Marin Katusa of Casey Research writes.

Rumors are swirling that India and Iran are at the negotiating table right now, hammering out a deal to trade oil for gold. Why does that matter, you ask? Only because it strikes at the heart of both the value of the US dollar and today's high-tension standoff with Iran.

Independent report by Robert Fisk.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning -- along with China, Russia, Japan and France -- to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Craig Murray writes:

[...]

It is ludicrous that Kenneth Clarke has announced that the Gibson Inquiry cannot go ahead because of the Metropolitan Police inquiry into rendition and torture anent Libya, when the Leveson Inquiry continues despite the long-running and delberately ineffective police investigations into News International.

[...]

Scotland Yard stated that there is no investigation into complicity with rendition and torture in Libya.

BBC report.

An escalation of a dispute with Iran could see Britain sending military reinforcements to the Gulf, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said.

USA Today reports.

Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces.

The change in policy comes after at least three allied troops have been killed by the Afghan troops they trained in the past month and follows what appears to be the deadliest year of the war for NATO trainers at the hands of their Afghan counterparts.

Craig Murray writes.

The French government has suspended training for Afghan forces after four of their troops were killed by an Afghan soldier under training. Extraordinarily, that makes eight NATO troops killed by their trainees in 2012 already.

[...]

But do not worry: NATO have come up with a brilliant and effective policy response to this problem. They are suppressing statistics on NATO personnel killed or wounded by Afghan army and police personnel. So that's alright, then.

Juan Cole writes.

With all the talk of Iran and Israel among the GOP presidential candidates, it is worth remembering that in this poll of a few years ago, three quarters of Americans could find neither Israel nor Iran on a map. Despite the US being at that time the occupying power in Iraq, some two-thirds couldn't recognize that one, either.

A few more did recognize Iraq than the others, reminding one of Ambrose Peirce's dictum that "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

New York Times report.

Iran's currency, the rial, fell to its lowest level ever against the dollar on Wednesday in unofficial foreign exchange transactions in Tehran, Iranian news agencies reported.

[...]

The Iran Student News Agency and Mehr News Agency said the unofficial black market rate in Tehran was 18,200 rials to the dollar, compared with 11,000 to 12,000 last month.

Guardian report.

The judge-led inquiry into allegations of British collusion in the torture of detainees has been abandoned for the time being, Ken Clarke has announced.

Laura Rozen on her Yahoo! news blog.

[...]

In response to questions about the various theories flying about, several current and former American officials told Yahoo News Sunday on condition of anonymity that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had last month issued a request to the Pentagon that the exercise be postponed. The United States did not seek the delay--and American sources privately voiced concern that the Israeli request for a postponement of the exercise could be read as a potential warning sign that Israel is leaving its options open to conduct a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in the spring. Thus, the concern went, it may not want 5,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Israel in April and May, as had been scheduled for the exercise.

Article in Foreign Policy by Mark Perry.

Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.

Moazzam Begg in the Guardian's Comment is free.

The case of Belhaj -- who was surrounded by men kissing his hands and forehead as a people's liberator (shortly after the visits of David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Recep Tayyip Erdogan) when I met him -- is even more embarrassing for the British government. He, like Saadi, was offered up as a gift to Gaddafi -- the new ally in the "war on terror" back then -- but used skills gained on the battlefields of Afghanistan to lead the rebels in Tripoli to victory as a key leader of the National Transitional Council. The evidence, unlike in the cases of the Guantánamo prisoners, is not hidden in the secret intelligence files of the CIA or MI5/6 that can never be accessed due to "national security" excuses. The smoking gun was uncovered, paradoxically, by western-backed rebels who stormed the headquarters of the Libyan mukhabarat (intelligence); a Human Rights Watch researcher found documents there that revealed clear and friendly communication between Britain and Libya which named Saadi and Belhaj as offerings to help bring Gaddafi in from the cold.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

I do not know the life, background or motivations of one Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who was killed, along with another passenger, when a motorcycle rider out of a Bourne movie stuck a plastic explosive on his car door and blew him to smithereens. What I do know is that he was a scientist working, we're told, as a procurer in Iran's nuclear power/arms program. Does he make the decisions in this theocratic tyranny? Is he responsible for the policy? Maybe he is an adamant Khamenei supporter. Maybe not. But he has been assassinated by someone. How should we respond?

Here's how Rick Santorum responded to these kinds of killings:

On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly.

Guardian report.

The case was brought by the BBC and one of its home affairs correspondents, Dominic Casciani. who had been seeking to broadcast an interview with Ahmed who has been held without trial for longer than anyone else in recent history.

From Danger Room.

How's this for timing: by accident of Navy schedules, the U.S. military now has two aircraft carrier battle groups near Iran's shores, with a third on her way, right as a bomb killed an Iranian nuclear scientist and Iran threatens to close off a key waterway. But while there was just one carrier in the region for weeks, the Pentagon insists that its ship movements aren't a response to Tehran's recent bellicosity.

Cory Doctorow writes. Read this important article.

[...]

We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

Guardian report.

An Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility has been killed in a bomb explosion, the latest in a series of assassinations and attempted killings linked by the country's authorities to a secret war by Israel and the US to stop the development of what Tehran insists would be a peaceful nuclear capability.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in central Iran, died after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

Reuters report.

Israel's government broke all its settlement-building records in 2011, diminishing prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Israel's anti-settlement activist group "Peace Now" said Tuesday.

Independent report.

When you have already spent half a million pounds on rent, £300,000 on furniture and £2.3m paying your staff, an extra £8m on unexplained "administrative expenses" might seem to be stretching credulity, but that is what Tony Blair has told Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which as a consequence has received a rather smaller cheque from the former Prime Minister than it might have expected.

new York Times report.

The imminent opening of the enrichment site -- the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum -- confronts the United States and its allies with difficult choices about how far to go to limit Iran's nuclear abilities. The new facility is buried deep underground on a well-defended military site and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz, limiting what Israeli officials, in particular, consider an important deterrent to Iran's nuclear aims.

Guardian report.

An Iranian court has convicted an American man of working for the CIA and sentenced him to death, according to reports on state radio.

Iran charges that as a former US marine, Amir Hekmati, received special training and served at US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan before heading to Iran for his alleged intelligence mission.

Telegraph report.

Mr Musharraf will announce his intention to return from London where has been living in exile despite facing arrest by the civilian government on treason charges.

"His return will be announced by video link at a rally in Pakistan on Sunday," a source close to the former president told the Daily Telegraph.

Independent report.

An explosion ripped through a busy intersection in the Syrian capital today, hitting a bus carrying police and killing up to 25 people in what Syrian authorities said was the second suicide attack in as many weeks.

[...]

Also today, SANA said terrorists blew up a pipeline that carries diesel from the central province of Homs to nearby Hama. There have been several pipeline blasts in recent months, but it is unclear who is behind them.

Guardian report.

The naval commander for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said the drill in February would be "different compared to previous exercises held by the IRGC". The Iranian navy finished 10 days of exercises in the Gulf on Monday, during which it tested a range of new missiles. It warned that Iran could close the strait of Hormuz, the narrowest point in the Gulf, through which a fifth of the world's traded oil passes.

On the same day, the Israeli military said it was preparing for joint exercises with the US to rehearse missile defence and co-operation between the forces. The manoeuvres, which are codenamed Austere Challenge 12 and involve thousands of troops, have been planned for some time and were hailed by Israeli and US officials as their biggest joint drill.

Telegraph report.

A roadside bomb targeting Shiite pilgrims killed 44 people in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Thursday, following bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 29.

Officials said 44 people died and 72 were wounded in the attack, which occurred just west of Nasiriyah as pilgrims were walking to the holy shrine city of Karbala for Arbaeen commemorations.

The attack came on the same day two Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad were targeted in bombings that left at least 23 people dead.

Craig Murray writes:

David Miliband and William Hague are implicated in three entirely new Adam Werritty/Matthew Gould meetings admitted by the FCO in response to one of my FOI requests. Gould's meetings with Werritty, in his capacity as Principal Private Secretary to first Miliband and then Hague, were entirely left out of Gus O'Donnell's "investigation" into Werritty's activities.

Jerusalem Post article.

Israel is moving forward with plans to hold the largest-ever missile defense exercise in its history this spring amid Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.

Last week, Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US's Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel.

The drill, which is unprecedented in its size, will include the establishment of US command posts in Israel and IDF command posts at EUCOM headquarters in Germany -- with the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.

From Mondoweiss.

On Dec 20 Jerusalem Post reported thousands of American soldiers were deploying to Israel to take part in the "the largest-ever missile defense exercise" in Israel's history.

We're back, after a seven month gap.