The author writes that the war in Syria has devastated entire cities, the death toll is 470 thousand (there are no reliable statistics to confirm the figure) and 6 million people have become displaced. As a result, religious communities in Syria cannot live together in one state anymore. He believes that Syria should be divided into parts populated by Alawites (for some reason it includes Damascus) and Sunni Muslims. The options include a partition of the country into independent states or forming some kind of loose confederation like Bosnia and Herzegovina. James Stavridis is a four-star Admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He is an influential person in military and political circles.
The Admiral made public his views on Syria soon after US State Secretary John Kerry referred to plan B in Syria in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 1.
According to the US top diplomat, he will move towards a plan B that could involve a partition of Syria if hostilities continue because the political forces cannot coexist in one state.
The idea of dividing Syria, Iraq and other states in the Middle East has been considered by US strategic thinkers since the 1980s. Bernard Lewis, the patriarch of American oriental studies, was the first to suggest it. For many years he has been a member of and consultant to the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Formally an independent think tank, the Council exerts great influence on shaping US foreign policy.
In The Roots of Muslim Rage, an essay published in 1990, Bernard Lewis describes a ‘surge of hatred’ rising from the Islamic world that “becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such.” The thesis became influential.
The essay inspired Samuel Huntington, the author of the clash of civilizations hypothesis. Lewis is a widely read expert on the Middle East and is regarded as one of the West’s leading scholars specialized in that region. His advice has been frequently sought by policymakers, including the Bush Jr. administration in the early 2000s. Jacob Weisberg, a prominent US journalist, writes that Bernard Lewis was perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In 1979, Bernard Lewis first unveiled his project aimed at reshaping the Middle East to the Bilderberg Meeting in Baden, Austria. The goal was to counter Iran after the Islamic revolution and the Soviet Union with its military deployed to Afghanistan the same year. According to him, the anti-Iranian policy was to include the incitement of an armed Sunni-Shia confrontation and support of the Muslim Brothers movement. The Soviet Union was to be countered by creating an «Arc of Crisis» in the vicinity of its borders. The national states of the Middle East were to be ‘Balkanized’ along religious, ethnic and sectarian lines.
The Lewis project was advanced further after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992 the scholar’s article titled Rethinking the Middle East appeared in Foreign Affairs, the US leading forum for serious discussion of foreign policy and international affairs published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
There he presented a new map of the Middle East. The plan envisaged breaking Syria up into small fragments with the territories populated by the Druze and Alawites separated to become independent mini-states. Lewis wanted to establish new entities: a tiny state on the territory of Lebanon populated by Maronites, an independent Kurdistan comprising the Kurds-populated areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, an independent Shia state in Iraq, an Arab state in the Iranian province of Khuzestan – the major oil-producing region of Iran. The plans also envisaged the creation of independent Balochistan.
Bernard Lewis advocated a policy called ‘Lebanonization’. According to him, “A possibility, which could even be precipitated by Islamic fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization’. Most of the states of the Middle East – Egypt is an obvious exception – are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity… The state then disintegrates – as happened in Lebanon – into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties,” the scholar wrote.
The main goal of such projects is to prevent the emergence of regional forces able to challenge the hegemony of the United States [or Israel]. That’s what made the US add fuel to the fire of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Washington succeeded in making the war last for eight years. By provoking the hostilities, the US killed two birds with one stone: it prevented Iran from growing stronger and weakened Iraq ruled by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.
The West launched Operation Desert Storm to keep Iraq weak. In 2003 it concocted a false pretext (the possession of weapons of mass destruction) to occupy Iraq and deprive it of sovereignty. By and large, the same fate awaited Syria.
In 1990 Syrian troops remained in Lebanon as peacekeepers in accordance with the Taif Agreement. The US gave its consent because Damascus took part in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. Besides, the Syrian government of Hafez Assad effectively committed itself not to take hostile actions against Israel. In ten years the situation changed. Damascus launched the policy of strategic partnership with Iran. It supported the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. Washington changed its stance to say the Syrian military in Lebanon was an occupying force. Using the imposition of sanctions as a weapon, the United States made Syria withdraw from Lebanon. In 2011 the US started to undermine the Syria’s national sovereignty.
The most faithful US allies – Saudi Arabia for instance – have no guarantees they will not become part of such plans. Nowadays, the United States does not depend on the oil supplies from the Middle East. It has put an end to the policy of direct confrontation with Tehran. As a strategic partner, Riyadh is not as important as it used to be. It’s hardly a coincidence that US media outlets started to publish maps with Hejaz (a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia) drawn as part of Jordan with the eastern part of the Saudi Kingdom together with South Iraq shown as part of Shia Arab state. Actually, a genuine settlement to the problems faced by the Arab world is something quite opposite from what the United States has to offer.
The partition of the Middle East into tiny powerless states will give rise to new crises accompanied by ethnic and religious cleansing. It will lead to a ‘war of all against all’ (bellum omnium contra omnes) – the term coined by Thomas Hobbs.
In case of such a war, the small principalities will need someone for arbitration. Washington will offer itself for this role.
In the future, the creation of large Arab space (Grossraum) may lead the region out of the deep crisis it faces, but that’s a different and a very serious matter to be discussed some other time.
The recent scandal in Paris concerning the decoration with the Légion d’honneur by the French government of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammad Ben Nayef, highlights the importance of the absolutist Gulf Monarchy to France’s imperial strategy in the Middle East. The spurious left/right divide in French politics between the Socialist Party and the Republicans, is manifested in a Middle East geopolitics of the Socialist Party’s special relationship with Saudi Arabia, while UMP, formerly led by Nicolas Sarkozy, tends to favor Qatar, the irony being that Qatar is a tad more liberal than the ‘socialist’ backed Saudi behemoth.
While there was muted outrage in the French capital over the decision to honor Ben Nayef on his own request, in order to boost his international ‘credibility’, I believe the French government’s actions were perfectly logical and reasonable. Why wouldn’t the French government honor Saudi officials? Since the creation of a unified kingdom with British backing in 1932, the Saudi dictatorship has served its function well. It has, along with its sister Israel, constituted a bulwark against the two threats to Western, Zionist suzerainty in the Middle East and North Africa: Arab nationalism and revolutionary Shiism.
The Wahhabi regime does this by keeping so many of the Muslims of the former Ottoman Empire indoctrinated in an obscurantist death cult, under the supreme authority of a degenerate ruling caste who, instead of developing the industrial sector of their country so as to improve the lives of the poor, squander billions on Western arms deals in order to better oppress their own people and those of neighboring countries such as Yemen, who are attempting to emancipate themselves from the neocolonial yoke.
Relations between the Saudi monarchy and the French government are currently so good, the words ‘honey moon’, have been used to describe them. When President Holland visited Riyadh Just months after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in January 2015, French press pundits on the capitalist ‘left’ and ‘capitalist right’, were waxing lyrical about the ‘great friendship’ that exists between Saudi Arabia and France. In June 2015, the French government signed over 10,3 billion dollars in contracts with the Saudi regime in areas extending from military, aeronautics, health, transport and solar energy. This means that a sizable portion of the French bourgeoisie, what President Clemenceau once referred to as “the syndicate of interests”, are perfectly happy with the Franco-Saudi status quo.
French imperialism currently bears the distinction of having surpassed the United States in bellicosity. The French led the carpet bombing and destruction of Libya in 2011; they have led in the destruction of Syria too. In negotiations with Iran, the Quai d’Orsay was the most intransigent; this won it more favor with Riyadh. With US/Saudi relations strained, due to American détente with Iran, Paris is using Saudi insecurity about its future to gain more influence in the Arabian Peninsula.
The French government sold more arms than ever in 2015 and they intend to sell even more this year, thanks to the ‘honey moon’ relationship with the head chopping regime in Riyadh; a regime openly promoting the Wahhabi death cult all around the world, including in France’s sprawling proletarian banlieux, where mis-fortunate youths such as the infamous Kouachi brothers fall under their influence. The fact that the Saudi regime promotes and funds Takfiri terrorism is not a secret; US Vice President Joe Biden candidly admitted this to students at the Kennedy Business School in Harvard University in 2014.
While US presidential candidate Donald Trump, in what appeared to be a veiled critique of Israeli terrorism, recently declared that ‘everyone knows’ the Saudis are behind Takfiri terrorism.
In fact, it is regularly admitted by the French corporate and establishment media that the Saudis are funding terrorism in Syria and other countries, yet Riyadh remains the privileged partner of countries claiming to be fighting an international ‘war on terrorism’! None of this makes sense but, of course, that is because it doesn’t have to make sense. For this global war on terrorism is a war without a real enemy. The enemies are fabricated by the panoply of agencies that constitute the military-industrial-media-intelligence complex; a netherworld of special interests and high finance.
In this post-modern wasteland of consumerist meaninglessness and zero-consciousness, the terrorist is a shifting signifier. The ‘War on Terror’ narrative operates like Derridean deconstruction, whereby the terrorist is both real and unreal, present and absent, constantly deferred, displaced, with no essential being outside the labyrinthine obfuscations of the war on terror’s ever expanding mythos. And the political elites, who serve corporate and financial power, no longer care what the public thinks of them. They are now discretely admitting that the war on terror is a fraud, that the French government supports the most outrageous dictatorships on earth, that human rights, as Marx noted, signify nothing more than vile property rights ; that money is God and that they have nothing but snickering contempt for the French public.
Everything is now out in the open. We are governed by criminals and tyrants and they don’t mind us taking cognizance of that fact. Therefore, the media disclosure of emails showing how the French government attempted to play down the Légion d’honneur affair will not bother them. Speaking to France Inter last week, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, said: ” Diplomacy can sometimes surprise us. One should see it like that” In other words, this is an affair of state and we have no duty to explain our policies to the public. Procul, procul, este profani! Be off, be gone, ye uninitiated!
In 1999, a relative of Ben Nayef was arrested in Paris in possession of 20 tons of cocaine. The Saudi prince was smuggling drugs from Latin America into Europe, in order to finance Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan. The prince escaped to Saudi Arabia but was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison by a French court. The fact that this convicted, felonious relative of Mohammad Ben Nayef was under the protection of the Saudi regime did not even enter into the agenda of the French delegation to Riyadh in 2015.
Why would it? Drug trafficking is a key component of class rule, constituting the carefully concealed underbelly of the global, capitalist system.
Drug dealers operating under the aegis of the French Socialist Party were responsible for crushing the massive French labor strikes of 1948, when there was a real chance of the French Communist Party, (PCF )taking power. In cahoots with the CIA, Socialist Mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Deferre used the drug trafficking mafia clans to crush the worker’s movement. Today, cities like Marseilles are awash with drugs, delinquency, and poverty. The workers are no longer organized as immigration keeps them disunited and demoralized, while Saudi princes party with their French counterparts along the French Riviera. Meanwhile, ‘socialist’ leaders meet farcically in Paris to discuss the “danger of the far right”, movements whose ranks are increasingly being filled with demoralized workers.
The Saudi prince deserves the Légion d’honneur, for the Saudi regime is a worthy partner of French imperialism. It is waging war against the Syrian people, waging war against the Yemeni people, and would soon be waging war against the Iranian people, were it not for the fact that Persia is capable of flattening it.
The Wahhabi regime poisons the minds of millions of young Muslims, diverting their social anger at the ruling class into sectarian hatred of their class allies, killing other poor Muslims and Christians instead of the tyrants spreading hate, oppression and permanent war. The Saudi regime is a Zionist entity, which wages permanent war on Muslims mostly, murdering and defaming them and sullying the Islam. For the deeply unpopular French regime instituting a police state, Saudi Arabia is a role model. In this sense, by bestowing the highest honors of the state on despot Mohammad Ben Nayef, the French government is revealing to the world the true meaning, the transcendental signification of their oft incanted ditty of ‘human rights’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.
According to disclosed data, the German government has approved several deals for the export of arms to countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia as the kingdom continues its deadly aggression against the impoverished nation of Yemen.
According to an Economy Ministry letter seen by Reuters on Monday, the EU powerhouse will deliver 23 Airbus military helicopters to Riyadh.
In the letter to lawmakers in the economy committee of the lower house of the parliament, Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel explained that the government’s Federal Security Council had also approved a deal by Heckler & Koch to deliver 130 machine pistols and automatic rifles to the United Arab Emirates and allowed Rheinmetall to export 65,000 mortar cartridges to the country.
The United Arab Emirates is among Saudi Arabia’s allies in their invasion against Yemen.
It also gave the green light for Heckler & Koch’s delivery of 660 machine guns, 660 additional gun barrels and 550 sub-machine guns to Oman.
The government also approved the delivery of five military helicopters by Airbus to Thailand and the export of nearly 490 machine pistols and automatic rifles by Heckler & Koch to Indonesia.
In January, Gabriel had said Germany may look harder at its arms exports to Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf kingdom carried out a mass execution causing international outcry.
Saudi Arabia is also widely believed to be financing to Takfiri militants wreaking havoc in the Middle East.
Riyadh has also been engaged in military operations in Yemen since late March last year. At least 8,400 people, among them 2,236 children, have been killed so far in the aggression and 16,015 others sustained injuries. Tens of Saudi solders as well as mercenary forces have been killed in the aggression.
Canadian Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, puts forth such a distorted understanding of Syria that she has either fallen prey to the corporate media’s false rendition of Syria, or she is towing the line for political gain. In either case, the rhetoric she has employed over the past five years has gone from dismaying to appalling, considering that we are not in the early “confusing” months of the war on Syria, we are five years in, and the anti-Syria lexicon she repeats has long been discredited.
In June 2011, May’s Green Party described the situation in Syria as a “pro-democracy uprising,” and called for “more robust sanctions to include an international trade and energy embargo and not just sanctions against specific individuals and Syrian security organizations.”
Apparently the Iraq lesson—wherein 1.7 million Iraqis died as a “direct result of the genocidal sanctions” (source)—is not relevant to May. She would do well to read the Lancet’s report, “Syria: end sanctions and find a political solution to peace,” as of May 2015:
“The cost of basic food items has risen six-fold since 2010, although it varies regionally. With the exception of drugs for cancer and diabetes, Syria was 95 percent self-sufficient in terms of drug production before the war. This has virtually collapsed as have many hospitals and primary health-care centres.
Economic sanctions have not removed the President: … only civilians are in the line of fire, attested to by the dire state of household and macro-economies. Sanctions are among the biggest causes of suffering for the people of Syria.”
Perhaps May doesn’t care about the effects of sanctions on the Syrian people, but instead supports the US plan to destabilize Syria through various means, including sanctions, as noted even in 2005:
“As an alternative to direct military intervention to topple the Syrian government, the United States chose to pressure Damascus through sanctions and support for the internal Syrian opposition.”
As for the “pro-democracy uprising,” it has thoroughly been revealed to have been an armed insurrection from the very earliest protests, with sectarian chants and killings occurring by the so-called “democracy-loving” “unarmed” protesters from the very first months. The CIA has a long history of supporting such violence in Syria. For more on this, and the mythology on Syria in general, see my extensively-linked earlier article, “Deconstructing the NATO Narrative on Syria.”
Vilifying Assad and Russia; Silence on Turkey, Sauds
In October 2015, after Russia had been invited by the Syrian government to fight terrorists in Syria, May issued a statement condemning Russian airstrikes, stating bizarrely: “The bombing by Russian forces within Syria of rebel groups trained by the CIA under cover of a claim their target is ISIS brings into sharp relief the perils of air strikes against one rebel group in a civil war.”
She is upset that Russian strikes also target al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, who she admits were CIA-trained? She continues with the “civil war” refrain?
Fellow Canadian and journalist Mark Taliano, in a January 2016 article noted:
“There are no “moderate” terrorists. The mercenaries are all being paid and enabled by the West and its allies, including Turkey (a NATO member),Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan.”
Later in the article, Taliano pointed out:
“Assad – … is defending his country from foreign terrorists, not “killing his own people” – the Western invaders are killing Assad’s people.”
In a February 23, 2016 post, May again referred to Russia’s role in Syria, stating it is “legitimized by US and its allies own bombing campaigns”. Apparently May, a lawyer, misunderstood the legalities of both parties roles in Syria. The US-led coalition’s violations of Syrian airspace are in contradiction to international law. Russia’s presence, on the other hand, is not in violation of international law: Russia was invited by the Syrian government.
In the post, May on the one hand acknowledged that Western intervention in Iraq and Libya have been the cause of the subsequent chaos that continues to this day in those countries, while on the other hand still voiced lexicon and arguments which endorse intervention in Syria.
This is May’s (2016) nutshell interpretation of the war on Syria:
“Syria is a giant mess of competing nasty forces. The government (if one can still call it that) is run by a brutal dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Assad is supported by Iran and Hezbollah, while Al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS want to over-turn Assad. Saudi Arabia is reported to be supporting ISIS. Russia supports Assad and is using its access to bombing, legitimized by US and its allies own bombing campaigns, to hit hard at Assad’s enemies – whether they are ISIS or not.”
Overlooking the childish terminology she employed, in the entire post, the only mention of the nefarious Saudi role in Syria is this one passing reference, of the Wahhabi kingdom being “reported to be supporting ISIS”. Why is May wilfully overlooking the deeply-entrenched role of the Saudis in funding, training, and brainwashing Wahhabi mercenaries to kill in Syria?
Regarding her, “Assad’s enemies—whether they are ISIS or not”— May seems to be attempting to convey that long-dead myth that there are “moderate” terrorist-rebels. The reality is that Russia and Syria are fighting Da’esh (ISIS), al-Nusra, FSA and any other terrorist factions warring against the Syrian state and people.
Further on in the post May disingenuously suggested, “We could do more to stop the flow of weapons and money to ISIS through its black market activities,” but again failed to mention Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, ‘Israel’ or the CIA ties to, and support of, ISIS and like terrorists.
By continuing (five years on) to claim the war on Syria is a “civil war” and its president a “brutal dictator”, May is feeding the line-of-logic that the only way to bring peace to Syria is the removal of its elected president and the supporting of Wahhabi-backed “opposition”—who themselves could not even come to an agreement to attend the last (Feb 2016) Geneva talks, which Syrian government representatives did, in contrast.
Following the collapse of those talks, Syria’s ambassador to the UN, Dr. Bashar al-Ja’afari, clearly explained that fault lay with the Saudis and their “opposition” puppets, and with the UN itself.
In a February 16 briefing, he explained that de Mistura had told the Ambassador he had “decided to suspend the talks because he knew earlier that the Riyadh group decided to withdraw from Geneva before even engaging in the indirect talks.”
In contrast, according to al-Ja’afari, “the delegation of the Syrian Arab Republic was the only delegation to engage twice with the special envoy. … We didn’t know how many delegations there should be there. We didn’t know the names. In the last couple hours before we left Geneva, the deputy of Mr. de Mistura came to me at the hotel and gave me a partial list of names, not the full list of names….” Yet the media blamed Syria, unsurprisingly, and not the Wahhabi “opposition”.
Secular Syria; Women-Strong
Bizarrely, May’s February 2016 post acknowledged that that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was secular, its “cabinet included women and had no Islamist doctrine,” but failed to recognize that of secular Syria, whose leadership includes:
-Numerous women (including, but not all of): Vice President, Dr. Najah al-Attar, also Minister of Culture, a Sunni with a Western education and a PhD. Political and Media Advisor to the Syrian President, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, also Sunni and holding a PhD, Western-educated; former Minister of Tourism, Lamia Assi (also former Minister of Economy and Trade); Minister of Social Affairs, Rima al-Qadiri;former Minister of Social Affairs, Dr. Kinda al-Shammat.
-Sunnis (including, but not all of): Prime Minister, Dr. Wael al-Halqi; Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem; Minister of Defense Fahd Jassem al-Freij, Parliament Member Mohammad Jihad al-Laham.
“President Bashar al Assad himself is married to a Sunni woman. The Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, is a strong Sunni supporter of the secular state. Sheikh Mohamad Al Bouti, murdered along with 42 others by an FSA suicide bomber in March 2013, was a senior Sunni Koranic scholar who backed the secular state.
Syria’s secular tradition is nowhere stronger than in the Syrian Arab Army. Making up about 80% of Syria’s armed forces and with half a million members, half regulars and half conscripts, the army is drawn from all the country’s communities (Sunni, Alawi, Shiia, Christian, Druze, Kurd, Armenian, etc). However they identify as ‘Syrian’ and ‘Arab’ and confront a sectarian enemy that brands itself ‘real Sunnis’.”
On the issue of women in Syria, Anderson explained:
“The Syrian Arab Republic was the first country in the Middle East and North African region (MENA) to give women the vote (1949, 1953) and the second after Lebanon to allow women to stand for election (1953). Syria was the first to have a woman elected to parliament (1973). Syria has by far the highest level of paid maternity leave in the MENA region – a minimum of 17 weeks paid leave, 100% paid by employers. Although one of the poorer MENA countries, the Syrian Arab Republic has a maternal mortality rate (per 1000,000 live births) of 46 in 2008, well below the MENA average (91); that is linked to skilled assistance at birth much higher than average (93% Syria / 79% MENA). In Syria, …‘women’s health adjusted life expectancy’ is the best in the MENA region (Sources: UNDP 2014; UN Women 2011).”
Journalist Julie Lévesque wrote on the US history of meddling and destroying women’s rights in Afghanistan, and their attempts to do so now in Syria. She cited a (2013) US State Department conference in Qatar (of all places) promoting “women’s rights,” hosted by the Women’s Democracy Network (WDN), which Lévesque points out “is an initiative of the International Republican Institute, well-known for supporting dissidents in various countries defying US imperialism.”
On the US meddling in Syria, she wrote:
“…the US along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia is supporting Islamist extremist groups fighting against the secular Syrian government. Some so-called “liberated areas” in Syria are now run by religious extremists.
…Were a US proxy regime to be installed in Damascus, the rights and liberties of Syrian women might well be following the same “freedom-threatening path” as that of Afghan women under the US-backed Taliban regime and continuing under the US-NATO occupation.”
Doh, Canada! Supporting Terrorism in Syria
In March 2016, May at least issued a statement against Canada’s “military contributions against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria.” She also said, “We need to work with our international partners to cut off Daesh’s funding.”
Yet no mention was made of the gigantic elephants in the room: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, ‘Israel’ and the CIA, among other US departments. Further, Da’esh are but one of numerous foreign terrorist factions warring on Syria.
Nor was any mention made of the fact that since the beginning of the war on Syria, Canada has been funding and abetting terrorists in Syria.
Ken Stone’s detailed November 2015 article explains the manifold ways Canada has aided terrorists in Syria, as well as the attempt at “regime change”, including:
“organizing the covert mercenary war against Syria through the Group of Friends of the Syrian People (“Friends of Syria Group”);
establishing a regime of economic sanctions against Syria and hosting, in Ottawa, the Friends of Syria Group’s International Working Group on Sanctions;
funding and supporting the so-called “rebel” side;
planning for an overt western military action against Syria;
working with Syrian-Canadians antagonistic to the Assad government;
contributing to the demonization of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and to the de-legitimation and isolation of his government.”
With regard to Canada-Saudi relations (which May never seems to address), journalist Stephen Gowans wrote:
“To claim that Canada’s intervention against the violent Sunni Muslim fundamentalists is motivated by opposition to the organization’s barbarity is a demagogic sham. ISIS is virtually indistinguishable in the cruelty of its methods and harshness of its ideology from Saudi Arabia, which Canada strongly supports. If Ottawa truly abhorred ISIS’s vicious anti-Shia sectarianism, cruel misogyny, benighted religious practices, and penchant for beheadings, CF-18s would be bombing Riyadh, in addition to ISIS positions. Instead, Saudi Arabia, a theocratic absolutist monarchy, one of the last on earth, continues to receive Canada’s undiminished support.”
Stop The NATO-Speak, Stop The War Propaganda
Although Elizabeth May purports an anti-war stance, her puerile NATO-esque rhetoric serves the war agenda. This rhetoric includes:
-Demonizing a government that the vast majority of the Syrian people support, with infantile and tired, incredibly loaded, rhetoric;
-Endorsing criminal sanctions which only hurt the Syrian people;
-Continued lack of any condemnation of the Gulf, Turkish and ‘Israeli’ roles in creating, supporting, funnelling, and treating terrorists and sending them back into Syria;
-Her refusal to acknowledge the will of the Syrian people—which is overwhelmingly that they want President al-Assad to remain, they want the NATO alliance to stop sending terrorists into Syria, they want their sovereignty and an end to the foreign war on Syria which May to this day insists on wrongly calling a ‘civil war’.
In employing the lexicon of the NATO axis’ propagandists, May is potentially more dangerous to Canadians than easily detestable politicians like Harper, Trudeau or Kinney, who are overtly supportive of the war on Syria. She is slyly misleading those Canadians less-versed on Syria into believing the same stereotypes and myths that confused many in the early months of 2011 but which have now been laid to rest. It’s time May lays her rhetoric to rest, and grows a political spine.
Eva Bartlett is a justice activist and independent journalist, with years of on the ground experience in the Middle East.
Pluto-Zionism is the three-way marriage of plutocracy, right-wing Zionism and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a serial war criminal, racist and servant of Wall Street. How did this deadly ménage-a-trois come about? The answer is that a stratospherically wealthy donor group, dedicated to promoting Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and deepening US military intervention in the region, has secured Clinton’s unconditional support for Tel Aviv’s ambitions and, in exchange, Hilary receives scores of millions to finance her Democratic Party foot soldiers and voters for her campaign.
Pluto-Zionism and Clinton
Pluto-Zionists comprise the leading financial backers of Clinton. Her million-dollar backers, among the most powerful financiers and media moguls in America, include: George Soros ($6 million), Marc Benioff, Roger Altman, Steven Spielberg, Haim and Cheryl Saban ($3 million and counting), Jeffrey Katzenberg, Donald Sussman, Herb Sandler, Jay and Mark Pritzker, S. Daniel Abraham ($1 million), Bernard Schwartz, Marc Lasry, Paul Singer, David Geffen, Fred Eychaner, Norman Braman and Bernie Marcus. Waiting in the wings are the Republican billionaire ‘king-makers’, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the Koch brothers as well as the ‘liberal’ multi-billionaire, Michael Bloomberg who had contributed $11 million in 2012 elections. These erstwhile Republican funders are increasing frightened by the anti-‘free trade and anti-intervention’ rhetoric of their party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, and are approaching the solidly pro-Israel, pro-war and pro-Wall Street candidate, Madame Clinton.
Israeli-First Ideologues and Clinton
In addition to the powerful Pluto-Zionists, a vast army of Israel-First ideologues is behind Clinton, including ‘veteran’ arm-chair war mongers like Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim among so many other promoters of Washington’s continuous wars on many fronts. Ms Nuland-Kagan, as US Undersecretary of State for East European Affairs, openly bragged about using hundreds of millions of dollars of US taxpayer money to finance the right-wing Ukrainian coup. Michael Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security after 9/11, jailed thousands of innocent Muslims while freeing five Israeli-Mossad agents arrested by the FBI for suspected involvement or pre-knowledge of the attacks in New York after they were seen filming the collapse of the towers and celebrating the event from a warehouse rooftop in New Jersey!).
Pluto-Zionists and the Israel-First ideologues support Ms Clinton as a reward for her extraordinary military and economic activities on behalf of Tel Aviv’s quest for regional dominance. Her accomplishments for the Jewish State include the promotion of full-scale wars, which have destroyed Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan; economic sanctions and blockade against Iran (she threatened to ‘obliterate Iran’ in 2007; and her own repeatedly stated unconditional support for Israel’s devastation against the people imprisoned in Gaza, which has cost thousands of civilian lives and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. (In a letter to her ‘banker’, Haim Saban, Hillary stated: “Israel didn’t teach Hamas (the people of Gaza) a harsh enough lesson last year”).
Clinton versus Trump: ‘Moderation’ is in the Eyes of the Deceiver
The Pluto-Zionists, Israel-First ideologues, the US mass media and their acolytes on Wall Street and the Republican and Democratic Party elite are all on a rampage against the wildly popular Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, labeling him as ‘a danger to everything America stands for. (sic)’ Apart from savaging his persona, the anti-Trump chorus contrast his ‘extremism’ with warmonger Clinton’s ‘pragmatism’.
A careful examination of the facts reveals who is the ultra-extremist and who deals with reality:
Women
Madame Clinton’s much touted wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of women and children and uprooted millions of households. This bloody and undeniable record of mayhem was cited by Donald Trump when he argued that his policies would be much better for women than the Feminist Clinton’s had been.
So far, Trump’s worst offenses against women are his crude rhetorical misogynist quips, which pale before Hillary’s bloody record of devastation.
African-Americans
Clinton is backed by the leading black politicians who have long fed out of the Democratic Party patronage trough while selling the Clintons to the black electorate as ardent protectors of civil rights. In fact, as Steve Lendman has written, Hillary had referred to marginalized black youth as “super predators (with) no conscience, no empathy”. During her husband Bill’s presidency, she was on record supporting his draconian ‘three strikes’ crime laws, leading to the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of young blacks; and she backed his ‘welfare reform’ program, which shredded the social safety net for the poor and forced millions of impoverished mothers to work for sub-poverty wages, further eroding the stability of black female-headed households. On the African front, ‘Sister’ Secretary of State Hillary’s war on Libya led to the displacement, rape and murder of tens of thousands of black women of sub-Saharan origin at the hands of her jihadi war-lord allies. Millions of black sub-Saharan migrants had lived and worked in Gadhafi’s Libya for years, tens of thousands becoming Libyan citizens. They endured the horror of rampant ethnic cleansing in Clinton’s ‘liberated’ Libya.
Trump, at worst, has done nothing of direct harm to African Americans and remains an enigma on black issues. He opposes Clinton’s war on Libya and has vividly blamed her policies as responsible for the chaos and human misery in post-NATO bombing Libya.
Latinos
Under the Obama-Clinton administration almost 2 million Latino immigrants have been seized from their homes and workplaces, separated from their families and summarily expelled. As Madame Secretary of State, Clinton backed the Honduran military coup that overthrew the elected government of President Zelaya and led directly to assassination of over three hundred activists, including feminist, indigenous, human rights and environmental leaders, like Berta Caceres. Clinton actively backed unsuccessful coups against the democratically elected Bolivian and Venezuelan governments.
Trump has verbally threatened to extend and deepen the Obama-Clinton expulsion of whatever remains of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrant Latino workers after Obama’s expulsion of the 2 million and the hundreds of thousands who have voluntarily gone home. His ‘extremist’ vision is completely in line with that of his allegedly ‘pragmatic’ opponent whose State Department promoted the destruction of so many Latino families in the US.
Foreign Policy
Clinton has launched or promoted more simultaneous wars than any Secretary of State in US history. She was the leading force behind the US bombing of Libya and the brutal ‘regime change’ that has fractured that nation. She promoted the military escalation in Iraq, backed the violent seizure of power in Ukraine, ‘engineered’ the military build-up (pivot to Asia) against China and negotiated the continued presence of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan.
Clinton has repeatedly pledged to her supporter Haim Saban and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim that she will give Israel with “all the necessary military, diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to vanquish Hamas” regardless of the many thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties. The ‘pragmatic feminist’ Hillary is a fervent supporter of the Saudi despotism and its genocide war against the popular forces in Yemen. Hillary tried to pressure President Obama to send US ground troops into Syria. She promotes the continuation of harsh trade sanctions against Russia.
Trump opposes any further direct US intervention in the Middle East. During his debate in South Carolina, he repeatedly denounced President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – as based on ‘deliberate lies to the American people’, to the shock and horror of the Republican Party elite. He has rejected Pluto-Zionist financing, arguing that only as an independent ‘honest broker’, who doesn’t take the side of Israel in its conflict with Palestinians, can he be effective in brokering a ‘deal’. He opposes sending ground troops overseas to Europe or Asia, which imposes a huge financial burden on the US taxpayers. He has gone on to suggest that European and Asian powers can and should pay for their own defense. Trump argues that the US could work with Putin against radical Islamist terrorism and he regards Russia as a potential trading partner. His anti-interventionism has been labeled as ‘isolationist’ by the Pluto-Zionist ideologues and militarist warlords holed up in their Washington think tanks, but Trump’s ‘America First’ resonates profoundly with the war-weary and economically devastated US electorate.
Israel
Clinton has totally and unconditionally pledged to widen and deepen US subordination to Israel’s war aims in the Middle East and to defend Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and within apartheid Israel. As a result, Clinton has built a coalition made-up of unsavory mafia-linked, gambling, media and speculator billionaires, whose first loyalty is not to America but Israel. She denounces all critics of Israel as ‘anti-Semites’.
Trump has never been a critic of Israel but he has called for greater ‘evenhandedness’, which is anathema within Zionist circles. For that reason he has not secured a single Pluto-Zionist supporter. So far, he has not been labelled an anti-Semite…. perhaps because his own daughter converted to Judaism following her marriage, but his lack of effusive philo-Zionism has him marked as ‘unreliable’ to the Jewish State. As a subterfuge for his lack of servility to Tel Aviv, Democratic Party Zionist hacks emphasize his ‘racism’ and ‘fascist’ tendencies…
The Democratic Elections: The Real Muck
Clinton currently leads Sanders for the Democratic nomination mostly on the basis of non-elected delegates, the so-called ‘super delegates’, who are party loyalists appointed by the bosses and elite politicians. Sanders’ call for a “political revolution in America” has no traction unless there is first a political revolution within the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party is like the Augean Stable – a clean up requiring a Herculean effort and a loud pugnacious leader with a big broom. Senator Sanders is no Hercules.
As a positive beginning, Sanders has mobilized grass roots support, raised progressive health, education and tax policies that adversely affect Clinton’s billionaire Wall Street backers (Big financier Jaime Diamond called Sanders ‘the most dangerous man in America’), and secured millions of contributions from small donors. But he has failed to target and demand the exit of the Pluto-Zionists, the Wall Street bankers and speculators and venal black politicians controlling the Democratic Party. They run the elections of US presidents and will make sure Hillary Clinton secures the nomination by hook or (more likely) crook.
Clinton is backed by this formidable authoritarian (profoundly anti-democratic) electoral machine. She is totally embedded in the process. Clinton has a track record of enthusiastic support for the barbarism of torture – laughing at and cheering on the torture-death of the wounded Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. In the pursuit of wars and war crimes, Hillary Clinton knows no limit and has borne no accountability. What makes Hillary so terrifyingly dangerous is that she could be ‘Commander in Chief’ of a great military power. While Clinton may be no Hitler, the US is vastly more engaged in world politics than Weimer Germany ever was. Her dictate would bring on global destruction.
If the Democratic primaries are as profoundly undemocratic as they have been in the past, the Republicans and their plutocrat partners are openly planning and plotting to ‘Dump the Donald’ and prevent Trump from obtaining an electoral victory. They have been discussing ways to use convention procedures to undermine a majority vote, and set up a ‘brokered convention’, where the ‘big-wigs’ jigger the delegates, rules and voting procedures behind closed doors robbing the populist front-runner of his party candidacy.
Conclusion
The US presidential primaries reveal in all their facets the decay and corruption of democracy in an era of imperial decline. The ascendancy of a financial oligarchy in the Democratic Party, backing a psychopathic militarist, like Hillary, cannot disguise her track record by labeling their candidate a ‘pragmatist’; the majority of Sanders supporters have no illusions about Madame Clinton. Panic and hysteria among an unsavory elite in the Republican Party and its efforts to block a sui-generis conservative Republican isolationist speaks to the fragility of imperial rule.
If the psychopathic war-monger Clinton is crowned the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, there is no way she can be considered the pragmatic ‘lesser evil’ to Donald Trump or any Republican – their bosses decide to spew out. At best, she might be the ‘equal evil’. In this case, more than 50% of the electorate will not vote. If, after being robbed of his growing movement for the Democratic Party candidacy, ‘Bernie’ Sanders does not break out with an independent bid for the White House, I will join the minuscule 1% who vote for Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, says the Arab member states of the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council ([P]GCC), which recently listed the resistance group as terrorists, do not have the interests of Lebanon in mind.
During a live televised speech on Sunday, Nasrallah said those who assume that the Arab regimes will protect Lebanon have “pinned their hopes on a fantasy.”
Had Lebanon waited for a unified Arab strategy in the face of Israel instead of opting to resist against the occupying regime, “then the fate of this territory would have been the same as the fate of the territories Israel has taken control of,” he said.
On Wednesday, the six-nation Arab bloc issued a statement labeling Hezbollah a terrorist organization. The [P]GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“Many of these Arab countries today, who designate us as terrorists, what do they have to do with this resistance and these victories and these achievements?” Nasrallah said.
Israel unleashed an all-out offensive on Lebanon 10 years ago under the pretext of releasing Israeli soldiers allegedly captured by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The invasion claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 Lebanese people, most of them civilians.
The Tel Aviv regime was, however, forced to retreat without achieving any of its objectives after Hezbollah fighters displayed heavy resistance against the Israeli military.
“Back then, we said to them (the Arab countries) ‘we don’t want anything from you… Today, we also say to them, to these regimes, ‘We don’t want anything from you. We don’t want money, nor do we want weapons, nor do we want support or blessing,” he said. “Just leave this resistance alone, leave this country alone, and leave this people alone.”
He blamed some Arab regimes for conspiring against anyone standing against Israel.
Nasrallah also underlined the assistance provided by the resistance group to the Iraqi government in its fight against the Takfiri terror group Daesh and reminded that Hezbollah did not wait for any orders to initiate its anti-terror fight in Syria and only fulfilled its religious commitment.
The secretary general of Hezbollah also addressed the tension that has been bubbling up between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, causing the former to take a raft of hostile measures against the latter.
“If it’s angry with us, it has the right to. I understand Saudi Arabia’s anger. Why? Because when one fails, at the very least he will be angry,” Nasrallah said.
He went on to explain that the Saudi rage has emanated from the kingdom’s failures in Yemen and Syria.
“In Syria, there’s a very great Saudi anger because what they had calculated in Syria [was that] in two or three months, ‘Syria would fall into our hands,’” Nasrallah said.
Hezbollah has been successfully aiding the Syrian military against foreign-backed militant groups.
“He, who confronts Saudi Arabia in Syria is the real defender of the Lebanese national interests,” Nasrallah said.
“The same goes for Yemen. The estimations of the new Saudi leadership was that ‘we will decide the battle in Yemen. We will teach a lesson to all the Arab countries and the Arab world… and we will impose ourselves on the Arab world,’” he said.
Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of military aggression against Yemen in late March last year in a bid to bring fugitive former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Riyadh ally, back to power and undermine Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement.
Riyadh has, however, failed in accomplishing either of the two objectives, and has become entangled in a prolonged expensive war, whose adverse economic impacts—along with economic mismanagement—have gradually been giving rise to domestic discontent inside Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia will take delivery of French-manufactured arms originally ordered for the Lebanese army, following Riyadh’s recent decision to retract USD four billion in military aid to Beirut.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir announced the plan on Saturday during a visit to France.
Last month, the Saudi regime said it had suspended USD three billion in military assistance to the Lebanese military and another USD one billion to the country’s internal security forces.
The aid was cut after Lebanon refrained from endorsing Saudi-crafted statements against Iran at separate meetings held in Cairo and Jeddah.
The move also followed victories by the Syrian army, which is backed by fighters of Lebanon’s resistance movement of Hezbollah, in its battle against Takfiri terrorists battling to topple the government in Damascus.
“We made the decision that we will stop the USD three billion from going to the Lebanese military and instead they will be re-diverted to the Saudi military,” Jubeir told journalists in Paris, adding, “So the contracts (with France) will be completed but the clients will be the Saudi military.”
The aid is vital as the Lebanese army is fighting Takfiri militants from the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and Daesh near the country’s northeastern border with Syria.
France’s arms delivery to Saudi Arabia comes amid Riyadh’s ongoing military aggression against Yemen and its support for militant groups in Syria.
Several European countries including Germany, Britain and France have been engaged in major arms deals with the Saudi regime, turning a blind eye to calls by rights groups to cancel the agreements.
Back in February, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the imposition of an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia, and urging EU member states to stop selling weapons to Riyadh as it is accused of targeting civilians in Yemen.
According to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Saudi Arabia’s imports for 2011-15 increased by 275 percent compared with 2006–10. The British government has licensed USD 7.8 billion in sales of arms, fighter jets and other military hardware to Riyadh since Prime Minister David Cameron came to power in 2010. France also signed USD-12-billion contracts with Saudi Arabia in 2015 alone.
Yemen has been under military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015. More than 8,300 people, among them 2,236 children, have been killed. The strikes have taken a heavy toll on the impoverished country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools and factories.
A 30 page investigative report on the “Caesar Torture Photos” has been released and is available online here. The following is a condensed version of the report. Readers who are especially interested are advised to get the full report which includes additional details, photographs, sources and recommendations.
Introduction
There is a pattern of sensational but untrue reports that lead to public acceptance of US and Western military intervention in countries around the world:
* In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Relying on the testimony of a Red Crescent doctor, Amnesty Interenational ‘verified’ the false claims.
* Ten years later, there were reports of yellow cake uranium going to Iraq for development of weapons of mass destruction.
* One decade later, there were reports of Libyan soldiers drugged on viagra and raping women as they advanced.
* In 2012, NBC broadcaster Richard Engel was supposedly kidnapped by pro-Assad Syrian militia but luckily freed by Syrian opposition fighters, the “Free Syrian Army”.
All these reports were later confirmed to be fabrications and lies. They all had the goal of manipulating public opinion and they all succeeded in one way or another. Despite the consequences, which were often disastrous, none of the perpetrators were punished or paid any price.
It has been famously said “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” This report is a critical review of the “Caesar Torture Photos” story. As will be shown, there is strong evidence the accusations are entirely or substantially false.
Overview of ‘Caesar Torture Photos’
On 20 January 2014, two days before negotiations about the Syrian conflict were scheduled to begin in Switzerland, a sensational report burst onto television and front pages around the world. The story was that a former Syrian army photographer had 55,000 photographs documenting the torture and killing of 11,000 detainees by the Syrian security establishment.
The Syrian photographer was given the code-name ‘Caesar’. The story became known as the “Caesar Torture Photos”. A team of lawyers plus digital and forensic experts were hired by the Carter-Ruck law firm, on contract to Qatar, to go to the Middle East and check the veracity of “Caesar” and his story. They concluded that “Caesar” was truthful and the photographs indicated “industrial scale killing”. CNN, London’s Guardian and LeMonde broke the story which was subsequently broadcast in news reports around the world. The Caesar photo accusations were announced as negotiations began in Switzerland. With the opposition demanding the resignation of the Syrian government, negotiations quickly broke down.
For the past two years the story has been preserved with occasional bursts of publicity and supposedly corroborating reports. Most recently, in December 2015 Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report titled “If the Dead Could Speak” with significant focus on the Caesar accusations.
Following are 12 significant problems with the ‘Caesar torture photos’ story.
1. Almost half the photos show the opposite of the allegations.
The Carter Ruck Inquiry Team claimed there were about 55,000 photos total with about half of them taken by ‘Caesar’ and the other half by other photographers. The Carter Ruck team claimed the photos were all ‘similar’. Together they are all known as ‘Caesar’s Torture Photos’.
The photographs are in the custody of an opposition organization called the Syrian Association for Missing and Conscience Detainees (SAFMCD). In 2015, they allowed Human Rights Watch (HRW) to study all the photographs which have otherwise been secret. In December 2015, HRW released their report titled “If the Dead Could Speak”. The biggest revelation is that over 46% of the photographs (24,568) do not show people ‘tortured to death” by the Syrian government. On the contrary, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence (HRW pp2-3). Thus, nearly half the photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.
2. The claim that other photos only show ‘tortured detainees’ is exaggerated or false.
The Carter Ruck report says ‘Caesar’ only photographed bodies brought from Syrian government detention centers. In their December 2015 report, HRW said, “The largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody, either in one of several detention facilities or after being transferred to a military hospital.” They estimate 6,786 dead individuals in the set.
The photos and the deceased are real, but how they died and the circumstances are unclear. There is strong evidence some died in conflict. Others died in the hospital. Others died and their bodies were decomposing before they were picked up. These photographs seem to document a war time situation where many combatants and civilians are killed. It seems the military hospital was doing what it had always done: maintaining a photographic and documentary record of the deceased. Bodies were picked up by different military or intelligence branches. While some may have died in detention; the great majority probably died in the conflict zones. The accusations by ‘Caesar’, the Carter Ruck report and HRW that these are all victims of “death in detention” or “death by torture” or death in ‘government custody” are almost certainly false.
3. The true identity of “Caesar” is probably not as claimed.
The Carter Ruck Report says “This witness who defected from Syria and who had been working for the Syrian government was given the code-name ‘Caesar’ by the inquiry team to protect the witness and members of his family.” (CRR p12) However if his story is true, it would be easy for the Syrian government to determine who he really is. After all, how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? According to the Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time. Considering this, why is “Caesar” keeping his identity secret from the western audience? Why does “Caesar” refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?
The fact that 46% of the total photographic set is substantially the opposite of what was claimed indicates two possibilities:
* Caesar and his promoters knew the contents but lied about them expecting nobody to look.
* Caesar and his promoters did not know the contents and falsely assumed they were like the others.
The latter seems more likely which supports the theory that Caesar is not who he claims to be.
4. The Carter Ruck Inquiry was faulty, rushed and politically biased.
The credibility of the “Caesar” story has been substantially based on the Carter-Ruck Inquiry Team which “verified” the defecting photographer and his photographs. The following facts suggest the team was biased with a political motive:
* the investigation was financed by the government of Qatar which is a major supporter of the armed opposition.
* the contracted law firm, Carter Ruck and Co, has previously represented Turkey’s President Erdogan, also known for his avid support of the armed opposition.
* the American on the legal inquiry team, Prof David M. Crane, has a long history working for U.S. Dept of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency. The U.S. Government has been deeply involved in the attempt at ‘regime change’ with demands that ‘Assad must go’ beginning in summer 2011 and continuing until recently.
* Prof Crane is personally partisan in the conflict. He has campaigned for a Syrian War Crimes Tribunal and testified before Congress in October 2013, three months before the Caesar revelations.
* by their own admission, the inquiry team was under “time constraints” (CRR, p11).
* by their own admission, the inquiry team did not even survey most of the photographs
* the inquiry team was either ignorant of the content or intentionally lied about the 46% showing dead Syrian soldiers and attack victims.
* the inquiry team did their last interview with “Caesar” on January 18, quickly finalized a report and rushed it into the media on January 20, two days prior to the start of UN sponsored negotiations.
The self-proclaimed “rigor” of the Carter Ruck investigation is without foundation. The claims to a ‘scientific’ investigation are similarly without substance and verging on the ludicrous.
5. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is involved.
In an interview on France24, Prof. David Crane of the inquiry team describes how ‘Caesar’ was brought to meet them by “his handler, his case officer”. The expression ‘case officer’ usually refers to the CIA. This would be a common expression for Prof. Crane who previously worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The involvement of the CIA additionally makes sense since there was a CIA budget of $1Billion for Syria operations in 2013.
Prof. Crane’s “Syria Accountability Project” is based at Syracuse University where the CIA actively recruits new officers despite student resistance.
Why does it matter if the CIA is connected to the ‘Caesar’ story? Because the CIA has a long history of disinformation campaigns. In 2011, false reports of viagra fueled rape by Libyan soldiers were widely broadcast in western media as the U.S. pushed for a military mandate. Decades earlier, the world was shocked to hear about Cuban troops fighting in Angola raping Angolan women. The CIA chief of station for Angola, John Stockwell, later described how they invented the false report and spread it round the world. The CIA was very proud of that disinformation achievement. Stockwell’s book, “In Search of Enemies” is still relevant.
6. The prosecutors portray simple administrative procedures as mysterious and sinister.
The Carter Ruck inquiry team falsely claimed there were about 11,000 tortured and killed detainees. They then posed the question: Why would the Syrian government photograph and document the people they just killed? The Carter Ruck Report speculates that the military hospital photographed the dead to prove that the “orders to kill” had been followed. The “orders to kill” are assumed.
A more logical explanation is that dead bodies were photographed as part of normal hospital / morgue procedure to maintain a file of the deceased who were received or treated at the hospital.
The same applies to the body labeling / numbering system. The Carter Ruck report suggests there is something mysterious and possibly sinister in the coded tagging system. But all morgues need to have a tagging and identification system.
7. The photos have been manipulated.
Many of the photos at the SAFMCD website have been manipulated. The information card and tape identity are covered over and sections of documents are obscured. It must have been very time consuming to do this for thousands of photos. The explanation that they are doing this to ‘protect identity’ is not credible since the faces of victims are visible. What are they hiding?
8. The Photo Catalog has duplicates and other errors.
There are numerous errors and anomalies in the photo catalog as presented at the SAFMCD website.
For example, some deceased persons are shown twice with different case numbers and dates.
There are other errors where different individuals are given the same identity number.
Researcher Adam Larson at A Closer Look at Syria website has done detailed investigation which reveals more errors and curious error patterns in the SAFMCD photo catalog.
9. With few exceptions, Western media uncritically accepted and promoted the story.
The Carter Ruck report was labeled “Confidential” but distributed to CNN, the Guardian and LeMonde.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour gushed the story as she interviewed three of the inquiry team under the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime”. Critical journalism was replaced by leading questions and affirmation. David Crane said “This is a smoking gun”. Desmond de Silva “likened the images to those of holocaust survivors”.
The Guardian report was titled “Syrian regime document trove shows evidence of ‘industrial scale’ killing of detainees” with subtitle “Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide ‘clear evidence’ of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees”
One of the very few skeptical reports was by Dan Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor. Murphy echoed standard accusations about Syria but went on to say incisively, “the report itself is nowhere near as credible as it makes out and should be viewed for what it is: A well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.”
Unfortunately that was one of very few critical reports in the mainstream media.
In 2012, foreign affairs journalist Jonathan Steele wrote an article describing the overall media bias on Syria.. His article was titled “Most Syrians back Assad but you’d never know from western media”. The media campaign and propaganda has continued without stop. It was in this context that the Carter Ruck Report was delivered and widely accepted without question.
10. Politicians have used the Caesar story to push for more US/NATO aggression.
Politicians seeking direct US intervention for ‘regime change’ in Syria were quick to accept and broadcast the ‘Caesar’ story. They used it to demonize the Assad government and argue that the US must act so as to prevent “another holocaust’, ‘another Rwanda’, ‘another Cambodia’.
When Caesar’s photos were displayed at the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress, Chairman Ed Royce said “It is far past time that the world act…. It is far past time for the United States to say there is going to be a safe zone across this area in northern Syria.”
The top ranking Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee is Eliot Engel. In November 2015 he said “We’re reminded of the photographer, known as Caesar, who sat in this room a year ago, showing us in searing, graphic detail what Assad has done to his own people.” Engel went on to advocate for a new authorization for the use of military force.
Rep Adam Kinzinger is another advocate for aggression against Syria. At an event at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in July 2015 he said, “If we want to destroy ISIS we have to destroy the incubator of ISIS, Bashar al-Assad.”
The irony and hypocrisy is doubly profound since Rep Kinzinger has met and coordinated with opposition leader Okaidi who is a confirmed ally of ISIS. In contrast with Kinzinger’s false claims, it is widely known that ISIS ideology and initial funding came from Saudi Arabia and much of its recent wealth from oil sales via Turkey. The Syrian Army has fought huge battles against ISIS, winning some but losing others with horrific scenes of mass beheading.
11. The Human Rights Watch assessment is biased.
HRW has been very active around Syria. After the chemical attacks in greater Damascus on August 21, 2013, HRW rushed a report which concluded that, based on a vector analysis of incoming projectiles, the source of the sarin carrying rockets must have been Syrian government territory. This analysis was later debunked as a “junk heap of bad evidence” by highly respected investigative journalist Robert Parry. HRW’s assumption about the chemical weapon rocket flight distance was faulty. Additionally it was unrealistic to think you could determine rocket trajectory with 1% accuracy from a canister on the ground. To think you could determine flight trajectory from a canister on the ground that had deflected off a building wall was preposterous.
In spite of this, HRW stuck by its analysis which blamed the Assad government. HRW Director Ken Roth publicly indicated dissatisfaction when an agreement to remove Syrian chemical weapons was reached. Mr. Roth wanted more than a ‘symbolic’ attack.
In light of the preceding, we note the December 2015 HRW report addressing the claims of Caesar.
HRW seems to be the only non-governmental organization to receive the full set of photo files from the custodian. To its credit, HRW acknowledged that nearly half the photos do not show what has been claimed for two years: they show dead Syrian soldiers and militia along with scenes from crime scenes, car bombings, etc…
But HRW’s bias is clearly shown in how they handle this huge contradiction. Amazingly, they suggest the incorrectly identified photographs support the overall claim. They say, “This report focuses on deaths in detention. However other types of photographs are also important. From an evidentiary perspective, they reinforce the credibility of the claims of Caesar about his role as a forensic photographer of the Syrian security forces or at least with someone who has access to their photographs.” (HRW, p31) This seems like saying if someone lies to you half the time that proves they are truthful.
The files disprove the assertion that the files all show tortured and killed. The photographs show a wide range of deceased persons, from Syrian soldiers to Syrian militia members to opposition fighters to civilians trapped in conflict zones to regular deaths in the military hospital. There may be some photos of detainees who died in custody after being tortured, or who were simply executed. We know that this happened in Iraqi detention centers under U.S. occupation. Ugly and brutal things happen in war times. But the facts strongly suggest that the ‘Caesar’ account is basically untrue or a gross exaggeration.
It is striking that the HRW report has no acknowledgment of the war conditions and circumstances in Syria. There is no acknowledgment that the government and Syrian Arab Army have been under attack by tens of thousands of weaponized fighters openly funded and supported by many of the wealthiest countries in the world.
There is no hint at the huge loss of life suffered by the Syrian army and supporters defending their country. The current estimates indicate from eighty to one hundred and twenty thousand Syrian soldiers, militia and allies having died in the conflict. During the three years 2011 – 2013, including the period covered by Caesar photos, it is estimated that over 52,000 Syrian soldiers and civilian militia died versus 29,000 anti-government forces.
HRW had access to the full set of photographs including the Syrian army and civilian militia members killed in the conflict. Why did they not list the number of Syrian soldiers and security forces they identified? Why did they not show a single image of those victims?
HRW goes beyond endorsing the falsehoods in the ‘Caesar’ story; they suggest it is a partial listing. On page 5 the report says, “Therefore, the number of bodies from detention facilities that appear in the Caesar photographs represent only a part of those who died in detention in Damascus.”
On the contrary, the Caesar photographs seem to mostly show victims who died in a variety of ways in the armed conflict. The HRW assertions seem to be biased and inaccurate.
12. The legal accusations are biased and ignore the supreme crime of aggression.
The Christian Science Monitor journalist Dan Murphy gave an apt warning in his article on the Carter Ruck report about ‘Caesar’. While many journalists treated the prosecutors with uncritical deference, he said, “Association with war crime prosecutions is no guarantor of credibility – far from it. Just consider Luis Moreno Ocampo’s absurd claims about Viagra and mass rape in Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya in 2011. War crimes prosecutors have, unsurprisingly, a bias towards wanting to bolster cases against people they consider war criminals (like Assad or Qaddafi) and so should be treated with caution. They also frequently favor, as a class, humanitarian interventions.”
The Carter Ruck legal team demonstrated how accurate those cautions were. They were eager to accuse the Syrian government of “crimes against humanity” but the evidence of “industrial killing”, “mass killing”, “torturing to kill” is dubious and much of the hard evidence shows something else.
In contrast, there is clear and solid evidence that a “Crime against Peace” is being committed against Syria. It is public knowledge that the “armed opposition” in Syria has been funded, supplied and supported in myriad ways by various outside governments. Most of the fighters, both Syrian and foreign, receive salaries from one or another outside power. Their supplies, weapons and necessary equipment are all supplied to them. Like the “Contras” in Nicaragua in the 1980’s, the use of such proxy armies is a violation of customary international law.
It is also a violation of the UN Charter which says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other matter inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”.
The government of Qatar has been a major supporter of the mercenaries and fanatics attacking the sovereign state of Syria. Given that fact, isn’t it hugely ironic to hear the legal contractors for Qatar accusing the Syrian government of “crimes against humanity”?
Isn’t it time for the United Nations to make reforms so that it can start living up to its purposes? That will require demanding and enforcing compliance with the UN Charter and International Law.
The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.
It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands — and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts — could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.
Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest — and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid — when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.
Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” — a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests — that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office. The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death. (The New York Times has vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.)
Orders then make their way down to drone operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is often unsure who will die,” as a New York Timesheadline put it.
That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any given moment can be faulty. And so, as the Timesreported, “most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed. The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardianreported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan — only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes — the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children.
Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison.
Their Grief and Mine
Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings as mere “collateral damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all. We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe.
I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep in news reports — including the 30 people killed, three of them children, when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or the two women and three children blasted to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity and which barely make it into American news reports — I find I can’t quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father.
To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead, you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street in Switzerland — where I was backpacking at the time — and learned that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire missile.
Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis. And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek.
A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless: Why was he dead while the rest of us lived?
And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,” I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends. I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized — to hate not just our drones but our country and us — because the answer to that is obvious.)
Playing God in the Oval Office
“It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor Liam Neeson recently wrote on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental experience of loss — of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posted about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a “relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown. Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12.
U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings, too. And funerals. And clinics. And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes. The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous portrait of a child on the ground in a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially refer to as “bugsplats.” It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved.
Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when he glimpsed a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot, “Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping messages to ask the mission’s remote observer — an intelligence staffer at another location — if there was a child present. He’ll never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued sleeping bag.
Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues to receive kill orders from above.
Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it’s not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington’s increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.
When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.
Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved ones of others?
Syria may be divided into four parts, the Turkish conservative newspaper Yeni Safak recently reported. According to the article, such a scenario is part of a US plan B if the ceasefire agreement between government and opposition forces fails.
The first area would be controlled by Bashar Assad’s government, including southern Damascus, Homs and Tartus and to the Syrian-Turkish border. The second part is the Kurdish region, including the Kurdish-controlled line east of Aleppo. The third zone is central Idlib controlled by opposition groups. The forth projected part is Daesh-controlled areas as well as Raqqa and Palmyra.
After Daesh is defeated this area would be controlled by the international coalition fighting terrorists, the article in Yeni Safak read.
After a ceasefire deal on Syria was reached Washington announced it was considering a backup plan which should be used if the deal fails. The cessation of fire in Syria commenced on February 27.
According to Yeni Safak, among those supporting the plan B are US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, and CIA Director John Brennan. They have called for President Barack Obama to pressure Moscow and intensify support for Syrian rebel groups.
In the current context, such stove-piping activity is logic, analyst on Middle Eastern affairs Stanislav Tarasov said.
“The recent events have proved that Turkey’s actual policy toward Syria is aimed at dividing the country. What is more, it is logic in the broad context of the Arab Spring, with the gradual fragmentation of Arab states,” he told Svobodnaya Pressa.
According to him, despite the Geneva peace process, there is still a scenario to divide Syria, and some forces are pushing it now.
“One of the most serious issues is Syrian Kurds. If Assad stays in power it would have to pass a new constitution with a new form of territorial division of Syria. Syrian Kurds are now enjoying support from both the US and Russia. And they are likely to ask for more autonomy,” the analyst pointed out.
The Kurdish question is a big concern for Ankara, he added. If Kurds create their own autonomies in both Syria and Iraq, Turkey will be geographically and politically blocked. Such a prospect is also encouraging the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) to intensify its struggle against Ankara, including for a Kurdish autonomous region in Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cannot let this happen.
This is why, now the Turkish government is testing public attitudes toward this scenario.
As a result, it is clear that despite the course on preventing Syria from disintegration, there are a number of actual processes and contradicting interests in Syria, like it was in Iraq after the US invasion, he concluded.
What is more, he added, some, especially in the Middle East, have insisted that there is no need to destroy Daesh. According to them, only its radical groups should be destroyed, to establish dialogue with its “moderate wing.”
“We are witnessing a trend to legalize Daesh as a pseudo-state formation. Earlier, the US and Turkey proposed a new Sunni state in Daesh-controlled parts of Syria and Iraq,” the analyst said.
He also assumed that if Syria is divided into four parts controlled by different groups difficulties will persist in the implementation of peaceful agreements.
The autonomy of the Syrian Kurdistan is almost an accomplished fact, Semyon Bagdasarov, head of the Center for Middle East and Central Asia Studies, said.
“Syria in its current form is nearing the end. But it’s hard to predict how the country will be divided and which parts will governable and which not,” he said.
I met Dr. Kevin Barrett as planned at a small bookstore near the Notre Dame Cathedral landmark in Paris France. On that day, December 11, 2015, the Paris bookstore was the site of a significant academic conference entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society.”
Hours earlier I had exited the last class of the fall term in my third-year Globalization Studies course at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. I had driven to Calgary, hopped a flight to Dallas, and then transferred onto a big American Airlines 777 for the trans-Atlantic flight to the City of Lights now under martial law.
For the second time in 2015 Paris had been rocked by violent episodes attributed to the independent actions of Islamic terrorists. After the first event last January, Dr. Barrett had coordinated the emergency responses of a team of analytic observers, myself included.
Together we uncovered the outlines of an outlandish fraud of an externally-engineered false flag terror event. Dr. Barrett assembled the revelations in his edited book entitled We Are Not Charlie Hebdo. Now a sequel volume was in the making as Kevin and I met up in the Paris bookstore where the inner workings of the “Islamophobia Industry” were the subject of scholarly investigation.
The majority of contributors to Dr. Barrett’s book on the first Paris shooter event of 2015 concluded that the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo cartoon office and on the customers of a Jewish Deli were not as they were made to seem in the mainstream media. The evidence pointed to a continuation of the same type of state-manufactured violence directed at civilian populations in Western Europe during the Cold War by the NATO’s overseers of Project Gladio.
The aim of Project Gladio was to discredit the politics of progressive reform by misrepresenting the nature of NATO-concocted episodes of seemingly arbitrary violence directed at civilian populations.
Violent events were engineered by right-wing agents of NATO’s occupation of Western Europe to make it appear that left-wing progressives were subject to the control of psychopathic extremists intent on foisting their will on society through coercive methods.
A new wave of false flag terrorism is underway with the objective of turning public opinion against groups slated for state-sanctioned assaults, including aggressive warfare.
As demonstrated by the deep state politics of Project Gladio, false flag terrorism has long been a standard psy-op deployed by the Western intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies to affect public perception, attitude, and behaviour.
The deployment of false flag terrorism to bring history’s course into conformity with the objectives sought by strategic planners has become the particular specialty of the Israeli deep state.
The most ambitious false flag terror episode ever occurred on September 11, 2001 in the orchestrated strikes on three World Trade Center Towers, on the Pentagon and on the remnants of integrity in our governing structures. The overwhelming weight of evidence derived from these events points squarely at those in charge of the powerful networks of global influence aligned with the expansionary aspirations of Likudnik Israel.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 provided the pretext for the transition from Cold War’s demonization of socialism, as manifest in the engineered terrorism of Project Gladio, to the demonization of Muslims through what might most accurately be described as the Global War of False Flag Terrorism (GWOFFT).
The 9/11 strikes were central episodes that created the core narrative and imagery for a multi-faceted psychological operation that continues yet. This 9/11 psychological operation has been frequently characterized as a global coup d’état. The 9/11 global coup d’état was engineered to entrench neoconservative agendas aimed at concentrating more power in the world’s dominant banking, military, media and academic cartels together with the plutocrats that control them.
In the Global War of False Flag Terrorism, ruling elites everywhere have attempted to entrench their regimes of fraud and corruption by characterizing their critics and opponents as terrorists, as potential terrorists or as terrorist sympathizers.
Without a doubt it is the Jewish state of Israel that gained most from replacing anti-communism with anti-terrorism as the primary purpose and preoccupation of the world’s dominant military-industrial complex. The key to manufacturing consent for this shift has been the incitement and political exploitation of hatred towards Muslims. This engineered hatred of Muslims is often described as Islamophobia.
Convening in Paris to Shed Light on the Islamophobia
The study of Islamophobia brought together scholars from Europe and North America at the conference in the Paris bookstore. This convention of scholars was organized under the auspices of the Race and Gender Studies Center at the University of California in Berkeley.
The Chair was Prof. Hatem Bazian, Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Part of the U of C, Zaytuna College is the first Muslim liberal arts institution of higher learning in the United States.
Prof. Bazian had assembled about a dozen scholars at various stages in their movement through the academic procedures of tenure and promotion. Generally speaking the assembled scholars have taken on some of the most difficult and fraught subjects covered in our university curricula. To study the institutional workings of the cynical business of purposely turning public attitudes against Muslims is an especially difficult academic mission in the poisoned atmosphere of these times.
In spite of our criticism of their work, the dozen or so colleagues who gathered at the Paris bookstore on December 11 deserve much respect and recognition. These colleagues have persisted in following a very contentious line of investigation in spite of the serious professional recriminations often thrown their way by critics who think nothing of destroying academic careers to advance political agendas.
Kevin Barrett and I took part in the proceedings with the anticipation that we would co-host our own alternative conference the following day at a hotel near the Charles De Gaulle Airport.
This plan was a response to the rejection of Dr. Barrett’s paper that was originally accepted as part of their conference.
Dr. Barrett’s proposed contribution highlighted the frequent exclusion of Muslim perspectives from officialdom’s accounts of the originating events triggering the 9/11 wars.
Dr. Barrett’s academic credentials in the subject matter of the conference are of course very strong as evidenced by the initial warm welcome extended to his offer to contribute to the conference’s scholarly proceedings.
Then came the events of Friday November 13th 2015, when the world was told Islamic terrorists had murdered over a hundred victims at a concert at the Bataclan music venue, at the Stade de France and at other Paris locations. In the wake of this development Dr. Barrett was informed by Professor Bazian,
“Due to state of emergency in France and the on-going active operations, the organizing committee is not able to accommodate your paper at this point in time. Our supporters on the ground are under extreme emergency conditions and the whole program is under stress due to it.”
In spite of the declared state of emergency in Paris the organizers had pressed ahead with the conference minus the contribution of Dr. Barrett. No explanation was given of why it was deemed alright to go forward with the other presentations but not the one containing Dr. Barrett’s interpretation of Islamophobia. The exclusion of Dr. Barrett, a Muslim himself with advanced degrees and many publications in Islamic Studies, could be seen as an expression of the very same forces that the Paris event had been convened to identify and analyse.
Rather than step aside without a protest, Dr. Barrett took part in the proceedings. I had joined him with the expectation that the next day we would try to put right the lapse that unfortunately seemed indicative of a more general failure of the academy.
How is it that, generally speaking, professors in our institutions of higher learning have failed so conspicuously to sort out truth from falsehood, accurate reporting from fraud, when it comes to explaining the origins and ongoing impetuses of the 9/11 wars?
Why have we in the academy mostly failed to rise to the responsibility of our higher calling when it comes to the vital job of identifying the thick web of lies and misrepresentations used to justify the post-9/11 surge of aggressive warfare abroad, the betrayal of human rights and civil liberties at home?
How has this treason of the intellectuals been transacted at the very moment society is most in need of evidence-based research to sort out fact from fiction when assessing the claims and assertions of the permanent war economy’s primary protagonists?
Through efforts like those of Dr. Barrett’s in his personal and public truthjihad, there have been significant breakthroughs in illuminating fraudulent reporting by presstitutes that often disseminate the disinformation essential to realizing the subversive agendas of false flag terrorism. Less has been done, however, to highlight the failures of academy to identify the lies and crimes entailed in the wholesale smearing of Muslims essential to the dark objectives of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Islamophobia is the essential mental ingredient in the atmosphere of fear produced by the psychological geo-engineers pushing forward the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In the words of Prof. Bazian, Islamophobia has to do with “the construction of an imagined and staged world rooted in the mind.”
The dissemination of the imagery of self-directed, self-financing Islamic terrorists acting autonomously out of no other motivation than their own religious zealotry constitutes the core lie of this malevolent psychological operation. The demonization of Muslim people, Muslim religion, Muslim cultures and Muslim countries forms the basis of the scaffolding on which a global and unbridled police state is being constructed.
This background helps explain how it is that Dr. Barrett and I had converged at the Paris bookstore on the eve of our effort to host our own conference of world-class thinkers expert in deciphering the inner workings of the Global War of False Terrorism. In taking on this responsibility we were moving into the vacuum of truth telling that the academic community has created, for the time being at least, by failing to come up with a viable evidence-based explanation of the origins and ongoing genesis of the 9/11 wars.
On December 11, 2015, the effort to go beyond the issues explored by the academics assembled in the Paris bookstore would take form the next day in a four-hour event entitled “False Flag Islamophobia” broadcast live on No Lies Radio. This event, in turn, helped encourage and hearten some of the contributors to Dr. Barrett’s new book.
Introducing the Islamophobia Industry
Sociology Professor David Miller of the University of Bath in Great Britain was one of the senior contributors to the conference at the Paris bookstore. Miller is a prolific scholar whose work on Islamophobia emerges from his important investigations into the relationship between corporate power and public relations as pioneered by the so-called father of media spin, Edward Bernays.
This approach permeates Miller’s Spinwatch website and his co-authored volume published in 2008, A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power.
In 2011 I had seen Professor Miller offer up a very interesting presentation in the Westminster Parliament in London England. His address in the Mother of All Parliaments helped give rise to his co-authored publication, The Cold War on British Muslims.
Professor Miller’s presentation in Paris on 11 December 2015 continued the development of themes that have brought on significant wrath from elements of the Jewish-Israeli lobby in Great Britain.
Along with Professor Bazian, Miller has been prominent in identifying the financing and workings of an interlinked complex of agencies that Nathan Lean and others have dubbed the “The Islamophobia Industry.”
According to the Legislating Fear report of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the dozens of agencies that make up this hate-inciting industry are funded to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars. In the words of Bazian, the aim of the well-funded endeavour is “to use fear and hate-mongering to lull our intellect to sleep” and “to implant negative and racist ideas about Muslims and Islam in our collective consciousness.”
Prominent among the core institutions of the trans-Atlantic Islamophobia Industry are the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Henry Jackson Society, the Quilliam Foundation, the Gladstone Institute, Daniel Pipe’s Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative, the Clarion Project, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting.
These and many other agencies whose mission is to incite Islamophobia, derive their funding from a variety of sources including the family foundations of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Sarah Scaife, Harry Bradley, Irving Moskowitz and Canada’s Bronfman dynasty. As noted above, the Gladstone Institute has made the work of Professor David Miller, including the content of his website Spinwatch, a particular target of its pro-Zionist defense of the Islamophobia Industry.
Much of the work of David Miller and his colleagues in exposing the pro-Zionist activities of the anti-Muslim hate purveyors involves tracing the money fuelling the Islamophobia Industry. This follow-the-money approach could very easily extend to tracking down the sources of financing for the staging of expensive false flag terror events.
Throughout the academic presentations I witnessed at the Paris bookstore, there was a persistent resistance by all the presenters to engage in some sort of reckoning with the anti-Muslim thrust of the false flag terrorism currently imposed upon us.
In every presentation there was the same conspicuous absence of interest in investigating the primary engine of contemporary Islamophobia, namely the engineering of false flag terror events to be blamed on Muslim fundamentalists said to be acting alone for no other reason than their religious extremism.
According to Kevin Barrett’s record of the event, when it came time for questions and answers I posed my query as follows:
“This is all very interesting, but I’m not hearing any of you get to the root of why there is all this Islamophobia. There is now a huge literature on the fact that these big terror attacks are contrived. It was 9/11 and all of the subsequent events that have created the wave of Islamophobia. I know it’s not a good career move, but: Why can’t we talk about this? Why can’t we –”
I emphasized in my question the observation that the dominant forces animating Islamophobia lie in the extravagant media misrepresentations of false flag terror events. Again and again these episodes of false flag terror are presented as the independent, self-directed work of Islamic extremists acting exclusively out of religious zealotry rather than the actions of mercenaries paid to create the political currency of fear necessary for the maintenance of the permanent war economy.
These misrepresentations form the very core of the activities of the Islamophobia Industry as composed by agencies such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. An outgrowth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the FDD was created a mere two days after the events of 9/11.
It fell to Professor Miller to respond to my question. He began by taking exception to my suggestion that some “psychopaths” might be involved as “assets” in the execution of false flag terrorism. Miller indicated that, in his estimation, Islamic terror events were by and large the product of considered actions on the part of alienated Muslims who had experienced devastating consequences from various forms of hostile invasion into the lives of their own families, communities, and nations.
Their violent responses, he indicated, were often the product of long reflection and preparation by mostly intelligent individuals prone to be especially sensitive to the gross abuses of human rights directed at Islamic populations both within the West and on its resource frontiers.
In retrospect Miller’s response was a classic illustration of the “blowback theory” of 9/11. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire is the name of an iconographic text by a former CIA analyst, Chalmers Johnson.
Although Johnson’s Blowback was first published in 1999, the volume became a bestseller after the events of September 11, 2001. Johnson believed the United States was imperiled by the flood of recriminations that would almost inevitably arise from those most negatively affected by the secret incursions of American empire.
Many seized on the central argument of Blowback to explain what had transpired on 9/11. I include myself in that category. Until my friend and colleague, the late Mohawk activist Splitting The Sky, insisted in 2008 that I look into the evidence of what did and did not happen on 9/11, I adhered to the blowback theory.
I mistakenly believed that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Indigenous peoples resisting repeated rounds of imperial assault on their lands, their persons and their ways of life. I recall it was difficult for me to put this interpretation aside once I began looking at the overwhelming evidence that the various agencies charged to protect us were in fact deeply involved in perpetrating the lies and crimes of 9/11.
The response of Professor Miller to my question seemed to demonstrate the continuing allure of the Blowback theory of 9/11 in spite of the conclusions that have emerged from the elaborate citizens’ inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001. The outcome of the citizens’ inquiry demonstrated long ago that the evidence does not support the thesis that all the destruction on 9/11 can be traced back to the independent actions of 19 Saudi jihadists acting to realize a plan hatched by Osama bin Laden.
I found it very instructive to witness how a group of otherwise courageous and conscientious scholars skated around any direct engagement with the origins and genesis of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. Our collective failure to force on our governments and institutions some basic reckoning with the lies and crimes of 9/11 have made our societies vulnerable to a seemingly endless repetition of the same scenario of manipulation through the incitement of fear towards Muslims. The key to creating these fears lies in the parade of recent false flag terror events in, for instance, London, Madrid, Bali, Ottawa, Paris and San Bernardino to mention only a few.
The event at the Paris bookstore might be characterized as a frontier zone marking the boundary between permitted and prohibited academic discourse. Their proceedings therefore provided an instructive window illuminating the more general failure of the academy to deal in deep and systematic ways with the full extent of the travesty. The potential of humanity is grossly undermined by the absurdity of a never-ending war being waged “on Terror”. The War on Truth is the most essential feature of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The Islamophobia Industry and the Deep State Operations of the False Flag Terror Industry
I have learned a lot at the Paris conference and in my subsequent research into the leads provided by the scholars who participated. Professor Miller and others called my attention to, for instance, the dual preoccupations of the same funders and lobby groups that simultaneously instigate hatred to Muslims even as they invest in and promote Jewish settlements on the expansionary frontiers of the Israeli warrior state.
I found particular value in the content of a report by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network entitled, The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements of Justice. The document explains in detail the financial, ideological and political community of interests wedding the arms and media industries in the United States to the military and security establishment of Israel.
The channeling of vast treasuries of public funds from the USA to Israel has the effect of creating huge slush funds that end in the coffers of American politicians and in the corporate proprietorships of war profiteers.
The authors go on to explain that this coalition of shared interests is pointed against all manner of progressive movements including environmental groups as well as the decolonization struggles of Blacks, Latinos and Indigenous peoples. It seems the same techniques deployed to cast an aura of criminality over the freedom movement of oppressed Palestinians is being applied more broadly.
Accordingly, the demonization of whole populations by practitioners of the Islamophobia Industry casts a very broad shadow. The hate inciting smear campaigns support oppressive structures of top-down power running contrary to the exercise of even the most fundamental principles of universal human rights.
The Islamophobia Industry’s assault on human rights extended to an attack on the academic freedom of Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, one of the more prominent participants in the proceedings at the Paris bookstore. Abdulhadi is Director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative at San Francisco State University in California. Recently she has was targeted by a formidable array of Islamophobes led by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative.
The attack on Professor Abdulhadi was discussed in The Business of Backlash. Her Zionist detractors accused the Palestinian-American academic of being “a terrorist supporter as well as a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” She was said to embody “all that is wrong with radical elements of academia who have all but hijacked the social science and humanities fields. Her obsessive focus on Israel and monomaniacal demonization of the Mideast’s only democracy betray a troubling pattern of Judeophobia and overt anti-Semitism.” http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/222457/terrorists-campus-ari-lieberman
A formidable coalition of academic colleagues and civil rights organizations rallied to the defense of Professor Abdulhadi who was represented by the lawyers of the Palestinian Solidarity Legal Support network. Abdulhadi’s participation in the Paris conference as a working professor attests to their success in persuading the administration of San Francisco State University to fend off the malicious attempt to end this important scholar’s academic career.
It seems very strange that those who participated in the academic conference in Paris, like those who authored The Business of Backlash, could make themselves so expert on the relationships between the Islamophobia Industry, Jewish Settlements on the West Bank and the deep state machinations of the Israeli-American power elite but not extend their investigations further.
The evidence has become overwhelming that what is portrayed in the media as self-motivated, self-financing, self-directed Islamic terrorism is rather the outcome of a complex network of connections linking intelligence agencies, paid assets, mercenaries and other private sector contractors connected to the operations and objectives of the pro-Zionist Islamophobia Industry.
As my reading on the Islamophobia Industry progressed I came to see the most visible agencies of public hate mongering towards Muslims as but the tip of the iceberg of far larger structures of deceit and corruption. Beneath the overt activities of the Muslim-bashing agencies lie the covert deep state entities devoted to generating the false flag terror events on which the parasitic Islamophobia Industry feeds.
This connection can be well illustrated in the reincarnation after 9/11 of the Project for the New American Century as the pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The basic aim of this whole sordid complex of deep state and public agencies is to transform Israel’s Arab and predominantly Muslim regional enemies, the Palestinians, into one element of a larger global entity presented as the antithesis of the West’s self-proclaimed “freedoms.”
Composed of the worldwide community of Muslims, the ommah was instrumentalized in public mythology as the aberrant “other” to be guarded against, pacified and sometimes vanquished. The wholesale demonization of Muslims served the purpose of providing the war machine with a new enemy to replace the defunct enemy of the Soviet Union.
The Memes, Symbols and Demonology Deployed in Generating Hatred Towards Muslims
The same banking-military-media establishment that benefited most from the permanent war economy on the capitalist side of the Cold War was reborn, re-energized and refinanced with the launching of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In this fashion a degree of continuity was maintained as the same national security establishment created to fight communism was re-deployed in a very strange operation involving both the creation of, and opposition to, Islamic terrorism.
In the decade and a half since 9/11 a powerful Islamophobia Industry has set the tone for the entire mainstream media. In the process, the imagery of Islamic jihad has been rendered an essential part of the visual vocabulary of popular culture. The project of generating fear of Muslims in mainstream media draws on many tried and true techniques of the Public Relations Industry.
The integration of Islamophobia into popular culture often invokes archetypes and symbols from religious mythology like, for instance, the stereotypical demonology of witchcraft and devil worship. Resort is made to mental imagery rooted in children’s fables such as Peter and the Wolf.
To convey these messages, instant-made-for-TV “terrorist” experts regularly conjure up terms such as “Lone Wolf Terrorist” even as they warn us against the “Homegrown Terrorists” said to be lurking amongst us. In such theatres of normalized hate speech, whole populations are wedged, divided and turned against each other to grease the gears of fear and distrust as primary lubricants for political and commercial exploitation.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 lie at the origins of a Great Transformation for the worse. To fail to deal with what did or did not happen in the Mother of All False Flag Terror Events is to give credence to the interpretation that the saga of misrepresentation essential to the Global War on Terror’s genesis did not begin until 2003.
According to that gatekeepers version of reality, the administration of George W. Bush was an innocent victim of Islamic attacks until the executive branch began floating the lie that the government of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Much of the responsibility for publicizing the false assertions that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction has been laid at the doorstep of the New York Times and the work of its star reporter Judith Miller.
Miller’s primary sources on this story included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all prominent Israeli-American members of the Project for a New American Century.
In a major report in 2000, PNAC anticipated the events of 9/11 by proclaiming that the realization of their neoconservative agenda could not be achieved “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event– like a new Pearl Harbour.”
Is it credible that a handful of Saudi Muslims led by Osama bin Laden, armed with nothing but box cutters, a smattering of flight training and intense jihadist zeal, acted independently to bring about the elaborate high-tech crime that took place on 9/11?
Is it credible that the neocon cabal controlling both the Israeli government and the Bush White House was fortuitously presented by self-directed jihadists with precisely the catalytic event it needed to institute its ambitious agenda of police repression at home and military expansion abroad.
Is it credible that the neocon establishment was only a respondent to, rather than an author of, the cataclysmic events of 9/11? If the events of 9/11 were indeed a surprise attack on power symbols of American prowess in warfare and commerce, why was no one responsible for such a stupendous breach of national security fired for such a spectacular failure? How is it that so many of those who accuse the Bush-Cheney regime of lying about so many subjects refuse to explore the extent of the lies whose effect is to protect the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes?
Part of the problem in the official cover story of 9/11 is that the custodians of the fable keep on changing it to suit the changing currents of political expediency. In the early days following 9/11, the culprits were said to be Osama bin Laden and his coterie of Islamic extremists in al-Qaeda.
Then the demonology of 9/11 shifted so that somehow Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi government were made to epitomize the jihadist extremes of Islamic terror. Once Saddam was captured and executed the world was briefly introduced to a person or persons identified by the name Khalid Sheik Mohammed. For a time it seemed that the US executive branch would conduct a show trial in New York of Khalid, the supposed “mastermind of 9/11” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the infamous day.
The plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed for war crimes was abandoned. This prisoner remains jailed in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. There he has been tortured through water boarding many dozens of times in order to elicit all manner of confessions including some that found their way into the 9/11 Commission report in the United States.
The creation of an official government report, whose conclusions are drawn from supposed evidence obtained from illegal torture, is itself a war crime. Accordingly, those academics, jurists, politicians, journalists, and other public intellectuals who accept the 9/11 Commission report as accurate and satisfactory are rendered complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Instead of conducting a show trial, the government of US President Barack Obama opted to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by announcing that US Navy Seals had hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound near Abbottabad Pakistan.
In this fashion bin Laden was posthumously returned to the role assigned him by the White House and media agencies within hours of the 9/11 strikes without any formal investigation whatsoever.
According to Seymour Hersh, the White House’s story on bin Laden’s elimination “might have been written by Lewis Carroll.” Bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea. What sense would it make simply to execute the man that would be far and away the world’s foremost authority on international jihadism if the mythological demonology attending the 9/11 psychological operation was actually true.
The elimination by the Democratic Party President of the Republican Party President’s initial 9/11 patsy cleared the way for a new phase in the Global War of False Flag Terrorism overseen by Barack Obama.
This Democratic Party version of the neocon plan for global domination restored al-Qaeda to a role something like it had played in the 1980s as a part of the mujahadeen proxy army army serving US geopolitical strategies. Where al-Qaeda helped overthrow the US-backed puppet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the second decade of the twenty-first century al-Qaeda was reborn as a mercenary instrument of NATO’s assault on the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The instrumentalization of mercenary armies paid to fight under the banner of Islamic religion has grown in scope so that this historical trajectory lies at the very heart of the international showdown for control of the lands and resources of Syria. Under heavy Israeli pressure, the US government with backing from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar has built up al-Qaeda’s successor, Jabhat al-Nusra. The aim of this sponsorship of Islamic theocrats hostile to Bashir al-Assad’s more secular and pluralistic Russian-backed Syrian government is to balkanize the region and possibly to prepare the ground for the eastward and northward expansion of Israel.
This US backing of al-Qaeda-related fighters was spun as support for a “moderate opposition” to the Assad government. This scenario unfolded concurrently with the rise, in Iraq and Syria, of the entity known variously as the Islamic State in the Levant, ISIL, ISIS, and more recently Daesh.
The evidence has become overwhelming that this fighting force is financed, armed and organized in part to embody the memes of hatred and extremism essential to the operations of the Islamophobia Industry and the main protagonists of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The close connection in the international oil business linking governments of Turkey, Israel and the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State, highlight the many layers of complicity in a very strange operation. The US government presents itself publicly as the world’s leading opponent of Islamic terror while it cultivates, assists and facilitates the very forces it says it is fighting.
In a recent post on his website, Voltairenet, Thierry Meyssen has described the prevalent blindness to what has been really taking place in the region of Syria and Iraq. He lays bare the dynamics of a dangerous game that involves “pretending, like NATO, that these [Islamic fighting] groups are independent formations which have suddenly materialised from the void, with all their salaries, armament and spare parts. More seriously, the jihadists are in fact mercenaries in the service of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar…. to which we must add certain multinationals like Academi, KKR and Exxon-Mobil.”
A Reversion to Old Styles of Imperialism in the Name of Anti-Terrorism?
Since bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea by the US Armed Forces in 2010 the role once assigned to al-Qaeda as the all-purpose boogyman of Islamic terrorism has now been re-assigned to the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State. When acts of false flag terrorism take place as in Ottawa in October 2014, or in Paris in November of 2015, or in San Bernardino a month later, the authorities in charge of pseudo-investigations are prone to announce almost immediately a connection to ISIS/ISIL Daesh.
The criminal law is thereby put aside and the violent events are immediately elevated to “acts of war” justifying quick retaliation by Armed Forces. Within hours of the Friday the 13th Paris event, for instance, French President Francois Hollande was ordering the French Air Force to intervene in Syria.
While the supposed target was ISIS/ISIL/Daesh encampments and strongholds, there is reason to see the real objective of the supposed anti-terror attacks as the overthrow of the Assad government. This French military intervention could thus be interpreted as a resort to France’s old imperial role in the part of the Middle East assigned it by the Eurocentric Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
The point of this foray into the recent history of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism is to encourage colleagues in the academy to address, document and explain the unfolding patterns of deception so integral to the process of enlarging the unaccountable powers of the covert deep state, diminishing the overt role of the public state. I extend this encouragement especially to the colleagues that Dr. Barrett and I met in the Paris bookstore at the event entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society”.
These colleagues and their networks of academic collaborators have made a good start in identifying the institutionalization of hate mongering in the Islamophobia Industry. The time has come, however, to connect the visible workings of this Zionist enterprise of anti-Muslim provocation to the deep state operations in the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
A former director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency has said that the international agreements made after World War Two are starting to fall apart, and may change the borders of some countries in the Middle East.
“What we see here is a fundamental melting down of the international order,” Michael Hayden told CNN. “We are seeing a melting down of the post-WWII Bretton Woods American liberal order. We are certainly seeing a melting down of the borders drawn at the time of Versailles and Sykes-Picot. I am very fond of saying Iraq no longer exists, Syria no longer exists; they aren’t coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”
Hayden described the current situation as a “tectonic” moment. “Within that we then have the war against terrorism; it is an incredibly complex time.”
He explained that there are two fronts in the war. “The way I think about it, we Americans with our military backgrounds, call one element the close battle and the other the deep battle. The close battle is the one you and I are able to see everyday, that’s the heat-blasting fragmentation against those people who are already convinced they want to come kill us, and frankly, we are pretty good at that one.”
However, he said that the US is “not good” at the deep battle. “That’s the production rate of people who want to come kill us in 3, 5 or 10 years. Fundamentally the problem there is that that is not our fight.”
Internment of civilian nationals belonging to opposing sides was carried out in varying degrees by all belligerent powers in World War Two. It was also the fate of those servicemen who found themselves in a neutral country.
At the outbreak of war there were around 80,000 potential enemy aliens in Britain who, it was feared, could be spies, or willing to assist Britain’s enemies in the event of an invasion. All Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were called before special tribunals and were divided into one of three groups… continue
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