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Massive Israeli attacks pummel Yemen’s main airport, Sanaa pledges ‘response in kind’

Al Mayadeen | December 26, 2024

The Israeli occupation launched a large-scale attack on Yemen while the leader of the Ansar Allah movement, Sayyed Abdul Malik al-Houthi, was delivering his speech.

A source told Al Mayadeen on Thursday that the Israeli aggression on Sanaa and Hodeidah targeted civilian facilities and was carried out with the US and UK’s coordination and support.

The source also said that targeting civilian facilities is evidence of the occupation’s failure to have a clear target list within the country, stressing that this “will not change the course of the war and will be met with a similar response.”

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent, in turn, also confirmed that the Israeli occupation’s aggression targeted a gathering of travelers, including patients, at the Sanaa International Airport terminal, and also targeted airport control towers.

Significantly, sources told Al Mayadeen, that the Israeli aggression on Sanaa International Airport took place during the presence of two UN personnel in the airport: the WHO’s Director and the UN’s resident coordinator.

Moreover, the sources reported that the UN airplane’s co-captain had been injured and was transported to a hospital after the Israeli aggression on the airport, adding that two other airport employees were also killed as a result of the attack.

The source emphasized that the Israeli entity should “not lie in wait for a response from Sanaa because its military operations will continue.”

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent then added that the Israeli airstrikes hit Sanaa International Airport in the northern part of the capital, as well as two airstrikes on the Hiziz Central Power Plant south of Sanaa.

The correspondent further noted power outages in parts of Hodeidah Province due to the Israeli attack on the Ras Kathib Central Power Plant in the northern part of the coastal city on the Red Sea in western Yemen.

Additionally, our correspondent underscored that the Israeli occupation’s aggression on Hodeidah was executed with the US Navy’s participation through their warships.

Yemen likely to intensify operations against ‘Israel’: Israeli media

Meanwhile, Israeli media outlets reported that officials in “Israel” expect an increase in attacks from Yemen, especially after this assault.

Channel 14 confirmed that the attack targeted three central sites: Sanaa Airport, a power plant in Sana’a, and the Hodeidah port, noting that “this is not an ordinary attack, but the opening of a battle that could be prolonged.”

Israeli Channel 14’s correspondent also mentioned that Israeli aircraft disabled Sanaa International Airport by destroying the control towers and also disrupted the Hodeidah seaport.

According to Israeli Channel Kan, this was “Israel’s” fourth attack on targets in Yemen, adding that the United States had been informed of the operation.

In response, Ansar Allah’s spokesperson, Mohammed Abdulsalam, condemned the targeting of Sanaa International Airport and other civilian infrastructure, describing it as a Zionist crime against the entire Yemeni people.

He pointed out that if the Zionist enemy thinks its crimes will stop Yemen from supporting Gaza, it is mistaken, affirming that Yemen will not abandon its religious and humanitarian principles.

December 26, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

Manufacturing rebels: How the UK and US empowered HTS

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | December 26, 2024

On 18 December, The Telegraph published an extraordinary investigation into how the UK and US trained and “prepared” fighters in the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA), a “rebel” force that collaborated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the mass offensive toppling of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad weeks earlier. 

In an unprecedented disclosure, the outlet revealed that Washington not only “knew about the offensive” well in advance, but also had “precise intelligence about its scale.” Washington’s now-confirmed “effective alliance” with HTS was described as “one of many ironies” emerging from the decade-and-a-half-long proxy war.

The Telegraph suggested this collaboration was inadvertent – simply a symptom of how Syria’s grinding, protracted civil war gave birth to “a bewildering array of militias and alliances, most of them backed by foreign powers.” 

US support of HTS: A ‘necessary’ alliance 

Alliances were fluid, with groups often splintering, merging, and shifting allegiances. Fighters frequently found themselves switching sides, blurring lines between factions. Yet, ample evidence indicates the UK and the US maintained deliberate, long-standing ties with the dominant rebels of HTS.

For instance, in March 2021, President-elect Donald Trump’s former lead Syria envoy, James Jeffrey, gave a revealing interview to PBS, during which he disclosed that Washington secured a specific “waiver” from then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo to assist HTS. 

While this did not permit direct funding or arming of the UN/US-designated terrorist organization, the waiver ensured that if US-supplied resources “somehow” ended up with HTS, western actors “[could not] be blamed.” 

The fungibility of weapons on the Syrian battlefield was something Washington counted on heavily. In a 2015 interview, CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines was quizzed about why Pentagon-vetted fighters’ weapons were showing up in the hands of the Nusra Front (precursor to HTS). Raines responded: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces – we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”

This legal loophole enabled Washington to “indirectly” support HTS, ensuring the group did not collapse while maintaining its designation as a terrorist organization – a status complete with a now-rescinded $10 million bounty on leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa. 

Jeffrey rationalized this strategy, calling HTS “the least bad option” for preserving “a US-managed security system in the region,” and thus worth “[leaving] alone.” HTS’s dominance, in turn, gave Turkiye a platform to operate in Idlib. Meanwhile, HTS sent unmistakable messages to their US patrons, pleading:

“We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”

‘Safe haven’

Since Assad’s fall, officials in London have markedly taken the lead in legitimizing the HTS-led interim administration as Syria’s new government. The group was added to the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations in 2017, its entry stating HTS should be considered among “alternative names” for the long-banned Al-Qaeda.

While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared it “too early” to rescind the group’s designation, British officials met HTS representatives on 16 December – despite the illegality of such meetings.

This likely signals an impending, highly politicized western rehabilitation of HTS. Throughout Syria’s dirty war, UK intelligence waged extensive psychological operations to promote “moderate rebels,” crafting atrocity propaganda and human-interest stories. 

These efforts were ostensibly aimed at undermining groups like HTS, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. Yet leaked documents from UK intelligence reveal how HTS remained intertwined with Al-Qaeda post-2016, directly contradicting media narratives.

In other words, throughout the decade-and-a-half-long crisis, HTS was officially considered on par with the most fundamentalist, genocidal elements in the country. 

British documents also make a total mockery of the common refrain that HTS severed all ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016. A 2020 file described how Al-Qaeda “co-exists” with HTS in occupied Syrian territory, using it as a launchpad for transnational attacks. 

The document warned that HTS’s domination created a “safe haven” for Al-Qaeda to train and expand, fueled by instability. British psyops against HTS spanned years but ultimately failed. Instead, leaked files lament HTS’s growing influence, territorial gains, and rebranding as an alternative government.

“[Al-Qaeda] remains an explicitly Salafi-Jihadist transnational group with objectives and targets which extend outside Syria’s borders. [Al-Qaeda’s] priority is to maintain an instability fuelled safe haven in Syria, from which they are able to train and prepare for future expansion. HTS domination of north west Syria provides space for [Al-Qaeda] aligned groups and individuals to exist.”

British-backed propaganda benefiting HTS

British intelligence psyops attempting to hinder HTS were in operation from the group’s founding until recently. Yet, they appear to have achieved nothing. Numerous leaked files reviewed by The Cradle bemoan how HTS’s “influence and territorial control” had “dramatically grown” over the years. 

Its successes allowed the extremist group “to consolidate its position, neutralize opponents, and position itself as a key actor in northern Syria.” But HTS’s “domination” was secured in part by the group rebranding itself as an alternative government.

HTS-occupied territory was home to a variety of parallel service providers and institutions, including hospitals, law enforcement, schools, and courts. The group’s domestic and international propaganda specifically promoted these resources as a demonstration of an “alternative” Syria awaiting rollout across the entire country.

Ironically, many of these structures and organizations – such as the infamous White Helmets, who also operated in ISIS-run territories – were direct products of British intelligence, created for regime change propaganda purposes. Moreover, they were aggressively promoted by London at enormous expense.

Repeated references are made in leaked UK intelligence documents to the importance of “[raising] awareness of moderate opposition service provision,” and providing domestic and international audiences with “compelling narratives and demonstrations of a credible alternative to the [Assad] regime.” There is no consideration evident in the files that these efforts might be assisting HTS greatly in its own efforts to present itself as a “credible alternative” to Assad.

Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that Syrians in occupied territory would accommodate HTS “particularly if [they are] receiving services from it.” Even more eerily, the documents note, “HTS and other extremist armed groups are significantly less likely to attack opposition entities that are receiving support” from the UK government’s Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund (CSSF). 

This was the mechanism through which Britain’s Syrian propaganda war and organizations like the White Helmets and extremist-linked Free Syrian Police were financed.

These UK-run governance structures and opposition elements, which were allegedly intended to “undermine” HTS, operated in areas controlled by the group safe from violent reprisals for their foreign-funded work, as they “demonstrably provide key services” to residents of occupied territory.

There is also the darker prospect that HTS was well aware these “opposition entities” were bankrolled by British intelligence, and they were unmolested on that very basis.

Coordinated offensive

As The Telegraph‘s report explains, “the first indication that Washington had prior knowledge” of HTS’s offensive was when its RCA proxies were given a rousing pep talk by their US handlers three weeks prior. 

At a secret meeting at the US-controlled Al-Tanf air base close to the borders of Jordan and Iraq, the militants were told to scale up their forces and “be ready” for an attack that “could lead to the end” of Assad. A quoted RCA captain told the outlet:

“They did not tell us how it would happen. We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”

This followed US officers at the base, swelling the RCA’s ranks by unifying the group with other UK/US-trained, funded, and directed Sunni desert units and rebel units operating out of Al-Tanf under joint command. 

According to The Telegraph, “RCA and the fighters of HTS … were cooperating, and communication between the two forces was being coordinated by the Americans.” This collaboration proved to be of devastating effect in the “lightning offensive,” with RCA rapidly seizing key territory across the country upon explicit US orders.

RCA even joined forces with another rebel faction in the southern city of Deraa, which reached Damascus before HTS. RCA now occupies roughly one-fifth of the country, pockets of territory in Damascus, and the ancient city of Palmyra. 

Hitherto “heavily defended” by Russia and Hezbollah, Moscow’s local base has now been taken over by RCA. “All members of the force continued to be armed by the US,” receiving salaries of $400 monthly, nearly 12 times what Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers were paid.

It is uncertain whether this direct financing of the RCA and other extremist militias that toppled the Assad government continues today. What is clear, though, is that the UK and US supported HTS from the group’s inception, even if “indirectly.” In turn, this covert backing played a pivotal role in positioning HTS financially, geopolitically, materially, and militarily for its “lightning” swoop on Damascus and assumption of government today.

Reinforcing the interpretation that this was the objective of London and Washington all along, following Assad’s ouster, Starmer promptly declared that the UK would “play a more present and consistent role” in West Asia as a result. 

While western and certain regional capitals may celebrate the apparent success of their lavishly funded, blood-soaked campaign to dismantle decades of Baathism, British intelligence had long cautioned that the outcome would grant Al-Qaeda an even larger “instability-fueled safe haven” for “future expansion.”

December 26, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Israel’ Struggles to Deter Threat by Yemen’s Ansarullah

Al-Manar | December 24, 2024

Facing the escalating challenges from Yemen’s Ansarullah revolutionary group, the Zionist entity weighs its options, with no clear resolution yet to the significant threat posed by the intensified actions in support of Gaza over the past year.

Zionist officials and experts are deliberating strategies to counter these threats, with recent military responses proving ineffective at best, Al-Akhbar Lebanese newspaper reported on Monday.

Ansaruallah, having pledged its support to the Palestinian resistance, has disrupted maritime activity by targeting commercial ships heading to Israeli ports through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea. This strategy aims to pressure Israel to stop its genocidal war on Gaza.

Israel initially relied on US intervention, citing limited resources due to the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) spreading themselves thin across the northern and southern fronts.

However, US responses have remained tactical, with strikes limited to retaliation for disruptions to trade and supplies, their insufficiency as deterrence is highlighted by a recent friendly fire incident that destroyed one of their own jets.

Remarking on the US aggression, Yemen’s Defense Minister Mohammed Nasser Al-Atifi warned Washington that the country was capable of sinking the US’s naval fleets, and was in possession of weapons yet to be revealed.

Despite Israeli airstrikes on Yemen, analysts agree these efforts have failed to deter Ansarullah, Al-Akhbar’s Yahya Dbouk wrote. The group has intensified its operations, reiterating its support for Gaza and vowing further action unless ‘Israel’ halts its genocide against Palestinians.

Israeli experts suggest alternative strategies, including targeting Yemeni leadership in Sanaa, weapon production facilities, and economic hubs such as ports and energy sites, as well as bombing Saada for its symbolism in the Yemeni public’s consciousness according to Dbouk, who added that proposals to strike Sanaa and Saada aim to weaken Ansarullah’s influence and mobilize opposition forces within Yemen.

As he considered that these measures are seen as unlikely to achieve decisive results, the Lebanese writer noted that Tel Aviv has also considered reviving the Saudi-Emirati led war against Yemen with Zionist support.

However, doubts remain about its feasibility, given the previous failures of the coalition to secure a military victory during the war waged by the Saudi-led coalition on the Arab impoverished country since March 2015, according to the author.

Another debated approach involves targeting Iran, viewed as Ansarullah’s so-called “primary supporter”, Dbouk reported, noting that this strategy, however, raises questions about the Zionist entity’s capacity to address broader regional threats in wartime.

On the other hand, a ceasefire in Gaza has been proposed as a potential solution to ease Yemeni attacks. Ansarullah themselves have said on multiple occasions that as long as the war on Gaza continues, so will the attacks from Yemen and the maritime trade disruptions.

Such option “seems likely to break quickly, due to a possible failure in the second phase of a potential swap deal between Gaza and ‘Israel’, which is widely believed in Tel Aviv will never see the light,” Dbouk wrote.

The Zionist entity continues to weigh its options, with no clear resolution yet to the significant threat posed by Ansarullah and its broader implications for regional security.

December 25, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Frustrated by Incessant Missile Attacks, Israel Threatens to Start Assassinating Houthi Leaders

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 24.12.2024

Israeli terror bombing attacks targeting Yemen’s port and energy infrastructure and a year-long US-led naval deployment in the Red Sea at Tel Aviv’s urging have failed to deter Ansar Allah (better known as the Houthis) from launching increasingly impactful drone and missile attacks.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has threatened to start targeting the Houthis’ leaders.

“We will inflict a devastating blow to the Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen,” Katz said.

“Just as we took care of Sinwar in Gaza, Haniyeh in Tehran and Nasrallah in Beirut, we will deal with the heads of the Houthis in Sanaa or anywhere in Yemen,” Katz warned, referring to the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah assassinated by Israel this year. “We will act both against their infrastructure and against them to remove the threat.”

Katz also took a pot shot at Iran, whom the US and Israel have regularly accused of backing the Yemeni militia, warning that “whoever sponsors the Houthi terror in Hodeidah or Sanaa will pay the full price.”

Iran, which has long denied providing direct military support for the Houthis, said Tuesday that the militia’s operations have forced Israel and the US to alter their calculations.

“Even under the heaviest bombardments from the American-Israeli coalition, they target the heart of the occupied territories with their homemade missiles,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at a press conference in Tehran. “The Yemenis have proven they need no external assistance. Despite dire economic and military conditions, they have stood firm and resisted,” he added.

The Israel Defense Forces reported early Tuesday morning that they had intercepted a Houthi missile outside Israel’s airspace. Sirens wailed across central Israel amid fears of the missile reaching its target, with over two dozen people injured (one seriously) while running for cover in the panic.

Houthi official Hezam al-Asad vowed the group would continue its attacks “until the aggression against our people in Gaza stops.”

On the diplomatic front, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Monday instructed Israel’s diplomats in the EU and the UK to label the Houthis as a terrorist organization (currently, only Israel, the US, several Gulf states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Malaysia do so).

“The direct threat to freedom of navigation in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes is a challenge to the international community and the world order. The first and most basic thing is to define them as a terrorist organization,” Sa’ar said in the directive.

On Tuesday, Sa’ar sent a letter to US UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield asking her to convene an emergency session of the Security Council to condemn the Houthis for their “flagrant violation of international law.”

In addition to their drone and missile campaign, the Houthis have done major damage to Israel’s merchant shipping fleet by imposing a partial blockade of the Red and Arabian Seas targeting Israeli-linked and Israel-allied shipping.

A Houthi missile penetrated Israel’s much-touted missile defenses Saturday, injuring 16 people in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. The IDF probe into the incident found that the warning system “was activated late for reasons that cannot be detailed.”

Another Houthi missile landed a direct hit in Tel Aviv last week, again overwhelming air defenses, with the militia characterizing the attack as their “natural and legitimate” right to respond to Israeli aggression.

The militia also scored a major PR victory against Israel’s US allies last week, reporting the shootdown of an F/A-18 jet during an attack on the USS Harry Truman supercarrier. The Pentagon said the jet was downed in a friendly fire incident. Whatever the case, the Houthis have confirmed kills of nearly a dozen US Reaper drones, and are known to have downed a number of US and NATO-made helicopters and fighter jets from the mid-2010s onward in their war against a US-backed Gulf State coalition.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison

The Cradle | December 24, 2024

When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya. 

A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.

But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?

Vast underground prison complex?

On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya. 

Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”

He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.” 

As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.

In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.

“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison. 

She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya. 

However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.

During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.

Human slaughterhouse?

In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.

The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.

However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.

Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.

The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.

When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.

This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.

But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”

Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.  

Psychological operations

Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable. 

A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.

As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.

However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.

For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.

“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.

However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims. 

Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.

The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”

The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria. 

Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.

While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.

The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.

But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.

Syria’s missing

Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed. 

While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths. 

One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life. 

One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse. 

Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.

Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.

The “Repentance” prison

But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.

When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.

“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”

While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.

The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.

Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”

The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.” 

The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.

Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.

Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.

“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”

“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”

Julani’s prisons

Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.

While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air. 

When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.

An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.

For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”

In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”

Conclusion

No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Yemeni forces target USS Truman, down F-18, thwarting attack on Sanaa

Sputnik – 22.12.2024

Fighters of the Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthi) group have repelled joint US-UK air forces attack, shooting down a US Navy F/A-18 fighter jet during their attack on USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, the group’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said on Sunday.

“During the operation an F/A 18 jet was shot down attempting to repel the attack [on the US aircraft carrier],” Saree said on air of Almasirah TV channel.
Eight cruise missiles and 17 unmanned aerial vehicles were involved in the operation, the spokesman said.

He pointed out that the majority of fighter jets left Yemen’s air space and headed for the neutral waters of the Red Sea trying to repel the attack on the carrier. USS Harry S. Truman left its positions after the strikes, Saree said.

In early December, the Houthis attacked a destroyer and three army supply vessels of the United States with missiles and drones in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.

Earlier in the day, the Associated Press, citing CENTCOM, reported that a US Navy F/A-18 jet was downed by friendly fire over the Red Sea during an attack on Houthi targets. Both pilots ejected safely, with one sustaining minor injuries.

December 22, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

The Israeli Hit List – Iran Remains

If Americans Knew | December 18, 2024

The seven countries that the U.S. continues to meddle with and antagonize have a shared history and connection: Israel and the Zionists who pushed for the Jewish state want them to be destabilized, weakened, or eliminated. Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor, the university’s highest academic rank. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). Alison Weir is the founder of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest, which works for “U.S. Middle East policies that represent the highest values of our founders and our citizens and that work to sustain a nation of honor, decency, security, and prosperity.” Weir is also author of the book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.

Source videos:

Jeffrey Sachs on Piers Morgan    • “WHY Are We Doing Netanyahu’s Bidding…  

Alison Weir’s speech February 2017    • Israel-Palestine: Essential facts on …  

Alison Weir – Iraq Tribunal: The Israel Connection – 2022    • Iraq Tribunal: The Israel Connnection…  

Alison Weir’s speech September 2019    • Alison Weir Visits Clovis Community C…  

Donald Trump on the invasion of Iraq 2016    • Does Trump think George W. Bush lied …  

General Wesley Clark on Democracy Now    • Gen. Wesley Clark reveals 2001 plan t…  

General Wesley Clark’s speech at the Commonwealth Club of California    • Gen. Wesley Clark reveals 2001 plan t…  

Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress 2002    • Israeli Perspective on Conflict with …  

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The fall of Syria: A NATO, Zionist and Gulf state operation

By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | December 21, 2024

The day after the ceasefire with Hezbollah was announced on 26 November the so-called Syrian rebels launched their offensive.

But this was not just an isolated coincidence. Not only were fighters attacking Syria from the North, but two other fronts were opened at the same time showing clear co-ordination.

From the North East the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (or SDF) attacked.

And from the South, there is a relatively new grouping called the Southern Operations Room.

Who were these groups and who is backing them?

First, in the North, were two groups. The first is the Syrian National Army the rebranded name for former constituents of the Free Syria Army, a collection of militias most of which have been supported directly in the past by the US.

Then there is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham the rebranded name of the Nusra Front, the former Al Qaeda franchise. It is reportedly the strongest and largest so-called rebel group in Syria. Its leader Abou Mohammed al Jolani, has been successively the deputy leader of Islamic State in Iraq, the founder of the Nusra Front in Syria, a defector to Al-Qaeda who then rebranded HTS as something separate from Al-Qaeda. This is even admitted by the mainstream media as in this report from NBC:

When Syria’s vicious civil war erupted in 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), sent Jolani to Syria to establish the Al-Nusra Front, a branch of Al Qaeda. Their conflict escalated two years later. Jolani rejected Baghdadi’s calls to dissolve the Nusra Front and merge it with ISI to form ISIS. Instead, he pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, which later disassociated itself from ISIS. The Nusra Front then became Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate and later battled ISIS for supremacy in the battle against Assad.

Both HTS and the SNA are being supported directly by Turkiye.

Turkiye obviously has its own interests but as a NATO member, it is under the leadership of the US. Jolani is himself effectively a US asset as well. Here is Aaron Zelin the chronicler of Takfiri groups for Zionist regime asset WINEP:

HTS and its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, have sought to garner support from the United States and other Western governments over the past years in a bid to get themselves removed from terrorist lists. Although that has yet to occur, their overtures did not fall on deaf ears, at least during the Trump administration.

Zelin quotes a spring 2021 interview with Frontline by former US special representative James Jeffrey, which noted that he had “engaged with the group via backchannels while serving in President Trump’s State Department. He also noted that Washington had stopped targeting Jolani in August 2018.” In his view, “HTS was the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.”

In his long interview, Jeffrey also noted that

  • We got Mike Pompeo to issue a waiver to allow us to give aid to HTS
  • I received and sent messages to HTS
  • Messages from HTS: “We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”
  • The US was “supporting indirectly the armed opposition”
  • “It was important to us that HTS not disintegrate”
  • It was important “to ensure that nobody somewhere in the terrorist bureaucracy would decide to take a shot at [Jolani]… that would have been bad.”
  • “Our policy was, … to leave HTS alone.”
  • “Syria, … is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region.”
  • [The] Abraham Accords, … was, … encouraged by what we were doing in Syria and elsewhere.”
  • And the fact that we haven’t targeted [HTS] ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them … “It’s just like [Turkiye] in Idlib. We want [Turkiye] to be in Idlib, but you can’t be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, … HTS is a U.N.-designated official terrorist organization. Have I ever or has any American official ever complained to [Turkiye] about what [they’re] doing there with HTS? No.”
  • HTS “are the least bad option”

In the North East of Syria, Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces are a proxy for the US, which is in occupation of Syrian oil fields there. US officials refer to this part of Syria as being “owned” by the US with its “local partner” the SDF. The US has a smallish number of troops there and appears to depend on the roughly 100,000 Kurdish forces who enable them to steal almost all of Syria’s oil.

In the south of Syria, a seemingly new grouping emerged. The Southern Operations Room, reportedly a merger of a coalition of Sunni and Druze groups, announced its creation on December 6. Staggeringly they were reportedly the first to reach Damascus. According to reports, these fighters would appear to be related to the previous Southern Operations groupings created by Jordanian & US intelligence agencies.

The CIA covert operation Timber Sycamore was run out of Amman in Jordan and involved the transfer of weapons, including from Saudi Arabia to the Jordanian intelligence agency for onward transmission to Syrian rebel groups. The agency is known as the General Intelligence Directorate. In fact, as Salon reported in 2016, “the CIA essentially created the GID to help shield the Jordanian monarchy from internal and external threats.” Fighters from the Southern Operations Room were the first to reach Damascus on the 7th of December and may have been involved in the widely seen footage of armed rebels removing large numbers of boxes from the Syrian Central Bank.

So, all four of the supposedly disparate “rebel” forces would appear to be backed directly or indirectly, by the US, even though some (especially HTS/SNA and the Kurdish SDF) seem to have contending interests in some areas.

The HTS forces are famously murderously sectarian, and more evidence of this quickly emerged. At a geopolitical level, they are directly helping the Zionists to continue the genocide. Let’s remember that the Zionists have been undertaking continuous strikes on Syria over the last year. The “rebels” even appeared to credit the Zionists with successfully supporting their march on Damascus, In advance of the ceasefire announcement they carried out further attacks, which are continuing. The Zionists themselves were quite open about how useful the alleged ‘uprising’ is.

“From Israel’s perspective, the rebel advance in northern Syria further isolates Iran and Hezbollah”, said Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and Arab affairs adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Many of the weapons Hezbollah used against “Israel” in the recent war were transferred to them via Syria, according to Marco Moreno, a former senior officer in the IOF’s Human Intelligence Unit 504.

The rapid advance of HTS and the SNA has been enabled by Israeli strikes against Resistance groups that support the Syrian government.

According to Melamed: “This ongoing Israeli pressure, coupled with the rebel offensive, weakens the ‘Axis of Resistance’ and challenges Iran’s hegemonic ambitions.”

The extraordinary speed of the ending of the Assad government begs all sorts of questions about what happened and the significance of the events.

It is no surprise that “Israel”, the US, Turkiye and other supporters of Western power should celebrate, but the significant outpouring of positive sentiment from Muslims was perhaps more surprising.

The failure to appreciate the geopolitics of it all and to apparently blithely accept the victory of takfiri terrorists is disturbing for those who see the importance of Muslim unity.

More will likely become clear in the future, but for now, we can say that it appears that an agreement was reached between Russia, Iran, some Gulf states and the US. This allowed the Assad family to exit with some apparent guarantees on an orderly transition, including an order from the Syrian government side for the Army to stand down, and commitments from some of the opposition about avoiding looting and attacks on minorities, desecration of religious shrines and the like. The deal will also reportedly allow Russia to maintain its air and Naval base in Syria, but it is not clear how that will turn out.

The apparent support for the so called “revolution” in sections of the Muslim community in the UK and elsewhere is an indication of the success of propaganda and misinformation much of it from the West and the Zionist entity.

Despite myriad assertions, it is not true that the Palestinian armed factions opposed Assad. With the exception of the Hamas Political Bureau between 2012 and 2020, every Palestinian Resistance faction supported Assad including the PFLP, PFLP-GC, DFLP, PIJ, PLA, Liwa Al Quds, and Fatah al-Intifada.  It is true that elements of the Hamas politburo (in Qatar – particularly Khaled Mesh’aal), was always closer to the Qatari/Turkish line and broke with Assad from 2012-20.

However, the targeting of Hamas leaders by the Zionist entity has been based particularly on those who support the Axis of Resistance, because they are the ones perceived as a threat. The most obvious example is Yahya Sinwar. Some of them still remain. Those at the sharp end of confronting the Zionist genocide knew more than anyone, how much their supplies of weapons and other equipment depended on Assad’s support.

From the other side, it’s also true that Bashar al-Assad, was made repeated offers by King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia and others to accrue huge personal benefits if he gave up on Palestine and Lebanon, and cut ties with the Resistance. He refused. Even up until the last days of his rule, the UAE’s Islamophobic Zionist dictator Mohammed bin Zayed made Bashar an offer on behalf of the US to cut the Axis of Resistance in return for the US keeping him in power. He refused.

He was made such offers because Syria was the backbone of Palestine and the Lebanese Resistance, without which both will find it very difficult to recover from a logistical perspective. The arms, money, and intelligence that are essential to fighting guerrilla warfare on a serious scale require state support, and Syria under Bashar was the land bridge for all of those supplies reaching Lebanon and Palestine. Which is why they were assiduously bombed by the Zionists.

David Miller is an investigative researcher, broadcaster, and academic. He is the founder and co-director of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch and editor of Powerbase.info.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Scandalous detention of Iranians by US to extort information

Press TV – December 21, 2024 

Two Iranian nationals have been recently arrested in the United States and Italy on allegations of involvement in equipping drones allegedly used in attacks on American forces—a claim Iran has strongly rejected as baseless.

On the evening of December 16, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, 38, a mechanical engineering graduate from Sharif University of Technology, was detained by Italian police at Milan Airport while preparing to travel to Switzerland. The arrest, carried out at the request of the United States, has cut off all direct contact with him.

Meanwhile, Mahdi Mohammadsadeghi, 42, a US resident, was arrested in Massachusetts around the same time.

According to reports, the arrests of the two individuals are allegedly linked to a January 28 drone attack carried out by Iraqi armed groups against a US military outpost in Jordan known as Tower 22.

The attack killed three American soldiers and injured 47 others. The FBI claims that the equipment used in the drone attack was supplied by these two individuals.

A university peer of Mohammad Abedini told Tasnim News Agency that Abedini is an Iranian national and the CEO of Sanat Danesh Rahpooyan Aflak (SDRA), a company in Iran specializing in precision measurement equipment.

The company’s products have diverse applications, including medical and sports technologies.

Abedini also headed a Swiss-based company, Illumove SA, which focused on motion capture equipment manufacturing. All activities of these companies were conducted under the legal and financial oversight of the Swiss government.

The unnamed source explained that due to their advanced technology, the equipment produced by these companies has multipurpose uses. Once legally sold in Iranian markets, the products can be purchased and utilized by any individual or entity.

However, the US government has fabricated charges, claiming the equipment was used in drones involved in the aforementioned attack, leading to the arrest and prosecution of these individuals.

He emphasized that the lack of formal communication with the Iranian embassy and the denial of access to Abedini constitutes a clear case of abduction.

“Even if the allegations were proven, the appropriate course of action would have been to prevent his entry into Europe or the United States, not to detain him based on unsubstantiated claims,” he said.

Since two days ago, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its consulate in Italy, has launched extensive efforts to secure Mohammad Abedini’s release or at least obtain information about his condition. It is hoped that these efforts will yield results before any judicial action is taken against him.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , | Leave a comment

Washington trained, armed extremist groups to topple Syrian government: Report

Press TV – December 20, 2024

The United States prepared and bolstered an armed group in southern Syria weeks prior to the offensive that ousted President Bashar al-Assad, a Western media report says.

In the first indication that Washington had prior knowledge of the offensive, the group known as Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA) revealed it had been told to scale-up its forces and “be ready” for an attack that could lead to the end of the Assad government, the Telegraph reported.

The RCA fighters, trained by Britain and the US, were told “this is your moment” during a briefing by US Special Forces stationed in the Arab country before Assad was toppled on December 8, the report noted.

The RCA fighters said Washington had prior knowledge of the offensive, which was mainly led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The RCA was told to increase its forces and prepare for a major attack that could “end” the Syrian government.

Capt Bashar al-Mashadani, an RCA commander said in the weeks preceding the offensive, the RCA’s ranks were expanded by smaller “freelance” units, all of which were briefed at the US al-Tanf air base.

“They did not tell us how it would happen,” al-Mashadani told the Telegraph from a former Syrian army air base on the outskirts of the city of Palmyra.

“We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”

The RCA is an armed group established by defected Syrian Arab Army (SAA) troops and is headquartered in the al-Tanf area, near the Syria-Jordan-Iraq border area, in southern Syria.

US forces are also stationed in the al-Tanf area, where they claim to be fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the region.

‘On the US payroll’

According to the British newspaper, the RCA remains on the US’s payroll, as Washington claims to require their assistance to prevent the resurgence of Daesh. All members of the force continued to be armed by the US and to receive their salary of $400 a month.

The group has now filled a major void vacated by the former government forces, taking over one-fifth of the country’s territory and pockets north of the capital.

Among the chief targets of the US-backed operation was Palmyra, known for its ancient ruins.

Palmyra was among the main objectives of the US-backed operation, according to the Telegraph. Fighters who captured the Russian-controlled air base in Palmyra were reportedly told to prepare to take such action in early November.

The sources also said that Americans coordinated communication between RCA and HTS during the offensive. The HTS and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, are terror-listed by the US.

The report indicates not only that Washington knew about the offensive led by HTS, but that it had precise intelligence about its scale.

It would therefore be only one of many ironies if the US has been in an effective alliance with a group like HTS, which was al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, the report said.

A senior delegation of US diplomats on Friday arrived in Syria to speak directly to the representatives of HTS, which is designated a terrorist group by Washington.

December 20, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Is Seeking to Stop a War a Crime?

Whistleblowers and other government activists need to be heard

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • December 18, 2024

The early November detention of Asif Rahman, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, indicted in a federal national security court in the Eastern District of Virginia on two counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act,” was largely downplayed in the national media. He was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Tuesday November 5th at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh in Cambodia where he was stationed and was sent to appear in the nearest federal court in Guam on Thursday the 7th to be charged. After his initial court appearance and indictment, Rahman, was transferred to a federal prison in Virginia.

Rahman was a CIA analyst with a top-secret clearance that gave him access to the classified material that passed through the Agency’s Cambodia Station, which would have included much of the routine collection and dissemination of information on developments in Asia. Rahman allegedly selected one report containing two files relating to plans by Israel to attack Iran, which he then placed on an Iranian frequented site on the Telegram messaging app called the “Middle East Spectator,” which in turn claimed that the information came from a Pentagon source. After being posted it attracted a considerable audience, including US security monitors, numerous Iranians and, inevitably, the Israelis. The two top secret documents were marked as having been produced by the US government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. They included satellite imagery from October 15th and 16th that showed that Israel was moving Air Force military assets preparatory to conducting a military strike on Iran. Bear in mind that Israel has long sought to eliminate Iran as an adversary in the Middle East region they share, up to and including assassination of Iranian scientists and government officials and air attacks on targets in places like Syria that have been regarded as Iranian allies. Iran, for its part, has never attacked Israel prior to recent developments relating to the Gaza conflict.

The US government declared the leak of the classified files to be “deeply disturbing” and investigators who finally focused on Rahman declared that he might have been “ideologically” motivated to expose the information. Rahman has declared himself to be not guilty and as the case relates to intelligence on a non-allied foreign country’s military making preparations for war it raises some ethical problems as well as political issues connected to Israel’s unofficial special relationship with the United States government. It is, for example, not normal for someone detained for leaking classified information to be imprisoned as the preparations for trial are underway unless they are likely to flee jurisdiction. Rahman is from a prominent and wealthy family based in Vienna Virginia and his father Muhit Rahman and lawyer Amy Jeffress sought to have him stay at home with family in custodial pretrial, which is normal, but a ruling by US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles overruled a magistrate who said a week before that Rahman could be free of additional restrictions including detention while he is awaited his trial. Jeffress has indicated that she will be appealing the detention order which was restored by Giles.

In the event, Israel decided to proceed with its plans and carried out the attack targeting Iran’s air defense systems and missile manufacturing facilities in late October. Citing no actual evidence, court papers related to the case reveal that the US government claims the leak of the files caused Israel to delay its attack plans. Prosecutor Troy Edwards said the volatile nature of the developing situation in the Middle East made the leak especially dangerous. He explained that “It is hard to overstate what other circumstances present graver risks of danger to human life than unilaterally deciding to transmitting information related to plans for kinetic military action between two countries.”

Actually, stopping the planned “kinetic action” is the solution if one wants to save lives. Edwards’ line of reasoning, encouraging one side to proceed, could be considered to be the reverse of what might be true if one is truly seeking to mitigate the “danger to human life.” While it is unquestionably true that a government employee who takes classified information and shares it is committing a serious crime under the Espionage Act as well as other legislation, one might argue that Rahman, if actually guilty as charged and convicted, may have been responding to what he might have considered to be mitigating circumstances. By exposing information on Israeli plans to attack Iran he might have believed that he was actually saving many lives as well as avoiding an escalation of a developing major war in the Middle East. He may have revealed information that the US government considered to be classified due to the way it was obtained by satellite but which, apart from that fact, did not in any way impact on the national security of the United States. Quite the contrary, as it would be quite plausible to argue that the United States would have been dragged into any conflict escalated by Israel against Iran, which does not in any way threaten the US, and which would serve no American national interest. Examining the leak from that perspective it would be quite reasonable to argue that Rahman, if he is guilty of mishandling the classified information, was trying to avert escalating a war that would quite plausibly do damage to all countries involved, including the United States and Israel.

The Rahman case is just one more indication of how anything having to do with Israel is not quite treated by government and media in the same fashion as for any other country. It is clearly a response to the immense power of the Israel Lobby in the United States. There is a strong tendency by the US to always defer to actions and behavior that Israel exhibits while also giving the Jewish state a pass when the results are awful or even genocidal as they are in Gaza. And there is a certain irony in how it all plays out going in the other direction. Israel, in fact, has a history of actively spying against the United States without any real consequences to make it pay a price for such behavior. The most devastating spy ever to steal American defense secrets was Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish civilian employee of the US Navy, who stole whole rooms full of classified information in the 1980s, including the beyond top secret National Security Agency‘s ten-volume manual on how the US gathers its signal intelligence, to include the technical details of how the US collected information on its actual enemies during the Cold War, revealing aspects of US intelligence gathering’s “sources and methods.” The defense information went to Israel where it was used in part to trade for visas from Moscow so Russian Jews could emigrate, certainly arguably a good cause, but paid for by damaging US security. Other US classified information went from Tel Aviv to China. Condemned to a life prison sentence, Pollard actually spent years in jail, where, in 1995, he became an Israeli citizen, but he was eventually released under parole in 2015 requiring him to stay in the United States. The parole requirement was canceled by President Donald Trump and Pollard immediately returned to Israel where he was celebrated as a hero. So much for Israel as America’s good friend and ally.

By another definition, Rahman, even if found guilty as charged over the sharing of classified documents, might easily be viewed as a whistleblower, revealing information that the United States government had collected on a foreign government that might lead to a war and many deaths. Rahman may have believed that the exposure of the war plans would make Israel pause and reconsider. And maybe it would also lead the United States to also reexamine its often touted “ironclad” support of everything that Israel does as excessively risky in a volatile part of the world where Washington has considerable real interests in terms of energy issues and national security.

If Rahman were to consider himself a whistleblower acting as he did as a matter of conscience, he would not be the first CIA officer to do so. John Kiriakou was an analyst and later a case officer and counterterrorism specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who worked in the Middle East, Pakistan and Greece. After leaving the Agency he became a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and later a consultant for ABC News, after which he became the operating manager of a political risk analysis consulting firm in Arlington Virginia. To John’s credit, he became the first US government official to confirm, during an interview with a reporter in December 2007, that waterboarding, which was simulated drowning, was routinely used to interrogate terrorist suspects, which he described as torture. One victim was reportedly waterboarded 183 times in a secret prison.

In Kiriakou’s case, as it was and still is illegal for the US government to torture people to extort a confession, the same Virginia court that is trying Rahman had to avoid allowing the potential war crimes issue to surface. So on April 5, 2012, Kiriakou was indicted, not for exposing torture, but rather for one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, three counts of violating the Espionage Act, and one count of “making false statements” for lying to the Agency’s Publications Review Board regarding a book that John was writing. Kiriakou pleaded not guilty and was released on bail. His time in court began on September 12th, 2012, at the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It was conducted as a closed hearing in line with the Classified Information Procedures Act. On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou agreed to a plea bargain of guilty to one count of passing classified information to the media, violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and thereby avoiding a formal trial. All other charges were dropped. On January 25th, 2013, John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison. On February 3rd, 2015, Kiriakou was released to serve a final three months under house arrest at his home in Virginia. Following his release, Kiriakou said his case was not about leaking information but about exposing torture, continuing, “and I would do it all over again.”

Kiriakou, to his immense credit, never walked away from what he did, declaring firmly that the torture regime and the lies that supported it was wrong, both illegal and immoral. Was Asif Rahman a whistleblower like Kiriakou? The answer to that depends on one’s point of view as he might have been seeking to stop a war rather than start one. He may have thought that it was something that his conscience and sense of shared humanity obligated him to do without regard for the possible consequences to himself. We will see how he defends himself when he finally appears before the judges. It will possibly be a very interesting discussion about America’s values as a nation vis-à-vis the questionable behavior of the state of Israel, but instead of listening to what Rahman has to say, the public will likely be hearing something like this from those in government as echoed by the captive media: Michael Waltz, Trump’s foreign policy advisor nominee recently said “When [Secretary of State] Blinken touched down in Israel yesterday, I hope he apologized to Bibi for leaking their battle plans, and told the Israelis that they were right all along. Because the Ayatollah is in hiding right now, not because of Biden, but because of Bibi.” The sad reality is that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has overwhelmed Joe Biden and will likely do the same to Donald Trump, has been allowed to become the prime architect of the shambles that the Middle East has become with no one but a handful of whistleblowers seeking to restore sanity.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

December 18, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

USS Harry S. Truman Leads American Naval Deployment to Middle East

Sputnik – 15.12.2024

The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group arrived in the Middle East on December 14, entering the US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) area of responsibility. The deployment was announced by CENTCOM on the social media platform X.

The group includes the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, Carrier Air Wing 1 with nine aviation squadrons, the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg (Ticonderoga class), and two guided-missile destroyers, USS Stout and USS Jason Dunham (Arleigh Burke class).

Earlier in November, US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were deployed to the region from the United Kingdom, reinforcing the American military presence in the Middle East.

The deployment comes amid heightened regional tensions and US President-elect Donald Trump’s earlier remarks promising to avoid “starting wars” once he officially takes office.

December 15, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

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