit trying to escalate tensions with Iran.

On the Iranian nuclear front, according to the IAEA Iran is 3-8 years away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb.

According to an IAEA report, Iran has not only ignored IAEA requests but the nation has also expanded its nuclear program.

“Iran has not suspended its enrichment-related activities. Iran has continued with the operation of their pilot fuel enrichment plant and with construction of their (planned industrial underground) enrichment plant,” the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in its report.

“It has started feeding cascades with UF6 (uranium gas). Iran has also continued with its heavy water-related projects.”

But it said the amount of uranium gas fed into the cascade was far below the 80-90 percent suitable to detonate an atom bomb.

Of course Iran hasn’t complied.  The nation has no intent to do so.  It’s time the IAEA and the UN Security Council realizes that and proceeds how they see fit.

What is the CIA doing in Iran?  Before we could hypothesize on any and all activities taking place, but now thanks to ABC News, we know what they are doing.

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions . . .

“I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,” said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,” Nasr said.

Let me get this straight.  Iran is arming the Mahdi Army in Iraq to target Coalition soldiers and they are arming Al Qaida in Iraq.  Iran has moved on with the nation’s nuclear program without complying with the IAEA.  Iran is arming and training the Taliban.  Iran’s fingers are deeply entrenched in the instability in Lebanon.  Iran is involved in Somalia.  Iranian leadership continues to lead circle jerks where the crowd yells out ‘Death to America.’  All of this, and it’s the United States that is escalating anything?  Maybe, Mr. Nasr, the U.S. is finally just trying to respond.

But the larger news here is why does ABC News feel this type of information should be brought to the forefront?  The Blotter notes that Vice President Dick Cheney favored a military strike but President Bush signed off on the formerly covert plan, so does this news hitting the presses alter that any?

President Bush decided to declassify an intelligence report which indicated Osama bin Laden urged the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to turn Al Qaida in Iraq into an international terrorist group and specifically attack the U.S. within the homeland.

Forgive me, but I’m not sure what is actually new news here.

Bush said the intelligence community also reported that bin Laden asked another one of his deputies, Hamza Rabia, to send Zarqawi a briefing on operations against the United States and that another deputy suggested bin Laden send Rabia to Iraq to plan attacks with Zarqawi. That deputy, Abu Faraj al-Libi, later speculated that if this effort proved successful “al-Qaeda might one day prepare the majority of its external operations from Iraq,” Bush said.

And we’ve known that for some time now.

“The core of this presidency has been a political doctrine that George Bush calls the ‘Global War on Terror,’ ” said Democratic Party presidential candidate John Edwards at a campaign rally at the Council on Foreign Relations.  “He has used this doctrine like a sledgehammer to justify the worst abuses and biggest mistakes of his administration, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to the war in Iraq.”

Now wait a minute.  I have no qualms with Edwards believing the GWOT is nothing more than a bumber sticker as he said later, however Edwards is saying the Bush Administration wanted Abu Ghraib and that there’s something wrong with Guantanamo.  In fact the only thing wrong with Guantanamo is that people like Edwards, that is to say the $400 a hair cut types, criticize the detention center without even knowing any of the facts involved or offering an alternative to keep those detained within.

“We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes,” Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery. “By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.”

Should Bush instead of called the conflict the ‘discussion with those who want to kill us?’  What really gets me is that Edwards considers the many theaters of the GWOT as ideological wars, which they actually are, but Edwards considers them Bush ideological wars as opposed to, say, Islamism versus the so-called West.

And there’s the Democratic Party’s leading candidate in Iowa.

Todd Bensman of the San Antonio Express-News has written a four-part series on a human smuggling ring from the Middle East into the United States. The entire series is well worth the read, but I’ll quote one important excerpt.

“They are not all economic migrants,” said attorney Janice Kephart, who served as legal counsel for the 9-11 Commission and co-wrote its final staff report. “I do get frustrated when people who live in Washington or Illinois say we don’t have any evidence that terrorists are coming across. But there is evidence.”

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension numbers, agents along both borders have caught more than 5,700 special-interest immigrants since 2001. But as many as 20,000 to 60,000 others are presumed to have slipped through, based on rule-of-thumb estimates typically used by homeland security agencies.

“You’d like to think at least you’re catching one out of 10,” McCraw said. “But that’s not good in baseball and it’s certainly not good in counterterrorism.”

This human pipeline, Bensman reports, is embedded in Syria and flows through Texas which coincides with a local report I read documenting a South Texas sheriff holding up patches torn off the clothes of IRGC officers.  Yep, that’s Iran’s special unit. There have been known terrorists who crossed the southern border that have been caught, but how many escaped capture?

This is the concern that should be front and center in Washington today, yet we all know the ridiculous calls of racism and the terror-denying open border advocated have turned the debate on end.

Read Bensman’s full report.

Iran is actively seeking to pacify the Middle East, or at least that is the line the Iranian government repeatedly trots out when accused of aiding the insurgency in Iraq. But two reports out now question the Iranian talking points.

First in Iraq, where it has long been known Iran is contributing to both Shia and Sunni groups to make life difficult for the Iraqi government and Coalition soldiers. The Guardian reports Iran already has a plan to ramp up the violence in time for U.S. General Petraeus’ report to Congress this fall.

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran’s Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. “We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus’s report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush’s controversial, six-month security “surge” of 30,000 troop reinforcements],” the official said.

“Certainly it [the violence] is going to pick up from their side. There is significant latent capability in Iraq, especially Iranian-sponsored capability. They can turn it up whenever they want. You can see that from the pre-positioning that’s been going on and the huge stockpiles of Iranian weapons that we’ve turned up in the last couple of months. The relationships between Iran and groups like al-Qaida are very fluid,” the official said.

The expected uptick in violence is being orchestrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who answers only to the Ayatollah, according to the U.S. official quoted by the Guardian. None of this is exactly surprising to anyone who has followed Iran’s involvement in Iraq.

Now to Afghanistan where the Telegraph reports Iran has armed and trained the Taliban to fight Coalition and specifically British forces. Why would Iran support the Taliban when they were opposed to the Taliban during the group’s rise? It’s a matter of convenience and shared short-term objectives of course.

Officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are supplying hundreds of weapons, including the missiles, to Taliban insurgents, it is believed.

Most worrying is the news that SA7 Strella anti-aircraft missiles have been supplied to the Taliban . . .

Other weapons being smuggled in include plastic explosives, anti-tank mines, AK47s, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

“There is reporting that leads us to believe a number of agencies, that possibly include Iranian organisations, are significantly supporting the Taliban,” a military intelligence source told The Daily Telegraph.

There is no evidence that the technology behind the advanced roadside bombs that have penetrated at least four British armoured vehicles in southern Iraq has arrived in Afghanistan. But Iran is thought to have showed the Taliban how to make basic roadside bombs from old land-mines.

Just remember that in the greater context of the war in both theaters, forget all mention of Iran and focus like a laser beam on soldier deaths that just might encourage certain NATO nations to retreat after losing three while said nation has tried in earnest to keep as far away from the Taliban as they could.

The Lebanese military, which is unwilling to confront Hezbollah, has been shelling a Palestinian refugee camp aimed at disrupting the Al Qaida-linked Fatah Islam radical Islamic group. Fighting has gone on now for three days without an end in sight.

Fatah Islam is led by Palestinian Shaker al-Absi (Shaker Abssi) and the group is accused of trying to build an international terrorist organization in the mold of Al Qaida. Al-Absi is himself connected to Al Qaida, having been a close confidant to the now-deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Absi was released one year ago from a Syrian prison, which raises questions as to why he was released in the first place.

The Lebanese military incursion is the result of a Fatah Islam attack in the Sunni city of Tripoli. Fatah Islam is certainly a Sunni group, which once again challenges the very core of Salafist groups who claim their jihad is to be waged against those it deems un-Islamic.

Al-Absi has granted interviews in the past and offered his reasoning for attacking.

“There is no organizational relationship with al-Qaida, but we are in agreement to fight the infidels. This is the ambition and doctrine of every Muslim - to fight the enemies,” he told Al-Jazeera television earlier this year.

“The only way to achieve our rights is by force,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives and their economy are threatened, they will know that they should leave.”

But the United States has never dealt with Fatah Islam.  It is the same deflecting of ’cause’ Islamists use to beat the drums of jihad over and over again, before or after they slaughter more Muslims while arguing they are fighting for the good of Islam.

Al-Absi is also walking the fine line of truth when he stated, “ther is no organizational relationship with Al Qaida.”  That might be true, however he is under Jordanian indictment for conspiring with Zarqawi in a 1999 plot to assassinate a United States diplomat to Jordan.

Evan Kholman of the Counterterrorism Blog picks up on the Al Qaida or not question.

Yet, arguably, some of the most convincing primary evidence showing Fatah al-Islam’s orientation towards Al-Qaida comes from a somewhat unlikely source: private, password-protected chat sessions on an infamous Internet forum known as “Al-Hesbah”, used by Al-Qaida and other Islamic militant groups to disseminate propaganda and to recruit new members. During the past two years, one of the more prolific participants on Al-Hesbah was a user known as “Khattab Laden”–a composite ID formed from the names of his two heroes, Al-Qaida leader Usama Bin Laden and the late Saudi mujahideen commander in Chechnya, Ibn-ul-Khattab.

In the real world, “Khattab Laden” was “Abu Abdelrahman al-Maqdisi”, a twenty-something Palestinian refugee originally from the Gaza Strip. After earning a college degree in chemistry, in mid-2006, al-Maqdisi passed up an opportunity to continue studying medicine in Germany, and instead joined the Fatah al-Islam movement in northern Lebanon. Al-Maqdisi was a regular participant on Al-Hesbah, offering words of support for Al-Qaida and insurgents in Iraq and providing online technical assistance to other “brothers in need”. The young Fatah al-Islam commander was also clearly an avid supporter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, offering his unqualified support for statements spread by Zarqawi and, likewise, the current leader of Al-Qaida’s “Islamic State of Iraq” Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. When al-Hesbah offered its users the opportunity to submit questions to notorious Saudi Al-Qaida leader Abu Nasser al-Qahtani in Afghanistan, Abu Abdelrahman al-Maqdisi immediately responded, asking, “Is there an ability to receive young men arriving in Afghanistan? Are there camps and weapons training? Or will they be forced to hide indoors?” Separately, al-Maqdisi posted files for download by other Al-Hesbah users justifying and celebrating the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, to learn that Al-Hesbah and other online terrorist websites have recently begun carrying official releases from Fatah al-Islam alongside similar material produced by Al-Qaida and jihadist organizations based in Iraq.

Fatah Islam allegedly has between 150 to 300 jihadis of Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese origin, which is worth noting with reports indicating 50 jihadis have been killed thus far in the fighting.  The group was formed when it split from the Syrian-backed Palestinian group Fatah al-Intifada, linked to the Fatah party in Palestine.

A Pew Research poll displays a few alarming trends.  Sure the number of American Muslims who support suicide bombing is concerning, but the numbers pertaining to how American Muslims view the war in Afghanistan is downright shocking.

Foreign-born American Muslims are split on whether the war in Afghanistan was right or wrong at 40 percent.  That’s to be expected since the respondents in that series were not born in this nation, therefore skewed from the rest of society.

But wait.  Native-born American Muslims believe the war in Afghanistan is wrong 65-26.  How could this be?  I suppose it’s not too much of a stretch seeing as how 29 percent of all Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is wrong, or in plain English 29 percent of Americans should never have the right to vote again because they are incapable of reason.

Another interesting poll result comes via LGF.  The number of American Muslims sits at or around 2.35 million, which is five to eight million below the number cited by CAIR every time they try to inflate such figures to make their group more relevant.  It is also consistent with previous figures.  The figure, once again, also challenges the ridiculous notion that Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion that we all hear every time a debate turns beyond the absurd.

Overall though, there doesn’t appear to be anything to be concerned about, or at least overwhelmingly so.  The majority of American Muslims reject Islamism, which was known prior to, but there are pockets that do accept the doctrine.  The American Muslims that reject it need to fully understand it’s those who accept the doctrine that the nation needs to find with their help, but that’s where the survey shows a disconnect if you will.  Even amongst those who reject Islamism and consider theirselves to be more integrated into the U.S., they still fall in line with many of the Islamists’ conspiracy theories gladly pushed by nutters and are less inclined to help the U.S. government against Islamists.