“It is a direct confrontation between Al-Qaeda on one side, and all those who back the Syrian regime and Iran on the other,” said Hilal al-Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut.

“The two blasts are a direct message to Iran that says: ’You are the origin of the problem in Syria, we will face you directly, not by proxy.’”

The embassy of Iran, which supports Hezbollah and backs Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, is in south Beirut.

At least 25 people were killed and nearly 150 wounded on Tuesday when suicide bombers attacked the embassy, located in a stronghold of the powerful Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah.

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On July 30, a report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) revealed the depth of the betrayal. According to SIGAR, there are at least 43 individuals and companies that are suspected of being “supporters of the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and al Qaeda,” that regularly receive millions of dollars from the U.S. military. To its credit, in the report SIGAR recommends immediately severing all relations to these organizations.

In what has to be one of the most ironic excuses offered by the federal government for maintaining its support for these “enemies of the state,” the SIGAR report claims that such a severance would be unacceptable as it might violate the “due process rights” of the alleged terrorist beneficiaries.

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"It's like the United States government subsidizing the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, those groups that are trying to shoot and kill our soldiers," said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a member of the Senate's Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News with Diane Sawyer".

A list of 43 companies in Afghanistan was compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) using data from both classified Pentagon investigative reports and Commerce Department lists of terror-connected companies.

Among them is a road construction company the U.S. says is partly owned by a leader of the brutal Haqqani network, which was blamed for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that claimed 16 lives in 2011.

The cover letter of a classified investigation by the U.S. Army said there was evidence of a direct role of both the company and its owners "in the facilitation and operation of the Haqqani Network" and that "approximately $1-2 million per month flow[s] to Haqqani Network to finance its activities."

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The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky -- who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.

"We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that," FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said in an ABC News interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News with Diane Sawyer" and "Nightline".

"I wouldn't be surprised if there were many more than that," said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul. "And these are trained terrorists in the art of bombmaking that are inside the United States; and quite frankly, from a homeland security perspective, that really concerns me."

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Later in the day Al-Manar found out that the Yemeni ambassador was lightly injured in the blasts.

Iran's foreign ministry subsequently added that the blast was the work of Israeli mercenaries. Syrian information minister Omran Zoabi to Al-Manar has come out with a similar opinion, saying that Israeli and Saudi intelligence are behind the explosions. Later in the afternoon Reuters reported that Al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam brigades have claimed responsibility for the double suicide bombing.

Russian Foreign Ministry has condemned the attack saying that the international community should give a “principled assessment of this criminal action.”

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HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli security officials said their forces killed three Palestinian militants on Tuesday who were part of an al Qaeda-linked network in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority, which administers the territory, denied the three had had any relation to al Qaeda and accused Israeli of setting out to kill the men.

An official from Israeli's Shin Bet security agency said it had learned from a number of earlier arrests that the network was planning attacks in the coming days against Israeli targets and against the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.

Two of the men were killed when they opened fire on officers trying to arrest them in the area of the city of Hebron, the official said. A number of explosive devices and two guns were found in their vehicle, the official added.

The Israeli military said a third militant was killed in a gunfight after the initial clash.

Al Qaeda-inspired groups have a small presence in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, but are less common in the occupied West Bank, which is policed by Israeli and Palestinian Authority forces.

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Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi royal who seems to own most everything there is to own -- a chunk of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a piece of Twitter, all of Paris’s George V Hotel, the Savoy in London, and a Boeing 747 for his personal use -- was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago the other evening (he and Bill Gates own most of Four Seasons Holdings), offering up the view -- the view of an experienced negotiator from the Middle East -- that U.S. President Barack Obama is outmatched by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran,” he told me, with a directness that would make Benjamin Netanyahu blush. “We’re really concerned -- Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East countries -- about this.”

It is quite something for a Saudi royal to state baldly that his country is part of a tacit alliance with Israel, but Saudi leaders, like Israel’s leaders, are frantic with worry that an overeager Obama will accede to Iran’s desire to become a threshold state, one whose nuclear program is so advanced that it would only need several weeks to assemble a deliverable weapon. Alwaleed, like Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, believes that Iran, in its ongoing negotiations with the world’s major powers, will pocket whatever sanctions relief it gets without committing to ending its nuclear program. “Why are they offering relief?” he asked. “Keep the pressure on. Sanctions are what brought about the negotiations to begin with! Why not keep the pressure up?”

Obama, Alwaleed says, is a man who is in desperate political straits and needs a victory -- any victory -- to right his presidency. “Obama is in so much of a rush to have a deal with Iran,” he said. “He wants anything. He’s so wounded. It’s very scary.

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The United States teamed up with Saudi Arabia in the 1990s to conceive Takfirism, says former CIA officer Robert Baer in his book.

In his 2003 book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer traces the Saudi government’s finance of Takfiri terrorism in Chechnya.

“After I left the CIA, I found my answer in a batch of Russian intelligence reports that drew a convincingly direct link between the Saudi government and the Chechen rebels. It was not a question of Saudi charity money finding its way to the Chechens,” writes Baer.

In June 1998, he said, forty Chechens were “quietly brought to a secret military camp located seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh” to undergo military training for four months.

“A lot of time was set aside for indoctrination into Wahhabi Islam. [Prince] Salman, the governor of Riyadh and the full brother of [then Saudi ruler] King Fahd, was the camp’s sponsor,” writes Baer.

Baer, who spent 21 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, said Saudi Arabia was “directly sponsoring terrorism.”

He noted that the money US pays for crude oil supplied by Saudi Arabia serves terrorist activities.

“For American arms makers, Saudi Arabia is an industry subsector all its own, with its own peculiar rules. We buy oil from Saudi Arabia, refine it, and put it in our automobiles, and a certain small percentage of what we pay for it ends up funding terrorist acts against America and American institutions at home and abroad,” wrote Baer.

He said the center of the global economy is a “kingdom built on thievery, one that nurtures terrorism, destroys any possibility of a middle class based on property rights, and promotes slavery and prostitution.”

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