Regime change in store for cultural conservatives?
It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.
And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.
USAID was founded in 1961 and it was intended to serve as a vehicle for nurturing democratic government and associated civic institutions among nations that had little or no experience in popular government. That role has become less relevant as nation states have evolved and the organization itself has responded by becoming more assertive in its role, pushing policies that have coincided with US foreign policy objectives. This has led some host nations to close down USAID offices. Within the US government itself, participants in foreign policy formulation often observe that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) now are largely in the business of doing what the CIA used to do, i.e. interfering in local politics by supporting opposition parties and other dissident or even terrorist groups. Both organizations were very active in Ukraine in 2014 and served as conduits for money transfers to the opposition parties and those who were hostile to Russia’s influence for “democracy building.”
Samantha Power, who is married to another Democratic Party affiliated power broker, lawyer Cass Sunstein, traveled to Hungary on her diplomatic passport but took pains to cover her travel as a routine bureaucratic visit to an overseas post. Hungary is undeniably a democracy, is a member of the European Union, and also of NATO, but Power reportedly did not clear the travel with the Hungarian government and apparently did not meet with any government officials, even as a courtesy. She tweeted that her visit was to reestablish USAID in the Hungarian capital, “Great to be here in Budapest with @USAmbHungary where @USAID just relaunched new, locally-driven initiatives to help independent media thrive and reach new audiences, take on corruption and increase civic engagement.”
By “independent media” Power clearly meant that the US will be directly supporting opposition press that is anti-government and which embraces the globalist-progressive view currently favored by the White House. A US Embassy press release on the visit revealed that Power was in town as part of a project to relaunch seven USAID programs throughout Eastern Europe. It did not elaborate on the “corruption” that Power intended to address, which, of course, would have been a direct insult to the local governments wherever she intended to visit, nor did the document reveal that many of the groups that will be supported are likely to be affiliated with “globalist” George Soros.
In Budapest, Samantha Power did indeed meet with opposition political figures and civil organizations and groups, with particular emphasis on the homosexual community including “Joined @divaDgiV, @andraslederer, and @viki radvanyi for lunch in Budapest where we spoke about their work to advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and dignity in Hungary and around the world @budapestpride” as described in one of her tweeted messages after arrival. Power was also accompanied throughout by the highly controversial US Ambassador David Pressman, who is openly homosexual, of course, married to a man, and who has been highly critical of the conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which was reelected in 2022 by a landslide margin in a vote that was considered free and fair. Orban is disliked by Joe Biden’s Washington because he is conservative and a nationalist, not because he is incompetent or dishonest while Pressman was and is a perfect example of the Biden State Department sending a terrible fit as ambassador to an extremely conservative country just to make points with the gay community in the US. Pressman has persisted in telling Hungarians how to behave not only on foreign policy but also on sexual diversity and cultural issues and, for his efforts, was finally told to “shut up” by Hungary’s Foreign Minister.
To be sure, Hungary’s undeniably democratic government, which is politically and economically tied to Washington, does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong and even escalate the Russia-Ukraine war and will not contribute to arming Ukraine. It does not accept “globalist” open immigration that seeks to challenge the established national culture, and also opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It does not allow LGBTQ material to be presented to minors in state schools, which it considers to be morally correct anti-pedophilia legislation. For that reason, the time was clearly right, in the “woke” view of the Biden Administration, for Samantha Power to show up with a little dose of regime change in her portfolio. Hungarian officials had already expressed their concern over what they consider extreme pressure coming from the United States, largely because Hungary is a conservative country that values its culture and political independence. The visit by Power sent a signal to the Hungarian government and people that the pressure will likely increase and that Washington will not hesitate to use its embassies and overseas military bases to actively support groups that promote views that are not generally embraced by the local populations.
The Samantha Power story is of interest, to be sure, because it demonstrates that since the United States is the self-appointed enforcer of the “rules based international order” nothing in the world is off limits. Far too many US politicians and media pundits think that other states are not really sovereign and have to submit to US dictates in everything, and if they dare to step out of line they can be punished. If a conservative Christian country or leader – by which one might include Hungary, Russia or Brazil – believes that homosexuality or even abortion on demand are morally objectionable the US now believes that it has a mandate to use federal government resources to change that perception including by actively engaging with a foreign nation and its government on its own soil. To put it bluntly, the United States must certainly be considered the world leader in compelling all nations to conform to the political and moral values that it insists be adhered to.
So if one wants to learn why US Foreign Policy is so inept in terms of actually serving the interests of the American people, look no farther than was has happened and continues to roil in Ukraine as well as the implications of the Samantha Power visit to Hungary. For Foreign Service Posts, providing support for the agendas of the collection of freak shows that make up the Democratic Party has become manifestly as or even more important than promoting genuine national interests overseas or assisting American businesses and travelers.
What is perhaps most interesting is the way the “woke” foreign policy is being largely concealed from the American public and is being run as some kind of stealth operation. One initiative run by USAID in Macedonia in 2016 under President Obama included a $300,000 grant for “suitable” Macedonian applicants to “fund” a program entitled “LGBTI Inclusion” to counter how “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance.” How many American taxpayers would be happy to learn that their hard-earned money has been going to support programs run in nonconsenting foreign democracies to make them more “woke?” Of course, no one in the Biden Administration is telling the public about it, nor is the story likely to appear in the mainstream media, so presumably no one will know!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
March 7, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Hungary, NED, Obama, United States, USAID |
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While most Canadians would prefer to think of themselves as free of constraint from U.S. foreign policy, still history will show that most often Canada’s foreign policy is a mirror image of the U.S.
Canada has blood on its hands in Syria. Canadian intelligence would have provided its government with the facts concerning the Syrian uprising in Deraa in March 2011. That information would have allowed the Canadian government to determine whether to support the U.S.-NATO attack on Syria for regime change or to stand on its own two feet and stay out of nation-building in the Middle East. Instead, the Canadian government knowingly hung on to the apron strings of their southern neighbor and followed the leader into destroying a nation, and deliberately preventing its recovery when the conflict was over.
The conflict in Syria has been described as a popular uprising that was crushed, or as a civil war. The Syrian conflict is neither. It was a CIA-engineered plan for regime change directed by U.S. President Obama. Later, the EU and Canada supported the U.S.-NATO attack on Syria because the EU and Canada usually follow the lead of the U.S. unquestioningly.
The U.S. plan failed because of overestimating the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s support in Syria. The majority of the Syrian population are Sunni Muslims, but they are overwhelmingly secular in terms of governance. Had the population supported the Free Syrian Army, which was the foot soldiers of Obama, the regime change might have been successful. But, most Syrians rejected the notion of chopping off the heads of their neighbors to effect a change in government. The majority of Syrians reject Radical Islam, which is a political ideology hiding behind a religion. They prefer a secular government that protects religious rights for all, given the fact, there are 18 different sects in Syria.
The conflict in Syria has ended with the country having been split into 3 sections. The main section covers 75% of the territory in the hands of the central government in Damascus, while the northeast corner is under the occupation of the U.S. military partnership with the Kurds, and the last remaining terrorist-controlled area is in the tiny enclave of Idlib.
The Kurdish section was not involved in the recent earthquake, and they support themselves by selling stolen oil from the oil wells guarded by the U.S. military which President Trump ordered, and President Biden has ordered to remain occupied. When the U.S. troops leave Syria, the Kurds will reunite with the central government. The U.S. occupation is the only thing keeping them separate.
The country has been prevented from recovery due to the U.S.-EU sanctions which prevent any materials from being shipped to Syria. Canadian companies, and individuals, have not sent machines, materials, or other recovery supplies for fear of being penalized by the U.S. Treasury Department. Humanitarian supplies are supposed to be exempt, except there is a time-consuming and costly procedure to get an exemption approved, and most firms and individuals are not willing to seek approval.
On February 9 the U.S. Treasury Department issued General License 23 which waives the sanctions for humanitarian supplies only for 180 days in the wake of the 7.8 earthquakes. Canadian companies and individuals could send supplies to Damascus, but they must be sent through an NGO and not the Syrian government.
Humanitarian aid was sent to Idlib from the UN, crossing the Turkish border at Bab al Hawa. International aid agencies and charities have arrived in Idlib from Turkey. When the Canadian government states they are supporting humanitarian efforts inside Syria, they are referring strictly to the one small province of Idlib, under the command of Al Qaeda terrorists who call themselves Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Canada has taken in over 25,000 Syrian refugees. While this has been seen as a humanitarian act, it is also a political tool. From the outset of the conflict in 2011, refugee camps were established on the border of Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Refugees sleeping in tents in bad weather demonstrate on western media that Syria was not safe to live in, and not politically correct. Some of the refugees left Syria because they were politically opposed to the government in Damascus. Those refugees mainly numbered among the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a global terrorist organization, whose goal is to establish an Islamic government everywhere. However, most of the refugees were escaping violence caused by the conflict. Houses were destroyed by both the terrorists and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). In many cases, it was the terrorists who attacked homes and civilians. In response to the terrorists’ attacks, the SAA responded likewise attacking terrorist positions which were located in civilian homes.
Both Turkey and Jordan were allied with the U.S. foreign policy under Obama and were playing supporting roles to the CIA program Timber Sycamore which supported Radical Islamic terrorists fighting the government in Damascus. Both Turkey and Jordan had offices that supplied weapons, cash, and training to the terrorists fighting in Syria. The refugee camps in both countries served as a haven for the families of the terrorists fighting in Syria, in which the UN and other international aid agencies would be feeding and caring for the basic needs of the refugees in the camps.
By 2016, Canada had spent over $1 billion in humanitarian, development, and security assistance in the Syria crisis. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced 2016 Canada’s new strategy for the Syrian crisis. His new strategy was to keep following the Americans, and he tried to reframe his government’s involvement as humanitarian.
Over the years, Canada has been accused of being a lap dog for the U.S. While most Canadians would prefer to think of themselves as free of constraint from U.S. foreign policy, still history will show that most often Canada’s foreign policy is a mirror image of the U.S. Many would say that is because the U.S. policy is in the best interest of Canada, and not a dictated position. U.S. President Obama used the Israeli paper “A Clean Break” as the road map for regime change in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria. He was trying to create a ‘New Middle East’. His plan failed in each country, but succeeded in destroying much of each country, and killing thousands. Obama used the Muslim Brotherhood as his partner on the ground in each of the countries. Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria resisted the Muslim Brotherhood and fought back to remain secular governments even though the full weight of U.S.-EU-NATO resources was thrown at the project.
By April 2017, Trudeau was still hanging on to the Obama regime change project in Syria. However, by then President Trump had been elected to office, and he shut the CIA operation in Syria down. Trudeau attended a G7 meeting and was talking up Syria with UK Prime Minister May and French President Hollande. They were anticipating directions from U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson concerning the future of the U.S. regime change program in Syria.
They would later find that Trump was not in favor of the Obama plan, and it was his wish to leave Syria, but in 2019 he was prevented from a troop withdrawal from Syria by the U.S. State Department headed by Mike Pompeo, who said the U.S. troops needed to remain to prevent the Syrian government from access to their oil. This is why Syrian homes have 30 minutes of electricity 3 times per day now.
According to the U.S. government, and their Canadian followers, if you keep the Syrian people without electricity, without gasoline, and without heating fuel in winter, they will rise and complete the Obama regime change plan. That strategy is both immoral and unethical. It is also illegal under international law to steal a nation’s resources.
The Muslim Brotherhood is very well established in Canada and had connections at the highest levels in the Canadian government. In February 2015, the standing senate committee on national security and defense met in Ottawa to study and report on security threats facing Canada.
In the meeting of senators, an excerpt from the memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood was shown as evidence.
“The Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.”
The Muslim Brotherhood had successfully entered into the Obama administration and key U.S. official positions. The group had done the same in Canada.
In the Ottawa meeting, it was stated that in June 2012, a delegation of Islamist leaders linked to the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada had met with Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews. The delegation was led by Hussein Hamdani, an adviser to the Department of Public Safety, as a member of the Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security.
Hamdani was in a conflict-of-interest position in his role as an adviser on national security matters since he has been associated with organizations whose charitable status has been revoked by the Canada Revenue Agency due to their involvement in the financing of international terrorism.
Senator Beyak spoke at the meeting and said, “They declare themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood, and as Senator Lang pointed out, their plans are very clear.”
This demonstrates the deep understanding of the Canadian government of the deadly nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, its involvement in Canada, its government, and its link to the conflict in Syria, which was part of the Obama plan.
How Canada plays into the hands of radical Islamists
The Canadian government is capable of determining whether the U.S. foreign policy and never-ending wars abroad are in the best interest of Canada.
The Canadian government had understood from U.S. intelligence that the Obama plan to destroy Syria was based on using the Muslim Brotherhood, and the political ideology known as Radical Islam, as the foot soldiers inside Syria. The Canadian government understood that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated Canadian society and was involved with the Canadian government at the highest levels. The threat to Canada was known, but the decision was made to blindly follow Washington’s dirty war in Syria.
U.S. President Obama is the main villain in this story, but Canada was capable of standing firm against plans to use Radical Islamic terrorists to change governments abroad.
Canada has supported humanitarian aid to Idlib, but not the rest of the country. Idlib is the last remaining terrorist-controlled province in Syria. It is an olive-growing region with no industry or resources outside of the production of olives. It was chosen as the headquarters of the Al Qaeda branch in Syria (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) because it sits on the Turkish border. Turkey, following the U.S. directives, supplied the terrorists with all resources needed including tanks and anti-tank missiles which have even been used to bring down a plane.
Canada does not supply any aid to Syria other than Idlib, which represents 2% of the total area of the country. Aleppo, Damascus, Latakia, Hama, Homs, and all other areas in Syria have never received even a loaf of bread from either the U.S. or Canada. However, the UN does supply some food to certain areas outside of Idlib. Funds for the UN World Food Program are in part from U.S. and Canadian donations. Even now, since the 7.8 magnitude quake occurred on February 6, Canada continues to only recognize the 3 million persons in the so-called “The Islamic Republic of Idlib” as Syria. The other 20 million in Syria get nothing, even though Latakia alone has 820 dead, 142,000 homeless due to the quake, and 102 collapsed buildings.
From the U.S.-Canada foreign policy on Syria point of view: Idlib must be maintained as a separate viable ‘state’, free of Damascus. The U.S.-Canada policy is to ignore the government in Damascus and pretend that Idlib is Syria. The Al Qaeda terrorists are thus rewarded by the west for their participation in regime change, which was the Obama policy that Canada signed up to.
Last month, David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen published an article detailing the Canadian special forces’ participation in a controversial 20-member U.S. military team dubbed Talon Anvil in 2015, which has been accused of killing scores of innocent people in Iraq and Syria.
“In December 2021 the New York Times revealed that Talon Anvil was responsible for launching tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in the process had killed hundreds of civilians. The reckless actions of the Talon Anvil team, which operated from 2014 to 2019, alarmed members in the U.S. military and even the CIA, the newspaper reported.”
“Independent investigators and human rights groups have estimated that at least 7,000 civilians were killed by coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.”
Last month, Canada announced it would take back 23 of its citizens who have been held in Islamic State camps in northeast Syria, under the control of the Kurds who are partners of the U.S. military there. The group includes six women, 13 infants, and four men.
This would be the largest repatriation for Canada after the Islamic State caliphate was destroyed in 2019.
More than 42,400 foreign citizens, most of them children, have been held in life-threatening conditions in IS prison camps across Syria, Human Rights Watch says.
Canadian intelligence was well aware of who in Canada was following Radical Islam, and who had left to fight in Syria before the founding of ISIS. They were also following events on the ground in Syria while Canadians and other foreigners were fighting the Syrian government, and who among them had made the transition to joining ISIS once the U.S.-sponsored FSA had disbanded.
In 1998, Richard N. Haass wrote “Sanctions: too much of a bad thing.” In his expert analysis, it was proven that U.S. sanctions do not work in big projects, such as regime change in Syria. He further proved that innocent people suffer under sanctions, and they were immoral and unethical. The sanctions against Syria must be lifted and allow citizens to rebuild their lives and allow foreign governments to donate and invest in the rebuilding of the country.
Aid should be allowed to enter Syria in all locations, from Idlib to Deraa, and all in between. All Syrian citizens should have the right to receive help. Planes with aid should be allowed to land in Damascus, Aleppo, and Latakia and shipping containers should arrive in the port of Latakia.
The international community should be putting pressure on the terrorists in Idlib to lay down their arms or arrange to leave the country. They are holding 3 million civilians as human shields. The freedom of those civilians should be a priority to western nations such as Canada.
The President of Turkey, Tayyip Recip Erdogan, has already voiced his wish to repair his relationship with Damascus. Canada and other peace-loving western nations should be supporting his negotiations with Damascus. Washington has told Erdogan not to talk with President Assad, but Canada could show some backbone and defy Washington by showing support for Erdogan’s peace initiative.
Canada should re-open their Embassy in Damascus. With diplomats and humanitarian experts available on the ground, this would be a positive and constructive action that would truly show the Syrian people that Canada cares.
Finally, Canada should identify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Care should be taken by all future Canadian governments to study plans in Washington that assume Canadian support. The Canadian government, supported by its intelligence agency, is capable of determining whether the U.S. foreign policy and never-ending wars abroad are in the best interest of Canada. Taking the high road is sometimes a lonely road, but lives and nations might be saved.
March 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Canada, Middle East, Obama, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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GOP Representative Matt Gaetz has introduced a resolution seeking to direct President Joe Biden to remove all US troops from Syria. The House must vote on Gaetz’s proposal within 18 days of its introduction due to the bill’s war powers status.
“[T]he purpose of my legislation is to force members of Congress to vote on record regarding whether they think we ought to continue Obama’s war in Syria. President Obama kicked off our involvement (…) and now we still find ourselves in the middle of a Syrian civil war with Russia and Turkey and Iran, all present in a very confined neighborhood,” Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told the US press earlier this week.
Gaetz, a House Armed Services Committee member, filed the War Powers Resolution on February 22 after he learned that four US military servicemen and a working dog were wounded in a US and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) helicopter raid in northeastern Syria.
Speaking to the US press, Gaetz shared his concerns with regard to the US president’s ability to handle Syrian matters. The congressman quoted Biden’s August 2021 interview in which the president claimed that the US “[doesn’t] have military in Syria to make sure that we’re going to be protected.” However, according to the American media at the time of Biden’s comment, there were at least 900 troops in Syria who were helping their SDF proxies on the ground.
Gaetz has also drawn attention to reports alleging that Russian and US personnel get into very close proximity with one another. “[T]he risk of an accident or miscalculation or just misuse of authority could lead to direct kinetic conflict between the United States and Russia in Syria,” the lawmaker insisted.
In addition, Congress has never authorized the use of military force in Syria, the congressman argued. “America First means actually putting the people of our country first — not the interests of the military industrial complex,” he said.
Gaetz’s resolution has been filed under the War Powers Act of 1973, which was designed to limit the president’s authority to wage war and reasserted Congress’ authority over foreign wars. Notably, at the time of the 1973 bill’s introduction, then President Richard Nixon tried to veto it. However, Congress overrode his veto, and the resolution became law following the US pullout from Vietnam in early 1973.
If Gaetz’s legislative initiative passes, US military personnel must be removed from the Syrian Arab Republic within 15 days.
Meanwhile, the lawmaker lamented the fact that Democratic progressives who used to be anti-war activists have become “cheerleaders” for the US’s overseas conflicts. “‘The Squad’ used to be anti-war. Now, they’re waving their pom poms for NATO,” he said.
The representative believes that the upcoming vote on his resolution will show who the real patriot of America is and who continues to stick to Middle Eastern adventurism.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was the first who sought to pull US troops out of Syria. Nonetheless, he later insisted that some of the contingent should stay in place to “protect” the Syrian oil fields occupied by the US-backed Kurdish-dominated SDF. Trump was also misled about the actual number of US servicemen in Syria. US Syria envoy Ambassador Jim Jeffrey admitted in November 2020 he was “always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.”
February 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Obama, Syria, United States |
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National Security Adviser to President Biden Jake Sullivan played a prominent role in plotting the September 26, 2022, sabotage against the Russo-European Nord Stream pipelines, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed. So, who is Jake Sullivan: “the cat’s meow,” “once-in-a-generation intellect,” or a reckless hawk?
“I have great respect for Hersh and his reporting and believe that Sullivan could certainly have been instrumental in pushing for and carrying out this deceitful campaign that likely has inflicted monumental damage on citizens worldwide while also sapping America’s remaining national prestige,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, acting with Joe Biden’s blessing, convened men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments to come up with a plan on how to destruct Nord Stream 1 and 2 designed to pump Russian natural gas to Europe, according to Seymour Hersh’s recent bombshell.
In early 2022, the CIA told Sullivan that they knew how to blow up the pipelines. The group decided to keep the risky plot on a hush. The US Congress wasn’t informed. The US military and intelligence operatives did their best to conceal Washington’s role in the sabotage. As per the investigative journalist, the team had concerns about the legality of the plot and was well aware that it could quickly morph into a foreign policy nightmare.
After the pipelines had been destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, later, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly praised the development.
“When any crime is committed, the immediate question to ask when seeking suspects is ‘to whose benefit?’ Not only did it benefit the US, US officials made comments before and after the pipeline’s destruction virtually confirming their role and the benefits derived,” Brian Berletic, geopolitical analyst and former US marine, told Sputnik.
For his part, Jake Sullivan stated laconically on September 27, 2022, that the US was supporting efforts to investigate the “apparent sabotage” and “will continue [it’s] work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”
“Hersh’s reporting on the Nord Stream bombing is completely convincing and I know for a fact that he has reliable sources, mostly in the intelligence community, but I would rather regard Sullivan as the implementer of the attack on the pipeline by virtue of his position rather than the driving force behind it,” Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. “To be sure, Joe Biden would have had to promote and endorse the project.”
Clinton’s Golden Boy
Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a “golden boy” by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
Sullivan was just 32 when he was sworn in as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for policy at the US State Department. When Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, Obama promoted Sullivan to the position of national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2015, Sullivan married Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to well-known hawks Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who used to previously work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security. (Goodlander is currently Counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland).
Sullivan is known for being a quiet but prominent member of the Clinton-Obama team. According to the press, he was part of the “exclusive” team working on resuming relations with Cuba and striking the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. He is also said to be Hillary’s close confidante in the Libya plan, which was developed months before the 2011 NATO invasion of the North African state and brutal killing of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sullivan and his boss, Clinton, adhered to the concept of “smart power,” which encompasses the use of military threat, force, and sanctions and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves, which includes humanitarian aid and negotiations.
The aide was reportedly called “the cat’s meow” and a “potential future president” by Hillary, while Biden lauded him as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.”
In 2015, the sandy-haired Minnesotan joined Hillary on her 2015/2016 election cycle as a foreign policy adviser and eventually returned to the US administration as Joe Biden’s national security adviser in 2021.
Sullivan Lacks True Sense of Right Versus Wrong
However, there’s another side to Sullivan’s stellar career. “Sullivan is clearly drunk on power and lacking a true sense of right versus wrong,” according to Ortel.
“Sullivan is a fiercely partisan globalist who achieved numerous high honors in academic life so he is supremely self-confident and, sadly, often grievously wrong,” Ortel told Sputnik. “One way to get a sense of the way he operates is to look through the State Department and Podesta WikiLeaks files and the FBI Vault files on Hillary Clinton where Sullivan is frequently involved. Like the Clintons, Sullivan thrust himself into contact with powerful Democrats and operated well above his experience level early on. But unlike the Clintons, Obama, and Biden, Sullivan has yet to hold elected office.”
One might wonder why Sullivan rose to prominence so fast even though he had relatively little experience in government affairs. Hillary herself admitted that Jake wasn’t the most experienced diplomat when it came to foreign policy.
“Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence,” Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices while describing her decision to tap Sullivan to kick off negotiations with Iran in 2012. “His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process.”
According to US media observers, Sullivan’s primary secret is that he mastered himself in delivering on his boss’s wants and needs even when it went contrary to rules and ethics. The US press quoted a senior Obama aide as saying that Sullivan was ready to do “everything” for then-Secretary Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had no scruples about Hillary’s unsecured email server use for classified and top secret government correspondence. He was bullish on Washington’s Libyan and Syrian interventions which spiraled out of control, completely ruining the North Africa state and leaving the Syrian Arab Republic in tatters.
“Under Obama and Biden, Sullivan is connected to train wreck after train wreck, from the Arab “spring”, to Benghazi, ISIS, the Iran ‘deal’ and more. He seems to be a huge fan of secret negotiations that are never subject to oversight,” Ortel noted.
Sullivan got mired in Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi scandal revolving around the former secretary of state’s failure to prevent a brutal slaughter of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US nationals in Libya on September 11, 2012. During the investigation into the matter, the House committee stumbled upon Sullivan’s letter in which the official emphasized that “we need to live in a world of risks,” while touting Washington’s decision to oust Gaddafi which opened the door to chaos in Libya.
Trump-Russia “Collusion” Hoax
“In the 2016 campaign, he had every motive to hide the misdeeds of the Clintons, including corruption and tax fraud involving The Clinton Foundation and many other charities,” said Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years. “Here it will prove interesting to see what [Special Councel] John Durham has to say about Sullivan, including his likely role pushing the Russian Hoax, for Trump’s impeachment and for electing Joe Biden.”
Sullivan appeared to have no scruples about actively spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and keeping the myth alive even after the allegations about Trump were proven null and void. Later, Durham’s investigation shed light on Clinton campaign operatives’ role in peddling a fake Trump-Alfa Bank story and uncorroborated “dirty dossier” by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
However, when testifying under oath before the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, the Clinton confidante denied any knowledge of the plot or people involved in it.
US investigative journalist Paul Sperry alleged that Sullivan was well-aware that the Trump-Alfa Bank story was “cooked-up” and personally spearheaded a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin.
Sullivan was also the one who personally promoted the Trump-Russia collusion story prior to the 2016 elections. Thus, during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Sullivan met with a number of mainstream media producers and anchors to tell a story “that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election.”
Around that time, the CIA intercepted Russian intelligence’s “chatter” about a Clinton “foreign policy adviser” who allegedly proposed a plan to vilify Donald Trump by linking him to the Kremlin in order to distract public opinion from Hillary’s emailgate scandal. Some US observers believe that the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.
According to Ortel, Sullivan could well be aware of many other “dirty” secrets of the US Democratic establishment, including the Clinton’s alleged pay-to-play schemes, Joe and Hunter Biden influence peddling and Team Obama’s efforts to undermine then-sitting President Donald Trump through a string of dodgy investigations and leaks.
“Simply put, Sullivan has no choice but to cover up the disasters connected to Biden, Obama and Clinton and likely cannot accept the grave errors (and high crimes) that seem to have been committed. In this effort, he will believe he is secure because his wife is a close advisor and friend of Attorney General Merrick Garland,” the Wall Street analyst remarked.
Nord Stream Reporting Not Done
When it comes to the Nord Stream sabotage, “in a just process, Sullivan and his co-conspirators would swiftly be charged, convicted and incarcerated if it is proven that he orchestrated an undeclared war against Russia,” argued Ortel.
According to Ortel, by fanning the flames of proxy war against Russia, Team Biden both pursues vested interests and seeks to cover up and obscure political misdeeds involving Biden, Clinton and Obama in Ukraine and other nations from 2009 to date.
Still, it appears that one could soon hear more about the Biden administration’s secretive and risky plot. Hersh indicated to Sputnik that more investigative pieces about the Nord Stream explosion were forthcoming, but declined to provide further details.
February 9, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Obama, United States |
1 Comment
The curtain is coming down on the brutal 11-year old Syrian conflict, which former US President and Nobel Laureate Barack Obama initiated, as the Arab Spring swept through West Asia two decades ago. The United States has suffered yet another big setback in West Asia as the year 2022 draws to a close. The unfolding Turkish-Syrian reconciliation process under Russian mediation is to be seen as a saga of betrayal and vengeance.
Ankara came under immense pressure from the Obama Administration in 2011 to spearhead the regime change project in Syria. Obama blithely assumed that Turkiye would gleefully serve as the charioteer of “moderate” Islamism for the transformation in West Asia. But Ankara took its time to calibrate its foreign policies to adapt to the Arab Spring before responding to the shifting landscape in Syria.
Erdogan was caught unprepared by the uprising in Syria at a juncture when Ankara was pursuing a “zero-problems” policy with Turkiye’s neighbours. Ankara was unsure how the Arab Spring would play out and remained silent when the revolt first appeared in Tunisia. Even on Egypt, Erdogan made an emotional call for Hosni Mubarak’s departure only when he sensed, correctly so, that Obama was decoupling from America’s staunch ally in Cairo.
Syria was the ultimate test case and a real challenge for Erdogan. Ankara had invested heavily in the improvement of relations with Syria within the framework of the so-called Adana Agreement in 1998 in the downstream of Turkish military’s massive showdown with Damascus over the latter harbouring the PKK [Kurdish] leader Ocalan. Erdogan initially did not want Bashar al-Assad to lose power, and advised him to reform. The families of Erdogan and Assad used to holiday together.
Obama had to depute then CIA chief David Petraeus to visit Turkey twice in 2012 to persuade Erdogan to engage with the US in operational planning aimed at bringing about the end of the Assad government. It was Petraeus who proposed to Ankara a covert program of arming and training Syrian rebels.
But by 2013 already, Erdogan began sensing that Obama himself had only a limited American involvement in Syria and preferred to lead from the rear. In 2014, Erdogan went public that his relations with Obama had diminished, saying that he was disappointed about not getting direct results on the Syrian conflict. By that time, more than 170,000 people had died and 2.9 million Syrians had fled to neighbouring countries, including Turkey, and the fighting had forced another 6.5 million people from their homes within Syria.
Simply put, Erdogan felt embittered that he was left holding a can of worms and Obama had scooted off. Worse still, the Pentagon began aligning with the Syrian Kurdish groups linked to the PKK. (In October 2014, US began providing supplies to Kurdish forces and in November 2015, US special forces were deployed in Syria.)
Indeed, since then, Erdogan had been protesting in vain that the US, a NATO ally, had aligned with a terrorist group (Syrian Kurds known as YPG) that threatened Turkiye’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
It is against such a backdrop that the two meetings in Moscow on Wednesday between the defence ministers and intelligence chiefs of Turkey and Syria in the presence of their Russian counterparts took place. Erdogan’s reconciliation process with Assad is quintessentially his sweet revenge for the American betrayal. Erdogan sought help from Russia, the archetypal enemy country in the US and NATO’s sights, in order to communicate with Assad who is a pariah in American eyes. The matrix is self-evident.
On Thursday, Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said: “At the meeting (in Moscow), we discussed what we could do to improve the situation in Syria and the region as soon as possible while ensuring peace, tranquility and stability… We reiterated our respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty rights of all our neighbours, especially Syria and Iraq, and that our sole aim is the fight against terrorism, we have no other purpose.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been counselling Erdogan in recent years that Turkiye’s security concerns are best tackled in coordination with Damascus and that the Adana Agreement could provide a framework of cooperation. The Turkish Defence Ministry readout said the meeting in Moscow took place in a “constructive atmosphere” and it was agreed to continue the format of trilateral meetings “to ensure and maintain stability in Syria and the region as a whole.”
Without doubt, the normalisation between Ankara and Damascus will impact regional security and, in particular, the Syrian war, given the clout Turkiye wields with the residual Syrian opposition. A Turkish ground operation in northern Syria may not be necessary if Ankara and Damascus were to revive the Adana Agreement. In fact, Akar disclosed that Ankara, Moscow and Damascus are working on carrying out joint missions on the ground in Syria.
The Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu’s willingness right in the middle of the Ukraine war to take the steering wheel and navigate its reconciliation with Syria adds an altogether new dimension to the deepening strategic ties between Moscow and Ankara. For Erdogan too, Syria becomes the newest addition to his policy initiatives lately to improve Turkiye’s relations with the regional states. Normalisation with Syria will go down well with Turkish public opinion and that has implications for Erdogan’s bid for a renewed mandate in the upcoming elections.
From the Syrian perspective, the normalisation with Turkiye is going to be far more consequential than the restoration of ties with various regional states (starting with the UAE) in recent years who had fuelled the conflict. Turkiye’s equations with Syrian militant groups (eg., Syrian National Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), its continued occupation of Syrian territory, Syrian refugees in Turkiye (numbering 3.6 million), etc. are vital issues affecting Syria’s security.
The US resents Erdogan’s move to normalise with Assad — and that too, with Russia’s helping hand. It is now even more unlikely to give up its military presence in Syria or its alliance with the Syrian Kurdish group YPG (which Ankara regards as an affiliate of the PKK.)
But the YPG will find itself in a tight spot. As Syria requests Turkiye to withdraw from its territories (Idlib and so-called operation areas) and stop supporting armed groups, Turkiye in return will insist on pushing the YPG away from the border. (The government-aligned Syrian daily Al-Watan reported quoting sources that at the tripartite meeting in Moscow, Ankara has committed to withdrawing all its forces from Syrian territory.)
Indeed, the replacement of the YPG militia by the Syrian government forces along the borders with Turkiye would lead to the weakening of both YPG and the US military presence. However, the question will still remain unanswered as regards the place of Kurds in the future of Syria.
The US State Department stated recently, “The US will not upgrade its diplomatic relations with the Assad regime and does not support other countries upgrading their relations. The US urges states in the region to consider carefully the atrocities inflicted by the Assad regime on the Syrian people over the last decade. The US believes that stability in Syria and the greater region can be achieved through a political process that represents the will of all Syrians.”
Last week’s meetings in Moscow show that Russia’s standing in the West Asian region is far from defined by the Ukraine conflict. Russian influence on Syria remains intact and Moscow will continue to shape Syria’s transition out of conflict zone and consolidate its own long-term presence in Eastern Mediterranean.
OPEC Plus has gained traction. Russia’s ties with the Gulf states are steadily growing. The Russia-Iran strategic ties are at their highest level in history. And the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister means that the Russian-Israeli ties are heading for a reset. Clearly, Russian diplomacy is on a roll in West Asia.
Conventional wisdom was that Russia and Turkiye’s geopolitical interests would inevitably collide once the floodgates were opened in Ukraine. Herein lies the paradox, for, what has happened is entirely to the contrary.
December 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Obama, Russia, Syria, Turkey, United States |
4 Comments
An investigation into British and American collusion with the terror groups that kidnapped and murdered western hostages in Syria
On 19 August, 2014, ISIS released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley who was kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria.
Foley’s shocking execution became one of the most widely followed news stories of the Syrian war. Foley’s killer, Mohammed Emwazi, popularly known as “Jihadi John” by the western media, was a Kuwaiti-born Brit from West London. In the Foley execution video, Emwazi’s unmistakable London accent can be heard.
However, what is less known about the notorious ISIS member, was that he travelled to Syria as part of a “terror-funnel” established by British intelligence, and abducted Foley while fighting for an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen – or the Emigrants Brigade – which enjoyed direct support from British intelligence. Many members of al-Muhajireen, including Emwazi, then helped lay the foundation for the rise of ISIS by joining the terror group with its establishment in April 2013.
Further, for a period of Foley’s captivity he was being held in a prison jointly controlled by another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, or the Monotheism Brigade, which operated under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) umbrella and received aid directly from US intelligence. Some of this included arms being sold onto ISIS, including to the group leader holding James Foley.
In other words, although James Foley’s murder occurred in the deserts of Raqqa, it arguably began in more familiar places, namely London and Washington.
The terror-funnel
In 2009, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was told by top UK officials that “Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria.”
This involved sending British jihadis to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence decades before, to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo against Serbia. According to former US federal prosecutor John Loftus, British intelligence had used the London-based Al-Muhajireen Movement to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs.
The Al-Muhajireen, later known as al-Ghurabaa and Islam4UK was a Salafist religious movement established in Britain in 1996 by exiled Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who, as journalist Nafeez Ahmed details, was a long-time informant for UK intelligence, meeting regularly with MI5 agents throughout the 1990s.
Bakri himself acknowledged his role in training jihadists to be dispatched abroad, in an interview with The Guardian in May 2000.
A month after the 7 July, 2005 attacks in London, in which suicide bombers targeted the city’s transport system, killing 52, Bakri left the UK for Lebanon. Although former Muhajireen members participated in the attack, the British Home Office did not prevent Bakri from leaving the country but did ban him from ever returning.
By 2009, Lebanese security forces were accusing Bakri of training Al-Qaeda members, while Bakri himself boasted: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites … Al-Qaeda in Lebanon … are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”
Jihadi John
But who was Mohammed Emwazi? As the Guardian reported, Emwazi came to Britain with his family from his native Kuwait as a young boy. After attending the University of Westminster to study Information Technology, Emwazi became politically active as part of a group of West Londoners who followed an Islamic preacher named Hani al-Sibai. Some members of the group took part in jihadi training camps in Northern England and Scotland and were being monitored by M15.
In 2009, Emwazi traveled to Tanzania with two friends from the group, Bilal el-Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr. Assumed to be traveling to Somalia to join Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabab, MI5 had the men detained in Dar es Salaam and subjected them to lengthy interrogations before forcing them to return to the UK. Both Berjawi and Sakr later succeeded in traveling to Somalia and were killed in US drone strikes.
Emwazi continued to be monitored by MI5 and was prevented from traveling to his native Kuwait in 2010, where he allegedly wished to marry. Emwazi claimed he was interrogated and harassed at Heathrow Airport by MI5, and complained of his treatment to CAGE, a London-based advocacy group led by former Guantanamo detainee Moazem Begg which focuses on Muslim detainees. CAGE then began an advocacy campaign on Emwazi’s behalf.
Yet Emwazi was then somehow later able to travel to Syria. The Daily Beast reported that this seemed odd, given that Emwazi had been “described as a core member of an extremist network linked to the al Shabab group in Somalia during a court hearing as far back as 2010” and had been tracked by MI5 for at least five years. “His links to terror networks were well known—and yet, he was released by the authorities” to travel to Syria.
Journalist Nafeez Ahmed reports that according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, British authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video and other evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy.”
Ahmed notes this “terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with [the Islamic State] – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria?”
Upon arriving in Syria in August 2012, Emwazi joined an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen. Journalist James Harkin reports that according to Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian jihadi that fell out with his brigade and was imprisoned for a time with Foley, most British jihadis traveling to Syria joined Katibat al-Muhajireen.
A “deep embarrassment”
Crucially, Katibat al-Muhajireen enjoyed support from UK intelligence services. This is evidenced by the terror trial of Swedish citizen Bherlin Gildo, who according to the Daily Mail fought for Katibat al-Muhajireen as well.
The Guardian reports that Gildo was detained while transiting through Heathrow Airport having been accused by British authorities of attending a terrorist training camp and receiving weapons training between 31 August, 2012, and 1 March, 2013 – as well as possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
However, the terror trial collapsed “after fears of deep embarrassment” to the British security services. This was because, as Gildo’s lawyer explained: “British intelligence agencies were supporting the same Syrian opposition groups as he [Gildo] was.”
British intelligence support for Katibat al-Muhajireen was further confirmed when former Guantanamo detainee Begg of CAGE was also tried on terror charges. Begg had also traveled to Syria several times in 2012 and provided physical training to foreign fighters from Katibat al-Muhajireen in Aleppo, as reported by Foreign Policy. Begg made his latest trip to Syria in December 2012.
As a result, Begg was later detained by British authorities and accused of attending a terrorist training camp. The Guardian reported, however, that Begg was freed after MI5 “belatedly gave police and prosecutors a series of documents that detailed the agency’s extensive contacts with him before and after his trips to Syria,” and which showed that MI5 told Begg he could continue his work for the so-called opposition in Syria “unhindered.”
In short, Emwazi traveled to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence, and then joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, that was supported by British intelligence, but which was viewed as a terrorist organization by the British police.
“Kidnapped by the one who killed him”
James Foley was an American freelance journalist who reported from Iraq and Afghanistan before traveling to Libya in 2011 to cover the NATO-led war on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government. While in Libya, a close colleague of Foley’s was shot and killed by Libyan security forces, who also detained and imprisoned Foley for 44 days.
In 2012, Foley began making trips to Syria to report on the conflict for the Global Post and AFP, including in July when armed opposition groups, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the FSA’s Liwa al-Tawhid, invaded the city.
In October 2012, Foley published an article from his time in Aleppo suggesting that the opposition armed groups enjoyed little popularity among the city’s residents. Foley noted that “many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition,” which was “deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups.”
This ran contrary to mainstream narratives about the Syria conflict, which suggested the armed opposition groups were comprised of army defectors fighting for democracy and enjoying strong popular support.
In November 2012, Foley was returning to Turkey after a reporting trip with British journalist John Cantlie. After stopping at an internet café in the town of Binnish, the pair’s taxi began heading for the border when it was overtaken on the road and forced to stop by a van full of armed men. Among them was Muhammad Emwazi.
James Harkin explains that according to two European hostages who had been held with Foley but later freed, the kidnapping gang that took Foley and Cantlie was led by Emwazi. “[Foley] was kidnapped by the one who killed him,” one of the freed Europeans told Harkin: “I am sure of that.”
Emwazi participated in Foley’s abduction just two months after arriving in Syria. Note that this was during the period Katibat al-Muhajireen was receiving support from British intelligence, as shown by the periods when Gildo and Begg attended Katibat al-Muhajireen training camps.
According to a US Department of Justice indictment, Emwazi was joined by two of his fellow Brits, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, in the operation to abduct Foley. Emwazi, Kotey, Elsheikh, and one other Brit, Aine Davis, were later collectively known as the “Beatles,” initially by their captives due to their British accents, and later by western media.
Foley’s critical coverage of the US and UK-backed armed groups occupying Aleppo, coupled with the British Foreign Office effort to control the narrative of the war in the media – including by “waging information warfare in Syria by funding media operations for some rebel fighting groups” – raises the question of whether UK intelligence officials ordered the Muhajireen militants to kidnap Foley. On this point we can of course only speculate.
Collaborations with ISIS
According to the Belgian jihadi Bontinck, Emwazi and his fellow Beatles continued serving as Foley’s guards at various times, and passed him to Aleppo’s ISIS leader, Abu Athir, sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2013. By this time, they had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
This raises the question of whether Emwazi, and the other British Muhajireen fighters continued to enjoy support from UK intelligence after joining ISIS as well.
By August 2013, Foley was being held by ISIS in a prison in the basement of the Aleppo Children’s Hospital, along with several other foreign hostages.
Another American journalist, Theo Padnos, had previously been held in the same prison, but as a captive of the Nusra Front. As the Washington Post reported, Nusra had established a headquarters at the Aleppo Children’s Hospital in 2012, which it shared with Liwa al-Tawhid, the US-backed FSA faction.
According to the New York Times, after ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi announced the creation of ISIS, the Nusra brigade sharing the children’s hospital headquarters with Liwa al-Tawhid pledged loyalty to ISIS.
Liwa al-Tawhid then continued to share the headquarters with ISIS, and its leader, Abd al-Qader al-Salah was criticized for his cooperation with ISIS. Killed by a Syrian government airstrike in November 2013, the New York Times noted that Salah “ultimately made accommodations with ISIS that, to some of his allies, were at best disappointing and at worst ugly. Though he had welcomed journalists and aid workers, when Islamist groups began kidnapping them, even holding hostages at a compound he shared with ISIS in Aleppo, he made no public moves to stop it.”
Liwa al-Tawhid’s collaboration with ISIS had come into the spot-light in August 2013, while Foley was languishing in prison in the two groups’ Aleppo headquarters.
On 4 August, Tawhid commander Abd al-Jabbar al-Okaidi, who also served as the head of the FSA’s Aleppo Military Council, was filmed celebrating the capture of the Menagh Air Base in the Aleppo countryside with ISIS commander Abu Jandal. Okaidi praised the ISIS fighters and referred to them as “brothers” for their help in capturing the airbase.
The video of Okaidi celebrating with the ISIS commander proved embarrassing to the Obama administration, because US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford had crossed the border to Syria to meet with Okaidi a few months before, in May 2013 – and because Okaidi was considered the main conduit for US–provided non-lethal aid to armed opposition groups in northern Syria.
McClatchy reports that in response to the Menagh video, Ford called Okaidi directly to complain, saying that it had created “a public relations nightmare for the Obama administration, which was trying to show Congress and the American public that it was boosting moderates and isolating extremists on the battlefield.” However, as McClatchy notes, “When the importance of the jihadis became undeniable, Obama administration officials were irate.”
Okaidi had also previously spoken openly of his collaboration with ISIS, again referring to ISIS commanders as “brothers” and indicating that he communicated with them daily in an interview with pro-opposition Orient TV.
Buying weapons from the FSA
Abu Athir, the ISIS leader in Aleppo holding Foley, had similarly kind words for Okaidi’s FSA. Al-Jazeera quoted Abu Athir as stating in July 2013 that, “We are buying weapons from the FSA. We bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti-tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA.”
The Koncourse missiles had in turn been provided to Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid courtesy of the CIA. According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, Koncourse missiles were provided to FSA groups such as Tawhid via the CIA’s regional allies, while CIA officers trained FSA fighters in the use of these weapons in Jordan and Turkey starting in November 2012.
In August 2013, a month after ISIS leader Abu Athir boasted of buying Koncourse missiles from the FSA, a video emerged of Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid fighters also using Koncourse anti-tank missiles in the fight at Menagh airbase.
This suggests that Okaidi was receiving Koncourse missiles from his CIA handlers, and was then selling some of them to his ISIS counterpart, Abu Athir.
Ambassador Ford had himself been involved in the CIA effort to provide these weapons to Okaidi and the FSA. According to journalist Michael Gordon of the New York Times, Ford traveled to Langley, Virginia in 2012 to meet with then-CIA director David Petraeus to plan providing weapons covertly to the Syrian opposition.
Recall that US-favorite Okaidi was the FSA leader in Aleppo and claimed to communicate daily with his ISIS counterparts during this time. If pressed by Ambassador Ford, Okaidi could have therefore inquired with Abu Athir about Foley and the other foreign hostages held by ISIS in August 2013.
Dragging their feet
In January 2014, a civil war broke out between ISIS on the one hand, and Nusra, Liwa al-Tawhid, and other opposition factions on the other, in which ISIS was expelled from Aleppo city but took full control of Raqqa, which would go on to serve as its de-facto Syrian capital. Foley and other foreign hostages were then moved to Raqqa, while ISIS massacred most of the Syrian prisoners it had held in Aleppo before evacuating.
In the following months, ISIS freed 15 European hostages after receiving ransoms averaging some two million euros, whether from the captives’ governments, families, or insurers. However, the US government refused to pay a ransom for Foley.
Further, Ambassador Ford’s State Department threatened to prosecute Foley’s parents if they paid a ransom, which deterred them from raising funds for that purpose.
ISIS pointed to this in their English-language magazine, Dabiq, explaining that “As the American government was dragging its feet, reluctant to save James’s life,” other hostages had been spared after ransoms were paid.
British-backed militants
On 19 August, 2014, Foley was beheaded by Emwazi, who shortly thereafter also executed journalist Steven Sotloff, and aid workers David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig, as well as 22 Syrian soldiers. John Cantlie’s fate is still unknown.
Emwazi was killed in a US airstrike in Raqqa on in November 2015. However, two of his fellow Beatles, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, were later captured alive, and stood trial in the US. Both were convicted of participating in Foley’s abduction and killing and sentenced to life in prison.
It is no coincidence that Kotey and Elsheikh were tried in US courts. Any effort to prosecute them in the UK would have quickly collapsed, because British intelligence were supporting the very same armed group – Katibat al-Muhajireen – in which they and Emwazi were members when they abducted Foley. A UK trial would have proved a “deep embarrassment” for British intelligence, just as the attempted prosecutions of Bherlin Gildo and Moazem Begg had been.
In short, James Foley was abducted, held captive, and later murdered by militants from an armed group that received direct support from British intelligence. These militants fought in a dirty war to topple the Syrian government orchestrated by US planners, including Ambassador Ford.
Weapons sent by Ford and his CIA counterparts were given to another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, which shared a prison with ISIS during the time Foley was held there, and which sold some of these weapons to the ISIS commander then holding Foley.
Not only Foley but hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed as a result of the US and UK-led dirty war on Syria. The murder of James Foley is just one atrocity among countless others for which both Washington and London are responsible as a result of their effort to effect regime change in Syria.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, ISIS, Obama, Syria, UK, United States |
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Former US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are to hold conferences encouraging more online censorship.
According to Axios, the conferences by the two former presidents will “highlight rising threats from authoritarianism and disinformation — and how to combat them globally and at home.”
On November 16, the George W. Bush Institute will hold a conference called “The Struggle for Freedom.” The conference will address revitalizing democracy globally. The conference’s third panel is titled “Emerging Technology and the Future of Freedom.”
The conference will be attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine.
Bush’s conference only subtly hints at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Obama’s conference, the Democracy Forum, more broadly states disinformation will be a topic.
The first panel of the conference is titled “Tackling Disinformation, Protecting Democracy.” Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, a platform that claims to be “the friendly place where everyone builds the web, is listed among the key speakers.”
The second panel is titled “Lightning Talk: Dismantling Hate in the Digital Age.” One of the key speakers is Vidhya Ramalingam, CEO of Moonshot, a company dedicated to developing tech solutions to “expose threats, disrupt malicious actors and protect vulnerable audiences online.”
Obama has been a vocal supporter of content moderation and has called “disinformation” a threat to democracy.
“Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all that ails our democracies or tears at the fabric of our world, but it can help tamp down divisions and let us rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make our democracy stronger,” Obama said at an event at Stanford University earlier this year.
Despite most Republicans calling for less censorship, Bush has encouraged content moderation.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | George W. Bush, Human rights, Obama, United States |
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I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.
The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.
Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.
We may, if so inclined, most charitably explain the persistence of the Black Budget by appeal to bureaucratic habits (which do die hard…), even when the rational grounds for the secrecy no longer obtain. The strategic grounds originally used to justify the Black Budget disappeared with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but so did the tactical grounds, given that advanced nuclear weapons systems are already possessed by several governments, and the technology has been shared with others as well—whether by spies, defectors or simple mercenaries. The secrets, then, remain secrets, ironically enough, only to the very citizens who pay for the systems, including nearly all of their elected representatives.
Legislators continue nonetheless reflexively to approve every new defense budget, along with any requests for funding which anyone cares to cast as a matter of national defense. Indeed, embedding controversial, non-defense measures within National Defense Authorization Acts (NDA) has become a tried-and-true technique of passing new laws which would never have been ratified on their own, as stand-alone bills. A notable and relevant example is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which was rolled into the NDA of 2013. This tactic works because any congressperson who votes against “national defense” becomes an instantly denounced target by the political opposition and the media.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned in 1961 about the danger of perversely prioritizing state means of mass homicide over every other thing. How this ultimately came to fruition has been illuminated by Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), who shows how historical crises invariably expand the power of the state, the agents of which are loath to give any of it back. Even when the originating crisis is somehow mitigated or resolved, the government does not retract in size. Instead, it continues to “ratchet up” in response to each new crisis, with the previous expansion regarded as the new baseline.
Everyone is aware of this dynamic on some level, whether or not they spend much time reflecting on foreign affairs. We all know, to take a considerably less grave example than the summary execution of persons deemed “suspicious” by anonymous analysts, that when we prepare to fly anywhere in the world from the United States, we are not permitted to transport in our carry-on luggage any liquids or gels in volumes greater than 100ml (~3.3 ounces). Why do we still have to remove our footwear to get through airport security, more than two decades after September 11, 2001? Because some incompetent dude thought that he could use explosives hidden in his shoes to blow up a plane.
The post-9/11 travel security measures seem unlikely ever to change, and we can also expect the structural features of the sprawling homeland defense apparatus, including mass surveillance of citizens not suspected of any crimes, to continue to grow, given the conservative nature of belief conjoined with the bet-hedging behavior of lawmakers. Setting what is arguably bribery by lobbyists to one side, the primary driving factor in the minds of politicians who wish to be reelected is plausibly that they want not to be blamed, should anything untoward happen after they vote to reduce the defense budget or eliminate any of the security-related laws already in place. And God forbid that unelected bureaucrats who dispense unaccountable Black Budget funds at their caprice should be “hobbled” through oversight!
The reasoning of opportunistic politicians appears to be that adding even more restrictions, filling the (feckless) defense department’s already overflowing coffers, and allowing off-the-leash bureaucrats to do whatever they may deem necessary in the name of national defense, will all be seen in a positive light by citizens who are counting on the government to serve as their protector. This fictional image is maintained, against all empirical evidence of the actual outcomes of every military intervention since World War II, because the populace is constantly “tutored” by the government-coopted mainstream media to support anything whatsoever labeled by anyone as “defense”. Examples include the “War on Terror”; the “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the Libyan people; the empowerment of Saddam Hussein; the arming of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and, later, in Syria; the bombing of Kosovo; and the goading of Russian President Putin in 2022 to the point where he may opt to use nukes. Despite the human misery which these undertakings have caused, all have been “worth it,” according to mainstream media pundits, and as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might say.
Now, given the tendency of government restrictions enacted in response to crises to expand, the power of government authorities in such circumstances to augment, and the natural resistance of human beings to relinquish any of that power, the persistence and expansion of the Black Budget may not seem puzzling in the least. Having been trained quite effectively to believe that “national defense” is always and everywhere good, few citizens would find it troubling even to learn that trillions of Pentagon dollars have been “lost track of”—creating what is in effect an enormous supplement to the Black Budget, which should perhaps be termed the Ultra Black Budget.
Albeit considerably less charitable than the “bureaucratic habit” explanation for the persistence and growth of the Black Budget, equally plausible is that it has created a class of people who now wear what is tantamount to the ring of Gyges (Plato’s Republic). They are capable of committing crimes invisibly, with no possible risk of being redressed, much less punished, for their morally dubious activities. Why would anyone in such a position ever renounce that privilege, the unassailable power to do anything at all to anyone at all for any reason at all and with complete impunity? To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature and the reality of corruption, it should be clear that the ongoing pretext of state secrets privilege has opened up the possibility of an entire criminal underworld operating under the aegis of the U.S. government and fully funded by taxpayers.
What it worse, far from serving either strategic or tactical roles in defending our waning republic, the Black Budget is arguably being used to undermine it. Let us take as a possible example the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines between Russia and Europe. If this intentional act of piracy was perpetrated by the United States, then it is equivalent to a declaration of war against Russia. As a Black Op, the secret need never be admitted to anyone, even if it leads to World War III and nuclear holocaust. And therein lies the irony: the means to destroy the United States in toto are now possessed by a few individuals with access to the Black Budget, even though all of what they do is paid for by citizens under the assumption that they are being protected. Such is the logic of the legislatively shielded Black Budget that, if in fact the Nord Stream sabotage was a U.S. operation, then anyone who knows what happened and who dares to go public with compelling evidence of the truth becomes guilty of espionage, if not treason, and subject to the federal death penalty, if convicted. Conviction?
One of the most significant expansions of federal power in the twenty-first century has been the executive’s elimination of the requirement of conviction in a court of law before state execution. This assault on the most basic principles of the republic came about in incremental steps, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and was made possible by the technological development of the ability to kill by remote control.
The U.S. government’s first publicly vaunted execution of suspects by lethal drone outside a war zone was carried out under the authorization of President George W. Bush, on November 3, 2002, in Yemen, when a group of men were incinerated while driving down a road. Nearly twenty years later, President Joe Biden claimed to have terminated the life of alleged al Qaeda mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 31, 2022. For his part, President Donald Trump openly bragged about having used a lethal drone to eliminate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleiman on January 3, 2020, at Baghdad International Airport, as though this brazen act of premeditated, intentional homicide were somehow noble or courageous.
Before Biden and Trump, it was President Barack Obama who in 2011 summarily executed not only Osama bin Laden, when he could have been taken prisoner, but also Anwar al-Awlaki, which places Obama in a league all his own, having intentionally denied even a U.S. citizen his right to stand trial for whatever crimes he was believed to have committed. (Note that an American, Kamal Derwish, was killed by the Bush administration in its publicly vaunted drone strike on November 3, 2002, but this fact appears to have been discovered after, not before, the strike.) Had Anwar al-Awlaki been found guilty of treason in a federal court, he might have been sentenced to death. Obama opted instead to streamline the process, in the manner of every tyrant since time immemorial, by imposing the death penalty on the basis of what the president, a fallible human being, had been persuaded by bureaucrats to believe was evidence of the suspect’s guilt. John Brennan, Obama’s drone killing czar at the time, was promoted in 2013 to the directorship of the CIA.
Obama also authorized the execution of U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, for which no official explanation was ever offered by his killers. Being a male and having recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday, the younger al-Awlaki did satisfy the Obama administration’s scrupulous standard for classifying a corpse as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA). Yes, the label EKIA was applied to all men who found themselves at the receiving end of missiles launched by U.S. drones, whether inside or outside areas of active hostility, provided only that they were of military age. We have Daniel Hale to thank for having revealed to U.S. citizens the unsavory truth about the drone program, that the burden of proof was inverted by the drone killers, who defined their victims as guilty until proven innocent. Note that Hale was rewarded for his courageous act of whistleblowing with a federal prison sentence.
The longstanding international proscription to political assassination has been flouted throughout the twenty-first century, and the string of intentional acts of homicide perpetrated and openly acknowledged by four successive administrations together illustrate that the U.S. executive is no longer constrained in any way by the letter of international law. Once someone has been labeled a “terrorist” by appropriately situated bureaucrats, the U.S. executive grants the drone assassins the license to take him out. Given this normalization of assassination, what precisely is the Black Budget being used for, if people deemed dangerous by the U.S. government may be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process whatsoever?
No one privy to the details, the line items shrouded in secrecy, is permitted to share them publicly without risking harsh sanctions. But logic suggests that the Black Budget and the ancillary Ultra Black Budget (the trillions of dollars “lost track of” by the Pentagon) are being either siphoned off by mercenary criminals, in yet another version of the lobbyist kick-back scheme, or else used to commit crimes which are even worse than the summary execution of suspected criminals without trial. Assuming for the sake of argument the latter to be true, if government officials are now permitted premeditatedly and intentionally to assassinate human beings, including U.S. citizens, perceived of as potentially dangerous, then what is it that the Ring of Gyges wearers are not permitted to do and which must, for allegedly strategic and tactical reasons, be done secretly and beyond the reach of any form of accountability?
There is no proof that the U.S. government perpetrated the Nord Stream attack and thereby increased the likelihood of nuclear war, in which millions of Americans could be expected to die. But undermining democratically elected foreign governments, through inciting mass unrest and plotting coups are enterprises in which the U.S. government is known to have engaged repeatedly. Again, a great deal of that sort of activity went on during the Cold War, on the grounds that the evil Communists could not be allowed to spread their ideology around the world. But communism is no longer a threat, so it is unclear what the rationale for undermining democratically elected governments is supposed to be today, beyond maintaining U.S. global military hegemony.
In this post-Communist world, examples of crimes worse than the summary execution of terrorist suspects (some of whom are in fact innocent) could be the summary execution (or attempted elimination) of persons whose outspoken opposition to the U.S. hegemon is perceived of as threatening to the defense apparatus itself. Such figures may have included Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, John McAfee, et al.—anyone who has dared to reject in an effective way the reigning narrative that “We are good, and they are evil,” which has been used to rationalize mass homicide and destruction wherever and whenever the current crop of U.S. elites happen to please.
Consider the plans reportedly drawn up to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is undeniable that this sort of initiative is both illegal and criminal, and yet it is, one gathers, fully funded by taxpayers. Less clear examples of the same phenomenon may or may not include the fate suffered by a long list of other “annoying” persons who came to tragic ends either by their own or someone else’s hand. The case of Julian Assange is especially troubling because he quite successfully exposed U.S. war crimes, and for his efforts he has been discredited and criminalized as though he were a mass murderer. It is true that Assange is still among the living, which cannot be said of the many other arguably less fortunate nonviolent dissidents eliminated by governments throughout history. But Assange has by now been incapacitated to the point where it can be said without hyperbole that he no longer is the person who he once was. His power to express dissent has been stripped entirely away. The Nord Stream sabotage “mystery” is in fact just the sort of event which Assange, if not shackled and muffled, might have been able to illuminate with the aid of whistleblowers.
Needless to say, this schema does not bode well for the future of free people, and least of all dissidents who criticize the government, pointing out its crimes and contradictions. President Biden recently announced that “domestic extremists” currently constitute the gravest danger to the republic, an allegation which he claims is based on reports from “our very own intelligence agencies,” presumably including the CIA and the FBI. Both of these organizations have evinced a morally unsavory “scorecard” mentality in recent years, attempting to rack up as many EKIA (in the case of the CIA) or federal convictions (in the case of the FBI) as possible—by all means necessary.
In the drone killing program run throughout the Middle East by the CIA in the twenty-first century, analysts have been generously remunerated for finding potential future terrorists to kill, with ever-lengthening hit lists of targets created through bribing informants on the ground while mining the cellphone data of persons previously suspected of terrorism. Meanwhile, in the homeland, FBI agents have gone to great lengths to identify potential future members of factional terrorist groups, and even to lure them into complicity in conspiracies to commit violent plots which were in fact masterminded by government officials and informants, who provided funding to hundreds of hapless losers who ended up being convicted and are now serving sentences in federal penitentiaries. It sounds preposterous, if not impossible, but such techniques of entrapment have been well-documented by Trevor Aaronson in his extremely disturbing exposé, Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (2013).
Given the ways in which suspected potential terrorists were targeted and ensnared by the CIA and the FBI throughout the “War on Terror,” we should be very wary of anyone who maintains that persons in the homeland who reject the current administration’s narratives are properly labeled “extremists”. “Extremism” is a concept by now wed to the notion of “terrorism,” and by calling dissenters at home “extremists,” the path is paved for bureaucrats to deploy the very same “tools” against them.
By stripping our civil liberties away and propelling the nation toward World War III, the bureaucrats currently protected by state secrets privilege are on track, and indeed seem determined, to destroy what remains of the republic. Nowhere is the danger before us more evident than in the shockingly reckless handling of the crisis in Ukraine by war propagandists posing as diplomats. It has become abundantly clear that the only way to rein in what has transmogrified into tyrannical rule by an unaccountable oligarchic bureaucracy is to abolish the Black Budget and cease funding any of the network of activities being perpetrated under cover of a spurious and obsolete need for secrecy.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
October 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, FBI, Obama, United States |
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A mild flutter ensued after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent meeting with his Turkiye counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York on September 21 when it came to be known that Cyprus figured in their discussion. Jaishankar highlighted it in a tweet.
The Indian media instinctively related this to Turkish President Recep Erdogan making a one-line reference to the Kashmir issue earlier that day in his address to the UN GA. But Jaishankar being a scholar-diplomat, would know that Cyprus issue is in the news cycle and the new cold war conditions breathe fresh life into it, as tensions mount in the Turkish-Greek rivalry, which often draws comparison with the India-Pakistan animosity, stemming from another historical “Partition” — under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that ended the Ottoman Empire.
The beauty about peace treaties is that they have no ‘expiration date’ but the Treaty of Lausanne was signed for a period of a hundred years between Turkiye on one side and Britain, France, Italy, Greece, and their allies on the other. The approaching date heightens the existential predicament at the heart of Turkiye’s foreign policy.
The stunning reality is that by 24th July 2023, Turkey’s modern borders become “obsolete”. The secret articles of the 1923 Treaty, signed by Turkish and British diplomats, provide for a chain of strange happenings — British troops will reoccupy the forts overlooking the Bosphorus; the Greek Orthodox Patriarch will resurrect a Byzantine mini state within Istanbul’s city walls; and Turkey will finally be able to tap the forbidden vast energy resources of the East Mediterranean (and, perhaps, regain Western Thrace, a province of Greece.)
Of course, none of that can happen and they remain conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, the “end-of-Lausanne” syndrome remains a foundational myth and weaves neatly into the historical revisionism that Ataturk should have got a much better deal from the Western powers.
All this goes to underline the magnitude of the current massively underestimated drama, of which Cyprus is at the epicentre. Suffice to say, Turkey’s geometrically growing rift with Greece and Cyprus over the offshore hydrocarbon reserves and naval borders must be properly understood in terms of the big picture.
Turkiye’s ruling elite believe that Turkey was forced to sign the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 and the “Treaty of Lausanne” in 1923 and thereby concede vast tracts of land under its domain. Erdogan rejects any understanding of history that takes 1919 as the start of the 1,000-year history of his great nation and civilisation. “Whoever leaves out our last 200 years, even 600 years together with its victories and defeats, and jumps directly from old Turkish history to the Republic, is an enemy of our nation and state,” he once stated.
The international community has begun to pay attention as Turkiye celebrates its centenary next year, which also happens to be an election year for Erdogan. In a typical first shot, the US State Department announced on September 16 — just five days before Jaishankar met Cavusoglu — that Washington is lifting defence trade restrictions on the Greek Cypriot administration for the 2023 fiscal year.
Spokesman Ned Price said, “Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken determined and certified to Congress that the Republic of Cyprus has met the necessary conditions under relevant legislation to allow the approval of exports, re-exports, and transfers of defence articles.”
The US move comes against the backdrop of a spate of recent arms deals by Cyprus and Greece, including a deal to purchase attack helicopters from France and efforts to procure missile and long-range radar systems. Turkiye called on the US “to reconsider this decision and to pursue a balanced policy towards the two sides on the Island.” It has since announced a beefing up of its military presence in Northern Cyprus.
To be sure, the unilateral US move also means indirect support for the maritime claims by Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration, which Turkiye, with the longest continental coastline in the Eastern Mediterranean, rejects as excessive and violates its sovereign rights and that of Turkish Cypriots.
Whether these developments figured in Jaishankar’s discussion with Cavusoglu is unclear, but curiously, India too is currently grappling with a similar US decision to offer a $450 million military package to Pakistan to upgrade its nuclear-capable F-16 aircraft.
Indeed, the US-Turkey-Cyprus triangle has some striking similarities with the US-India-Pakistan triangle. In both cases, the Biden administration is dealing with friendly pro-US governments in Nicosia and Islamabad but is discernibly unhappy with the nationalist credo of the leaderships in Ankara and New Delhi.
Washington is annoyed that the governments in Ankara and New Delhi preserve their strategic autonomy. Most important, the US’ attempt to isolate Russia weakening due to the refusal by Turkiye and India to impose sanctions against Moscow.
The US is worried that India and Turkiye, two influential regional powers, pursue foreign policies promoting multipolarity in the international system, which undermines US’ global hegemony. Above all, it is an eyesore for Washington that Erdogan and Prime Minister Modi enjoy warm trustful personal interaction with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The photo beamed from Samarkand during the recent SCO summit showing Erdogan arm in arm with Putin must have infuriated President Biden. Modi too displayed a rare moment of surging emotions when he told Putin at Samarkand on September 16,
“The relationship between India and Russia has deepened manifold. We also value this relationship because we have been such friends who have been with each other every moment for the last several decades and the whole world also knows how Russia’s relationship with India has been and how India’s relationship with Russia has been and therefore the world also knows that it is an unbreakable friendship. Personally speaking, in a way, the journey for both of us started at the same time. I first met you in 2001, when you were working as the head of the government and I had started working as head of the state government. Today, it has been 22 years, our friendship is constantly growing, we are constantly working together for the betterment of this region, for the well-being of the people. Today, at the SCO Summit, I am very grateful to you for all the feelings that you have expressed for India.”
Amazingly, the western media censored this stirring passage in its reports on the Modi-Putin meeting!
Notably, following the meeting between Modi and Erdogan in Samarkand on Sept. 16, a commentary by the state-owned TRT titled Turkiye-India ties have a bright future ahead signalled the Erdogan government’s interest to move forward in relations with India.
India’s ties with Turkiye deserve to be prioritised, as that country is inching toward BRICS and the SCO and is destined to be a serious player in the emerging multipolar world order. Symptomatic of the shift in tectonic plates is the recent report that Russia might launch direct flights between Moscow and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state supported and recognised only by Ankara. (Incidentally, one “pre-condition” set by the Biden administration to resume military aid to Cyprus was that Nicosia should roll back its relations with Moscow!)
Without doubt, the US and the EU are recalibrating the power dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean by building up the Cyprus-Greece axis and sending a warning to Turkiye to know its place. In geopolitical terms, this is another way of welcoming Cyprus into NATO. Thus, it becomes part of the new cold war.
Can South Asia’s future be any different? Turkiye has so many advantages over India, having been a longstanding cold-war era ally of the US. It hosts Incirlik Air Base, one of the US’ major strategically located military bases. Kurecik Radar Station partners with the US Air Force and Navy in a mission related to missile interception and defence. Turkey is a NATO power which is irreplaceable in the alliance’s southern tier. Turkey controls the Bosphorus Straits under the Montreux Convention (1936).
Yet, the US is unwilling to have a relationship of mutual interest and mutual respect with Turkiye. Pentagon is openly aligned with the Kurdish separatists. The Obama administration made a failed coup attempt to overthrow Erdogan.
October 2, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | BRICS, India, Obama, Russia, SCO, Turkey, United States |
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Though Washington insists that it is not interested in a direct military conflict with Moscow, the latter claims that the US is, in fact, directly involved. But who is telling the truth?
On 8 September, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared in Kyiv on an unannounced visit. He carried with him pledges of yet another military and financial package of nearly $3 billion, mostly to Ukraine, but also to other Eastern European countries. According to a report published by The New York Times in May, US financial support for Ukraine has exceeded $54 billion.
Devex‘s funding platform states: “A relatively small percentage of that funding is humanitarian-focused.” The same source also indicates that the total amount of mostly military aid provided by the West to Ukraine between 24 February and 16 August has topped the $100 billion mark.
For such a massive military arsenal to operate, one can imagine the involvement of legions of military experts, trainers and engineers. Washington’s latest package includes hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, such as more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
And more is coming. According to Blinken: “President Biden… will support the people of Ukraine as long as it takes.”
The Russians, however, have no illusions that US military support for Ukraine is confined to mere weapons shipments or limited to financial transactions. On 2 August, the Russian Defence Ministry accused the US of being “directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine.” The ministry’s statement cited an admission by Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, Vadym Skibitsky, who told The Telegraph: “Washington coordinates HIMARS missile strikes.”
This is not the first time Russia accuses the US of direct involvement in the war. As early as 25 March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the West had declared “total war” on Russia. In this instance, Moscow’s top diplomat was referencing every aspect of this “real hybrid war”, including unprecedented sanctions that were meant to break the back of Russia’s economy and the will of its military forces. Since then, the US Western embargo on Russia has exceeded 10,000 sanctions, an unprecedented number in modern conflicts.
Also, since then, the nature of American involvement in the war has changed. The type of weapons first provided to Kyiv by Washington quickly transformed from weapons of defensive capabilities with limited outreach, to weapons of offensive capabilities with long-range artillery systems, including HIMARS and M270.
Much of the US involvement can be understood through common sense. Consider Politico‘s report on 29 August, alleging that: “Since the early days of the war, Kyiv has seized the initiative as missile strikes and mysterious explosions have wreaked havoc on the Russian fleet, sinking several vessels… and devastating its Crimea-based air wing in a dramatic attack this month.” If these details are accurate, it is hard to imagine that such success would have been carried out by, as described by Politico itself, a “small Ukrainian navy”.
When American weapons are provided and operated by American military experts, and when the movement of Russian forces is monitored by American satellite coordinates, one should easily conclude that the US is indeed involved in a direct war with Russia. This argument is strengthened by the fact that the US is utilising all of its expertise in economic warfare, used against Iraq, Cuba and others, to devastate the Russian economy.
But why does the US refuse to accept that it is engaged in a direct war against Russia?
Successive US administrations have perfected the art of engaging in military conflicts without making such a declaration. As the US fought its protracted war in Vietnam starting in the mid-1950s, it engaged in many other military conflicts that were mostly kept secret. These undeclared wars included the Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia, which resulted in the estimated deaths of 100,000 people.
To curtail the power of the president to conduct war without notifying Congress, the US Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, also known as the War Powers Act. Despite a presidential veto, a two-thirds majority in Congress managed to pass the resolution into law. Still, successive administrations found ways around the law, including the US involvement in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and again in the US war on Libya in 2011.
In fact, it was in Libya that the phrase “leading from behind” was used in abundance. Americans seemed to have found a brilliant way of engaging in war while avoiding its costly political consequences. This way, former US President Barack Obama could be involved in several wars all at once without being called an interventionist or a war-mongering president.
To understand the extent of America’s ongoing, undeclared wars, marvel at this 1 July report by The Intercept, which obtained the data using the Freedom of Information Act. This was “the first official confirmation that at least 14” military operations – known as 127e programs – were active in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region in 2020, and that between 2017 and 2020, US commandos carried out 23 separate operations.
So, even if the US engages in direct combat against Russia, the chances of war being declared are almost nil. Therefore, the extent of US involvement can only be gleaned from evidence on the ground.
Call it “leading from behind”, “proxy war” or “hybrid war”, Washington is very much a party in the devastating war in Ukraine, which is paying a heavy price for Washington’s desire to remain the world’s only superpower.
September 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Obama, Ukraine, United States |
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Our government is imposing draconian limitations on our lifestyles, our economy and our finances to save the planet from supposed catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), now renamed ‘climate change’. Probably one of the most repeated arguments you’ll hear in support of the need to achieve ‘net zero’ is that ’97 per cent of scientists agree CAGW is happening’.
President Obama is just one of many who have made this claim: ‘Ninety-seven per cent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.’
So did President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, when he warned of the ‘crippling consequences’ of climate change and said: ‘Ninety-seven per cent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.’
Yet, in spite of the damaging effects reaching ‘net zero’ will have on Western economies, not a single politician or mainstream journalist seems to have made the effort to find out where this ‘97 per cent’ figure came from and how accurate it is.
The main author of the paper which came up with the figure was John Cook, an Australian former web programmer and blogger who later gained a PhD in philosophy at the University of Western Australia and founded what could be seen as a climate alarmist website.
He assembled a group of volunteers recruited via the website as part of a ‘citizen science’ project and tasked them with examining the abstracts of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Note that the volunteers didn’t speak to any scientists and didn’t read the scientific papers. They just looked at the abstracts – a summary paragraph or two. The volunteers classified the abstracts into one of seven categories according to their opinions of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):
1. Explicit endorsement of AGW with quantification
2. Explicit endorsement of AGW without quantification
3. Implicit endorsement of AGW
4. No position or Uncertain
5. Implicit rejection of AGW
6. Explicit rejection of AGW without quantification
7. Explicit rejection of AGW with quantification
The reviewers then ‘simplified’ results into four main categories as follows:
Endorse AGW 3,896 32.6 per cent of abstracts
No AGW position 7,930 66.4 per cent of abstracts
Reject AGW 78 0.7 per cent of abstracts
Uncertain on AGW 40 0.3 per cent of abstracts
This gave 32.6 per cent of abstracts which the reviewers concluded endorsed AGW.
Now comes the clever bit. Instead of admitting that just 32.6 per cent of papers (actually just abstracts of papers) endorsed AGW, the group removed the 7,930 abstracts which didn’t take a position on AGW. That left just 4,014 abstracts of which 3,896 (97 per cent) supposedly ‘endorsed’ AGW.
This is like doing a survey of the voting intentions of 1,000 people. You find that 90 say they’ll vote Labour, 10 say they’ll vote Conservative and the remaining 900 are undecided. You eliminate the 900 undecideds and claim that 90 per cent of voters support Labour and just 10 per cent of voters will vote Conservative. This is, of course, complete statistical nonsense as the real percentage of the sampled 1,000 voters who have said they will vote Labour is 9 per cent, not 90 per cent.
That’s not the end of the magic employed to reach that wondrous 97 per cent. The reviewers lumped together three categories of abstracts – ‘explicit endorsement with quantification’, ‘explicit endorsement without quantification’ and ‘implicit endorsement’. (Implicit endorsement means that the reviewer felt that the paper endorsed the AGW theory even though the paper didn’t do so explicitly).
In the paper claiming 97 per cent support for AGW, the reviewers don’t tell us how many papers fitted into each of these three categories, but the survey’s own database shows that of the 3,896 abstracts which supposedly ‘endorsed’ AGW, just 64 were in the ‘explicit endorsement with quantification’ category; 922 were in the ‘explicit endorsement without quantification’ and the vast majority – 2,910 out of 3,896 – were in the ‘implicit endorsement of AGW’ category.
Thus only 986 of 11,944 – that’s just 8.2 per cent – of abstracts explicitly said they agreed with the theory of man-made global warming.
To summarise, this ‘97 per cent of scientists’ claim was based on the work of 11 to 12 volunteers, whose scientific credentials have not (as far as I know) been released and all of whom were probably firm AGW believers. Each looked at around 1,000, often quite obscure, scientific abstracts and from these documents decided whether the scientific papers (which they hadn’t read) supported the AGW theory. To claim such an approach is statistically valid is beyond farcical. To call the ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse AGW’ result ‘garbage’ could be seen as insulting to garbage.
Given the damage ‘net zero’ will do to our economies and our lives, it is incredible that not a single politician, mainstream journalist or editor seems to have had the ability or the inclination to expose the dubious origins of the ubiquitous ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse AGW’ claim.
September 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Obama |
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Former President Donald Trump is supposedly one of the biggest scoundrels in American history for allegedly retaining documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago home. Trump denies wrongdoing but the Justice Department is targeting him for violating the Espionage Act and other laws. DOJ is refusing to reveal the affidavit and the specific charges that the feds claimed justified a massive, heavily-armed raid on Trump’s Florida base.
Much of the media commentary on the raid castigates Trump for conspiring to block Americans’ access to official records. But the federal government has done thousands of times more damage on that score than Trump.
Trump is suspected of violating the Presidential Records Act, a law Congress enacted in 1978 after former President Richard Nixon claimed his secret Oval Office tapes and other records were his personal property. The law asserts, “The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records…The Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”
“The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people,” Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero declared earlier this year. But the statue is a pseudo-disclosure law that keeps far more secrets than it exposes.
All records from former presidents are kept secret for at least five years, and presidents can also slap a 12-year automatic delay on other records. After that deadline, people can file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see specific records. But as Politico reported in March, “At many presidential libraries, the queues for processing FOIAs stretch for years,” and requests “involving classified information can take more than a decade.”
The disclosure of Barack Obama’s records could be delayed practically indefinitely because his lawyers concocted a new legal doctrine, “White House equities,” to justify vetoing FOIA requests that could tarnish the image of the Obama presidency. At the end of the Obama administration, a congressional committee report aptly titled “FOIA is Broken” noted that journalists had completely abandoned “the FOIA request as a tool because delays and redactions made the request process wholly useless for reporting.”
Federal disclosure logjams are increasingly the topic of ridicule on social media. When Pfizer submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration for a new COVID vaccine in 2020, the FDA approved it in 108 days. But when a group of scientists and professors filed a FOIA to see the application and the data on injury from the vaccine, FDA told them it would take 75 years to fully release the data. A federal judge smashed FDA and is requiring them to complete disclosure a hundred times faster than they planned—releasing 55,000 pages a month instead of 500 pages. But unless people can afford to pay massive legal fees to fight the feds in court, FOIA is mostly a mirage.
As soon as presidents leave office they can collect king’s ransom advances for writing a memoir. Former president Bill Clinton received a $15 million advance for his memoir; George W. Bush received a $10 million advance; and Barack Obama and his wife Michelle received $60 million for a two-book memoir deal. Presidents can practically use any information they please—including info that no one else can use—to write their memoirs with expedited clearance of classified information.
The rigging of presidential records enables politicians to profit massively from lying about their time in office. When George W. Bush was president, he vehemently denied that he ever authorized torture, which is considered a war crime under U.S. and international law. But in his 2010 memoir Decision Points, Bush bragged about ordering torture. Bush wrote that when he was requested to approve the CIA’s waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he responded, “Damn right.” Six months before his memoir was released, in a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he told the audience, “Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.” But there is no evidence that torture saved any Americans’ lives. Actually, torture helped send 4000+ Americans to their death in Iraq, since the Bush administration relied on false confessions gained via torture to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. The United States had classified waterboarding as torture since the Spanish-American War, and the U.S. government had classified waterboarding as a war crime since 1947.
If all of the Bush administration’s records were made public, Bush and plenty of his subordinates might be indicted for war crimes. But Bush doesn’t need to worry because the U.S. government blindfolds Americans from learning of their rulers’ crimes.
Sham transparency is “close enough for government work.” At the end of the Obama administration, 30 million pages of his records were trucked to a warehouse near Chicago. The Obama Foundation promised to pay to have those records scanned and made accessible online but that never happened. The Obama Foundation says that 95% of the non-classified Obama records now held by the Archives are already digitized. The Archives could push a few buttons and make them accessible, but that would put a lot of bureaucrats and lawyers out of work. Instead, each document needs to be “reviewed” by bureaucrats before release—assuring that the vast majority will not see the light of day until long after Obama collects tens of millions of dollars in additional speaking fees.
In a 2017 Politico article headlined, “Presidential Libraries are a Scam,” author and former congressional staffer Anthony Clark observed, “Presidential libraries are perfect examples of just how far presidents will go to control their own legacies. Since the first one was created in 1941, what were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history.” Unfortunately, most politicians prefer “huckster history” to the real thing. Clark notes that the National Archives and Records Administration “has increasingly become reliant, for ongoing financial support and political cover, on the private foundations presidents create to build the libraries. Which means that [the Archives] cozies up to these organizations, working side by side to help fulfill the foundations’ legacy-polishing ambitions.” The result is the Archives putting its stamp of approval on policies and exhibits that are as deceptive as the typical White House press conference.
If honesty is the goal, then separating state and history is necessary. Presidential records should be automatically and speedily accessible to Americans on the day a former president signs a lucrative contract to write his memoirs. Former presidents should be stripped of any prerogative to limit or delay the disclosure of 99.99%+ of the non-classified records from their administration.
It remains unclear what, if any, legal violations that Trump may have committed with the records seized by the FBI. But there is enough on the table to know that the Presidential Records Act is an ongoing crime against self-government. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson declared in 2019, “If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.” But our current system of government is designed to blindfold Americans on the vast majority of federal crimes. If democracy depends on transparency, and government transparency is an illusion, then what is U.S. democracy?
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
August 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Obama, United States |
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