(GLOBALRESEARCH) Terrorism with a “Human Face”: Rebranding the Public Image of Syria’s Al Qaeda Brigades
By Phil Greaves
Global Research, January 07, 2014
SYRIA: Testimonies from Homs Reveal Identity of Terrorists and Mercenaries involved in Atrocities
Western corporate media, its Oil and Gas counterparts (GCC), and the various acolytes and paid-propagandists in the “tailored analysis” industry, are once again attempting to bolster and rebrand the public image of the fundamentalist rebels in Syria.
In the space of a week, two new formations of armed rebels mysteriously appeared across the mass-media lexicon and declared war on the dominant extremists through the usual “activist” social media accounts. The new brigades have virtually no historical record in the conflict, and appear to be largely a creation of the impotent exile opposition and its western sponsors. An abundance of reports relay stories of the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) simply abandoning their posts and being turned over by this supposedly “moderate” new force.
Yet, in reality, the most predominant militia in Syria – those of a Salafi-Wahhabi fundamentalist bent, who now fight under the umbrella of the Islamic Front (IF), and are led by Hassan Abboud of Ahrar al-Sham, and Zahran Alloush of Liwa al-Islam – have made a concerted effort to avoid sowing discord between themselves and the overt Al Qaeda affiliates of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN).
The new narrative emerging draws heavily from the Sahwa (Awakening) in Iraq, in which Sunni tribes from the western province of Anbar took up arms against, and eventually defeated, the Al Qaeda insurgency that followed the US invasion and occupation of that country. Western and Gulf media are now attempting to reinvigorate the rebels’ public image by concocting a portrayal of brave “moderates” taking on the extremists within ISIS. Yet contrary to the Syria-Sahwa narrative, the vast majority of opposition forces, as much as one can generalise, have in fact been shown to share far more in common with their extremist equivalents than they have differences, particularly in regards to their reciprocal – and sectarian-laden – religiopolitical ideologies.
According to Western and Gulf propagandists, Jabhat al-Nusra ostensibly represent the “homegrown” Syrian Al Qaeda branch. Whereas in actual fact, the claim is entirely false; JaN’s militia hold a distinct foreign contingent and many of its commanders have also been found to be of foreign descent – particularly Iraqi. Jabhat al-Nusra, therefore, should be correctly viewed as a semi-Syrian militia at most, built and sustained by ISIS and its former incarnation: the Islamic State of Iraq, (ISI) also formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
The ideologically aligned Salafi-Jihadists of Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, and more recently ISIS, have formed the spearhead of the insurgency throughout the entire Syrian crisis, leading offensives against Syrian army installations, whilst also having enough manpower, funds & materiel to attack, encamp and militarily fortify civilian areas across the country. Most notably in Raqqah, which has become a virtual Al Qaeda statelet under the control of either Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS.
Examples of the dominant role fundamentalists have played in the insurgency are abundant, during an interview with TIME magazine, Ahrar al-Sham fighters – who, as we have seen through a plethora of evidence, are inextricably linked to Jabhat al-Nusra – freely admit they were planning a violent insurgency in Syria well before any peaceful protests occurred in 2011, and that recruits with underlying sectarian agendas made efforts to sanitize and mask their true Jihadist cause during the earlier phases of the conflict in order to win over the Syrian population. Whats more, a recent report in the National relayed much the same admissions from supposed “FSA” rebels operating in the south of Syria around Dar’aa.
The rebels interviewed admitted that
“They [JaN] offer their services and cooperate with us, they are better armed than we are, they have suicide bombers and know how to make car bombs,” rebel sources went on to say that “the FSA and Al Nusra join together for operations but they have an agreement to let the FSA lead for public reasons, because they don’t want to frighten Jordan or the West,”.
During the interview rebels further elaborate on the efforts made to boost the public image of the western-backed imaginary moderates saying that “operations that were really carried out by Al Nusra are publicly presented by the FSA as their own,” and that supposed moderate FSA fighters “say that Al Nusra fighters are really from the FSA to enable them to move more easily across borders,”. The reports bolster earlier analyses that contradict the dominant narrative, often dismissed as “conspiracy theory”, which indicated such actions were being undertaken, and that the armed groups responsible for the initial violence in March-April 2011 were indeed religious fundamentalists, not the secular “freedom fighters” endlessly lionized by the lackeys of western governments and media.
Such candid rebel admissions once again expose the falsehoods that liberal opportunists rely on when blindly repeating the Imperialist narrative of a peaceful protest movement simply morphing into an Al Qaeda-led insurgency. In reality, the generally small and legitimate protests calling for reform were used as a fig leaf by Syria’s various internal and external enemies to hide the extremist-led militant insurgency they were orchestrating and colluding with.
As evidenced in numerous interviews and statements from Abboud and Alloush, the Islamic Front is not by any stretch of the imagination a “moderate” force opposed to JaN, ISIS, or Al Qaeda ideology in general (unless one utilises the doublespeak of the US State Department when describing their “moderate” Wahhabi-Salafi monarchical clients in the Gulf). Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa a-Islam and other various proto-Salafi militia operating under the umbrella of the Islamic Front have repeatedly fought alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, and taken part in offensives that have targeted towns and villages on the specific criteria of the sect of the civilian inhabitants. The massacres committed upon the civilian residents of Latakia provide just one recent example of such sectarian barbarity – committed not only by the extreme elements, but with the full cooperation and participation of supposed moderate “FSA” militia. A more recent example of the Islamic Front cooperating with its Al Qaeda-affiliates came in December, when the IF took part in the attack and ensuing massacre of civilians in the workers district of Adra, Damascus – another rebel war-crime almost totally omitted from western media, regardless of the fact the BBC’s chief foreign correspondent was a mere 20 miles away while the massacres were occurring.
When framed in the correct context, it becomes clear that the vast majority of rebels in Syria are in fact ideologically allied to the very Al Qaeda affiliates the media is trying to portray them as opposed to. A recent communique from the political head of the IF, and leader of Ahrar al-Sham, Hassan Abboud, was disingenuously portrayed as a Islamic Front “warning” to ISIS. Opposition-friendly media outlets and analysts are in effect conflating the Islamic Front with imaginary “moderates” and in turn attempting to portray them as ideological opponents to their more extreme Al Qaeda counterparts. This narrative is turning reality on its head, as Abboud’s recent statement is actually a “warning” against discord with ISIS. Abboud encourages the Syrian population to treat the Muhajirin (foreign jihadists busy murdering Syrians) “kindly”, and further encourages ISIS to emulate the “more healthy” manner of their supposed “home-grown” incarnation Jabhat al-Nusra. Accordingly, one can safely conclude that Abboud, Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa al-Islam, and the various Salafi militia operating under the umbrella of the Islamic Front – the largest militant force of the opposition – have close to zero ideological disparity with ISIS or JaN.
Even if what seem to be inflated reports of discord and infighting between the Islamic Front and the supremacist ideologues in ISIS were to result in a considerable loss for the latter, it would simply be replaced at the top of the fundamentalist food-chain by the next militia willing to impose its barbarity and coercion in the most effective way. This is ultimately the inherent nature of fundamentalist militant insurgencies, they are designed, indoctrinated, equipped, and funded to impose upon states and peoples through murder, coercion and fear, not through the appeal of a popular political doctrine and the mass support of the people. The simple facts that the insurgency as a whole is under no central hierarchy, and holds little to-no support inside Syria and is therefore susceptible to becoming reliant and subordinate to its foreign patrons, are clear indications that it will not be cohesive, regardless of the varying shades of fundamentalism the dominant groups have attempted to enforce.
The historical record of Western-GCC-backed insurgencies in the Arab and Muslim world provides copious amounts of evidence to show that invariably the United States and its Saudi partners have always utilised, fomented, and sponsored reactionary forces to meet geopolitical ends, particularly when subverting or attacking nationalist governments that refuse to abide by the Anglo-American capitalist order – with disastrous consequences for the countries in which the fundamentalist proxies are set upon.
One needs only to glance at the very recent history of Libya to negate the establishment falsehood that if the Syrian government had been overthrown quickly the fundamentalists would not have gained in strength. Again, this is turning the historical record on its head, as the joint NATO-Al Qaeda war on Libya has once again shown; the swift overthrow of a state’s government and leadership inevitably results in reactionary fundamentalists taking advantage of the power vacuum left behind. The US-Saudi-backed insurgency in Afghanistan during the 1980?s, which fought against the Soviet-backed Communist government, provides perhaps the definitive example of the type of proxies the United States and Saudi Arabia choose to employ to destroy target states. As with Syria and Libya, the original “Afghan Arab” insurgency – which helped to create and empower Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, Hekmatyar, the Haqqani network and a host of other fundamentalist militancy – was wrought with infighting, extremism, warlordism, and reaction, this trend has continued in virtually every state the US and its GCC partners have targeted for “liberation” via jihadist proxies.
Perpetual infighting evidenced throughout the Syrian insurgency is in fact a result of the long-standing fragmentation of the various opposition forces, their varying degrees of fundamentalism, and the battle to win influence, arms, and funds through foreign donors and exploitation.
The evidence-free narratives of supposed existential disparity between what actually represent ideological allies, the patterns of ever-changing nomenclature and rebel rebranding, and the efforts to scapegoat the most overtly extreme elements for the systematic crimes of the opposition as a whole, are nothing more than public relations exercises, designed to whitewash the massive crimes of the “rebels”, whilst extricating the Western Elite and their GCC partners from the criminal act of sponsoring extremists for geopolitical ends.
Phil Greaves is a UK based writer on UK/US Foreign Policy, with a focus on the Arab World, post WWII. http://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/
Labels: AL-QAEDA, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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(CFR) Transferring CIA Drone Strikes to the Pentagon
Policy Innovation Memorandum No. 31
Author: Micah Zenko, Douglas Dillon Fellow
Download Now
Full Text of Memorandum (96K PDF)
Publisher Council on Foreign Relations Press
Release Date April 2013
The main obstacle to acknowledging the scope, legality, and oversight of U.S. targeted killings beyond traditional or "hot" battlefields is the division of lead executive authority between the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)—a subunit of the Department of Defense (DOD) Special Operations Command—and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In particular, the U.S. government cannot legally acknowledge covert actions undertaken by the CIA. The failure to answer the growing demands for transparency increases the risk that U.S. drone strikes will be curtailed or eliminated due to mounting domestic or international pressure. To take a meaningful first step toward greater transparency, President Barack Obama should sign a directive that consolidates lead executive authority for planning and conducting nonbattlefield targeted killings under DOD.
One Mission, Two Programs
U.S. targeted killings are needlessly made complex and opaque by their division between two separate entities: JSOC and the CIA. Although drone strikes carried out by the two organizations presumably target the same people, the organizations have different authorities, policies, accountability mechanisms, and oversight. Splitting the drone program between the JSOC and CIA is apparently intended to allow the plausible deniability of CIA strikes. Strikes by the CIA are classified as Title 50 covert actions, defined as "activities of the United States Government . . . where it is intended that the role . . . will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly, but does not include traditional . . . military activities." As covert operations, the government cannot legally provide any information about how the CIA conducts targeted killings, while JSOC operations are guided by Title 10 "armed forces" operations and a publicly available military doctrine. Joint Publication 3-60, Joint Targeting, details steps in the joint targeting cycle, including the processes, responsibilities, and collateral damage estimations intended to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties. Unlike strikes carried out by the CIA, JSOC operations can be (and are) acknowledged by the U.S. government.
The different reporting requirements of JSOC and the CIA mean that congressional oversight of U.S. targeted killings is similarly murky. Sometimes oversight is duplicated among the committees; at other times, there is confusion over who is mandated to oversee which operations. CIA drone strikes are reported to the intelligence committees. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), has confirmed that the SSCI receives poststrike notifications, reviews video footage, and holds monthly meetings to "question every aspect of the program." Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI), chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), has said that he reviews both CIA and JSOC counterterrorism airstrikes. JSOC does not report to the HPSCI. As of March 2012, all JSOC counterterrorism operations are reported quarterly to the armed services committees. Meanwhile, the foreign relations committees—tasked with overseeing all U.S. foreign policy and counterterrorism strategies—have formally requested briefings on drone strikes that have been repeatedly denied by the White House. However, oversight should not be limited to ensuring compliance with the law and preventing abuses, but rather expanded to ensure that policies are consistent with strategic objectives and aligned with other ongoing military and diplomatic activities. This can only be accomplished by DOD operations because the foreign relations committees cannot hold hearings on covert CIA drone strikes.
Consolidating Executive Authority
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission recommended that the "lead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department" to avoid the "creation of redundant, overlapping capabilities and authorities in such sensitive work." The recommendation was never seriously considered because the CIA wanted to retain its covert action authorities and, more important, it was generally believed such operations would remain a rarity. (At the time, there had been only one nonbattlefield targeted killing.) Nearly a decade later, there is increasing bipartisan consensus that consolidating lead executive authority for drone strikes would pave the way for broader strategic reforms, including declassifying the relevant legal memoranda, explicitly stating which international legal principles apply, and providing information to the public on existing procedures that prevent harm to civilians. During his February 2013 nomination hearing, CIA director John O. Brennan welcomed the transfer of targeted killings to the DOD: "The CIA should not be doing traditional military activities and operations."
The main objection to consolidating lead executive authority in DOD is that it would eliminate the possibility of deniability for U.S. covert operations. However, any diplomatic or public relations advantages from deniability that once existed are minimal or even nonexistent given the widely reported targeted killings in Pakistan and Yemen. For instance, because CIA drone strikes cannot be acknowledged, the United States has effectively ceded its strategic communications efforts to the Pakistani army and intelligence service, nongovernmental organizations, and the Taliban. Moreover, Pakistani and Yemeni militaries have often taken advantage of this communications vacuum by shifting the blame of civilian casualties caused by their own airstrikes (or others, like those reportedly conducted by Saudi Arabia in Yemen) to the U.S. government. This perpetuates and exacerbates animosity in civilian populations toward the United States. If the United States acknowledged its drone strikes and collateral damage—only possible under DOD Title 10 authorities—then it would not be held responsible for airstrikes conducted by other countries.
The CIA should, however, retain the ability it has had since 9/11 to conduct lethal covert actions in extremely rare circumstances, such as against immediate threats to the U.S. homeland or diplomatic outposts. Each would require a separate presidential finding, and should be fully and currently informed to the intelligence committees. Of the roughly 420 nonbattlefield targeted killings that the United States has conducted, very few would have met this criteria.
The president should direct that U.S. drone strikes be conducted as DOD Title 10 operations. That decision would enhance U.S. national security in the following ways:
* Improve the transparency and legitimacy of targeted killings, including what methods are used to prevent civilian harm.
* Focus the finite resources of the CIA on its original core missions of intelligence collection, analysis, and early warning. (There is no reason for the CIA to maintain a redundant fleet of armed drones, or to conduct military operations that are inherently better suited to JSOC, the premier specialized military organization. As "traditional military activities" under U.S. law, these belong under Title 10 operations.)
* Place all drone strikes under a single international legal framework, which would be clearly delineated for military operations and can therefore be articulated publicly.
* Unify congressional oversight of specific operations under the armed services committee, which would end the current situation whereby there is confusion over who has oversight responsibility.
* Allow U.S. government officials to counter myths and misinformation about targeted killings at home and abroad by acknowledging responsibility for its own strikes.
* Increase pressure on other states to be more transparent in their own conduct of military and paramilitary operations in nonbattlefield settings by establishing the precedent that the Obama administration claims can have a normative influence on how others use drones.
A First Step Forward
In an interview, President Obama revealed, "I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come—partly because technology may evolve fairly rapidly for other countries as well." The Obama administration has two central objectives for its targeted killing reforms: preventing constraints on its ability to conduct lethal operations and setting precedents for the use of armed drones by other states. By law, institutional culture, and customary practice, drone strikes conducted by the CIA cannot reach the minimum thresholds of transparency and accountability required to achieve either objective. JSOC is also a highly secretive organization, but the United States could provide a much clearer and more detailed explanation of the outstanding issues regarding targeted killing without compromising the military's sources and methods—should the president prioritize such change. Moreover, according to a February 2013 poll, U.S. public support for military drone strikes (75 percent) was higher than for those conducted by the CIA (65 percent). Without ending CIA targeted killings, the Obama administration cannot undertake any of the reforms that it has stated are necessary both to ensure drone strikes do not go the way of third-country renditions and enhanced interrogation techniques, but also to establish the precedents of greater openness in how such operations are conducted by others.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, CIA, TERRORISM
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) Destroying a Nation State: US-Saudi Funded Terrorists Sowing Chaos in Pakistan
Baluchistan, Target of Western geopolitical interests, Terror wave coincides with Gwadar Port handover to China. The Hidden Agenda is the Breakup of Pakistan
By Tony Cartalucci
Global Research, December 24, 2013
landdestroyer.blogspot.com and Global Research 12 February 2013
Region: Asia
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', US NATO War Agenda
In-depth Report: PAKISTAN
[originally published in February 2013]
Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province, bordering both US-occupied Afghanistan as well as Iran, was the site of a grisly market bombing that has killed over 80 people. According to reports, the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility for the attack. Billed as a “Sunni extremist group,” it instead fits the pattern of global terrorism sponsored by the US, Israel, and their Arab partners Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The terrorist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group was in fact created, according to the BBC, to counter Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the 1980?s, and is still active today. Considering the openly admitted US-Israeli-Saudi plot to use Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups across the Middle East to counter Iran’s influence, it begs the question whether these same interests are funding terrorism in Pakistan to not only counter Iranian-sympathetic Pakistani communities, but to undermine and destabilize Pakistan itself.
The US-Saudi Global Terror Network
While the United States is close allies with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it is well established that the chief financier of extremist militant groups for the past 3 decades, including Al Qaeda, are in fact Saudi Arabia and Qatar. While Qatari state-owned propaganda like Al Jazeera apply a veneer of progressive pro-democracy to its narratives, Qatar itself is involved in arming, funding, and even providing direct military support for sectarian extremists from northern Mali, to Libya, to Syria and beyond.
France 24?s report “Is Qatar fuelling the crisis in north Mali?” provides a useful vignette of Saudi-Qatari terror sponsorship, stating:
“The MNLA [secular Tuareg separatists], al Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine and MUJAO [movement for unity and Jihad in West Africa] have all received cash from Doha.”
A month later Sadou Diallo, the mayor of the north Malian city of Gao [which had fallen to the Islamists] told RTL radio: “The French government knows perfectly well who is supporting these terrorists. Qatar, for example, continues to send so-called aid and food every day to the airports of Gao and Timbuktu.”
The report also stated:
“Qatar has an established a network of institutions it funds in Mali, including madrassas, schools and charities that it has been funding from the 1980s,” he wrote, adding that Qatar would be expecting a return on this investment.
“Mali has huge oil and gas potential and it needs help developing its infrastructure,” he said. “Qatar is well placed to help, and could also, on the back of good relations with an Islamist-ruled north Mali, exploit rich gold and uranium deposits in the country.”
These institutions are present not only in Mali, but around the world, and provide a nearly inexhaustible supply of militants for both the Persian Gulf monarchies and their Western allies to use both as a perpetual casus belli to invade and occupy foreign nations such as Mali and Afghanistan, as well as a sizable, persistent mercenary force, as seen in Libya and Syria. Such institutions jointly run by Western intelligence agencies across Europe and in America, fuel domestic fear-mongering and the resulting security state that allows Western governments to more closely control their populations as they pursue reckless, unpopular policies at home and abroad.
Since Saudi-Qatari geopolitical interests are entwined with Anglo-American interests, both the “investment” and “return on this investment” are clearly part of a joint venture. France’s involvement in Mali has demonstrably failed to curb such extremists, has instead, predictably left the nation occupied by Western interests while driving terrorists further north into the real target, Algeria.
Additionally, it should be noted, that France in particular, played a leading role along side Qatar and Saudi Arabia in handing Libya over to these very same extremists. French politicians were in Benghazi shaking hands with militants they would be “fighting” in the near future in northern Mali.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is Part of US-Saudi Terror Network
In terms of Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, as well as the infamous Lashkar-e-Taiba that carried out the 2008 Mumbai, India attack killing over 160, both are affiliates of Al Qaeda, and both have been linked financially, directly to Saudi Arabia. In the Guardian’s article, “WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists,” the US State Department even acknowledges that Saudi Arabia is indeed funding terrorism in Pakistan:
Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton.
“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said.
Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has also been financially linked to the Persian Gulf monarchies. Stanford University’s “Mapping Militant Organizations: Lashkar-e-Jhangvi,” states under “External Influences:”
LeJ has received money from several Persian Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates[25] These countries funded LeJ and other Sunni militant groups primarily to counter the rising influence of Iran’s revolutionary Shiism.
Astonishingly, despite these admission, the US works politically, financially, economically, and even militarily in tandem with these very same state-sponsors of rampant, global terrorism. In Libya and Syria, the US has even assisted in the funding and arming of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, and had conspired with Saudi Arabia since at least 2007 to overthrow both Syria and Iran with these terrorist groups. And while Saudi Arabia funds terrorism in Pakistan, the US is well documented to be funding political subversion in the very areas where the most heinous attacks are being carried out.
US Political Subversion in Baluchistan, Pakistan
The US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been directly funding and supporting the work of the “Balochistan Institute for Development” (BIFD) which claims to be “the leading resource on democracy, development and human rights in Balochistan, Pakistan.” In addition to organizing the annual NED-BFID “Workshop on Media, Democracy & Human Rights” BFID reports that USAID had provided funding for a “media-center” for the Baluchistan Assembly to “provide better facilities to reporters who cover the proceedings of the Balochistan Assembly.” We must assume BFID meant reporters “trained” at NED-BFID workshops.
Image: A screenshot of “Voice of Balochistan’s” special US State Department message. While VOB fails to disclose its funding, it is a sure bet it, like other US-funded propaganda fronts, is nothing more than a US State Department outlet. (click image to enlarge)
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Images: In addition to the annual Fortune 500-funded “Balochistan International Conference,” the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy has been busy at work building up Baluchistan’s “civil society” network. This includes support for the “Balochistan Institute For Development,” which maintains a “BIFD Leadership Academy,” claiming to “mobilize, train and encourage youth to play its effective role in promotion of democracy development and rule of law.” The goal is to subvert Pakistani governance while simultaneously creating a homogeneous “civil society” that interlocks with the West’s “international institutions.” This is how modern empire perpetuates itself.
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There is also Voice of Balochistan whose every top-story is US-funded propaganda drawn from foundation-funded Reporters Without Borders, Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, and even a direct message from the US State Department itself. Like other US State Department funded propaganda outfits around the world – such as Thailand’s Prachatai – funding is generally obfuscated in order to maintain “credibility” even when the front’s constant torrent of obvious propaganda more than exposes them.
http://www.bso-na.org/sitebuilder/images/bsona-929x195.jpg
Image: Far from parody, this is the header taken from the “Baloch Society of North America” website.
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Perhaps the most absurd operations being run to undermine Pakistan through the “Free Baluchistan” movement are the US and London-based organizations. The “Baloch Society of North America” almost appears to be a parody at first, but nonetheless serves as a useful aggregate and bellwether regarding US meddling in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. The group’s founder, Dr. Wahid. Baloch, openly admits he has met with US politicians in regards to Baluchistan independence. This includes Neo-Con warmonger, PNAC signatory, corporate-lobbyist, and National Endowment for Democracy director Zalmay Khalilzad.
Dr. Wahid Baloch considers Baluchistan province “occupied” by both the Iranian and Pakistani governments – he and his movement’s humanitarian hand-wringing gives Washington the perfect pretext to create an armed conflagration against either Iran or Pakistan, or both, as planned in detail by various US policy think-tanks.
There is also the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad, or BSO. While it maintains a presence in Pakistan, it has coordinators based in London. London-based BSO members include “information secretaries” that propagate their message via social media, just as US and British-funded youth organizations did during the West’s operations against other targeted nations during the US-engineered “Arab Spring.”
Image: A screenshot of a “Baloch Human rights activist and information secretary of BSO Azad London zone” Twitter account. This user, in tandem with look-alike accounts has been propagating anti-Pakistani, pro-”Free Baluchistan” propaganda incessantly. They also engage in coordinated attacks with prepared rhetoric against anyone revealing US ties to Baluchistan terrorist organizations.
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And while the US does not openly admit to funding and arming terrorists in Pakistan yet, many across established Western policy think-tanks have called for it.
http://landdestroyer.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/pakistanmap1.png
Image: Why Baluchistan? Gwadar in the southwest serves as a Chinese port and the starting point for a logistical corridor through Pakistan and into Chinese territory. The Iranian-Pakistani-Indian pipeline would enter from the west, cross through Baluchistan intersecting China’s proposed logistical route to the northern border, and continue on to India. Destabilizing Baluchistan would effectively derail the geopolitical aspirations of four nations.
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Selig Harrison of the Center for International Policy, has published two pieces regarding the armed “liberation” of Baluchistan.
Harrison’s February 2011 piece, “Free Baluchistan,” calls to “aid the 6 million Baluch insurgents fighting for independence from Pakistan in the face of growing ISI repression.” He continues by explaining the various merits of such meddling by stating:
“Pakistan has given China a base at Gwadar in the heart of Baluch territory. So an independent Baluchistan would serve U.S. strategic interests in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamist forces.”
Harrison would follow up his frank call to carve up Pakistan by addressing the issue of Chinese-Pakistani relations in a March 2011 piece titled, “The Chinese Cozy Up to the Pakistanis.” He states:
“China’s expanding reach is a natural and acceptable accompaniment of its growing power—but only up to a point. ”
He continues:
“To counter what China is doing in Pakistan, the United States should play hardball by supporting the movement for an independent Baluchistan along the Arabian Sea and working with Baluch insurgents to oust the Chinese from their budding naval base at Gwadar. Beijing wants its inroads into Gilgit and Baltistan to be the first step on its way to an Arabian Sea outlet at Gwadar.”
While aspirations of freedom and independence are used to sell Western meddling in Pakistan, the geopolitical interests couched behind this rhetoric is openly admitted to. The prophetic words of Harrison should ring loud in one’s ears today. It is in fact this month, that Pakistan officially hands over the port in Gwadar to China, and Harrison’s armed militants are creating bloodshed and chaos, attempting to trigger a destructive sectarian war that will indeed threaten to “oust the Chinese from their budding naval base at Gwadar.”
Like in Syria, we have a documented conspiracy years in the making being carried out before our very eyes. The people of Pakistan must not fall into the trap laid by the West who seeks to engulf Baluchistan in sectarian bloodshed with the aid of Saudi and Qatari-laundered cash and weapons. For the rest of the world, we must continue to uncover the corporate-financier special interests driving these insidious plots, boycott and permanently replace them on a local level.
The US-Saudi terror racket has spilled blood from New York City, across Northern Africa, throughout the Middle East, and as far as Pakistan and beyond. If we do not undermine and ultimately excise these special interests, their plans and double games will only get bolder and the inevitability of their engineered chaos effecting us individually will only grow.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, PAKISTAN, SAUDI ARABIA, TERRORISM
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) NATO’s War on Syria Just Got Dirtier
By Tony Cartalucci
Global Research, December 10, 2013
Land Destroyer
West scrambles to cover up Syria false flag revelations as Pulitzer Prize-winner & Syria’s Electronic Army expose all.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who had warned as early as 2007 of US-Israeli-Saudi plans to use Al Qaeda as proxies to overthrow the Syrian government, has published another groundbreaking report titled, “Whose Sarin?” In it, Hersh states (emphasis added):
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
The lengthy report goes on in detail, covering the manner in which Western leaders intentionally manipulated or even outright fabricated intelligence to justify military intervention in Syria – eerily similar to the lies told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Image: The Syrian Arab Army is decisively winning the the war through conventional means and would only invite the one possible method of changing that, foreign invention, through the use of chemical weapons. Commonsense, the evidence, and even the liars who would say otherwise, all point to NATO-backed terrorists as the culprits behind chemical weapon use in Syria’s ongoing conflict.
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The report also reveals that Al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, was identified by US intelligence agencies long ago for possessing chemical weapons. These are the same terrorists Hersh warned about in his 2007 article titled, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which prophetically stated (emphasis added):
“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
Hersh has now warned the public of both a conspiracy by the West to use terrorists to overthrow the sovereign government of Syria (which has unfolded exactly as was predicted years ago), as well as their use of chemical weapons. He has also exposed the systematic manner in which the West has lied about the August 21, 2013 gas attack in Damascus.
As Hersh summed up his latest report, he asked a fundamental question those still insisting the Syrian government was behind the attack have failed to answer:
The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.
The West abandoned its plans for military intervention in Syria because the world rejected its narrative, and despite assurances that the West had air tight intelligence, after many months still, the lid is tightly closed. It is clear that the West desired military intervention in the worst way, and had it possessed real intelligence linking the attacks to the Syrian government, it surely would have revealed it. As Hersh points out, they never had such evidence to begin with and depended entirely on their ability to sell yet another pack of lies to the public.
Armchair “Experts” to the Rescue
But even with the West’s capitulation in Syria, and months passing without a shred of credible evidence produced, hacks among Western media continue to perpetuate the original narrative. Among these are of course corporate-financier funded think-tanks and propaganda fronts like the Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy Magazine, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), and establishment papers like the Guardian. In the middle of it all is couch-potato self-proclaimed weapons expert, Eliot Higgins, a representation of the West’s propaganda 2.0 campaign.
UK-based Higgins lost his job and now spends his days combing social media sites for “evidence” he then analyzes and reports on. The Western media, with its propagandists expelled from Syria and many of its “sources” in Syria exposed in humiliating attempts to fabricate and manipulate evidence, quickly picked Higgins up and elevated his armchair blogging to “expert analysis.” Since then, Higgins has joined the already discredited “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” another UK-based individual, as the basis upon which the West’s Syrian narrative spins.
The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker, who has maintained a particularly suspicious proximity to Higgins and his work, recently published a startling condemnation of venerated Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh. In a hit piece titled, “Investigating chemical weapons in Syria - Seymour Hersh and Brown Moses go head to head,” “Brown Moses” referring to Eliot Higgins’ alias, Whitaker claims:
In the blue corner, Seymour Hersh, one of America’s most famous and highly paid investigative reporters. In the red corner,
Eliot Higgins, who sits at home in an English provincial town trawling the internet and tweets and blogs about his findings under the screen name Brown Moses.
On Sunday, in a 5,000-word article for the London Review of Books, Hersh suggested Syrian rebels, rather than the regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attacks near Damascus on August 21.
On Monday, Higgins responded on the Foreign Policy website, demolishing the core of Hersh’s argument in a mere 1,700 words.
While seeking to re-ignite the “whodunnit” debate about chemical weapons, Hersh’s article unwittingly revealed a lot about the changing nature of investigative journalism. Hersh is old-school. He operates in a world of hush-hush contacts – often-anonymous well-placed sources passing snippets of information around which he constructs an article that challenges received wisdom.
The Hersh style of journalism certainly has a place, but in the age of the internet it’s a diminishing one – as the web-based work of Higgins and others continually shows.
Whitaker is desperately attempting to keep the wheels on the establishment’s new propaganda 2.0 vehicle – manipulating social media, much the way Hersh describes intelligence being manipulated, to create any outcome necessary to bolster a predetermined narrative.
What he doesn’t address is the fact that Higgins’ work almost entirely depends on videos posted online by people he does not know, who may be misrepresenting who they are, what they are posting, and their motivations for doing so – such is the nature of anonymity on the web and why this evidence alone is useless outside of a larger geopolitical context.
Both Whitaker and Higgins, who maintain that the Syrian government was behind the attacks, fail to address another glaring reality. A false flag attack is designed to look like the work of one’s enemy. In other words, terrorists in Syria would use equipment, uniforms, weapons, and tactics that would pin the crime on the Syrian government. All Higgins has proved, thus far, is that the superficial details of the operation made for a convincing false flag attack.
Claims the Militants Can’t Produce or Properly Handle Chemical Weapons are False
Whitaker hails Higgins’ Foreign Policy piece arrogantly titled, “Sy Hersh’s Chemical Misfire,” but in reality, all Higgins does is point out specifics of the attack, some of which are confirmed, some of which are implied – all of which could either have been the work of the government or militants. The question Higgins fails to answer is what motivation would the government have had to carry out the attacks with the UN based just miles away and with government forces already decisively winning the war with conventional weapons? The only possible scenario that would lead to the Syrian government losing this conflict now would be foreign military intervention – and the best way to make that happen would be by using chemical weapons.
Toward the end of Higgin’s piece, he, like his friends at the Guardian, attempt to claim Al Nusra, contrary to Hersh’s report, are most likely not capable of producing sarin. He states (emphasis added):
I asked chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta for his opinion on that. He compared the possibility of Jabhat al-Nusra using chemical weapons to another terrorist attack involving sarin: the 1996 gassing of the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
“The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons,” Kaszeta said. “Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we’re looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people — not just one al Qaeda member — needed to produce this amount of material?”
Of course, to call Al Nusra a nonstate actor is not entirely truthful. Al Nusra and other extremist networks inside of Syria have had the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel’s backing since at least as early as 2007. Since 2011, Qatar and Turkey have also played immense roles in supporting Al Nusra – with NATO-member Turkey providing them sanctuary and even logistical support. Higgins and his “expert” ask where the factories, waste streams, and skilled people are – the answer is most likely somewhere within one of the many axis nations supporting Al Nusra. They certainly have the capacity to both manufacturer the gas and transport it into Syria – or conversely – provide Al Nusra with the supplies and personal to do it inside of Syria.
Higgins and his “expert’s” attempt to make Al Nusra sound like cave dwelling simpletons running on a shoestring budget, when even the US State Department admitted by 2012 that the terrorist organization was operating at a national level, carrying out hundreds of attacks across the country. In an attempt to cover up the growing influence the Western-backing of Al Qaeda was creating within Syria, tales of vast “Twitter donations” were spun to explain how Al Nusra was expanding faster than so-called moderates who were receiving billions of dollars in equipment, training, vehicles, and weapons by the West and its regional allies. In reality, that torrent of cash and supplies was going intentionally into the hands of Al Nusra and other extremist groups.
Clearly, if anyone in Syria, beside the government, was going to produce and deploy chemical weapons, it would be Al Nusra.
Higgins, Whitaker, and other journalists have also maintained the West’s official narrative that not only are they sure the government did it because the “evidence” suggests so and because the militants do not possess chemical weapons, but also because the militants fighting the government don’t possess the training to carry out the attacks. Higgins has done a masterful job proving that all the militants would need is a flatbed truck and a metal tube to launch the ordinance implicated in the attacks. As far as training in handling chemical weapons, CNN itself revealed the United States had long since taken care of that.
CNN’s December 2012 report titled, “Sources: U.S. helping underwrite Syrian rebel training on securing chemical weapons,” stated that:
The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday.
The training, which is taking place in Jordan and Turkey, involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials, according to the sources. Some of the contractors are on the ground in Syria working with the rebels to monitor some of the sites, according to one of the officials.
Syrian Electronic Army E-Mails Exposes A Deceitful, Depraved Western Media
While perhaps Higgins and company missed that CNN report, it is now revealed that at least Higgins, and several other journalists were told by an American contractor on the ground inside of Syria, that militants had gained access to chemical weapons and more importantly, were planning to use them in a false flag attack – this months before the August 21 attack in Damascus.
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has released e-mails this week between American contractor Matthew Van Dyke and members of the Western media, including Higgins. The e-mails indicated that militants had chemical weapons and were planning to use them in an attack to frame the Syrian government – serving as impetus for wider foreign intervention. SEA’s emails have been confirmed by Higgins himself in a series of self-incriminating tweets where he goes, point-by-point, attempting to provide explanations for the damning revelations.
Image: It’s true – but… The back-peddling Eliot Higgins aka Brown Moses may just be presiding over his early retirement as an establishment propagandist – thanks not to some Western NGO dealing in transparency, but the Syrian Electronic Army, listed by the FBI as “terrorists.”
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The e-mails reveal multiple correspondences regarding chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists aimed at using them in a false flag operation, Higgins’ and Van Dyke’s mutual “benefactor” located in Virginia, “near DC” (Langley, Virginia?), and job offers for Higgins from NGOs and a defense contractor involving “open source intelligence,” the new buzzword used by Higgins and Whitaker in regards to the new form of propaganda they both participate in.
Being a Propagandist is Lucrative
The e-mails illustrate prior knowledge of chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists who fully planned on using them in a false flag operation. Higgins and others had this information, and now, have Seymour Hersh’s report as well, yet they still pose the argument that the militants had neither the ability nor the means to carry out the attacks. In fact, it appears that the Western media and underlings like Higgins went out of their way specifically to discredit the notion from even being considered. In other words, a concerted cover-up.
The e-mails above, and others in the large cache also reveal the possible motivation for these lies. So-called journalists and researchers peddling the West’s narrative appear to have a wide range of lucrative offers presented to them, as well as funding for them to continue doing the work they are already involved in. This of course is only the case so long as their narratives mesh with the institutions, corporations, and individuals cutting the checks.
Why would Higgins even mention the possibility of a false flag attack, when all that would do is alienate him from the establishment he is so eagerly trying to be a part of? His recent piece in Foreign Policy and the Guardian’s ceaseless promotion of his work are favors that demand reciprocation – in the form of toeing the line and selling a narrative Higgins and others know is deceitful.
That Higgins, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy are prepared to throw veteran journalist Seymour Hersh under the bus to protect their interests, gives us a look into the depths of depravity within which this “new” media Whitaker celebrates, operate.
Worst of all for the West, is that the transparency and accountability they claim to uphold, had to be kept in check by the SEA - an organization wanted by the FBI as “terrorists.” We would be led to believe by the likes of Whitaker, Higgins, and Van Dyke that the Syrian government and their supporters are the villains, but in their own words and actions we see the truth.
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Note:
The full extent of SEA’s leaked e-mails exposes Van Dyke and the journalists he associates with as utterly depraved, deceitful, unprincipled individuals each driven by untethered greed and narcissism. The e-mails also reveal that “aid ships” are used to bring in weapons and foreign fighters, that the Syrians are almost entirely behind the government and that the so-called revolution was “fake.” Van Dyke is exposed as having conspired to kill a man and his entire family over a trivial personal dispute and much, much more. Readers are encouraged to comb through the archives, and to follow SEA on Twitter @Official_SEA16.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, NATO, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) Western Sponsored Humanitarian Crisis in Syria: Foreign Supported Insurgency Responsible for Civilian Deaths
By Nicola Nasser
Global Research, December 04, 2013
Creating a humanitarian crisis in Syria , whether real or fabricated, and holding the Syrian government responsible for it as a casus belli for foreign military intervention under the UN 2005 so-called “responsibility to protect” initiative was from the very eruption of the Syrian conflict the goal of the US-led “Friends of Syria’ coalition.
Foreign military intervention is now ruled out as impossible, but what the Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin described on last November 29 as “the biggest humanitarian crisis in a decade” was created and this crisis “is worsening and no end is in sight” according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) on November 11.
Objective and non-objective as well as official and non-official reports about the responsibility of the Syrian government are abundant, but that of the insurgents has been for too long covered up and only of late come under the scrutiny of human rights organizations and media spotlight.
The early militarization of civilian protests in Syria aborted all prospects for a long overdue peaceful change in Syria and created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Militarization opened the Syrian doors wide for foreign military, intelligence and political intervention to turn a national conflict between the haves and have-nots into a regional and international one.
More importantly, unguardedly and grudgingly but knowingly the so-called “Friends of Syria” also opened the Syrian doors to al-Qaeda linked offshoots as an additional weight to enforce a “regime change;” in no time they hijacked the armed leadership of the marginal local armed insurgency and became the dominant military power out of the control of the intervening regional and international powers who financed, armed and logistically facilitated their infiltration into Syria.
The responsibility of the “Friends of Syria,” both Arab and non-Arab, for the militarization and the ensuing humanitarian crisis was highlighted by the US former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call on Syrian rebels not to disarm as much by the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari opposition to a political solution through the upcoming Geneva – 2 conference next January 22.
When the United States last December added al-Nusra Front to its list of terrorist organizations, topped by al-Qaeda, supposedly to tip the balance in favor of what is called, in US terminology, the “moderates” against the terrorists in the Syrian insurgency, it was a measure taken too late.
The US measure was only a green light for the beginning of another war inside the Syrian war, this time launched by The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Da’a-sh) against all others in the insurgency, including al-Nusra Front.
The end result was further exacerbation of the Syrian humanitarian crisis, for which the United States & partner “friends” could not be absolved of responsibility and should be held accountable.
The responsibility of the insurgency, which is politically sponsored, financed, armed and logistically facilitated by them, is now unfolding to uncover the fact that the militarization of the early legitimate peaceful protests has created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today by the military tactics the insurgents used.
These tactics include mortar shelling of civilian densely populated areas under government control, targeting public services infrastructure of power, oil and gas, hospitals and health clinics, schools and universities, stealing public warehouses of strategic basic food reserves, dismantling and stealing public and private factories, flour mills and bakeries, interrupting or cutting transportation and traffic on highways, assassinations, extrajudicial killings and public beheadings, suicide bombings in city centers, targeting and besieging minorities, destroying and desecrating all religious and historic relics, flooding Syria with tens of thousands of foreign mercenary fighters obsessed by the al-Qaeda-like bizarre interpretations of Islam who violently compete among themselves for local leadership and war exploits because they are controlled by competing foreign intelligence agencies, and subjecting the population who come under their control to their brand of Islamic law courts, fatwas and orders, which dumped women out of society altogether to be reserved only for their sexual needs, etc.
However, exploiting the fact that the regular army was deployed along some seventy miles of the ceasefire line for a confrontation with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on the Syrian Golan Heights and trained for a regular warfare, their strategic military tactic was from the start to entrench themselves among the civilian population, using them as human shields, in countryside towns and villages where the army has no presence and where even the police and security agencies maintain minimal presence or none at all.
The early successes of the insurgents were military exploits against peaceful civilians; they were not achieved in military vs. military battles. It was enough for a few rebels to hold any such peaceful town or village hostage, but it needs an army operation to kick them out.
Except for the northern city of ar-Raqqah, which Da’a-sh turned into what the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar on last November 8 defined as “Syria’s answer to (Afghanistan’s) Kandahar – the birthplace of the Taliban” since the rebels stormed the city early last March, the Syrian state maintains control and presence in all the major cities.
But the official Arab Syrian Army had been on the defensive for some two years since the eruption of the insurgency in 2011. It needed this time to adapt, train and allocate counter insurgency units to fight in irregular city wars.
Since its strategic victory in al-Qaseer early last June it has gone on the offensive and is rapidly gaining more ground and achieving successive successes ever since.
However, the insurgency bears the main responsibility, mainly during the “defensive” interval, for the civilian plight; waves of refugees and displaced people came out from the areas under their control to find refuge either in government held cities or across the nearest borders with neighboring states. The latest largest wave of refugees of the Syrian Kurds into northern Iraq had nothing to do with government and was caused by infighting among insurgents.
The fact that the Syrian state and government were reacting rather than acting against the insurgency is now coming to light. This fact is now acknowledged by the UK-based opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which reported on this December 3 that it had documented the death of (50,927) government soldiers versus (36228) insurgents including (6261) non-Syrian fighters.
Rebel infiltration into countryside towns and villages was the main reason for more than two million internally displaced civilians who left their homes as soon as they could out of fear either of the rebels themselves and their practices or the inevitable government retaliation. They were taken care of by the government in government shelters.
In addition to Christians and other minorities targeted by the rebels who posture as the defenders of Sunni Islam, most of the refugees and those displaced are Sunni Muslim Syrians and more than one million of them are hosted by their compatriot Alawites in the west of the country, a fact that refutes the narrative of the US government and media about a “civil” and “sectarian” war in the country.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
Labels: AL-QAEDA, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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(LANDDESTROYER REPORT) Al Qaeda Terrorists Pass US Special Forces, CIA Agents on Way to Syria
November 1, 2013
(Tony Cartalucci) - A recent Daily Telegraph article reveals that armies of Al Qaeda terrorists are using NATO-member Turkey as a springboard for their invasion of neighboring Syria.
NATO is the chief executor of the so-called "War on Terror," started in 2001 after Al Qaeda terrorists allegedly flew four passenger planes into various targets on America's east coast, including the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Nearly 3,000 people died in a single day. The invasion of Afghanistan promptly followed based on the pretense that it was "harboring" members of Al Qaeda. The invasion and nearly decade-long occupation of Iraq followed shortly thereafter.
Yet despite all of this, Turkey, a NATO member since the early 1950's, appears to be guilty of the very crime Afghanistan was allegedly invaded and to this day still occupied for, harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. An army of Al Qaeda is (and has been for nearly 3 years) using southern Turkey as a safe-haven and staging ground for the invasion of Syria - disingenuously portrayed by the Western media as a "civil war."
Worst of all, these terrorists, literally carrying Al Qaeda's banner into battle, are passing CIA outposts, US, British, and French special operations training camps, and through Western-funded refugee camps, on their way to commit a wide array of atrocities along and within Syria's borders.
This defies all explanations except one - the "War on Terror" is a fraud, and the very terrorists thousands of Western troops have died chasing across the planet, have been armed, funded, trained, propped up, and reconstituted by the West itself as a perpetual excuse to engage in global aggression, occupation, and wars of immense profit in both terms of wealth and geopolitical power.
The Daily Telegraph, in its article, "Al-Qaeda recruits entering Syria from Turkey safehouses," has recently reported:
Hundreds of al-Qaeda recruits are being kept in safe houses in southern Turkey, before being smuggled over the border to wage “jihad” in Syria, The Daily Telegraph has learned.
The network of hideouts is enabling a steady flow of foreign fighters - including Britons - to join the country’s civil war, according to some of the volunteers involved.
These foreign jihadists have now largely eclipsed the “moderate” wing of the rebel Free Syrian Army, which is supported by the West. Al-Qaeda’s ability to use Turkish territory will raise questions about the role the Nato member is playing in Syria’s civil war.
Turkey has backed the rebels from the beginning - and its government has been assumed to share the West’s concerns about al-Qaeda. But experts say there are growing fears over whether the Turkish authorities may have lost control of the movement of new al-Qaeda recruits - or may even be turning a blind eye.
Of course, the Telegraph is plainly deceiving its readers. The use of Al Qaeda as a militant proxy against Syria is not an unpredictable and unfortunate result of the ongoing Syrian conflict, but instead a well documented Western plan exposed as early as 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh in his article, "The Redirection," which stated (emphasis added):
"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."
Clearly, the only thing NATO, Turkey, and the Western press have "lost control" of, is the narrative used to deceive the public.
The CIA Not Only Watches Al Qaeda Pass, But is Clearly Arming Them
The New York Times in their March 2013 article titled, "Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid," admits that:
With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.
The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.
The New York Times piece attempts to spin America's role in arming militants in Syria. The Times continues by stating:
The American government became involved, the former American official said, in part because there was a sense that other states would arm the rebels anyhow. The C.I.A. role in facilitating the shipments, he said, gave the United States a degree of influence over the process, including trying to steer weapons away from Islamist groups and persuading donors to withhold portable antiaircraft missiles that might be used in future terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft.
Just like the Telegraph, the Times is overtly lying to its readers. So-called "Islamists" constitute the summation of armed aggression against the Syrian government specifically because the plans outlined by Hersh in 2007 are now being executed by the CIA, within NATO-member Turkey's territory, along the Turkish-Syrian border.
Western Special Forces are Training Al Qaeda Terrorists
In addition to the CIA, Western special forces are also operating along and within Syria's borders. A June 2013 LA Times article titled, "U.S. has secretly provided arms training to Syria rebels since 2012," admitted:
CIA agents and special operations troops have trained the rebels in anti-tank and antiaircraft weaponry in Jordan and Turkey.
The LA Times continued:
CIA operatives and U.S. special operations troops have been secretly training Syrian rebels with anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons since late last year, months before President Obama approved plans to begin directly arming them, according to U.S. officials and rebel commanders.
The covert U.S. training at bases in Jordan and Turkey, along with Obama's decision this month to supply arms and ammunition to the rebels, has raised hope among the beleaguered Syrian opposition that Washington ultimately will provide heavier weapons as well. So far, the rebels say they lack the weapons they need to regain the offensive in the country's bitter civil war.
Al Qaeda's Al Nusra front has established itself on Syria's battlefields allegedly because of its martial prowess, in contrast to the bumbling "moderates" allegedly trained by US special forces. How is it possible that the West, along with their regional partners, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are arming, funding, and admittedly training armies of "moderates," and yet Al Qaeda has still managed to prevail? Who is arming, funding, and training them? The answer is simple - there were never any meaningful "moderates" despite ham-handed attempts by the Western media to insist otherwise, and the West is intentionally assisting Al Qaeda, just as was planned in 2007.
Thousands of Western troops have died, and are still dying in the so-called "War on Terror." Many more have been maimed and/or psychologically effected. Evidence suggests that there was no lapse between US backing of Al Qaeda in the 1980's in Afghanistan and today - and that even as US troops fought on in Iraq, the West and its partners in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel were arming and funneling terrorists into the country to fuel sectarian violence designed specifically to set up the strategic assets necessary for a covert/proxy war versus Iran, Syria, and Lebanon.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, CIA, COLONIALISM, LYBIA, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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(WHAT'S LEFT) On the Iraq-Syria Border, ‘Terrorist’s’ and a Prime Minister on One Side, ‘Rebels’ and a ‘Brutal Dictator’ on the Other
October 25, 2013
By Stephen Gowans
No one would be surprised these days to open a newspaper to read: Violence in Syria has risen dramatically since the spring of 2011, when a mostly Sunni and primarily peaceful protest movement against the Alawite-dominated government in Damascus drew a violent response from regime forces.
But would they be surprised to read the same sentence, with Shiite replacing Alawite, and Baghdad in place of Damascus?
Probably.
Yet much the same sentence appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 24. Reporters Matt Bradley and Ali A. Nabhan wrote that, “Violence (in Iraq’s Anbar province) has risen dramatically since the spring, when a mostly Sunni and primarily peaceful protest movement against the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad drew a violent response from security forces.”
Anbar borders Syria.
The Western narrative on Syria is that a government dominated by one religious group used violence to quell a largely peaceful protest movement of another, triggering an armed rebellion. Just like Anbar.
The government’s actions, and the uprising that followed, were labelled a problem by Western news media and governments—a problem to be resolved by removing a president who is “killing his own people” (and who also, just happens, to refuse to play along with Washington’s economic and foreign policy agenda.) Not like Anbar.
Hence, while two very similar situations exit side-by-side, they have been met by completely different reactions in the West, not only on the part of governments, but also the news media, and a certain faction of leftists that mistake reaction for revolution.
The Western news media have been virtually silent on Maliki’s cracking down violently on a mostly Sunni and primarily peaceful protest movement, yet fevered and voluble in its coverage of the Syrian insurgency, and was, even in the uprising’s early days. Practically everyone knows about Syria. How many know about Anbar?
Western governments have designated Syrian president Bashar al-Assad a pariah, but haven’t demonized Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, have refused to denounce him as a brute who kills his own people, and haven’t told him he has lost his legitimacy, and must step down, as Assad has been told.
And yet as the Washington Post’s Liz Sly noted on 8 February,
The grievances [against Maliki]…are real, as was articulated last week in a Human Rights Watch report condemning the “draconian” measures used by the Maliki government to curtail its opponents. The report cited widespread allegations of abuse within the criminal justice system including torture, the rape of female prisoners and arbitrary arrests, as well as the successful suppression of an earlier attempt to organize Arab Spring-style demonstrations in Baghdad and elsewhere in 2011 (“Arab Spring-style protests take hold in Iraq”).
While some leftists in the West have embraced the Syrian insurgency as if it were a modern day October Revolution in embryo, they have not rallied to the cause of the Anbar insurgents. Probably because they’ve never heard of them, and maybe because the Western news media have yet to invent a faction of moderate (i.e., ‘good’) rebels that the kind souls of the left can embrace. The field, instead, is dominated by the same al-Qaeda-linked Islamists who lead Syria’s insurgency.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Anbar fighters “flow fluidly back and forth across the Iraq-Syria border, staging attacks on both sides…” These are the same fighters the US occupation army battled in Iraq during the surge of 2007. Of course, back then, they were called “terrorists”, and were considered “legitimate” targets in a war on terror.
Funny, “terrorists” is what the Syrian government calls them today, when they set off car bombs, execute captives, eviscerate bodies, and saw off heads, on the Syrian side of the border. All the same, this is considered illegitimate terminology by Western governments, who prefer that terrorists who work on their side be called rebels, freedom fighters, or part of a popular, democratic, uprising.
Maliki, the prime minister who wields violence to crush largely peaceful protest movements, remains Washington’s man in Baghdad. As a consequence, he need not worry about getting the Assad-treatment…for now. Just as Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi was in reality the monster Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is made out to be by Western governments and news media, Meles escaped sanction and demonization from the West, and was lionized when he died last year, because he did the West’s bidding. Mugabe is more interested in his country’s independence from the West—hence, the sullying of his name in Western capitals and newsrooms.
It didn’t matter how many people Meles locked up, killed and tortured, he remained the model statesman in Western eyes, as Maliki may, so long as he doesn’t develop too much of an independent streak. Assad, the president who says “Syria is an independent state working for the interests of its people, rather than making the Syrian people work for the interests of the West,” is, however, quite another matter.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, STEPHEN GOWANS, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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(REUTERS) Insight: Saudi Arabia boosts Salafist rivals to al Qaeda in Syria
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN | Tue Oct 1, 2013 10:51am EDT
AMMAN (Reuters) - Alarmed by the rise of al Qaeda in Syria, Saudi Arabia is trying to strengthen rival Islamists with ties to Riyadh and this week helped engineer a consolidation of rebel groups around Damascus under a Saudi-backed leader.
That might bolster the opposition militarily as President Bashar al-Assad's forces have been pushing back, but it also underlines al Qaeda's expansion in Syria - and the proliferation of splits among Assad's enemies, just as world powers are trying to corral them into talks with his government.
Rebel and diplomatic sources said it was Saudi Arabia which nudged rebel brigades operating in and around Damascus to announce this week that they have united under a single command comprising 50 groups and numbering some thousands of fighters.
The formation of the Army of Islam in the capital's eastern fringe under Zahran Alloush, leader of the group Liwa al-Islam, strengthens Salafist jihadis owing allegiance to Riyadh against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al Qaeda branch which has in recent weeks taken control of territory from other Islamist forces in parts of northern and eastern Syria.
While fighting for religious rule in Syria, local Salafists do not generally share the international ambitions of al Qaeda's jihadists, many of them foreign, who want to drive Westerners from the Middle East and unite Muslims in a single state.
The establishment of the Army of Islam follows last week's joint declaration by groups, mainly in the northeast but also including Liwa al-Islam, who agreed to fight for Islamic rule and also rejected the authority of the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition in exile, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC).
That accord was notably not signed by ISIL.
Zahran Alloush, who founded Liwa al-Islam, or the Brigade of Islam, with his father Abdallah, a Salafist Syrian cleric based in Saudi Arabia, has avoided declaring personal opposition to al Qaeda or to the SNC. But he criticized failures to bring unity to rebel ranks in explaining the creation of the formation:
"We have formed this army ... to achieve unity among the units of the mujahideen and avoid the effects produced by the divisions within the National Coalition," he told Al Jazeera television, referring obliquely to recent rebel in-fighting.
"The Army of Islam is the result of accelerating efforts to unify the fighting units operating in the beloved homeland."
SAUDI CONNECTION
Liwa al-Islam, several thousand strong, is among the biggest and best organized rebel groups, respected even among non-Islamist rebels for integrity and effectiveness. Alloush could not be reached for comment on the Saudi role in his new unit.
Saudi officials do not comment on their operations in Syria, where the Sunni Muslim kingdom has backed the uprising among the Sunni majority against Assad and his minority Alawite elite who are allied to Shi'ite Iran, Riyadh's rival for regional power.
However, rebel and diplomatic sources told Reuters that Saudi Arabia, which furnishes arms and other supplies and funds to Assad's opponents, was behind the Army of Islam.
The commander of an Islamist rebel unit on the opposite side of Damascus from the Army's base of operations in the east told Reuters that Saudi figures had been in touch with various Salafist groups in recent weeks, offering support in return for a common front to keep al Qaeda allies from expanding their presence around the capital - a presence already detected.
"Saudi tribal figures have been making calls on behalf of Saudi intelligence," the commander, who uses the name Abu Mussab, said. "Their strategy is to offer financial backing in return for loyalty and staying away from al Qaeda."
While hoping to avoid outright confrontation with fellow jihadists, the Saudis had been gauging the willingness of local Salafist fighters in joining Saudi-backed formations, including a proposed Syrian National Army. This, Abu Mussab said, might oppose al Qaeda in the way the U.S.-funded Sahwa, or Awakening, movement of Sunni tribesmen fought al Qaeda in Iraq from 2007.
A Western diplomat following the conflict closely said: "Saudi Arabia is growing increasingly uncomfortable with more rebels joining al Qaeda ranks. The recent advances by the Islamic State have embarrassed the Saudis and the new alliance appears designed to stop al Qaeda from gaining influence."
He said Saudi strategy was two tiered: back less extreme Islamist figures in the exile SNC political organization and woo Salafist brigades on the ground with arms and money.
"Lots of these Salafist groups detest the Syrian National Coalition," he said. "But the Saudis do not see this as a contradiction as long as they stay away from al Qaeda."
Abdulrazzaq Ziad, a liberal activist based in Turkey, said the formation of the Army of Islam, announced with elaborate ceremony in an online video, has already irked al Qaeda: "We are already seeing from Facebook comments of people close to the Islamic State that they view the new formation as a rival."
A second diplomat based in the Middle East said: "We have seen in the last few weeks that every major group has stepped up its efforts to increase its sphere of influence. An alliance like this would not take place without Saudi blessing.
"Liwa al-Islam and its allies have not been comfortable with al Qaeda establishing a foothold in the Ghouta so their interest and that of Saudi Arabia converged," he said, referring to the Damascus suburbs where rebel forces are dug in round the city.
CONFRONTATION
The Salafist movement in Islam, founded on literal readings of early texts, is close to the Wahhabi school associated with the Saudi royal house. Its religious teaching influences al Qaeda but the militant network's Saudi founder, Osama bin Laden, turned against Salafists he saw as allies of a Saudi monarchy that had been corrupted by its alliance with the United States.
The Army of Islam seems to want to avoid fighting al Qaeda for now. After a man named Saeed Jumaa, described as a captain in the Army, told an opposition television station that there could be open conflict with ISIL if they "continue this chaos", Zahran Alloush took to Twitter on Tuesday to disown him.
Jumaa's comments were "dangerous", Alloush said, and were designed to create "strife among Muslims".
The Army of Islam has also avoided an outright break with the SNC: "We do not make enemies of those who are not enemies to us," Army spokesman Islam Alloush told Reuters. However, the group did share the others' criticism of the SNC that it should be directed by fighters inside Syria, not leaders in exile.
If Riyadh's aim is to thwart al Qaeda enemies by rallying local Syrian Islamists in the way Washington did with Iraq's Sunni tribal Sahwa, it may be miscalculating, said commentator Hazem Amin. Unlike the Iraqi fighters, he said, Syrian Salafists were increasingly embracing radical views close to al Qaeda.
"Syria is different," Amin wrote in al-Hayat newspaper. "The social fabric is less cohesive ... At its core, the new Syrian Salafism is jihadist in nature. It is moving towards extremism."
(Additional reporting by Alexander Dziadosz; Editing by Dominic Evans and Alastair Macdonald)
Labels: AL-QAEDA, SAUDI ARABIA, SYRIA
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US-British Al Qaeda Airlift: 3,000 Tons of Weapons Fuel Syria's Destruction
March 9, 2013 (LD) - The primary reason, we are told, that the West must immediately begin wider operations to support the so-called Syrian rebels is to head off extremists - namely Al Qaeda, from overrunning Syria.
This narrative has been sold for nearly a year now as it has become evidently clear that all major offensives in Syria against the Syrian people and their government have been led by Al Qaeda terrorist fronts, including most notoriously, Jabhat al-Nusra.
It turns out, however, according the London Telegraph, that the US and Britain have already been arming terrorists operating in Syria for some time, including a massive airlift of 3,000 tons of weapons, sent across Syria's borders with Jordan and NATO-member Turkey. In the Telegraph's article titled, "US and Europe in 'major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb'," it is reported:
It claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November
The story confirmed the origins of ex-Yugoslav weapons seen in growing numbers in rebel hands in online videos, as described last month by The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, but suggests far bigger quantities than previously suspected.
The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria's neighbours. But the report added that as well as from Croatia, weapons came "from several other European countries including Britain", without specifying if they were British-supplied or British-procured arms.
British military advisers however are known to be operating in countries bordering Syria alongside French and Americans, offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian army officers. The Americans are also believed to be providing training on securing chemical weapons sites inside Syria.
With so much admitted involvement in the violence aimed at overthrowing Syria's government by the West, it is inconceivable that Al Qaeda could be "overrunning moderate forces" in Syria, unless of course, no such moderate forces exist, and the West had planned from the beginning to use Al Qaeda as a mercenary force. And indeed, that is precisely what is happening. It has been established with documented evidence since at least 2007, and reaffirmed with this latest report.
Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, in his 2007 New Yorker report titled, "The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?"stated explicitly that:
"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."
Is there any doubt that the US has executed this plot in earnest, arming and funding sectarian extremists "sympathetic to Al Qaeda" on both Syria's northern and southern border? Where else, if not from the West and its regional allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, could extremists be getting their weapons, cash, and logistical support from?
And of course, Syria's borders with Jordan and Turkey have been long-ago identified by the US Army's own West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) as hotbeds of sectarian extremist/Al Qaeda activity - hotbeds that the West is purposefully funneling thousands of tons of weaponry through, while disingenuously claiming it is attempting to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of extremists.
The CTC's 2007 report, "Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq," identified Syria's southeastern region near Dayr Al-Zawr on the Iraqi-Syrian border, the northwestern region of Idlib near the Turkish-Syrian border, and Dar'a in the south near the Jordanian-Syrian border, as having produced the majority of fighters found crossing over into Iraq throughout the duration of the Iraq War.
Image: (Left) West Point's Combating Terrorism Center's 2007 report, "Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq" indicated which areas in Syria Al Qaeda fighters filtering into Iraq came from during the US invasion/occupation. The overwhelming majority of them came from Dayr Al-Zawr in Syria's southeast, Idlib in the north near the Turkish-Syrian border, and Dar'a in the south near the Jordanian-Syrian border. (Right) A map indicating the epicenters of violence in Syria indicate that the exact same hotbeds for Al Qaeda in 2007, now serve as the epicenters of so-called "pro-democracy fighters."
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These areas are now admittedly the epicenters of fighting, and more importantly, despite being historical hotbeds of Al Qaeda activity, precisely where the West is flooding with cash, weapons, and military "advisers." Just like in Libya where the West literally handed an entire nation to sectarian extremists, we are watching a verbatim repeat in Syria - where we are told Al Qaeda terrorists are "pro-democracy" "freedom fighters" that deserve US cash, weapons, and support, when it couldn't be any clearer they aren't.
Not only has the US and UK lied to the world about their policy toward Syria and their current level of support for increasingly overt terrorists committing an array of atrocities - their latest act including the taking of over 20 UN peacekeepers hostage in the Golan Heights - but have revealed once again the manufactured facade that is the "War on Terror."
Labels: AL-QAEDA, NEOCOLONIALISM, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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COMMENT - Clearly the UK and US are back in bed with Al-Qaeda, in the interest of overthrowing governments in Libya and Syria. Considering AQ gave the Bush Administration everything they wanted on 9/11, did they ever stop working for the (Rockefeller faction of the) US government at all? Remember that
Dick Cheney used to be a Director at David Rockefeller's CFR.
David Rockefeller was CEO/Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase after they took over JP Morgan and Company), and his family owns large chunks of ExxonMobil, the world's most successful oil company, started by his great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr. Quite simple, really.
Syria: West’s Legitimacy Collapses as it Props up Hostage-Taking Terrorists
By Tony Cartalucci
Global Research, March 08, 2013
Land Destroyer
The so-called “Syrian rebels” have taken dozens of UN peacekeepers hostage, demanding the Syrian Army withdraw its troops from its own nation’s territory. The UN has confirmed that their peacekeepers are indeed being held hostage by what they call “rebels,” and has demanded their release.
Despite this overt, criminal act of terrorism directed at the UN, the West has spun, downplayed, and otherwise ignored the incident, an incident that had the Syrian Army been behind, would have invoked howling indignation, frothing condemnation, and in all likelihood, full-scale military intervention.
Image: Several of over 20 UN peacekeepers taken hostage by terrorists operating in Syria – operating with Western cash, arms, and immense, continuous political and media support. The inability of the West to condemn and recognize the so-called “rebels” as intolerable terrorists, ravaging an entire nation, inflicting death, injury and suffering upon tens of millions, is indicative of a West that has resigned entirely its legitimacy, and even feigned interest in the impartial application of international law. Worst of all, the West had purposefully planned this orgy of terror since 2007, not for promoting “democracy,” but specifically to undermine and destroy neighboring Iran.
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Instead, the US Secretary of State John Kerry awarded the terrorists a whopping $60 million in what he called “non-lethal aid.” The UK’s Foreign Secretary William Hague also pledged support, including sending armor, vehicles and even weapons directly to the hostage-taking terrorists. This substantial and continuous torrent of cash, equipment, and weapons is sent to Al Qaeda terrorists even as both the US and UK sink in unprecedented domestic budget crises.
The West’s Arab collaborators, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have led the Arab World in offering these verified Al Qaeda terrorists Syria’s seat in the Arab League. The Arab League has given the green light (officially) to begin directly and openly arming the terrorists, though they have been arming them since at least 2007.
As the West coddles terrorists who are more overtly committing atrocities, both against the Syrian people, along Syria’s peripheries, and even against international observers including the United Nations, they shed the remainder of their legitimacy. In fact, a US State Department, a British Foreign Office, and even a UN who refuses to condemn and entirely break off relations with an organization that takes hostages amidst a myriad of other atrocities documented over the past 2 years, already has absolutely no legitimacy.
The people of the West must realize their governments have descended into a dangerous psychosis and has abandoned even a face-value commitment to maintaining a rule of law. A nation not confined by law, or even attempting to pretend to be, is a nation capable of anything, on any scale, at any time.
The people of the West now reside in nations far beyond the red line. Now, more than ever, people must begin making hard decisions about their lifestyles and their patronizing of the West’s corporate-financier monopolies. It is not the government or the individuals that constitute it that drive this agenda. It is the corporate-financier interests that create policy think-tanks, that literally write the scripts congressmen, presidents, secretaries and ministers read from – corporate-financier interests we patronize on a daily basis.
While we cannot change the current, perhaps terminal unraveling of Western civilization overnight, we can begin with small but significant steps in rolling back our dependency on corporate-financier monopolies by boycotting them and replacing them. Even a miniscule percentage of change in our lifestyles, month to month will have a profound, collective effect on usurping the unwarranted influence that has granted these insidious interests free reign over the planet and humanity. Decentralizing these monopolies is the ultimate goal, but will take hard work and patience – but it is a goal that most certainly can be achieved, and in many parts of the world it is already being achieved.
If we read the news of hostage-taking terrorists being showered with millions of our tax dollars and being allowed to destroy an entire nation after our own soldiers paid in blood to fight them in a 10 year faux “War on Terror” and are angered, searching desperately for a solution – getting self-sufficient, and decentralizing this war machine, thus returning the reins of power back to the people is that solution. That is real revolution.
The problems in Syria may seem distant, even if absolutely outrageous, but it is a symptom of a sickness our Western governments, amongst us, involved in our daily lives, suffer from. Refusal to treat the illness now, as it ravages Syria, will only allow it to get worse until it inevitably visits upon us the same unhinged hypocritical insanity it is now unleashing on the Syrian people. The fate of the Syrian people is indeed tied directly to our own wealth, prosperity, peace, and well-being. Failing to realize that is folly we shall pay for many generations to come.
Labels: AL-QAEDA, NEOCOLONIALISM, SYRIA, TERRORISM
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