"Netanyahu has decided to attack Iran before the U.S. Elections in November."

Global Research
Michael Carmichael

Senior Israeli officials now confirm that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has, "decided to attack Iran before the U.S. elections in November."

Netanyahu's agenda is much broader than knocking out Iranian nuclear installations for his aim is to reshape the political landscape in the USA and Israel shifting everything to the far, far right in order to create a new comfort zone for religious fundamentalists.

Netanyahu's major backer, Sheldon Adelson, is now firmly behind Mitt Romney, and they are known to believe that an Israeli attack on Iran in September or October will displace Obama and many dovish Democrats in Congress and establish a hawkish regime in Washington.

Israel has agreed to restrain any attack on Iran until after the current round of five talks between Iran and the P5+1 that will come to an end in either late July or August:

"U.S., Israel continue preparations for strike on Iran nuclear facilities.

The website cites U.S. defense contracts and Israel's new military preparations, suggesting that 'all sides are getting ready for whatever may come.'

Israel and the U.S. are pushing forward with preparations to jointly strike Iran's nuclear facilities, the U.S. blog Business Insider reported on Saturday.

"U.S. defense contracts, an Iranian F-16 acquisition, and Israel's new military preparations suggest that all sides are getting ready for whatever may come," the report says.

According to the blog, the U.S navy has recently signed a $338 million contract with defense contractor Raytheon to "provide the Navy with 361 Tomahawk cruise missiles in their most recent configuration. According to the website, the U.S. is either renewing its stock of missiles or planning ahead.

"On May 9," the report added, "the U.S. House of Representatives passed the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, which seeks to "reaffirm the commitment to Israel's security as a Jewish state; provide Israel with the military capabilities to defend itself by itself against any threats... [and] expand military and civilian cooperation."

A senior Israeli official recently told Reuters that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to attack Iran before the U.S. elections in November." (Haretz, June 23, 2012, emphasis added)
Military experts have long agreed that the "sweet spot" for an Israeli attack on Iran will be this coming September or October precisely because of the timing of the US presidential election cycle.

For maximum political impact and minimal diplomatic responsiveness, the time of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC - September 3-6 comes within this window of opportunity as well as the days immediately prior to the US election - say from Halloween till the 6th of November.

It may be instructive to recall that Israel's Operation Cast Lead was timed to coincide with the transition between Obama and Bush and ended abruptly immediately before the Inauguration in January 2009.

Presidential election cycles have played major roles in the design of military timetables. For only one example, recall the Tet Offensive in early 1968 that drove LBJ out of the race for the White House.

Israel Attacked A US Navy Ship 45 Years Ago Killing Dozens Of Sailors — Survivors Want To Know Why

Business Insider
Robert Johnson

FlickrIt's understandable if you've never heard of the USS Liberty and the more than 200 sailors who were wounded and lost their lives the day she was attacked in the summer of 1967.

That was the Summer of Love, when nearly 100,000 American youth descended on Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, and the Vietnam War was really getting into the ugly abyss it would become. Nearly 13,000 American's died in the jungle in 1967, less than half the number who would fall in 1968.

So, it's understandable if amid all that carnage, loss, and revolution the lives of a couple hundred Liberty sailors fell to the heap of history and were forgotten.

What's still not understandable is why the Liberty was ambushed by Israeli gunships, that efforts to rescue dying sailors were called off, and a massive cover-up trailed the incident's wake.

Elizabeth Flock at U.S. News reminds us of the incident in a piece honoring this Friday's Liberty memorial service to be held at Arlington National Cemetery in D.C.

Flock points to lingering outrage and concern of a cover up that has prompted a Facebook page asking people to sign a petition calling for a renewed investigation of the incident, which apparently went down something like this:

Three days into Israel's Six-Day War, the Liberty was parked off the coast of Egypt collecting communication signals in international waters.

While initially some concern was given about the ship getting too close to shore, or mistaken for an enemy vessel, those misgivings seem to have vanished when Israeli planes flew in for a visual inspection at about 6:00 a.m. local time as the mist was still burning off the surface of the Mediterranean.

American sailors say the Israel aircraft flew so closely that they rattled the Liberty's steel plating and the ship's crew waved to the planes pilots, who did the same in return.

All morning and into the afternoon the Liberty went about her mission unmolested when at 1:40 p.m., unknown to the Liberty crew, an Israel torpedo boat reported wan "unknown vessel" traveling at speeds only attributable to warships.

Twenty minutes later two, Mirage II fighters rattled down over the Liberty and made two visual inspection passes at 3,000 feet. The Mirage pilots radioed command that the ship looked like a non-Israeli destroyer and orders came back over the airwaves to attack.

The Liberty's command knew the planes were Israeli so the ship's crew were all on "stand down" mode, non-defensive, with no helmets or even life jackets at the ready.

The twin Mirage's pounded the Liberty with all the cannons, rockets, and bombs at their disposal during three separate runs. When they depleted their ammunition they were replaced by two Dassault Mysteres filled with napalm bombs that tore into the Liberty engulfing it in a raging inferno from the bridge to the deck.

When it was all over 34 sailors were dead, 174 were injured and Israel claimed they'd mistaken America's most distinctive ship for an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport half the Liberty's size with a completely different profile.

Israel apologized, made reparations to the U.S. and the sailor's families, and then according to many — the incident was swept under the rug and a whitewashing of the facts came in to preserve Israel's reputation

A letter to Congress from USS Liberty veterans, asking for the renewed investigation, also says that rescue efforts to save the Liberty's crew were somehow called off, and that makes even less sense to them than anything else about the whole, tragic, and nearly forgotten fiasco.

The most detailed version of the incident and all that followed may be found here in the NSA's de-classified documents.

My Dad Helped the CIA Kill JFK: Part I

Truth Jihad

Saint John Hunt, recipient and custodian of father
E. Howard Hunt's confession to participating in
the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated murder of JFK

Kevin  Barrett

Of all the big lies told about the JFK assassination, perhaps the biggest is: "I guess we'll never really know what happened."

Bullshit! We do know.

Some of us know because we have studied the issue. Others, like Saint John Hunt, son of CIA executive and covert action agent E. Howard Hunt, know because they got it straight from the horse's mouth.

In 1979, as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I wrote an article for the Madison, WI Daily Cardinal compiling evidence that the CIA killed JFK. Shortly after the article was submitted to a dozen or so publications, but before it was published,  a woman appeared at my house and very politely announced she was a CIA-operated mind-control slave, brain wired with electrodes, whose job was to target enemies of the CIA for elimination. The next day, I asked my politically-savvy journalism professor, John T. McNelly, what was THAT about. He said, "They're just f**ing with you, kid. They're trying to intimidate you."

Saint John Hunt knows how badly "they" can f** with you.  He helped his CIA-agent father Howard conceal money and documents during the Watergate scandal, and suffered the pain of having his mother, Dorothy Hunt, blown out of the sky under circumstances that are far beyond suspicious.

So Saint John Hunt gets my vote as one America's greatest living heroes, for having the guts to stand up and tell the truth about his father's confession to participating in the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated assassination of John F. Kennedy. His family didn't want him to do it, the lawyers didn't want him to do it, and of course the CIA didn't want him to do it. But Saint John Hunt chose to live up to his arrangement with his dying father, who apparently felt some ambivalent remorse about his participation in "The Big Event" and, at the end of his life, asked his son to help expose the truth. By doing so, Saint John Hunt is not only keeping faith with his father, but also keeping faith with his country and its tortured, slowly dying Constitution. And if you believe, as I do, that one of God's highest names is al-Haqq (truth/reality), Saint John Hunt is keeping faith on that level as well.

11/18/2011 Interview with Saint John Hunt, lightly edited, Part 1 (Listen to the full interview here)

Saint John Hunt
(The JFK assassination) happened 49 years ago this November 22nd. That's basically a generation. And the old generation has published, I don't know, 500 books on the subject, noting all manner of conspiracies from every conceivable source - everything from the CIA to space aliens.

We were well warned by Eisenhower, when he passed the torch to JFK, that we've got a very dangerous situation here with the miltary-industrial-congressional complex - that's what was left out of his speech, the word "congressional." Those were (Eisenhower's) words, and he was correct in that appraisal.

Kevin Barrett
You've laid it on the line in a way that few have. I mean, this is your father that we're talking about! It must be really, really tough, (dealing with) the feeling of betrayal that we all have when we look into issues like this, when (we find) our own government has betrayed us, our own government has slaughtered 3000 people in the World Trade Center and blamed it on their enemies. People in our own government, the people really in charge, kill the President, kill his brother, and so on. We all feel a horrible sense of betrayal. But having it in the family must be worse. It must be like betrayal squared.

Hunt
Yeah, it was a pretty big shock when he called me down to his, we'll say his death bed side in Florida. And of course I had heard and seen...I had even attended a lecture in the mid-1970s by a comedian-turned-activist named Dick Gregory at San Francisco State. He was one of the first, along with Mark Lane and Silvia Meagher. And of course they accused my father of being one of the agents involved. So I was well aware that there were a lot of accusations flying around, and I just wanted to sort of figure things out for myself. But I kind of dropped the issue for ten or twenty years, until I got this phone call from my father. And lo and behold, there was some truth to the accusations and the alleged evil deeds. So that was quite a shock. And the arrangement that I had with him...originally we were going to bring it out together, before he passed away. But there was so much pressure from the inner family circle, and from various lawyers, and of course the CIA itself, that he backed down.