We know that the source, DEBKAfile,  is not always completely reliable, but this report seems to us to ring true:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s personal cameraman, Hassan Golkhanban, who defected from his UN entourage in New York on Oct. 1, brought with him an intelligence treasure trove of up-to-date photographs and videos of top Iranian leaders visiting their most sensitive and secret nuclear and missile sites.

The cameraman, who is in his 40s, is staying at an undisclosed address, presumably a CIA safe house under close guard.

He stayed behind when Ahmadinejad, after his UN speech, departed New York with his 140-strong entourage. For some years, Golkhanban worked not just as a news cameraman but personally recorded visits by the Iranian president and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of top-secret nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guards installations.

When he left Tehran in the president’s party, his luggage was not searched and so he was able to bring out two suitcases packed with precious film and deliver it safely into waiting hands in New York.

The Iranian cameraman has given US intelligence the most complete and updated footage it has ever obtained of the interiors of Iran’s top secret military facilities and various nuclear installations, including some never revealed to nuclear watchdog inspectors. Among them are exclusive interior shots of the Natanz nuclear complex, the Fordo underground enrichment plant, the Parchin military complex and the small Amir-Abad research reactor in Tehran.

Some of the film depicts Revolutionary Guards and military industry chiefs explaining in detail to the president or supreme leader the working of secret equipment on view. Golkhanban recorded their voices. …

Although Golkhanban’s defection to the United States and request for asylum was disclosed to the media some days ago, Tehran has not made any comment.

The report may be telling the truth, but is the defector? It is more than possible, even very likely, that an asylum-seeker bearing valuable information is on a mission to deceive. As the report says:

From his years as a member of the loyal Bassij militia, the cameraman earned the complete trust of Iran’s security services and was able to reach his professional pinnacle as personal photographer for the two most eminent figures in the country, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, with the task of recording their most confidential pursuits.

Were they fooled? Or is the US being fooled?

If the information is genuine, will it prompt an attack on those nuclear installations? Not, we think, while Obama is (absurdly!) Commander-in-Chief.

This is from Larry Kudlow’s account of his reaction to Wednesday’s debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney politely cleaned Barack Obama’s clock tonight. A lethargic and at times tired looking President Obama was out-hustled, out-facted, out-energized, and out-informed by Former Governor Mitt Romney …

Romney had to correct President Obama on a number of issues, including oil tax breaks, healthcare issues, job training programs in the federal government and even how Obamacare works. Romney’s knowledge base was broad and deep, much broader and deeper than President Obama showed tonight.

At times, Obama looked petulant because he knew he was beat and he knew he was outhustled and not in command of the facts. What’s more is that Romney’s demeanor was calm but insistent. You could see a man who is for limited government and private enterprise, who wants to make sure that people understood his commitment to those key principles, and he never wavered. On the other side, you could see Barack Obama committed to big government all the way. …

For almost every question, President Obama had a government solution. For almost every question, Mitt Romney had a private-sector solution. …

We agree with all that. Though we did not like every single idea Mitt Romney expressed – for instance that he believes in some government regulation of the economy, and that he “likes” green energy (fortunately not as much as he likes oil and clean coal) – we are highly delighted that he overwhelmed Obama on all points.

But Larry Kudlow also writes:

We have no new knowledge of what President Obama would do if elected to a second term. We know he opposes everything Romney supports, but we have very little idea about what President Obama himself actually believes in.

Very little idea? Why’s that? His intentions and ideology have not been hard to read.

But we have a hunch that Obama might actually want to lose the election; that he is all too aware he is in over his head. We surmise that he wanted to be Chief Celebrity, but hadn’t anticipated how tough a job the leadership of America really is – even if his intention was to subvert  it, weaken it, impoverish it, make it ungovernable, bring it under the authority of the nefarious UN, and smooth the path of encroaching Islam, as he has done. He’s had to work for all that while yet seeming to be a patriot and do the chores of the job, however reluctantly and incompetently (like occasionally listening to or glancing at intelligence briefings). And now blame is pouring on his head, and the deluge will come harder as the dark truth behind the Middle East bonfire and the murder of Ambassador Stevens breaks.

He cannot cope with figures. As the sum of the national debt keeps growing he must dread looking at the dancing numbers. Another of our suspicions (we openly wear  the badge of skepticism) is that he has an affliction called dyscalculia. It is similar to dyslexia, only to do with numbers not letters. Hence “57 states”; “10,000 died” in a tornado in Kansas;  “millionaires and billionaires”, as if there was little difference between a million and a billion … To take just a few examples.

Well, he attained his celebrity. He attained power. He’s managed to do America a lot of harm. He was the first black president. He has his place in history. Why endure any more of the hassle? Enough already! Maybe he’s saying that to himself, as his hair turns grey, and Romney rises.

PS. For extra delight, see how disgruntled Obama supporters are over last night’s debate here and here.

No, we also hadn’t heard of it.

We learn from this article by Terry Jeffrey that it was the anti-Gaddafi rebel force. Some of its savages, we reckon, including al-Qaeda members, murdered US Ambassador Stevens in Banghazi last month.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they made it clear that the only time the president would have the authority to use military force without prior authorization from Congress was when, as James Madison recorded in his notes from the Constitutional Convention, it was necessary to “repel sudden attacks.”

It was thus fittingly symbolic that when Barack Obama announced he had ordered the U.S. military to intervene in Libya’s civil war, he did not do so from the Oval Office or the well of the U.S. House of Representatives, but from the capital city of Brazil.

In that speech, delivered March 19, 2011, Obama repeatedly used the first-person pronoun, I, in explaining who had decided America would intervene in Libya.

“Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians,” Obama said. “I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice, and it’s not a choice that I make lightly,” said Obama.

On what authority had I, Barack Obama, taken America into war?

“In this effort, the United States is acting with a broad coalition that is committed to enforcing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which calls for the protection of the Libyan people,” Obama said from Brazil. …

The U.N. Security Council’s permanent members include not only the United States, France and Great Britain, but also Russia and the People’s Republic of China, which, according to Obama’s State Department, is still governed by communists. In 2011, the Security Council also included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Columbia and Gabon, Nigeria and Lebanon, Portugal and South Africa, and the government of Brazil, which hosted Obama’s war announcement.

Obama’s case was plain: The governments of these nations – not the constitutionally elected representatives of the American people – had given him authority to decide whether America would go to war in Libya, and he had decided America would go to war in Libya. …

But what did Obama know about the revolutionary forces in Libya, the so-called “thuwar”, before he ordered the U.S. military to take up their cause? What sort of prudential analysis had he done about the potential aftermath of this intervention? What consideration had he given to who would restore order and security in Libya and how they would do it? Why did he believe a truly representative government in Libya was likely let alone possible? …

We now know that the revolutionary forces in Libya started committing war crimes even before Obama ordered the U.S. military to intervene on their behalf.

On March 2, the U.N. International Commission of Inquiry on Libya  published its report on human rights violations there. “The Commission received reports of executions by the thuwar  …  War crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by thuwar and that breaches of international human rights law continue to occur in a climate of impunity, … acts of extra-judicial executions, torture, enforced disappearance, indiscriminate attacks and pillage. [But] no investigations have been carried out into any violations committed by the thuwar.”

Had Obama followed the U.S. Constitution and sought congressional authorization for his use of force in Libya, the members of Congress who voted for such an authorization would have shared the responsibility for what that intervention helped bring about. As it is, the responsibility for exceeding his constitutional authority and intervening in a civil war he did not understand lies solely and deservedly with Obama himself.

At least insofar as he is answerable to the American people. But he could claim that the UN was the Big Chief who gave the orders. If he did, he would be confessing that he is a mere lackey of that appalling institution. He does not confess it. He does what he always does in a crisis: nothing. And he knows the mainstream media will protect his inaction by reporting almost nothing about the horrific events in Libya.

Here the thuwar introduces itself. No need to watch all of it. It’s just a loud unjustified boast. That lot would never have won the fight against Gaddafi without American and European intervention. Obama made their triumphalism possible. For which they have had their revenge on Obama’s ambassador. 

The revolutionaries who founded the United States of America were willing to kill and die to establish a Republic in which all would be free. The First Amendment, enshrining the principle of free speech, was passed on December 15, 1791,  two and a half years after the final ratification of the Constitution on June 24, 1787.

Are there still Americans willing to kill and die to preserve freedom? They may be found in the armed forces, but are there any in government? Or among those who vote for a government which urges the nation to submit to an aggressive enemy of freedom?

[That America] remains one of the very few places in the world, even among Western democracies, where freedom of speech is absolute, came about through stirring speeches, deeply felt debates, classical ideas and a passionate political culture — but most of all it came about because large numbers of people were willing to kill over it.

Currently large numbers of people are willing to kill over the idea that Islam is the supreme religion, that Mohammed is a deity whom all mankind should respect and that the infidels living in the suburban sprawl of a thoroughly explored continent should accept that or die. Our government calls those people a tiny minority of extremists. Our unofficial name for them is, “Muslims.”

Laws are decided by many things, but sweep away all the lawbooks, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and final law is still the law of force.The law begins with the power to impose its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.

Law either has force behind it or it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.

Islam has made laws that it expects all of mankind to abide by. These laws are not backed by novel legal theories or by petitions, though its practitioners are willing to offer both, they are backed by the naked practice of force. And the imposition of these laws can only be defended against by force. …

The lawyers who run all our national affairs have chosen to respond to the Islamic legal briefs of bombs and bullets with the equivocation with which they meet all difficult questions. They will not abandon the principle of freedom of speech, but they will lock up the filmmaker whose imprisonment the murderous Muslim legalists called for. They will not censor YouTube, but they will encourage YouTube to censor itself. They will not ban speech that offends Islam, but they will strongly condemn and discourage it.

These equivocators offer to abandon the practice of freedom so long as they are allowed to retain the theory of freedom. The Bill of Rights will not change, but as in the Soviet Union it will not apply. The authorities will pay lip service to the freedoms that we only think we have until we actually try to use them and then we will discover that we don’t actually have any of these freedoms left in stock.

In theory America will be an independent country, in practice it will be a vassal state of the Muslim world whose displays of outrage will be our law telling us what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot think, and what we can and cannot do.

This is the typical kind of bargain that decadent empires make with the barbarous warlords on their doorstep. The empire will keep its splendor and its titles, while the barbarians will tell the empire what to do. …

A demand for a code of conduct backed by violence is law. It is not our law, it is not the law of the civilized man, but it is the law that we are slowly adopting. It is the law of the decadents appeasing the savages. …

Under this code, Muslim violence dictates our permissible forms of speech. To know whether a thing may be said, drawn or filmed, we must first determine how Muslims will react to it. If they will react with violence, as they do to a sizable percentage of things, then it becomes incitement, retroactively, that must be punished and condemned.

Muslim violence has become our law. It is the law of action which determines our laws of speech. To understand what we can say, we first have to decide what Muslims will do about it. …

When we were revolutionaries, our government saw force as a way of dealing with other countries who wanted to tell Americans what to do. But since then our government has really gotten used to telling us what to do. …

Our new breed of lawyer-kings is composed of urban utopianists ruling through central government. To them the Bill of Rights is a piece of incomprehensible lunacy that prevents them from getting anything done. They are not concerned with rural government trespasses, they are worried about bombs and riots in their cities and they are terrified of their global goals being sabotaged by some movie trailer.

They are making Muslim violence into our new law, just as they made urban violence into our new law, just as they have made their own bureaucratic mandates backed by SWAT teams and prisons into our new law.

The age when laws were made by men, rather than machines of social progress composed of lawyers and activists, bureaucrats and think-tanks, lobbyists and judges, is long since gone. There is no law in our laws, but the law of force. The Constitution sits on a dusty shelf while the judges bang their gavels and practice the law that mandates something because those in power want it that way.

And now our utopian lawyer-kings, our armies of bleeding-heart social justice activists, our legions of bureaucrats stamping their papers over our skulls, our grinning black-robed activist judges wielding their gavels like swords, are cringing in terror before a Muslim mob. The bullies who have bullied us for so long have proven to be cowards. While they dismantle our army to sell it for scraps so that the EPA and HUD and the cowboy poetry festivals can get their billions, they order us to fall on our knees before the Army of Allah.

The liberal bullies who bullied us for so long have been successfully bullied and have handed us over to the bully’s bully. But bullies, of the liberal or Muslim kind, are cowards. Their bullying only works until they are successfully bullied and without their threat of force, their laws wither and blow away on the wind.

These quotations are from an article by Daniel Greenfield  at Canada Free Press.

Read it ALL here.

We see a logical link between the appalling murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, and the infiltration of the Obama administration by the Muslim Brotherhood.* 

There can be little doubt that diplomatic secrets – the Ambassador’s whereabouts, and the location of the “safe-house” belonging to the consulate – were betrayed from inside the legation. (How else would a “safe-house” become known?) Also, that there was a policy of trusting local Arab security personnel to guard America’s representatives and their staff. How could it come about that legations in that part of the world, recently emerged from violent uprisings and still in a state of instability and internal strife, should be exposed to such obvious risk? Why were those Marines – too few of them – who were nominally on guard at the Cairo embassy not issued with ammunition? These policy decisions issued from the State Department. The head of the State Department is Hillary Clinton, and her closest adviser, Huma Abedin, is intricately  and intimatetly involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, the  jihadist organization that has come to power in Egypt.**

But, you might point out, Ambassador Stevens was killed by al-Qaeda, not the Muslim Brotherhood. (See our post The Gitmo alumnus, September 28, 2012.) Yes, but observe  that the imam who preached protest in Cairo against the “anti-Muhammad” movie deliberately shown to Egyptian audiences for that very purpose is  the brother of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. (For a full account of this, see our post Al-Qaeda incited the Islamic world to riot, burn and kill, September 16, 2012.) Does that not suggest that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are co-operating with each other?***

Are we alone in finding it irresistible to “connect the dots” and see a picture emerging of the worst betrayal of America in all its history?

The administration has become tangled in a web of deceit in trying to cover up what really happened in Benghazi. The motive for the cover-up is ascribed to President Obama’s wish to claim that the “War on Terror” is over; that with the killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda was defeated – while in fact al Qaeda is bigger, stronger, and operating lethally in many more countries than it was before bin Laden’s death.

The estimable Rep. Peter King puts this argument forward in this video:

It may be, however, that the really terrible secret Obama and his henchmen are trying to cover up is that the betrayal stems not just locally from the inside of the US legation in Libya, but from Foggy Bottom and the White House.

*A thoroughly researched study of this, The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration by Frank Gaffney, is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and is available from them.

**Huma Abedin’s close connections to the Muslim Brotherhood are documented in Frank Gaffney’s study.

*** Go here to read about every al-Qaeda leader’s membership of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Times of Israel reports – quoting a British newspaper, the Sunday Times:

Israel could destroy Iran’s electric network with a specially designed electromagnetic bomb in the event of a military conflict between the countries …

[It] would be detonated above the ground, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would “disrupt all the technological devices working on the ground,” an American expert was quoted as saying to the London paper.

The use of the new technology by Israel was brought up in discussions regarding a possible attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities …

Such a move would send Iran “back to the stone age,” the British paper said.

Such a bomb would not kill people, or destroy buildings. It would wreck communications systems.

This kind of bomb would operate based on the nonlethal technology of gamma rays… The outburst of energy would “fry” electric devicesand currents around the source of the explosion.

Will Israel use this powerful weapon?

In his speech to the United Nations last Thursday (September 27, 2012), Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb. The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.

But he did not go on to say that if Iran crossed that red line, Israel would destroy those nuclear installation by whatever weapons it deems most effective. Having sounded strong and determined up to that point, the Israeli Prime Minister suddenly sounded weak.

I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down. This will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program altogether.

Sanctions and diplomacy, tried for years now, have spectacularly failed.

As long as Barack Obama is president of the US, no red line will be drawn. He won’t even consider it.

Will Israel yet save the world from a nuclear-armed Iran? Will it even act to save itself? If it will, and if not now, when?

“The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),”, to quote Wikipedia, “is a nonpartisan non-profit organization whose stated mission is to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

But “not in the case of the Muhammad movie”, Investor’s Business Daily reports, referring to the video film titled “Innocence of Muslims”, which has been absurdly blamed by the Obama administration for Muslim protests and uprisings across the globe, violent attacks on US embassies, and the torture, sodomizing, and murder of US Ambassador Stevens in Libya.

The silly little film had been on YouTube for months without being taken notice of. Then it was found, pounced on and used by Arab media men, politicians, al-Qaeda leaders, and imams to boost an Islamic campaign to put an end to freedom of speech in the West, particularly in the US. And the Obama administration, ever sympathetic if not passionately devoted to Islam, is doing its best to help them achieve their aim.

And they’re not being opposed in this by the ACLU which exists to defend rights and liberties in America.

Here is more from the IBD report:

The ACLU’s executive director failed to release an official statement condemning the outrageous efforts of the White House to deep-six the film including pressuring YouTube to remove its trailer from the Web. …

Not until The Daily Caller contacted the ACLU did it speak out, and only meekly so. It said it was “concerned” about the White House request to censor the “repellant film.”

The ACLU’s strangely muted response contrasts sharply with its militant reaction to post-9/11 measures to crack down on Islamic terrorists.

“The government has gone to extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent (in the Muslim community) — from censorship and surveillance to detention,” it says on its website, complaining it was “encroaching” on the “free speech rights” of Muslims. …

Where is this bias coming from? Muslims. The ACLU now counts at least eight on its national executive staff alone. In fact, a Muslim runs the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, while another heads its National Security Project.

The irony is not lost on Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The ACLU was founded on the basis that there shouldn’t be any blasphemy laws,” said Emerson … “Yet in the last 10 years, they’ve appointed (to their boards) members of the Muslim Brotherhood who believe in blasphemy laws.”

The top Muslim lawyer in ACLU’s stable is [a Canadian named] Jameel Jaffer, … [who] successfully sued the U.S. to reveal CIA secrets for interrogating terror suspects. …

[Jaffer is] a Muslim activist closely tied to major Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups. [He] now heads the ACLU’s Center for Democracy after heading its National Security Project.

[He is] pals with Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood .. [who] was denied a visa in 2004.  …  Jaffer successfully sued the U.S. to get Ramadan’s visa restored. …  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the six-year ban in 2009. …

Jaffer has lobbied the Justice Department to remove CAIR and other Brotherhood and Hamas front groups from its blacklist of groups complicit in a criminal conspiracy to raise money for terrorists.

He’s also pressured the FBI to purge names of Muslim terrorist suspects from the no-fly list.

What’s more, Jaffer wants to deny the feds one of its most effective weapons in the war on terror — freezing the assets of terrorist front groups.

He’s also sued to kill the government’s drone program, perhaps its most effective weapon of all.

This is who’s controlling the agenda at the ACLU these days. It was bad enough when the group was run by leftists. Now it’s also run by Islamists.

The purposes of Islam could not be more different from the purposes for which the ACLU was created. Plainly the ACLU no longer exists to protect liberty. It is now run by adherents of a movement which opposes liberty.

Is there an American institution of any importance which has not been infiltrated and corrupted by Islam?

According to a February 2012 report, 27% of prisoners released from custody at Guantanamo Bay return to their vocation of terrorism.

We wonder, why only 27%?  What do the rest do? And why are any released while the jihad is still being waged against us?

One of those who graduated from Guantanamo, and was put in the care of that trustworthy fellow Colonel Qaddafi who promised to keep him from doing any more jihad fighting, was – it now transpires – leader of the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in which US Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were killed on the eleventh of this month.

This is from RedState:

As the administration’s false narrative about the events leading up to the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi and the killing of our ambassador continues to unravel, a sordid detail has come to light.

The leader of the the attack is believed to be an alumnus of Guantanamo Bay who was released from custody via an anti-American left wing group headed by an Obama donor….

Abu Sufian bin Qumu, according to his Guantanamo file, was picked up in Pakistan in early 2002 after being identified by the Libyan government (that would be the same government we helped jihadists overthrow) as an al Qaeda operative. He arrived at Guantanamo in May 2002. He had extensive links to a wide variety of Islamist terrorist groups, including the men directly responsible for 9/11. …

Even though the US military recommended he remain in custody, the far left and wildly misnamed Center For Constitutional Rights (CCR) took on bin Qumu as a client and worked to get him released. They were successful and in 2007 he was returned to Libyan custody. He was released from prison as Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi tried to mend fences with radical islamists in 2008. …

The head of the CCR when bin Qumu was released was Michael Ratner [who] endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and contributed $2,300 to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. [He] remains “President Emeritus” of the CCR.

Read how Ratner boasts of getting jihadists released from Guantanamo here.